Katie and I arrived at the airport in Seoul on Wednesday at five in the morning. After the fourteen hour flight (I watched Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland about 4 times) I was ready to smoke a cigarette. Luckily immigration and customs only took about 5 minutes getting us to the baggage area where we found all of our luggage intact. While we waited for the bus station to open, I chain smoked, and Katie and I agreed that Alice in Wonderland was as dark, funny, and well made a film as could possibly be hoped for with all the shitty CGI manipulation. And it was shit. But, the airport was slick. Lots of curved metal structures and glass tubes taking people places. But the airport in Seoul, like all airports, felt pretty much like a non-space. I only knew I was in Korea when I reminded myself that I was. The fact that I was surrounded by Asian people seemed more like an anomaly than anything else. A few minutes before the bus terminal opened for business, a forcefully friendly cab driver (who had offered a number of times to take us to Jochiwon) helped us with the Hangul spelling of our destination which we then used to buy our tickets. The first hour in Korea was surprisingly smooth.
The bus ride to Jochiwon was uncomfortable, mainly because of the heat. The Korean passengers didn’t seem to mind riding without the air on, but while the ride wasn’t exactly cozy, it was entrancing. The terrain is much different here than anything I’ve ever seen. We drove for a while alongside the Yellow Sea, which was spotted with beautiful mountain islands, topped with vegetation, that rose steeply out of the water. The soil in Korea is red where you can see it, but during the rainy season nearly every inch of ground that isn’t a building is packed with foliage. Even in the cities, any open space between buildings is crammed with red peppers, soy beans, corn, green onions, and other edible plants I don’t have names for. They practice a sort of guerrilla gardening here, which is refreshing, and the older Koreans even make use of the wild vegetation growing along the drainage ditches and in the mountains.
We traveled for around two hours through a pretty large expanse of rural countryside, scattered intermittently with small cities, each one looking exactly alike (tall white stone highrises that look like/are apartment buildings, surrounded by smaller four or five story buildings full of restaurants, singing rooms, and internet cafes). Jochiwon is a rural town known primarily for its exceptionally good peaches. It’s small, probably the same size as Lafayette, IN, but there are two universities, one foreigner bar, and a movie theater, not to mention a train station that can get you to Seoul in the blink of an eye.
