Greetings, I can't believe I've already been back in Korea for almost 6 weeks and we've finished 5 weeks of school already, though the first one was just a 3-day week. Nonetheless we're fully back in the swing of things here and the end of Term 1 is just around the corner. First though we're going to get a whole week off for Chuseok this year (the Korean holiday most often described as Korean Thanksgiving because of the emphasis on family and food, but with the added aspect of honoring ancestors). That will be during the first week of October and I'll be traveling to Japan to hang out in Tokyo and Kyoto with Alan Goral. We're still planning our itinerary but we may try to climb Mt. Fuji while we're there.
To prepare for that adventure I feel like I need to catch up on all my recent adventures in the Incheon area. The weather has been much cooler and for the most part less humid than what I remember at this time last year when I'd first arrived. We've also had a little bit of rain which was actually nice. Last year I didn't see a drop of precipitation until the first (and practically only) dusting of snow in the middle of December. Anyway, long story short, it's been great weather to be out and about on my bike and also on foot hiking some of the many mountainous paths around here. Let's get to it!
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| Just a shot of a market I passed by while walking home from Cheongna after dinner with Eric one night. |
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| This is Mo (short for Mohammed - he's one of our relatively few non-Korean students), one of my Environmental Science students this year. As a class we were taking a walk around our local area here doing an "environmental survey" finding all the different things we could (living and non-living) in our immediate environment. Mo has a praying mantis in the bag. |
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| Here I am at the summit of a mountain just east of here. |
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| This is a picture I took of my seating chart for one of my two Environmental Science sections because we were going off on a field trip and I needed a list of all their names so I could keep track of them. |
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| And here's that class at the National Institute of Biological Resources, which is a pretty nice facility not far from here at all, only about 3-4 km. I didn't find it until last spring so I wasn't able to take last year's classes there but it was a perfect first field trip this year because they have both outdoor and indoor exhibits and they specialize in species native to Korea so we were able to claim that we were trying to identify the stuff we'd collected on our walk around the school area the week before. As you can see there are 14 kids in this picture (one student wasn't able to come because he had a volleyball game) so with 15 students this one section is more than twice the total number of Environmental Science students (7) I had in my two sections combined last year! The other section has 13 students this year. |
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| This is one of the indoor exhibits, in a section of the museum more geared toward younger kids. The rest of the place is much more mature, but I thought this was pretty funny so I took a picture. |
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| This is on the Airport Island, Yeongjongdo (the "do" suffix means "island") on the way to the summit of Baegunsan (the "san" suffix means "mountain"). I went for a hike here after work on of the first Friday's we were back in school, then grabbed dinner in the town of Unseo, where I'd started my hike. It's only 2 subway stops west of here so it's quite convenient. You can see the sun is going down in the west (duh) and we're looking northwest and you can see those islands north of this one which I'd taken the ferry to and ridden around by bike last spring. |
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| This is looking more due west. The airport itself is just there on the flat part of the island which, like Cheongna itself, didn't used to exist at all. If you Google "Timelapse google" the first link is to the Google Earth Engine Timelapse website where you can see images of Earth since 1984 and watch how they change. It starts you in Miami but you can navigate to other places. If you then type "Incheon" into search bar and choose "Incheon International Airport" it will take you to a view of this area. For this picture I'm standing on the one bit of green stuff sticking out of the tidal mudflats back in 1984. Likewise the entire city of Cheongna, including my school, was also tidal mudflats you can see just to the east of where this mountain is. |
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| Similar to the pic above but with my face in it. Also, in the far distance you can see the third island I wanted to ferry to. That one is off the south end of Yeongjongdo (the airport Island I'm on here). It's called Muuido and you'll see some pictures of my adventure there below. |
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| This is looking southeast-ish toward the mainland. That big bridge is not the bridge I usually take to the airport, but rather the one further to the south which takes you to the city of Songdo, which is all the high rises you can see at the far end of the bridge. On the left side of the picture you're looking at Incheon which is between Songdo to the south and Cheongna to the north (left). |
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| This is looking more due east (note my shadow in the center of the frame) and you can see Incheon straight ahead and Cheongna to the left of that. Also, that highest mountain across the water just on the left edge of the picture is Gaeyangsan which I'd climbed on a very hazy day last year and could hardly see anything from. However this year I've been on some slightly lower ones just to the south of that (which you can see them on the horizon) and have had some nice views. The picture of me in the purple scrub above is from one of those. You'll see some from today's hike further below. |
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| There, I've finally rotated far enough counter-clockwise to be looking far enough north (east-ish) that you can see the bridge which connects the island to my part of the mainland (just behind the bit of tree). That's the one the airport subway goes over so I'm always traversing that for flights or to take my bike out to this island for a ride. |
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| Me again. |
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| On the way back down toward the town of Unseo, where the subway stop is, I passed this map. I always seem to pass the maps on the way back from wherever I've been. |
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| I rewarded my successful hiking efforts with a tasty Korean BBQ dinner. |
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| Now it's Sunday and I'm taking my bike to that southern ferry-connected island I'd mentioned above, called Muuido (apparently it's named that because the outline of the island looks like an (historical?) soldier's uniform which is called a Muui). As you can see they're in the process of building a bridge to that island so this ferry won't be operating too much longer. |
