Saturday, April 12, 2008

The city of beauty, Romanticism, and Dream!

I finally made my first ever trip to Mokpo, one of the five cities in Jeollanam-do and probably the one with the biggest name recognition for those unfamiliar with the area. I'm still greatly under the influence of bronchitis and the packet of horse tranquilizers the doctor gave me, so I didn't spend too much time exploring, but it seems like a neat town. It's got a fair bit of stuff and has a nice set-up, with the city wrapping around Yudalsan, a small mountain on the southwestern side of town. I'm gonna save the museums and the islands for another time.

This weekend was the Yudalsan Spring Festival, so it was as good a time as any to visit. It was a nice, fairly leisurely few hours, but I will add a line that seems to creep into a lot of write-ups on Korean zoos: "the park was cool until I got to the animal displays." Reminds me of the time I went to Grand Children's Park and saw the polar bears with green hair thanks to their exhibit's chlorine. Anyway, near one of the Yudalsan's entrances there was a small 무빙주 ("moving zoo"), courtesy of your friends at Zoo Zoo. Sad reminder that Koreans usually aren't too good with animals (unless we're talking about 보쌈).


The small turtle is on its back because that guy flipped it and tossed it at the big one.


Wearing a trash hat! Hahahaha!


This dog was tied to the tent with a foot-long leash, so that when people tried to pick it up *slaps forehead* they nearly pulled the tent down.




They brought a monkey.


Not my hand.


Burying its face in its hands and feet. The Zoo Zoo employees in green (background) let passers-by wake up the animals by banging on the cages.








Anybody who has ever seen a donkey before knows why this is not a good place to pose with your baby.


To be fair and give Korea credit where it's due, if a display like this were set up in the US, with scores and scores of unsupervised baby animals, they'd all be stolen in about eight minutes.


Okay, when they put a baby rabbit on top of the baby human, that was really cute.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When I see scenes like this, I wish we could turn the tables and put these people on the other side of the cages and see just how much they'd like having their cages rattled while being poked and prodded.