Travel back in time. Dongducheon

I am really excited about marking on map the places I visited. Since I finished my report on trips around South Korea in 2019, now I have to deal with my experience in 2018. It is been almost two years and my memories and my impressions are of course far from reality, but I hope the photos I made during the trip will bring me back to those places and that time. So, let us go!

My story starts from the second day of my stay as I have already highlighted my impressions about the flight and the first day in South Korea a long time ago. Seems it will be quite hard to detach a quite small experience of 2018 from the deeper one of the 2019 year and describe it from the view of a less knowing person.

I am a pup who for the first time went out of a foxhole to discover the external world. The bowery footpath leads me to a deserted street, it is 10:30 am, that is the burning sun force the people to stay inside with cool conditioners.

Not far from the foxhole a shallow river slows. The further I go, the higher the chance to get lost is.

The plants remind me of Ukrainian steppe.

This is Dongducheon city with very Korean street views: facades overcrowded with colourful banners each one trying to catch a customer, the countless road signs and contrary natural paths alluding to the eastern philosophies.

A cosy green park where one can enjoy walking, lie down or have lunch in a pavilion, exercise on a set of trainers or enjoy peering a pond, especially at night when frogs start their serenades.

Unusual to my eye orderliness and mildness of the large facade, while in Ukraine ostentatiousness, willfulness and flashiness are the best adjectives for many facades.

12:12 – it is time to enjoy lunch!

I can say it was a fateful lunch since it was the first time for me to taste this quality of sushi. After that moment, whenever I enter a sushi bar in Ukraine I feel a great prejudiced disappointment with a smell of marinated, salted or whatever but not fresh fish, which do not have the fishy smell at all. Moreover, the price of a set of rolls stuffed with anything but seafood costs almost the same as real sushi in Korea. I feel very pity about the people who enjoy that much the sushi in Ukraine, they still do not know how should it taste.

Dongducheon is a very ancient city. From prehistoric times many of dinosaurs lived there as like my friend because he is very ancient too.

First records about Dongducheon appear in 757 during Goguryeo when that area belonged to Naeeulmae 內乙買 or Naeimi 內爾未. Previously I saw the character 買 when investigated the history of not far located Hwacheon, which was called Yasimae 也尸買. Both areas, by the way, belonged to Goguryeo, and among two major explanations of the usage of these characters, I would choose that one claiming people used the characters just to record phonetic pronunciation but the meaning of the toponym (another explanation is that Goguryeo intently used characters with negative meaning to designate toponyms of the areas conquered by Goguryeo).

During Joseon, in 1466 after another renaming of areas, the name Dongducheon 東頭川 araises. This name is dedicated to a river 川 which have its headwaters 頭川 on the east 東. Later, the character du 頭 head was changed to a simpler one in spelling du 豆 bean. That is why nowadays Dongducheon is denoted as 東豆川 in Hanja.

Dongducheon is located in the north part of South Korean, close to the border with North Korea. Due to these circumstances, there are camps of the United States Second Infantry Division in the city set there to defend the capital, Seoul which lies just about 50 km to the south from Dongducheon.

Information in any of its forms is well evaluated and saved in South Korea as I can see from the numerous survived ancient artefacts and precious national treasures (331 by 27.02.2020). For centuries temples used to be one of the main cultural heritage preservers (books, sculptures, paintings, etc), while nowadays museums are meant to be the cultural and educational centres.

The first topical museum I am going to visit is the Freedom Protection Peace Museum aimed to elucidate the course of the Korean War.

Photographs.

Uniform of soldiers from some of United Nations Command member countries, who supported South Korea in the war.

The exhibition is presented in various ways: simply, by the items related to the period of the war, videos, also by the model representations and other interactive spots for very young visitors, i.e. smash the fish.

Views around the museum.

Amazing views from the museum. That what happens when you ask your friend to take a pic of me holding the top of the mountain. By the way, near the museum, there is Soyosan mountain I am going to visit next year.