a couple weeks ago, mikey and i traveled down to the southwestern part of korea. i’ve been putting off posting this because we did so many things that it is pretty massive. so to make it more manageable, i am just splitting it up.
we took the ktx train which is the high speed rail train here in korea. it was very fast and comfortable.
yongsan (dragon mountain) train station. 
we traveled through most of korea on the west side. its an interesting mix of farmland and small towns. because i’ve heard so much about seoul being the main metropolitan area, i mistakenly thought that most of the other towns (other than busan and incheon) would be pretty small. however, each had a distinctive mark of the modernizing movement of the late 80’s early 90’s here in korea: high rise apartment campuses and a giant 8+lane road through the middle of it.
a more pleasant suprise was the informal farming that abounded adjacent to the train. farms would go all the way up to the fence of the train tracks. other small plots would appear… sometimes no more than 80 square feet, sometimes not even more than one row of 10 stalks of corn. i tried to take some pictures but the train was too fast. so i took some other pictures instead:
we were invited to go to naju+gwanju by our friends jose and sookyung. jose’s friend warren teaches english at the university and naju and invited us and offered to show us around. when we got to the train station in naju, jose and sookyung picked us up in their rental car and took us to warren’s house. warren lives in a apartment complex that sits literally adjacent to a rice paddy.
that bowling alley/club was built in the boom days of the 90’s when companies were building random things everywhere… even in the middle of rice paddies. it is now an abandoned building. naju used to the be capital of the south province of korea until it became gwanju in the early 1900’s. it is also famous for delicious naju asian pears.. YUM. warren took us on a whirlwind tour of the city and was a textbook of information on it.
one of the original walls to the city…
being me, what caught my attention was what was next to the wall.
we continued through the small city to get to the center where the old governors house was. after that, we were going to go to a teahouse, but then the teahouse owner was teaching a class on the traditional korean tea service at the governors house, so we got to have tea there! 
as we walked further down, we walked to the old palace and it’s wall has this massive tree that had either grown around the wall, or the wall had been built around it? either way it was beautiful. 
it was a nice treat that we got to go inside one of the palace rooms. you don’t get to do that in seoul because there are so many tourists but naju is small enough where you get to do things like this. :) 
this was followed by a brief trip to a buddhist academy(?) where we saw this wonderful tree in the courtyard
thanks to warren’s knowledge of the city, we got to see massive amounts within a span of one hour.
to be continued….
