postmortem

What a disaster. I have the feeling that most or all of my long walks, from now on, are going to come with this level of calamity—a combination of age (I'm almost 57), health, and simple mortality. We all have limits, I guess, and mine aren't very hard to reach, maybe because I never trained hard in my youth and never really learned how to test and push my physical limits. Distance walking is something I'd been inspired to do, first in the US back when I lived there in 2008 and thought about crossing the mainland from west to east on a journey of discovery about American religious diversity, then again in 2016 or 2017 after I'd watched a Canadian guy's video of him biking across the Four Rivers trail. The guy used a drone, a GoPro, and a cell-phone camera to capture vistas that, up to that time and despite years of living in Korea, I had never even seen before. So in 2017, after some rudimentary training and planning, I did the Four Rivers trail myself, 633 km from Incheon to Busan, from the northwest of South Korea to the southeast corner. It was a thrilling, life-changing experience, and I'd felt as though I'd finally Done Something Big with my life, even if "big" meant walking across a small country.

What went so wrong this time? Why was everything so much harder for what was supposed to be a relatively short walk?

Maybe we should start with what went right. My weight had been creeping up again. I'd been at my lowest in 2021, not long after my stroke: I'd gotten down to nearly 100 kg from 128 kg. Recently, my weight had crept up to around a shameful 114 kg, and when I got back from the walk yesterday, I checked my weight again, and it was down to 110 kg. Lugging 12-13 kg on your back while walking for hours isn't exactly easy work. Of course, in 2008, I didn't know a damn thing about distance walking, and I'd unwisely overpacked about 60 pounds (27 kg) of equipment. There are pro hikers out there who do cross-country routes in the US with at most ten pounds in their packs—and that's including the water they start their days with. Light as a feather. I pack half as much as I used to, but I haven't reached that level of packing wisdom. But this time around, at least, I had at least lost a few pounds (sorry to mix Imperial and metric: it's the price you pay as a Yank in a metric country). Another thing that went right: When I measured my blood pressure yesterday, it was 110/67, which is slightly better than it's been in previous months (my recent worst was around 132/90). What also went right was that I learned a lot about the route—both the bike route nearer the river and the parallel walking route on the berm above. Sometimes, there are things you can learn only by being there, on the ground. I also learned that, thank Cthulhu, Daejeon isn't far enough south from Seoul for the locals to have that annoying southern accent, but I do still hear a little something there.

So what went wrong? It's very tempting just to write off the whole trail with an "It sucks" and move on to other projects. But a more honest answer is that the trail doesn't suck at all. Certain adverse circumstances were beyond my control: the two asshole cabbies, the inadvertently rude kid (I kinda feel bad about how that encounter went), the biker who crashed into the garbage pile right in front of me, the motel that turned out to be a guest house, the extra kilometers of walking that followed, etc. Certain aspects of the trip were in my control, e.g., how to plan the route so as to avoid camping and thus be able to pack more lightly, etc. I could've done that better; everything felt unnecessarily heavy. At the same time, I recognize that I was in control of my emotional reactions even though I'm loath to admit that fact (we all prefer the "He made me angry" excuse to evade our own responsibility), so I could have reacted less rudely to the kid, who might have been slightly retarded, and who deserved something better than anger, disgust, and offense just because I was in a pissy mood. Realistically, if this is the first time a kid has called out "Grandfather!" to me, then this marks the beginning of the Grandfather period of my life, so I'd better get used to the new normal. I'm just a shuffling, old, fat dude with narrowing shoulders, man-boobs (I can hear my goddaughter imperiously declaring, "They're called moobs!"), no waist, and a large, kickable ass. I've never been and never will be a lady magnet, and that's fine. I'm an introvert anyway—alone but not lonely. My right big toe also went wrong, and that might or might not have been preventable. People keep suggesting better footwear, but I've done nothing but search for better footwear from the beginning, and nothing seems to prevent injury (I get injured during every long walk, no matter the shoes). I used my Skechers again, like last year, and they had taken me from A to B even before last year, so why wouldn't they work now? I think, as I've said before, that it really comes down to weight loss: Lose the weight and immediately lose the pressure bearing down on my feet when I walk for hours and hours. When I did the east-coast walk in 2021, after losing so much weight following my stroke, my feet were as close to fine as they'd ever been. This time around, another reason why I had to stop came down to a time-and-logistics crunch: I had brought only so much medicine with me. Adding days to this walk would've meant walking without meds, which would've meant experiencing angina. Angina would've made the walk impossible. (I know the easy solution is "Bring extra meds!", but then the calculus becomes, OK, genius, so how much extra?)

With my longer walks, I normally get involved with equipment reviews and thoughts about the sights I saw and a few column-inches about my interior state as well as what I'd learned along the way. I've got some things to say, but I'll try not to take as long as usual to say them.

Let's start with critters—sentient beings. Every walk involves encounters with critters. Barking dogs are a recurrent motif. I separate the barkers into two categories: good watchdogs and bad watchdogs. Most of them are bad because they don't start barking until I'm right on top of whatever property they're guarding. A rare few of them are good because they either see me or smell me (or even hear me) from far off and starting barking while I'm still at a distance. Those dogs get a silent nod of approval from me. Because my walk took place at the tail-end of winter, I couldn't expect to see any shaman spiders (called Joro spiders in Japan and the US), and I didn't see any live snakes. I did hear a lot of male pheasants (sorry, I just feel weird saying COCK pheasant), and I saw a few flapping clumsily away. Male pheasants are pretty to look at, but they strike me as the dead end of a very weak evolutionary branch: They've got stubby wings, a weird squawk, and they don't generally fly that high, preferring instead to flap desperately, then glide low to the ground. They're "hide in the underbrush" sorts of birds, and I can imagine people hunting them out of a sneering sense of disgust. Pheasants are, basically, goofy; they deserve to be put out of their misery, which is likely why Koreans eat them. And no, pheasant-lover, I'm not going to spend time learning about all the little idiosyncratic quirks that make them unique. Other critters I saw: mainly crawling insects and, during the warmer hours, flying insects. There was also a dead bird. And a dead cat that must've been only recently killed. ("Recently" is a relative term, I realize; the carcass had lost most of its moisture, but it hadn't broken down to the point where bone was showing through skin.) Most cat carcasses look as though the cat died mid-yowl, and this one was no exception. Cats can be theatrical; they often seem to die the way they live.

Any special insights about this walk would boil down to: Plan better. While I couldn't have anticipated the trouble with the asshole cabbies, I think I've devised a workaround for the next time I attempt this route: Have a paper map handy, one with Korean-language explanations of what I'm doing and why I need to be dropped off at Destination X. I will also try to rein in my temper should I ever be accosted by a goofy teen again. Also also: I might need to double-check destinations to confirm I'm—for example—actually headed to a motel and not to guest house.

