A Giant Fortress

Now I am finally finishing my posts on when my family was here at the beginning of the year. It was a really nice week. We got to visit some tourist destinations in Seoul, and they also came to visit mine and Kelsey's city of Seosan. They even got to visit our school and meet some of our students. Actually, in the afternoon classes I forced each of my students to write ten questions to ask my family, and they were rewarded with candy when they could answer one.

We also ate a lot of great food when they were here. I got to show them some of my favorite Korean meals; such as bibimbap, budaejigae (hotdog soup), kimbap, and of course Korean barbeque. I think that they really liked most of it.

This post is about a trip we took on the last Sunday they had in Korea, when we went to Suwon to visit Hwaseong Fortress. I don't know a lot about the history, but by checking here I know that it was built in 1796.

The trip involved a pretty long train ride and a short taxi ride, so we left bright and early to spend the day there. The fortress is basically a giant wall surrounding the former center of the city. There were a few points of interest along the wall, so we went and checked them out. Here is a view of the lookout tower, which was way up on a hill:

Kelsey, Dave, and I were feeling energetic, so headed up the hill:

About half-way to the lookout point was our first encounter with the dragon bus. More about this creature later:

So here is the lookout point. I took this photo of Dave, which is one of my favorites. I think that it was his facebook picture for a while:

I like this picture of Kelsey walking up the stairs even though it is framed wrong:

We walked a ways along the wall and got to what is probably the coolest part of the fortress. It's a giant bell, probably bigger than a Cadillac. You can ring it three times, for about two bucks. Here is a nice video of Dave ringing the bell:

Each ring turned out to have some meaning in terms of who we are honoring. I'll let you read below in their weirdly unspaced English translation:

This is another picture of Kelsey's back looking along the fortress wall:

Next we went back down the hill toward the dragon bus to meet up with the rest of the family. The guide to the dragon bus said that it operates only in above freezing weather. Although the day we visited was below zero, it was luckily (or unluckily?) still operating. You could say that we were freezing and shivering the entire way. We rode to the other side of the fortress where there were traditional Korean restaurants. Here is a picture of Kelsey, Dave, and Amber. I'm not really sure what's wrong with Dave. Maybe he's just sleepy:

Another picture of the dragon bus driving along the fortress:

We were so hungry for lunch by the time we arrived at the restaurant area that we had trouble finding the actual restaurant. We wandered around and ended up in a tea shop before finally finding the restaurant. Once inside, it took forever, but it was worth the wait to eat our bulgogi (seasoned pork) soup and makgeoli (Korean alcoholic rice wine).

We finally made it out of Suwon after sitting in traffic for a while and headed back to Seoul. We were so exhausted from walking around the fortress in below freezing weather that we had to take a break for a while. We also went to one of my favorite restaurants, Thai Orchid. That night we attended this wacky comedy-cooking show called Nanta which was pretty cool.

The next day was Monday, and since we are in the future compared to the U.S.A., this was when we were able to watch the Packer playoff game. It was something like 6:00 in the morning when we had to get up to watch it. Amber was sick that morning, unfortunately, and couldn't join us to watch the game.

The Packers won while we watched and ate kimbap, so we were in a good mood although we had to say our tearful goodbyes. Amber eventually recovered, although I'm sure her plane ride wasn't great, and my Dad suffered from jetlag for weeks after returing. Other than that, the visit was a nice time.

The DMZ

Alright, back to cranking out some posts! Remember when my family came to Korea to visit after New Years Day this year? Well this is from then.

One highlight of the time my family spent together in Korea was our trip to the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ between North and South Korea. I think most people are somewhat familiar with the Korean war where the country was split in two, possibly from watching MASH or something. Anyway, now they are the somewhat volatile neighbors to the North of us. Luckily, we have this barrier called the DMZ which is heavily guarded by both sides so that no one will go through.

We went on a Saturday, and had to wake up bright and early to get on a subway and ride to the USO in Seoul. From the USO it was another bus ride since the DMZ is North of Seoul. Once we arrived at the DMZ we got a tour guide who was a US soldier stationed in Korea. He was pretty funny but one time he forgot to tell us when it was OK to take pictures so we missed some photo opportunities.

