The Eye’s a Filter For You to See
Jin and I went to the beach to eat at one of our favorite restaurants. I’ll probably write about the place one day, but if you’re ever in Pohang it’s behind Tilt, the foreigner bar, maybe about a block or so in.
Afterwards we wandered around a nearby neighborhood where I snapped the above picture. Posting it here has started me thinking how the city must look to people only reading about it on this blog. There’s certainly a trend in my pictures that runs counter to the actual. For one thing the city has people in it, and most of it doesn’t look like the weird, dirty, and empty parts I post pictures of.
This coming week I’ll post more mundane pictures. Maybe the quotidian will be as strange.
Up a Mountain
Mossy roots. Also the best picture I took all day.
This one is for the Mossy Skull.
I did a bit of hiking today on Mount Naeyeon outside of Pohang City. It’s actually still in Pohang county but an hour by bus north of downtown. It was a beautiful late summer day: windy and relatively cool. It rained when we got off the bus but cleared up when we reached the trail. The trail runs beside a river then loops around one of the peaks. There’s thirteen (twelve?) waterfalls along the trail. We passed maybe seven of them. There’s also a Buddhist temple, Bogyeonsa, with various hermitages and buildings nestled in the valley.
If you’re in Pohang it’s a great day trip.
Now come the blurry cellphone pictures.
A waterfall
LOOK INTO THE LIGHT!
300 years ago a monk probably lived in this cave.
The folks on the right were a father and son pair meditating above a small waterfall.
Overall a pretty fun day.
The bus trip is cheap, about 2USD (1,500 Won), with another 2.5USD tacked on for admittance to the park. We didn’t visit any of the temple buildings although most of them were open to the public and you could hear monks chanting from various points of the trail. This added to the calm atmosphere (as an aural environment it was amazing: water trickling over rocks, wind blowing through leaves overhead, and monks chanting… yeah, I wanted to record it all).
The one thing I wished I got a picture of was the coffee vending machine in the middle of the forest where the trail branched towards the temple. It wasn’t even near a rest area, just there beside the trail.
Next time.
Learn English or It’s the Sharp End of the Stick For You
I wonder what their summer English camp is like, and if it at all resembles The Lord of the Flies.
Talk about stressful. Can you imagine having one of these things staring at you during class?
The Best Naengmyeon in Pohang
Rotary Naengmyeon
The characters on the glass doors read “Naengmyeon Jonmun” and that means “Naengmyeon Specialty”. I like restaurants that have only two things on their menu and both of them are wonderful.
The where? Rotary is located up the street from the CGV movie theater at the 6 Street Intersection (AKA yuk-gori, the “go” is pronounced like it would be in “got”) across the street from one entrance to the pedestrian shopping street. It’s a family-run restaurant that’s been in business for 50 years. The city hall used to be a few blocks up the street in what’s now the public library.
Wiki-quote for the uninitiated: “Naengmyeon is served in a large stainless bowl with a tangy iced broth, julienned cucumbers (Korean cucumbers are like the gourmet cukes. Remove seeds if using the ubiquitous waxy cukes), slices of Korean pear, and either a boiled egg or slices of cold boiled beef or both. Spicy Mustard sauce [or Mustard oil-use sparingly] and vinegar are often added before consumption. The long noodles would be eaten without cutting, as they symbolized longevity of life and good health, but modernly, servers at restaurants usually ask if the noodles should be cut prior to eating and use food scissors to cut the noodles.”
The why? Rotary makes their own noodles, the broth is incredible, and the beef slices are better (quality and quantity-wise) than I’ve had elsewhere.
The bibim naengmyeon’s not bad either.
Islands
“On my island there is mountain and clean ocean beautiful forest and hill but they have no name.”
“On my island is big mountain and forest. It’s fun. The tree is tall. Its river is blue. beautiful!! wow!”
Internet Down
Our home internet connection is out and likely to remain unfixed until tomorrow. Right now I’m using the wifi in my new favorite cafe, Hand’s Coffee above the Dickies on the pedestrian street section of Shinae. Here’s a picture of the bike trail I walked along this morning. It’s the backside of Pohang where it backs against the hills (and if you consider the front side the East Sea). According to one cab driver in town, the hills are home to packs of wild boar that rampage through the streets in the fall and winter.
Wild f’n boar!
Today I saw a few happy dogs, a scrawny cat, and a horde of ants eating a scarab beetle. No boar at all. But, who knows, maybe they were there, watching, waiting…
A Quick One
The thing about teaching kids is that you’re constantly bumping into and having to deal with your own impulses/negative emotions/short-sightedness, except it’s in another person, a kid, who has no idea how to mask, hide, or, most importantly, deal with these things.
In not unrelated news, Jun got mad that none of the other students would let him cheat at Halli Galli or let him bully them, so he took his ball and went home.
Parents, I don’t know how you do it.
(Which isn’t to say I don’t find the job fun and rewarding most days.)
Some Houses
A row of houses near the school where I teach. Behind them is the old beach, Songdo Beach. The houses have courtyards accessible through those wide doorways and these lush interiors belie the otherwise blank exteriors. Across the street from here is the weather station along with a pine tree park and a highrise apartment complex.
Yesterweird 