gwangju (광주)

chuseok (추석) is a majour korean holiday...probably the biggest holiday of the year...its three days long, and follows a lunar schedule...(which can be good or bad, depending on the days of the week the holiday falls on)...this year it fell on a tuesday/wednesday/thursday, and i took the friday off as well...i taught that monday at school, or at least, i kept the kids entertained all day...only a little bit of what is normally done in the classroom actually happened, since some kids were missing, and i didn't want some classes to get ahead of others in their books...anywho...
tuesday i relaxed most of the day in my flat, watching the rain out the window...it poured...ALL DAY...after a while i got to wondering how the sky could possibly still have any more rain...that evening, i made my way over to kim's flat, she has two bedrooms...(the perks of being a teacher at an international school often include a higher housing allowance)...her flat is only a ten minute bus ride away from the train station we needed wednesday morning...she had spent her entire day working on lesson plans...YUCK...and unlike my lesson plans, which are done mostly for appearance, hers actually mean something...
we had decided to go to joellanam-do (저라남도) which can be translated as south joella province, the province farthest from seoul on the peninsula...neither one of us had been in that area before, and with the extra days, it made sense to explore while we could...as i read in the guidebook, that area of the country was once where political dissidents were sent as a form of exile...
wednesday morning we got up, caught the bus, and hopped on our train to gwangju (광주)...it was a ktx train, a bullet train...it goes around 300kms/hr, which makes korea really small!! three hours later, we arrived in gwanju...it seemed the rain had followed us, which wasn't so pleasant...just outside the train station was an information booth, so we grabbed a tourist map, and got in the taxi line...we took the taxi to the bus station, knowing that there would be plenty of love motels to be found...love motels don't have the greatest reputation, but both kim and i have always found them to be clean, and usually cheaper than any other option...plus you get cable tv, and sometimes a computer!!...we could've chosen a yeogwan (여관) near the train station, but we knew we'd need the buses to get around, hence the taxi ride...since we arrived around lunch time, both of us were hungry...we'd seen plenty of open restaurants in the bus station and train station, so we figured we'd find something relatively easily...but that definitely wasn't the case...it took around two hours of walking to find food!!! korea reeeeeeally closes up shop during this holiday...of the three days, the middle one is the BIG day, so there is even less open...while walking, we had started following signs toward a cultural center and 5.18 democracy plaza...

at one point, the plaza stopped appearing on the signs, it took us a long time to figure out why...the cultural center also didn't appear...while at lunch, i got out the tourist map, and it said that the cultural center wasn't supposed to be open until 2012!! since there was nothing about it not being open in the guidebook, we figured it was probably undergoing massive renovation...the plaza turned out to be the area around the culture center...oh well...

after lunch, we stopped at a memorial for the november 1929 student uprising...the students had rebelled against the japanese colonialists for the crappy treatment of koreans, crappy treatment of students, etc...during those years of colonialiazation, japan had forced the instruction in schools to be only in japanese, in fact it was illegal to speak korean at all...basically, japan had tried to take away korean identity completely...(on a side note, this history is not being taught in japan, so many younger japanese these days don't know, or understand why the koreans hate them so much)...the memorial is small, in a small garden area, next to the current high school, and next to a memorial hall...the hall was closed, but we figured it was probably a museum inside...

close to that monument was a subway stop (gwangju has a single subway line, stretching through the city, both kim and i wondered how much the subway is used on a regular basis) so we got on a train and took it to the convention center stop...the convention center looked to be the closest stop to a park we identified on the tourist map that seemed interesting...well, we though we had identified the parks...it took us a few minutes to figure out which exit we needed from the subway station, and then we started walking...the signs pointed to 5.18 liberty park, and we followed...at one intersection, the sign pointed right, but that seemed to be a residential street, (massive apartment complexes) so we kept walking...at the next intersection, we saw signs for 5.18 memorial park, (pointing straight) and 5.18 liberty park (pointing right)...needless to say, we didn't know there were two, or what the differences might be...so we turned right...almost immediately we saw what was clearly a park, and walked in...only it had absolutely nothing to do with 5.18...5.18 was the may 18th uprising in 1980...that's when the people rebelled against the military dictatorship that was running the country at the time (propped up and supported by the US government, which made us decide that the US government has no trouble supporting repressive governments, so long as they aren't communist) and the uprising was put down...harshly...this was the second majour uprising that had started in gwangju, and knowing that it had once been a place of exile for political dissidents, we weren't too surprised to find out that their posterity had also become political dissidents...the 5.18 uprising was put down by the military police, with force...some were killed in the fighting...many were arrested, and kept in the military police base in the city...they weren't even put in the regular jail...instead, in the mp station they were imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured...
as it turned out, the first park we found wasn't either of the 5.18 parks...it was called sangmu citizens park...a nice place for people to hang out...a couple fountains, sculptures in a wooded area, a pond, etc...but not what we were looking for...

