For Tulip House

Photos: Icheon Baeksa Sansuyu Flower Festival and Aggregate Valley

Hi folks. It's been a couple of weeks since I've dumped photos onto the blog, so here we go. On the first weekend of April Kate and I went to a small festival in Icheon, about half an hour away from Yeoju. And last Thursday we went for a walk in the fields/industrial landscape behind our house.

Here's the evidence:

Click here to view these pictures larger

Click here to view these pictures larger

This all from our Shutterfly site, of course.

Non-related post-script. We went to the Icheon festival after spending Saturday/Saturday night in Seoul. We met up with Amanda's old friend Tana and we had a lovely time walking around her neighborhood. That night we went to a dinner/night out organized by our teaching recruitert. There were about 50 other teachers there, all from our province (Gyeonggi-do) or Seoul. We made a few new friends who are pretty excited to travel around Korea with us :-)

Class Project

Adventures in Korean Terraforming/ A walk

Last Wednesday Nathan and I were informed that -- surprise!-- we had half of Thursday off. This explained a nagging mystery: all day Wednesday students had been saying to us "Teacher, tomorrow, no school?", to which we could only answer "Huh?" Luckily, at the end of the day we cornered our director. After asking about the questions, she claps her hand to her head "Oh! Yes. No School. I guess... umm.. I forget to tell you?"

Like so many things, she had forgotten to tell us. Welcome to Korea.


But sometimes surprises are good, and in this case, we had an excellent, unexpected, afternoon reprieve. Since it was a gorgeous day, we used the reprieve to ramble for about 6 miles around Ohok. During the ramble we encountered a bizarre/amazing industrial landscape. We also found further evidence of Korean terra-forming projects, massive experiments in soil erosion, and what can only be called a small-scale industrial Paths of the Dead (more photos on that soon-- and, yes, Dean and Ceci, that reference was for you).

Following random roads, we eventually arrived at Aggregate Valley, an industrial-agricultural Idyll bounded by an enormous Han River flood-control channel and a "strait-as-shit" rural highway (Nathan's words). The valley itself is several feet below the flood plane, which leads you to wonder about the utility of the flood-control earthworks beside it, and organized into precise patchworks by strait concrete roads and irrigation ditches. Mixed in with all of it, were some lovely hay fields, a few lonely patches of rushes, and several swatches of actual greenery. Amazing: The perfect place to sit and watch the distant earth-movers, drink a bottle of Cass, read some Cosmicomics, and watch the herons fly overhead. It was a beautiful afternoon.

We have plans to return soon with bikes, more beer, more books, and friends.

Especially once the weather is warmer.

P.S. if anyone knows were to find a cheap bike that is big enough for a 6' tall man, please let us know. Korea is full of adorable cheap bikes for me, but sadly lacking in (any) bikes Nathan can ride...

P.P.S. We got a call today from our Director saying we may have to move imminently. Not cool. We just completed the epic battle against the awful bathroom smell!

Terraforming! Click for Huge!