Sabbatical XVIII - Enough Already - Geology Digression, Final Travels, How I Wrote This, Was It Good?

Geology Digression (skippable) - I’ve been asked about this numerous times; last week’s earthquake swarm in the Ridgecrest area of SoCal was dramatic, but not particularly surprising in its geography. 

The San Andreas Fault system defines the boundary between the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate.  The Pacific Plate is moving northwest relative to North America, but they are jammed together, and the intermittent jerky motions as they slide past each other are what we experience as earthquakes.  Anyway, depending on the interpretation, on 75%-90% of the relative plate motion occurs along the SAF.  The rest takes place along the Eastern California Shear Zone, basically an oblong blob running from west of Death Valley NNW up the east side of the Sierra Nevada (through the Owens Valley), dying out (at present) at about the latitude of Reno.  

Why?  If you look at the map below, the SAF is the thick orange line (the red lines are other major faults).  Notice that it bends north of LA: this is not a happy plate boundary.  What’s probably happening (and has happened in the past, several times) is that the boundary is gradually jumping inboard to east of the Sierra Nevada.  So in five million years or whatever LA won’t be off San Francisco: most of the motion will be further east.  Maybe.  Check back with me then.

The tight cluster of balloons on this map shows all the seismicity associated with the Ridgecrest event as of Sunday.  They occurred on several of the major lateral faults that transfer motion from the SAF to the ECSZ.

Bottom line: if you live in the Bay Area, worry about this instead. 

And find where you live on these maps.  And get ready.

Yes, this the level of information I used to torture my UCB students.

Thursday July 27 – Thursday July 4 – A pause in Walnut Creek.  I arrived the previous evening after a long night flight, only to have it be night again.  I tend to have really bad jet lag after long eastward flights, and this return was not anomalous.  So during this travel parenthesis, I:

• Unpack, do laundry, wear different clothes.
• Hire a plumber to replace my leaking hot water heater. 
• Trim the pomegranate tree, and do enough other yard work to make my house looked lived in.
• Sleep when I can, within reason, drifting when possible towards Pacific Time.
• Yoga.  Taiji.  Meditate.  Gym.
• Write.  Triage DSLR photography.
• Catch up with friends and family.
• Five books, three movies, four whole issues of The New Yorker
• Go walkabout or runabout, often before dawn.
• Run a 4^th of July 5k race, and do my first sub-eight minute mile since knee issues:

 

Friday July 5 – Button up the house, and off again, to OAK this time.  A delay, almost expected for an end of day Southwest flight during the summer weather season.  My app says that my flight to Portland is this 737’s eighth segment of the day.

So, I do my usual several laps of the terminals; about a quarter mile:

Warmed up, I watch the tide rise:

Observing and trying not to judge how different this domestic traveler crowd is from what I saw in Sydney, Auckland, Brisbane, Perth, Singapore, Seoul, and SFO.  More people dressed in fashion-inspired clothes that don’t fit well.  Or in pajamas.  I want to say there are lots more high-BMI Americans waddling around, but I don’t trust my biases or travel impatience.  It could just be my ongoing perceptual adjustment; I unconsciously expect to be around a lot of Koreans rather than the broader spectrum of Americans.  I will not miss dreaming in Korean, i.e., people saying things I can’t understand.

A plane, the usual super-efficient Southwest transition (allowing for pre-boarding of seven wheelchairs and three “companion” animals):

North, late afternoon over the Coast Ranges and Central Valley.  Hazy, but not much fire smoke.  Yet.  Eventually over the Cascade volcanoes.  A nice well-behaved chain at a convergent plate boundary, compared to the complexity of the Taupo Volcanic Zone.  Crater Lake from 32k feet:

PDX.  Portland seems minuscule after Seoul and Singapore.  Budget gives me a Nissan compact, which while brand new, seems to have had its engine transplanted from dear MG back in Auckland.  I fear accelerating, as I head southwards on I-5.

First destination is Salem, and an overnight visit with my friends Daisy and Bruce.  We catch up some before jetlag flatlines.  I taste a chocolate peppermint stout.  It is not awful.

Saturday July 6  - A morning walk with Daisy, Bruce, and Ollie, their Jack Russell terrier:

Not posed, thanks to Daisy for the picture.  

