#107 Exploring Uirimji Lake, Jecheon, South Korea

Transcript

All right, it's a few days later. Got my proper recorder. I met the Uirimji Reservoir, U-I-R-I-M-J-I Reservoir. And when I decided I was coming to Jecheon, just again purely because of a cheap Airbnb, random city, I looked up stuff on YouTube because that's a great way to find out about stuff.

And I found a couple Americans, one American and a Canadian who was passing through. But this American lady who was an English teacher and got posted here as a YouTube channel. I'm afraid I don't recall her name off the top of my head, but if you look on YouTube for the videos about Jecheon, you can't miss her. And in one of the comments, somebody mentioned the reservoir. The reservoir is the best part of the city. And I can't disagree. Being here right now, it's extremely reminiscent of, oh man, that's the weirdest thing. The park in Fukuoka, the big park, the central park with the big lake. And like I'm walking over a bridge now, going through the center of the lake. There's water springs, that sound, I don't think they did that in Fukuoka. But it's so weird when I first came here a couple of days ago. It's the name of the Fukuoka parks sprung right into my mind. And then on the way here today, I was thinking about it and I knew the name. And now that I'm here and I got the recorder turned on, now I don't remember the name. I believe it starts with an O. Now this is that thing where it's like my brain, I've set it on the journey. Now it's got to go into the filing cabinet of my mind and dig through a bunch of fucking drawers and it's going to, you know, in 10 minutes, I'll remember the name. Oh, Hori. Oh, Hori Park. Anyway, it reminds me a lot of a Hori Park, which is a very good thing. It's got the little swan boats and everything. And actually, coming here the other day, it's kind of at the northern part of the city. It's not that far. I looked it up. It's like a 5 kilometer walk or something because my Airbnb is right by the station, the train station. So pretty much across the whole city. That's it. So it took me a while to get here just because it's a bit of a distance. And there is a bus, but I'm just so reticent to take buses. Like, even today, I walked three quarters of the way here before I saw a bus go by. And on the way, I could stop, you know, at a convenience store and buy some stuff. Actually, I assume a bus went by while I was in the convenience store because I think it's every 23 minutes or something. But then even when I saw the bus go by, it was pretty packed full of people. I'm just like, yeah, I just don't want to do that. I would just rather walk. But it was enough of a walk that it took me a while to actually come here.

But even just on the way as the city started to recede, and you walk across kind of a lot of like farmland type things, lots of stuff planted, big fields. And the greatest compliment I can give is for the first time in South Korea, I felt like I was in Japan, you know, as I got closer to the mountains than the distance and away from the city. Because Chechan is the city, the definition of prettier at night. In the daytime, it is just really run down and grimy. Whereas at night, suddenly everything's lit up and there are a lot of churches, but they're all lit up too. And there's all these like cool neon lit up crosses in the sky and stuff. It's pretty cool. It's quite beautiful at night. In the daytime, you know, like I was saying, it's just just a tiny soul as all it feels like to me. So getting to the edges here feels a lot better. But that's how I felt two days ago. Today on my way up, it's like, oh, it's not working today. I still, it's nice enough, but it doesn't feel like Japan, but it's obvious why not, because today is one of the worst pollution days since I've been here, still only moderate, but you know, not red zone. I don't know if it ever hits the red zone here, like it doesn't soul, but the yellow zone, fairly high up on the yellow index.

I'm passing a little amusement park thing with someone doing announcements, 5:00 but yeah, because of it's a pollution day, it's a very warm day. It's a very sunny day, but this time, walking across the fields and walking toward the mountains, there's just the haze everywhere. The dust haze, the pollution haze. And it's like, oh man, it's just, I feel kind of bad about my opinions of South Korea. I wish I could be more positive. There's so much good stuff about it. I mean, there's some stuff in particular. I mean, I'm definitely glad I came here. I'm sure I'll be back. But like that last day, I was on the mountains in Bukhansen by Seoul, the big national park. Walking up into the mountains, the snow on top, after I finished recording that last episode from Seoul, I walked past some mountain dogs, you know, they tried it by one way. I got out of their way and just went by the other way.