It was unfortunate that, for most of this walk, I was dogged by a desire for the experience to be over. While I've had vague echoes of that feeling on certain previous walks (no walk is ever perfect), the feeling was never as bad as during this trek. At a guess, it's probably because the first day had started so badly. I was steaming mad after I'd had to deal with those cabbies, and one thing I didn't mention previously was that, along with deciding to start walking from right where I was (in the vicinity of Daejeon's Shintanjin Station), I also huffily resolved not to bother finding any of the certification centers along the way. And if I'm perfectly honest, I was looking for excuses to stop the walk early. I have to go back once again to the idea that this entire endeavor felt cursed, star-crossed from the beginning. So I'll try this walk again when my head is clearer, and I've planned in more detail. I might go back and do a bit more reconnoitering, especially about things like motel locations.

Otherwise, this walk, though brief, did teach me a few things. I have a much better idea of what the region is like. I learned something about the littering patterns of walkers versus bikers (and by implication, how much litter I've missed on other walks). I know a bit more about the shape of the terrain (hillier than most of my other routes except for the east-coast trail, which has some surprisingly steep inclines). I learned that I have personality traits that I need to work on, mainly in the area of learning to keep my temper, which is normally under control, but apparently not perfect control. Well, if you're not learning and curious and growing, you're basically just vegetating. As Morgan Freeman's character Red says in The Shawshank Redemption, quoting his escapee friend Andy:

Get busy livin', or get busy dyin'.

Day 5

What, no "Leg"?

Well, y'ain't got much of a "leg" if'n y'ain't got no feet. 

Here's what I saw yesterday at the motel, after three days of walking:

March 19, 8:38 p.m. Note the perfect hole that marks the old diabetic ulcer.

March 19, 8:38 p.m. strangely enough, the ooze was not coming from the original hole.

It occurs to me that I have plenty of blood-stopper powder (the Korean version).

March 19, 9:00 p.m. I used my blunt "bandage scissors" to cut away some loose skin.

 And tonight, having sloppily debrided more of the skin around the wound:

March 20, 10:08 p.m., in the aftermath of an Epsom-salt bath but before the reapplication of iodine

The last pic, above, shows the wound after several things had happened: (1) further debridement, (2) cleaning and soaking with iodine, (3) a nearly hour-long soak in Epsom-salt solution, (4) re-drying and re-cleaning, then (5) re-bandaging the wound. I'll see the doc on Monday and ask for antibiotics.

So during Leg 3 of my walk, I walked 29 kilometers on that. Let's talk about Leg 3, and now that I've had a day to wallow in my defeat, let's talk about why I came back to Seoul today instead of pushing on to do Legs 4 and 5.

I think this walk was cursed or jinxed from the beginning. I finished Day 2 at the Crystal Motel in Gongju City, stayed there an extra day (Day 3, avoiding the rain), then started off on Day 4/Leg 3 of the walk yesterday. The married couple managing the motel turned out to be nice and chatty, and the Crystal was a decent stay at W40,000 a night, but after two nights there, I could see a lot of the flaws: for example, the sink had a leak (plumbing leaks from the sink and/or toilet are common in a lot of motels; they kind of come with the territory), and the bed was so soft that, by my second night, I was having lower-back problems. It would have been better to sleep on the floor. Also, the motel's location at the periphery of Gongju City also meant it was hard to access convenience stores and restaurants (because sometimes, all you want at the end of a long day of walking is just a decent, hot meal). The Crystal is a nice place to stop thanks to the friendly service, but it would have been better to have a firmer bed, no leaks, and more local options for food and supplies.

Despite the lower-back pain, I got ready early in the morning and was out the door and in the cold by 4:47 a.m. on the 19th. Every morning on this walk has been cold. And my fingers were more frozen during this walk than during any of my previous walks—this despite that fact that it's now officially spring (happy March 20! vernal equinox!). The original distance for this particular segment had been 26K, but I ended up doing 29K (as you see above). Let's go over the how and why.

Most of the walk was decent; it was a nice section to travel. In my original plan for this day, I would have followed Naver Map's bike route, and that would have been 30 kilometers. The thought of doing 30K tired me out, though, so I switched the Naver Map app to "walk" mode, which almost always offers a shorter route than "bike" mode, and Naver gave me a 26K option that, like the bike route, mostly followed the Geum River but on a parallel track to the bike path.

And the impression I'd had about how much litter was along the Geum River route was reinforced by my choice to follow Naver's walking route: There was so damn much trash, which left me feeling a bit depressed. But I did learn a valuable lesson: As much as I complain about Korean bikers and the occasional biker's rudeness when he strays off the bike path and into the pedestrian path, I began to realize that the pollution I was seeing lay all along the walking path. Conclusion: However rude some bikers might be, very few of them litter. The bike paths everywhere are generally much neater and cleaner than any long sidewalk or footpath. But Jesus Christ, those long sidewalks yesterday were a shit-show. Plastic bottles, metal cans, wax-paper coffee cups, mysterious cardboard boxes, randomly tossed bookshelves (I'm not exaggerating), plastic and metal bits and chunks hinting at larger equipment—the list goes on and on. Before I had realized that this problem was almost exclusively a walking-path thing, I began unfairly thinking that the Geumgang path is filthy. And as I said, this was a depressing thought. Sure, I've seen trash along bike paths; anyone who's read my walk blog about doing Jeju Island in 2022 knows how surprised and disappointed I was about the litter problem in what should have been one of the most beautiful spots in all of South Korea. But I don't think I'd realized until the 19th how dirty the walking paths paralleling the bike paths were. There seems to be a rule in Korea: if there's a sloping berm or embankment with a road or sidewalk running alongside it, you have to throw shit down that hill. So much garbage. Now, I'm nobody's tree-hugger, but why would anyone want to turn their country into a toilet? (And sure: To be fair, America's got a huge litter problem, too. I encourage all foreign tourists to go document it and shame us. We should all take more pride in our own countries instead of turning them into shitholes.)

Aside from the litter (and some barking dogs), the only other real annoyance about yesterday was the frequency of long, gently sloping hills that would tire me out simply by going on for so long. My lower back began to recover as I walked, now that I was away from the Crystal Motel's too-soft bed, but there was still something of an ache there thanks to my backpack, as well as a good bit of soreness around the hip joints. With water bottles, my backpack shouldn't have been all that heavy at around 12-13 kg, but I could just be getting older. (I should probably train by rucking with my weight vest, which can hold up to 20 kg.) I stopped frequently; for a large part of the walk, I would count 150 paces while walking, take a fifteen-breath break, then continue on. On hills, I'd go back to a 60-pace/15-breath rhythm.

