Category Archives: Daegu

The prettiest little boots in all the world

Daegu, Gear

Once upon a time, I used to be quite a girly girl. Not in the sense of wearing make-up every day, but definitely in that I’d rather be indoors reading a book than out playing sport or hiking or anything of the sort. I’m the kind of girl who actually quite likes wearing high-heels (stilettos are so pretty!) and really enjoys looking elegant. I’m never more in my element than when I have an excuse to put on a beautiful ball-gown and dance the night away. One of my friends once commented, after just such a night, that I never needed to find a man because clearly all I needed to leave me positively glowing was a beautiful dress and a perfect night.

When I moved to Joburg and started working, the world opened many more opportunities to look like a grown-up, which I relished. The idea that it might be all pants suits and high heels was soon shattered, however, as I started heading out into the field which, in my particular case, meant spending Fridays and Saturdays on dusty sports-fields helping to make large-scale inter-school, multi-code events happen. So I settled into a relatively happy pattern of jeans and golf-shirts on the weekends and pretty work-clothes during the week (when I wasn’t too exhausted).

Somewhere between then and now, I was bitten by a strange bug. It relates not only to what I wear for work. As a lead trainer running intensive courses for such complicated groups as 18-21 year old volunteers and school teachers, I learnt the power of dressing right for the training setting. These days I wear slacks or smart skirts, collared shirts and make-up to school. It’s the best way to make very sure that these kids (all of whom are from fairly well-off families) take me seriously. And it seems to be working.

Outside of work, however, the exploring bug has bitten. And for the first time in my life, I know exactly what equipment and clothing I need and it all seems strangely natural. I imagine the ability to be ‘outdoorsy’ was probably awakened when I started visiting one of my favourite game-parks in the whole world, Lapalala Wilderness in Limpopo. The visits were entirely work-related – the idea was to design training to be carried out in the park – but they also involved everything from sleeping under the stars around a wood-fire – by which I mean literally in sleeping bags on mattresses on the ground with nothing between you and the sky – to sunset game drives. The Game drives were particularly amazing. The park is a private reserve which, although they were moving towards it, did not at the time have big 5 or many large predators, meaning that the population of young animals was healthy and huge. Our drives in one particular season included sightings of baby antelope of all sizes (kudu, springbuck, etc.), baby giraffe, a white rhino calf and the delightful sight of a family of warthogs running across the dust road with their tails in the air like flagpoles.

The was probably the first time I’d spent significant amounts of time in the wilderness as an adult and was a particularly special time not just because of the place but also because the people involved were amazing and I could see such potential for the programme. It was also the first time I found myself buying outdoorsy clothes, much to the amusement of my housemate at the time.

Now, several years later, I find myself in a country that is made of hills and mountains spending most weekends wandering around exploring. So far I haven’t done any actual hiking but I am walking far more than usual and I can feel my ankles taking strain. Also, I am starting to quite like the idea of walking up a mountain “to see what I could see”, even if I am far from wanting to go on any really difficult hikes or a walk of more than half-a-day. So today, bank card finally functional, I went off to some of the outdoor shops to find a pair of boots.

In the first shop I walked into, I got distracted by a daypack that I think I will go back and buy. When I saw the price (as happens at all of these stores) I got a bit of a fright and went away to see what the other place cost and think about it a little. As it turned out, the other place was wholly unhelpful and in fact didn’t even seem to notice that I’d walked into the shop. Normally I prefer this approach from sales staff but I don’t know very much about hiking boots, so the North Face sales assistant’s help was welcome. After some testing and trying on and figuring out what size my feet are in Korean sizes (which means millimeters, it turns out), I found a pair of red, made in Korea, ankle-height boots. They’re pretty and comfortable and, according to the sales guy, exactly the right size to remain comfortable even when I’m walking for ages and ages.

For those in the know who may want details, they’re North Face boots (made in Korea) and made of Goretex, which apparently means that they’ll be water-resistant and let the air circulate. I was more concerned that they’d be comfortable and provide the ankle support I need but I’m going to complain about the rest. Right now, my pretty shoes are sitting in a box  next to me looking pristine and new and just waiting for the first dusty road or muddy hill to make them real shoes. And all the stories that go with that. Me and my red boots have many stories to tell. I look forward them all.