I got to the next gate, you know, the next archway in the big wall.

And I walked through and there was more dogs, just chilling there, just chilling.

I just said a little hello to the mountain dogs and then went down to the mountain shrine, and it's like magic. That shit in particular, being up on the mountains with the mountain dogs, it feels like a dream. It's so awesome. It's all worth it for that alone. And just stuff in general is all right. It's not bad. But yeah, I just can't get past the pollution thing. I just can't. It's such a shame. Looking at it right now and it's like, man, those mountains, that's not natural, dude, they're not supposed to look hazy like that. The hell's going on, you know. I mean, we know what's going on. The deserts, the pollution of China, the unfortunate geography of where this country is placed. But yeah, that alone. It's like no matter how much something is, I don't know, I mean, I guess, yeah, just to do one last comparison to Japan, even if something in Japan was pretty half-assed and kind of lame, you know. It didn't take much to impress me. I was like, all right, this is great and beautiful and amazing. Whereas it's just because of the pollution, it's the reverse here. Even if something is fucking great, I shouldn't have my mask off right now. That's just so fucked, dude, I just can't get past it. It's so fucked. It's the thing I said, the first episode I did from Korea and I will reiterate it, it is still true. It's fucking criminal that people don't bring this up, that people don't mention it, that people don't talk about this when they're talking about visiting South Korea because it's the number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and 10th thing you need to know about South Korea is that there's pollution everywhere and you need to wear a mask regularly. You know, like the Airbnb I met right now, I had to get switched to a different room and the new room is like a little bit musty. But what can you do? You can't open the windows, that's worse. You know, you can't open the windows, you know, it's just like, fuck, man, come on, dude. But anyway, there's the complaints out of the way, the hard, cruel reality. But yeah, this reservoir, so now I've just passed it, the main lake part and I was like, oh, cool, you know, I thought that was it. If that was it, I'd be like, right on. That's pretty sweet. But then I wandered a little further, which is where I'm going right now. And there were stairs or like a ramp that went up a mountain or up the side of a hill, I'll say. So I was like, all right, let's go, let's go explore that. And then up there was a second lake with kind of this like man-made castle thing going on there that's just like a ornamental castle. You can't go into it or anything, it's just a cool picture, I guess. And then you can follow along the river that feeds into that lake further up. And yeah, it's all just great, it's all just beautiful, it's super good. If you happen to be coming to Jechion and you found this podcast just by searching for stuff about this city, and there's probably not a ton, so maybe I came up. Definitely the reservoir, that guy on the YouTube comment was right, this is the thing to do. Besides this, you know, I did manage to find some mountain trails eventually that are pretty good.

But you know, they're also kind of generic. And it really does take some time for a city to open itself up to you. I'm coming in on the end of the second week and I'm glad that I was here for three whole weeks because yet took me over a week just to really crack the code of those 10:00 mountain trails. And then yeah, coming in on the second week before, I mean the reservoir is my own just that I didn't come here. But it's still like it took that time to just explore the other parts of the city and go to all the other different parts. And even though they all kind of didn't lead anywhere and I didn't find anything, you know, it still takes time to cross off all those avenues to try out all the different stuff to see what maybe could happen. And then just mostly nothing happened. But yeah, the other day I got here pretty late in the day. So I couldn't go that far beyond here because it was going to start getting dark. Today it's only 12.30 right now, so this is good. I got plenty of time. But I'm not quite sure what the plan is because about a kilometer beyond the second lake with the castle, you know, there was like, I'm on this like walking like wooden walking bridge thing right now that goes along the whole side of this little river.

And you could follow it another kilometer up to a parking lot. And then from there, there were all kinds of signs and stuff describing how you can go further. Just keep going up the river.

