Suwon: Folk Village, Fortress, AFB, and more

Phillip and I have been in Suwon since Wednesday, arriving by train from Daegu on April 20th. That train was not a high speed train, although it did go faster than the cars on the highway that we paralleled for a part of the ride.

It almost looks like we were near water in this view out the rail car window, but these are fields of hoop greenhouses. The terrain had larger flat land areas between the mountains and many collections of these greenhouses. It was the biggest collection of greenhouses that we've seen and puts my little 10 foot by 12 foot greenhouse to shame, but then I'm not raising vegetables for millions of people!

Our hotel room is the best one we've had so far, large and with a sitting area after we walk in the second door. Two doors, like we had in Jeju and in Busan, because after entering the first door off of the hallway, we're in a small alcove where we are expected to remove and leave our shoes. Unlike the Jeju room, this floor is not heated nor is it raised, but the flooring is different in the alcove and the hotel provides slippers to wear in the room. The room is nice. The mattress on the bed, however, is extremely firm, almost as firm as the floor we slept on in Jeju.

Thursday morning, we awoke to a steady rain outside. We decided to take the free shuttle bus to the traditional folk village anyway. We had umbrellas and figured there'd be museums and it might not be crowded. The umbrellas did work well, there were museums, but there were also busloads of children. The rain didn't keep them from coming for a field day. The kids were as much fun to watch as the exhibits were to see. We knew when a class made it to the exhibit with the live hogs, as we could hear the shouts of excitement from the kids.

Folk villages of the Joseon dynasty have been recreated on this 245-acre complex. Unlike the traditional houses we saw on Jeju, these have woodent walls and tile roofs instead of rock walls and thatched roofs. The houses were built as small compounds, with rooms opening into the center courtyard.

Except for the meat, the food served in the restaurants is grown or made at the folk village. We came aross their kim chee pots, actually in use as they were labeled with the date the kim chee fermentation began.

And every place has food vendors - we bought some rice candy from this one and he posed with Phillip for a picture. They are holding the scissors with which he cut the candy into smaller pieces for us. The rain had stopped for the day by this time. Some of the traditional performances were canceled because of the rain and mud, but we were able to see two - a percusion musical and a trick horse show. 

I've got to have another flower picture. This isn't from the folk village, it's from a crosswalk island in the middle of Suwon. After we returned to town, we walked from the subway station in search of another market and found an intersection - not a special intersection, just an intersection with crosswalk islands - where the landscape was magnificent. All the tulips and pansies, different varieties, were in fill bloom. The intersection had no markers or anything that said a private company planted them, so I guess the City of Suwon planted them. 

On Friday, we planned to go to Osan Air Base in the afternoon, so I got on TripAdvisor to find a morning activity. The Samsung Innovations Museum was ranked in the top 10 sights, so using the Trip Advisor location, we headed out. I learned a lesson: don't trust the TripAdvisor map. It was about 1/2 a mile off. Not a big distance in a car, but we were walking. I turned on my phone and found the location and eventually navigated us to it. Samsung is headquartered in Suwon and has a huge facility with secure access - and a museum that is by reservation only. We managed to talk the nice lady at the desk into letting us go thru it - a private tour of the three story museum basically. The displays were technically fascinating, as the projection and "special effects" were top notch as one would expect from an electronics leader.

The museum focused on electricity, its discovery and uses over history to improve people's quality of life. Phillip and I found televisions we watched as children and phones we used ten years ago in the historic displays. Yes, we felt old...our childhood and even adult electronics are now museum relics.

After Samsung, we caught to subway and headed for Osan Air Base, which is actually 5 miles outside of Osan, in the town of Songtan which is two subway stops farther than Osan. Fortunately, I knew that from Lonely Planet, a more accurate source than TripAdvisor (I still like TripAdvisor, I just won't trust their maps).  Phillip had been stationed at Osan AFB thirty-eight years ago. Songtan today is nothing like it was then. It had been a small village with shacks, no buildings over two stories, and dirt roads a few blocks outside the Air Base gates. 

Today, tailor shops and clothing stores are still there, but the bars have been replaced with restaurants, including a McDonald's and a Popeye's. All the businesses are in sturdy, real buildings, not shacks. Phillip said this pedestrian street is five times wider than the road was when he was there. The subway didn't exist in 1977, so the entire part of the town near the subway was new to Phillip. We spoke with several service members assigned to Osan AFB who were shopping in this market area. The deployment to the base is still a one-year assignment and the servicemen were generally pleased with the assignment and with Korea. Phillip couldn't get over his amazement at how much the main gate area had changed since he'd been there. He was still talking about it when we headed for the subway back to Suwon.

Yesterday (Saturday), we spent the entire day at what turned out to be one of my favorite attractions in Korea - the Hwaseong Fortress. The original fortress was completed in 1796 (much of what we saw was reconstruction, as the fortress was extensively damaged by the Japanese in the early 1900s and by bombing during the Korean War). We walked the entire fortress wall. Only one section of it was up (then down) a mountain. 

Signage in Korean, English, and Chinese was placed at each point of significance to describe what what there. The fortress had four gates and numerous other military spots like this sentry post.

At one of the secret gates (built where the terrain allowed it to be covered with dirt and rocks if needed) I stepped outside the fortress and took a picture there. Notice that the ground slopes away. When the enemy (usually the Japanese, but could have been folks not loyal to the Joseon Dynasty) approached, the fortress seemed even more imposing to them.

This was a command platform. The military leaders met here to decide the strategy. The smaller rock structure to the left of the building is a crossbow platform. The fortress had a command platform on the east and on the west sides. From this west command post, which was on the mountain, the view was as far as 50 km (about 30 miles). It was overcast yesterday, so we could only see about 10 miles away. As I am writing this post, I found that I told Phillip something that wasn't entirely accurate. I told him the trek around the wall would be 5.7 km (a little over 3 miles). Actually, the distance from the South Gate directly to the North Gate is 5.7 km. The fortress is a circle. If the diameter was 5.7, the circumference, i.e., what we walked, was actually 17 km.... more like 10 miles. I guess that's why it took us almost 5 hours to make the circuit! (FYI, we walked from our hotel to the fortress, about 2 km, before we started the tour.)

After the fortress walk, we had a fried chicken lunch, Korean style - a whole (small) butterflied chicken, skin-on, no breading or batter, deep fried in an iron cauldron of boiling oil. It was really good, crispy skin, and bowls of sauce to dip the meat in. Then, we walked thru Hwasong Haenggung, the palace inside the fortress. This was not the main palace of the Joseon dynasty, but it was one they used. The most fun part of this was that visitors could rent traditional clothes to wear as they strolled about. This couple was trying to take a selfie without a selfie stick, so we took their picture with their camera to get the entire outfits in the photo and they posed for us to take a picture of them. 

This girl is weaing the hanbok (traditional dress). As we were leaving, I noticed that the "guards" had been posted at the entrance. Their main purpose wasn't guarding, it was for tourist pictures.

You can see some of the palace buildings thru the gate past the guards. I took this quick picture when the opening was empty of tourists, and there were plenty of them on this beautiful April day.

Phillip and I find it hard to believe that we only have four more days in Korea. It has been wonderful and the people have been, without exception, friendly and helpful. We've still got another Suwon day and three days in Seoul, so we'll have more fun before we leave...