Close to Home: The Plants

We live off-post near Camp Carroll, which is where we go for work, working out, grocery shopping, and Burger King. It's about half a mile away. We don't have a car or bikes, so we walk or call a cab. But mostly walk.

There's so much to see on the way. That 12-minute walk is just packed with culture shock.

Like, I've mentioned a few times how much agricultural activity there is here, and how the Koreans seem to cultivate every patch of ground they can. There are gardens everywhere.

 

In this picture, over the rice paddy and the little garden, you can see an unused guard tower and part of the barbed-wire-topped cement wall which encloses Camp Carroll:

Apartment buildings and a vegetable garden:

This next picture, where some Koreans are working in a garden, was taken fairly late in the day. It's common to see people farming after normal work hours and on the weekends. It makes me wonder if that's their full-time job, or if the Korean people are so industrious that extensive, dirty manual labor is considered a hobby.

The garden behind our apartment, a few months ago, before harvest (which was on a weekend):

A few weeks later, on a Sunday:

Also...red peppers are everywhere. Once they're harvested, they're put into tents for drying.

(And I super like this picture):

Also everywhere, as I've mentioned, is rice:

Sunrise over the fields:

Harvest:

There's even a house right near our apartment with pomegranate trees in the yard. Pomegranate trees, guys. (I like this picture, too.)

Here's a shed with pumpkins growing on the roof, just a couple of days before they were harvested:

Sometimes, when I'm in the bathroom, I'll stand on my tippytoes and straddle the toilet and bend over the counter (it's kind of an awkward angle) and look out the window, because there are such interesting things to see out there. There's always this one lady doing her work. And it's totally 100% not creepy that I have three pictures of her that I took from the awkward angle at my bathroom window.

 

You can't see it well, but there are red peppers on the table in the pictures.

I've gotten used to stepping around tarps covered in drying plants on the sidewalks. A couple of months ago, it was red peppers, then some furry dark green plants with pod-things on them, and now rice. Except in the following picture, you can see both rice and furry dark green pod-plants. The corner of reddish dirt at the bottom of the picture is a harvested rice paddy with a fresh layer of soil on it.

Yeah, we already saw that last picture. This time, look at the sidewalks blanketed in rice-drying tarps.

By the way, this is what the harvested rice paddy looked like before the fresh layer of soil was spread:

So, yeah. That's everything near my house that has to do with plants. Next up: More things near my house.