Day 8, Leg 7

The eighth day and the seventh leg of this walk saw me go another shortish stretch:  just 22 km from Jangsu Pension to the bizarrely named On You Hotel in the northern part of Choongju City, a city so large that I'll need four days to pass through it.  I'm here for only one night, but when I reach the middle of the city, I'll be staying for two nights in one of my favorite, hilariously tacky yeogwans, the kind with the red mood lighting and the vibrating beds.  I always enjoy the chintz factor when I'm there; it makes me wonder if this is what Graceland is like. 

The On You claimed to have no rooms last year, and the other motels clustered in the area were all dead-looking and empty. This time around, though, fortune favored the foolish, and I got a room from a front-desk woman who had a lot of trouble understanding me.  That's always frustrating; I'm aware that I speak Korean with an accent, but I've been praised time and again by taxi drivers for my clear pronunciation: "발음이 정확하시네!" ("Your pronunciation is so accurate!") they say.  At the same time, I've encountered plenty of Koreans who just can't or won't understand me.  It's as if they see a foreigner and automatically pre-decide that nothing the foreigner says will be understandable.  Call it willful stupidity.  Call it racism.  Call it culturally determined cognitive blindness.  I call it a pain the ass.  Anyway, once I started speaking very loudly and slowly, the lady understood me, and I got my current room. I then went out to the same resto I visited last year and ordered the same soondae gukbap.  With a decent meal in my belly, all was right with the world. 

Rewind back to this morning. I had my usual fitful night's sleep, and I deliberately delayed getting out of bed for nearly an hour.  I was out the door by 6:45 a.m., and the proprietor, who had been asleep when I arrived yesterday, leaned out of a second-floor window and hollered a goodbye right as I left his property and hit the main road.  I raised my trekking poke in mute farewell.

It was cold out:  in the high 40s Fahrenheit.  I walked nearly a kilometer before stopping at a shwimteo and digging my jacket out of my backpack.  I trudged forward, crossing a familiar bridge, then following another steep, spiraling exit downward to the level of a nearby creek.  I eventually met up with the Han River again, and all was smooth sailing for another few kilometers... until the urge to take a shit welled up and took over all conscious thought.

I had actually foreseen this very situation:  the large meal I had cooked for myself yesterday at Jangsu Pension, followed by a lack of intestinal output that evening, meant that everything would be coming out the following day, and probably over two sessions.  I'd fired off a decent-sized missile before leaving the pension, but now, not even five kilometers into today's walk, I could feel a second cataclysm building, as sure as the fulfillment of an apocalyptic prophecy.

But the gods intervened:  not long after the horrible urge began to build, I nearly squealed with girlish joy when I saw a pair of porta-johns off to the side of the path.  Unfortunately, the gods are also capricious, for when I opened the door of the men's john, I saw it was a fucking squat toilet.  Those who are close to me know of my intense hatred for squat toilets.  The problem comes down to the fact that I can never squat properly, and my ultimate nightmare is firing a fuck-nugget of shit straight into the pants crumpled around my ankles. 

But there was no arguing with my intestines, which were screaming for sweet release and long past caring about my dainty, fragile sensibilities.  So into the john I went.  Without getting into too much detail, I'll say that the mission proved surprisingly successful.  My targeting system was accurate enough to keep me from speckling my pants with butt-sewage, and I got the rest of the previous day's lunch completely out of my system.  I walked the next several kilometers with a stupid smile on my face as I basked in my private victory.

And it was another gorgeous walk.  I'm in full-on farmland now, and it makes me feel, much more intensely than I might otherwise, the full meaning of harvest season.  A city dweller or suburbanite might understand "harvest" in terms of what specials are available at the local grocery, but out here, I'm seeing the reality of what a harvest means.  I'm watching all this produce, all this life, spring forth from the ground in its organic exuberance.  It's truly something to behold.  I'm witnessing, up close, how this country sustains itself.

Toward the end of my walk today, I visited a tiny old general store run by a tiny old gentleman who offered me some makgeolli.  He rambled about his own adventures in his youth, about how his life is now devoted to running his store, and about his adult children, now scattered to the four winds and living all over the world.  We talked a bit about my walk; he wondered whether my shoulders hurt from the backpack.  I told him no, but my feet hurt. 

Here are some pics from today's adventure.  First up:  my humble "bed" at Jangsu Pension:

The old, beaten-up kitchenette where I made my fateful, budae-jjigae-like meal:

Another pergola-style shwimteo:

A nice view:

The power and majesty of bridges:

Signs:

Why do I do these walks?  Here's why:

And here's why:

It truly was a beautiful day.

I was wowed by the solar paneling:

Rice is everywhere, and it will soon be harvested, maybe later this month. 

Attack of the marauding plant genitals! 

The funky, Bauhaus-ish house that I always photograph whenever I pass this way:

This simply had character:

Old dude with whom I hung and chatted:

Next to the old dude's store was an abandoned property with this spray-painted "Beware of Dog" sign.  The dripping red paint gave the sign a creepy, horror-movie vibe.  I thought it was funny enough to photograph.  The stand-up urinal off to the side sucked away whatever menace the sign might have had.

I believe this is a squash flower:

There were times when I'd try to photograph flowers, but every time I'd train my camera on one, the wind would suddenly pick up as if God were messing with me.  In the pic below, I'm holding the flower to keep it from thrashing about. 

So there you have it:  just a few of over eighty pictures taken today.  And now, it's time to kick back and watch some YouTube.  I was hurting while at Jangsu Pension:  there was no Wi-Fi there.

PHOTO ESSAY