Look! More Mascots and Signs

It looks like this will be my last post in October, so I wanted to end October with a bang. This is another post from my August trip to Busan. Busan is a really great city to visit, and has some absolutely spectacular mascots and some mind-boggling signs. If anyone has ideas for alternate captions, post them in the comments and if I like it I'll bring you something from Korea.

"This is my fifth aneurysm and yet I keep coming back for more!"

"I'll lay down so you can take a bite of my delicious back meat."

"Orange train wins again!"

"Migrain chicken is amazing..."

"Quiet please while us monks do our bidness."

"Mexican is best tasting nationality."

I have no idea what this sign could be about. If anyone reads this who is Korean please let me know if you can translate.

Okay, I'm trying to think if this is a typo, but I can't possibly think of a typo that would bring the word crotch into the description of something served at a restaurant.

Beomeosa Temple

And back to my trip to Busan from a few months ago, this is definitely one of the highlights. Busan features an absolutely beautiful Buddhist temple called Beomeosa located halfway up a mountain on the north side of town. The trip involved about 45 minutes on the subway and maybe another 20 on the bus, so it was definitely worth the trip....twice. My friend Daniel and I went on an afternoon and didn't have enough time, so we went straight back there again the next morning.

So a little background then, I guess. According to Wikipedia, this temple was built in the year 678 originally but burned down a few times. The main hall and front gate were reconstructed in 1612, and still stand. Well that's all I will say about the history anyway, since I mostly just enjoyed the scenery. Here is a picture of the nearby mountains:

This is the long walkway leading up to the front entrance:

The side of one of the buildings was lined with bamboo trees, which looked great:

Some great artwork on one of the doors:

A few tiny monks keeping watch:

A nice view of one of the buildings:

One of the older buildngs, I'm guessing it's up for renovation soon:

There were four guards keeping watch at one of the fountains, and here is one:

Some prayer beads lining a wall:

This is definitely one of my favorite photos, the monk on a cell phone. Another interesting monk moment was when I went into the bathroom and noticed that a monk was just finishing up his business. I'm sure this is not true for every monk, but he did not wash his hands.

All in all my few hours spent there were pretty great. I got some really nice gifts from the shop, too, including a bracelet for my little sister with tiny wooden skull beads. There was also a great picnic area with some large rocks located in a stream flowing down the moutain. It was really nice but also super packed with picnicing people.

Beomeosa was my favorite temple I've been to, even if not all of the employees wash before returning to work. I would like to do a temple stay soon and it is on the top of the list of candidates. The only problem is that its at least 4 hours of travel time each way.

I Went to Busan in August

So most readers here know that I didn't blog most of August and September, so there's a bit of a backlog. Upcoming series include my trip back to the U.S.A. and some events from recent weekends. Right now, though, I am going to describe the trip I took to Busan, a large Korean city on the southern shore.

Busan's population is about 3.6 mil according to Wikipedia, so it's a pretty big city. I chose it for the beaches pretty much, as the first week of August is a great time to sit on a beach all day in Korea. It turned out they also have a really great temple located on a mountain, a modern art museum, and a lot of cool mascots. Look for posts on these soon.

The trip to Busan involves Korea's high speed train system, the KTX. This was one of the most exciting parts of the trip for me to be able to finally take the train. I travelled with my friend Daniel, and he insisted that we ride first class. It was only a few dollars more, and the seats were very spacious and offered all the water you can drink. To get to the KTX line I had to take a one and a half hour trip to Daejeon, followed by about two hours aboard the KTX.

From the KTX it was an easy transfer to the subway in Busan, and then quickly to the beach. There was some interesting scenery on the way:

The beach we spent most of the time at was called Gwangali Beach. From what I understand there are two main beaches in Busan, Gwangali and Haeundae. From my friend Daniel's experience Haeundae is a bit overcrowded, so we spent most of the time at Gwangali. Here is a picture of scenic Gwagnali beach. It's basically the beach on the right with a line of hotels, restaurants, and bars on the left. Really nice.

This is a piece of artwork that I enjoyed at the beach:

A restaurant that I visited no less that three times was called Breeze Burns. It had really great hamburgers, decently cheap beer, and some chili cheese fries that destroyed my digestive system one night:

Here's a picture of the other beach, Haeundae. This place was absolutely packed but we spent one night hanging out there drinking beers on the beach.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was travelling back from Haeundae beach to our motel, where we entered the taxi of one of craziest guys ever. This man knew his way around Busan, and would travel about 145 km/hr over bridges and swerve around the slower cars. This guy was awesome.

Our nights were spent at a motel called the Seoul Motel, recommended to us by some random guy we met in Busan. It was a trip down the subway line, but worth the trip because it costs only 30,000 Won (about 25 American) a night.

My last night there was spent at Gwangali again so that I could snap a picture of this beautifully lit bridge at night. It was cool, too, because it looks like the end of the world at the top of the reflection of the lights:

So Busan really was a great trip, I enjoyed my 5 days there. I feel a little bad that I didn't write about it sooner so that I could remember more about it. If I was to come back to Korea, I would definitely look into Busan.

My First Typhoon

The same day my little sis' was coming to town, I ended up having an unexpected visitor. This one was a lot louder, noisier, and left much more debris on the streets. This one was a typhoon.