Dust in the wind

Daegu, ,

Saturday’s exploring was of a slightly different nature. Most of the places I’ve visited so far have been parks that, while they often have some historical and/or cultural significance – and signboards telling people about it – are really most important for their current purpose as a place for the community to be outside. Because the houses here have no gardens and most are apartments high-rise apartment blocks, the space for children to play and people to walk is crucial to the health of the community. The place I went on Saturday is different. It’s not a park constructed as part of the somewhat chaotic urban planning of the city. It can’t be. It pre-dates the modern city of Daegu by a very long time.

I’ve been scouting out places to see through tourist and travel information on-line. On Saturday morning (well, early afternoon), I headed off to catch the 401 bus to a whole new part of the city. Most of the places I’ve visited have been in the South or centre of the city. My destination on Saturday was to the North. Because of the bus system set-up (which I’m finally figuring out) it is difficult to find a bus that goes directly from South East to North East. Fairly logically, most of them go into town and then out again in another direction. This meant quite a long bus trip but the bus wasn’t crowded and the day was calm, a perfect opportunity to watch the world go by from the window of my bus. A blogger I follow intermittently recently wrote a piece on the terror of buses. I also have a love-hate relationship with intra-city buses. They’re terrifying because, in a city or even just an area that you don’t know, their routes are difficult to figure out. Also, destinations tend to be just off the bus route, so it’s always complicated to figure out where to disembark. At the same time, however, there is no better way to see the side-roads and suburbs, the ordinary places than by taking the same transport that local people use to get from place to place.

As the bus wound it’s gentle way towards the centre and then through downtown and back out towards the mountains in the North (as opposed to the mountains in every other direction), I watched the scenery change. Daegu is a city built around and in between geographical features, like hills and mountains. One of the things I often forget, is that several smallish waterways also wind their way through the city. The area where I live is mostly hills and high-rise buildings, so I don’t see the rivers all that often, and I’m always a little excited when I do. Of course, these are generally glimpsed from a bus window as we cross the many bridges but the sparkle of light on moving water always makes me happy. One of the prettiest bridges is towards the north and is lined with pink petunias and geraniums in pots all along the bridge. I keep meaning to stop there but I always seem to pass it on my way to somewhere else.

After a good half an hour or so, the bus passed the airport. This is the first time I’ve been past the airport (at least that I’ve been aware of) since I arrived there. It seemed larger and more modern in the daylight and without the fogginess of 24 hours travelling and fairly significant jetlag. Just beyond the airport, the bus drove along a road lined with flower-sellers. There are certain streets in Daegu where businesses of the same type cluster together. This is the place where all those who sell flowers, to flower-shops and arrangers, work side-by-side. The result is a street of flowers. Unfortunately I didn’t get a picture because I was, by this time, looking out for the next bus stop, based on the on-line instructions that said to get off just beyond the flower-selling area.

The problem with instructions like this is that it’s quite hard to make them clear in a city that doesn’t have street names (even in Korean) and where the reader is unlikely to recognise any of the landmarks. These ones said to get off and walk along the road until the overpass and then turn right. After walking two or three blocks I finally saw the overpass. Unfortunately, it was not situated at a road along which I could go right. Having reached the point where I’m now less obsessively tied to instructions than I used to be, I backtracked a little and took the previous right. I found myself walking along a suburban street. Suburban has a somewhat different meaning here. Nowhere are the white-picket fences (or in the case of Gauteng, 6-foot walls topped with barbed wire) surrounding gardens where children and pets play freely, and one or two story houses with curtains and windows looking out over trees and flowers. Houses are multi-story and narrow and cluttered together and courtyards open right onto the street. The streets don’t even have pavements out here. Walking along means walking between parked cars and moving aside for the moving cars that try to squeeze between those parked on both sides of what in other countries would probably be a one-way street.

