Saturday, November 02, 2013

Pohang Trip, Part III: along the shore

Here's a series of pictures of the next phase of our trip last Saturday. After eating at Marado, Charles, Hyunjin, and I walked back out to the shore, making our way past the strange, fascinating, and often humorous sculptures of the Pohang Steel Art Festival. One sculpture in particular, a goofy-looking haetae,* caught my eye because the artist had decided to give the haetae an actual anus. Hemorrhoidal haetae—who knew? An American who was hanging around the sculptures laughed when he heard my "Look—it's got an asshole!" outburst, and told us that he'd been startled by it, too. Charles and I both noted that the sculptor had taken liberties: this haetae had wings as well as a mace-like tail that reminded me of the bludgeon on the far end of an ankylosaurus.

Our shoreline walk took us onto a sort of pier made of stone; Hyunjin got there first while Charles and I dithered on the beach sand, fascinated by skipping-stones, gull tracks, and shells. She took some pics of us approaching from a distance. Several people, including some foreign tourists, were already on the second story of the pagoda-like structure at the end of the pier; I took a moment to enjoy the sea breeze and to stare at a few lengths of rope that floated in the water, snake-like, through my field of view. As always, hover your cursor over the images to see their captions, and click the images to enlarge them.



















More images to come.







*The Korean haetae is a cousin of the Chinese fu-dog. The haetae is a fiery beast that often serves as a guardian of holy places, like Buddhist temples, and is even said to have an acute moral sense that allows it to settle fights and disputes (often by ramming the disputants!). Like a dog, the haetae is all about duty and loyalty. It also embodies moral wisdom.


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5 comments:

John said...

Damn, I miss it.

Bratfink said...

Mickey Mouse only has 3 fingers and a thumb. In fact, most cartoon characters do for some weird reason.

http://tinyurl.com/kktk5kz The mouse

http://tinyurl.com/l4m3nah The duck

http://tinyurl.com/luoe29x Wile E. Coyote

http://tinyurl.com/l72fepg The sponge

http://tinyurl.com/l9jj6fb Ren & Stimpy

Weird, eh?

Kevin Kim said...

And indeed, I was fully aware of that. Perhaps I should have mentioned it to keep people from thinking me ignorant.

Charles said...

The first sculpture up there, if I remember correctly, is called "Impression: Sunrise"--I remember thinking it a rip-off of Monet. It makes more sense when seen from the front (the other side), which has a wavy red band that I assume represents sunlight on the water.

And on that note, the Chinese characters on the pagoda are actually 迎日臺, which roughly means "Sun-Greeting Pavilion" (臺 doesn't really mean "pavilion"--it's used for tall but fairly level buildings, i.e., not pagodas or towers).

Bratfink said...

I hope you don't think that I think you are ignorant.

/:|