A Lack of Swords

Last Saturday, my coworkers P and H and I (that's a first-person pronoun, not the initial of one of my coworkers) went on an adventure. We had meant to go zip-lining, and planned for it, even. We met at the bus station, ready to clamber aboard and endure 2 and a half hours of busing so long as it meant we could make Tarzan noises to ourselves as we hurtled through the forest canopy. It occurred to us when we were all together waiting for our bus, to call and be sure we didn't need something like a reservation at the place in question. For the record, dear readers, you should check that before the day you intend to go. They were full up through the month of October. Since we were already at the bus station, we exchanged glances, shrugged collectively, and decided to try somewhere different. I've put in a jump because this is very long. Go ahead and click it to see many photos and hear tales of great wonder and bold adventuring.



The suggestion was made to go to Damyang, a relatively remote spot with an impressive bamboo forest and some famous parkway thing lined with metasequoias (sadly, these are not sequoias that reference themselves). It was a way of letting us down gently from our dreams of yahoodling through the treetops: we would stroll quietly through the tree bottoms. There would be trees, either way.

The bus ride was long and uneventful. Our first leg was over two hours and took us to Kwanggido (my Romanization is probably terrible. Sorry), where we switched buses to get to Damyang proper. 40 minutes later, we were in the smallest town I've been in since I came to Korea (not saying much, I live in a city of 1.5 million, and spend most of my weekends in Seoul). I suppose it wasn't really the size of the place I found so striking as the absolute lack of accessibility to foreigners. I know, I know, it's Korea, of course things are in Korean! Still, in Daejeon and Seoul, there are signs for everything important (like transit, etc.) in English. Not so in Damyang. I was far more fascinating to the Damyangians than I have ever been to people in Dajeon (and here, I have been deeply interesting). I saw not one single non-Korean the whole time we were there (hours. In crowded places). Crazy.

Anyway, once off the bus, we decided we'd had enough sitting and it was high time to walk. We strolled right down from the bus station to the metasequoias, where some lovely photos were had. I must say, for those who are not aware of my extraordinary photogenicity, I am Reba, Destroyer of Photos. Seriously, I have been alive for 23 years, and the photos I have not inadvertently bombed number fewer than ten. I am the opposite of photogenic. P is something of a photographer, and even he had to admit I am the dreaded Photo Ruiner. Accordingly, this is the only photo of that part of the trip with me in it that I will show:

It's a CURVED mirror! I FEEL your judging eyes through the internet...

While the colors are somewhat under-saturated in that photo, it was a beautiful day, and the landscape was pretty terrific. We walked a long time on that road, which segued into the popular parkway, where rented bikes, Power Wheels vehicles, and four-wheeled bike-carriages swam through pedestrian traffic. I was told that I could play the Foreigner Ignorance card and tip our little troupe over the edge to getting the Power Wheels trucks, but I declined. Perhaps another time, after some soju.  I'm afraid this shot is not so peopled as it should be to give the real feeling of the place, but you get the idea:

I imagine Korean personal ads saying that their authors are Sagittarii and enjoy long walks in Damyang.

Lots of walking later, we came to a good pausing place, where a man had a portable cart for making stamps from the local bamboo. Apparently, in Korea, every adult has a personal stamp, with his or her name on it in Hangul or Hanmun (Chinese characters). It is used in place of a signature on official documents and so on. P and H have real ones, given to them by their parents, as tradition dictates. I got one from the guy with the cart. My name looks like a tropical fish in Hangul, doubly so when in its circular stamp. It's not really valid, as it's only my first name, but I can totally stick it on my students' work for that extra bit of I'm-appropriating-your-culture authenticity. (The part of me that is not the now-guilty friend of passionate anthro majors thinks it's pretty cool looking, actually).

 Damyang's main draw is its bamboo forest - we're getting to that part of the story. There were some really tacky designs, but P and H helped me keep it classy.

Here's my tropical fish name. I'd show an actual stamp of this on some paper if I only had some ink for it. Anyway, the classy background of my placemat is gone because when I turned the stamp up, the camera was way more interested in the weave of the mat than the stamp.




We'd been trotting around for about an hour then, and decided a bus to the bamboo place wouldn't be all that much of a hardship. The bus actually just took us back to town (from which we'd been walking away), and from there it was a quick hop up the road to the bamboo zone. Everything in this part of the town was about bamboo. We ate at a bamboo restaurant (though they served non-bamboo items), the first of what seemed a million in the warren of streets leading to the bamboo forest proper. They served "bamboo rice," which is rice with chestnuts and some other stuff cooked inside a bamboo cup (a section of bamboo basically forms its own little vessel). They served it with enough side dishes to bring a charging, starving hippo to its knees:

 We got to keep our bamboo cup things, too! When mine is finished drying, I think it will move on to a fulfilling new life as a pencil cup.

 From the restaurant, we moseyed up to the bridge and river, where we discovered we were too cool for the bridge and would take the stepping stones instead.

I lied. There I am again.

 On the far side was the bamboo forest, with its welcoming fountain and... panda. No one's totally sure what the panda's doing there.

...or why it has a volleyball.

Once into the forest, it was all walking and oohing and ahhing and taking pictures:

Silly families, getting in the way of my photographic GENIUS. No, I failed to do justice to the interplay of light and shadow on my own. It was pretty awesome.

I expect the call from JJ Abrams any day now. Sweet lens flare!

 It was very green. For those who don't know, that is totally my favorite color, so it was a good day, but I felt unprepared for all the herbacious verdantry. (BECAUSE I'M THE LINGUIST, THAT'S WHY!)

H and P took a brief break from the trail to do an alternative workout.

 Also, we found Korean Narnia. Here are H and P to prove it (P claims this is a real smile. It isn't):

 This makes P look like a kid in one of those stories who goes into the bright fairy forest. He is, of course, dressed entirely wrong, and swordless, as no adventurer should be in such a tale.

This, on the other hand, is the other kind of story. The kind that end in huts with chicken legs and bleached bones, or houses made of gingerbread (as there are two of them).

Thankfully, it all ended fine. I caught up to them as they were doing their level best not to be one-upped by would-be wielders of the Green Destiny. You may not be able to tell at this magnification, but you want to click that picture to see the traditional Korean Panda Face of Intimidation, as rendered by P. It is very intimidating.

It was less intimidating when, on our way back to the bus station, we saw an alternative set of stepping stones. We thought it a fine way to end up the day, but it turned out this set was for the more courageous among us, as it started several feet into the river, rather than leading right up to shore as the other set had. P and H played a game of rock, paper, scissors (which is a much more epic and serious thing in Korea than it is in the US) and when H won (as she usually does... I do not know enough of the strategy behind the game to know if she is cheating or just very lucky), the price was that P had to leap the gap and meet us on the far side of the more challenging stepping stones. He made a successful leap, and there was much rejoicing when he didn't do a header right into either the next stone or the water. H and I walked around by a pedestrian bridge, not being triathletes or quite so bouncy as P. When we approached the stones from the opposite side, we saw someone... meditating on the rocks. It was P. The gap on our side was mirrored on the other, and he had not yet ventured the leap, having to run up to it over uneven rocks rather than smooth shore. Here is H, possibly rejoicing in the consequences of her win? (P and H have a bit of a friendly rivalry on, but both are generally good sports).

In the end, P jumped the gap (he made it look positively trivial, actually, and there was a certain amount of shoe-scuffing and muttered, "I could have done that, too," which was doubtless a lie) and we moseyed back to our bus. At long last, we were back in Daejeon, where we ate obscene amounts of food and went unto our homes by different routes. And good times were had by all.