No dust, no flies.  There are flowers:

Away, further south on Eugene.  I’m impressed all over again at how wide the Willamette Valley gets.  This compressional plate boundary, defined by the Cascadia Fault Zone off the coast (as due as the San Andreas for a major event), is mashed up the edge of the continent, forming the high terrain all the way from the CA/OR coastal ranges to the Olympics; the Willamette Valley and the trough up through Puget Sound are an area of downwarping behind this.  The Willamette was further carved by the numerous Pleistocene glacial floods.  The Valley narrows as I go south; more faulted blocks of volcanic rock poking up through the alluvium.

I guess I haven’t explained this segment of my trip.  I am going to the “Even Decade Party”, a reunion of the West Coast part of my family:

Seven birthdays with ages ending in zero, ranging from my father at 90 to cousins at 10.  Clever.  I didn’t think of it.  Anyway, spending time with family – arguably the wing I see the most and am closest too – seemed the right way to conclude the sabbatical travel phase. 

So up the McKenzie River drainage, Springfield, Walterville, and to Leaburg.  My cousin Charis rented a house, which I will share with her, her boys, and boyfriend.  I am happy to sleep on the deck, with a view of the Goodpasture Covered Bridge (one lane, wooden):

I am not sure where the pasture is, presumably further up into the national forest. 

It’s sort of a weird house, in terms of layout.  It’s three stories but narrow, built into the cut bank of the river to maximize the views:

Lots of stairs.  Lots of decks.  It functions well for family gatherings.

We’re on a narrow reservoir behind a small hydroelectric dam in Leaburg.  The water is cold, and full of anglers:

I enjoy the view and the forest before the remainder of the immediate family arrives:

We have a barbecue and reacquaint:

I subject interested parties to descriptions of my trip, with maps.  They don’t hate me. 

Sleep, eventually.  Today would have been my sister’s 56^th birthday; being with family is a good way to remember her, although she is always with me.

Sunday July 7 - Morning runabout, eight miles on the Leaburg canal:

This prepares me for the main event:

I've been hanging out with this part of my family for four decades.  There is now a whole generation younger than me. 

I estimate 36 immediate family members attend, and another 25-30 friends.  I talk to almost everyone.  Sore from my run, I still can’t resist playing frisbee for an hour plus.  Too much cake, pie, cake, and blueberries:

It is not too hot.  There was a fly.  There is some dust, but it smells of conifers and volcanoes.

I am tired.  Sleep.

Monday July 8 – Good bye to family, good bye to river house.  Before I even leave in the morning, Southwest lets me know my flight is behind schedule.  Same parameters as before.  I must have picked evening flights for some reason, I forget what it was.  No matter, more time to wander north.

Route 126.  This one minor two lane road in Oregon is in much better conditioned and better constructed than most of the roads I drove on in New Zealand.  I tire of I-5 quickly, so abandon it at Corvallis, which I’ve not visited since the 1980s.  I can’t find a coffee shop, so I continue north through Monmouth, Rickreall and Amity. 

Rural Oregon.  Working lands, a true jumble of vineyards, orchards, horse farms, tree nurseries, and other agriculture.  Sort of like North Island, only less organized in its diversity.  There are also many more pockets of wild flora, another jumble of native and non-native species at a variety of levels of maturity.  It’s kind of ugly.  I know there is plenty of rain and the soils are great, but I don’t like looking at it.  Not the narrow band of variety in the Kimberley or in Queensland, where I could make sense of the transitions. 

McMinnville.  Quaint, definitely in wine tourist country.  I eat at a diner where the server calls me “hon”.  I came here to visit the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum.  You know by now I can’t resist a good museum; this was more on the way the than Portland Gallery of Art.

I explore two large spaces full of lovingly restored machines, ranging from a Wright Flyer to a 21^st century Air Force drone.  The main attraction however is the Spruce Goose, the giant flying boat built by Howard Hughes in the 1940s.  It is too big to photograph in toto, but I try:

The interpretation is good.  Each aircraft has a general history, and then a specific provenance description for that particular flying machine.  The space exhibits gives a good overview of machines and people off the planet; it’s even-handed and not focused on American exploits.  I get a tad artsy:

Evergreen is an interesting contrast to all the art and history I saw overseas.  Most of the other visitors are guys (largely older) who clearly love planes, and their patient families.  

