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.

A Different Kind of Supermarket

One day, we went exploring in downtown Waegwan.

Umbrellas when it's not raining are a common sight in Korea.

 

 

 

A sign over a shop

The things in the jars below are either fermenting roots or pickled alien body parts.

There was a dimly-lit general store with really narrow aisles selling cool stuff like:

A children's pollution protection mask (and one for adults)

On a gift bag

Then we found a covered market outside.

 

 

Desserts (filled with bean paste)

Kimchi

 

People eat the darnedest things

Meat for sale!

Chicken bits

 

Dried red peppers and bunches of garlic

 

We bought a watermelon for $14 (probably the first time in my life that a fruit has become a special treat like how kids used to get oranges in their stockings at Christmas) and some grapes which were not the type we're used to and were gross.

Maybe it's just this part of Korea, but it seems that the economy here is based on small business. I have yet to see a store even a quarter of the size of one of our Wal-Marts. There are 7-11's everywhere, but that's the only chain store with such a presence - not like in the U.S., where there's a McDonald's inside of a Wal-Mart next-door to a Bed Bath & Beyond attached to a PetSmart on every corner.

I guess small business is good for, like, families and stuff (man, I sure know a lot about economics,) but it's worrisome to not have access to chains of similar stores with familiar layouts and all the items I expect. Without 600 billion trillion Wal-Mart and Targets everywhere, it's more difficult to find the exact product you're looking for. A lot of times, you just have to go with something else and hope you like it.

But really, I've got it easy. I still have the Commissary and the PX and the internet. Which is awesome because otherwise, Christmas shopping would probably be impossible. Hey - if there's a major holiday like Christmas here...which I don't think there is....I bet the Koreans don't buy nearly as much stuff as we do, 'cause there's not as much stuff always in their faces and ready for their shopping carts. Because most places don't have shopping carts.

We Ate Duck

A common type of restaurant here in Korea are the "beef & leafs." (No, not "leaves," "leafs.") When they bring the menu, you choose the meat you want. The server brings out the raw meat and then cooks it in the table in front of you, because the table has a gas-powered hole in it for cooking things.

Beef & leaf menu

Before the meat comes out, though, the server brings you a whole bunch of other foods which serve as appetizers, side dishes, and leaf-roll "sandwich" fillers. Below, around our main dish in the center, you'll see a little bowl of jalapeno slices, another of bean sprouts, one of bean paste, two with stuff in them that I don't know what they are, a thing of pickles, another thing of bean paste, another thing of jalapeno slices and garlic, kimchi (the rectangular white things with red stuff on them,) and two other things which I don't know what they are. Oh, and in the upper right-hand corner, a basket of leaves. Every side dish has unlimited free refills.

At this restaurant, we were shoeless, sitting on the floor at low tables on a screen-optional porch. The weather was beautiful and the sun shone on our spot.

There was a loud gathering of Korean women in the back and a man sleeping on the floor a couple of tables over.

And there were kitties outside the porch waiting for scraps. There's tons of feral kitties in Korea. A lot of them are of the tailless variety (like Manx cats.) The ones that do have tails, their tails are all messed-up-looking. The first few I saw, I just assumed their tails had been broken, but nope, they can be just genetically like that.

Once your meat is all cooked, you pick up a leaf and put it flat on your palm, use chopsticks to fish some rice out of your bowl, put the rice on your leaf, then put some of the cooked meat and/or side dishes on the rice. Sometimes the meat burns your hand through the leaf. Then you wrap the leaf around it all and eat it and stuff falls out everywhere unless you're awesome like me and use TWO leafs.

When we first got to this restaurant and read the menu, we saw that one of the menu items - the most expensive one - was duck. We ordered that, fully expecting a whole bird, probably one that was looking at us from the plate. But it was already cut up and unrecognizable and ready to cook and it turned out to be delicious.

Other beef & leaf restaurants we've been to left us still hungry, but this one was very filling. I think it's our favorite restaurant experience here so far, even better than the taco buffet we like in Seoul. It was just so comfy and beautiful and we were starving and there was so much food. And I got to feed the fatty parts to the kitties.