Autumn Leaves at Songnisan

At last the bright colors of fall are here.

We planned a day trip with our neighbor friends to Songnisan, a very large national mountain park. Having gone to the mountains quite a few times now, I think I have a decent grasp on what a casual Korean mountain visit looks like.

Before you reach the mountain itself, you will walk through a main thoroughfare of restaurants and street vendors. It reminds me a little of the feel of resort towns, with many small shops selling ceramics and traditional-looking souvenirs. But the sidewalks are also crowded with little old women and men selling fresh and dried produce.

At Songnisan, mushrooms and daechu were the local crops being sold by many street vendors. Daechu are about the size of a grape tomato and are the texture of an apple with a very subtle sweet flavor. Daechu are sold fresh and dried, and the dried version is used in traditional medicines and food dishes.

You've done well to make it past all of the shops and then you arrive at the park itself. If there is a mountain in Korea, it has at least one Buddhist temple. That is a gross underestimation. Usually the mountains are pocked with the pointy roofs of several temples. So if you are going for a hike in the mountains of Korea, you will see many temples.

Even before entering the park you can see Buddhist influence, like the symbols on the bridge below or the gate.

I'm more of a nature person, wanting to admire the trees and fall colors, but the temple we visited was pretty impressive, with something like a 1500 year history. It also housed two national treasures, the giant buddha statue and the 5 story building below. I don't remember much information about the particular history of this temple. It did have more fish-related things than other temples we have visited before. Small bells with hanging fish are on the corners of the 5-story building, and there is a carved wooden water dragon.

It's a relaxing and picturesque stroll mixing pretty man-made structures with beautiful nature.

You can always find little alcoves of trickling mountain water and ladles to refresh yourself. Many people splash the water in their face and drink out of the ladles. Drinking fresh mountain water is another highlight and standard of visiting the Korean mountains.

We headed back down the mountain and prepared to have lunch at one of the shops we passed before. We returned along a different path and I especially liked hopping these rocks across a calm mountain stream. It reminded me a little bit of the rocks back home in the Congaree River.

If you look closely you will see little rock cairns stacked in the river and along its edge. You can see a person or two admiring one of those cairns. Those are our neighbors and they were especially impressed with a cairn that used large, oddly shaped rocks yet still was balanced and stable.

On the way down, we did a special rock walk. You take off your shoes and there are countless tiny marbles of a certain type of clay that has some health benefits. It is part torture, part foot massage, and the clay beads coat your feet with a fine chalky layer. For some reason the guys found this more uncomfortable than we girls did.

I had to pause during our somewhat excruciating rock walk to snap this picture. This tree was my favorite, for obvious reasons.

Food time! There are foods especially associated with autumn trips to the mountains, so I'm told. Korean pancakes and dongdong ju. Korean pancakes have a salty, not sweet, batter with vegetables, kimchi and/or seafood mixed in. Dongdong ju is a fun name for a traditional tasting drink. It's a sweet rice wine that has ginseng and daechu steeped in it.

The other things we ate: mixed rice with mountain mushrooms in the silver bowls, and I believe pork tenderloin. Isaac saw meat roasting on a skewer out front of this restaurant and had to eat it. :)

So that is Songnisan as we saw it. Walking on, looking at and eating wonderful things.

Takes a Little Getting Used To

I'll go ahead and warn you that these pictures are pretty awful and boring - especially coming after our exciting European honeymoon!

I've been living in Korea for just over three months now, and there are a few things about our newlywed nest that still stick out to me. These are the things that felt very uncomfortable at first, and still three months later, I find myself missing the American alternative. So I thought I'd share a little about these differences, and hopefully the boring pictures add a little something.

So this inconspicuous box sits high on the wall above our dining room table. Most of the time it minds its own business, but every so often it comes to life. Chimes or classical music begin to play and then a voice comes through. It's a speaker to spread announcements to apartment residents. It's very practical, but quite annoying because there are many buildings covered by this speaker system; so sometimes the announcements are irrelevant to us. Lately our building has been undergoing a lot of maintenance, so at least twice a day I hear it. Usually I listen hard for our building number (one of the few Korean words I can make sense out of its muffled voice) to find out if it will affect us, but otherwise I ignore it. I can't help but think of 1984 when I hear its music begin to play.

