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=0=| So now we are getting into a series of street scenes. This is a pile of new yuntun, which were the most common cooking and heating fuel. They are made from a composition of coal and clay dust which are pressed into a mold to get yuntun. They are really quite convenient as there are holes through the center (so they burn smoothly) and there are pincers that you put into the holes from the top and carry the yuntun easily, even while it is burning. That is important as yuntun are pretty hard to light. Everything that uses yuntun to heat will always take more than one yuntun so that you take the top one (which is still burning) out, set it aside, remove the used up one (or more) which is just the clay residue, put the burning one at the bottom, and put new ones on top. The rate at which the yuntun burn depends on the air flow which you can control through vents at the bottom and they can easily last 8 to 12 hours. |
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| Often kerosene burners were used to cook with (that is what we used), so you could start a yuntun by putting it on the burner for several minutes, but really what you do is go to the neighbor with a new one and ask for a light ('bool chu seh oh' or 'fire please'). They would just swap your new one for a lit one in one of their stacks. The clay residue looks just like a yuntun but is a light pink in color. That is what they use to build the wall at the back of the trash trucks (presumably they would recycle them to make new yuntun) or we would sometime use them for road repair. At the second house we stayed at there was a section of road that would wash out and we would fill it with yuntun which we would stomp down. Fixed, at least until the next heavy rain. Right next to the yuntun shop (just a pile of yuntun on the side of the road) was the kimchi pot shop which had loads of new kimchi pots. There was only a barbed wire fence around the pots, so it didn't seem to take much to start a kimchi pot shop. |
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| This is a brick factory which was just beyond the kimchi pot shop. In the foregroud is the main component of their bricks which is sand. They would shovel the sand onto a metal mesh that screen out the larger rocks and then mix the sand with a very little bit of cement and mix it by hand with water. They would then use a machine to press the mixture into bricks on a board. The board would be about one foot wide and two feet long and have six bricks on it. These would be placed in the sun to dry (you can see several ros of them just beyond the pile of sand). After a day or so, the bricks would be stacked in a pile with an eight inch hole in the center (six bricks to a side) as you can see just to the right of the sand pile. They will be allowed to dry for another week or so and then are ready to go. Because of the high sand content, the bricks really aren't that strong and if you are persistent you can wear through these bricks with just your fingernail. They make similr bricks in the U.S. and I able to visit one such factory in Houston, TX. |
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| This is the delivery mechanism for the bricks, basically a heavy cart puled by a horse. We felt sorry for the horse as it basically just pulled loads of bricks around the neighborhood all day (but then the Koreans worked long hard days, too). Behing the horse is the office for the brick factory. That was a real common sight around Daegu as they would often set up a wood frame and then tie tarps over it. The tarps were almost exclusively nylon and came in one of tow patterns, either the straight orange like you see for the roof, or blue and white striped with little stripes of red. When the Koreans are building a more modern house, they will first build the walls which are pretty thick, perhaps a foot thick. I presume this was for beter insulating properties in the winter and cooling effect during the summer (retaining the coolness from the night). |
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| Once they had the walls up, they would then set up plywood to hold the cement floor/ceiling while it is poured. However, instead of supporting the plywood with 2 by 4s (which presumably wastes some wood to square things off in a convenient shape), they use the entire trunks of small trees. These trunks were also used to build the ramp shown here by just lashing the trunks together. Here they are pouring the ceiling of the first level and floor of the second level. They mix a pretty good quality cement (not nearly as much sand as in the bricks) by hand, shovel it into the back packs of the carriers, carry it up on their backs where the cement is dropped where needed by pulling a lever. There are three men on the top who distributed the cement so that it was about six inches thick and smoothed it. All most labor intensive. I was able to help out at a concrete pour in the Seattle, WA and Tualitin, OR and they were quite a bit different. Once they finish the walls and floors and ceilings, they would cover the brick walls with a good quality cement plaster (presumably to protect it from weather). There is a finished house just to the right of the house under construction and on the first floor they have covered the plaster with a granite facade on the first floor (very left edge) and just painted the plaster on the second floor. This is a shop keeper's house and so the front would be a display for the shop with sliding wooden panel frames with glass panes. However, for better security when the shop is closed they lock in place plywood panels covered in tin sheets. When when were in Korea there was virtually no violent crime (violent crime was held with great disdain), but much burglary. |
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| This is a picture of the road just outside the market. Of course it is a dirt road. There are also two of the particularly common three wheeled trucks that they would use for their different deleiveries. The pink truck was unusual in that virtually all of these trucks had white tops and blue bodies. The pink truck was probably painted later. They also had two cycle motors making the classical 'ping ping ping' sound that in the U.S. I associated with tiny motor bikes or motor scooters. These trucks were being unloaded for the market, but those trucks would often carry what seemed huge loads to us. They never went very fast, but they got people and their products where they needed to go. We later saw trucks like that in Rome. but I am told they don't make them in Korea any more. There are other pictures of three wheeled trucks in 2007 in Rome and Florence, too. |
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| Notice the unusual hat that Barbara is wearing. We got hat like that in Taiwan and liked them very much. More about that later. You can see how small these little trucks were. This is one little three wheeled truck that Barbara really liked. watered and fed it regularly until it grew up into.... |
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| a full sized three wheeled truck. It appears that they no longer made the tiny trucks as you never saw any new of the small trucks, they were all old and beaten, but you did see new larger trucks, presumably made by the same company. Barbara visited Korea in 2005 and was sorry to hear that the company which made three wheeled trucks is no longer in business, so they are no longer the common type of truck on Korean roads. |
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| This is Barbara with Mrs. Chae, the lovely woman who was our landlady at the first house we stayed at. This truck is at the site of a newly completed house and so they are taking about the lumber they used in contruction, presumably to be reused at another site. |
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This page was last updated on October 21, 2007.
