Weekend trip

I went to Ichon this weekend with Etsuko and Mayo. Ichon is not far from Seoul -- practically a suburb, actually -- and it is famous for its pottery.

The all knowledgeable Moon Handbook devotes only two pages to Ichon, but I can sum up its major drawing points even more succinctly: pottery, rice, and hot springs.

On Saturday, we got into town around 11:15 am and had seafood stew for lunch at a place where the owner, upon us asking him how to get to the Ceramic Village, drove us to our desired destination. (I think we should add that as a drawing point: really, really nice people.)

This has happened to me before -- when Maiko and I were in Jindo and needed to find an ATM, the owner of the restaurant we had dinner at drove us to the bank and then back to our motel. This also happened to me once in Prague over 10 years ago, when Lara and I were lost at night in a deserted part of town and came upon a pair of policemen, who, although they couldn't understand us and didn't know where our lodgings were, drove us around and around until they found the place. Does this happen in the U.S.? Etsuko said it wouldn't happen in Japan.

I asked for the card of the restaurant when we were getting out of the owner's van, saying that we'd recommend the place to our friends, but he didn't have any on him, and waved us off. And then drove back in the direction we'd come from -- he'd gone out of his way to drop us off!

At the Ceramic Village (one of about three in the area), we found a really lovely place to make our own pottery. I say "our own pottery" as if we really made it, but in fact, the wife half of the husband and wife team owners very skillfully managed to make us feel as if we'd actually had a part in making our cups and bowls when she was doing all the work. That's quite a gift. No one wants to go home with an ugly clay product, even if it's 100 percent "self-made" -- virtually everyone would prefer to have a smaller part in the process and have a beautiful product at the end. Smart proprietors, they were.

It was really fun to play with the clay and the wheel, and then spend nearly two hours decorating our vessels with drawings and stamps and such. The place was really charming -- a spacious room on the second floor, with a walkway all around, white curtains neatly and artistically pinned together, flower pots on the walkway. Even the bathroom, located outside, was cute -- someone had "drawn" flowers on the walls with blue and white twine, and the five feet or so leading up to the door was covered with gravel and brick stepstones. It looked like the couple, in their 50s or so, lived in the back rooms. Artisans always do seem to lead such elegant, beautiful lives.

I decorated my rice bowl with a cosmos flower pattern, and wrote my name, date, and the city name inside. At the last minute, though, I realized I had written Incheon, the name of another city, instead of Ichon. I managed to correct it, and we had a good laugh about that.

After making our cups and bowls, we sampled some of the famous Ichon rice at a nearby restaurant. It was really tasty, but I can't decide if that's because I was really hungry or if it indeed was better than your average rice.

There were two dogs outside the restaurant, one tied up and the other, a puppy, romping around freely. The tied-up dog insisted on barking when we were obviously not going to do her or her domain any harm, so I stepped right up to her, folded my arms, and stared down disapprovingly. She looked up at me for a minute and slunk into her doghouse, quiet. Heh.

Actually, I kind of felt bad about asserting my alpha dog status like that, but then I reminded myself that there's always an alpha dog in a pack, and it's not like the beta dogs feel hurt about it.

We caught the bus back into town, and strolled along the drag where the shops were, buying this and that randomly (earrings for US$1.60! cropped pants for US$10.75! track pants for US$6!) before deciding that it was getting late and that we should hie over to the Miranda if we wanted to get in our spa time tonight.

The Miranda is a big, ugly, yellow behemoth of a hotel that is mentioned in all the guidebooks. The rooms were too rich for our blood (130,000 won, or US$111, when we could and did get a room for US$30? I don't think so!), but I suspect the hotel gets most of its money from its other attractions, namely, the hot springs, the nightclub, the swimming pool, the sauna, and the karaoke bar. Maybe the barber shop brings in a share of the revenue too.

In any case, we paid our 9,000 won (US$7.75) and tried out all the different pools. The charcoal one was interesting (and charcoal is reputedly good for the skin), but the smell lingered in our skin for some time, even after the dip in the mint pool (I felt like I was in a large teacup), the Chinese herbal pool, the rice wine pool, and the clay pool. The nicest experience, though, much like when Maiko and I went to Asan, was lying in the pools outside and looking up at the night sky. There was a pine-scented dry sauna outside too, and I alternated between going in there and getting baked by the heat (must be some latent longing for L.A. summers) and standing by the tub where Etsuko and Mayu were sitting with their heads back and eyes closed.

The next day, Sunday, was a bit more frustrating. We were first planning to go see the tomb of King Sejong, but the getting there seemed so complicated that we gave up on that. Then we decided to see a ceramic expo, but no one seemed to know how to get there, or what we meant, so after standing around at the bus station for 20 minutes, we finally just boarded a bus that another bus driver had told us to get on. A nice woman who spoke Japanese communicated to Etsuko and Mayu that we needed to go elsewhere (and kept talking to me in Japanese until I slowly and clearly said again that I wasn't Japanese), so we hopped off the bus, and then were at loose ends again, because there were no signs and no indication of any expo nearby.

I ended up asking what looked like a high school or college student, who provided us the most clear explanation of any of the various people who'd tried to help us out (people were either very nice and misinformed, or not nice and dismissive). We probably meant Seolbongsan, and the best way to go was by taxi, she said. So we went to a group of taxi drivers, who insisted on looking at our tourist map, declaring that there wasn't really anything on there worth looking at, and then bundling us into a car and on our way.

Seolbongsan was actually worth going to -- built in 2001, it's a collection of museums and playgrounds and exhibits on Seolbongsan Mountain. We dutifully looked through a museum before succumbing to hunger and fatigue, which led us first to the food vendor, and then to a pavilion near a carpark, where we all three fell asleep, cooled by the breeze off the artificial (I think) lake and the rustling of the leaves.

Yikes -- time for me to get to work. Well, that was all, anyway. We ate dinner near the bus station and endured a very jerky ride home, and that was the weekend. As One-Armed Maggie would say, very satisfying.