This past weekend we drove across the peninsula to Korea’s west coast to Nae Jang San. Famed in Korea as one of the best of the national parks, Nae Jang San boasts a fall spectacular of color. It’s been warm up until very lately, so the park was still quite green. I could imagine that in a few more weeks, things would peak and be truly amazing. Only some of the maples have gone completely red, some only on the fringes and some, particularly in the lower elevations, are still green. The huge white oak trees were also a mix of green and yellow. The ginkgo trees, however, were a very pretty yellow.

The picture above is of one of the outer buildings of Bae Gyang Sa temple and Nae Jang Mountain in the background. Probably one of the better pictures I’ve taken this year. The temple is at the base of the mountain and entrance to a large box canyon filled with the now emerging fall colors.

The temple has been there for hundreds of years. The trees surround it are nearly as old. Many of the maples they say are 300-500 years old. The white oak behind MyeongHee and SaTang is enormous

Quite a few people were scurrying around under the oak collecting acorns which they make into a tofu-like jelly.

I have complained much in the past on Korean furniture. Minimal would be the best description. I’ve learned this weekend, however, that minimalist furniture can be quite an advantage at times. We went on this trip with two other couples and another woman – seven of us total. Rather than go out to eat in restaurants, we saved money by eating in. And Korean women can pack some food! What Americans might call a carpet picnic is very common in Korea. Just pull up a piece of the floor and dig in. On Saturday night, we spread a few newspapers on the hotel floor and used a small camping stove to cook pork. Kimchi and other side dishes travel well and were copious. On Sunday, after cruising through the park and fighting the huge crowds, we stopped the car on the side of the road and had another picnic. Who needs a table? We just spread out a pad that seems to be standard equipment in everyone’s car and sat on the shoulder. While it may be uncomfortable, it’s convenient as hell to just eschew the table and embrace the floor or ground.

Way back in February when I took a trip back home to Texas, the Korean Won was running nice and high around 930 Won to the dollar.  I could treat every 1000 note (their smallest paper currency) like a virtual dollar. Indeed, I even called them dollars among my foreign friends. That 1000 won note brought me about $1.07 when I exchanged it. Bring enough and you can make a few bucks.

These days, however, the extremely volatile markets around the world have worsened the exchange rate. Today, it’s trading at 1408 Won to the dollar.  That doesn’t really mean a whole lot for the guy just living here as living expenses here haven’t risen. It does mean that sending money back to the US is a bad deal. For every 1000 won note I would now bring over, I could only get $0.71.  Bring enough and you could lose a few bucks.

I hope it gets better by the time I go back to Texas next year. My youngest daughter, Teri, will graduate from the university and my oldest, Jessica, will have given birth to twin girls: Two momentous events I would not miss for the world. A poor exchange rate is not enough to stop me from coming, but it might make the trip expensive as hell. Last time, I ate sushi and steak and big-ass hamburgers. This time, I might have to make do with cheese sandwiches.

Yesterday was another gorgeous day and we decided to do some hiking up on Munsusan. There’s about a half dozen major paths up the mountain and numerous smaller ones. Yesterday we went up near a cascade of waterfalls and then took a path up the ridgeline. Rather than a series of switchbacks across the face, we went directly up the backbone of ridge. That was a hard climb.

When we reached the top, MyeongHee wanted to take another path down that she knew of. It, too, was a major path but  three-way junction half-way up fooled us. We spent an hour or so following paths that either eventually went back up the mountain or paths that led to dead ends. We ended up following a creeek bed strewn with boulders and scree and we scrambled our way down.

By the time we made it down the mountain and into town again, it felt like we had done less of a hike than a death march. We stopped at the grocery store for some dinner makings and then hibernated the rest of the evening. A hot foot-bath and early bed time meant we were just setting ourselves up to be sore today. And we are. We stiffened up quick and it might take a day or two to loosen up again.

Despite the hard climb, I got some decent pictures of harvest time in Korea. It’s not the kind of heavily mechanized affair that America endures. Its rather a manual labor thing with only small motorized carts and splitters.

A man drives a load of rice past a small village of traditional farm houses. Field in the foreground have been cut by hand with a scythe. Some of the stalks of rice still lay on the ground drying while others parts of the field have been processed and grain recovered. In the background, another field still stands, the rice heavy with seads.

The weather was fabulous today, a Sunday, and we decided to make a day of it with a trip to Mt Shinbulsan.  The Mountain is listed as another of Ulsan’s 12 Secenic Sites and in all this time I’ve not been there before. The tourist brochures list it as the “Four Seasons of Mt. Shibulsan” and rightly so as each makes a very distinct impression. The fall season, one might think, would be the changing of the leaves. But then, thinking only the mundane and forgetting that in Korea things are just different, one could be, well, quite wrong.  During Autumn, the reed plains of Shinbulsan take over. The reeds, really tall grasses with 6-foot willowy seedheads, cover an entire mountain side and bring  almost as many Korean hikers, although those are somewhat smaller in stature.