But it was blocked off just with tape, you know, just with like, dude, I'd enter tape, but beyond that, the path seemed fine. You could see pretty far up the river. And at all, I don't understand why it was blocked off. Maybe it's just the time of year. Maybe there's something more severe going on. Do I want to hop at the fucking the tape and see? I mean, probably not. I probably won't do that. But I'm pretty sure by there there's some mountain hiking type spots too.

So maybe I'll do that instead if you cross the street. We'll see. I'll pick a lane. I'll decide something to do. And then I've just got, I got some notes I have accrued of just thoughts, things I've noticed while I was here. So I'll yammer about those as I walk. Man, one thing though. So these boots I bought in the shoe district of Seoul have been awesome. They've been so great.

Even in the summer when it's dead hot, since I'm a guy who only has one pair of footwear, you know, because like traveling around I don't have room for a second pair. It's nice in the summer especially to have a nice light pair of shoes. But I find you don't notice until you abandon your boots and then put on your shoes. And you're like, Oh, that's what it's like to have light feet. How nice. But if you just don't switch, you don't notice. Like right now, I'm sure these boots are big and heavy, but I don't notice because it's just what I wear every day.

And I wonder if I should just have boots all the time, regardless of time of year. If I'm going to have one pair of things, even if it's a bit sweaty in the summer, I just love having boots. It's so good. You can just tromp around wherever you want. But I was having a little trouble when I first got them, so that they were making my feet hurt, because I had them tied too tight. So what I ended up doing, I took the the end sole out, but I actually put those back in because it turns out I got plenty of room once I untied the main laces, because these boots are so good. They have a zipper up the side and a little button that buttons them closed. The tongues are connected to the boots so they can't really drift around. So I'd basically took all the laces out and I only laced at the very top, just up at the very top, to keep the boot closed. The like four eyelets, well eight. The four rows of eyelets heading down the boot are just, I didn't lace them at all. And it's just great. So perfect. I really didn't know. Like I didn't know what kind of just some random brand I never heard of before. I was like thinking maybe this would be one of those cases. Like when you buy cheap shoes at Walmart and they just fucking dissolve, you know, they just disintegrate on your feet. I didn't really know what kind of quality level I was looking at, but so far these have been just perfect. I fucking love them. It's so much so that it's like I gotta go back there next time I need a footwear. That's fucking great. But why I'm yammering about my boots is because I took the laces out of the eyelets and they make this very subtle jingle as I walk. And I weirdly like it here. Let me let me put the recorder down by the boots if you can hear the subtle jingle.

I don't know. It doesn't seem like a very good representation of it. It just sounds like I'm crinkling a bag or something. But I don't know. Take my word for it. Certain times when I'm walking. I guess it depends on what I'm walking on. It's just this nice jingle. It feels so good. So yeah, not only is the reservoir pretty cool, but it's definitely the gateway. 15:00 The mountains around here, and I just passed the Tells Hale Older Folk in their hiking gear. With their north-face windbreakers and their hiking poles. Identical to the old people in Seoul. It's like only old people that ever seem to be taking advantage of the nature in this country. But I'm getting to be pretty old myself, and that's what I'm doing. So I guess it all... I guess it's just something that happens in people's lives. They get a little older, and the city is not fun anymore. The edges are fun. But yeah, not only is the reservoir itself very nice, but all these mountains and stuff. There's no doubt tons of hiking around here that I probably won't get too deep into, but if I were an English teacher who got dropped in Jechon, this is for sure what I would do.

I was thinking like if I ever came back to visit here, it would be nice to have an Airbnb more on this side of town, but does one even exist? I don't know. I have a feeling there's probably not a ton of them around here.

But alright, let me get a little deeper in, figure out what the fuck I'm doing with myself.

This is pretty sweet, man. This is definitely the money melon. If I were to come back to this city, this would be why. I was being a little dismissive, I guess, of the other trail that I found. Because it's good, too. Just go west from Jechon station. And there's a golf course. Can't miss it. So if you go west and then a little bit north, there's just a big wooden stairway right up into the mountain path that winds around the golf course. Really easy to get to. Also really good. I still, I got unfinished business there.