At the end of the street-that-should-have-been-one-way, I crossed what looked like the road at the edge of town (it petered out into dirt not far away) and walked up a grassy bank towards the signboards about the Ancient Tomb park. Things looked a little run-down and like that part of any town where urban slowly fades into rural. To my right was a rather run-down place growing vegetables and with plastic replacing missing roof tiles. The grass was quite long. The paths that started on the other side of the little fence were worn down and eroded.

The paths, however, wound between two grassy mounds that I knew, from pictures, were the ancient burial mounds of the park. I walked past a granny and her granddaughter eating corn-on-the-cob just inside the entrance and set off to find the past. The Bullo-dong tomb park is a place where 211 burial mounds lie scattered across the hills like huge, ancient mole-hills. Over the years, they have excavated a few (1937 and 1963) and found pottery, iron weapons, gold and bronze ornaments, horse bits, arrowheads and items still used in local funeral rituals, such as shark bones. Bodies and other funeral items were placed in four-sided stone crypts and a large capstone placed on top, onto which dirt was piled, giving these tombs their distinctive ‘mound’ shape.

Although I knew before I visited the park that there would be many of these tombs, and I even had an idea of their size – the website said 15-20 metres in diameter and 4m high – it was no preparation for seeing them. Most of the mounds really are quite large – like small hills – but they vary in size. Some are much smaller, perhaps those of lesser rulers or children, while others are really like little mountains all on their own. They’re big enough that, when walking between them, the view disappears. And there are so many. It’s difficult to visualise over 200 mounds that size until you’re there. There are hillsides covered from top to bottom with mound after mound, tomb after tomb. I walked for nearly an hour, up hills and along meandering paths between the tombs without reaching the end.

The tumuli or burial mounds are thought to be the final resting place of the aboriginal rulers of the area during the Three Kingdoms period, probably in the 5th and 6th century. Every information source I have found has pointed out that they are assumed to be the tombs of the aboriginal rulers. There is something humbling about walking through this huge area filled with the head-high burial mounds of what were obviously important and wealthy people, with gold and metal and enough strength in numbers to have burial places lined and topped with stone and built metres high and yet people whose identity and names are lost in the mists of time. All their wealth and strength and yet their children’s children are forgotten. Each tomb is marked with a number. Most of the markers are still intact, a few have broken off. The grass is cut regularly and the paths are there for those who want to walk around, but all that remains is mounds of earth. Families picnic between the tombs and children catch butterflies with no thought to the ones who were.

As I wandered around and watched birds flying and landing, I found myself wondering what my people – both in Africa and Europe – were doing in the 5th and 6th centuries. I wonder if they have burial mounds or monuments somewhere and children catch butterflies around them too. I wonder, too, if we in South Africa found a place with over 200 burial mounds, if we’d mow the grass and put up markers and info boards and then largely forget them. Korea is a country, like many others, that reveres the ancestors. Chusoek, one of the most important national holidays, is in a week’s time. During this harvest festival, Koreans travel to their ancestral home towns to celebrate the harvest with their extended families and participate in various celebratory meals and activities, including visiting and tending ancestors’ graves because it is a festival that shows reverence for family present and past. I wonder if anyone will be visiting these tombs.

As I started to head towards the exit, the funereal quiet, birdsong and sounds of insects and frogs were interrupted by the voices of children. I walked down a slope and came upon a group of women picnicking with their families. When I said a polite 안녕하세요, they asked me to join their picnic. I considered it but I was, by this stage, a little tired and rather introspective and didn’t relish the idea of trying to make myself understood and trying to understand others who didn’t speak English. I politely declined and walked on.

The exit I headed to is, it turns out, the real entrance. There is a smart Tourist Information Centre (closed on a Saturday afternoon) and an information board which, unfortunately, contained only the same information as the other boards I had seen. There was also a field of Cosmos. Cosmos always makes me think of my cousin’s wedding and of roadside flowers in Gauteng, on the road from the Airport to Pretoria or from Pretoria to Johannesburg on the back roads. It is starting to appear all over in Daegu at the moment. It appears Autumn is Cosmos season here.

