A heart-pumping day (Day 237)
We had a heart-pumping day in more ways than one, first on the way to Daejeon's Science Museum and then at Daejeon Station on the way to Pohang.
We packed up, not that it takes us long to pack our 7kg of stuff each, and walked the 3.5km to the Science Museum along the river. Probably a bit of a silly thing to do – the temperature was 34 degrees and very humid. Three-quarters of the way there I was finding it quite hard to breathe and my Fitbit was informing me that my heart rate was 138 bpm. For some reason, Tim thought this was funny. We stopped until my rate got down to 100bpm and continued to the museum. As it was a weekday, the museum was a lot quieter than Saturday when we visited briefly. First, at the Natural History Hall, it was so fascinating seeing and touching part of an Iron Meteorite, discovered in 1999 during a road construction in a forest. Imagine that crashing down on your house! It weighed 180kg and was cut into 5 pieces, and the one we were looking at is the largest at 72kg. There was also a fragment of a piece of rock from the Moon. It was given to the Museum from America as a gift of hope for world peace. Obviously not from the current president then! As well as rocks from outer space, there were also many rocks from planet earth, rare ones 2.5 billion years old and some fossils of animals and plant life a mere billion years old. Wow, we are just minuscule pinpricks in the scheme of life. They certainly packed a lot into this small area, describing the formation of the 3 different types of rock, the evolution of living creatures and plants from 1 celled organisms, questions such as did dinosaurs have scales or feathers – the debate continues. I really didn’t find these things interesting when I was at school, perhaps I am a late developer. I’d love to learn more about these subjects now. Can anyone recommend a great free learning site for subjects like geology/biology – nothing too taxing, please? After looking at more rocks, fossils, stuffed animals and display of many forms of insect, we moved to the Science and Technology Hall. Both of us enjoyed having a go at a virtual race car – we were all over the place, crashing the car, good job it wasn’t real. Next, we had a running race….an actual one, not virtual. We had to put our feet in the starting blocks which I’ve never used before. Instead of going up, I went down and ended up on my face! :) Tim moved onto baseball and managed to throw the ball at 78 km/h (Professionals throw at 90km/h – so pretty good for an old man as our boys would say). A quick look round at the advancement of computers, telephones and adding machines and then onto some robots. I loved the one with Albert Einstein’s head called Albert Robo! We didn’t have too much time here. We had a train to catch. Being a bit more sensible, we went by taxi. As we reached the station, I spied a man wearing a trilby hat with two live budgerigars on top. How bizarre! (II think Tim had hat envy as well). While we were in the station, the Korean Red Cross was encouraging people to have a go at resuscitation on models. I pumped a dummy’s heart and Tim practised mouth to mouth – so, between us, a person will be fine. I was amazed by how hard I had to press. My hand hurt, yet all I thought of was “this could save a person’s life so bear up girl”. Our train arrived and a couple of hours later we were at Pohang train station. It looked fairly new, built in 2015 and we were surprised that it was quite a way out of the hub of the city. We hopped on a bus, crikey it was like being on a fairground ride. The bus driver was mad, swerving far too fast around corners; we were hanging on for dear life! Luckily two seats became vacant so we managed to stagger across to them and collapsed in the seats. I had a look at the map to see how far we had to go. Oh dear, it seems that we were further away from our destination. Yes, we’d caught a bus going the wrong way! Needless to say, Tim and I are getting quite used to this and take it all in our stride. We got off at the next bus stop, found the underpass to the bus stop going back into town and 5 minutes later we were heading the right way. We eventually arrived at our latest Airbnb – and we have views…..of tops of buildings and the steel plant in the distance. Not the view I had in mind. The Airbnb is fairly basic consisting of one room with a bed, small wardrobe, washing machine, fridge-freezer and kitchenette and one corner is the small wet room. It is very reasonably priced though. Tim popped out to buy some milk whilst I chopped up some vegetables for dinner. I then thought I’d catch up on emails. Good job I did, there was one from Tim! He’d forgotten to take the front door code with him! I wondered where he’d got to.
