today's brief walk

Today's walk ended up being a meager 12.7 kilometers, and partly because I took some ibuprofen before I began the walk, my right foot was fine the entire time. I'm tempted to say that I'm ready to try a full-scale, 30-kilometer walk, given how well today went, but that might be asking for too much, too soon. We'll give it another couple of weeks.

We all received a text-message notice from the government this morning, which told us that a stretch of path in Yeouido was going to be closed off. We actually got to that very stretch of street, which is a famous one, lined with cherry blossoms and begging for romantic couples to stroll there. Some twenty-somethings wearing some sort of uniform blocked our way and told us where to detour in order to reach the Han River. I shook my head about all the path closings, but JW explained the rationale for the closings this way: the cherry blossoms are out, so these paths that ended up being closed off would have been crowded with people otherwise. JW doesn't seem to think that the moving air would have served a protective function against the virus (compare the open air to a closed-in office space or subway car), but there we are.

In the shot below, we're away from Yeouido and heading out toward the last few kilometers before the Gayang Bridge. This walk felt a bit surreal: when I do a normal walk to Incheon, I start from my place, and the Gayang Bridge represents the end of a very long day's walking. By the time we hit the bridge today, the walk felt... how shall I say this... unearned. Even JW was commenting on how short the walk felt, which means he's successfully recalibrated his sensibilities to those of a true distance walker.

Using his phone, JW directed us to a local restaurant-of-good-repute not far from the Gayang Bridge. I think the place is called Deungchon Kalguksu. I haven't looked up the hanja for "Deungchon," but I'd guess that it means something like "Lantern Village." I won't be surprised if I turn out to be wrong, though; this is just an uneducated guess.

According to JW, who was reading the info off his phone, Deungchon is famous for its multi-stage meals: start off with soup, then after you eat most of the soup solids, the ladies dump in a bunch of udong noodles, and when you finish off the noodles, the ladies give you a mixture of rice, egg, and minced vegetables that all get stirred into the remaining spicy broth.

JW wanted me to take a picture of how full the resto was. We sat at a table on the second floor; the first floor was simply too crowded. As you see, the ambiance was convivial, and no one was wearing a mask. In theory, this was a high-risk environment—the very sort of thing that the ROK government is discouraging and the US government is—depending on the state—outright banning. You see JW in the bottom-right corner, looking smug.

Round 1: the soup:

I think this wall is showing the resto's name:

The menu:

Pretty much everyone in the restaurant ordered the same thing, i.e., the beoseot maeuntang, or spicy mushroom stew. Here's Round 2—the udong noodles (definitely not kalguksu):

And finally, Round 3: the rice, eggs, and veggies:

JW gave me his perspective on the whole COVID-19 situation, Trump, etc. I'll blog in detail about this later, after my moratorium ends on April 19. For now, suffice it to say that JW calls himself a conservative, but he sounds like a liberal statist to me. He talked about reading both Camus's La Peste (The Plague) and Huxley's Brave New World recently (changes at work have allowed him much free time for reading, he says), and he pronounced himself seduced by Huxley's vision of a world in which people are bred to be happy with their lot in life, willing participants in a version of Plato's noble lie. I found it kind of scary to hear my old buddy talking this way, but I'm going to chalk this up to a phase: JW often gets temporarily inspired by the books he's reading, then the inspiration fades, and he gets inspired by the next book on his list. Still, as they say on Instapundit: "1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to manual!" Oh, yeah: JW also read Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel.

JW told me that he also has another walking partner: his young daughter, who apparently loves walking—unlike JW's constantly complaining son! So he may be bringing her along on these walks as well. She's already apparently tough enough to go 10 or 15 km (they did a long walk just the other day), but I'm not sure I'd take her for a 30-kilometer stroll quite yet, and I've told JW that that's our next route: the 30K stretch from Gayang Bridge all the way to the western shore and the beginning of the Four Rivers Trail in Incheon. That's actually going to be close to a 35-kilometer walk if we include the distance from Gayang Station to the Han River, plus the distance from the Ara West Sea Lock (where the Four Rivers Trail begins) to the nearest subway station, Geomam, about 3.2 km away.

Politics and dystopian thinking aside, it was a fine walk on a fine day, and I'm happy with how my right foot performed. More walking to come, especially now that spring has sprung.