My admission included an IMAX film, a National Geographic production called “Living in the Age of Flight”.  I thought this would be corny and lightweight, but it is quite impactful.  Seeing how flight and air travel have changed the world and our perspectives on it, as well as many familiar things – the show is partially filmed at SFO and on a Qantas 747, and goes to many places I’ve been – times my time over the past couple months together.

A final museum done, I head to PDX.  Portland rush hour: it takes me 94 minutes to go 23 miles.  No rush, my end of the day Southwest flight is delayed.  Plenty of time to hand off the Son of MG to Budget, walk a couple miles in the airport and eat at my favorite airport restaurant .

A final plane.  A final airport.  My car, not a bus, train, shuttle, or Uber.  My house, finally, and I’m really done.

How I wrote this blog - for the curious

It was fun.  I liked the creativity.  I didn’t know in advance how much I’d write, but I got into it.  The positive feedback helped.  Thanks for that.

My main steps: 

• I wrote observations, thoughts, and ideas down as possible during the day, i.e., not much on the Gibb or in Korea.  Ink memory is good, particularly when there are lots of new experiences.  I consciously avoided being guided by the motivation of “oh, this would be good blog material”.  
• I wrote a draft, pretty much chronologically but digressing as observations and interpretations gestalted.  Usually this was pretty close to final; I mentally organize pretty well in advance. 
• I gave the draft one good edit. 
• Uploading and inserting pictures:  I mostly used pictures from my phone: while the CCD is at least an order of magnitude smaller than my DSLR, it was much more convenient due to Google Photos.  Some photo editing as needed.  Picture insertion was often the most annoying phase; getting the formatting to play nice over a wonky internet connection made me want to bite people. 

I tried to simply describe my experiences, thoughts/interpretations, and feelings.  I rigorously avoided adding other information, other than looking up the occasional place name.  I was not interested in telling necessarily coherent stories.  Perhaps the material organized itself that way, given this was kind of a daily log and the proclivities of the human frontal cortex.

I discovered that when I wrote, or organized my observations and thoughts to be written, it helped me comprehend my experience better.  Maybe stay fresher for what was next; there was always a next.  I suppose this should be no surprise, I’ve kept a journal for almost four decades; this was it for the duration of my trip. 

Was It a Good Trip?

Friends have asked me this question.  I of course think about this but am confounded.  A lot of stuff happened.  I went unknown places, saw new things, new rocks, met people.  I was away, out of routine and comfort zone.  The trip was so diverse, and no particular goal, like all my past research trips.  So I have three answers.  First, these experiences that sift to the top of my mind:

New Zealand: running on the beach at Paekakariki, hiking at Tongariro, White Island

Australia: Charnley River Station, driving on unsealed roads

Singapore: the bachata 

South Korea: the art museums, led by the Samsung

Maybe this is an answer.

Second, I’ll invert a quote from Marvin the Paranoid Android (Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe):

“The first day was the best.  The second day was the best too.  After that, things went into a bit of an improvement”. 

Finally, a more personal answer.  As alluded in Blog I, chunks of my reality got blown away due to family losses in winter 2012-13.  Grief and loss are part of life, but they suck.  Since then, I have felt like I’ve been inhabiting my life rather than living it.  Early in this trip this shifted, I think on the drive from Hastings to Ashhurst in NZ.  The loss remains, but having travelled, written way more than expected and taken a lot of pictures, I know I’m alive again. 

Sabbatical Maps - New Zealand and Australia

These maps might give a sense of where I've gone, for the geographically oriented among you.  The color coding is just Google indicating traffic.

New Zealand Route:

Australia Route: large scale map for orientation, detailed maps with place names:

Sabbatical VXII – The Final 31 Hour Day

Wednesday June 26 – Last morning in Seoul.  I clean the apartment, including an expedition to the recycling/trash depot on sublevel 4.  The attendant is delighted to take my debris.

Somehow fit all my stuff back in my bag.  I didn’t buy a lot in Korea, but still, it seems tight.  Feels heavier too, but then I haven’t picked it up for a while.

Still feeling a bit run down.  I’m drinking lots (including a Japanese equivalent of Gatorade, called Pocari Sweat -not recommended) and taking my anti-cold herbal supplement.  No matter how I feel, I’m having a day, going to Incheon, and going home.

While I am looking forward to having a rest in familiar surroundings, I am also sad at the end of this trip.  If I had a next stop, and it was a serious few days of R&R, I could keep going.  But I’m not.  I planned what felt like enough, in terms of experiences, time, and costs.  Plus I have a family reunion to get to in Oregon after I get home.

