6 April 2019
A day of rest and walking
Exploring the Daejeon arboretum and Expo science park
For my rest day I walked about 20km around Daejeon. On the way I identified where I am going tomorrow. I also went to about 30 gardens, joined a speed skating crew, went to the world expo park, played a round of golf and then surprisingly found the actual centre of town which had eluded me until now.
I set off without a plan and followed the subway line, in case a plan came to me. Before very long at all I arrived at the centre of the city. Daejeon really is the city that google forgot. Not until I googled the actual suburb name while I was standing in it did I find any reference on google to it being the downtown heart of Daejeon with the big department stores and all that goes with it. So there are so far 3 centres of Daejeon that I have found, all in a town of just over a million people. It also occurs to me that one day I will be reading this and laughing at saying 'google' a lot, when google is nothing more than altavista is to us now, but I digress, as usual.
From here I headed North, I knew where I was heading because every website makes mention of the GREAT DAEJEON EXPO of 1993, surely the greatest spectacle the world has ever seen since the unveiling of the magnificent Sunsphere (yarn barn) at the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee.
The expo is long gone, and is now a convention centre and some rather strange government buildings including the national statistics training bureau and bus stop design centre institute. More on that to come.
Perhaps even stranger, adjoining the main convention centre is a golf mall, complete with theme hotel, pitching green, putting green, and golf swing correction medical centre.
My path back took me back past the speed skating until I realised that the real geographical centre of town is an extensive military base, which explained all the 15 year olds walking around the parks in full camouflage fatigues cuddling their sobbing mothers. I was also wearing camo pants, but no mother tried to adopt me. Once I hit the razor wire I had to make a detour around the compound back to safety.
The first park of the day, still quite early. I had already walked through the very very closed until 11AM centre of the city at this point.
Well at least you get a story.
This was the start of the main park, split in two, I think they call it the arboretum. There was definitely an 'oak zone'.
Splitting the arboretum was this massive pedestrian concrete marching area / speed skating course. The really strange thing about it is that roof is on wheels, and theres a few pieces of it that can slide along to different positions. Why though? Why not just erect a permanent roof?
The speed skaters on rollerblades were really going very fast, which made the fact that pedestrians and kids on scooters can also just wander across the track a particularly dangerous situation. I saw a number of near misses just while I was standing here waiting for the photo, one little girl chased a ball into oncoming speed skaters. I helped out by sliding the giant roof along the tracks a bit.
The park has an impressive mound to climb up and appreciate the view from. Behold, many blossoms, and a clear sky. It was very warm at one point, I would guess about 20 degrees, but then after lunch it got cloudy and quite cold. Discussing the weather really is very boring.
It was now time to head to the great expo park, I was super excited, who knows what wonders of the modern world await?
While crossing the expo bridge I identified where I will be going tomorrow. Assuming I can work out which bus to take.
Yes, its a sign, but its a sign that says 'Daejeon traffic culture institute'. These are the sorts of things that now occupy the former expo site.
And here is golf world. That is a 5 storey (story) high metal golfer statue. You really can go into that place to get corrective surgery to improve your golf swing. I researched who uses storey and who uses story and considered just typing level, then I saw that storie is also acceptable. Yay English.
On my return journey I passed yet another park, this one is a prehistoric park, complete with straw huts with cctv.
The main part of the city was now open, the big mall thing had 3 basement levels, the third of which was a very nice food court, very metallic and minimalist.
I decided to have vegetarian spicy gimbap, actually quite spicy this time. Very good. Nice soup also, no idea what it is, chicken, miso, dirty dish water, who knows.
Between the city centre and my hotel were a number of universities and street areas that look like this. I will walk past again tonight at night and be blinded by all the flashing billboards.
And just like Japan, Korea has no bins at all, only bags. Piles and piles of bags of garbage on the street at all times. This is how you get a good recycling outcome, make all garbage visible at all times!