A Soju Saturday

A Soju Saturday

Pictures

1. The view from the bridge to nowhere, the houses of North Korean refugees who fled the D.P.R.K. at the end of the war in 1953. For some reason these humble homes occupy some of the best sea front property in all of Sokcho, fronting a wide sand beach with a great view of the sea. How long will it be, next year, maybe the year after, when all these humble homes are torn down to make room for hotels and mindless monuments to consumerism?

2. Looking back across the small pond that this mamouth bridge crosses.

3. I love dogs, and can never take enough picutres of the nice puppies that I find around the town.

4. The fishing port of Sokcho. This is where the boats dock when they are not at sea. On the far side of the channel you can see the back of the main street of Sokcho.

5. Squid boats under the bridge to nowhere. These are squid boats, the mainstay of the Sokcho industry. These boats head out night after night, sweeping the seas clean. They use the powerful lights that you can see to attract the squid to the lines.

Conner and I went for a long ramble through the streets of Sokcho today. Fueled by generous amounts of soju, Korean traditional liquor, that we drank with a late lunch of scallops and squid down by the port, we had the energy, the will, and the drive, to conquer the streets of Sokcho.

After a late lunch down at the port, we spent the day exploring the streets of our little town. We rambled far and wide, hitting both the high points and the low, from the bridge to nowhere to a bit of North Korea, it was a grand adventure.

A Sunday Stroll

A Sunday Stroll

Picutres

1. Korea, like Japan, is well known for its cherry blossoms. Down in Gwanju they have a festival for them and its is incredibly bueatiful. Up here, where it is cooler we do not have the mass of cherry trees they do in the south but there are a few scattered around. These blossoms, outside a little farmhouse in the country, are the first I have seen this spring.

2. When I walk and drive in the c0untryside here I often stop and look at the old tumbeled down buildings that somehow litter the landscape. It is amazing to me, that after thousands of years of war, strife, invasion and colonization that there are any old buildings left, but here they are. How long has this wall stood on this spot? How long have people been living in this village? A hundred years, a thousand?

3. Rural village, street scene. No stores, no schools.

4. A couple boys enjoying there sunday off.

5. The dog.

Finally spring has come to Korea, well at least up here in the far northern reaches of the peninsula. Down south the weather has been great for a couple of weeks now. In Gwanju the cherry blossoms are already out and in Busan people have been enjoying temperatures in theT sixties for a couple weeks now. It has been so much warmer that my buddy Greg down in Pohang, about two hundred and fifty miles south of here, has been seeing mosquitoes in the fields and his apartment.

Up here, in the cold and snow of the far north, we have, just last week, seen significant snow fall both the mountains and in town. While the migratory ducks and geese have been flying over us for a week, heading to their summer homes on the taiga of Siberia, the land here has been locked in the tight embrace of winter.

But today, just today, spring finally arrived. When I got up around eleven I could feel, by putting my hand outside of my window, that the wind was finally blowing from the south, bringing with it the warm air of the tropics. Well, not really the tropics, but it was a lot warmer than it has been.

That being said it was time for a stroll around the countryside. I grabbed my friend Connor and Aubrey and Paul and headed for the countryside to take in the sights and sounds of early spring.

Walking along, climbing the pass of Chundaesun mountain, we could hear birds singing, and on a few trees, the first pale green buds of spring poked their way out of their winter homes.