I walked back to the bus stop, stopping on the way to buy a bottle of water at a small café. The owner told me the amount in Korean and I handed him a thousand won note. His eyes lit up when I seemed to understand (I’m finally starting to get a handle on numbers in Korean). He asked if I spoke Korean. I was almost sad to disappoint him and for some odd reason found myself wanting to say ‘ndithetha isiXhosa esincinci’. Strange how non-mother-tongue languages sometimes get confused. I was chatting later that evening to an American who speaks fluent Spanish and had been having a conversation with a guy from Peru she had met in the market and found the same problem, with her Spanish and Korean getting all mixed up.

The bus home was a slightly unusual experience. I have never seen a Korean bus overloaded. Sometimes buses are a little full when it’s just the time when all the schools are getting out but generally it clears out quite quickly and only occasionally you have to stand for a stop or two. This bus was more full than any I’ve been on since getting here. I am used to taking buses on routes that are very well served but this area has only one or two buses running and is the route to several popular weekend hiking spots, so it was completely packed. It wasn’t until after we reached downtown that the majority of people, most of whom were older Korean men and women in hiking gear, hopped off the bus and I was able to sit down and think about the things I had seen.

Park-hunting

Daegu, ,

I teach several classes that revolve around helping teenagers learn to answer questions articulately in their second language. One of the questions they always seem to struggle with is the question of what there is of interest to see and do in their own city. I’m sure the question is included because it seems like it should be easy. Their struggle to find something to talk about always reminds me of how little we pay attention to the places where we live. We all do it. People who live in Johannesburg look a little bemused and generally resort, after a long pause, to suggesting a favourite restaurant or perhaps Gold Reef City. Cape Town people get stumped, too.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the moment when life in a completely new and foreign place stops being filled with the sheen of strange-ness and becomes familiar, but I think that is probably the moment when it becomes hard to think of places and things that are exciting about the city you live in. It’s also the moment when it starts to take definite effort to go out and find things to see and write about, not because things have become less interesting but because their familiarity makes them seem less spectacular. The fact that the place feels familiar, because it’s the place you live and not a place you are visiting, means there is less urgency to go and see things, instead of sleeping for another hour or sitting in your flat.

I’ve been very aware of that tendency in myself recently. It has taken me a long time to get back in touch with the fact that I want to live deliberately, consciously and, to quote something I once wrote “experience each moment before it is gone”. Choosing to do that, not just on exciting, brief trips, but in the place where you live and work, requires effort. One of the reasons I was originally so pleased with the idea of my rather odd working hours was because it would give me the opportunity to see the world I am living in. Recently I have been forgetting that and allowing myself to be dragged back into the mundanity of office politics and the stress of new classes and the sagas we create for ourselves to occupy the time that we would otherwise have to fill with things that take effort, like exploring. Today I dragged myself out of the house, determined not to drown in the lethargy of feeling like it’s too much effort and the excuse that I only have a few hours before work.

I really did only have a few hours before work, but I’ve been meaning to visit one of the parks slightly further away from home for a while now and this was the day. I hopped a bus and headed for my usual subway stop and down into the depths of the Daegu subway system. The bus was marvellously without the masses of school-children who usually crowd onto it on my way to work (they were still at school) and the train arrived almost immediately and was also pleasantly empty. The train-ride to Duryu from Manchon takes about 15 minutes. I am clearly becoming inured to subway travel because my mind drifted and I nearly missed my stop. Nearly but not quite.

From the platform I headed up and sought exit 12, as recommended in the directions I was following. I emerged from the subway exit and found myself on the usual busy intersection, except with slightly smaller buildings and a little more open space, which is always a welcome relief. The instructions said turn right, which was a little unclear as right would have meant walking into a brick wall, but I assumed (correctly as it turned out) that they really meant ‘go right along the big road crossing the intersection’.

As I walked up the road, I was struck by the feeling that this was a somewhat different part of the city to what I’m used to. For one thing, there weren’t signs for English academies everywhere and the shops didn’t all have fake-English names. I got the sense that here I had found a corner of the city not designed specifically for foreigners. This might make it slightly less attractive to occasional travellers but it’s somehow comforting to know that it’s not all one giant amusement park for the ‘others’.