The photo taking was somewhat limited, there were only a few areas we could photograph without having our cameras confiscated. One of those was the room where they showed us a nice informational powerpoint presentation. I made the most of it, I guess. Here is a picture of our tour guide and another guy:

So this one shows a map of the actual demilitarized zone, as you can see located a little bit above and a little bit below the 38th parallel.

We were told some pretty good stories about incidents that happened around the DMZ that I don't remember so clearly anymore. I think there was a story about the south side chopping down a tree which somehow provoked a firefight between both sides. Sorry I don't remember much of the details. My favorite part was talking about how the both sides are determined to build a flagpole taller than the other side, no matter how ridiculous it gets. This one shows the South Korean flag is reaching 109 meters, while the North Korean flag is nearly twice as high:

Next was a pretty cool part where they brought us to this building where outside is a little trailer where the North and South hold meetings, if there are any. We had to wait inside of the building and some cool looking South Korean soldiers strolled by:

So then we walked outside and saw the North Korean side. I took this picture of their side, and you can see a real North Korean solder over there:

Some of the rules we had to follow were strange. For one thing we couldn't turn around and take a picture of the side of the building facing North Korea. I don't really know why. We also couldn't make any kind of hand gesture or pointing toward the North Korean side or it might provoke them or else they will monitor it and use it as propoganda for their side about how stupid Americans are or something. I accidentally pointed at the other side without thinking when I was talking to my Mom and was quickly scolded by the tour guide.

Here are some South Korean soldiers. I like these uniforms because they all have cool helmets, sunglasses, and these thick jackets to make them look really ripped. As you can see, there is a solder standing half-behind the blue building. Apparently this is to protect his heart if they were to take a shot at them:

This is inside of the board room. This table in front of the Korean soldier is on the exact border between the North and South, so when I took this picture I was technically in North Korea. Hurray!

From inside I spotted these North Korean solders with some kind of a device they were looking through. Possibly a camera or something, but its obvious that they were up to no good:

After that building there was a stop where we got to look at some land that is on the border, which wasn't too exciting. The next stop was lunch, and then we got to see a tunnel. The North Koreans had some really long tunnels that were all headed into South Korea for the purpose of invasion or spying or something. The Southies found four of them so far, and we got to go visit one and go inside of it and everything. Unfortunately, photography was not allowed.

The tunnels were really cool, though, although very damp and murky. Also they were very short. The ramp down was long, somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 meters down, which wasn't so bad on the way down. To walk to the barrier that blocked us, we had to go under a really short ceiling most of the way. It's not good for your back if you are really tall, and it probably hurt your back even if you are about 5'7" or so. I definitely couldn't imagine carrying my battle supplies all the way through that tunnel.

We did get to take some photos of the outside area of the tunnels. Here's a nice photo of a family trying to push these giant half-spheres together as a symbol of the North and South reuniting.

After departing the tunnel, our last stop was a train station. It's the North most train station in South Korea, put right near the border. If North Korea's borders were open, then South Korea's train system could potentially connect all the way through into China, Russia, and then all of the European rail systems. Unfortunately, North Korea will not have this. I though it was cool how this is a gate to Pyeongyang, although not functional:

I liked the train station for one because they had a stamp that said North Korea on it that I stamped into my passport. Not exactly legal, but it's really cool looking. They also sold North Korean beer and soju there. One strange thing is the beer and soju from North Korea is far superior to anything in the South. In South Korea both the beer and soju just taste really mass produced and horrible, while the North Korean beer is German style and good and the soju has a real flavor to it.

Anyway, it was a great day and I recommend the USO DMZ tour if you are ever in Korea.

I'm Back!/Bijindo Island

Hi everyone, I know that it has been so long since there has been a post up on this site. I guess things got extremely busy before I left Korea. I thought it was better to do as much as I could while I still had time instead of sitting around and blogging about things I already did. Am I right?

So I guess you know by now that I have left Korea. It was a great and crazy second year with that trip to Vietnam, a visit from my family, lots of bungee jumping, new Iron Kimchi lineups, and then my case of walking pneumonia and then the ensuing broken rib due to coughing. Hahahaha. Good times. Anyway, I plan to clear my vaults of all the blog posts I have stocked up. This could be upwards of 10, so I recommend to keep checking back a lot because I have some time off now.

