Tunnelling through Yeosu

Yeosu is a sleepy town at the bottom coast of Korea, with mountains in the midst of town that give you a million and one perspectives of the ocean, and yet separate one part from another, the old Yeosu from the new, the downtown from the beach, yesterday from tomorrow.  It is a place not without its charms, and has been oddly overlooked as a travel destination, like that kid who gets picked last on the sports team.  

You get teleported there via KTX and immediately notice that there is no immediacy.  You see people actually sitting around doing absolutely nothing (a pastime I thought extinct in Korea), or wandering about with no fixed objective.  I had the weird notion that I had somehow travelled beyond the border and found some new and wondrous civilisation.  

We spent much of the time in the so called old town, the area that was originally thought to have been the downtown before that got moved to the other side of a mountain and through a tunnel - they are always tunnelling in Yeosu.  You go through a million tunnels just to get there from Seoul, and when you arrive, you go through a million more.  To go get some milk, to go to the beach, to go see an old friend, you have to go over a mountain or through a tunnel.  I wonder how painstaking life was before tunnel technology came to the place.  I bet they weren’t sitting around doing nothing though.

We went to a coffee shop overlooking the sea, called Blank.  I ordered 2 espressos, held up 2 fingers before the waiter's eyes in case my Korean accent wasn't working and waited.  The waiter took a deep breath, praying, I suppose, to the God of English that he might be allowed to survive this ordeal.  “What do you like?” he asked.  I repeated my order, with the 2 fingers again, paid and as he was giving me the change and the buzzer, I could see him bracing himself again.  It was the long pause you do when you are about to give a ridiculous offer for a second hand car and you are not sure how badly the other party is going to take it.   “Let me bring out to you,” he said, putting the buzzer quietly down on his side of the counter and looking relieved when I nodded.

With some wifi I looked on the usual english websites to see what there was to do in the place, but all I found was that familiar litany of visits you get pointed towards in any Korean destination:  A temple here, another there, a market, a museum and another temple.  This was my top ten of misery:  Temples where monks sit around listlessly or not at all and where tourists snap off zillions of photos holding up 2 fingers in the air and museums full of old plates and bowls that don't have any food on them.  I would like to see the monks doing some hot yoga or martial arts training on the lawn, karate chopping or slide kicking one another.  But no, not this time.  

I went into the bathroom and to my surprise found that there was no back wall at all.  Instead I was faced with what I was always faced with in Yeosu, a mountain.  They had not cut it out or filed it down like in the middle of town, but meshed it with the structure and saved themselves the trouble of building a wall...a bit draughty, but nice.