Most of the day went by more or less smoothly aside from the aches, soreness, and fatigue, the latter of which I began to attribute to my heavy backpack, which was heavy because I was carrying camping gear for Day 4 of this trip. But disaster struck at the very end of the 26K segment I had planned: I arrived in the town of Buyeo-eup (an eup is a town, and Buyeo is pronounced "boo-yaw"), at what Naver had told me would be a motel called the L-tel (엘텔/eltel in Korean), only to discover that the place was actually a guest house called, creatively enough, Buyeo Guest House. You normally need to reserve space at a guest house in advance, and that doesn't necessarily guarantee you a private space (many guest houses will put you in a bunk bed in a shared room; I've only ever had one good experience at a guest house). I entered the building anyway and saw signs of construction or renovation, but the place's parking lot was full, so I assumed the place was doing business even with renovation going on. Seeing no one, I went tiredly back outside and met two construction workers who were walking up the same hill I had just walked up to reach this place. I told them my situation and showed them on my phone how Naver Map had labeled the place as a motel with the name "L-tel," and they then told me I needed to walk further to reach the downtown area (Korean shinae—shi = "city," nae = "interior"), about 1.5 km. One of the guys pointed uphill to where I needed to go (I groaned inwardly), and he reassured me that there would be plenty of motels once I got downtown. I thanked the guys and started to limp.

But here's the thing: I had been so let down by Naver's mislabeling of my destination that all of the negative aspects of this walk, plus my tiredness and lingering pissy mood, all became too much to bear. So as I walked away, I considered using my Kakao Taxi app to hail a cab and get driven to the Buyeo Intercity Bus Terminal instead of staying the night. With that in mind, once I'd rounded a corner on my way up the hill, I stopped, got out my phone, and called up the Kakao Taxi app. The app had somehow forgotten that I had already set up a pay-by-card payment method, and it again asked me to "enter a card." You're supposed to do this by physically holding your card up to the phone's camera and allowing the app to scan the card's image and info. I held the card up, and... nothing. The "enter card" screen reverted back to the previous "request taxi" screen. I tried this several times, but the app was obviously broken. I have bad luck with Korean apps. My Yogiyo app for food delivery doesn't work anymore; Kakao Taxi is broken; my Shinhan Bank app sometimes goes nuts when I have to renew the digital certification (as happened recently; see story here). I've had other Korean apps crap out on me before, too, including an app for buying bus and train tickets that froze on me when I was trying to access the QR code to be able to get on a train a year or so ago. The gremlins who fuck apps up seem to love me, and that's why my apps always die.

So I had little choice but to trust what the construction guys had told me: I continued my final slog to the downtown area of Buyeo. By that point, it was sunset, and I noted with bitter amusement that it was starting to get cold again. It might be the tail-end of winter, but winter isn't ready to let go quite yet, especially during dawn and dusk, and especially in mountain shadows during the day. Somehow, though, I followed the road signs and made it to Buyeo's downtown area, and sure enough, there were plenty of motels with their tacky signs ablaze with the arrival of evening. Since I had reached a mental tipping point, I had by this point decided that it was time to just give up this fucking cursed walk, and with that decision made, my mood lifted (per the Meyers-Briggs personality-trait system, I'm a J person, i.e., more comfortable after deciding something than before).

It was closer to 3 km than to 1.5 km before I reached the Myeongjin Motel. I had passed a motel advertising itself as a youth hostel, but I didn't want to deprive some youth of a berth for the night. I tiredly set my backpack down in my W50,000/night room and went back out to hit the convenience store across the street for a pack of tissues (cold weather always gives me a runny nose, and my nose had decided, from Day 1, to keep running even after the weather got warmer in the late morning). In another instance of bad luck, the GS25 "convenience" store didn't have any travel packets of tissue, but it did have a ton of soft, "winged" feminine products on the shelves devoted to tissues and other soft products. It also had plenty of wet wipes, but I didn't need those ("It's like ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife"). I went over to a "Nature Love" grocery store to see about getting something to eat, but I saw nothing that appealed to me. So I went over two buildings to a Chinese resto that had a yeongeop-joong/영업중 ("open") sign, but the moment I stepped inside, the ajumma made a face and said, "We're all finished" ("다 끝났습니다/da ggeutnasseumnida"). It was 7:48 p.m. I guessed everything in Buyeo finished early; I'd seen a lot of closed businesses in the evening. Either that, or some crotchety ajumma doesn't like foreigners. I smiled tightly, bowed, nodded, and left while muttering. Nice to see that my luck was at least consistent if nothing else. I went back to the convenience store, bought snacks, and returned to my motel.

By this point, I was dead tired, as I usually am at the end of every such walking day. I slumped into a chair, placed my snack and drinks on the table, and before I started eating and drinking, I ripped twenty sheets out of my room's complimentary Kleenex boxes: I was going to get my tissues one way or another. The god of misfortune wasn't going to win every round. Ha! I stole my tissues, refolded them, then stuffed them into my empty travel-tissue package. I blearily wrote up my blog post, then set about the grim task of examining my right foot, which had been hurting for several hours. 

The first three pics you saw above were from that examination—the loose flap of skin, the chewed-up wound, the blood, the ooze. But thanks to my diabetic neuropathy and the fact that I wasn't in the middle of a walk, there wasn't as much pain as there would have been had I been healthy. Quite frankly, I'd like to lop my big toe off surgically; it's been the source of so many problems over the past few years. And the surgeons can take my right pinky toe while they're at it. (And please don't write any comments about how you need your toes for balance. In the world, there are doubtless millions of people who do just fine despite missing some digits.)

I got the wound cleaned up and redressed, and the sight of that torn-up flesh convinced me that stopping the walk now would be the right decision. I put on multiple layers of bandages, then thought no more about my toe and went to sleep. The morning of the 20th, I woke up and, not wearing my contact lenses, I squinted at my toe. Something seemed funny about the bandages, so I palpated my foot and realized the bandages had partially peeled off during the night, probably because the toe had never stopped oozing. A worse realization followed hard upon this one: I must've bled/oozed onto the bed linens! Squinting, I threw back the covers and, sure enough, saw the stains from my toe wound all over the mattress cover and blanket. Ick. And fuck, too—this was going to piss off whoever would have to deal with the bed linens. While I'm sure the motel crew had seen a lot worse, in terms of bodily fluids, then a few ooze stains, I still felt awfully guilty about what had happened, so I dashed off a note in Korean and left an extra W30,000 in the room for the crew's trouble. Frankly, I've bled onto motel sheets before—for various reasons—and in most of those cases, I've never left money. But for whatever reason, maybe to right whatever karma had gone so wrong on this trip, I decided that monetary restitution would be appropriate in this case. I only hope that the cleaning staff didn't come in later, take the money for themselves, and destroy the note. Koreans are generally more trustworthy than that, but you never know how desperate someone might be.

Otherwise, I packed, left, and did the 1.2-kilometer walk to the Buyeo Intercity Bus Terminal. I used the weird little automatic ticket dispenser (I almost never go to a window to talk to a human being these days; machines are easier to deal with, and I generally read "machine Korean" just fine), which looked very different from the machines I normally use in Seoul, to buy an 11:00 a.m. bus ticket to Seoul Nambu Terminal. After that, it was just a matter of waiting. The bus eventually pulled into its slot; I asked the driver whether I could store my backpack in the undercarriage storage area; he nodded. I got on board and gave the driver my ticket; he ripped it in half, I went to my seat, and we trundled off to Seoul. It was about a two-hour ride, and I dozed off a few times, physically and emotionally exhausted by this very brief walk. I hadn't done Days 4 and 5. But whatever. We stopped in Seoul; I got my backpack and headed to the subway station, which was right on Line 3, i.e., I could go a mere few stops and end up at my place.

