Jeonju · Sunday — Departure morning

Day 7 · Jeonju

Sunday — Departure morning

Sunday, September 27, 2026 Pungnam-dong (Pungnammun gate area)

Pungnammun gate full façade — worn stone base at the bottom of frame, dark timber pavilion above, the eave-line cutting across pale grey sky

The gate was bigger than I remembered from the approach yesterday.

I had walked past the tourist side of it twice this week and filed it under things to return to. This morning I returned to it. 6:30, the city not yet started, the sky still holding the pale grey of first light before it makes up its mind. The gate stands where Jeonju begins, or once began, the stone base worn unevenly at the corners — not by visitors, too low for that, just by the fact of being stone for three hundred years and weather for all of them. The wood above is darker under the eaves where the overhang protects it. Darker, and quieter-looking.

I stood in front of it without moving for a while. There was nothing to interpret. It was just very old, and I was there, and the air smelled faintly of something I couldn't fix to a source — warm stone, maybe, or the residue of yesterday's heat releasing. Nobody else came.

inside a small CU convenience store on the approach street to the gate, a narrow lit box of fluorescent overhead light, a single counter with a scanning pad, shelved drinks visible behind her through the glass door she has just pushed open — the door is mid-swing, she has stepped one foot across the threshold, neither in nor out — the interior fluorescent light bisects her from the grey-cool exterior

The CU door chimed when I pushed it. The fluorescent light inside was the particular white that makes everything look like evidence. I put a canned coffee on the counter. The man behind it was watching something on his phone with the volume low and he didn't look up while he scanned it, which suited us both. Outside I held the can with both hands — it was cold enough to feel deliberate — and drank it standing on the pavement with my bag against my shin. The air tasted faintly of something burning off, not smoke exactly, more like the last of the damp leaving the stone.

canned coffee held in both hands at waist height, condensation visible on the cold aluminium, Korean label facing the camera

I walked back. Repacked the things I'd left out. At the bottom of the bag: a coin, a receipt I couldn't read, a dried leaf I had no memory of picking up. I put the leaf on the windowsill and left the rest.

On the bus I sat with my hands in my lap and watched the city recede through the window — the rooflines, the low commercial streets, the hillside going pale in the flat light. A woman across the aisle adjusted her bag twice, then gave up and held it in her lap.

a seat on a departing intercity bus, the window beside her showing Jeonju receding — low commercial rooflines, a hillside going pale, warm golden-hour light just beginning to rake the upper edges of buildings at 07:10 — she has stopped watching the city — her gaze has dropped to her hands in her lap, one hand open, the other resting on top of it, the window still showing the city leaving

The last thing I noticed before we cleared the city: a single tile on a guesthouse eave with a crack running its full length, grey against grey, almost nothing.

a guesthouse eave seen from the bus window in the final moment before leaving the city — a single clay roof tile with a crack running its full length, the tile the same grey as the overcast sky behind it, almost illegible — the tile fills the frame — the crack running grey-on-grey its full length, and at the extreme right edge her reflection in the bus glass, barely present, watching it pass

What she wore

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I wore the mini skirt because it was barely 6:30 and no one else was there yet and it felt like the right kind of small decision for a morning that asked nothing of me.

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The coffee was from a CU and I drank it outside with my bag already packed and the overshirt was just enough for the walk back.

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I changed into the trousers before the bus because there is a version of travelling that is about the place and a version that is about the seat you have to sit in for two hours, and this was the second one.