Brad's Worldwide Adventures

My New Home: Hanseo University

2012-02-16T19:24:00.004+09:00

I write this now as my latest period of unemployment is coming to an end. I will soon be starting a new position as "English Professor" at Hanseo Univeristy. I use quotes because it doesn't seen really appropriate to call me a professor.

But, it is a really nice job to have. I signed my contract recently for 30 million a year. Thats right, 30 million, no need to ask what currency that is in. That salary is for two semesters of teaching 8 or 9 90 minute lectures plus four office hours per week. Plus, I get one day off per week for "research," and months of vacation per year.

One thing I love about this job is the location of the university. Hanseo University can be translated as "Korea West" University, and it is nestled nicely in the middle of some mountains in the Western part of Korea. It's not really located in a city, but a nearby town called Haemi is about 5km away; and Seosan (my previous city) is about a 20 minute drive from the campus. It seems to be a great location if you really love hiking, though not such a great location if you like partying.

I'll get to some pictures, anyway:

the gate to Hanseo campus

A nice mountain next to the campus area

this is the view from the top of the mountain in the previous picture

the architecture building, where my office will be located

a pagoda housing a bell located at the top of the campus

a sculpture garden

a nice woman playing cello, in the woods

a horse

The campus is really littered with sculptures. I heard that all of the sculptures located on campus are by former students, thought I haven't confirmed it. There are a few really nice ones, but there are a LOT there that range from mediocre to eyesore territory. Oh well.

I hoped you like the tour of campus, I'll take more pictures as spring comes and keep everyone updated!

The Great Korean Road Trip of 2012: Part 3

2012-02-06T16:32:00.007+09:00

And now the grand conclusion of my Chinese New Year road trip around Korea. Well, it's not really that grand because we just kind of screwed around and drove around in some mountains for the rest of the time. Here it is, anyway...

After leaving the crazy crab vilage, we continued North. We wanted to make it to a Northern city, and found one called Samcheok right around the time we got sick of driving. We spent the rest of that night looking for a chicken barbecue place, but didn't find one. Instead, we had some pork barbecue and some whisky. We also got the bright idea to ask people "how does a cat speak" in Korean. The joke for the rest of the night was to ask this, and it actually worked. The best moment was when we were in a bar. The three of us had a rock scissor paper contest to find out which one of us would have to approach a table of 7 Korean girls and ask them the question. I eventually lost, but it worked out well. All 7 girls laughed and meowed. Some of them made a little cat scratch motion with their hands.

After getting some rest, we were on the road again. We were driving out of town, and near the edge we found a nice place to stop near bridge. This allowed for some planking:

And there was this great little bay. We ventured down and had to cross trough this bamboo forest to get to the rock ledges in the picture below:

The bamboo forest:

After setting out again, we found ourselves in some pretty serious mountain country. We found this city called Taebaek, which was a small Korean city, but spread through some mountains. It was actually a really great drive, and for me it was a highlight of the trip.

We made a stop at a little convenience store at the top of a mountain. Here is the view of the mountain road:

The place had these nice little outdoor rooms, which I assume were for drinking in the Summer time:

Driving out on the mountain roads, I developed my skill for taking photos through the windshield while driving. Here's one picture:

At one stop, these little dogs came and started barking at us. I got a good look at this one little dog who had a face that looked like a horror movie monster. Does anyone know what kind of dog this is?

Another driving shot of this rock tunnel we drove through:

We made one last stop before heading to Seoul, near this altitude sign:

I don't have any pictures from our night out near Seoul. We had a nice time hanging out near Nick Slater's school in Yongin. That was our last night before the other guys would have to work, so we left Nick in Yongin and headed back to the Seosan area. Here we are driving into the sunset:

All in all, it was a great trip and we covered a lot of Korea. Tracing it back full circle, the trip looked like this:

We didn't make it as far North as I would have liked, but we definitely had a great time. I guess a Northern trip can be saved for a later blog post...

The Great Korean Road Trip of 2012: Part 2

2012-01-30T18:52:00.009+09:00

Hello, and welcome again to the Great Korean Road Trip of 2012. We left off with leaving Mokpo, picking up some strawberries, and heading to Busan. Let's continue there, shall we.

