Busan/Pusan hosts

In late June I went to Busan (sometimes spelled Pusan), Korea's "second city" for a conference and a little sightseeing. My friend Jiwon (the wife of my former private student in Suwon) put me in touch with her old high school teacher and I stayed with him and his wife. Here they are in front of the migratory bird sanctuary/nature preserve at the river estuary (I forgot the official name).

When we went for a short walk in the woods by the beach, this lady told me she grew up in a house with a straw thatch roof and no indoor plumbing...a far cry from the high rise where they now live. (Even though I think most of the high rise apartment buildings here are hideous, I understand their appeal to people like her.)

We were talking about the popularity of hiking in Korea and she said she thinks Korean people love the mountains here so much because they re-forested them themselves after the Korean war.
After much of the countryside had been bombed, the forests were largely destroyed and, after the armistice, there was a national campaign to re-forest the mountains. Children's part of this campaign was to capture the caterpillars and other insects that could damage the young trees. Their teachers gave them quotas for homework and they would go to the forest with chopsticks and catch the bugs and bring them to class for the teacher to count and make sure they'd caught enough.