Oct. 7 and 8

I will make this post a bit short, but wanted to say a few things about the last two days. Hanna – a friend who I met at the HSP center in Vanderhoof is back in Korea now. She came over and took me on a driving tour around some areas of southern Korea. It is amazing how much construction is happening in Korea. There are highways under construction everywhere – big highways. There are so many small mountains here and many of the highways seem like they are almost half tunnel. We zip along fairly straight and level, just going through the hills that get in the way. When there aren’t tunnels there are bridges. They are expert bridge builders here, it would seem, as there are huge suspension bridges all over the place – between mountains, between islands, joining islands to the mainland - everywhere. Also, there are apartment buildings being built everywhere. Since I was here last year 7 or 8 new large apartment buildings, and a bunch of smaller buildings and houses have been built in front of Michael and Elizabeth’s place.

The trip with Hanna took us to the top of Jiri mountain. This mountain is one of the higher mountains in Korea and is also a place where Northern Korean soldiers hid after the war when they were cut off from returning home by the creation of the border. Many were hunted down and killed, so the mountain is a scene of quite a bit of suffering. Now, though, it is very calm and beautiful. Here are a couple of pictures from the mountain:  

We also got lost for a while and missed the highway, which turned out to be a good thing as it took us along a small and winding road through mountains with valleys filled with golden rice and roads lined with rice laid out to dry in the sun. We ended up mostly just driving, but we stopped from time to time to walk around a market or eat interesting food, and it was very interesting to see all of the differences in lifestyle as we moved from country areas to city and back to country again. Korea has intensive agriculture happening in every place that is flat enough to grow something. They do an amazing job of utilizing the space that they have.