We arrived in Busan at around 9 p.m., with not much for maps and a slight idea where we wanted to go. We entered the city from the West side, and needed to head all the way to the South East side, where the beaches are. This took around an hour and a half due to getting lost a few times. But we arrived to find this at Gangwali Beach, so it was OK:

Bridge at Gangwali Beach

Unfortunately, the restaurant I wanted to go to was closed by that time, and the other good looking ones were closed. We settled on some crappy night club type thing that served us some poorly cooked pizza and some overbreaded chicken. We ate it.

The area of Gangwali seemed a bit dead, so we meandered over to the more famous beach, called Haeundae. I don't have any nighttime photos of the place, but we had a good time there. The one photo I do have is from the enchanting fake window plastered to the wall in the hallway of our hotel:

We got some good rest that night, and woke eariler the next day to get some decent brunch and look around. This time, the restaurant I wanted, Breeze Burns Burger, was open. They had the best chicken wings there that I have had in a long time, and excellent hamburgers, too. Along the way I found this place:

"Someone should go to prison for letting me drink this!"

We loitered around Haeundae Beach for a while, knowing that we would have to spend a long time in the car that afternoon. Here are a few photos from our time there:

"No smoking!"

Haeundae Beach

Some crazy patriotic Korean kite flying man

We cruised out of town that afternoon, without even stopping at a gas station before leaving. There was about an eigth of a tank left, so I figured we could make some time before filling up again. I was wrong. That was a huge mistake. Somehow we ended up on a highway that was a huge black hole for LPG (propane) stations. We had to finally stop in a city called Ulsan and ask directions to the nearest station, with gas lights blinking and the needle at rock bottom. Finally, we found one, what a sweet relief:

the sleek Kia Carens, strawberries on the dash

On the side of the road in Ulsan was this crazy giant temple structure, so I pulled over. I never truly found out what it is because I never asked, but I gathered that it was some kind of Buddhism school where young monks are raised. It was a nice place to stop for a few minutes anyway:

From there, we set on the road again due North. We wanted to make it most of the way to North Korea by nightfall, but we weren't so lucky. We started looking for potential stops for the night, and ended up in this crazy crab city. We didn't stop, but they made it completely obvious that you can't escape eating seafood and crabs while there. Much of the architecture was crab-based; restaurants, bridges, bus stops. Driving by the restaurants resulted in people yelling at us to park and get some crabs. We somehow resisted.

There was a nice stopping place near the city, with a temple set up on a hill. We were attracted by the multi colored lights:

It turned out to be a fake tree

The temple, decorated for a New Year celebration

We made another pit stop at a convenience store to look for some snacks and beverages. Timmy found a hat:

I found a nice sandwich with pictures of pomegranites and beans on the packaging. The best I could tell is that it was sweet red beans and pumpkin inside. Surprisingly, it didn't taste that bad:

I later found out that city was called Yeongdeok (pronounced like 'young duck'), the crab capitol of Korea. Pretty much every city in Korea is the capitol for something, like how Seosan is the garlic capitol. Yeongdeok just took it way too far.

It was freezing cold there, so we couldn't do much walking around. We got back in the car and headed North once more...

To recap the trip so far: we started in Seosan, headed South to Mokpo, East to Busan, North to Ulsan and Yeongdeok. That path is about half way around the country. Nice!

Tune in next time for the conclusion of the trip!

The Great Korean Road Trip 2012: Part 1

2012-01-29T20:41:00.009+09:00

Hi everyone. I'm proud to announce my return to blogging...at least for a while. I'm currently jobless and living in Korea, at least until my university job starts at the end of February. Because of this, I plan to work through some of my back-logged blogs and get them up.

This post is the start of my road trip that I took over the Chinese New Year vacation, which gave us Monday and Tuesday of last week off. The Friday that the road trip was starting was also my move out date from my apartment, so it also marked the date that I became homeless and jobless. Homeless, except for my girlfriend's apartment which is currently vacant while she visits her family in China. Anyway, on Friday I moved all of my stuff out of my apartment, loaded it into the car, loaded it into my girlfriend's apartment, dropped the dog off at the vet, prepared some documents for my new job, sent them, and I was ready to go.

We set out with no real itinerary. All we had before leaving was an idea to search for some of the excitement and uniqueness to be found in the hidden corners of Korea. See, all cities of Korea are basically the same. It's high-rise apartments surrounded by the same convenience stores, shops, and restaurants everywhere. My goal was to see if there is anything different out there.

