The Sharks of Yeosu

We headed past the World expo site on our way to the Aquarium, and to say that it had become a wretched wasteland would be too kind a complement.  There was ripped up concrete all over the place.  I hopscotched over the gaping holes and pieces of wreckage and soon came upon the Aquarium.  During the expo it was just another pavilion but was now it was a great symbol in the promised land, like an obelisk in the desert.  It was clearly a wondrous local novelty, attracting townsfolk who stood mesmerised by its grandeur, as though a strange UFO had appeared in their midst.  

You had to take a ticket to buy a ticket to get inside.  I got number 262 and they were only up to number 150 as gaggles of people burrowed about the lobby and fathers half heartedly tried to keep a track of their kids.  We bought a coffee in the coffee shop and grabbed a table on the landing where you could contemplate the lovely bay.  Contemplation was not easy because just to your left was the wasteland and you wanted to keep that out of your mind.  A middle aged man who acted like an old man wandered over and hovered above our table to gaze at the horizon.  He stood with his feet spread wide and his hands cupped behind his back, which made his belly protrude further out and even closer to my face than he already was and I tried real hard to enjoy my morning espresso.  As it turned out, I could have waited until I was within the aquarium itself to buy a coffee.  There was a coffee shop right in among the tanks and so instead of having a man hovering above, it could very well have been a tiger shark or grandaddy turtle, or giant eel.  

The Zoo or Aquarium experience is a lesson in how simple man is.  You essentially go to these places to watch animals eat.  You have already accepted that, because you’re no ruler of an exotic land, that you won't get to see the animals fight, or even pursue each other around.  No.  There would be none left for tomorrow.  And somehow watching them mate is not quite so pleasing as it should be.  You would much rather observe your own kind do that.  And so you’re left with getting the most fulfilment from watching them eat.

The good news was that the Yeosu Aquarium understood this part of the human equation and got that craving out of the way right away.  No sooner had you gotten through the doors did you come upon a half dozen starving sea otters in a glass compound.  And you felt no sympathy for their empty stomachs.  Indeed you were delighted in this, and in witnessing them feed so frantically and with such ill manners.  A staff member was next to the otters selling a jar of four worms for 2,000 won, which sounds a lot, until you caught sight of the worms.  You pour them into a hole where the otters gleefully receive them, but often fumble them and have to go back for them later in the running water.  I would have happily bought a jar, except I wasn’t sure by the time I got to feed them that they would still be hungry.  I didn't want to pay to feed them unless they were truly desperate.  

Quite a few worms who, like people, are slippery creatures to begin with, went through the hole and slithered beyond the otters to temporary freedom, signalling that the chase was afoot.  One otter had a worm trapped underneath its belly and was looking around for it, quite oblivious to how close it really was.  You could see it through the glass and you wanted to call out, "hey get up youre sitting on your snack you idiot," or if you were going for the worm, "hey get off him you bully."  You wanted to see both the feeding and the escape and so you were torn and ended up refraining from taking sides.  It was jolly good sport.  

And then a father put his finger through the hole that was the border between man and otter, and he wiggled it around in temptation.  "Come here, dear otter, come and bite my finger."  This was a brave man and I appreciated his arrival to the theatre.  To his credit, the otter wasn’t biting.  He knew that worms came in jars, that they were thinner than this man’s finger and they didn't just linger out in the open like that as if to say, "hey wanna meal?"  So that made a few of us disappointed: dad and the kids, who didn’t get to see any super close-up of the otter, and me, who wanted to see what an otter biting an index finger looked like.

The starving otters were to the Aquarium what the Rookie's are to the Marathon.  They charge out and give you a thrilling beginning after which things settle down into predictable monotony.  And so it was at the Yeosu Aquarium.  From that point forward, it was good old fashioned fish swimming happily in the tanks.  No big fish eating smaller fish and no fish fingers.  And yet a lot of big sea creatures, a menacing tank full of piranhas and even some small whales and sharks.

It was not a bad way to spend 16,000 won and two hours. 

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.