Once back in my apartment building, I decided to console myself with some hot food. If you've been reading my main blog, you know about the new Chinese resto with the only-somewhat-satisfactory food. This time, I tried some different menu items, ordering the jjajangmyeon (chewy noodles with black-bean sauce), the jjambbong (spicy-salty seafood-and-pasta soup), and those gun-mandu (fried, thick-skinned dumplings or potstickers). The server, in another bit of unintentional rudeness, meekly asked whether I really meant to order that much for myself. I smiled and nodded, unbothered because I was back home and in a fog of fatigue. The food came out as I was scrolling through some sort of Insta-Substack article about Iran's now-destroyed illegal Bitcoin economy. I noticed, this time, that the mandu was very chewy and hard to bite through. The jjajangmyeon proved bland to the point of being tasteless, and it didn't come with any cubed potato or a topping of sliced, fresh cucumber. Judging by the lackluster nature of the menu items I've tried, I see no reason to waste my money any further on that place. I suspect that, in a year or two, it too will go out of business as so many previous businesses have. My building's basement shows no mercy to losers. If this resto doesn't do something to up its game, it's going to fail. Things the place could do would be to (1) make the mandu crunchier and thus easier to bite through; (2) make the gganpoonggi about ten times crunchier, with a thicker coating of batter; (3) at least add sliced cucumbers and cooked, cubed potatoes to the jjajangmyeon, but also make the sauce stronger and less bland by both adding more black-bean paste to it and spicing the sauce up (a recent, popular trend, which I approve); and finally, (4) add some shrimp and squid tentacles to the jjambbong, which was otherwise pretty okay in terms of saltiness and spiciness. Failing that, failing those measures... only death and destruction lie ahead.

Even though this walk was a disaster from the beginning (my last disaster was in 2024), I did learn a lot of valuable lessons, and if I have time this fall, I plan to try doing the walk again. I'll talk more about what I mean when I write up this blog's postmortem. In the meantime, expect the full complement of each day's pictures to appear: they'll be uploaded, enlarged, captioned, and commented, as I do with every walk blog. That's one of my projects for the weekend.

So sit tight. There's more to come. Postmortem first.

Day 4, Leg 3

I'm gonna devote my time to showering, watching some YouTube, then resting. I'm sure I'll have much more to say tomorrow. Enjoy the pics and images.

This step count includes a lot of walking after the day was done.

Yeah, about 29K total.

Bye, Crystal Motel

tree gettin' fonkeh

a fence made of snowboards and skis

clouds across the way and the bike path below

grub-larva-creepie-crawlie

imshi pojang = temporary cover(ing)

In this case, a covering of asphalt. It'll be replaced.

doodads

afternoon sun

It's not a motel called the L-tel no matter what Naver says.

By the end of today, I was feeling about like this.

PHOTO ESSAY

leaving the Crystal Motel after two nights, 4:47 a.m.

early-morning shot of the place as I leave

lookin' down the street

In the above pic, you get a tantalizing glimpse, off to the right, of the complex that is the Oncheon Motel I had decided not to stay in. The sheer size of the place indicates it would've been expensive.

crossing the empty street

daring a car to come out of nowhere and hit me

walking along the sidewalk like a good citizen

You can see the right-side bike path paralleling my course.

almost a chiaroscuro effect

The painted street sign says 무령로/Muryeong-no, or Muryeong Street, named after the Baekje king.

5:14 a.m.—a few cars fly by

tree in the dark, a-boppin' away

Ugh. Sorry for the blur.

looking out at a bridge

decent shot of the Big Dipper

Constellations aren't something you see in or near big cities thanks to light pollution.

At some point, I had to turn on my phone's flashlight for a few minutes to avoid cracks and potholes.

a bridge approacheth

shwimteo in the dark—but I don't stop here

I recall that I couldn't find this bridge's name on Naver. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

There's a bridge right after this one, though, and it has a name.

In this shot, you can see the next bridge over.

coming up: Ungjin Bridge (Ungjin-daegyo/웅진대교)

Normally, it's abandoned gloves. How sad to be somebody's abandoned shoe.

The sky lightens. The bridge's lights allow me to see the path ahead for a bit.

morning mist on the water

ggachi (까치, magpie) nests

another shwimteo, not so much in the dark

Eerily glowing mountain. Because of uranium?

I'm passing under a lot of bridges, it seems. I didn't get this one's name, either.

too narrow for under-the-bridge culture

Hey, glove—did you hear about the shoe back that way?

up a slight rise

My destination is Buyeo-eup (an eup is a town), but not quite 25K away from this point.

Snowboards and skis: one way to make a fence.

The quirky fence goes on a ways.

Ten-hut!

6:29 a.m.—a shot of the fields that fascinate me

I have to veer left, so I cross here and try to stay out of cars' way.

I must have given up on finding bridges' names.

fuckin' trash

slight downhill

a pile of something... scrap?

6:40 a.m.

glove curled up on the frosty ground

shapes and colors

over the little bridge

What great or awful works lie behind that wall? The people on the bridge above know.

a place that deals in metals

under construction

ubiquitous farmland

It's hard to know what season this is just from this image. The first official day of spring is tomorrow, 3/20.

entering a somewhat built-up, industrial zone; the sign is warning, "authorized personnel only"

trudging on

downhill, then swerving left

Man down!

I imagine that an electrician can read this situation.

I've seen bullet cases flowered out like that after impact.

truncated

Bizarre to see roofing tiles on this sort of wall.

more bizarrerie

tree, proudly erupting

onward, into the fog

...and we're out of the built-up zone.

walking alongside a crick for a spell

curving left

This reminds me of something.

Anyone else see the Korean zombie-horror historical drama Kingdom? I reviewed it here.

frosty plants, 7:17 a.m.

I really haven't walked that far in 2.5 hours.

onward and slightly upward

There are fields, Neo. Endless fields...

Farmland awaits tilling and spring planting.

What's it like to live out in places like this?

one of several arfers I'll encounter today

looks like a shark-diver's cage

wide shot

You can't hide from me.

straight on

The wax-paper litter shouts its imperative. But it's still litter.

'nuther dead glove

I think this is a glove, hence the photo.

another mysterious utility building

also awaiting cultivation

We're almost through this farm village.

a baesumun (drainage gate), with catwalk

creek, vaguely

work glove + plastic litter

We'll be crossing that little bridge.

litter, litter

...and more litter

the little bridge, with a weirdly farting steam pipe on the other end

Creek tragedy! I'd hate to be the one to have to clean all that shit up.

Does the mist make things better or just more gloomy?

