Day 6, Leg 5

About 150 of 633 km down.

I keep forgetting how pleasant the walk to Yeoju City is.  Granted, there's a nasty hill at about the 10,000-step mark, but aside from that, the path and the view are both lovely. Pain levels were manageable today, although I wonder about an occasional hot spot on my right sole, on the padded part of the foot that's just back from the space between the second and third toes. Palpating the spot reveals no blistering, so perhaps the Leukotape is doing its job. 

Yes, I'm using Leukotape again despite the bad experience last year, but I'm being more cautious about it this time around.  I'll never again make the mistake of wrapping Leukotape completely around a pinky toe, but after watching some hiker vids on YouTube, I've decided to use Leukotape as prophylaxis against blistering.  Thus far, it seems to be working:  by this point in the two previous walks, I had some nasty blisters on at least one foot. Pre-taping seems like the way to go.

I have an embarrassingly short walk tomorrow:  just 17.3 kilometers. As a result, I'll be leaving Yeosu rather late in the morning, around 9 a.m.  I'll be in no hurry to reach Jangsu Pension; the place is low-tech, and it's out in the middle of nowhere, which leaves me with very little to do.  That's why I've also been in no hurry to write this blog entry:  I can stay up until 2 a.m. and still be up by 8 without feeling too tired.

In preparation for storing my walk-related photos on my phone, I've spent much of the evening uploading my Food Porn folder of photos (several gigs' worth) to Google Drive, then deleting the photos from my phone.  I now have room for around 1100 photos, but if today's photo spree was any indication, that might not be enough. We'll see. 

I took 131 pics today. Here are only a few of them, plus commentary, with a promise to upload the rest once the walk is done.

Last year, I passed by what appeared to be a rainbow-brick shwimteo.  The structure was hollowed out and looked for all the world like some kind of bus stop, which made no sense on a path for walkers and bikers.  It was the happiest little shwimteo I'd ever seen, but my feet took me past it before my brain kicked in and made me regret not having taken a photo of the thing.  This year, I didn't want to repeat the same mistake, so I determined to stop and take a shot.  Two problems:  (1) the structure had been completed, and it was obviously neither a bus stop nor a shwimteo; and (2) I left my motel much earlier than I had last year, which meant that it was dark when I needed more light to take the picture. I used my cell phone's flash function to snap the following shot:

It was light out when I left my motel last year.  This year, I left at 5:30 a.m. on the dot, so all was initially dark:

I found the following scene eldritch and evocative:

The sky continues to lighten, and I swear I didn't use a blue filter; the light was naturally that way:
 

I'm resting at a local sports park that's heavily kid-themed.  Happened upon my favorite jangseung:

A cosmos flower, up close (hi, Mom):

One of many long stretches today:

A glimpse of quasi-suburban living:

I passed two dams today:  Ipo and Yeoju.  Here's a shot of Yeoju-bo (bo means "dam"), not far from Yeoju City, where I am now:

I found the Prince Motel, got my room, then went out for a late meal (5:30 p.m. is late when you normally try to finish eating by 4).

I need to write a memo to myself about the parklands next to both dams.  They're gorgeous, and I'd like to convince my friends to go out there and visit those spaces. 

Today started off rainy and cool, but the weather gradually turned sunny.  I thoroughly enjoyed the scenery, and when the nasty hill appeared around the 10K-step mark, I was ready for it.  I know I've lost at least one inch around my waist; I may even have lost two.  None of the weight loss will be visible to friends and coworkers; when you're as fat as I am, you need to lose at least 30 kg before anyone will notice anything.  And I'm fine with that. 

There was a lot more I wanted to say, but I'll likely add more to this post later, once I've uploaded the other 120-some photos.

PHOTO ESSAY

This worries me:

A vending machine for "adult products":

I love Konglishy names:

Anyone else see this and think "doodoo"?  According to the hangeul rendering (visible in the lower-left corner), it is indeed pronounced dudu (as in "hairdo," I imagine).  Maybe that's better than "dodo" as in "dodo bird."

This, on the other hand, is supposed to be pronounced like the "dodo" in "dodo bird":

housekeeping note

Blogging with the new Blogger interface is very difficult to do on a phone.  It's not as bad as I'd thought it would be when I'm on a computer, but for cell phones, the interface sucks.  I might handle future hiking days the way I did last year:  I'll take a slew of pics, which I'll save, and I'll upload only a handful of them, saving the full upload for when I get back.  There's a risk in doing that, of course:  people who read the blog up to October 26 might think to themselves, "Well, that's it, I guess," and abandon the blog before they get a chance to see the full spread of photos.  Or they might abandon the blog despite knowing that more pics are on the way.  I'm not sure how well things worked out last year when I did this; I have a very small core of readers who will likely remain with the blog and wait for the final pic dump, but as with any readership, there are also the lazy and the faithless, who won't put in the time and effort to stick around for the final round of images.  Nothing I can do about that; that's just demographics:  people and their personalities fall on a bell curve.  That said, if one of you is a marketing genius who can suggest ways to motivate more of the audience to stick around—or who can suggest a photo-upload method that isn't onerous to me and doesn't overly tax the audience's attentiveness—then I'm all ears.  Leave a comment.

NB:  I'm on a computer here in Yangpyeong.  It's not great, but it's easier than blogging on the phone, which had been taking me literal hours to do.  I don't have that kind of time or energy.

Day 5, Leg 4

Tomorrow, I'll be heading out to Yeoju. It'll be a nice walk, and perfectly standard at 30.1 km. Today has been restful, but when you're a mass of aches and pains, everything happens in slow motion, and time slips away before you know it.  Never enough time.

Today is the day after Chuseok, which means that a lot of stores and shops are still closed.  I had wanted to go shopping for a better power pack than the one I have, but none of the local cell-phone stores were open.  While I was on the way to Yangpyeong, I stopped by a convenience store and bought a better charging cord than the one I had with me. 

I also went to a pharmacy to get hydrogen peroxide and cough medicine (I had a cold and sore throat this morning), then I tromped over to the Chinese restaurant to eat what I'd wanted to eat last night. The meal proved to be satisfactory, but I had to struggle to finish it 

I took a few pictures during the walk through town; here they are.  First, three pics from the meal:

A look down the street:

The Chinese place has a name: in hwa ban jeom. The last two syllables often appear in the names of Chinese restaurants in Korea; the character in means "human" and hwa means "peace" or "harmony" (as when my buddy Mike jokes that such-and-such event is disturbing his wa, the Japanese pronunciation of the same character).

Typical of this part of town are the rotaries (a.k.a. traffic circles):

Staring down a street:

The vaunted Hoya Chicken:

A nearby bridge:

The river dominates:

Flags out for Harambe-- I mean, Chuseok.

The bike path you see below is new. When I came this way with JW and his boy months ago, the path had been stripped bare and was under renovation. Now, voilà!

Below: the VIP House, my current digs:

The facility below brings me a smile: it's a branch of Pizza Nara, Chicken Gongju (Pizza Country, Chicken Princess), a popular pichi (pizza + chicken) establishment. I used to order food from this chain all the time in 2014, back when I taught at Dongguk University and lived in a shack of a yeogwan.

So there's your glimpse of this little corner of Yangpyeong.  It's actually fairly large and spread-out, as cities go, but I'm never around long enough to explore it in any depth.