But everything in the world has its own expiration date, isn’t it? As for the black man, the expiration date is usually three years around after his coming to her place. After the period, he begins to feel boredom for living in her place and starts to tell lies little by little. She is depreciated day by day, and it is only natural that she notices it. There comes her struggling with herself again! She knows it only well that it is time for her to let him go. And to wait another full moon of fifteenth in Dumulmory in serch of a new balck man.


The story which comes down by tradition between shamans has a variety version of stories, and the story now is just one of them. We can easily guess that, while it is coming down by tradition by so many people, it is added up by many other stories, or sometimes it is exaggerated. Nonetheless, it is well known between shamans that Dumulmory is the place for a ghost with high fortune telling ability to be found.


These days, around ‘Dumulkyung’, which is the foremost place where the courses of two rivers’ water, one of which being South Han River, the other being North Han River, meet into one, you can see trees and silver grass which are fit for a shaman to hide herself waiting a black man. But now the atmosphere here is not something in which a black man appears even if a shaman is waiting him as earnestly as she could. For him to appear, the place around Dumulmory is too much with brightness, too much well arranged.


In the entrance of the river in the direction of Dumulmory, a well-made parking lot is located, and along the way to the Dumulmory, you can see the pathway which is very suitable for the sweethearts by twos, or other people by threes or fives, to walk along and spend time with idleness. And on your right, you can see a small patch of dry field, on seeing which, during the first outing of a spring day of the year, you are likely to hear the story of bomdong, vegetables which have got through a winter and still now growing, from a little cute country girl. And somewhat more inside to the way, you can see a pond full of lotuses. Just before the pond, there appears a pontoon bridge, on which I will write someday if the blog posting continues without stoping, to Semiwon, a flower garden.
With a few steps more, you can see a hot dog stand selling the place specialty, hot dogs one of whose ingredient is lotus, and a few tidy tea shops. The place is now so tasteful a place for young couples adequately spending a good spring day that, even if a black man came to the place, he might think he is in a wrong place. With all any shiny full moon of fifteenth date, it already is not a place around which a black man is likely to run on the water with loud splash. With time passing, the story of Dulmulmory may be forgotten from the memory of many people little by little.
Dumulmory is not so popular a place in Korea. If you are one of foreigners travelling Korea within a few days, the place is not where you are apt to visit. But if you are a foreign traveller visiting here for a relatively enough period, or a traveller who could be at leisure during the interval, Dumulmory is a good place to drop by. Dumulmory is not so far from Seoul, and if you have a well scheduled plan, you can safely visit it within a day without your own car. Spare your time, and you can also visit YongmoonSa, a temple in which there is a sixty-one-meter high ginkgo tree, known as the tallest one in Korea, and known as planted with a deep sorrowfulness by a last crown prince of a tragic dynasty a thousand and one hundred years ago.
If you are a foreigner visiting Korea with good fellows, the story of Dumulmory is something that you should not forget to keep with. Pointing out some proper place to your travel friends, why don’t you tell them that the place is where an aged female shaman was waiting a black man at midnight of a full moon. During your telling, if a more succulent story happens to occur to you, you might mix it up with one that you are now reading, and stimulate another curiosity of novelty of your friends’. If you do so, another version of Dumulmory story, which is somewhat similar to, at the same time somewhat different from, an original one, could be born, and we could have more diverse versions of the story. Who can say with certainty that someday when we Koreans are visiting your Dumulmory of Hudson River in America, we would not chance to meet a story teller who is telling with earnest his own version of a story concerning a certain black man and a shaman?


The story is finished, but next time, you can see a few pictures of Dumulmory scenery