But this is sweet. So I got to the second lake with the ornamental castle, walked the extra kilometer to the parking lot, and this time it was not blocked off. It must have just been blocked off the other day because of the time of day. Just too late in the day. Just too late in the day to go hiking. Good advice. But today, the path along the little river, you know, again, as usual, I don't think it's a river. It's like a stream, a creek, a brook, but probably it's really a river.

And then you could go up into the mountains to a campground, but I kept going along the river because I figure worst case scenario can just take this nice little path along the water. Next to like a road kind of a highway and eventually it'll probably take all afternoon, but it'll loop me all the way around. It seems back to to the center, maybe even around that golf course. But then paths started opening up into the mountains a little. So I've been taking those and I'm still only a little ways into the mountains, still basically heading along the route of the road. You know, it'll take me up into the mountains and then back down.

But yeah, this is a super duper pretty. And it's not polluted enough today that once I'm here, like right now in between two mountains, kind of in a valley with another little brook babbling away, that it doesn't seem polluted today. You know, I can't see it. I can't see far enough to really see the haze. So psychologically, it just feels nicer because this is real good. This is definitely should you find yourself in this city. This is what you do. Head to the reservoir. Keep heading north. Hike away. Man, there's a thing that they've been all over the place, but I haven't thought to bring it up. I guess that's one thing that's come into a different city. There's a lot of stuff that I've thought now, like, oh, I should mention this or that, because when you see it in a second city, it's like, okay, that's a thing. That's a distinct thing going on in South Korea, not just something in Seoul. So one of the things is on many hiking paths, like 50% of them. It's like a woven rug. I don't know what it is, presumably it's natural, some natural fiber. But I'm walking on one right now. There are tons of the mountain trails, and I don't know what they're made of or how they make them, because it seems continuous. It's not like they laid out a bunch of pieces of astroturf or something. It's just this one continuous woven carpet-looking thing that looks like it's made out of straw or hay or something. And I just assume that it's natural, that it's not synthetic, but I have no idea. It really integrates well with nature. 20:00 It's covered in pine needles right now, and it just makes it nice and easy and comfortable to walk on, kind of soft and springy, and makes it definitely clear that you're on the right path. I don't know what this is, but I got to look it up, because it's really cool, and it's all over the place, such a nice combination of man and nature, you know. It's like making it so much easier to hike around, but in a super unobtrusive way.

It's all right. I got just some miscellaneous notes that I've been accruing. First, I guess I can mention this Airbnb I'm at, which again is just like pretty much might have literally been at the time of my searching the cheapest Airbnb in all of South Korea, that is like private rooms. I'm not sure though, because I realized later that there's a little thing I can do to make my searches better, but it's real cheap. Again, I don't remember exactly how much, but if the one in Seoul was only like 15 or 16 bucks a day, whatever this one was, it was less, less than that. But it does mention in the listing that it's a very old style in, here we go, looping back down, looping back down to the road already. This is kind of nice how you get to take little, little sojourns up into the mountains, but then it just brings you back down to the road. No getting lost here, that's for sure.

And yeah, it even sat on the listing. It's always funny, like I'm quite impressed with the Google Translate. It's gone pretty well, especially with Korean to English, but the translations are a little funny sometimes. And this one said, if you are a sensitive person, maybe don't stay here because it's not a modern place, it's really old. And it's kind of cool just to experience an old building, because how old I have no idea. Like we're just dealing in time frames outside of North America that are beyond the scope of anything I grew up with. Plus, a couple hundred years is really far back. Around here, a thousand years is really far back. I'm not saying this is a 500 year old building or something, but it's just like I have no idea. I just don't know how to determine it all. How old it is.

So it's got a little keypad. The little keypads have been nice in general. It's been a while since I've had a key. It's kind of cool. Just as long as you know your numbers, you can just go and walk around and just beep, beep, beep, get back into where you live.

330 meters to something. 620 back to where I started. So I guess we'll see. We'll see what's coming up next.