Do you notice anything a little different about our bathroom?

No shower curtain. All of the bathrooms I've encountered in Korea so far have been built this way. The entire bathroom is designed to get wet, with the floors and walls tiled and a big drain in the middle of the floor. I've gotten used to the slightly exposed feeling of having no shower curtain, but it is still strange to accept the entire bathroom being wet. The floor is not angled towards the drain, meaning water just puddles up wherever it lands on the floor, as well as on the sink and toilet.

Maybe it sounds like a trivial thing, but whenever you are showering, it feels very strange. Keeping the mirror clean feels like a lost cause when hard water sprays on it every day, staining it. But it is very practical and just means the bathroom is less cluttered, since you don't want to leave just anything lying around in the rain forest.

Heating and cooling our home is different too. There is no central air conditioning system. There are no air vents and no ceiling fans either. If you want air conditioning, you buy a unit just like buying a washing machine. The air conditioning units I have seen look like tall and skinny refrigerators. The apartment does come with underfloor heating. Our floor is a soft laminate and it warms up to whatever temperature we set the knob, and so the heat rises and warms our apartment.

I quite like the heating system - instead of sitting by an air vent, I can just sit anywhere on the floor and feel the warmth. But I do miss the air circulation and filtration of a central air unit. I never thought much about air movement in a home before moving here. Of course there are windows to open, but that invites in more problems like pollutants. I'll probably talk (complain) about that another time. :)

No dryer means laundry takes longer. Thankfully, there are short narrow rooms on both sides of our apartment that are perfect for hanging clothes. Here is one of our drying racks and the dehumidifier which speeds things up. Opening windows is usually not a good option because of pollution.

I know many people hang dry their clothes. But I've been spoiled, only hang-drying delicate items. Laundry takes quite a bit longer when you have to factor in the time to set each item out on a rack and then let it dry. I've got the hang of it now though and it's kind of relaxing too.

You'r late for work, or maybe you're just coming back home, and you've got to use the bathroom. Running in and out the door isn't always so simple when you have to take the elevator.

There are 20 floors, 5 apartments on each floor, with each apartment averaging 2 or more people. That's at least 200 people sharing our one elevator. Living on the 12th floor, sometimes you have to wait quite a while, especially during busy times of the day. Occasionally I take the 184 stairs up or down, but usually waiting is not that big of a deal.  It can be torturous - when there is a delivery man carrying some yummy smelling food and you're trapped in the elevator with him.

So all of these things are just small differences, but they do stick out still as being unusual to me. They are small changes that just take a little getting used to, but maybe it's still fun to think about them. It will also make me very grateful for the day when I can buy a dryer and a shower curtain.

Honeymoon - Rome

Rome, our final destination. We had been visiting less crowded parts of Italy for more than a week now, and we felt the atmosphere change the moment we left our train and walked through the Roma Termini.

We needed to find our museum passes somewhere within the crowded train, subway and bus terminal. A girl with a blue collared shirt and lanyard offered to help us, and after walking a little way together, she started demanding we pay her. It was our first "gypsy" encounter, and a much different welcome than warm Montelupo or generous Genoa.

I guess it's no surprise that Rome was a lively and crowded place. Being in such a famous city, of course we wanted to visit some typical tourist highlights. But we also wanted to make sure that the last days of our honeymoon were laidback and fun. So we picked only two destinations to visit per day, making sure we were not rushed and could make whatever random detours we wanted.

Our first full day we visited the Roman Colosseum and Forum. I downloaded some free audio guides and listened to them as we walked through both locations. I repeated the highlights aloud to Isaac, sharing fun facts and figures as I heard them.

We had another interesting encounter with some locals here too as we tried to find the correct queue to enter. Another "gypsy" lady offered to help us, and then began getting pushy about giving us a guided tour of the Colosseum. An Italian man next to us plainly pointed us in the correct direction, and then began criticizing the lady for her behavior. We walked away to the sound of them yelling at one another: the man declaring that the lady was a disgrace to Rome and Italy, the lady defending herself saying she is just doing her job.