So a typhoon is actually just a hurricane, but they call them typhoons when they happen in the Pacific Ocean and not the Atlantic. I'm not sure why that is. The storm seemed to start about 5 in the morning with very loud wind followed by breaking glass and crashing sounds. It was pretty ridiculous. The sounds subsided around 7 in the morning, so I was able to fall back into sleep.

I carried on with my day basically as any other, eating breakfast and heading to work. The trip to work was definitely interesting, lets just say that I had to dodge a ton of broken glass on the sidewalks because of all the broken glass. I got to work, and my boss and the other teachers were sitting around a table, as it turned out that there was no power to the school as well as a lot of the city.

Yes, classes were cancelled that morning, kind of like a Korean snow day. I decided to use my extra time to walk around with my camera and take as many photos as possible. Here are the results in photo form:

This is a restaurant right next to my apartment, the entire roof was blown off.

Another blown off roof:

At my school a giant billboard was blown off. Apparently it costs a few thousand bucks to replace and they haven't gotten around to it yet. Now the old sign it exposed, saying Jung Chul Yeong Oeh (Jung Chul English).

This place had giant piles of soju bottles. I think they had them all stacked, but then they blew away and they had to sweep them back up.

So this was a giant real estate building with a three story white square arch on it. It was entirely blow down and this is what was left over.

Another view, this one even more awesome.

Here were a bunch of pipes, I'm not really sure why they were there.

A bunch of trees were either broken or blown down to an angle all over town. Here is a few of them.

The entire side of this building had its foam siding blown down to expose the white bricks underneath.

Broken windows were pretty much everywhere, especially with taller buildings where the wind speed was higher.

So the city was pretty much ripped apart with a lot of damage done. Everywhere had signs blown down, roofs ripped off, and windows and broken glass everywhere. The first rain ended up taking away a lot of the broken glass, but theres still some remaining on the streets which can be a hazard for bike tires. There were also four deaths in Korea attributed to the typhoon, with one in Seosan where a man was hit by a shingle from a roof. Definitely one of the more interesting and exciting days of my time in Korea.

I'm Back/Kelsey's Here/An Iron Kimchi Show

So ahhhh....yeah. That was quite a break from the blogging, huh? I hope everybody is happy now that I'm back. I swear I got really busy for a while with packing up and leaving for the U.S. and Kelsey coming and then being in the U.S. and everything, so I appologize for that. Anyway, I should be back now on a regular schedule, so please stop hassling me.

I'm pretty sure that most people who read this will know that my little sister came out to Korea to work at my school. Pretty exciting stuff. In order for this to work out, she had to come out and take over my classes for a few weeks while I was on vacation, then I came back when the other teacher left, and Kelsey took over the other teacher's classes. If that confused you, I won't be too surprised. A less confusing situation was our apartments. Kelsey lived in my apartment until the other teacher left and she could take hers. So this meant that Kelsey and I were living together for a while....for 5 days....in a tiny, tiny apartment.

It really wasn't bad, anyway. When Kelsey got here she needed money, so I took her to the bank and she traded in some US dollars for the Korean Won. It turned out she brought in just enought to get a bundle worth a cool million Korean Won. It made for a nice photo:

So it was a nice weekend, anyway, with another exciting fact being that Kelsey's birthday was on Sunday, so Saturday was time for celebration of number 24. That started with a BBQ at our friend Collin's rooftop, where Kelsey was able to meet a lot of other foreign English teachers living in Seosan. There was some great food and some drinks, and then we moved on to the next location, a convenience store. Yep, in Korea you can drink pretty much anywhere, and outside of a convenience store is a very convenient place to do it. From there, we moved to a bar called RnB, also know as the place that my band plays from time to time.

I'll go back to some photos, then. Here is Kelsey with her new friend, Megan:

And some general mischief:

And of course no birthday party is complete without some fire, so here was the setup:

And finally lit up:

It looked a lot cooler in person because the flash from the camera lights the background too much. Here's another shot where some liquor got spilled all over the bar and lit up. It was crazy.

From there it was a pretty huge dance party:

And really, a birthday is not complete without some karaoke (noraebong in Korean), so we headed across the street. We met a few ridiculous looking people along the way:

So noraebong went well, mostly for Kelsey. Everybody sang a few songs, but Kelsey ended up singing for about an hour and a half pretty much by herself. That was also pretty ridiculous, but I think it ended up being some happy birthday memories for her.

To cap off the weekend, and the rest of my time until I left for home, we had the final Iron Kimchi show featuring the original lineup. Adrian (on the left) was heading out of the country so it was the last time we could all play together. We did have a new bass player, though, named Lucas (pictured with bass).

The show was a lot of fun, but a little bit ridiculous. We kept having equipment malfunctions, like initially the second microphone did not work, so that limited the songs we could play. Later a string on my guitar broke and we went down to one guitar and a bass. Here's a nice shot of the band playing together, though:

We gave them a decent show anyway, at least everyone had fun, I'm sure. Here is a photo of our band together for the last time, a really good group of guys:

So for me it was off to bed, then on a bus at 6:30, And then about 15 or so hours of flying time. Plenty more to come on what happened at home. Later.