When I see a gathering of stones like that, I always think: aeration for the water.

creek a-gurglin' away

across

VIDEO: the farting steam pipe.

So this little bridge is the Geomsang Bridge (Geomsang-gyo/검상교).

A slight uphill awaits.

looking over at another nameless bridge

At this point, I have no idea whether I'm still on the official bike path. I confess I've been following the "walking mode" route on Naver Map. It's a shorter route (by about 4K), and I'm already tired even though it's only 7:45 a.m.

big, ol' heavy concrete block just sittin' there for some reason

coming up on some eerie properties

I hear barking. Once again, the watchdog is too late.

arfer

Maybe I'll see Ol' Jethro with his scattergun.

Luckily, I'm not going up.

Whoops—spoke too soon.

Litter. The tiny bottles are a yogurt milk called "Yakult" in Roman letters but ya-keu-reut in Korean.

The notion of tiny drinks is anathema to big eaters and drinkers like me. A single Yakult is little more than a swallow. What're you supposed to do, sip and savor it?

More trash. This was a trashy day.

up the ramp

—and no, not through the tunnel.

road level, with the bike path down and to the right

Somewhere, an old American Indian is crying.

an almost perfect scene except for the one piece of schmutz

In 3 km, I'm going to have to detour down to the bike path.

NB: Whether I'm on the bike path or the parallel walking path, it's hard to get lost as long as you're following the river. The issue of getting lost is most urgent at the beginning and end of each day's walk because you have to leave the official path to go to your lodging.

triangle sign: a warning about crossing wildlife
green sign: Ee-een Township (Iin-myeon/이인면)

"Danger: Frequently Foggy Area"—ya' think?

This deteriorated sign utterly mystified me.

I see an Easter Island statue in profile.

straight into the mist

For you semantically anal-retentive folks—I looked up the difference between mist and fog. Mist is thinner and less dense: you can see up to 1 km in mist. If you can't, it's fog.

schmutz, schmutz, schmutz

a shwimteo blighted by crap

So sad. Litterers have no pride or sense of duty to others.

Any aborted fetuses in there?

I imagine these ciggies had been gathered into a container...

...then, the container got dumped here. Great.

more shit

and of course, a glove (next to a cigarette)

This is almost a wallpaper-worthy shot, though. The kind of scene I live for.

when you've been too long at the mosh pit

curving oh-so-gently left

Buyeo Town (Buyeo-eup/부여읍), but my destination is less than 20K away.

stairs to mystery

hairy down low... the way I like my women

no escaping the solar panels

Gonna be a bit before this all burns away.

allowing the cloud-god to quietly pass through

Take your time, O Deity.

settling onto the Geum River like a contented cat

tantalizing view of the far bank

Mansu Village (Mansu-ri/만수리)

I don't know what hanja the word Mansu is. "Ten thousand hands (man + su)"? I don't think this is meant to be a Buddhist term. There is, however, a divinity in Buddhism depicted as a "thousand-handed Buddha." In reality, this Buddha is Gwanseum, the bodhisattva of compassion. I have a deep-dive explanation of this bodhisattva over at last year's blog. Click over and scroll down.

It's a big god rolling through.

a peek down

one of many small bridges to cross in this section of the day's trek

and it's the Mansu Bridge (Mansu-gyo/만수교)

looking back (try to ignore the litter if you can)

Nice. More desktop wallpaper.

en avant

The litter just never ends. And most of it goes unnoticed by bikers.

In the above caption, I'm not blaming bikers for not doing anything about the litter. I'd have to blame myself as well for just walking on by it. I'm simply noting that, with the bike paths generally being cleaner than the walking paths, it's probably a rare thing for a biker to look up while biking and see the crap strewn all over the tops of those berms. In other words, there are whole communities of people doing their own things right next to each other and largely ignoring each other. If anything, I praise the bikers for not contributing (so much) to the overall problem.

The company sign says Daegil Environment (Daegil Hwangyeong/대길환경).

Hey, Daegil! Look along the riverside! I've got an evironmental problem for you!

I'd like to think the fog/mist is starting to burn away. 8:45 a.m.

moving on

but not escaping the problem

the Leaning Tree of Kor-eeza

more stairs to mystery

"Slippery!"

Are we at last beginning to see a real fade?

Notjeom 1st Bridge (Notjeom 1-gyo/놋점1교, "note-jumm")

The wide gap and the steep fall made me paranoid. I hurried on past.

crossing da bridge

This almost looks like fall.

memento mori

the modern shwimteo at the bottom of the berm

Clear of fog!

construction 500 m ahead

Notjeom 2nd Bridge (Notjeom 2-gyo/놋점2교)

The air will be warming up now, but not in the shadow of the mountain.

more crap in and around this shwimteo

straight on

and as always, an abandoned glove

staring sadly at the litter

The label says that's the lid of a container for delivering cakes.

construction 400 m ahead

Notjeom 3rd Bridge

I looked up Notjeom but have no clear idea what it is.

never seen this sort of setup before

curiouser and curiouser

stairs on down... but I resisted the temptation to descend hic et nunc

looking back

baesumun (drainage gate) and, farther on, the forewarned construction area (a bridge)

no choice but to keep going forward

9:14 a.m.—Unam Village (Unam-ni/운암리)

closing in

A modest bridge-to-be. See you in two years.

Unam Bridge (Unam-gyo/운암교)

more solar

tributary, but not flowing which much conviction right now

myo (gravesite)

reminds me of strip mining, which is a depressing sight

It looks as if two bridges are being built. Is one only temporary?

trying to avoid oncoming traffic, not seeing a ramp down

the proto-bridge up close

How far does this construction site extend?

a man and his heavy equipment

I assume this is a support structure for the bridge's future off-ramp.

passing by, moving on

back to safe walking

Like a honey badger, the Geum River doesn't give a shit. It just keeps on flowing.

Ooh—what's going on down there?

geradeaus

more stairs to mystery (I'd try climbing if it were legal)

coming up on a very large piece of litter

the views I love on these walks

So what is that exactly? A bookshelf?

another glove to punctuate my journey

in context

This glove says, "Everything is A-OK!"

The arrangement of the litter makes me think there'd been some sort of satanic garbage ritual.

more schmutz

house color: to each his/her own, I guess

I'm reminded of the salmon-pink buildings that predominate in Nice, France.

myo

Ah—the bike trail meets up with my path.

