Monday, October 22, 2012

Busan

After more than one year of living in Seoul I was curious about the rest of Korea. However two little kids are not the best companions for traveling long distances. Besides a couple of journeys, until August I had not yet seen most of the country. I really wanted to visit Busan, its city beaches, enjoy its nightlife and visit the its fish market, the greatest in Korea. And I was curious about Sokcho, the city right on the other side of the peninsula, on the same parallel of Seoul. But I had never the chance to visit them.

So, when Fabio and Manuele told me that they wanted to remain one week after the Jeju conference, I thought that this was my chance! I proposed them to travel around Korea on the road, first along the eastern coast, on the East Sea, and after that back to Seoul,  passing over the mountains, all in 4 days. So we flew from Jeju to Busan, rented a car and followed the ocean road up north. 

Although potentially a great plan, things turned to be very different from my dreams. The problem was that the Jeju meeting was planned at the end of Summer, still in the raining season. Not that in Korea it always rains in Summer, but when it starts raining it can continue for a week and be really cold, which is exactly what happened.

But first I want to introduce my friends. The first is Manuele, who spent one week in Seoul before going to Jeju... 



...and the second is Fabio, who came just in time for getting all the rain in Jeju, around Korea and finally in Seoul!



As I wrote, until we were in Jeju, the weather was nice, although occasionally it was already wet...



...but it became horrible as soon as we arrived in Busan. You can see the joy and the astonishment in in the eyes of Fabio while watching Busan for the first time... 




So, what to do with such a weather!? We decided that the only option was to go to the fishmarket and have a great lunch. But before that, we explored the long lines of fisheries, where you could find any kind of fish. It was really impressive!



Finally lunch. We were a bit disappointed by the difficult start...


...but eager to try the korean fish soup.



After, a last look at the famous landscape of the small houses of Busan (through the rain)... 


...and the harbor of Busan...


...before leaving for the next adventure!



Friday, October 19, 2012

Jeju

Long time without blogging! Before I went to Europe in July I wanted to write many posts, but immediately after I arrived I was initially captured by family and friends, and immediately after from the organization of a conference, actually the first large international conference on geodynamics in Korea. It was an honor to have an important role in this event, and in this country, but it was also first of all a lot of work. At the end I was so tired that for two weeks I could not do almost anything. 

Jeju is a famous island in the South of the country, known for 30 years for being a love paradise for couples, but now mainly a touristic attraction for everybody. One of the great things of the event was that finally many friends who had never the chance to see Korea came to visit me. The first was Manuele Faccenda, who arrived from Padova one week before the meeting. In this photo he had just tried some hyper-spicy octopus! He survived, which is a pretty positive outcome for a newcomer. 



I have have a lot of photos from the meeting, but they would be quite boring for most of you. I will show only a few of them. This was the view from the hotel. Not bad, really!



A great thing of the hotel is that they had a little band formed by a guy playing a guitar and a singer. The girl was a blonde korean (well, not a real blonde, I guess), which is kind of special, and she had a great voice, but she was also unbelievably shy. Every time we tried to go to talk to her or just say "hurray", "great", she would freak out and leave. That happened every night, and it was difficult to understand for us. I just guess that this hotel is normally a romantic place, for just married couples, and the girl rarely received such an enthusiastic and loud response.



The conference room was beautiful with a great view on the sea. I cannot say anything about the conference, as I composed the program, so I cannot be fair. I know what worked well and what not. It was the first time that I had so much to do, and organize everything with so many prominent scientists. I had also to overcome my usual shyness. Half of the participants came from US, Europe and Australia, therefore the logistic was quite complex. I have spent most of the time running here and there, organising little things like finding a timer for the talks, deciding where to hang the posters, announcing changes of schedule, where to meet, when to eat, and so on. The nicest part of the conference was the discussion, in which we tried to address some of the main problems related to the last earthquake in Tohoku. I think that this will occupy a substantial portion of my future work. We had the goal of bridging several disciplines, from the tsunamigenic earthquakes to numerical models. From this point of view, I think that we did a good work.



Here on photo on the top you can see the back Scott King looking at the tsunami propagation slides . On the bottom left me and Sang-Mook Lee chatting and on the right image I show the room with some participants. Yes, I don't know how, but many can follow the talks while reading their emails. It is interesting how many seem distracted, but in fact they carefully listen (well, I hope so, at least!).



And fortunately we did not only work, but we had some really good time in the hotel garden, also with the new t-shirts promoting the secret "Geodynamics Liberation Front" created by the team of the Scripps (thanks Dave Stegman and Robert Petersen!).



