Han River

On a springtime day, looking northeast across the Han River
from Yeouido Hangang Park
to the Yongsan district of Seoul.

End of the Line

On Jeju Island at Daepyeong, Korea, an empty
public transit bus awaits passengers
for its return run toward Jungmun Resort Complex.

Buddha's Hand

At Yeomiji Botanical Garden on Jeju Island, Korea,
a "closed hand" form of the citrus fruit, Buddha's Hand.
Its fragrant rind smells strongly of lemon, and is used as a
flavor and aroma enhancer.
It also serves as an offering at Buddhist temples
where it symbolizes prayer.

National Assembly

In Seoul, the National Assembly Building on Yeouido Island
is home to the legislative branch
of the South Korean national government.

Looking across Han River from the
National Assembly grounds.

A policeman on guard duty in front of the
National Assembly Building.

Yongmoeri Peninsula

The Yongmoeri coast of southwest Jeju Island, Korea, is an otherworldly landscape of rock, sculpted by wind and water, meeting sea.  Fishermen, picnickers, sightseers, and seafood vendors selling their daily catch dot the legendary shoreline which purportedly resembles the head of a dragon plunging into the ocean.

Craggy peaks of the Yongmoeri coast.

Sightseers along the coast.

The seafood in the tubs, the cigarettes in hand, and the
little green soju bottles on the rocks
are all prevalent across much of Korea.

The surf crashed into this coastal inlet
unleashing mighty booms.

A calm, clear water pool.

Seaside picnic on a terrace.

Eroded, pockmarked cliff.

Where land meets sea.

Yeouido Springtime

Along the Han River in Seoul, cherry blossoms
on Yeouido Island
draw a Sunday afternoon crowd.

Strolling under the blossoms.

Blossoms frame the architecture
of Yeouido Island.

Boy up a tree.

Posing is imperative.

Green Tea Fields

Organic green tea fields at the O'Sulloc Seogwang plantation,
Jeju Island, Korea.

South Coast of Jeju

South coast of Jeju Island near
Daepyeong, Korea.

Looking down on Daepyeong port.

A lone fisherman heads down to the sea
under gray skies.

Loveliest of Trees

The eagerly anticipated cherry blossom time has arrived in Seoul.  I shot these pictures close to home this morning.

Tile art along the blossom
lined pathway.

Hallabong

The hallabong is a hybrid citrus fruit grown
on Jeju Island, Korea.
Named after Hallasan, the dormant volcano which is the centerpiece
of the island, hallabongs are sweet and seedless.

Daepyeong

Daepyeong is a seaside village on the southern coast of Jeju Island, and is about as far as a person can get from the 38th Parallel, and still be in Korea, without further island hopping.  Although only a fifty minute flight, it is a world apart from Seoul both in climate and lifestyle.  It is a land of palm trees and citrus fruits where winter temperatures seldom dip below the freezing mark, and its inhabitants I mingled with pride themselves on a slower paced, pastoral way of life.

We flew into Jeju City on the north side of the island, and caught a bus down to Jungmun on the south side where our guesthouse hostess picked us up in her car.  During the ride to the guesthouse, she told us Jeju is famous for wind, stone, and women (Jeju's women divers get worldwide attention from the likes of National Geographic). 

Sure enough, the next day, we had to lean into the wind as we walked, walls constructed of volcanic stone stretched everywhere, and we were fortunate to find seating in a small restaurant as a group of twenty-eight women, who arrived just after us, had reserved nearly the entire joint.  I think these women were tourists like us, and, given to verbosity, quite windy in their own right.  Unable to hear myself think, I sat and ate a huge bowl of juk (Korean rice porridge) in stony silence.

Daepyeong harbor.

This photo is representative of the narrow streets
and wind resistant, walled in, low profile houses of Daepyeong.
Standing a towering 6'3" tall, there were times
I felt like Gandalf in the Shire.

No mortar is used in constructing Jeju's stone walls
which are known as doldam.
The stones are simply (or not so simply for the
laborer) fitted and stacked.

Mosaic exterior walls, like this floral pattern,
are common on Jeju houses.

More mosaics.

From Daepyeong, looking out across garlic fields,
toward Gunsan Oreum.
Tangerines are grown in the distant greenhouses.

Jeju farm implement.

Jeju palm tree.

Dinner time at a Daepyeong restaurant.

Bird of Paradise

The perennial bird of paradise in full bloom
at Yeomiji Botanical Garden, Jeju Island, Korea.

Hyeopjae Beach

Hyeopjae Beach, Jeju Island, Korea.

White sands and black rocks
of Hyeopjae.

Looking northwest toward Biyangdo Island
from Hyeopjae Beach.