Or are we?

See, this is all blocked off, too, and very distinctly. You can't deny that this is blocked off, but again, I don't know why. Beyond here is just a normal path that looks fine. What's the deal?

I see construction period, which had just started, unfortunately, like a few days ago.

And continues on for the next three months. Well, well, well, well, that's bad timing. On the plus side, whatever this is, by the time this podcast comes out, this will be all over. So no worries there. Hmm, I mean, it looks fine. It's a Saturday. It's the weekend. I don't see anyone working.

I guess I shouldn't go through. I really can't even pull a foreigner card on this one. I can't pretend that I didn't see. It's like so clearly blocked off.

And if I did take this walk, like I said, it's quite a major loop. Yeah, not just around that, saying around the golf course, far beyond going around the golf course. Goes way up and around just to a highway. Yeah, yeah, I guess not. Oh, well, that's a shame. No choice but to go back. Still though, this is very nice. And there's other stuff I can check out.

This adventure is not over. I'll take the route a little closer to the road to go back even though it's a little more road noisy. It's not that bad.

Hmm, in fact, directly across the street are some stairs going up into those mountains. Maybe that's all I got to do. Yeah, passing through some kind of campground. A bunch of like, kind of like mobile homes, but they're silver. And they're extremely fancy and new looking. And some tents. Yonge du mountain auto camp, Y-O-N-G-D-U. 25:00 That's as far as I made it before. I got stymied by construction. Now I'm on my way back, back toward the reservoir.

But yeah, this Airbnb, it's a little hard to describe, but it definitely, it's clear that it's an old building. And it's an old building, you know, unlike any old buildings that would be in North America. Because I've never been in a place that felt quite that way. Where I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but I think it feels like a stable. Like you open the outside door. And when you go in, you're in a hallway. But the hallway feels like it's the walls, like an alleyway. Kind of like you're between two other buildings, even though there's a roof and a door and everything.

And then there's just rooms on either side that are just the rooms people stay in. And yeah, it just has this feeling of a stable, but not a stable for animals, like a stable for people. It's weird, but it's kind of cool.

And then the washroom is enormous, the wet room, just a gigantic big square room. That is a little weird that you got to, you got to plug in, a plug into an outlet to make the hot water work. But the plug's not outside of the room, it's in the room. And it's all covered in heavy plastic and stuff. And it's the plugs they have here, just like the two prong plugs. But it feels very uncomfortable, especially when I'm unplugging it after, because I'm just standing on a wet floor in my little flip flops, unplugging a big power cord in a wet room. It feels, I don't like that part, it feels weird. I wish that plug was outside of the room.

And then there's a little washroom with not a ton of squat toilets. I think there's more squat toilets in Japan, but there's certainly, they still exist around here. But it's got a western toilet and a squat toilet. So I don't know, whoever uses this squat toilet, I assume it's just again, because it's an old building. And then adding to the kind of weird stable feeling, when you go into the little kitchen, it's again, it's just kind of a stone room. Like that's part of it, it feels like a barn even, because it's just nothing is nice. Everything is so utilitarian. But it's the smallest doorway I've seen yet. It's literally four feet tall. I got a duck down, even, even, you know, the shortest of Korean women would have to duck to go under this thing. Really tiny, you go through this little portal into the fucking kitchen. But then the rooms are pretty nice.

And they have TVs, so such so incongruous to just have the TV in there. So I flipped through the channels a bit and definitely, like the way Japanese TV is a little bit, it's a little bland, you know, like Japan is amazing at video games, world class at anime, amazing at comic books, but whenever you see their live action dramas or their movies, you know, it's like serviceable at best. B minus level, you know, just not fancy. Where it's probably not a surprise the Korean TV is way better because, you know, K-pop videos and Korean movies are really becoming big lately. And, you know, these things look fucking gorgeous and their TV is no different. Flip and do the channels. I was like, wow, all this shit looks fucking great from dramas to cooking shows. Just everything looks really good. Super high quality. But it's a little funny that they have TVs because I don't know whoever uses them. I turn them on with the sound off and just flip through channels. But I rarely hear anyone else using their TV because people are really quiet in South Korea. Like it was definitely that way in the softhouse that I stayed in in Seoul, even though that thing had like 30 fucking guys all in this one crammed little area remarkably quiet.