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| There is yet another, smaller, island called Somuuido south of Muuido (at the far end of where the ferry dropped me) connected by a pedestrian/bike only bridge so I rode down there and across that bridge but then I had to park my bike because getting around that tiny island meant taking trails which weren't accessible to bikes. At one point I saw this tiny deer, called a "water deer", which was pretty exciting because I'd learned about this species at the National Institute of Biological Resources with my Environmental Science class field trip the week before. They're mini-deer, and before you say "awwwww" because they're so cute be apprised they have fangs! Hence their nickname "vampire deer". You can read about them here. |
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| Looking back toward Muuido. |
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| The beach at the south side of Somuuido |
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| The trail here had taken me down past those stilt-houses at the top of the hill and I could see they were for rent. It would be fun to spend a night out there sometime. |
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| Here's a map of Somuuido. You can see the beach at the south side and the bridge connecting it to Muuido at the top. |
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| At one point I came up close to a rock and a whole bunch of these little bugs scuttled away from me. |
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| I've been informed this is a poem, but I don't know what it says. |
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| It was on this tree. This is looking west. These are the rocks with the little scuttling bugs all over them. |
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| Continuing my hike around Somuuido I came to this viewpoint and was able to look back toward the beach from a couple pictures earlier. |
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| And this is looking west again, with some little gnats caught in a spider web in the upper left corner. |
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| I'm almost all the way back around Somuuido to my bike and the bridge which will take me back to Muuido proper (the island I'd first landed on from the ferry, which you can see in the distance in this picture). |
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| Back on Muuido I went to a beach. This was the first, only, and nicest swimming beach I'd seen in this area. Again there are little shacks you can rent overnight. I later found out they cost $40/night, which seems a little steep to me since it's nothing but a wood floor. |
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| The beach combing was great there. Darcy would love it. |
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| This is the far end of the beach. On the right is the landing zone for the zipline. But except for the zipliners and the people renting 4x4s to drive down the beach and back with their kids no one else came down to this end. All the bathers were clustered together a couple hundred yards behind me where all the shacks and restaurants were. So I went down to the far end and ducked into the woods to strip down to my underwear (I hadn't brought a swimsuit) so I could take a dip. The water was almost too warm. It was actually hot near the surface. It was a little cooler lower down as I got out deeper. |
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| Back to the main part of the beach I decide to reward myself with a late lunch. |
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| Yum, roasted huge oxymoronic shrimp! |
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| Leaving the beach now, ready to ride back to the ferry. |
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| On the ferry headed back to Yeongjongdo (the airport island) where I'll have to ride back to the airport then take the subway back across the bridge to my local stop, the first one on the far side of the bridge. |
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| The other Environmental Science section seating chart, in preparation for my return, with them, to the National Institute of Biological Resources. Because I have so many ES students this year (28 instead of 7) I decided to take each section separately instead of combining them like I did last year. |
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| Roaming around the Geomdan area north of here, this is some sort of monument/mausoleum for some famous historical family, to the best of my understanding. |
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| Crazy spider! |
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| Now I finally made it to today's pictures. This is from a hike from another ridge connected to the series of low peaks just west of here. This is looking kind of north-ish at an area called Simgok-dong (the "dong" suffix means "neighborhood"). This particular neighborhood has St. Mary's hospital (front right), where I would go for any medical needs, and where I got my immunizations and anti-malarial meds last year prior to my trip to Thailand. |
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| This is looking west more or less. The buildings on the right are Cheongna. Behind them you can see the water separating us from Yeongjongdo (airport island) and Baegunsan (Mt. Baegun) rising from it, where I'd taken that Friday eve hike a couple weeks ago. To the left of that you can see, I think, Muuido (Muui island) where I'd been bike riding in the previous outing. |
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| This is looking about 90 degrees to the left of the picture above, so south-east-ish. The part of the city beyond the hills there is called Bupyeong, and is where I inadvertently ended up at one point on my first major bike ride last year when I was trying to go to the Han river. |
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| Hiking on a little further I came to a higher peak and took some similar photos. It was sooooo clear today! I could finally benefit from climbing these hills and get great views of the area. |
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| This is a good picture of Cheongna, showing the canal running E/W right through the middle of town where all the restaurants and nightlife are. To the right of town you can see (close) some green rice fields (the rice was just getting harvested by tractor today as I was riding past) and (far) a golf course. Our school is just on the far side of the golf course. It's actually visible if you know what to look for. Behind that you can see the bridge which connects us to Yeongjongdo (airport island). |
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| Another shot like the one above, but rotated to the left a little so you can see Mt. Baegun on Yeongjongdo, where I'd taken those pictures at the top of this post looking back this way. |
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| Of course, on the way down I found a map. |
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| See what I did there? |
Finishing off with the special panorama and fish-eye type shots which my computer always sorts to the end for me...
So it was a great bike ride and hike today, finishing off a spate of fun explorations in the last couple weeks, and now I'm happy to be back home heating up some dinner and having a beer and getting ready to watch Netflix and start another work week tomorrow. Hoping you're all well! -- Chris
