Some sort of traditional food (no idea what it is, but it looked cool...also, I've never shot food in my life, so I thought I'd try it):
Man selling piles and piles of little fish:
And, of course, what would a trip to Busan be if I didn't find someone cool to shoot on the subway:
There are more pics on my Flickr ( http://www.flickr.com/tamasv ), check it out if you have a minute!
The next day, my good friend Conrad and I packed a borrowed Daewoo Lanos and headed off to beautiful Geoje Island, where we were to meet roughly 40 other foreigners and eat good food, chill on the beach, tell dirty jokes and otherwise relax for a few days.
Geoje used to be a beautiful little sleepy place, and it still has plenty of charm, but every time you go, you see a new forest of hotels and guest houses under construction, and traffic can get heavy on the weekends...times are-a changing!
We stayed in a "minbak" or "pension" (don't ask me...no idea why they call it a pension), which is basically a two-level beach house. With no furniture. Basically you come with a bunch of friends, bring your own mats/sleeping bags and sleep wherever there's enough room to put your stuff down...it's pretty cozy. There's also a kitchen (Koreans are VERY big on food: making it and sharing it), where we cooked up small meals...and shared it Korean style...it was all very communal and fun! At one point in the night, we all moseyed down to the beach, where we had a big fire. Somehow...no one out of our group of 40 or so remembered to bring marshmallows. Next time...
Conrad and I (and a few other friends) decided to sleep out in the open, on the roof of the house. The weather is perfect (at night, it usually doesn't dip much below 18-19 degrees), and falling asleep watching the stars and feeling the fresh ocean breeze is a beautiful experience, especially when you live in a crowded place like Korea!
In the morning, we woke to sunshine and fresh air and this view:
Simply gorgeous! However, with the morning came also the only disappointment of the weekend. I remembered the wind picking up rather seriously in the middle of the night and blowing our stuff all over the roof. As I woke up to this mini wind-storm, I recall grabbing at flying objects, securing my socks and other small things. Then I remember thinking that a good place for the bag that holds my sleeping bag (a very light material) would be inside my sleeping bag...sadly, in my dazed and confused state, I only THOUGHT this through, but neglected to act on it. Happy in the knowledge that I was smart, I went back to sleep and woke up in the morning...my sleeping bag's bag long since gone. Very sad.
After that and a hearty breakfast of a delicious chocolate-and-way-too-much-sugar pastry and chocolate milk, Conrad and I saddled up the old Lanos and headed to a Korean War-era Prisoner of War camp. Now, I must say I was looking forward to this very much. One of the things I love about Korea is its long and interesting history, and I like to learn about it as much as possible, especially when that learning takes place where the action was, not just from books in a library.
The Korean War is especially interesting since, technically, the two countries are still at war, and I live in a war-torn country. Also, since the war was active from 1950 to 1953 a lot of people you see walking on the streets lived through it.
Geoje was home to a major Prisoner of War camp, which they've now turned into a "museum" of sorts. I apologize in advance...but what follows is going to be a pretty negative review. In short...I hated the place. I realize that the two Koreas are still at war and no country will make themselves look bad...but museums are supposed to be places of truth and history...this "museum" was more of an outdoor propaganda center. I'm not even going to get into some of the literature they used, but suffice it to say that I didn't get the feeling that I'm in a museum dedicated to preserving history and relaying the truth.
Despite the war being over less than 60 years ago, there was very little (if anything) that was actually original in the camp. Everything was a reproduction/model/remake. Heck, even the airplane on display was mostly made out of plastic. The "Tank Exhibit" (about which I was rather excited) was actually a tank-shaped building that housed...an escalator and cardboard cutouts of Stalin, Mao and a few other world leaders. Big whoop.) They had a "bombed out building"...basically what appeared to be the waist-high remnants of a few stone walls...upon closer inspection it was made out of plastic...I was expecting to see some real war relics, but was sadly disappointed.
Worse yet, the dioramas and statues depicting North Koreans were staggeringly biased. While most of the South Korean soldiers looked like handsome, young, dashing fellows...the North Koreans (men and women) were made to look like Neanderthals. I'm not kidding.
The final straw was, I think, that they had something like SIX dioramas (some of them life-size, men and women) depicting people going to the bathroom. I'm not making this up. They were all fully exposed, pants around the ankles, squatting above a big pile of....well...human excrement. I mean...really? Is that necessary? Six times?
To make things worse (I can't make this up)...there was a dedicated "Photo Zone" (one of only three or so such places in the museum) where you were urged in multiple languages to pose next to life-sized statues. One of the statues was of a guy with his pants down, genitals showing, etc, squatting over a massive bucket of crap (one of 10 such buckets) with maggots over it (I am NOT making this up)...you were asked to squat behind him over your very own bucket of sh!t, smile and have your picture taken. The other one, you could join a soldier and mock-carry a massive bucket of crap...
Another "Photo Zone" urged you to be a smiling North Korean prisoner behind barbed wire...seemed to be in incredibly poor taste...
Conrad and I left the museum feeling completely let down. Thankfully, Geoje's natural beauty made up for the PoW camp's shortcomings...on the way home, we took the big, modern bridge that was completed less than 18 months ago, connecting Geoje Island to Busan. We found a gorgeous lookout point...check it out...
There...I thought I'd end on a happy and beautiful note! :)
Hope everyone's had a great weekend...this past weekend I hit up the Goseong Dinosaur World Expo as well as the Busan International Auto Show and the Busan Sand Festival...plenty of pics and stories to come from that as well hopefully in a day or two!
Cheers,
T
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