Breakfast was the hotel buffet, for the not-unreasonable price of 14,400-won (about 1,100 won to the dollar). I had scrambled eggs, sausage links, bacon, rice, some sort of spinach banchan (side dishes, usually pickled or otherwise dressed), kimchi, a salad of cold wheat noodle in gochujang (a sort of red pepper-based ketchup-like condiment paste), sliced Chinese peachse, a rambutan (like a lychee), and a cup each of caffe latte and orange juice. The tendency in Korea is to eat small amounts of lots of different stuff.
Having sent Laura to work, I went back upstairs to the room to catch up with my e-mail and write the previous blog post. I also carefully wrote in English and Korean (with the help of Google Translate) to the housekeeper to leave extra pillows and a spare sheet. Once I figured I couldn't load Hulu overseas (licensing restrictions), I figured there was no more procrastinating so I headed outside for a walk.
I had a hard time loading the pictures here and getting them to behave with the text, so they're on Facebook.
The first thing I checked out was the koi pond outside the hotel lobby window. The pond is L-shaped, and full of water lilies and watercress. The koi are very friendly and love to race in schools from one end of the pond to the other, stopping along the way to nibble at the water cress. I saw an "ajumma" ("auntie," an older lady) feeding them, but I keep forgetting to bring them bread from breakfast.
Next I went over to investigate the traditional pavilions on the hotel lawn. The hotel is built atop a hot spring, and apparently some Joseon-dynasty crown prince visited in the mid-1700s to practice his archery. Later the king (not the same guy) decided to commemorate the event by putting up a pavilion with a stone monument, incongruously but typically bragging about himself. Whatever his motivation, all of it is very pretty. There is also a Joseon statue of a buddha they found somewhere else, dragged it here, and likewise gave it its own painted, tiled-roof pavilion.
I then checked out a garden path connecting the hotel and the neighboring biergarten, which was full of interesting gnarled trees, plus some vegetables, before heading out the back exit to see the city. I also saw some very creative use of pines in landscaping, including some species that would be unusual in America, at least on the east coast (California has a lot of introduced Asian ornamental plants that help make California, California).
So while I exited from the direction the taxi driver had brought us (I wasn't yet aware there was a front exit, too), this turned out to be a mistake, in that the neighborhood was mixed older residential and light industry, and somewhat dusty. I have learned that the dust, "hwangsa," which is powdery and yellow, is in fact sand from the Gobi Desert that gets blown high into the atmosphere, floats on the humid dense air over the Yellow Sea, and finally dumps onto Korea. On the back streets it just sorta accumulates.
But away from the streets where there are shop fronts, there are quite a few single-household homes, most of these seem to be cinder-block and stucco construction, with either conventional roofs or the occasional traditional Asian tile roof. One interesting thing is how the neighborhoods are heavily gardened. Even a little strip of dirt next to the curb (the hellstrip) will host cornstalks or leeks. Lawns are extraordinarily uncommon—I have only seen them at the hotel complex, and even then they were very small. At the top of a small hill was a church, almost certainly Protestant, topped with a red neon cross, which are ubiquitous about the country. At night riding the KTX train at 300 KPH, you see a succession of neon red crosses everywhere. Christianity, and particularly hard-nosed Calvinistic Protestantism, is now the second-largest religion in the country and still looking to expand.
I wandered back down the hill onto slightly more busy side streets. I should mention the Korean system of addresses and road naming. Supposedly in 2011 the country adopted the Western style of addresses where there's a house number, alternating even and odd numbers either side of the street, and a street name. This system hasn't been implemented in Asan yet. Major roads ("ro") have unique names, but smaller roads simply don't have names. Busier side streets will be named "(Nearby major road name) (number) 'beon-gil.'" The exact relationship of the beon-gil to the ro is not clear to me. Sometimes they branch off the ro in perpendicular directions, and sometimes they're just nearby. All this makes reading maps extraordinarily difficult, and so I have to navigate by landmarks and essentially double-back.
So having gone down three of these beon-gil, I decided to go back before I forgot any landmarks. I was on the hunt for a convenience store, and while I passed a Lotte (a sort of mega-mart) right before I turned back, I was on the opposite side of the street without a crosswalk nearby. Even at a crosswalk one should be trepidatious in Korea, as drivers are somewhat reckless. Further, in the same neighborhood I also observed that sidewalks are not always a safe bet, as scooters will drive down them as well. A bit closer to the hotel, I had a choice between a no-name convenience store and a 7-Eleven, and being on the side of the street of the no-name store, I chose that one.
