On the first weekend of a new year and a new decade, what better way to celebrate than to take a trip out of town? I did not go far—about 30 kilometers—to Gwangju, but not the big city in the southwest corner of the country. To differentiate, the...
It was Saturday morning. I took Line 2 to Dongseoul Bus Terminal and then cruised down the highway to Cheongju. This time, however, I was not there on Jikji business (although I was carrying a copy of Jikji, and One NGO’s Lonely Fight to Bring It...
The 125-kilometer bus ride from Seoul to Gongju in Chungcheongnam Province is usually about 2 ½ hours long, but on this Thursday morning and afternoon it lasted almost six. The Chuseok holidays caused the roads to be packed. Gongju was not my...
It was liberation day—the defeated Japanese having begun a hasty exit from Korea 74 years ago—and President Moon Jae-in, in a pale blue hanbok, was addressing the nation from Independence Hall in Cheonan. I saw him on the TV from my seat at the...
Shocked if not flabbergasted to realize that I had yet to visit three small towns in the northwest corner of Chungcheongbuk Province, I set out to rectify the matter with a mid-summer excursion. Although Tropical Storm Falcon coming up from the...
These inter-Korean trips don’t always go as expected. My destinations on the first weekend of spring 2019 were Kohwun Garden and Wonsando (130 kilometers south of Seoul, with the Yellow Sea to the west and Cheonsuman Bay to the east). As things...
On this 223-kilometer bus ride to Korea’s east coast, I had two seat mates. The first was a young woman who had recently been through plastic surgery; I could see her bruised face underneath a mask. The second was a burly man who reeked of...
After lots of discussion and planning, Lee Su-hyeon (“Vicky”) and I arranged for me to visit Hayang, her hometown in North Gyeongsang Province, to give a talk about Jikji and my NGO’s efforts to extricate it from the clutches of the French...
I admit to having wasted a few hundred dollars on the lottery when I lived in the USA, but I am not a gambler. I had never been to Las Vegas or any other casino and now, in a 24-hour span, I would visit two. I researched the matter before heading...
It was my 11th Chuseok holiday, the first of which came in 2008 when I was teaching English in Daegu. I had five days and would use four of them on an excursion to the southern coast of Korea. Chuseok traffic is usually horrible, but we just...
I am a sucker for a good historical episode, and this is one. Please allow me to summarize. On April 15, 1885, three British warships (HMS Agamemnon, HMS Pegasus and HMS Firebrand) and two transport ships steamed out of Nagasaki and headed west...
I had been to Incheon before—once for a baseball game (the hometown SK Wyverns vs. the Nexen Heroes) at Munhak Stadium, once to visit friends and once to join a group catching a ferry up to Baengnyeong Island. But those were just brief visits in...
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