I decide to go down the ramp, which means temporarily going backward, then U-turning and going forward again.

more myo on the mountainside

Families have to have money for that kind of burial in a country where real estate is at a premium. Sad story: In 1986, I visited Korea for the first time with my family. I was in high school; it was the summer before I would be a senior. One of Mom's goals while in Korea was to find her mother's grave (my grandmother died in America before I was born, and she was returned to Korea where, presumably, my relatives took care of her burial). We went to the site, but Mom discovered the land had been redeveloped, with no record of where her mother might have been moved (if she'd been moved at all). It was a sad day for Mom. She cried. I was a stupid, self-absorbed teen (I also spoke no Korean at the time), and I don't think I realized how much of a blow this discovery had been. Much later on, in January of 2010, Mom died of brain cancer. She was cremated. My brothers are the keepers of her urn, and despite the passage of years, there's been no agreement as to what to do with Mom's ashes. I've written my brothers several times over the years about this, and there's been no response. My own preference would be to scatter her ashes over a site she used to love. I personally have no desire to keep the ashes, but maybe my brothers do for symbolic reasons. I'm a pragmatist: you can't hug ashes, and you can't expect them to reanimate and give you life-advice or joke with you or even scold you. Ashes are a thing: a what, not a who. They're Mom's ashes, not Mom herself. Anyway, I'd like to see Mom's ashes taken care of before I die, but I'm not hopeful that anything's going to happen anytime soon. We'll see. I do know I'd rather not bury the ashes: I'd rather that Mom's remains be scattered and associated with a grand piece of geography like an ocean or a mountain range, not with a narrow, specific bit of land like a cemetery. Cemeteries come and go. In the end, though, I view the whole thing with a sort of Buddhist nonattachment: If my brothers feel strongly that they'd rather keep her ashes around, then let them. I just hope to get a definite answer from one or both of them as to what to do.

stopping here for a few minutes

In cold weather, I'm always happy when a stopping point has a garbage can: I can throw away my snot-soaked tissue (cold weather gets my nose running).

And on I go.

76K to the very end.

67K back to the Daecheong Dam (where I didn't start).

fellow traveler

dry tributary (but spring rains are coming)

What did this? A heavy person on a bike? An electric vehicle? Driven by a heavy person?

Even along the bike path—schmutz.

looks almost like the bottom of that tossed-away cake box

You'll never find me!

waiting for all of this to turn green

I may have failed to walk this route this time, but I'll be back.

myo in the distance

a reminder that this is the right and official route (which I'll be diverging from)

grub/larva, flailing about helplessly

distant bridges

baesumun coming up

12:15 p.m.—Buzzcut Mountain (monument to Miles Quaritch?)

baesumun up close

"Sharp curve. Go slowly."

Naver is insisting I go up these stairs and back to the road.

I should have ignored Naver on this point, frankly.

Bug-eaten railing, but up the stairs I go.

at the top

looking down

walking until I hit a rest spot

12:57 p.m.—Let me tell you the story of my pinky toe.

By this point in the walk, I was feeling pain in my pinky toe. Turns out I had wrapped both the toe and the foot too tightly, so I ripped off the faux Leukotape around my little toe and used my first-aid scissors to cut the wrapping around my foot (see above) so as to ease the tension. I rewrapped the pinky toe with a simple, little bandage. It worked. No more pinky-toe pain for the rest of the day's walk. (I did end up with other pains, but that's a different story.) 

For large, heavy people, pain while walking is an inevitability. The best thing one can do is to lose weight. After my stroke in 2021, I lost almost 60 pounds in three months, and the walk I did that year involved no foot pain at all, which was a first after years of irritations and blisters and pus-filled wounds. Before my stroke, I was a hulking, blubberous 128 kg (282 lbs.). After my stroke, I went on a diet recommended by a British friend of mine and got down to 101 kg (223 lbs.). As of this writing, I'm currently 110 kg (242.5 lbs.), and I'd eventually like to get down to 90 kg, my weight when I was living and hiking in Switzerland back in college (1989-90 school year—I was in Europe for Ceausescu and the Berlin Wall). But losing 20 kg now is a harder job than losing 26 kg was a few years ago. Well... as high-voiced exercise guru Greg Doucette says, Train harder than yesterday. Harsh advice, but there's truth in those words. In weightlifting, the concept is called progressive overload. But I have to fight a mountain of laziness to accomplish anything meaningful. And I injure easily. Not a good mix.

I should've taken these stairs right back down.

baesumun seen from the back

stacks of giant marshmallows (wrapped hay bales)

"Hello, human! I am Red Pine! Please don't set me on fire!"

a mountainside village like so many

See the fanged/tusked demon in the flames?

Buddhist demon images. Buddhist demons have a lot in common with the demons in Christian cosmology. They are often driven by and promoting anger, viciousness, hatred, and ignorance. Specific to Buddhist cosmology, they often try to keep people within samsara, the painful axio-ontological cycle of birth and rebirth. Demons can tempt worldlings with the prospect of sensual pleasure. Remember, though, that certain wrathful divinities are not demons in and of themselves but are a reflection of one's own state of mind, somewhat in the spirit of the Western proverb that we create our own hell(s). Demonic possession, in Buddhism, is more of a Theravada thing than a Mahayana thing, and whether Buddhists take possession to be literal or metaphorical can depend on the experience and sophistication of the practitioner. Exorcism of demons, in the sense of driving them out or combatting them, is more of a Christian concept. Because they are sentient beings who are themselves trapped in the samsaric realm, demons are deserving of compassion and should, in many cases, be shown the proper path to follow so as to eventually escape the wheel.

There was an occupied SUV parked beside this bus stop. I studiously avoided it.

ramp down, then left through a tunnel

tunnel (1)

tunnel (2)

Popping out, I see a shwimteo.

Back up to the road.

These look like horse apples, but...

...they're actually fallen fruit (inedible, I have no doubt).

I asked the AI god what they were, and it suggested "old cannonballs." Ha! I love AI.

myo in the distance

closeup

looking right and riverward

The bike path mocks me from a distance.

I plod on.

So many tossed-away work gloves.

wide shot for context

the naughty, come-hither glove

The come-here gesture in Korea is done with the palm down and using the whole hand. Doing it the way we do in the West, palm-up and with a single, crooked finger beckoning, is considered rude—the gesture you'd do to a dog. Another rude gesture is the playful "Gotcher nose!" we do to kids in the States. In Korea, that gesture—with your hand fisted and your thumb protruding between your index and middle finger—is considered obscene, possibly a reference to a small penis. I've heard that that gesture is also called the "fig sign."

glove with context

I'll have to come back in a few years to find out what this is going to be.

Gyeondong Village (Gyeondong-ni/견동리)—but I'm not going that way.

when she's shaved only half of it off down there

Ugh...

green sign: Gyeondong 3-way Intersection (Gyeondong Samgeori/견동삼거리)
blue, arrow-shaped sign: Guksabong Street (Guksabong-no/국사봉로)

65K to the sea

nurseries, waiting for their plants to be planted

a hardcore glove that smokes and gives no fucks

context

Yuha Village (Yuha-ri/유하리)

See the gravesite waaaaaay back there?

myo, digitally zoomed

baesumun

probably less than 10K for me

My goal is a motel called the L-tel (el-tel/엘텔).

Once again, the path rises to meet me.

Do I even want to know what the glove and the blue article of clothing are doing to each other?

2:27 p.m.—I stop here and take a break for a couple of minutes.

dead boid—another memento mori

Bungang Village (Bungang-ni/분강리)—but I'm going straight.

Modest studio-apartment building? Looks like it.

