Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Goin' to the Country

I didn't get a chance to write about our trip down to my cousins' hometown a few weeks ago until now, so here goes... We met Haekgyung and Hyunjun on Friday at the bus station and embarked on a two-and-a-half hour ride southeast, to the town where their mother works as a principal (though I can't remember the name of the town). She picked us up at a small bus station and we swung by the local equivalent of Wal-Mart to pick up some groceries for the weekend. I believe it was an E-Mart, which actually bought up a bunch of Wal-Mart's stores when the American retail giant gave up on its dreams of conquering Korea a few years ago. Take that, Wal-Mart.

My aunt then drove the four of us down toward Seokpo, where my uncle works as a manager at a zinc refinery. But on the way there we made a few stops -- first, at a traditional Korean village where only people with the same family name had resided for generations. The houses had beautiful architecture, and the village sat in a shallow valley, surrounded by lush green hills and rice fields.


We winded our way through the hills some more and stopped in a small village that my aunt said was known for its smoked pork. We had two kinds, one that was lightly seasoned and scented with some pine and another that was thickly marinated in a dark red sauce. Both were amazing. I thought about that pork all the way to my uncle's apartment.


My uncle moved back to Seokpo a few years ago, when the company he worked for ran into some kind of trouble and asked for him to come back to supervise. As we came up to the town after dusk, my cousins started sitting up in their seats and pointing things out through the window. This was the town they had grown up in, and they hadn't been back in over ten years. Compared to Seoul, the streets were very dim -- pale yellow lights illuminated some run down-looking houses and stores to our left, and you could make out the faint reflections of the moonlight sparkling off the river to our right. A slight, metallic odor filled the air. As we drove along, the brightly lit factory came into view, with all its large metal silos and colored walkways standing in clear contrast to the dark hills behind. Soon, the car's headlights beamed upon my uncle, who was standing in the entrance to his apartment's parking lot waiting for us.

Hyunjun was thrilled to see the old place again. It wasn't the exact apartment he had grown up in, but since all the units followed the same layout, it was close enough to the home he once knew. The space was small -- two bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, and study, all crammed into about four to five-hundred square feet. It was older, too, with the wallpaper rippling off the wall in some places and the rusted plumbing clearly on display in the bathroom. Hyunjun kept saying he remembered it being bigger (the study had once been his bedroom) and he couldn't believe the four of them had at one point lived there together. Nissa and I wouldn't be sleeping here tonight, though. My uncle had rented the modestly furnished apartment upstairs for us to stay in over the weekend, in which a set of towels and toothbrushes were laid out neatly on the refrigerator for us upon arrival. After watching a little TV in my uncle's room, we headed upstairs to turn in for the night.

The next morning we set off for the seaside in a large company van my uncle had borrowed for the weekend. We wound through rolling hills for a couple hours, stopping once or twice to take some pictures. At one point we drove alongside acres and acres of cabbage that looked close to harvest. Apparently this area was known for its cabbage, which all eventually went into kimchi. My relatives said the owners were millionaires -- cabbage millionaires.


Soon the hills cleared and we arrived at Hosan, a beach area along the east coast of Korea, in Gangwon Province. The air was cool, a little humid, and just a little salty. My uncle rented a room for all of us at a motel along the shore, as a sort of base camp for the afternoon, and after changing into our bathing suits we headed out for the water. The waves were incredibly strong, so much so that they could knock you off your feet if you weren't careful. We didn't venture out far, for fear of the undertow, but it was fun battling against the waves nonetheless. We even got a little sunburned.


That evening, on the way back to Seokpo, we stopped in a town called Taebaek. This was a much larger town than Seokpo, we could tell just from the traffic heading in. Even though it only had a population of about 50,000, all the cars and lights from the restaurants and stores made it feel like we were in a metropolis again. As we got out of the car, we could hear a woman's powerful singing echoing down the street. Nissa recognized the song was from Les Miserables. A musical troupe was performing in the town's park -- songs from Grease, Fame...



We closed out the night in Taebaek with a traditional Korean dinner, where you are served about 20 side dishes along with rice that is cooked in a stone pot. On the way back to Seokpo, we could see the stars clearly in the night sky. The air was cool and the hills were quiet. It was going to be hard to go back to Seoul.

No comments:

Post a Comment