So goodbye to the Kings Garden.  I have time, so one final experience, visit a jjimjilbang: a traditional Korean spa.  Onto the subway, two transfers later I arrive at Yongsan station.  A major nexus with the national train system:

I’d decided to go to the Dragon Hill Spa.  It was near Yongsan, it seemed foreigner-friendly, and it had a gonzo variety of things to try. 

I drag my bag to the entrance, past tacky Chinese statuary, an artificial stream and bamboo grove, and along irregularly laid wood blocks.  It’s so overdone that I’d run away if it weren’t for the many positive recommendations.  The interior is even more crammed with about five too many of every time of Chinese good luck and health symbol.  This lack of restraint is very unusual for Seoul, but I persist. 

Store my bags.  12,000 won gets me a key, electronic bracelet and spa clothing (shirt and shorts).  First task: store my shoes in the right locker.  I find it, but the key is square – it fits in the lock four ways.  Well, I try four times, and it finally works. 

Elevator to the men’s floor.  Find my locker.  Third try works.  First step is to get clean.  Like Japanese onsen, jjimjilbang cleaning stations (showers or stools) and hot tubs are used in the buff.  Doesn’t bother me.  Clean, over the next hour I try five different temperatures and flavors of hot tub – more than the average onsen.  In between soaks, I take cold soaks, which keeps me awake. 

Soggy, I get dry and put on my Dragon Hill costume, which almost fits:

Fifteen minutes in a massage chair.  Good.

I leave the men’s floor (yes, there is also a women’s floor) and try out the saunas and the ice room.  I’m relaxed, so a nap in the communal sleeping room.  Just a space full of mats, sparsely occupied in the middle of the day.  Then finally, a real massage.  Ouch.  My masseur seems intent on making my shoulders relax. 

Three and a half hours have passed quickly.  No time to use Dragon Hill’s gym, outdoor swimming pool, video game arcade, restaurants, or get a pedicure.  A plane to meet, so back to Yongsan and a 75 minute train ride to Incheon International Airport.  This is tons easier than the bus. 

Goodbye to luggage.  I had bought an upgraded ticket, so hello to the Asiana Airlines Business Class lounge, where I proceed to eat myself into a post -spa, end of trip stupor.  Not really, I’m too wired before flying to get sleepy.  But good food, good wireless, not awful coffee.  Lots of fluids. 

Eventually, a plane:

A new Airbus 350-900.  Priority boarding, lots of leg room.  Nine seats wide in my class.  This is so worth the extra cost. 

Take off roll, and we begin the 11 hour flight to SFO.

 

The plane is kept dark.  I sleep fitfully once my body realizes it’s going to be in a seat for a long time.  A decent Korean dinner of ssambap (with instructions on how to assemble the ingredients):

Sleep, or not. 

I’m a little put off by the plane and the flight attendants.  The whole vibe feels kind of formal and overly organized.  I flew exactly the same kind of plane on Singapore Airlines; the décor and seats on this Asiana plane are less comfortable – for one, the headrests don’t move up as high.  Singapore is my favorite airline, so I admit to possible bias.  Maybe it’s the tan color scheme as well.  The attendants do their jobs well, but some of them seem vaguely put out at having to provide service during the flight.  No question it’s a first class operation well deserving of its very high ratings, but maybe I’ll try Korean Airlines next time. 

Sleep, or not, more.  After a Korean breakfast, I use my upgrade toothbrush.  Bliss.

There is land, finally. A sense of descent and a broad turn:

Almost there, then touchdown.  Hello to baggage.  I blink and customs is done.  No beeping attachments.  A real cold brew coffee. 

BART seems small and dark compared to Seoul.  I think the cars really are smaller; most of the system is certainly older than the lines I rode in Korea.  In my one car, I see more Latinx than I recognized during my whole trip. 

Walk home.  

I am done - for now. 

Sabbatical XVI – More Seoul - History, Tech, DMZ, Art

Monday June 24 – Deep sleep, there’s no way I’m not dehydrated.  Certainly sore from the glutes on down.

What to do today?  I had figured on a hike in Bukhansan National Park north of Seoul.  Reachable by subway, and a chance to get out of the city and into some nature.  But I’m too tired to think straight.  Avoiding the issue, I fall back asleep after breakfast while trying to decide what to do. 