The clerk was an unkempt woman in her 20s, and was the first person I talked to who spoke absolutely no English. After a few minutes of watching me amusedly peruse her merchandise she began talking to me, in Korean, presumably asking what I was looking for. I replied in English that I didn't speak Korean, and this seemed to confuse her momentarily, before she resumed chatting to me in Korean. I decided to make my selection—an unfortunately-named sport hydration drink called Pocari Sweat—and continue on my way back to the hotel.
Back at the hotel, I interrupted the maid in her duties. She had left extra pillows, so my note worked, but it seems maid don't do rooms one at a time like in the West, but a floor or wing at a time. When she came back however she had the facilities manager with her, who not only wanted to give me my sheet, but to clean the carpet. This odd operation consisted of him spraying the carpet with a dry-cleaning solution and then going over the carpet with what looked very much like a floor buffer. He carefully rearranged our shoes, took the trash, and then on his way out took the note, which he carefully pocketed. Perhaps it was unusual in his experience and wanted to keep it to show others.
So after getting the room back, I first figured out how to load Hulu, by using a Chrome add-on to make my IP address look like an American one (a VPN, virtual private network). Mildly naughty, since Hulu doesn't have rights to show content in Korea, but I'm an paying American subscriber, so fair's fair. I caught up on a couple episodes of The Daily Show and then decided on a nap, since I was a little wilted from my walkabout. Now, this is dangerous. Four p.m. here is 3 a.m. back home. And while I haven't felt at all jet-lagged, once you lay down to nap, you stay that way. It is a heavy-limbed kinda sleep. So at 7:45, with great difficulty, I roused myself to issue forth for dinner, figuring it was now or never.
Having figured out there was a front entrance to the hotel on a much busier street, I left through the front gate. I was immediately delighted to find the sidewalk had glass bricks embedded in it, with glowing LEDs in the bricks. I went around the corner, immediately found a convenience store (Sun-Mart) which I noted in my head for the return trip, and continued down the block. The first restaurant I saw was full of young people who appeared to be having a wonderful time, mostly sitting at one long table. The pictures of the food in the window looked delicious, but I felt intimidated, so I kept walking.
Next I saw an Italian restaurant, which had the same Italian grapes-and-majolica kitsch you see in the Olive Garden, only weirdly also Korean. But if I wanted indifferent Italian, I'd have gone to the Olive Garden and saved myself the trip. Next restaurant I came to had no English anywhere, no pictures, no patrons except a sad old "ajussi" ("uncle"), and the hostess seemed to scowl, so I moved on. As I kept walking I figured I was getting closer to the neighborhood where I walked earlier, so I turned around. The last thing I saw was a "hanbok" store, which occupied three storefronts, and was wall-to-wall with colorful, shiny fabrics, with two seamstresses sitting at a table gabbing away. Best I could guess, you walk in, pick your fabrics, the ajumma take your measurements, and make your hanbok for you. Hanbok is the traditional Korean garb, a bit like a kimono. You sometimes see elderly ajumma wearing them, but nowadays young people only ever seem to don them for weddings.
So I walked past the restaurant with the happy young people, sighed, and went back to the Sun-Mart. The cashier was a bored younger man, reading a paper. I made my selections—a bulgogi burger, some banana-flavored sponge cakes (strangely made by Samsung), and "makgeolli," a kind of unfiltered rice wine, formerly the drink of farmers, presently the drink of hipsters here—paid the man and went back to the hotel to eat. The relationship of the bulgogi burger to bulgogi was not apparent to me. The bun was a bun, the burger patty was somewhat tasteless and anemic (in other words, a convenience store burger), topped with a sort of slaw of mayo, cabbage, and pickle chips, further topped with a slice of potted ham, of which the Koreans seem fond. The banana cakes just tasted like sponge cake, without any discernable banana flavor. The makgeolli however was quite pleasant. It's a bit like nigori sake, where the rice must is left in for a fuller rice flavor (Momokawa Pearl is a close analogue), only a little sweeter, and slightly fizzy.
At this point Laura came home from work and a work dinner (she can write about it in another post if she wants), we chatted, I bathed, and we went to bed.
