Nonseong Fortress

Nonseong Fortress is a small park about 20 minutes' walk from our house.  It is primarily for walkers but also has exercise equipment out like most parks in Korea--elliptical-like exercisers,  bars for pull ups, seats for sit ups.  There are several paths around the park, and at the center is a square of earthen walls or berms that surround a flat area with some trees and smaller areas surrounded by flower fencing.  Dogs on leash are allowed, but we have broken the law and played frisbee in this surrounded plateau.  The walkers here are accustomed to seeing dogs and wave and even stop to pet the dogs.  The photograph below is of that plateau where we play frisbee.

This photo (below) is taken from atop the earthen wall of the outside area of the park.

Our walk to the park carries us past mostly residences and a few businesses.  The shop keepers seem to be okay with us now.  They reply to my greetings and no longer duck back into their stores.  I make sure the girls do not offend anyone!  I think the whippets' jackets make them more approachable.  Here we are at a monument that stands in the park.  The lettering at the base is in Korean and Chinese, so I am not sure who the man is that stands atop this, but I think he was a nature lover and protector.  (As an aside, while I write this, the Korean cable channel I am watching has had commercials for Baskin Robbins, Chevrolet, and Philadelphia cream cheese, in Korean, of course!  Luckily the English speaking movie I am watching has Korean subtitles.)

 There is also a tiger on one side of this but I did not get a good picture of it.

Through my volunteering at the Red Cross, I discovered an old friend from dog training in Savannah was here in Korea.  Liz Joffrion showed me this park, and we have walked with her and her 15 year old Cairn, Apollo.  My girls are a bit more active than he, so we tend to stay longer, but it is nice to know another dog person here.  Here the girls are on top of the earthen wall.

 The houses are in the town of Anjeong-ri.  The buildings farthest back may be on Camp Humphreys. 

 Tweek, my intrepid adventurer, was the first to scale the earthen wall.  Marie followed, and Pepsi waited for me to go before she did.

 Those are the dog's jackets on the ground.  We play frisbee without jackets, even when it is in the 20s. 

I enjoy seeing the dogs have fun, and I also enjoy seeing bits of every day life here.  I noticed the smoke then saw the woman working in her garden.  She was hand threshing, using a stick to knock grains from harvested stalks.  I suppose she was burning the stalks, but most folks use those as hay or feed.

On our last trip to the park, a Sunday, we met two groups of children.  The first group was in the park.  One brave girl came after us, asking to pet the dogs.  I showed her she could, and she did!  The other three kids came over, and as Tweek approached them, one backed up quickly.  I asked Tweek to sit, and she did, and petted her again, and the brave girl petted her, then petted the whippets.  The older boy petted her and the whippets while the youngest two stayed back.  The kids said, "Bye!" and I said "Bye!" and then in the residential area three boys on bikes stopped.  They were asking me questions I did not understand, but they all petted the girls, and I was able to communicate the dogs' names to them (Marie becomes Mahlee in Korean; there is no true 'r' sound in their language) which they proudly repeated.  I really need to work harder on my Korean language skills.  I hope we see them again sometime on our walk to Nonseong Fortress.

Average Day

Without a job to go to every day, I find I have the time to see more of the amazing little things life offers all of us on an average day.  I reached a milestone today when I successfully drove by myself from Anjeong-ri to Seoul and back.  I kidded with a friend that I should be congratulated since I survived and had not been captured by the North.  It is about a 2 hour drive from here, and for those who don't remember our vehicle, let me re-introduce her:  Stella is a 1996 Hyundai Galloper with all the trappings of an older Korean vehicle: no air bags, no radio, no suspension, no metal unmarred by rust, you get the picture.

I made a goal to learn to drive to Seoul on my own because I see many doctors.  For whatever reason, the dear Father blessed my family with many genetic issues, few of which are major, many of which are minor, and all of which require 'monitoring'.   Bill and I both needed to get established with a general practitioner here, and after asking around, we decided to use Samsung Medical Center.

Located in Seoul, SMC has an International Health Services program and doctors who are often trained in the United States.  If a doctor there does not speak English, the IHS provides an interpreter.  This is a large facility with a hospital, laboratories, and all manner of testing equipment, from CT to MRI to whatever else one may need.  Since I need to be at SMC more than the hubs, and since the hubs actually has a job, it was important for me to learn to drive to Seoul.  Mission accomplished.

Here is how medications are dispensed in Korea.  Those are little ziploc-like bags.  No childproof containers needed here, no sir, another advantage of socialized medicine:  you cannot sue your healthcare providers very easily.  I've always been an advocate of limiting lawsuit payouts, but I can also see where a childproof cap has assisted even the most observant and protective parent.

With as much free time as I have and with a yard 1/10th the size of our yard back home, I walk the girls (the 'big dogs') daily, weather and energy level permitting.  Today we walked a fair distance because the weather was nice, and we had not been able to walk the last few days.

It was chilly, and Marie likes to dress for the occasion.  Koreans have dogs as pets, guardians, and meat providers.  Their dog pets are usually small, and their guardians are usually Jindo, the most highly regarded dog breed here.  (I had originally called these dogs Akita, but I was mistaken).  Jindo look like smaller Huskies and come in all colors, although the majority I see are white.

We may not like seeing dogs tethered, but the guard dogs I have seen appear well cared for.  This fellow we pass almost daily, and he has quite an array of coats he wears on these chillier mornings.  When we have walked late in the afternoon, he is not there, likely having gone home with the shop keeper.  The guard dogs are sometimes family members, too.  I have yet to come across meat dogs, but the less I know about that, the better.

I think for many of us, when we think of rice paddies, we think of shallow pools of water with rice plants protruding.  That is only the early part of the process. Here is the latter stage of harvested rice and stalks.  Some of the fields are then buried to renew the soil, I think.  Some harvested fields are burned and tilled in to renew.  There are elaborate ditch and dam systems the farmers use to flood and drain those fields.  We walk past this daily as well.

When there isn't rice to deal with, there are always chores for a farmer.  I see them and their family members threshing by hand, setting out chili peppers to dry on the sidewalks, binding stalks into small bundles of hay.  Right about now we are all thinking of how to stay warm, so today we saw this fellow gathering wood.

There are fields next to the road that have a small wood just behind them.  He is loading these large limbs onto a hand cart and will likely push all that wood to his house.  He might chop it to sell or use.  This way of life is dying fast in Korea.  The country is becoming more westernized, and I have heard some older folks and a few younger bemoan this fact.

This was the girls' bonus for the walk today.  I saw him before he saw us, so I had the girls on super short leashes.  We all know how Pepsi loves a good chase, and Marie and Tweek were mighty interested, too.  My goal was to walk by this poor fellow without him running into the street, and we did, after many forceful 'leave it!'s prior to going forward.  Okay, I had to drag Marie just a little.

I am an avid birdwatcher and have missed all the bird life I had in my little back yard back home.  I did see a pheasant in a field near the river where we sometimes walk, and some type of hawk.  I see black and white magpies all the time, and doves, crows, sparrows not as often.  With the leaves falling from the trees, I saw these large nests, almost like an osprey nest in the tops of trees.  It gave me hope that come spring, I will see a few more birds than I am seeing now.  I also love this pine tree.  The owner has it tied in a few directions, training it to grow how he wants.  You never know what one walk will bring, even when you walk it every day.  It makes an average day special.