Reality Check

You know you've been married too long when...

Since the day I first set foot on Korean soil, I get the occasional native Korean well-wisher who goes out of the way to approach me, and, unabashedly, tell me that I'm "handsome".  Quite often a "hello" and a "handsome" are jumbled up with Korean, conversational vocabulary. 

It's really very flattering, and occurs far too frequently to be dismissed as mere friendliness.  My beauty has been praised along the banks of the Cheonggyecheon, in aisles of department stores, and, most recently, at a tourist attraction on Jeju Island.  There, on a walkway leading to a viewing platform along the seacoast, a large group of young, Korean women passed by my wife and me.  As they glanced at us, and greeted us with pleasant expressions of  "hello", the word "handsome" was quietly, yet very distinctly, bantered about amongst them, mixed in with their predominant, Korean tongue.  There was no elderly vision blurred by cataracts in this group.  All were in the prime of life, and in possession of keen eyesight.

With an air of smug satisfaction and, perhaps, hinting to my wife not to take for granted her trophy husband of many, many years; as soon as the girls were out of earshot, I inquired of her, "Did you hear that?".

With a roll of her lovely eyes and an exasperated sigh, my wife replied earnestly, "Yes...maybe the word has a different meaning here".

Fisherman

A fisherman baits his hook on the Yongmeori coast
of Jeju Island, Korea.

Escalation

Today, in a dramatic escalation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula, kids armed with toy small arms appeared for the first time in my courtyard.  All seemed normal as I headed out my backdoor during midafternoon.  A narrow steppingstone walkway runs along the building for a ways, then rounds the corner of the ground floor apartments, and heads toward the exit to the street.

I had to slow my pace for an elderly gentleman ahead of me who had, what I assumed to be, his grandchild clinging to his chest in a sternum hugging, papoose bearing type contraption.  The afternoon was sunny and warm with little hint of breeze.  The path widened enough to allow my passage, and as I slipped by, Grandpa was tugging a stocking cap down on the baby's head so as to cover the little ears.  Don't want to catch a sniffle.  Call it the universality of grandparenthood.

My amusement was short-lived as I turned the building's corner and stumbled upon five armed lads, maybe seven years old or so.  Only two were toting weapons.  One sat on a brick wall with a plastic, imitation military assault rifle across his lap.  It had a large orange fluorescent plastic knob on the end of the barrel which immediately put me at ease.  Another youngster gripped a midsize automatic pistol.  Again, the reassuring orange knob.

As I approached the small band of boys, the rifle bearer fidgeted which caused small, round, hard candy balls to dislodge from the gun's magazine and roll out of the end of its barrel onto the sidewalk.  The other boys scrambled after the ammo, gathering it up and stuffing it into their mouths as they chomped gleefully.

These were the first guns, real or otherwise, that I've seen on the streets of Seoul since my arrival.  I don't know if there's talk of possible hostilities at Korean supper tables, but I envisioned these boys, having heard recent news, taking up arms as defenders of our courtyard.

If the regime in Pyongyang catches wind of all this, I'm sure it will issue a rambling rant through the North Korean state news agency that'll translate along these lines:

"We formally inform the scumsucking rancid U.S. imperialists and their conservative warmongering nincompoop ninny puppets in Seoul that the putrid provocative antagonistic mean-spirited act of toy arming children soldiers in the courtyards of residential apartment complex buildings high-rise disloyal to the true and honorable state buildings will be regarded not disregarded as a reckless hostilely hostile act against the DPRK by the venomous swish of skirt and her Washington overlord puppeteers controlling puppet strings will all be smashed to smithereens by the strong-willed deterministic determination of all the united service personnel and well-fed people."

The Pyongyang regime, as well as being a master of terror, has proved itself repeatedly to be a master of the thoroughly redundant, somewhat incomprehensible, run-on sentence.

As I exited to the street, parting ways with the boy citizen soldiers in the courtyard, I couldn't help but notice three foreign war correspondents and their camera crews rushing pellmell toward the boys, in hot pursuit of a breaking news story.  Watch for it, leading off tomorrow's nightly news broadcasts.

Church of Sky

It was day four of our recent visit to Jeju, a volcanic island idyll off the southwest coast of the Korean Peninsula.  We had booked the trip several months ago, and it turned out to be propitious timing.  The dormant volcano, Mount Halla, looms large at the island's center, and over 350 parasitic cones dot the landscape.  The cones are places where smaller eruptions than Mount Halla's occurred.  These offshoots, where lava spewed out of fractures and fissures on Halla's flanks, are called oreum.