The Konglish expression one-room (weollum/원룸) is used to describe relatively cheap studio apartments. Construction quality varies; when I taught at Daegu Catholic University during the 2013-2014 academic year, I was housed in a one-room with paper-thin walls and floor. My neighbors were fellow teachers, and we were all complaining about each other's noise. The guy below me apparently heard my footsteps; the guy above me always left his cell phone on the floor; I could hear it vibrating violently whenever it rang and blared music. I'm currently in a one-room situation, but it's a huge, old battleship of a building, so there's almost no "neighbor noise." I still try to keep things quiet by using headphones when I watch videos and movies on my large-monitor computer. I never slam my dumbbells and heavy clubs against the floor. The only thing I can't hide is the horrific, gassy, blatting noise of my bathroom sessions, for which I am truly sorry. My next-door neighbor is a young woman. I can only imagine what she thinks every time I sound off.

one last look

It's a small village.

forging ahead

bridge in the distance

a sign for the Geum River and for Buyeo

We are railed in. Corralled.

Bungang Bridge (Bungang-gyo/분강교)

stepping onto the latest bridge

We swerve right, then left.

approaching an outpost on the edge of Buyeo

It's a shwimteo and a shop of some sort.

sign for Buyeo County (Buyeo-gun/부여군)

another arfer belatedly barks at me

There are two of them. One was quiet.

Down I go.

interesting way to set up stairs

what the stairs lead up to

green, vertical sign: alddeul-maejang/알뜰매장 = bargain shop

gentle curves

I assume these are pieces and parts that are ready for use should the need arise.

See the myo way back there?

rest in peace

So much of this terrain comes down to farmland. Agriculture is huge in South Korea.

I like the intense blue of whatever that is.

more fields waiting to be cultivated

We're hitting a tunnel and turning left.

through

bus stop for Jeoseok 3rd Village (Jeoseok 3-ni/저석3리)

The bus stop also shows that Gongju City is behind and Buyeo is ahead.

What an interestingly quirky place. I wonder how livable it is. Love the colors.

I'll be walking along this back road to my purported destination.

tree, bowing

up a slight rise

ease on down, ease on down the road

more solar panels

I got barked at by a tiny-yet-angry little critter here.

Shinjeong Village (Shinjeong-ni/신정리)

bus stop for Shinjeong Village, showing Buyeo ahead and Tancheon behind.

There's a creek where I live in Seoul called the Tan-cheon (which a Korean-fluent friend translates as "Coal Creek"). The Tancheon above seems to be more of a place name, though. Maybe it is associated with a local creek; I don't know.

Gotta keep moving even though I'm tired. 3:48 p.m.

This looks like leftovers from last harvest—uncollected hay that didn't get baled.

Where I officially part ways with the bike route: I go straight, but the route goes right.

I've got another kilometer or more down this road.

임시포장/imshi pojang = temporary covering (i.e., the asphalt)

farm road

off to the left: bus stop for Jeokseok 2nd Village

tall nursery and stacked-up stuff

I wonder what these are. Weeded weeds? Roots to rinse and eat? I have no clue. But they're probably not to eat.

pallets

There are pallets (for cargo), palettes (for artists' paint), and palates (for the roofs of mouths). In French a palate in the mouth is called a palais, the same word as for a palace.

a bounty of baskets

colorful, stacked pallets

Jeoseok 1st Village

...and we're still heading down this road (I'm moving very slowly now).

big sky

I wish I read more Chinese. Monuments for something.

looking left: bus stop for Jeoseok Village, with Buyeo ahead (right arrow) and Gongju behind (left arrow)

Beodeuraengi—I think this is a village of the Andong Kims.

My mother once told me how, when it came to common surnames like Kim, there were several tribes into which the Kims (etc.) were subdivided. For example, there were the Gyeongju Kims, the Gimhae Kims, and now I see the Andong Kims. I'm not sure which Kim I am.

Shwimteo! But tired as I am, I don't stop here.

Still ambling down this road.

Apiary! But it's too early for the bees to be flying about, I think. Another week or so, maybe.

pressing on

thingamabobs, doohickeys, thingamajigs, doodads

Are those myo up yonder?

wandering into town

I don't know it yet, but there will be a convenience store up ahead.

Shwimteo! But again, I don't stop here. (I will, however, stop down the road a bit.)

boulder with signage for the town's meeting hall

That cracked concrete wall is classic. So much older Korean architecture is slipshod in that way.

In his Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, author Robert Pirsig described once being in Korea and seeing what he considered to be a high-quality wall. That's a good wall, he wrote in a book that was all about the concept of quality, and how quality was an objective—not subjective—feature of our universe. In rereading Pirsig recently, I had a good chuckle at that his good wall. Yes, Koreans are capable of building good, sturdy walls—usually fortress walls that are the product of masonry, or modern skyscrapers in the richer part of big cities. But once concrete was introduced to the country decades ago, so many walls and houses were built from it with no attention paid to how to shore up such structures and make them long-lasting. The result is a long parade of cracked walls everywhere you walk. Would you look at the above image and say That's a good wall?

going up a slight rise

Jawang Village (Jawang-maeul/자왕마을)

Up to now, the particle for "village" has been rendered as -ri or -li or -ni depending on what the preceding consonant has been. Those particles are all Chinese, coming from 里, meaning "village." The word maeul ("mah-eul"), used above, is a pure-Korean word for "village." I'm not sure what Jawang means. It sounds Chinese. Reverse the syllables, and it's wangja, or "king-son," i.e., a prince. Near as I can figure, Jawang is just a place name.

cute dwelling

farm in the afternoon (4:44 p.m.)

shapes and colors

studio apartments (one-rooms)

shwimteo by bus stop

uphill

family-tent store

I don't think these are graves, but they might be cenotaphs.

for important people(?), obviously

My "destination" is close.

You can barely see it way up ahead, but the convenience store I visited was a few hundred meters away. It was run by a slightly irascible old lady who mumbled resentfully about having to bag the drinks and snacks I had bought, declaring that people normally just walked out with their products, bagless. So who the fuck were the bags for? I recognized the sound of someone fat and lazy and unwilling to move. Such people like to control their surrounding environment through their voices, so they adopt speech patterns meant to make you feel guilty or to do things. I just ignore the tone, make my transactions, and leave. Can't say that I care about a worthless lump of flesh who's not interested in customer service.

After walking a bit, I stopped at a small, partially enclosed shwimteo next to a bus stop. A Jindo dog wandered up, sniffing hopefully, but I hadn't opened any containers yet, so it sniffed and went away. I munched and drank thoughtfully, happy to have something in my gut after a day of no nutrition. I also thought, at the time, that I was close to my destination. Ha. Folly.

After fifteen or so minutes, I wandered on.

4:54 p.m.—passing a brightly colored school

What manner of powerful entity possesses two satellite dishes?

curving right

I wish I knew what all of this was dedicated to.

probably not a grave

onward and upward

Don't forget the gloves.

long shadows

Gajeung 1st Village (Gajeung 1-li/가증1리)

Sometimes, instead of Arabic numerals, village numbers are written with Chinese numerals.