Awake again, I look outside.  The clear sky of the weekend has been replaced by a muggy hazy overcast.  It’s still hot, but visibility is down.  This plus the time makes for an easier choice, or perhaps avoidance of choice – Bukhansan for another visit.

Clean, dressed, to the subway, en route to Yongsan and the National Museum of Korea. I looked at the website before I went – all the galleries have online VR previews.  Cool.

It’s clearly the work week, people in business clothes. 

Ichon Station and another reason I like Korea – there’s a direct, clearly signed portal leading to the museum grounds.  Lunch, and into the museum, which like all the public museums, is free.  A big, modern space, outside and inside:

The interior building stone for the floors and walls isn’t granite, it’s a very nice fossiliferous limestone.

The Museum covers Korean history to 1910, and Asian Art with an emphasis on Korea.  It’s interesting that it stops in 1910: the start of the Japanese occupation.  Well, that did pretty much disrupt Korean society, and I expect its modern incarnation is feels rather isolated from its history.  The culture definitely jumped the tracks after the ceasefire.

Ok, I can do this.  I start with Prehistory and work my way forward in time.  The exhibits are excellent, expanding on what I learned at the Seoul History Museum and the National Folk Museum.  As before, it’s at a more detailed level than I want to absorb.  I suppose being Korean and coming here is like being American, being taught American History (I assume this is still done) and then touring to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.  It enhances the broad timeline you’ve already learned or vaguely remember.  I read the signage and examine the artifacts that interest me.

Who knew that there were Paleolithic petroglyphs in Korea:

Why wouldn’t there be?  Just my ignorance.  

As I tour the history exhibits, the general progression articulated – and it is definitely advancement – is no surprise.  Paleolithic hunter/gatherers with stone tools to Neolithic crude metalworking and agriculture to Bronze Age cultures (protokingdoms) to the various increasing levels of organized and complex societies that flourished and failed in Korea through the early 20^th century.  Sounds kinda like every other first world national history I’ve learned.  Hmmm.  I’m also a little skeptical of the consistently positive evolution that is implicit in the exhibits.  Is this my mind organizing things, or Korean historical/cultural bias/national mythology?  Things must have been a lot messier, at minimum given the hundreds of times Korea was invaded, or the internal numerous dynastic conflicts that took place.  Anyway, the collection is outstanding.  Here are National Treasures 191 and 192, a gold crown and girdle from the 5^th century Silla period:

Wow, that was just the first floor, still two floors of art above me.  Since this is a civilized museum, there is a café on each floor.  I have what’s arguably the best Americano of my trip on level 2 and push on.  Through Calligraphy (too little) and Painting (great stuff, but too dim) including a powerful 11 x 7 m Buddhist painting.  I have to sit and feel the energy of this for a while.  This stonework counted as calligraphy:

Level 3: Asian Arts, including metalwork, ceramics, and sculpture.  Like level 2, the emphasis is on Korean materials, which is fine by me.  I take random photographs of pieces I like.  A bronze rain gauge:

Ornamental brickwork:

My favorite lacquered box:

A Joseon dynasty tray:

More Buddha:

Finally, ceramics.  These galleries are arranged by ceramic style – white porcelain, bucheong ware, and celadon -  which would probably mean something to me if I had ever taken art history.  As with the rest of the museum collections, the display pieces are superb.  I’ve never seen bucheong ware before, and I really like it; it’s a uniquely Korean style, so there’s lots of it.  My favorite jar:

Sorry, celadon has never appealed to me, so no pictures.  But there was also a small exhibit of black ceramics, which I like as well:

Enough art and history for one day, so on to the 21^st century.  Some of you may have heard of the Gangnam district of Seoul, made famous by a certain K-pop video that I have never seen, OK?  Really.  Gangnam is south of the Han River, a short subway ride from Yongsan.

Gangnam is known for its Korean nightlife, but I went there in order to 1) say I’d set foot in district and 2) go to Samsung D’light.  D’light is basically an Apple store that has taken lots of performance enhancing drugs.  A showcase for the current and future tech that Samsung hopes to sell to us.  If you are all worried about the coming technological singularity, when the machines/AI take over, this is not your place.  Picture and name appear above check in:

A pretty global attendance.