With the contribution of few biers and some (very expensive) wine, the nights turned to be very pleasant. Here we have some members of the international community. Form the left to right, you can see Erik Sevre (Seoul), Fabio Capitanio (Melbourne), Dave Yuen (a myth of geophysics, from Minneapolis) and Sylvain Barbot, now in Singapore. On the right foto the famous Paul Tackley (Zurich), also my former boss for some time, Dave Stegman (San Diego) and Erik again. On the first night we also managed to jump in the pool (absolutely forbidden after 7pm) but on the second day the ones who tried have been discovered, which created some little problem with the hotel management...



The hotel and the pool.



The last day of the meeting, after 10 hours of talks and discussions every day, we were destroyed and we went finally to explore the island. First we headed to the longest lava flow "tunnel" in the world (several kilometers!). On the left there is a piece of lava dropping from the tunnel top. On the other side again Dave Yuen with his chinese friends. 



Here I show are curiosities from the "lava" museum in Jeju. The museum is a really a special place,  a permanent exhibition of many things that we actually research, here shown to the public. It was strange to see that. They also have nice blocks of basalts, with plumes and planes of bubbles of gas, which is one of my main research topics.




Probably the most original character of Jeju is the periodic eruption, about one every 1000 years, happened in the past 500,000 years, each one in a different location of the island. This makes the products of the lava the most relevant, so it was inevitable that habitants specialized in a variety of statue and other artistic products made of this material. Here some "exotic" examples:  



And of course the main product of Jeju: the black pig! I think that few things had so much success as the dinner on the last day... this is Korean style!






Next post: the adventure along the coast of eastern Korea with Manuele and Fabio!

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Taean Seashore National Park

After a great day on Daecheon beach, we woke up and made the upsetting discovery that the weather had turned bad, with cold winds and some light rain. So we decided to go in a new direction. Just in front of Boryong there is a long peninsula, mostly part of the Taean Seashore National Park. Because on the maps they show that there is a beach every 3-4 km, we were curious about how they would look like, so after crossing the usual terrible traffic (one hour for 30 km on the highway!) we arrived there. 

After arrive we immediately realized that Daecheon beach is an exception on the western coast of Korea. Nearly everywhere else on the western coast the beaches do not really exist, but there are instead kilometers wide esplanades of mud where one cannot really go to swim, but on which koreans love to go to dig up huge shells and crabs to cook on the fire. This was really fascinating. In fact, although these beaches are not really made for a swim, they have their own special and very wild beauty.

The second thing that has hit us was the local architecture. Unfortunately I do not have photos of the weird buildings that are in construction in this "national park". In effect they were a funny imitation of the architecture that you can find in Europe, but all some how converted to a Korean style. Very weird.

In the middle of the first beach there was a large outcrop. If you look carefully you will notice a large plate where a story in korean is written, but I cannot remember what it said. You can also see in the second photo some people coming back from the mud plateau with their dig and proud of their booty.  



The landscape, so flat, was quite amazing, silent, very very calm. Places like this exist in northern Europe and in northern Australia and in general where the coast ends on a continental plateau (look at the sea depth: 1 2). However suddenly the silence was broken by a loud voice! We turned back and we saw that many trees in this little paradise had a loudspeaker attached to them, and that this loudspeaker was announcing something in korean. Maybe they were just telling people to go back as the tides were rising, I don't know, but that suggested us a bit a "1984" atmosphere, like if somebody was always observing us. Very weird! 



This photo shows how many people were at work there. It is really amazing. Every one of these little men and women, there in the mud, is just looking for and digging up crabs and shells. They may spend there the entire day, before going back to cook their prays. They say "Macchissoyo" here, which means "delicious".



A view also to the other side, where less people were hunting (or fishing??), I don't know why. Maybe it was far, or maybe it was somehow less convenient for finding crabs, who knows! I really will have to try this, sooner or later.



It was quite cold and we were not prepared to that so Dorothea invented a new style. Doesn't she look like dressed like Victoria Beckam?



After the surprise of the first beach we moved a southern to see if they were all the same, but we had time enough only for another one. Here we found instead some cute villas for summer vacation. Again I have forgotten to take photos of the architecture. We were probably too stressed by the kids. However the beach looked more like a mediterranean beach, but that was probably only because it was late, almost at sunset, and the tides were higher.   



I know that I look ridiculous with this scarf, shorts and sandals on the beach, but it was really windy!



And finally a tired look of Renee and an hungry one of Marlen told us that it was time to go back home...






Monday, June 11, 2012

One day on Daecheon Beach (and nearby)

With two children the time to write posts has now definitively decreased. Furthermore at work I have more and more to do. I have taken the main charge of the organisation of the first international conference on geodynamics that will be held in Korea (slab.snu.ac.kr). I am very happy of working on that, it is something new and very interesting, but the obstacles are huge. However I don't want to write about it today. I have instead some photos of our first trip to the beaches outside Seoul.