"Destination" up ahead.

power tower

Wassup?

So I got to my "destination," where I discovered the place was a guest house, not a motel. With motels, you can just walk in and get a room without a reservation. With most guest houses, as with pensions, you need to reserve (and probably pay via card or wire transfer) in advance. So I already knew I was fucked. And Naver never warned me that this place didn't fit the label that Naver had given it. This was therefore one of the few times I've ever been let down by Naver.

As you see in the pic below, the guest house appeared to be undergoing some kind of renovation. The Korean on the awning below says Buyeo Guest House, not L-tel. Two guys coming up from a restaurant stopped and spoke with me. They told me to keep walking toward downtown, and that that's where I would find my motels. Inwardly, I slumped. I had hoped that this would be my stopping point. Instead, I would need to walk another spell. One guy said that downtown was 1.5 km away; it ended up being closer to 3 km, and it was evening by the time I got into downtown. Shops and restaurants in Buyeo, a small town, were already closing up.

부여 게스트 하우스 = Buyeo Guest House

Korean is a compact, information-dense language when you're writing only Korean words, but it wasn't meant to bear the burden of writing foreign words, with their weird spelling and pronunciation rules. Look at this breakdown of the above signage:

부여 = Buyeo (2 syllables in Korean, 2 in English)
게스트 = Guest (3 syllables in Korean—geh-seu-teu, 1 in English)
하우스 = House (3 syllables in Korean—ha-u-seu, 1 in English)

Yeesh. Other foreign words that explode into many syllables in Korean:

(le) printemps (French for "springtime"): 쁘랭땅 (beu-raeng-ddang), 2 to 3 syllables
Christmas: 크리스마스 (keu-ri-seu-ma-seu), 2 to 5 syllables

Of course, when pronounced fast in Korean, the above foreign words are more or less recognizable. But written out in hangeul, they reveal how many syllables they take up on the page.

To be fair, we have the same problem in reverse in trying to render Korean into English. King Sejong's designation for his newly invented alphabet was Hunminjeongeum ("hoon-meen-juhng-eum," or proper sounds for the edification of the people), written compactly in Korean as 훈민정음. In both English and Korean, the words are four syllables long, but in English, where letters are written in a single line, it's a line of 14 Roman letters. In Korean, it's 12 individual letters, true, but only 4 syllabic clusters. And on a platform like Twitter, a single Korean syllabic cluster is equivalent to a single English letter, so writing 훈민정음 on Twitter uses only four of your allotment of 280 characters (for non-premium users). It feels like cheating, but that's how it works, and that's why Korean is generally (but not always) so information-dense.

guest house, with construction partially visible

the guest-house sign out front, and a full parking lot

So I met the guys, talked, and internally debated over whether to give up and get a cab to the intercity bus stop. Eventually, I just kept on walking despite now hurting pretty much everywhere and going at a speed of under 2 kph. Mentally, I was not in a good place, but I trusted the road signs pointing me to downtown Buyeo. Along the way, I encountered a dead cat:

meow

Even though the cat appears to be drying up, I'd still call it recently dead because it hadn't decayed to the point where bone was protruding out of skin. Note the cat's dramatic yowl. A lot of dead cats seem to die in mid-yowl. They're as theatrical in death as they are in life. You could counterargue that many mammals die open-mouthed, so there's no drama there. But if you argued that way, I'd know you were just trying to be a contrarian asshole, arguing just to argue.

a closer look

6:51 p.m.—I've arrived downtown.

I was walking so slowly that I might as well have been crawling. Not that I've never done 29K before (I've done 60K a few times), but my backpack was weighing fairly heavily on my frame, and my frame of mind wasn't very positive. I was looking for any excuse to stop the walk by this point, so I resolved to find a place for the night, then hit the intercity bus terminal in the morning. Which I did.

Buddhist symbol in the traffic circle, church nearby

The quiet battle of religions on the peninsula has been going on a long time, and some Christian fundamentalists have even committed arson and vandalism (like spray-painting "Only Jesus!") against Buddhist temples and shrines (read Frank Tedesco on some of the misdeeds). Islam has also established a beachhead on Korean soil, but it's a minuscule, minority religion. The real winner in the religious competition these days is mugyo/無敎, literally "no -ism." It's not quite atheism or agnosticism, nor is it quite "spiritual not religious." It just means that one doesn't belong to a particular tradition or distinct spiritual path. So mugyo includes atheists, the unchurched, etc. And it's the fastest-growing demographic. Meantime, looking across the physical landscape of Korea often means seeing a kaleidoscopic panorama of religious symbols, and a great diversity of religious practices, some of which have melded into strange, little syncretisms while others, like missionary Christianity, have done their best to keep their original integrity and hold fast against a demon-haunted world.

flower shop (closed)

The last few photos of this entry show a flower shop. It was on the way to my motel, the Myeongjin (명진). The pure-Korean word for "flower" is 꽃/ggot. The Chinese word is hwa/화/花. The Chinese word is generally a bound particle, i.e. a word or syllable that's almost always found attached to another word and almost never used by itself.

For example, throughout the blog, you've seen the bound particle gyo used to describe any number of bridges. But the generic, pure-Korean word for "bridge" is dari/다리, which also happens to mean "leg(s)" (there's a vaguely naughty, jokey pun based on that homophonic/homographic fact). So if, in Korean, you wanted to say that you were going to Jamshil Bridge, you'd call it Jamshil-daegyo/잠실대교. (A daegyo is literally a "big bridge.") But if you were to say, "Look there, under that bridge!", you couldn't use the word gyo by itself. So you'd use dari/다리, which is not a bound particle. 

Same for "temple." The bound particle is sa/사/寺, as in Bulguk-sa/불국사/佛國寺 (lit. "Buddha-realm Temple"). But the pure-Korean word for "temple" is jeol/절. So if you told your wife, "I'm going to the temple," you wouldn't say "I'm going to the sa," but rather, "I'm going to the jeol." But if you named the temple you were going to, then you could use sa, no problem. "I'm going to Tongdo-sa!" is okay.

So a lot of the time, when Koreans use a Chinese-derived term, it's often a bound particle tied to another word. When they want to refer to the word's referent generically and all by itself, they'll likely use a pure-Korean term for the same thing—one that isn't a bound particle.

Anyway, 꽃/ggot is a pure-Korean, unbound particle—an "independent" word unto itself.

Flowers aren't doing so well in the evening cold.

Flowers!

7:02 p.m.—literally, Buyeo Flower Department Store, but more naturally, Buyeo Flower Shop

I found my motel just fine but didn't find a decent dinner—just more snacks. And the following day, I walked the under 2K to the intercity bus terminal, figured out how to use the quirky, local bus-ticket machine, got myself a ticket, and trundled on back up to Seoul, my tail between my legs but with many lessons learned. I hope to try this walk again later this year.