The reeds cover the flank of this mountain wherever there aren’t rocky outcroppings or paths, both of which are many.

We drove up with MyeongHee’s good friend, UnZung, and her guy pal, Hye Da. Hye Da drove his car and it was nice to sit in the back for the ride through the mountains. It’s not quite peak color season, but it will be soon. We plan on going to a “pension” or “min-bak”, ( a Korean guest house) with them and a few others in two weeks I hope the color is really hitting it by then. In the meantime, the reed plain was well worth the arduous journey.

Driving through the heavily forested mountains, one is afforded few vistas. Once we got to the end of the road, we could see the wide plain, nestled in a saddle-back ridge between two peaks. Below us, the valley, villages, and small towns dappled in sunlight and cloud shadows. Shimmering in the distance, Ulsan. Above us, the surrounding peaks with hoards of hikers and several hang-gliders.

Paths upwards onto either of the peaks teemed with people out enjoying the weather and exercise. I was immediately struck by the resemblance of the paths, most of it rough-hewn wooden stairs, to the Great Wall at Badaling, near Beijing. Although its a little difficult to see in this web-sized picture, the stream of people goes to the top, and the outlines of many people are visible along the upper ridge.  In the foreground, another hang glider prepares for liftoff.

Being the energetic young lad that I am, I took my dog and bounded up the trail for a better look at things. We stopped at several of the outcroppings along the way to catch a view of the view. On our east side, the hang gliders dominated the air.

This is the same guy I saw earlier about to take off. He swooped in and around on the currents for a long while. When he came overhead, SaTang barked at him. They really excited her and she, in turn, freaked out the Koreans walking hear us, a good percentage of whom I now know are afraid of dogs.

Most everyone I saw today hiking was outfitted in the their best technical gear. No cotton for this crowd – only the best polypro shirts, hiking boots and other acoutrements. Many of them get all duded up in the gear, complete with pants tucked into socks and professional walking sticks – with usually only a stair-step trail or just a road to hike on.

Check out the ladies in orange and in pink mid-way up the stairs in this shot – they’ve got two walking sticks each, so you know they’re serious about their sports.

After hiking, its common to get a snack. Conveniently, plenty of places are nearby to satisfy a hunger and thirst. Some are just beach-umbrellas put over the Korean equivalent of a hot-dog stand. Others are full tents. We went to both. Our first snack was Pa-Zang, or green onion pancake. That just wasn’t enough, so we got some O-Deng, or fish ham. One hasn’t experienced Korean culture until eaten O-Deng at a roadside umbrella stand.

O Deng fish ham, is made with – you guessed it – ground up fish, rice powder and sometimes little veggies. It’s kept in a big pot of hot fishy broth and eaten off the stick, while standing, sometimes dipping it a soy-sesame-pepper sauce. It’s tasty, but you probably don’t ever want to know how its made. I don’t.

That wasn’t enough either, so we stopped at one of the tent-style roadside stands on the way down the mountain. These places serve any number of things, but are known for their traditional Korean food rather than any fads.

They all have the simple wood-burning stove for winter warmth, but that can also be taken care of with soju. We had dong-dong-ju, a rice punch that punches back and a table full of kimchi, radish greens, tofu and minori leaves.  Toilet paper napkins hang by each table, but Hye Da wanted to hide them so he stuffed them up in the rafters of the tent for this shot. He almost managed to hide them all.

Both up and down the mountain on the roadway we encountered problems. Like many rugged mountain roads around the world, this one was only a single lane. Should a driver come upon another driver headed in the opposite direction, the proper thing to do is try to find some way to resolve the head-on conflict. Not Koreans. Rather than backup or back down (both literally and figuratively)  they would sit in their cars and wait. And wait. Wait like Samurai  for the other to blink and reverse and allow them to pass. While this goes on, other cars come up from behind in both directions and further compound the problem. Sometimes, like this idiot, he simply got frustrated and left his vehicle.

When I came up on these cars, I had gotten out of Hye Da’s car to walk up and see what the traffic jam was all about. I saw almost 20 cars in each direction stopped. The woman in the SUV in the foreground could not back up for the cars directly behind her and the sedan kept gunning his engine and running up as if to ram her. Of course, he had nowhere to go either, so both stayed put. I had gone along and convinced the drivers in the rear to back up and park to make room and then I back the other way to do the same. The sedan driver simply abandoned his vehicle until he was done with his hike. No one was moving for a long time. Several times along the way up and down from Shinbulsan I got out of the car to negotiate a way out of their Mexican standoffs. Many understood and complied, but one old man refused to budge. I was about to yank him from his car and do it myself when his wife smacked him and he pulled over.

