Pinnacle Land

Last weekend Kyeol and I took a bus trip to Asan, a medium-sized city two hours south of Seoul. It is touted as the hot springs region of western Korea. We enjoyed spending a few hours at a giant Korean-style spa with the usual warehouse landscape of wading pools and hot-tubs, plus a pretty impressive outdoor circulating track pool that jettisons you along at a relaxing current. It was February and still cold in South Korea, so swimming in warm water with our heads and sometimes torsos exposed to the freezing air makes the spa experience something to remember.

Asan is quite small and so the tourism industry employs a popular trick: making every nominally interesting attraction seem like a destination worth traveling hours to see. In the city brochure were pictures and blurbs about a park around a small manmade lake, a few temples, and some art statues scattered around town. There was also a spot for Pinnacle Land (피니클랜드), a local theme park in the countryside boasting flower gardens and topiaries and dozens upon dozens of white-painted cement statues of cherubic boys and girls frozen nakedly in summertime poses of dancing and jubilation. Not to mention chickens and sheep and rabbits, and even a wedding hall. However, as I mentioned before, it was February. Therefore, the big event at Pinnacle Land was…sledding.

As we got off the bus in what appeared to be rural Indiana, I couldn’t help but notice that, aside from the cow farms, the refurbishing business with a yard full of rusted metal, and some massive steel manufacturing plants far off in the flat fields, there didn’t seem to be any attractions out here. It was just before ten in the morning, and Kyeol assured me that the place opened at ten and yes, it would be open in the winter. (According to the brochure the sledding event ended the next day.)

We walked up a dirt road and saw in the distance a stony peak rising above some nondescript patterns on the hillside. This must be the pinnacle in Pinnacle Land, I reasoned. We paid the 5,000 Won entrance fee and kept walking. I admit that my skepticism was high, but not as high as my pity for the people working at this ghost-town resort. There were literally zero customers and about ten staff members that we could see. When we walked into the café to order breakfast, they saw us and scurried quickly to take our orders, a sure sign that they weren’t expecting anyone. The emptiness presented a good opportunity to tell Kyeol about the scene in the National Lampoon’s “Vacation” when the Griswold family, exhausted and downhearted after crossing the whole country, finally pull into the empty parking lot at Wally World, only to find a cartoon moose stupidly repeating its recorded message that “Wally World is closed for the season”.

My first surprise, however, was at the design and the food inside the main building. There were flowers everywhere, a reflecting pond in front, and even birdsong echoing from the tiny exotic birds in a big cage. We had a pork tenderloin (똔카스) that was quite good with an interesting, crispy breading. (The tenderloins aren’t usually anything to write a home, or to blog, about.) Through the café windows we noticed the handful of visitors that had arrived and were walking up the path with inner tubes to take down the tiny sledding hill.

We spent about an hour going up and down the dirty snowhill in our tubes, feeling like kids with our cold cheeks and wet asses. We decided to explore the rest of the modest park. In Korea, in the thick of the winter, it seems that Christmas is still THE guiding symbol, as Halloween is representative of all autumn, starting from late August until mid-November. A giant Santa Claus statue greeted us on the main path. There were banners draped on poles streaked with winter dirt that proclaimed “Merry Christmas!” It was quaint and added to my allowance of pity for the place,

It was while walking on the brick and stone paths that wind up the sides of the hill that we noticed the absence of the flowers. On brown and dead stems and leafless trunks hung tags with colorful pictures of lilacs and forsythias, violets and roses. I felt like a person wearing sunglasses in an art gallery, taking off my brownly tinted view of the surrounding nature and realizing the potential beauty of the place in the warm and sunny seasons. Immediately the park transformed itself for me. Instead of statues and promenades and sculptures ruling over dry plant corpses, I imagined a verdant wall of ivy and trees, a jungle of colorful flowers from which peaked out pieces of human-made art, limbs of bronze and silver turbines spinning in the warm wind. The place became beautiful for its possibility to contain life.

From the top of the hill, the peaked Pinnacle, we could see the whole park. We looked even further down onto thousands of acres of flat, brown farmland. This farmland might also be green in summer. But the loving care that had gone into this mountain—the landscaping, the earth-pushing, the installation of giant metal wind-sculptures and tunnels of foliage and park benches and water gardens atop this quaint and lovely garden park—the splendid hybrid of nature and artistic functionality must be more beautiful than the well-tilled crop field that showed its beauty only in its yield.

This park snuck up on me in the way that many public spaces do in Korea. They are generally not grand, not so grand as those found in grander countries like China, Germany or the United States. Nor are they as pure and harmonious as the rock gardens and works of nature-bound architecture one sees everywhere in Japan. An “attraction” in Korea often seems to mean “a place where everyone goes to visit”, at least once. Sometimes they are heavily populated theme parks like LotteWorld or Everland. Other places, like the picturesque Nami Island in Chuncheon or even the countless small cafes tucked into side streets of large cities, offer a more personal view of what a public space should be.

For Westerners some spaces in Korea may seem a bit farcical, laughable in their attempted recreation of Western themes, foods, customs, expressions and pastimes. We see it as a superficial (and often strangely conceived) attempt at our culture. And sometimes we can see these cultural spaces as only a half-hearted attempt at entertainment. A space strikes us as inauthentic because it lacks many of the qualities we are used to in “the real thing” back home. Extra-curricular activities, “Fusion food” restaurants, playgrounds, parks, “live cafes”, beer hofs. These are a few of the things I’ve found in Korea that I admit to not finding fully convincing, as imitating another way of life that fails to capture its essence.

But on so many occasions I have been misled by absurd expectations. If the context is entirely different, how can I expect the presentation to be “right”? What seems important is that a space or activity achieve its goal of providing a diversion, a unique vantage, an escape into nature or into another culture—however self-deluding that “escape” may be. In our own cultures we find cultural pastiches all the time—Chinese restaurants in America, Karaoke in England, feng shui in our living rooms—but we rarely fault them for being less than authentic. We enjoy them for what they give us in our own delineated cultural context.

And what is even more important, it seems to me, is to recognize the gesture being made. At Pinnacle Land I found my initial pity being transformed into one of endearment and sentimentality. On reflecting about the work that so many hands put into this project; on seeing the fun that can be had on a slightly sloping piece of mountain in the middle of a boring countryside; on flying down the ice hill with my girlfriend again and again, and again and again, like small children from any culture, racing to the top just to go down again, I started not only to see the charm in such a place but to actually feel real joy in throwing myself fully into the modest activity the space provided.

When a space is faithfully created with passion and love, and when this space is used and enjoyed by even a small number of people, any space can provide an authentic experience.