Anyway, it was a fun interactive experience.  I get a wristband which triggers a series of interactive experiences around the theme of “Live Your Tomorrow”.  Here’s what it told me I am:

My preferred future:

You can decide.  Note that everything was in English.  I don’t remember choosing a preferred language, but I expect this changes appropriately.

Sufficiently inspired, I proceed upstairs to the future technology showcase, such as this giant curved 8K monitor:

Would not fit in my house.

 

The coolest bit of this was a series of AR (augmented reality) demonstrations of Samsung’s internet of everything lifestyle of the future.  At each point, you picked up a tablet, and it showed a short video of a family living in a totally connected house.  The video view changed as you moved the tablet around.  For example, in the picture below, you can see the real white kitchen in the background and the virtual one (with mom making dinner) on the tablet. 

An interesting vision, but no, I’m keeping my house as unwired as possible. 

The bottom floor of D’light was the store (I wasn’t shopping: Korea runs on 220V).  Computers, phones, monitors, appliances, and best of all massage chairs, where I took a badly needed 15 minute break.  I almost fit in the chair.  I’d get one of these if it did a better job on the legs.

Enough for one day.  Subway home. 

Here’s a digression on the Seoul subway.  As I wrote in an earlier post, the system has over 340 km of track and 22 different lines – about three times the size of the BART system in California.  The annual number of rides is some insane number in the low billions (10x-20x BART).  Several major stations integrate with the national train system, and there are stations at Gimpo and Incheon International Airports.

The system map is basically spaghetti:

Overwhelming, but I had a killer Seoul Subway app which gave me route planning, told me which direction to go at each station, when to transfer, the number of stops to ride, and other making-me-more-secure information.  The signage and maps in every station, in Hangul, Chinese, and English, were also excellent: very necessary as every one of my trips required one or more transfers.  Sometimes this required a good half kilometer walk – the app estimated walking time (but did not include time for dodging Koreans in a hurry or getting lost).  This video gives a feel for the subway experience.  I bought a T Card as in the video, much easier than single ride tickets.  All the trains and stations also have free 5G wireless:

The subway is very civilized.  Clean.  No music or food noticeable.  All the trains were the same length.  Floor signage made clear where the doors would open¸ every time.  No pushing/shoving to get on or off.  Reserved seating for the elderly/infirm/etc.  If you sat there without these characteristics, you got the snake eye.  There were also seats specifically for pregnant women: almost always empty, except on the lines where a small stuffed animal of indeterminate species further reminded you not to sit there:

People were helpful, more than once I was almost led by the hand to where I needed to go.  All the trains had real-time announcements and signs (eventually in English).  After initial, whoa, this is huge, I felt very comfortable riding around.

Many stations were multi-level and were deep underground.  This may have been to get into the consolidated alluvium which must underlie Seoul, or even into the bedrock.  I wonder if this was an engineering or defense decision, or both.  There was also a lot of space for stores and vendors selling pretty much everything you might want to buy or eat.  Clean restrooms.  Worryingly, a lot of emergency stations with fire extinguishers, first aid, and many, many gas masks:  

Tuesday June 25 – A better rest, but my body feels achy today.  I will assume this is cumulative exhaustion from three days in Seoul with my finger on the fast forward button, rather than an illness.  It better be; among my decisions yesterday was signing up for a tour of the DMZ.

Yes, that DMZ.  One can only visit on an organized tour, for obvious reasons, like getting shot or stepping on a land mine.  This is a day trip from Seoul: the DMZ is at most 40 km away.  That’s well within range of all kinds of bad stuff if the war ever resumes. 

At 8 am I presented myself at lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel (near the Kings Garden) to meet my tour guide.  Dissonance; a brief step out of Seoul and into five star international hotel vibe.  A number of other tourists and tour guides trying to find each other.  The staff seem used to this as a rendezvous point.

Pretty much on time, Shiny appears and homes in on me.  I join her, our driver, and six other tourists in a minivan.  As we start the hour plus drive to the DMZ, Shiny (who I gauge at late 20s-early thirties, moderate winsome princess style) explains that her name comes from her surname of Shin, anglicized for fun.  She gives us interesting background on the Korean War, the DMZ, and most poignantly, what this meant to Koreans.  Here family was from the north, and her generation is fully out of touch with their family there.

