fortress wall text

Okay, it would not let me add any words to the pictures posted, so you're just going to have to flip back and forth to see what I'm talking about. It also added the pictures backwards, so they come in a funny order for storytelling. Foul device.

On sunday, some friends and I went to see the old fortress wall in Suwon. My friend Debra found it in her tourist book, and it looked nearby and inexpensive and easy to find, so off we went. Many of the people in the program went to Seoul for the day, but we thought we had no clue where to start in Seoul and that we'd do better to let them scope it out and report back to us, so we did the wall instead. We thought that it would be a neat little relic kind of thing, like a fragment of an old wall from some war or other. It is in fact neat, and it is in fact an old wall that they built for battle, but it is definitely not a fragment. The wall turns out to go the entire way around old Suwon. It is 5.7 km long, which I believe is around four miles, and it took us all day to get around the thing and see it. People have looked at us funny since we came back and said we did the whole thing; apparently that is not a common thing to do. We didn't realize how long it was till we were halfway around, though, and so we decided to just keep going rather than backtrack to a place we could get off. The wall is mostly 18th century, from what I gathered from the few information signs that listed dates, and some of it, mostly the ornamental woodwork, has been redone recently. It has all kinds of neat bastions and lookout towers and crenellation and secret entrances and arrow holes and places to pour molten lead on people outside. Some of the high-up pagoda-looking structures are apparently common places for locals to visit to relax, meditate, feel a nice breeze, and take a nap. You have to take your shoes off to climb into those, and the wood floor of them was worn smooth and soft by the many many feet that had walked around them.

So, the pictures. The first one there (in a stupid place because I'm allergic to technology) is of three people I walked with, but not the three people that I went with. The three people I went with are in a picture lower down. These people are Ellen, Roy, and Paul, and they are from Holland. They were actually out looking for the beach. They couldn't find it, and while looking for it, they happened upon a spot right in the middle of the fortress wall where we just happened to be already standing. So they walked the second half of it with us. They are all very nice and good fun to be around. I don't have a better picture of them for you, alas. Paul has his back to you in the foreground, Ellen is talking to him, and Roy is almost hidden behind Ellen.

Next is me in a doorway to one of the buildings. I'm hunched over in the cheerleader pose because the door is not tall enough for me to walk through, which I thought was interesting so I took a picture of it. Koreans are not tall, and they might have been a little bit shorter in years before modern nutrition, but not that much shorter, so I'm not sure why they made their doorways so little. It's not uncommon. I've also got a picture of me hunched over in a tiny doorway at a temple we saw on the fieldtrip.

Next are the people I went with. They are, in order, Debra, Anna, and Jo. Debra is from Silver Springs, MD, Anna is from middle-of-nowhere Minnesota, and Jo is from Milwaukee.

The round building there is a guard tower that we went inside and all the way to the top. It doesn't have steps to climb to the roof. Instead, you go through this dark little passage that spirals up the building for several layers. It was super cool, and I got really excited. You can see the spiral construction a little bit where the roof does not go straight across; the place where it suddenly dips down is where the top layer ended and we came out onto the roof.

Next is Roy, Debra, and Ellen filling water bottles at a spring. Instead of public water fountains here, they have places where natural springs pour water, and it's clean and safe to drink. I think this is interesting, that it's safe to drink from the springs, because you don't drink from the tap. Inside buildings, you drink filtered water from these filter machines they have in hallways and the like, but outside, you can drink from the spring. Sometimes it's a place like this one where it has a lever that you can use to turn it on. Here, we filled our own bottles, and they also provide public ladles that you can fill to drink from. In other places, the water pours into a big stone basin, and the plastic ladles are floating on the surface or sitting on the edge.

Then a picture of the steps at the end of the wall where we entered it. The wall is way above the city all the way around, set on a really steep hill, so you have to climb aways to get on it. It winds through the mountains around the city, so there are really massive steps in some parts of it. Debra is training to run a marathon next year, and she counted the steps on the wall as her workout for the day.

Then is a picture of the underside of one of the pagoda-looking roofs. This is what the traditional architecture looks like in Korea, and not just on the walls; we've seen it several places, and I suspect it is pretty universal. The bases to the structures are made of stone, and these roofs are made of wood and placed on top, painted with flowers and dragons in beautiful colors. The outside of the roof is usually dark tiles, as seen in the picture below.

Next is another lookout thing of some sort. So actually you can't see the dark tiles, but it's backlit so it looks dark, and that's the effect you get when you can see the tiles. That's me on the steps looking very small.

Then is a view of the round fortress building that both ends of the wall run to, standing in one doorway and looking across to the other. This is sitting by itself on a roundabout in the middle of downtown Suwon, and when the taxi driver dropped us off here, we all thought "That's it? The whole thing?" I was excited about it anyway because I like castley things, but I had hoped for a wall to climb on, or at least a sign of some sort to tell me what the structure was about. Then a few minutes later we found the wall, and six hours later we felt silly for having wondered why there wasn't more to it. You can't see it really well in this picture, but on the other side of the far entryway, there's a crowded commercial street scene happening. Once you got on the wall, the world kinda slowed down and was beautiful, but here at the start, it was right smack in the middle of all the day's activity.

Last is the roof of the entryway I'm standing in when taking the previous picture. Lots of dragons painted, and while it's a little dark here, the colors are bright and beautiful. All of the colors in Korea are bright and vibrant, even the graffiti. You think I'm joking at that, but I may bring a picture soon of the beautifully colored graffiti on a wall on campus.

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