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Extremely nice and civilized for a small town bus station, with plenty of comfortable seats, clean bathrooms, a noodle shop, coffee and soft drink vending machines, a large TV and clearly marked platforms for various destinations. Hadong County has but 58,000 people.

Buses run regularly. The one in the photo was headed for Seoul.



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Same Vietnamese restaurant as below, with Vietnamese fish sauce, condensed milk, coconut milk, hot sauce, jackfruit chips, hot sauce and instant noodles for sale.



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Same Vietnamese restaurant as below, empty at 2:18PM.



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Entering this restaurant, I had to address the young lady four times before she realized I was speaking Vietnamese, so unexpected was my presence. Even before the coronavirus crisis, Hadong received no foreign tourists, she said, and only a few domestic ones.

Married to a Korean, she'd been in Korea for a decade, and had two kids, nine and three-years-old. She used to try to return to Vietnam every year, but hadn't been there in three, not that she missed it much.

She opened her restaurant two years ago, at a smaller location, and had just moved into this space two months ago.

Nearly all of her customers were regulars, she said, and she didn't know of anyone who had gotten sick from the coronavirus in this county of 58,000.

Remarkably cheerful, she laughed constantly as we talked, and she thought it was hilarious I would take buses to go places I knew almost nothing about. She herself had not seen much of South Korea.



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[gate to house below]



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[house]



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[Buddhist temple]



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[Hadong Cathedral]



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[across the street from cathedral]



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[motel]



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?! Maybe Ian Keenan can decipher this Latinated mystery...



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