A block or so up the road, I saw lots of trees and headed in that direction. This park (Duryu Park) is different to the ones I’ve visited so far. The parks I’ve been to have been tiny, perfectly manicured, carefully designed tourist attractions. This is just a park. A park with far more trees, well-maintained benches and old people playing board-games than I’m used to, but an ordinary large park on the gentle slopes of a hill. This means that every patch of ground is not covered in lawns and flower-beds. It really felt as if this is an ordinary place that is an integral part of the life of an ordinary community.

I wandered the paths for a while, enjoying the shade of the trees and the people living their lives and the gentle ordinariness of it all. At one point, I sat down on some stone stairs under some huge plain trees and just sat listening to the wind in the trees and the birds singing (or squeaking – strange birds) to each other. Down the slope, people were having quiet picnics or sitting in groups on benches chatting. It was wonderful to hear the wind.

At the top of steps, the world opened out into an open-air stadium. I assume that the stadium is used for sport, based on the soccer goal-posts on either side, but it looks more like a dusty school playground in rural Limpopo (in the middle of perfectly clean and maintained stadium seating) due to the distinct lack of grass. Perhaps this is because the stadium is also used for other things. I know there is a concert there next month as part of the Daegu Opera Festival. In the distance, I could see Woobang Towerland, an amusement park with rides and roller-coasters and the big swing/boat swinging from side to side.

A little more wandering brought me to a pond with purple and white water-lillies. I had astrange moment of trying to remember what Waterblommetjie Bredie is called. I also passed some fruit trees I was unable to identify the fruit of (the fruit of which I was unable to identify?), although one of them may have been a crab-apple tree. Near the exit of the park there are some fountains. Nothing spectacular or huge, but pretty water, arranged in a pretty way in the pristine light of an early Autumn afternoon.

On the way back, I stopped past the entrance to Woobang Towerland – the entrance is shaped and coloured like a Disney fairy-tale castle – and was taken by complete surprise by the sight of a scurrying grey-brown squirrel. It was rushing around, as squirrels should, I suppose, in Autumn, and wouldn’t hold still long enough for a photo but I saw it several times so I’m dead sure I wasn’t imagining it.

On the way back to the subway, I walked across a large pedestrial bridge. It was one of those that winds up the one side and then stretches across a busy road and winds back down the other. I’ve always thought that there is something ‘twirly’ and a little insecure about these bridges. At the same time, I love standing in the middle watching the traffic pass under you. It feels as though you have a unique opportunity to stand still just for a moment and watch the whole world rushing by.

Back on the platform of Duryu subway station, I saw a sign that said “origins of the name” and went to go and investigate, keen to find out all I could about the area. Unfortunately, the extent of the explanation was that the park was called that so the street was called that so the station is. Sometimes Koreans can be rather unpoetic with their explanations.

On the way back, I’d thought about stopping at the major downtown station to try and find the bookshop there that reputedly carries an English selection, but time was passing quickly and I still had a lesson to finish preparing so I decided to leave it for another day. I got off one station sooner than I normally do, just for the sake of variety and walked the two blocks or so to work.

At this point, I realised I was feeling a bit hungry so I went into the K-Mart downstairs from the office (school). This is one of the most mini-super-market-like shops I know in Korea (sort of like a Kwikspar only not sophisticated) but nothing looked appealing until I noticed that they were selling single apples. Daegu is famous for it’s apples, so they tend to be everywhere. I bought one and headed up to my desk. It seemed doubly appropriate to have an apple for the teacher. Most teachers, though, probably don’t end up with apples that take ages to eat because they are absolutely monster-sized and sweet and juicy all the way through. By the time I finished the apple (in between lesson prep), the afternoon of exploring was gone and my first class was beginning.

It wasn’t until I got home this evening that it dawned on me that a disproportionate number of posts on this blog so far have involved parks. It is a little odd that parks would be the places I seek out, although it’s probably appropriate given the excessive urbanisation of the place. I think the attraction is partly that and partly that parks are easy to find, always-open places which don’t involve conversing with any gate-keeper or teller who can’t speak English. Also, I happen to be a fan of parks, so it all works out for the best. Perhaps I have founded a whole new hobby – park-hunting, anyone?