Korea twice in one year - November 2022 - Page 7

I changed from the subway to the bus at the National Cemetery station. Which appears to be on the edge of town.

Stay on the bus until the end, and then go and buy water and muesli bars from the conveniently located 7-eleven. I was having flashbacks to my last visit.

There are a huge number of shops and a lot of hotels and what they call pensions which I think is some kind of time share arrangement.

I suspect this was a cafe. It was just before the gate to the paid area of the shrine.

Actually I think it was a hermitage not a shrine or a temple. There it is in any case.

A bit more. The sun was still coming up over the peaks. Cold in the shade.

The early on path was very well formed.

First view of the day is a very good view.

The path became the familiar dead and brown, but at this point not too leafy.

Signs suggest this is a view of a waterfall. Not at this time of year.

Some more view of mini pine trees on cliffs.

Great rocky path, but soon it became a very steep climb.

You can see the village below where I got off the bus.

Later on I would go over those peaks on the left, I will call those the technical part of the hike.

Near the top now as I am looking down the other side. Farmers are doing a lot of burning again.

View back towards the village from the top.

And another view a bit more to the right.

Not bad, but I have done better. The sun was bright.

At this point I am heading over to a bonus peak, from which I would double back. I could hear a lot of kids yelling and screaming. Up until this point today had been very quiet, no jets. There were other people up to the main peak but no one across to here.

There are at least 4 ways up to the higher areas of the park. These kids came up from a different one to me, and were now screaming at 100 or so other kids still coming up that path. I doubled back fast to avoid them.

A view back towards where I came from. I will now head back to peak number one on the same path, which no one else seems to use.

The lonely path between peaks was rocky and leafy. But progress was still relatively fast.

Back at peak 1, and it was time to loop around to the technical bit. First, A staircase down.

It was a long staircase. There were still a few people on this bit as it is an alternate route back down to the hermitage from the start of the day.

The view was often on show.

These bits were rocky, but mainly had stairs where it would have otherwise been hard climbing.

I think last time I was here I walked along this path in the other direction in the fog.

Time to check on the view... again...

I definitely remembered this from last time. I came up past it from the car park. This time I will loop back up again.

These were a great photo in the fog last time. No fog at all today, it was hot at this stage.

Now I was on the technical section. No more stair cases. Just rocks to clamour over.

Village below, I was walking along a ridge around it. Sometimes crawling.

The view down the other side. That city in the distance is not Daejeon, it is the new government capital city area called Sejong, where they plan to move the government to from Seoul. Apparently the plan is not going well.

A framed view.

A piney view. I did not really do a good job of capturing the tricky section.. which went for about 2 hours.

Final view before heading down.

I was thrilled to get down to a valley that was soft under foot instead of rocky.

And predictably, I popped out of the forest into another shrine. They were burning something that smelled terrible, dead bodies perhaps.

The 3 technical peaks behind the shrine.

Last photo, cabbages, hotels, the three technical peaks, and the higher less technical peaks with stair case access further to the left. That was a lot of photos. Tonight's outing will be brief.

Here is a back street with colourful lights.

And while I am crossing the road, why not stand in traffic and take a photo?

The Galleria basement did not yield many results, so I headed up to the 12th floor. They have ditched tradition and put the food court on the upper level, not the basement level. But alas, there was no roof garden.

Bulgogi. 100% Australian beef, allegedly. The black things are black beans. That was unexpected.
Tomorrow is not a hiking day, maybe I will go see the rocket.

First fog shot of the day, a foggy street.

I took a long winding route to the science museum, which went through an elevated park in the middle of the city. I kind of think the mound of dirt I am standing on was man made as there seems to be a few of them strategically placed at different points around the city.

Freeway overpass. Still foggy.

Heading over the river, is that fog or smoke, maybe a combo of both, foke. I refuse to acknowledge the term smog.

Heading to the museum, and there is no one around. I had to mess with the white balance on this photo, yellow grass tricks my camera into thinking it should be bright orange.

I was the only person inside future centre. The future is minimalist. There was not a lot of English in this museum.

Smart city AI control center is basically a cube of LED lights.

The future has accurately predicted everyone will be sitting in front of a heart made of flowers taking a photo with professional lighting.

Time to ride the maglev. There is an actual operating maglev at Incheon airport, it is slow and only a short ride to the convention centre.

South Korea exports a lot of rockets to North Korea, and vice versa.