It began on Friday night at around 10:00, when my friend Nick Slater arrived in Seosan, my city. He brought with him a present, a tool we could find valuable later on down the road:

The Road Toilet

I'll kill the suspense now, and say that none of us used one in the car. It was a nice thought, though. Once Slater arrived, we jumped in my sleek Kia Carens liquid propane gas running micro-van and went to pick up my other friend, Timmy. He lives in a small neighboring town called Daesan. I didn't realized it, but it's about 25 minutes away going North on our local peninsula. So we had to backtrack after picking him up, and finally headed South.

The highway we took, interchange 15 took us to the Southwest corner of Korea, and we arrived in Mokpo at 3:00 a.m. Mokpo is a prominent seaport in Korea. They offer ferries going to many of the small islands off the coast, so it seemed like a promising destination:

Road Trip Map

After arriving in an area with a few convenience stores and motels, we settled in at a 7-11 for a few beers. We drank outside the store in freezing temperatures, and a 40 something Korean man stopped by. He joined us for a few drinks, speaking only Korean and eventually offering us processed cheese singles as a snack. We couldn't understand most of what he said. I tried to ask him what we could do to have fun in Mokpo in broken Korean, and as far as I could tell he said the best way is to drink with your friends. Mission accomplished?

We crashed in a charming love motel room. We were a few floors up, but luckily the room had the "simplicity descending life line". It looked to be slightly tangled and out of order, but I'm sure it would work in a fire related emergency.

"simplicity descending life line"

That wasn't even the best, or funniest part of the room. When one goes to the use the bathroom sink to brush one's teeth, there is a tendency to get one's feet soaked. Why? Some genious plumber didn't quite connect the drain pipe, or line them up for that matter:

nice plumbing

We fell asleep quickly, and didn't wake up until 1:30 the next day, Saturday. Since all of the ferries leave earlier than that, we were forced to get a quick lunch and then look around for other tourist attractions.

There was a nice group of museum type buildings built along a highway on the coast. We stopped by the Mokpo Natural History Museum because of some nice animal statues:

Mokpo Natural History Museum

There were actually some pretty cool fake animals out on the lawn. I liked this 'artsy' photo I took from inside a fake dinosaur skeleton's mouth:

Mokpo Dinosaur Mouth

Looking at the signs, there were many hilarious misspellings, which I love so much. There was one where the museum was called the "Nateral History Museum," and my favorite:

"Where is the lacal history building?"

Here is me next to one of my favorites, the Gorilla:

And the three of us riding a tiger, as photographed by a nice Korean man who had his kids with him at the Museum:

Since the Natural History Museum cost money, we stopped across the street at the Mokpo Maritime Museum. This one had some nice boats out on the front lawn. There was a really great shrimping boat, and a few boats used by people to sneak into Korea. The people smuggling boat from China was all decrepit, but the one from Vietnam was in top shape:

Vietnamese People Smuggling Boat

We also checked out the children's exhibit, where you can drive boat simulators and make nice pictures of fish. Another exibit we saw was about a shipwreck that happened near Mokpo.

Satisfied with the boating exhibits, we set out on the road again towards Busan. We took smaller highways for a while. While being much slower, they do offer advantages such as ladies selling strawberries on the side of the road:

Road Side Strawberry Lady

I actually found the idea of her job to be quite terrifying. There were all of these stands by the side of the highway, but not really adequate room to slow down and stop. People are whizzing by the whole time at around 60 mph. Fortunately, the strawberries were amazing.

More next time from Busan!

The Korea Files: FREEDOM

2012-01-19T21:39:00.004+09:00

So I know it has been really slow with posts on here! I have a few things to post about, but lately I have been very short on free time. I blame most of it on the fact that I have been locked in a school for 9 hours a day.

That is until today. Earlier this week I informed my boss that I found a new job, and that February 17th would be my last day. She wasn't completely with that plan, and she told me she would release me from the contract when a new teacher arrives. I think that she was informed she wouldn't get a new teacher soon enough, and she informed me today that it is my last day at the school. I would pay back the plane ticket with whats due on my current salary, pay my bills, and move out by tomorrow. So I said sweet, this is the best news I have heard in a long time.

I am finally moving to greener pastures. At least they appear to be greener pastures, because you can never know for sure. But my old job was 45 hours a week being paid for 30, piles and piles of work, and almost constant nagging from a woman with the most ear shredding, shrill voice I have ever heard.