we decided to follow the signs for the liberty park, with me still trying to figure out where either park was on the tourist map...finally, i did figure it out...that map wasn't at all clear! anywho, 5.18 liberty park ended up being more of a museum than anything else...it was the old military police station, kept as it was during the uprising...the rooms in the buildings are mostly empty now, but there are pictures of what happened in each area, and some of the rooms have mannequins dressed in appropriate clothing, demonstrating EXACTLY what happened...the signs outside each building also told what happened...rather bluntly...kim and i enjoyed learning what had happened, but we were the only ones wandering around, so that made it a bit creepy...since i had figured out the map, we decided that next we'd head to 5.18 memorial park...on the way, we stopped at a temple...a single building instead of an entire complex...it was simple, quite, and nice...and while we were there, there were quite a few people worshipping, with a monk leading prayers, so we didn't stay long...plus, the sun was starting to go down...we followed a lovely wooded path to 5.18 memorial park, which was basically a giant memorial to those who had been killed or otherwise involved in the uprising...a nice, open area

at that point, it was dark, and we were hungry...according to the map, it looked to be a straight, relatively short walk back to the bus station...we should've remembered that the tourist maps in this country are never done to scale, so you never know how far something is from another point on the map...our walk back to the bus station was at least half an hour, and we weren't walking slowly...dinner was at the bus station food court, since that was still one of the only places we knew would be open...at the end, i realized we'd probably walked about a half marathon...i've done that kind of walking before, i did it a lot during my trip...but kim hasn't...either way, both of us were tired, and went to bed not long after getting back to the motel...(i should point out that love motel names are often really cheesy...we were staying at the ritz:)...a good night sleep helped our bodies (especially our feet) recover...

in the guidebook i had read about a temple called (운주사) about 40kms outside gwangju, so our plan was to go the next day (thursday)...according to information, the bus we needed could be caught at the bus station, thankfully...it was only 40kms, but it took an hour and a half...the bus wasn't going slowly, but it did go through neighborhoods and make stops, as city buses are supposed to do...the temple itself is 600m down the road from the bus stop, in a small valley...
when the temple was first built, a long time ago, information says that there were 1000 pagodas, and 1000 buddhas...now, there are less than 80 left of each...the temple itself is a typical temple complex, a few buildings (that all look the same to me as just about any other temple in korea)...the nifty part is all the buddhas and pagodas that are around...they are all over the sides of the valley, and up on the hills...the whole area is beautiful, and in climbing up to see all the buddhas and pagodas, we were treated to some lovely views over the whole valley area...after seeing all that, it's now one of my favourite temples in korea...too bad it isn't closer to seoul...the bus ride back to seoul was awful...just awful...the driver was a petrol head, and always tried to avoid the speed bumps...this means he was always going faster than he should've been, slowing down suddenly at the last minute, and swerving around the ends of the speed bumps...kim and i were sooooooo sick by the time we got back to the city...the driver kept up the crazy driving even in the city, even with old folks and young children on the bus...despite the speed, we didn't get back any faster than we had gotten to the temple...i ended up dry heaving only a couple minutes after getting off the bus...it was AWFUL...
dinner that night was in a restaurant in a tunnel under the bus station, and we went for a walk later in the evening...a walk to nowhere in particular, but it was still nice to walk...gwangju is so much quieter than seoul!!!