Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon
Getting up early for the trip to Jeju and also returning quite late meant we took a few hours extra sleep thursday morning, we did however have plans ready and these also held a timeline.
In Suwon, a city so close to Seoul that it is actually connected by subway there was the 51st Suwon culture festivale, and we'd pointed out something that would probably translate to "parade of the king" to look at. The bus was supposedly a lot faster than the subway, so we jumped on one and got there in about an hour. We did of course have no idea where to go from the bus/trainstation where we were dropped off, but a taxi did the trick and we were released into the wild at a policeblockade and told to walk past it and inwards.After a few hundred meeters we saw the first performers getting ready for their show in the street, and a few hundred more we saw the first temple gate.
The crowds were getting thicker and there were more and more performeres who had found their spot in the middle of the street.
After a while we also found a huge crowd of a couple hundred who were warming up for their rope-pulling contest. I'm guessing/hoping it was east vs west of the city or something like that, but I really have no clue, neighter do I know more than the ones closest to the square won. Good for them.
We kept on moving farther in, hoping to find something and surely enough the parade started after a while, and it was a long one. We guessed that the Hwaseong fortress which we were really there to see should either be the start or end point of the parade, and knowing where the parade ended elimnated that direction.
After fighting our way to connect to an open wifi we did however get a reply from google maps that it was a few streets away from us.
Arriving there we realized that the whole area actually was the fortress and this was only one of the entrances, but also where you could easily enter the wall.
The wall was massive, and at most gates there were large temple-like towers.
We took the longer and steepest road, southbound, and ended up at a hill overlooking the whole fortress city of Hwaseong. As mentioned in my previous post, my GoPro had a defect memory card, but arriving very late the day prior I didn't know this yet and lost even more photos using this card.
At the bottom of the hill they held the culinary part of the festival which was packed with people and to be honest, it was a bit chaotic.
A quick look through the main buildings down there before we headed for the "chicken street", where we managed to find a chinese resturant that didn't sell chicken.
After some gesturing we did however get something else, mostly fried rice and some brown/black onion sauce. It was okay, but not something I'll be looking to recreate at home.
Still believing that the memory card was working, and with an amazing sunset pushing through, we found a nice spot overlooking the city with the hill and a temple in the background. This timelapse is probably the footage I will be most annoyed by missing from the entire trip, but ot much to do about it now anyway.
Managed to salvage a few pictures, but it's a bit depressing to think how great a timelapse of the sunset would have been
We stayed at this spot for about half an hour before it started to get a bit too cold, found a taxi and got back to the busstation for one of the most aggressive busrides I've experienced. The busdriver really didn't have his best day, and I am happy there were seatbelts. Got home a bit late again, but for the next day we still had to get up early for the trip to DMZ.