This post is about a trip that I made with a bunch of friends to an island off of the southeast coast of Korea. It was over a long weekend where we had Monday off due to Korean Independence Day, which was awesome. We don't get a lot of long weekends working in Korea.

To get to the island involved two bus rides, a taxi ride, and then a boat ride. We first rode the bus to Daejeon in central Korea and spent a night out with a few friends who live there. Of course we ended up staying up way too late, but it was OK since it was just bus riding the next morning. So we rode the next bus, which was over 3 hours, to Tongyeong, the port city with a boat that goes to Bijindo, the island. Before going on the boat, we had a pretty mad shopping spree at the department store. We had to buy supplies for 2 nights of camping since there areno real stores on the island. Our shopping lists all included a lot of food, water, beer, soju, and beer. I ended up carrying a box with 20 bottles of soju because my friend Nick Slater thought it would be such a great idea to have that many bottles.

Anyway, we made it on the boat where we had to ride about an hour. To pass the time, Kelsey was playing this game where you wrap a string around your fingers and then another person puts their fingers through and rearranges the strings or something. I don't know if this game has a name or not. She managed to get the two ladies next to us to play. One of them was a monk, which made for this great photo:

So that went on until they all got sleepy and needed a nap. Meanwhile, I made my way to the back of the boat to look around. There were islands all around us and it made for a beautiful tropical feel to the area. Here is one of my favorite pictures:

Our campsite was nice, and on a grass patch basically right above the beach. There were something like 18 people staying with us, and our campground looked like this:

One of the best parts was definitely the white-sand beach, which had a view like this:

And closer to sunset it looked like this:

Due to the lack of refrigeration or even ice on the island, we had to get creative with cooling off our beer supply. My friend Rob and I worked on burying his Heineken mini keg in the beach in order to cool it off a little. Anytime a boat went by, though, a large enough wave would wash up to knock over the keg and the rocks surrounding it. We got used to drinking our beer warm.

Aside from trying to cool the keg, we spent much of the second day making sand castles and other creations from sand. Lets just say that the other art we made from clay is pretty sexually graphic and I won't put any pictures of it on this site. I will also say that it was well constructed and a lot of other people wanted to get pictures of and with it.

After the sand building, I went for a walk with my friend, Nick Slater. This island is actually made up of two circular islands connected by a land bridge. The island opposite of our campsite had a mountain perfect for hiking up and coming back within an hour or two. Here is the mountain:

As we walked up, we enjoyed the interesting vegetation and the nice views of the surrounding area and other island.

So we started our hiking trip pretty late, and ended up at the top at around sunset:

Getting to the top of a mountain at sunset means that unless you are planning to spend the night at the top, you are going to have to hike back down in the dark. I was OK with it since I had some quality shoes to go up in. Nick somehow managed to go all the way up and down in some flip-flops with minimal injuries. Quite a feat.

After coming back, we were quite hungry. Our time on the island with only peanut butter and jelly to eat led me to create a pretty tasty snack. What you do is take a piece of bread, spread peanut butter on it, put a peeled banana on it, and then smother jelly all over the top. It's kind of like a vegetarian hot dog, and it's actually really good:

After that we did some more socializing and drinking with some Korean people staying on the island. Lets just say that Korean people are good at drinking soju and the helped us to finish our supply. Then, it was an easy trip back the next day with the boat ride followed by two bus rides.

I did come across one snag, though. I lost my key on the island, somewhere. This wouldn't have been that bad, but I lost my other key on a beach about three weeks before and didn't have anymore spares. This means I was heading to my apartment without anyway to get into it. I got ahold of my boss and he called a locksmith to let me in when I got back. It worked out well and it only cost me about $20.

The real problem came when I needed to change the lock on my apartment door. I had to leave my door unlocked until I was able to change it. Due to being lazy, I waited about a week to even buy a new door lock. After that one of the screws was stripped and I had no way to remove it with the tools I had at home. After finally borrowing a cordless drill from my school I was able to change out my lock and lock my door again. It was a period of about 2 weeks where I couldn't lock my place from the outside, but nobody tried to break in ever so that wasn't a problem.