The Colosseum was grand and impressive, even if it's now just a shell of its former glory.

Right next to the Colosseum is the Roman Forum, a piece of land that was the heart of Rome for centuries, containing the ruins of many things like government buildings, monuments and temples. I listened to the audioguide, but we had more fun just wandering and walking along the ancient stone walkways.

We were thankful for fountains throughout the Forum like the one showed above, where you could fill your bottle up with cool water. By about 3 in the afternoon, our feet were aching and we were tired from the intense Roman sun. We headed back to our place, stopping by a pastry shop along the way and picking out some fun-looking sweets.

The next morning, we made sure to catch a bus in order to arrive at the Pantheon just as it opens to the public. Our efforts were rewarded and we were able to enjoy the glorious building without having to share it with many other people. The building itself is cool - full of fun details like it's central circular room has the same height and diameter, deliberately the right size to fit a perfect sphere within it. The only light comes through the hole in the ceiling. It was built as a temple for the gods - all gods - and people came and worshiped to whomever they wished. My audioguide mentioned that one reason it is so well-intact, compared to other Roman ruins, is because the temple has pretty much been in constant use since it was built in the second century. First, as a temple to many different gods, then as a Christian church.

The city square out front of the Pantheon was incredibly beautiful. Warm colors and old stonework add a charming frame for the epic, ancient temple.

Our plan for the rest of the day was: eat tiramisu, walk through park, visit art gallery. We tried Tiramisu at Pompi, a place that is supposed to be the standard for classic tiramisu - it was tasty, but nothing revolutionary. I guess tiramisu is delicious wherever you eat it.

Our walk through the Villa Borghese Gardens was an unexpected delight. It's a beautiful, grand park with huge trees and hidden ponds and monuments. Right below is the view from the edge of the gardens over the city of Rome, across the Tiber River, towards the Vatican.

Then to a very nice museum with a very boring name: National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art. The highlight for me was seeing The Three Ages of Woman in person. Gustav Klimt is one of my favorite artists, and I felt like I was posing with a celebrity when Isaac took the picture below.

There was also this giant piece of art made out of thorns. Pretty neat.

By the time we arrived in Rome, we had been missing spicy Asian food for some time. It seemed like destiny when we found a Chinese restaurant, Grand Dragon, very close to the place we were staying. Not only was it delicious, the prices were great, the menu was large and there was no coperto. In Italy, we quickly learned what the word coperto means - a cover charge that random restaurants apply to make more money off of tourists. Or at least that's what we figured it means. For all of these reasons, we ate at the Chinese restaurant three times while we were in Rome.

Below was our first meal at Grand Dragon. Isaac's plate was never more than three inches from his mouth for the entire meal.

Our last night in Rome, we were heartbroken to find that Grand Dragon was inexplicably closed. But it turned out to be for the best. We ended up finding a unique and exceptional Italian restaurant. Usually you have to make a reservation to eat at Pro Loco Pinciano, but they were kind enough to squeeze us in somewhere. The restaurant had a modern mindset with all fresh, local ingredients. The restaurant owner and her daughter were very passionate about their place and their food. The owner's daughter spoke English very well, and she acted like a food psychiatrist, listening to our tastes and diagnosing us with the menu items most suited to us. Actually she correctly guessed what I would like before I said anything. Mine had some type of fish and cheese I had never heard of. Everything tasted amazing.

Our last day in Rome, we revisited the area around the Pantheon, sipped a latte together and shared some other tasty foods. We arrived at the airport with plenty of extra time for our night flight back to Incheon. Isaac and I agreed that it is a shame that Rome put Leonardo da Vinci in its airport name. Da Vinci surely would have designed a much nicer airport.

Settled onto our airplane, we looked back through the many pictures we had taken, the beautiful places we had been. It already seemed like a distant memory, now that we were surrounded by the plane's familiar interior. We were so excited when the airplane dinners came - instant fish soup and kimchi have never tasted so delicious.

And now we're back! Still reveling in the memories from our trip, but so glad to be back in the land of spicy foods and late night delivery. Our first night home, we couldn't fall asleep and decided to have fun with our jet lag. At 2:00 am we ordered delivery, and thoroughly enjoyed stuffing ourselves.