Here it's more random people. There's probably only like, I think there's seven or eight rooms.

Maybe nine. And you know, sometimes there's nobody there, sometimes there's three or four.

Some dude, some women. So I thought maybe the softhouse was just like a strange phenomenon. But no, same thing here. Super duper quiet. So I hardly ever hear anyone with their TV on because like when it's time for bed around here, it is time for bed. You be quiet.

And there's one guy who came in who's there for a few days who snored, but he didn't snore too loud, and he's literally like pretty much, I guess there was also somebody in the softhouse for a few days who snored. But the number of snoring people I've encountered here is so minimal, it's like almost zero, which is nice. Because man snoring, not just because of snoring itself, it definitely makes my mesophonia kick in, my hatred of sound, isn't it? Certain noises? So I always have headphones in, and I sleep with like rain noises, and just random noises and sounds can really bother me, and man snoring, fuck, it just hits that exact fucking frequency that just travels through walls and into my fucking bones, I hate it, I hate fucking hate snoring. So I'm glad there's been very little of that. But yeah, this place, it's kind of neat just to try an old building, and see what it's like, 31:00 but I'm definitely there, you know, everyone else who's there is there for like a day, or maybe two or three days. It's weird that I'm there for three weeks, and the charm is definitely wearing off. Wait, am I back to where I started already? Holy shit, that was quick. That felt like kind of a long walk because I was hiking up into the mountains and stuff, but no, I'm already back to the parking lot where I initially couldn't get through. Jesus, I like did nothing today. But yeah, I'm going to go across the street and try over there instead to see what's going on over on that side. The least I can do as a visitor here is respect the wishes of the under construction sign. Even if it's the weekend and no one's there and they just started the construction the other day, it's probably fine, but hey, come on, come on. Don't be a dick, Keith, don't be a dick.

But yeah, I had to move rooms because mold popped up really suddenly, like I noticed a couple little spots on the walls, and I was like, were those always there? Where did those come from? And then I woke up the next day, and there was like in the two back corners, just very distinct green mold, just like it just shot up all the way to the ceiling.

Why is the CCTV making like playing pop music? It's weird. Anyway, yeah, so since I'm there for another like nine days, I messaged the lady and was like, you know, maybe you want to put me in another room and take a look at this because it came out of nowhere, and we shouldn't leave it for another week.

So she moved me to a musty, the other room that's musty, better than moldy, but yeah, I mean, the place does, you know, it's sort of sucks, but it took a solid couple of weeks for it to start to really for that to be any kind of an issue. Ultimately, it is kind of neat, just kind of cool. Yeah, here we go, a little washroom, pass up into the mountains, let's try this shit out. Yeah, the other thing, just to wrap up the Airbnb, is the heated floors. That was the thing in the share house. In Seoul, that was a huge problem, is that when people turned on the hot water boiler for the shower, it heated the water up to like 75 or 80 degrees Celsius, which 100 is boiling for anyone wondering about how Celsius works. Really hot, it's not like that nice Japanese method where you just set the temperature to like 42 degrees, 43 degrees, and take a shower. This is more North American style. The hot water tap is fucking hot like hell, it will scald you to death, and then you have to mix it with cold water. But that same system that makes the hot water, the pipes run under the floor and heat the rooms, and it was a huge problem in that share house. If someone left the thing on it, fucking three in the morning, it will just turn my room into a literal fucking oven. Horrible. Here, I don't quite know how the system works, but it's still the floor that gets heated, but each room has its own little thing. That you can only set up to 10 degrees, and I only had to set it up to full one night when it was especially cold. Well, the other day, actually, when I was recording, and I said it might snow, it did in fact snow. Where today, it's like fucking hot. I just got my coat tied around my waist, wearing a t-shirt, sweating a little. That weather did not last. But yeah, it's neat. It's just like the heat emanates from the floor, but there's certain spots where it's like, whoa, jeez, so hot, don't touch those, very hot.