Despite the minor annoyances of the drivers, the day was awesome. Beautiful mountains, weather, scenery, buffoonery made it a pretty damn good day.

A while back, I wrote on the trash problem here in Korea. At the time, I was told that its is mostly middle-school and high-school students who leave the majority of trash. I wish that were true. It’s simply not and I suspect those that told me that lie wished to deflect the truth away from the real truth: Koreans just have little respect for their environment outside of their own home.

I went to the park last night and saw a group of adults and children at one of the picnic tables. The children crowded all around my dog, yelling and throwing snacks at her. She didn’t want any of them and left them on the ground. One of the mothers came up and scolded the children but not for littering, but for yelling at the dog. She picked up the snacks and just threw them in another direction. Meanwhile, the kids, each with their own pack of snacks and small bottle of juice, had left the wrappers and bottles on the ground. She got nasty when I mentioned the kids were leaving their messes on the ground while there was a trash bag not ten meters away. This morning, I went out to the park again and the same table was filled with trash, the same snack wrappers and bottles from the kids on the ground, the same things that littered the table with the adults last night was still there this morning. Almost every morning, now that the weather has changed from the hot and humid, I come out to the park to be greeted by piles of trash and litter from the previous night’s impromptu picnics.

As I walked back to my house from the park, a man on a scooter went by. As he passed each building, he threw stacks of business cards on the ground. I looked up the street and it was full of the brightly colored cards he was throwing. That’s just a form of Korean advertising, so I guess he’s excused from any littering charges.

I’ve tip-toed around the issue for this long, but my patience with their filth is wearing on me and I’m beginning to despise their lack of respect for their own city. I may not have a crying Indian to wield, but I’ll come up with something that takes this battle to the source.

Persimmons are in here in Korea. This time of year is great for these fruit. I never ate them in America. I don’t recall ever seeing them in the grocery stores I shopped at. Tasty little things though, and they make for a nice variety from the apples and pears that are also in.  They’re called “gam” (rhymes with “mom”)  or “?” here. Back in 2004, I thought they were pale, orangish tomatoes and until of the teachers I work with brought in a bag of them I’d have likely never tried them.

I wonder why they were never a big seller in America? They grow them everywhere here, and I often see the trees full of truit as I ride the bike around.

Along the many paths I take while riding the bicycle is Seonbawi, or Standing Rock. I had decided that along as I was spending so much time cruising the Korean countryside and getting my heart rate up I may as well take my camera.  There are numerous paths to ride on near my house. Some are paved one-lane roads for the farmers to use to get to their rice paddies, some are gravel/dirt paths and some are city-developed paths for exercise and pleasure. Seonbawi (the ‘eo’ in Korean words is pronounced like ‘ou’ in the word “enough”)  is accessible via a city path on the Taewha River just a few kilometers from here. It’s one of the 12 Scenic Places that Ulsan advertises in its brochures. Its a large outcrop of rock, maybe 10-15 meters high, that didn’t get eroded by the river while the other rocks surrounding it have melted away over thousands or perhaps millions of years. It’s one of the regular places I like to ride for its beauty. The path to it takes me along the river which is lined with a multitude of small gardens tended by the old folks who live nearby.

Fall is soon to come and small hints of the color are visible on the rock and adjacent hillside. Already, the gardens are coming under the scythe and rice paddies are being cleared. Fall is spectacular here in Korea as the weather is usually sunny days and cool nights. I’ll try and capture a few more pictures of the countryside on my rides around town.

Our September was nice and warm. Not hot, but warm and muggy. Nights were cool, but still very humid. Beginning late last week, the weather has finally turned and it feels like fall. Cripsly cool nights and bright sunny days. Fall is probably the best time of year here in South Korea. Soon, it will be time to take a few pictures of the foliage as it turns from the the lush greens to bright yellows, oranges and reds.

Lately, my time has been occupied by some serious bike riding. I had gotten a nice layer of fat built up over the spring and by my birthday in July it was intolerable. I bought a bike then and have been riding it pretty hard ever since. I’ve slimmed down considerably, but not enough – when I wore a suit for the Chuseok holiday two weeks ago, a belt I had worn for years would no longer fit.

I’ve also been reading the news sites vociferously since the financial crisis began. The news here is filled with it, just like everywhere else. I, personally, am not in favor of any bailout, but rather a free market correction. Reading the news at least goes faster than watching since I read fairly rapidly.

Between working, riding, reading and living in wedded bliss these days, I seem to have little time for writing. I’ll try and do better than I have lately.