Gangwondo

Today I returned to Seoul for my last weekend before going back to America. Erma's parents drove me up, and tomorrow they will take away all the stuff they lent me. We drove to Seoul through Gangwon Province (강원도 江原道). Not far north of the capital city, Chuncheon (춘천 春川), we passed this sign, which illustrates several features of Korean transliteration of French that I mentioned in my previous post. The Korean says Bongjyureu, rendering French Bonjour. We see the use of Korean ㅇ ng for the nasalized vowel of the French syllable bon, and the foreign-looking spelling 쥬 jyu for the syllable that is normally spelled 주 ju in Korean.

What's funny about the sign is that Bonjour has actually been misspelled as Bongjour at the top of the sign, no doubt because the normal romanization of Korean ㅇ is ng.


Beef is not the only meat that is making news here in Korea. Avian influenza has hit the chicken industry hard here, and huge numbers of chickens are being slaughtered. In order to try to protect the uninfected chickens in the north, the authorities have set up several stations along the roads that spray all cars that pass.

The stations look like this:


Here's the truck in front of us approaching one of these stations.


And now we are going through the spray.


(Full disclosure for journalistic integrity: The careful reader will notice that I've mixed pictures together from three different places.)

Here's a truck carrying a cow. Poor cow has no windows to roll up, and will get exposed to the spray.




I have no idea what the spray could be. An antibiotic wouldn't be of any use against a virus.

At this point we were above the 38th parallel, not far from the DMZ. Periodically along the road one sees these structures:

They are protective barriers. In the event of a North Korean invasion, those large columns will fall across the road, blocking it off and, hopefully, slowing down the tanks.


We stopped for lunch at a restaurant with a lovely view that specialized in salmon trout sashimi (song'eo hoe 송어회).



It also came with salmon trout spicy soup (mae'untang 매운탕). On the top are hand-shaven noodles.

Much packing to do now!