It so happens, these oreum are laced with natural caves and manmade tunnels, the latter having been carved out of mountainsides by forced Korean laborers during the Japanese occupation during World War II.  Here, Japanese soldiers awaited the great, final battle that never arrived.

With threats of Armageddon emanating almost daily now out of Pyongyang, I couldn't help but think how cozy it would be riding out the impending fury of hell in a seaside redoubt on beautiful Jeju, overlooking the vast Pacific.  Jeju is famous for its women divers who scour coastal seabeds without the aid of breathing apparatus.  Stacey is always looking for a new hobby.  Perhaps, this watery world even offered potential as a career change option.

Historically, the women divers of the island were the main breadwinners in Jeju's matriarchal family structure.  A woman was, quite often, deemed the "head of the household" while her husband would tend to children and home management tasks.  This lifestyle would require absolutely no adaptation whatsoever on Stacey's behalf.  She has been breadwinning for decades, and is eagerly anticipating many more rewarding years in the workaday world.  Why not underwater?  It's surely peaceful down there; especially, in the rocky shoals where submarines don't lurk.

I could sit safely ensconced in our subterranean haven feasting on bountiful Jeju tangerines while Stacey ventured forth daily to learn the island ways, holding her breath for up to two minutes while diving deeply with newfound friends, seeking out abalones and sea urchins to supplement our citrus diet.  If she ruptured her eardrums (an occasional, occupational hazard), I could attempt to abate the bleeding upon her return.  This was, most certainly, a landscape and seascape worthy of exploration.

A structural tribute to Jeju's famed women divers.

After three days of hiking, we decided to give our weary legs a rest.  The preceding evening, we had arranged an auto tour of the southwest quadrant of the island.  Our driver and guide would be the owner and builder of the guesthouse at which we were staying.  A more pleasant and gregarious man would be hard to find. 

He had, a few years back, laboriously constructed the building that sheltered us from the famous, howling, seaside Jeju winds that gusted and whipped furiously our first night on the island.  He had fed us delicious breakfasts featuring homemade tangerine preserves, segments of locally grown citrus fruits doused in heavy cream, and assorted tossed salad greens.  At our dinner table, he had grilled strips of Jeju's renowned black pig pork belly, accompanied by perilla leaves, sliced raw garlic, and chili paste.  The warmth of the compact, tabletop grill was appreciated following a cool day of hiking, and the sizzling and popping of pork grease was culinary music to our ears.

We were well provided for.  When he inquired as to what we'd like to see on our guided tour, we decided to let him set the itinerary.  He knew the island, and through osmosis of our three days in close proximity, we figured he probably had a good idea of what we'd find interesting.

I fully expected, as we set out, that we'd make a mad dash for a glorious, coastal overlook and the crashing surf.  Instead, he drove us inland, skirting oreum, and putting more and more real estate between us and the sea.  In hindsight, I realize that he was carefully setting the stage for the day ahead.

Our first stop was an out-of-the-way, rural church of contemporary, simplistic design, devoid of people on a Thursday morning.  Our guide explained that it was the brainchild of the well-known, Japanese-Korean architect, Itami Jun.  Jeju is a convergence of wind, water, stone, and sky.  Jun had incorporated these elements into his design.  The building sat surrounded by shallow pools of water with weathered, rounded stone bottoms, and rays of sunlight rebounded off its reflective roof.  The winds of Jeju are omnipresent, and ripples on the surface of the pooled waters shimmered in the breeze.

Church of Sky exterior view.

Our guide, using his cellphone, summoned a man who appeared, seemingly out of thin air.  The apparition unlocked a church door allowing us to enter, then faded away.  With no congregation present, it was a quiet, peaceful place.  We loitered a bit, absorbing the simple elegance of the surroundings.

Through a little sleuthing when we returned home to Seoul, I discovered that the church was originally named the Church of Sky (a name I like, and refuse to relinquish), but was later dubbed the Ark Community Church.  Its shape resembles Noah's ark.

The Jeju Weekly reported that the church is acoustically sublime, and that famous, classically trained musicians who frequent the island often perform there, even at regular Sunday services.  According to the report, a typical Sunday morning congregation consists of a mix of the usual faithful seeking redemption, and tourists in attendance more for an appreciation of the architecture and the music.

Church of Sky interior view.

After a couple more stops inland, we headed west to meet the remarkable Jeju coast.  It would, indeed, as I had expected, turn out to be a day of witnessing geological wonders, panoramic views, and booming surf colliding with craggy, windswept promontories.  Our day's activities were bookended fittingly by the humble symbolism of the little, inland church during the morning hours, and an exhilarating, all encompassing, view of Jeju's patchwork of fields, sea, stone, and sky from high atop Gunsan Oreum at day's end.