The Wanderlust King: Life at f1.8, chillin' in Suncheon and meandering in Miryang...yup, another awesome weekend

Mwhahahaha...Monday morning never looked so good. My coteacher came in, and asked "Do you know your schedule for today?" I looked at him, grinned, leaned back in my chair, put my hands behind my head, let out a big satisfied sigh and said "Yeah...this." He laughed and said, "Exactly...I'm envious!". Today begins 3 straight days of deskwarming, followed by a holiday and one day of teaching on Friday. Tough times.

Okay. I know, I know. You guys are probably getting bored of reading this. But, man...what an awesome weekend! On Friday, I was pretty tired, so I decided to stay in...until the itch to go and explore got the better of me. Lately I've been falling in love with my little 50 1.8 lens, so I decided to slap that on the camera and go into Changwon for a few hours.

I have owned 3 copies of this lens and two 50 1.4s. Every time I have the 50 1.8, I love it, decide to upgrade, get the 1.4, regret it, sell it, and get turned off of primes. But, every time I get a 1.8, I'm reminded that primes are awesome, the Canon 50 1.4 just sucks bad. It's so much fun monkeying with the 1.8 (mine front-focuses a tiny bit, so I am shooting it on manual focus until I microadjust the body). I might get a Sigma 50 1.4 or get another Canon 85 1.8 (I kind of regret selling mine). Anyway...enough photo geek talk...onto the stories and pictures.

Oh, speaking of pictures, I apologize, but I'm going to have to roll them out slowly and not in order. I took 700 shots this weekend, and I haven't even started to go through them. I'll post stuff randomly as I go along (today will just be unedited snapshots).

Okay...back to the weekend. On Friday I bummed around Changwon and loved it. It was a beautiful warm night, I'm starting to know my way around this area enough that I can wander around without worrying about where I am or getting lost. (Pics will be at the bottom of this blog).

On Saturday, Mark and Kez and I headed into Suncheon, a city about 2 hrs from here. I have been through there (on my way to Yeosu), but I have never stopped there, so it was all new. It looked like it might be pouring all day, but by the time we got to Suncheon, the weather decided to be nice to us. Suncheon was a clean, friendly city.

We went to a place where they have hundreds of houses (including an entire village on the hillside) that's a movie set! It's open to the public when they're not using it and it's pretty sweet...looks like a ghost town. It's divided into two parts...one part is like a small town, the other is a village up on the hill. Apparently the village used to be a real village that hey added to to make it a movie set...pretty neat.

Some scenes from around the "town":

With Suncheon in the background:

The village up on the hill:

After that, we headed to some wetlands eco park that was awesome! As usual, the price of admission was dirt cheap (something like 3,000 won, I think...so $2.50-ish), which is actually expensive around here. Museums, for example are around 1,000 won (under a buck!). I love it...it's cheap to be a tourist here.

They had an awesome network of boardwalks for kilometres around the wetlands!

No idea why the angles turned out like this, but I kind of like it...

We also saw some neat wildlife here...cranes, crabs that live in the mud and these weird fish thingies that have leg-like flippers in the front...they're pretty trippy looking and they zoom along the mud like crazy (will have pics of them later). Oh, and drunken Koreans. What they point of coming to a gorgeous spot in the middle of nowhere and being loud as hell and screaming at the top of your lung is is beyond me, but they seemed to be rather fond of it.

Beyond the wetlands they also had a beautiful trail going up to a mountain lookout...from there, you could see the river and these col pancake-shaped islands:

(More from here later!)

Then, just as we were leaving the park it started absolutely dumping outside, which was pretty wicked timing.

On Sunday, I was up early and by 8 a.m. I was at the bus stop, waiting to go to Masan. I love the public transportation here, on a Sunday morning I waited maybe 2 minutes before a bus came. I went to the train station and wanted to go to Pohang, a beautiful city on the east coast of Korea. Since I don't have bus and train schedules for Masan (I usually just show up and take whatever looks good), I missed the train to Pohang by minutes, which turned out to be a good thing for several reasons. One, the train only goes in each direction once a day...so, I would have had to take a 4 hour train ride there, had about 2-3 hours, then 4 hr train ride back. Definitely going to be a two-day trip. The other reason was that I ended up going to a pretty cool little city.

As I was milling around the train station, trying to think of where to go, the announcements came on and said a train bound for Miryang is about to pull in. So, I quickly bought a ticket, ran down to the platform and boarded the train to Miryang. The scenery to Miryang was nice and we went through some massive tunnels...one, I timed at about 2 minutes...at 80km/h (speed limit for non-KTX trains on that stretch), that works out to roughly 2.5 to 3km long.

Once in Miryang, I started walking toward what I thought (correctly, for once!) would be downtown. It was sunny and warm (though extremely hazy/Yellow Dust-y), and very pleasant. It's a small town (only about 120,000 people), and walking around I immediately had a flashback to Sandpoint, Idaho, for some reason. Miryang is bigger, but the neighbourhood I walked through initially had smaller, older buildings, much like the ones in Sandpoint. Despite a population of nearly half of Victoria's, the place was deserted outside of the downtown core and just about every business was closed.

Anyway, Miryang was awesome. It's surrounded by rivers (has two rivers going through/around it) and its downtown is actually on an island! Pretty neat. I found a bench by the riverbank and lay down on it for about half an hour (I really need to do this more often...I explore too much and relax too little) and just enjoyed the sound of the river, the sunshine and the light breeze.

After that, I bumped into a little festival they were having where I scored a map and crossed the river on a floating foot bridge! Once on the other side, I headed for the hill where they have a ton of old buildings, including a temple, a pagoda thing, and a few more (pics later). The place was pretty historic...according to a sign, not only was it hundreds of years old, it was also a place where they keep these old stone tablets, that hold some sort of significance with respect to the ruling dynasties. When the Japanese occupied Korea in the first half of the 20th century, they apparently buried the tablets in an effort to erase Korean history and used the building as a jail.

While there, I went into a Buddhist ceremony for a few minutes. It was pretty awesome stuff. Then, I kept going, and found a bunch of old buildings, which used to house the local government hundreds of years ago. It wasn't all that interesting, but it was neat to be surrounded by history.

I then walked to the opposite end of town and found the "lake" I saw on a map, which turned out to be a man-made reservoir, and an awesome spot for a quick breakfast/lunch and headed back into town. All in all, I walked around for about 6-7 hours and vowed to be back.

Near the town, they also have some really cool places, including a valley where water freezes from March to September and melts in the winter, and some cool waterfalls and lakes. I think I'll make a weekend of it in a month or two!

Then, I came home and relaxed with some good old Office :)

All right...like I said, I'll have more pics throughout the week...but here are some from my night out and about Changwon with the 50 1.8...all of these are unedited, straight off the card :)

On the bus...f1.8 / ISO 1600