Since when we went to Japan, at the end of April, we decided that we want to travel more. Big cities in Asia are fascinating and never boring, but we missed the other side of it: if so many people live concentrated in such a small area (half of south koreans live in the metropolitan area of Seoul) it means that the rest of the country must be still under the control of nature. And in part it is really so.

Few weeks ago we rented a car for the first time and we went for a long weekend (Sat-Sun-Mon). The first idea was to take one day off at work and avoid the terrible traffic when returning to Seoul on Sunday. However we did not know that exactly that Monday that we randomly choose was a national holidays: the birthday of Buddha! And therefore this week-end turned into the most dramatic experience in my life of being stucked into a traffic jam. I will not bother you with the details, but I will only say that we have left our apartment at 10.30am and at 3pm we were still only 50 km far from Seoul. A real nightmare that convinced us to change our plans and not to go anymore in the extreme southern region of Korea, until Mokpo as we originally planned, but to stop at only 150 km from Seoul, on what the guide described as the "most famous beach" on the western coast of Korea. Daecheon, near Boryong

This place is mostly famous for the mud festival, which is in summer and is the most internationally renown event in Korea. When we went it was still low season, in fact while here you can find endless restaurants, bars, cafes, they were mostly half empty, which is just a pleasant feeling if you come from Seoul! We even found some very nice western style cafes, like the one where we went the first morning to get our breakfast.



Not everybody knows that the western coast of Korea is wet by the Yellow Sea, which is not a real sea. It is more a flat flooded continental plateau, therefore the beaches are normally made of a mix of sand and soil and they are very wide and long and regularly covered by tides. They are huge mud deposits and when the water goes away the exposed area can be kilometers wide. Here people use to go to dig into the mud to find precious huge shells, which are then cooked on a barbecue. It is a typical week-end activity for korean families!

However the beach is different in Daecheon because it looks quite similar to the ones that I have seen in Western Australia, near Broome, and in Donegal, in northern Ireland. However, very differently from there, in summer these beaches are crazily packed. We were lucky because now, although quite warm, still they were almost empty, but the hotels were not. We spent two hours, from 10pm to midnight to find a place to stay, and in the end we have gotten the only possible option, a student dormitory where they gave to the four of us a eight people room for the price normally paid by ... eight people! However I have to say that it was really a nice place where one sleeps on the floor, in a traditional korean style and with view on the sea. And the day after they gave us a very convenient and cheap room and they offered an authentic korean breakfast (with spicy soup!).

After spending the entire first day in the car we wanted only to rest a little bit, so we went to the beach. That was our first beach day of the year. The beach was different from what the summer standards are:




We have enjoyed our time there





At lunch time we went to a restaurant with a nice view on the coast



In the afternoon we were already tired of sun and bathing, so we took the map of the are and we went to discover the interior of Korea. We did not have to go very far to find some farmers planting rise. They used an interesting machine that was planting all of them in a nice order. That was quick. When we came back in the late afternoon they had finished to seed four large fields!  




The next step was a temple, originally a Buddhist school. However while searching for it we found first a closed, but beautiful shrine (yes, we spied over the wall)



and after we encountered the really used temple of the village. Because the following day was  Buddha's birthday, they had put a lot of lanterns. It was really nice. They invited us to eat in the temple and specified that this was an offer to the visitors and that they did not want anything from us. Ah, they had fantastic "wild cherries", tiny and delicious. 

And they had cats and dogs, for the joy of Marlen and some trepidation for Renee.




Finally on the way back we found the temple that we were looking for. It is a special lonely place, lost in the middle of nothing, with a raised patio several meters above the ground. Dorothea was angry with me because I have parked our car right in the middle of this Eden. I guess she was right. 



Dorothea caught the perfect light on the patio.




The place has been clearly abandoned after having been renewed. The locks are rosted. But you can see the elegant original design, and the paper made windows, like the ones that we saw in the tea house in Seoul. Hopefully koreans will find the way to regularly take care of their ancient treasures and in effect I am optimist about it.



I was impressed by seeing this place. I wander how long it will resist. But I felt that it was a privilege to have it only for us. Marlen found a broom under the floor and cleaned around a bit...



On the way back I took this sunset photo on the rise plantation.



Once in the village we went to search some place for dinner. The choice was mostly between seafood and seafood. No choice at all. But everything was really as much fresh as possible, i.e. they were putting alive fishes and shells on the fire and letting them fry...



As usual we have been enthusiastically invited nearly everywhere 



Twao calamari's tried to have their last party before dinner... 



And Marlen enjoyed a walk before going to sleep, with her Hello Kitty that she won on a shooting air balloons...

 

It was truly a first byte of holidays, although the day after the weather was not so clement with us, therefore we went for a different adventure that I will describe in another post.