Traffic fades with distance from Seoul.  All that’s left on the road are our minivan, other minivans, and several dozen busses.  Going to the DMZ is a thing.  We pull into a massive parking lot, where we will board a bigger bus for the rest of tour. This stop is to overlook the Reunification Bridge; where families met for a time before the current tensions:

Many reminders of the pain of separation:

Shiny in action:

We proceed to the Dorasan train station.  South Korea built this to be a real functional stop on a future rail line to North Korea and ultimately China, Asia, and Europe:

Don’t buy your tickets yet.  The roads on the map were briefly functional when South Korea operated an industrial zone just across the DMZ.  All shut now. 

Dorasan is a bit creepy; a real station, but just tour groups now:

And aspirational artwork:

A real train that got shot to bits during the Korean War. 

The idealized future.

I like Shiny’s approach.  She’s funny and sweet.  At each stop, she gives us an overview and her recommendations of what to prioritize, as well as logistics like where the bathrooms are and how much time we have.  Then she turns us loose to poke about independently.  I do wonder if she is required to adhere to a specified point of view when it comes to the politics of the DMZ; reunification is presented as this glorious, desirable, inevitable future, no mention of future war, moderate glorification of Korean leaders (all men).  

Here’s one of the several reunification sculptures I saw.  Popular for selfies.

On the bus, into forest.  Shiny tells us that there are over 2 million land mines on the land around us.  We cross a rather mundane blue stripe on the road.  We are now in the DMZ.  We go to the Dora Observatory for a look at North Korea.  The weather was still hazy, and it was near midday, so the photographic conditions were crap, but I try anyway:

The DMZ is the wooded area in the foreground.  Shiny told us that you can tell where North Korea starts because the trees vanish across the river (center of picture).  Cut for fuel.

Final stop is the “Third Infiltration Tunnel”, one of the several dozen passageways that have been discovered:

Mannequins.  The tunnels go south, as you might expect.  We get to walk 73 m underground and into it (no pictures allowed): 

It’s almost funny.  Here I am in a long single file line of people going down a 20% grade access tunnel, to walk through this tight tunnel that North Koreans blasted through the granite bedrock.  It’s well-lit with plenty of ventilation, but tight enough that it would not be good if I were at all claustrophobic.  We have to wear hard hats, which is good as I hit mine regularly on the low ceiling.  I have to crouch most of the distance.  Groundwater drips.  We come to the turnaround, and for a few seconds get to peer through the small window in the first of several thick walls blocking the tunnel.  OK, we are almost in North Korea, but this long walk for this?  It meets the Weta test for sure.  I also enjoy the stiff climb back up the access tunnel; this counts as exercise.

Back on the bus, back to our minivan, and back to Seoul.  I fall asleep.  We are dropped off at the Seoul City Hall (a major subway nexus).  Goodbye to Shiny.

I am tired, but I promised myself one more stop, so I subway to Itaewon.  This district might be familiar; it was where the big US Army base was until a decade or so ago.  Still full of foreigners.  I’m going there to see the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art: 

Highly recommended in my guidebooks.  For 11,000 won, I get admission and an audio tour: a Samsung phone with earpiece.  The audio tour is by far the best I’ve ever followed.  Instead of overlying long pedantic signage, every artwork has audio interpretation (with additional text); just enough to understand what you are seeing.  Better yet, the audio starts automatically as I pause in front of each piece.  Brilliant. 

No photography.  Museum 2 is three floors of modern art with themes of “Beyond Boundaries”, On Abstraction” and “Toward Expression”.  Korean and international artists.  Oh. My. God.  I have never been a gallery where every piece is a home run, much less brilliantly juxtaposed with works by other artists.  I don’t like everything, but it’s impossible not to be moved by such masterpieces.

Done, I breath deeply and go to Museum 1, which shows Korean art up through 1910, similar to the National Museum.  Oh. My. God.  I thought the material in the National Museum was good, this is better.  Not a lot of works, but enough to fully communicate artistry, evolution, and brilliance.  There is more bucheong ware, which I like even more.  Further, a few modern works are here, set to complement the traditional art.  There is an arrangement of bucheong ware set by a Rothko painting that almost makes me weak at the knees.  Or this might be fatigue. 

Done.  The Leeum wins, game, set, match.  Heaps above any other collection I’ve seen, due to brilliant curation. 

I’m done too.  Subway.  A CU dinner.  Laundry, sort gear, pack.