But yeah, very convenient, very nice, just set your room to whatever little temperature you want. Usually, I keep it pretty low, four or five or something, and just nice. It wasn't for just the unfortunate arrival of sudden mold on the back wall. Everything else about the place is actually pretty sweet. It's like hard to say, if I do come back to this city, I guess I would stay there again. Again, it's like, you know, mold problems, and even just mustiness to a smaller degree. It's similar to the pollution problem outside. It gets a big enough problem. You just don't want to fuck with mold, you know? It's like, um, I don't know. 35:00 But I don't, again, I don't even know what else is available in this city, whatever, who cares? We're about that in the future.

But yeah, that's another thing. This heating the rooms through the floor. Now that I've seen it twice, it's not just some weird thing that happened to be happening at this one place. It's at least semi-common. All right, I'm going to hit up this washroom and start hiking up one of these trails and see what happens. Got a nice romantic couple walking up and then a couple of old duffers. So this seems like it's probably not anything too serious.

But yeah, we'll see.

Man, this is probably vaguely insulting. But the thought that just keeps coming back to me over and over with South Korea is what a weird country. It's just weird. Things just feel weird.

So on this alternate trail that I'm taking, I went up a hill and there's a playground here. A really beautiful look and playground. It looks new, looks pretty new. Everything's real nice looking.

And no one's here and it's got all this again, the danger tape, the do not use tape for clearly no reason. And I translated the signs and it just says danger cannot be used until permission is available. But there's definitely nothing wrong with this. It's like two of these like tube slides, you slide down the tube, which is slides for kids. They're again, pretty damn new. New enough that like maybe this is just like not open yet, like it's completed, but they haven't officially opened it. But why not? Everything's fine. And then down below that, it's just like little swings and rope bridges and stuff and they all have the tape on them. But like there's nothing dangerous here. The tape is just there to prohibit, not to save anyone from anything. And that vibe comes up so much around here, just like prohibit. Don't do that. Maybe it's not quite related, but you know, I always just have like a VPN on my computer that you know just pretends I'm in in different countries. So no matter what country I'm in, it's like who cares. Everything just works fine. But I slowly started noticing weird stuff with the internet here. If I happen to be on one of my phones where I don't bother with a VPN, I just use the Wi-Fi on the phone. Because I knew there's obviously something weird going on with like porn and stuff, but it went beyond that. All I was doing was trying to go watch YouTube videos. And if it's a YouTube video that's marked, you know, 18 plus, which again, it's like probably not that bad. It's fucking YouTube. And it's like, yeah, in order to access this, you must verify your age. You must have a telephone number that you can send as a Korean government. And I was like, what? Fuck you. I'm logged in. Like, because that happens in North America, if you're not logged in to your YouTube account, you can't view mature fucking labeled videos. But I was logged in. And it's like not good enough. So I just got on the computer and switched to the VPN. And I was like, all right, sorry, Korea. Jesus. And yeah, beyond the, this is prohibited. It's just, I described it to one of my friends as it's like you're in the matrix, you know, like you're in a simulation. And it almost works.

But it just doesn't quite. It's just not quite right. You know, stuff like this is just like, why, why is everything, why is this a prohibited park for no reason? It's like something glitched out. Something's not quite right. That CCTV that was playing pop music earlier. Why is it doing that? That's just weird. The stray dogs and cats everywhere. It just feels weird. Just the haze in the air. It feels weird. You know, or if you go into the convenience stores and just buy a sandwich. And it's three ingredients that you would never put together in a million years. But that's just a normal sandwich here. It just feels weird.

