Day 74: Book Alley etc.

Since we've gotten back from Cambodia, things have been pretty routine, in a good way, though. Last weekend we stayed on the island and did some hiking. It's such a beautiful place. We hiked up the 2nd highest mountain, which is kind of in the middle of the island, and got some great views of both the north and south coasts of Geoje-do. There are trails everywhere, which can make running pretty interesting almost every day. Many of them are too mountainous to run the whole way, but hiking is good exercise too!

The North coast of Geoje

The more rugged, island-dotted South coast - my iphone can't do it justice

On a different note, we've made a few friends at church! A few Indian families get together on Saturday nights for this amazing homemade food. We went last weekend and it was really, really nice. I've been realizing just how difficult it is to make friends when you aren't obligated to be with the same people every day either in an academic setting or on a sports team. I've never really met people in any other setting, and, being a bit of an introvert, it's not easy! Church is an easy place to connect with people, though, and we've gone out to coffee a few times with a nice group of people from all over. Last weekend we had a great conversation with a couple of South Africans about teaching, travel, prestige dialects, language learning, and so many other things that Steven and I are both nerdy about. It was so good to get past the "Where are you from?/How long have you been here?/What hagwon do you teach at?" same old boring get-to-know-you conversation.

We go to a lot of coffee shops...these are from our favorite one: "Love Tree"

The main reason I wanted to blog today was to write about Book Alley! Now, if you know me and Steven, you probably know that we have a "problem" with buying too many books. The Ithaca public library puts on this huge book sale in the fall. This year, we happened to be home when it was going on this year! I think we bought like 27 books? At Calvin, any time the Campus Store or the English Department had a book sale, we'd be there between classes. I really noticed this "problem" when packing for Korea and organizing all of our worldly possessions. If you go by weight,  I would bet that books probably make up about 75% of everything we own.

So yesterday, we went to Busan to search for this street that foreigners call "Book Alley." It's actually called Bosu-Dong Chekbang Golmog, but Book Alley works too. Book Alley began around 1950 as one simple book/newspaper vendor run by a few refugees of the Korean war. After the war, it grew as students, professors, and other intellectual-merchanty types caught on to the idea of an entire street of book shops. Now it is an alley, about a block long and 10 feet wide, maybe? with over 70 used book shops crammed in. There are books absolutely everywhere. Inside each little stall are stacks and stacks of books just piled to the ceiling. The stacks are so close together that you can only walk through a row in one direction. There was no room for me to turn around, let alone for Steven! Probably 95% of the books were in Korean, some in Japanese, and fewer in English. But that's a good thing. If they were all in English, it would have been dangerous. The way it was, it felt more like a scavenger hunt to find the books in English than an actual shopping trip to find books that we wanted to read. It was around dusk when we were there, icy cold, and it actually felt kind of magical, like you could wander down one of those tiny hallways, or up a narrow staircase, and never come back.

 My pictures don't really do it justice, you can't tell just how many books there were. Well, maybe you can tell that there are a lot of books, but look at the pictures and then imagine like 100 or 1000 times as many books as they show, depending on how good your imagination is ;)