Before the above rockets, only rocket powered mass arrow launchers existed.

The previous building was future science center, this is just science center.

Natural history science center is predictably dinosaurs, trilobytes and meterorites. with the occasional stuffed polar bear. It was here that I became an exhibit.

It annoys me greatly that the yellow bumps for the blind are off centre at the science center.

I walked back to my hotel the long way around, which went past a different foggy creek. That is all for now.

It was almost raining but not quite. And given that I walked quite a long way to get here I was glad of that. I think last time I was here I stayed somewhere near that orange sign on the giant home plus store you can see in the middle of the stream here.

Here is an example of the foot spa / hot springs station. There are about 10 different ones like this but hey were not all filled with water.

Ornamental future kim chi.

The footpath / sidewalk has a small theatre built into it.

An example of the expanded foot spa garden area with lights and trees.

This was a particularly impressive light installation, it does 3d looking stuff in time to music, obviously featuring my heart will go on from titanic.

There are hundreds of hotels in this area, but also some shops and lots of restaurants catering mainly to groups of people. This is the local department store, NC wave, most Korean cities have an NC wave, they are generally quite small, this is the biggest one I have seen.

I was very happy with the Ramyun I had for dinner. Actually I think Ramyun is just a brand, they still call it Ramen. This appeared authentic to me, there was even a couple of Japanese guys in there trying to use English to order. They had on those sleeveless work jackets with company logos on them like every little Japanese worker man wears.

And for my last pic this evening, I stumbled into after dark garden store world. A whole street full of similar shops. The inside was quite large, and they stay open until 10pm in case you need an azalea or ficus at that time.

This is a golf driving range. I was alerted to the fact by the ping noise. If you have been to Japan you have seen the green netting on top of buildings, here they built a building around the green netting. It claims to be 130m long and related to the great white shark of the Saudi Arabian royal family / murderous regime - Greg Norman.

I found another urban hill to walk up and around. It was nice, but still grey early in the morning.

The view through the trees was foggy and all low rise buildings, no giant apartments. I thought the hills were man made but after I walked down I saw a stony cliff face, so they cut into it and left part of the hill and flattened the area around it. I think.

There were a whole heap of badminton courts. No one around but a bag with racquets and shuttlecocks was available, so I played with myself for a while.

At the base, the local old folks have done a lot of work on their smoking club house.

Nearby, a plane on a pole. One of my favourite things to stumble upon.

Inside the Daejeon station. It is bigger than the Gwangju station. There is also an upstairs with many restaurants. No train pics at all today!

Final boring photo, my modern minimalist Seoul hotel room. The price has more than doubled since I booked it. I like to check that because they have free cancellation, and sometimes you can cancel and re-book the same room for a cheaper price.

I took a photo of this gate from afar recently, it is normally closed. I was here earlier tonight and it was open, so I walked through the gate, and took this photo. Gates are meant to be open and closed and walked through.

The walk to Yongsan was largely uneventful, just a few colourful areas of bbq group eating places. Once you get there however, it is all modern sky scrapers.

The station is enormous, but strangely looks a bit small from this angle.

If you want, you can go out on a ledge and take a long exposure by perching your camera on a glass screen.

Handheld shot of twin towers.

I took a photo of this roof garden during daylight times as I left, the dinosaur looks better at night. It was a bit cooler tonight, a sign of things to come, but still I did not put on my jacket or gloves, just a long sleeve t-shirt.

I found an entire level of nerd stores. Everything you could dream of... Tamiya pictured here, Gundam, Lego, Marvel (pictured below), Nintendo and various things I had never heard of. Gundam seems to be be the flavour of the month. I have never seen an episode of Gundam.

My dinner is a very spicy risotto. This fusion of a Korean stew and risotto seems very popular with multiple different chains specialising in it, so I thought I better try it. It lived up to the spicy warning which means it was delicious. At first I was disappointed with the serving size, but like all risottos, it grows in you.

Marvel store. I have no interest in Marvel whatsoever.

On my walk home I took a detour through the clothing market, one of the streets has re-branded to have a row of shops selling xmas decorations. They all play music. It was almost unbearable.

Final photo for this evening, my hotel is on a laneway off the street. Despite this area being quite close to where I generally stay in Seoul, I had never actually been anywhere in this entire city block before, which was mildly surprising and probably quite uninteresting and irrelevant.