As if it's a dead end, by the way, that sucks. Hopefully I can go down a little further and just find a path that goes further down the mountain. And I don't know, this doesn't quite, I guess this fits in with the, it feels weird. File is, you know, there's like, he always heard about, in Japan, the idea of people taking pictures, that people skirts and stuff. And it's like, they have those trains where during rush hour, it's women only trains because it's like a problem that people get groped in subway trains and things. So I was aware of that phenomenon. I'm sure I would have found it a lot weirder if I'd never heard of it before. But around here, every single washroom, just all of them, have the signs of like, don't take pictures, don't take pictures of people. To the point that it's like, yeah, okay, that's nice. That is nice to enforce that. Don't take pictures of people. That's a terrible thing to do. 40:00 But there's so many of the signs. It's like so many. They're on every washroom and it's just like, that, that sends a different signal. That makes it sound like, like, it's just such a massive problem. It's just like, whoa. It almost defeats the purpose. Like, instead of a nice, gentle reminder, once in a while, it's just constant, continuous. It makes it sound like this is a nation of crazed voyirs. It's like, I think you just need to calm it down. You just need to take that down a notch.

If you have it love and explanation for this park, what is happening? What is the problem, dude? What is the issue? Why does every little thing need to be regulated? Calm down, you know.

All right, well, I got to figure out where I'm going from here. I think there's an unofficial path that goes up into the woods. That's usually not a great idea. Usually they go nowhere, but I guess we'll see.

Ah, man, nuts to this place. You know what? The hell with this, man. It's just so annoying. I don't think it's this city in particular. I think it is just the small city syndrome. It's like, so weirdly ironic, but the inaccessibility of stuff in a small city is just such a pain in the ass. For the way I do stuff that I just want to travel around on foot, not having subways and stuff. Just not having options. It's just annoying. It's just freaking annoying.

That first bit that I recorded with the hiking path by the golf course, I pulled up my phone and started recording because, you know, it opened up a lot more than I expected. I was feeling good that day because I'm like, oh, I thought this was just a little trail, but it opened up and there's more going on here than I thought. But realistically, there's highways on every side of that thing and, you know, one or two more bites of that apple, and it'll be all used up.

I've gone everywhere. I can go around there. And even though I have no idea where that music is coming from, by the way, I'm passing back on the other side of the ornamental castle. Now, and there's mystery music.

Yeah, even though there's mountains all around the city, like, you know, it was one of those things where I tried to get to them and there's just no clear hiking paths. There's no real way to do it. So I was glad to find that one, but it's, you know, it's not exactly enormous. That'll get used up before I go, for sure. And then today, I was just, you know, just there just saying, like, oh, this is the money mill and this is what you come to jetchown for. This is the best because for that brief moment, it was, it was amazing. It looked like, I finally cracked the nut. This was where it was meaning to go. This is the mountain paths. This is the beauty. And then it just gets stymied. It just gets cut off. It's like, what the fuck? Now, that was just bad luck, you know, if I just come a week ago, I could have gone through. But I think it's telling that that one pathway being blocked, like, that was it. There weren't alternate routes. There wasn't other ways to go up through the mountains. That was it. So I suspect, even though that's a pretty big loop, you know, I would just loop around, again, the highways, just around the highway, do the big roundabout around the city. And then there you go. It's not like there's all kinds of options and all kinds of stuff to do. And then on the other side of the river, where I just was with the mystery playground, there was nowhere to go from there. There was like one very unkept path, one just random, like, you know, just the tire tracks into the woods type of shit. That maybe was something, but it's like, I don't know, whatever. I don't fucking care. You know, because there's so few options. It's like, it's either that, either go to the death course that takes you to the fucking cabin from evil dead, or just go back, just go back to the reservoir and go the fuck back to downtown and whatever. It's like, God damn it. Fuck it then. I'll just go back to downtown. Fuck it. Like, am I going to bother coming back up here again to go where? To do what? Small towns, man, fucking it's annoying. It's not worth it. It's just a pain in the ass. That was what I was attempting to find out with this, just picking a random city and just going to a random place. Is it better than a big city? Absolutely not.