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Published: April 16th 2006
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It’s a sad and lonely Sunday evening in Seoul and I’m sitting in my empty apartment with Kristy’s laptop. Kristy is on a bus on her way to Guitar (?) to see her friend Christine. I pretended to know where that is but…..
I don’t mean to seek sympathy with this intro…as much as I thought it would be novel to mimic Kristy’s last entry.
I too, feel cozy, perched up on my third floor apartment, overlooking the street of loud high heeled shoes and old men spitting, while sipping my water. MMmmmm
This should make for a strange two weeks, the first time we’ll have been apart. I must say…..it’s a lonely feeling. Made me pretty thankful that this trip was not done solo. I feel more respect for those who venture out to take on adventures on their own. Especially for those in Slave Lake.
So Kristy and I had been planning on heading out of the city on weekends, as often as we could. But, during the winter its is a little easier to avoid cold outings and stick to the Starbucks Saturday and caramel popcorn/movie dates Sundays that we have become accustomed to. With
the arrival of Spring in Seoul (complete with pink cherry blossoms!!) we have had a renewed zest for exploring our new home. The weekend of April 7 and 8th saw us finally venture out. Sort of…
We headed West toward the West sea which is about 1.5 hrs away by bus. I pictured a nice tour of the countryside. Instead, the bus trip had as both nauseous with the non-stop explosions of gas pedal-break pedal as it made its way through what looked like an endless city landscape. By 9ish on Friday night we arrived in Gangwa-do. We were pretty impressed that this “small town” (I’m not convinced that we even left Seoul) was pretty quiet with much less traffic. Many businesses seemed closed, but we did find a nice ‘love motel’. This is what they call the cheap motels. It was actually really nice. It helped that we were just completely thrilled to be out of Seoul. Somehow it was that same sort of feeling of heading off to Jasper for the weekend….even though we would discover the next day…this was definitely not like a trip to the Rockies.
We wandered the streets that night, and found
a busy strip that had some restaurants. We had decided that this town was not too small to have a pizza joint. After looking for 15 minutes or so, we saw these dudes racing around their 1.5 ft high crotch-rocket motorbikes. Hilarious. We were laughing out loud…hard…as we stopped them and asked them if we could take a photo (“poto”). As you can see in the pic’s, they are easy enough to park.
I asked the dude in my best Korean accent….. “Pizza?”. He said “ok” which almost always means yes, and pointed straight up. We would have never seen this place and we were right below it. The biker guys were the delivery boys. So cool. The people there were so nice. We were the only ones there. They even let me pull out the beer that I just bought at the 7-11. Does Friday night get any better than that?
The next day, we woke up and were excited to take on the day. The plan was to rent bikes and ride the scenic bike path along the ‘coast’ around the island checking out the temples and ancient fortifications (as it was a coastal town, it
had been attacked numerous times by …well pretty much everybody). We left the hotel wondering why it seemed so grey and smokey outside, but were un-phased. We rented our little mountain bikes and were off. We kept reassuring ourselves “isn’t this so great to be out of the city”. Yeah…real great.
The cycle path was alongside the busy highway. Mmmm tour bus exhaust. The beautiful scenery was mostly hidden in the grey smog/stuff. Plus, everything was still pretty brown…no green anywhere. Ok, this is pretty complainy. We were thinking it was pretty good when we visited the temple. But it was a lot more biking than we expected and the day was smelly, windy and just not what we were hoping for on our day out of town.
But that was only half of it. Upon returning the bikes, we had to walk for close to 45 minutes back into the main part of the town…once again along a really dirty, dusty, busy road. By the time we got to a food joint, we felt sooo dirty.
We ate an early dinner and decided to head back to Seoul as it was just not a nice day out
to enjoy the surroundings. The whole bus ride back, I felt almost sick from the strong smell of dust in my hair and on my clothes.
Upon arriving in Seoul, we immediately saw a strange sight. A group of foreigners with masks (the white surgical kind). These are common for Koreans…but not foreigners. Then it finally dawned on us. Chinese yellow dust.
In Korea, spring often brings Yellow Dust ‘storms’ from China. Dust from the deserts travel high in the atmosphere picking up heavy metals (such as mercury) from the massively polluted air of industrial China, and settles across the Korean peninsula. We had seen it twice before. Usually we would awake to see the dust settled on all the cars and foods outside the food markets in the moring.
We later learned that it was the worst day of Yellow Dust since 2002. And we got to enjoy the whole thing!
We had a few moments of homesickness for the Canadian Rockies (or even Edmonton’s good ol’ river valley). We were still glad we did the trip, but were pretty upset to think about the air we breathed all day. Oh well, what doesn’t kill you….makes
you smell bad.
colin
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Gerry
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Pain, not Payne...
Colin, I know I haven't sent any parcels but would you like me to send a shotgun so you can relieve your pain? I got depressed reading it...