17 November 2022
Special zucchini
Gwangju Shinsegae
I found a much bigger department store and mall in Gwangju. Strangely located far from the subway, but it is where the main bus terminal is. It barely shows up on the map, Shinsegae should complain.
I walked there, along my now memeworthy creek, it seems wherever I go, I will follow the creek.
Along my creek walk I ended up in an underground car park that seems to be part of the actual creek, this is surely a bad idea whenever it rains.
The actual Shinsegae store itself was good enough, the basement is much larger than the store, and the nearby mall that joins onto the bus station has at least 50 restaurants including a few up market all you can eat places that charge $50 a head, and a food court with next to no customers.
As far as I can tell this area is a 3rd town centre, but it is not on the subway, and the under construction subway line is not due to come near it either, despite having one of the biggest long distance bus stations I have ever seen, in a city connected to the bullet train network...
Can you see the big bird in the middle? The creek is full of them. Also this morning there were a lot of woodpeckers making machine gun noises. There are a lot of birds all over Korea.
Here is the under water car park. There are parking spaces down each side, I am standing on a walkway that seems to sit on the water in the creek. It would only need to be a brief passing shower, and all the cars would float away. There are numerous extra parking levels over the creek above this spot too. Perhaps in the future, my entire beloved creek will become a linear car park.
For some reason I think this is a great photo.
Here is a long exposure. The dust spots on the right were really bad at 4 seconds of f/16 so I cloned them out. You can see the area I walked to last night, Sangmu, far in the distance.
And here is the mystery department store, Shinsegae, and the bus station mall complex to it's right.
Another bright city area.
The bus station food court was a bit of a ghost town. The surrounding restaurants were however doing pretty good trade. I cannot really work out why you would take a bus though. Admittedly when I came here years ago I took a bus from Busan to Gwangju. I am always the hypocrite.
Shinsegae basement food area was large, varied and busy.
And so I got a special zucchini stew with special zucchini. The sign made a big deal about the zucchini. I do not know what was special about it.
Tomorrow I go to Daejeon, I have to change bullet trains but it is still only a 2 hour journey. I will make it take all day, the train does not leave until early afternoon.