And the new pasture, Hanseo Univeristy. It's located about 20 minutes driving from my current city, surrounded by mountains. The job includes teaching 9 to 10 90 minute classes per week, and one extra day off per week for "research." I would say that is an improvement, but considering my last job, it's not even in the same galaxy. Not even the same universe. Not even the same multiverse. Wait, that doesn't really make sense. Anyway, my new job starts on February 20th, so I have a little bit of time off.

Since I don't like to put up posts without pictures, here is a picture of my newest interest, origami. I have almost perfected the crane, so I have been challenging myself by making them smaller and smaller.

Back To Korea/Happy Christmas!

2011-12-29T19:23:00.006+09:00

So hi everyone. I'm back to Korea now, as most of you should know. I found a job at a new school through a recruiting agency, and returned on December 6th. It's now December 29th, so it's been over three weeks since I've been here, and I haven't written a post. Sorry.

I've been having a nice time so far. I've collected both of my guitars, and may have a connection to get an electric guitar that was left by someone else. My school is pretty nice. There aren't so many classes yet because it's brand new, and there is a lot of material to teach with. I usually have to rush through my lessons because there is so much. But, the downside is that I spend so long each day preparing the material. I must spend Monday through Friday from 9am to 6pm at the school, mostly preparing flash cards. It's really a drag on most days.

But, for our short Christmas party last Friday, we prepared some Christmas hats for the kids. They also included beards for the boys. Enjoy:

The owner's twin son and daughter

a student who I stuck eyebrows to as well as the hat and beard

kind of a goofy kid

he's cute, but doesn't wear the beard right

my favorite student, Theresa

another goofy kid

Peter Pan. He was a student at my last school who switched to my new one. A nice surprise

Some of the girls

the girls again

me as a grandfather

Merry Christmas everyone!

UK Trip: York

2011-11-28T09:32:00.007+09:00

One stop on our massive road trip through the UK was York. We stopped there on our way North to Scotland to check out the historic city. It doesn't seem terribly huge, but the locals there have their own distinct accent. The accent includes pronouncing the name of their city 'Yark', so I thought that was pretty funny.

We spent one night at a hostel, and had a good time shopping, wandering around looking at historic architecture, and visiting an art museum. I'll get to the pictures anyway...

Castle tops along the gate wall of the city

a really great red brick building. I'm not sure what the building was, but it said 'Barclays' on the side.

This one is getting a bit old and sags in the middle

a church through the trees

We stopped at a pub to try and get a roast beef dinner because supposedly roast beef dinners from York are famous. They were out so we had to get pork that night.

A church under the clouds

With the history of the city, they also offer ghost walking tours. I'm not sure what that has to do with a guy on stilts...

We stopped at the art museum, and had some tea afterwards. This is my attempt at an artistic photo.

We walked around the city on top of the gate that circles it. Along the way there were was a gate that Roger took a nice photo in front of.

One of the famous streets in York called the shambles. Most of the buildings have overhanging shelves that were similar to a feature in butcher shops where they got their name.

York was our last stop on the way to Edinburgh, which was my favorite part of the trip. Check back soon for blogging from Edinburgh!

UK Trip: Bristol and Stonehenge

2011-11-24T13:11:00.004+09:00

I have a pretty short post today, just 6 pictures. We visited two places on the way back to Peterborough from Wales, Bristol and Stonehenge. Our plan was actually to get up pretty early and try to get a ride, but that didn't work out. They wanted something like $200 per person to ride, and then the weather ended up being normal England weather, so we just stopped by to see them. There ended up being a carnival there, so that was OK.

3 hot air balloons

At the carnival there were bumper cars (called Roger's so we got a picture of Roger in front). It was pretty slow, so the only three riders were me, Summer, and a small kid. It was pretty awesome.

Summer and some cotton candy

Our next stop was stonehenge. I think everyone will be pretty familiar with it because it's pretty famous, if not from the desktop screen included in Windows98. Once again, it was traditional English weather, so the pictures don't look too great. I like stonehenge with it's ties to astronomy and the mystery of who built it, but the setup is pretty stupid. You have to pay like $15 to walk close to it and listen to a guided tour. So in summary, you pretty much pay that much to walk around in one circle.

This is what you get

I like the green moss

The connector kind of looks like a boob

See you next time!

UK Trip: Bath, England and 3 Peaks, Wales

2011-11-22T07:36:00.006+09:00

So this post is a bit out of order with the others chronologically. Roger, Summer, Marlene (Roger's Mother) and I took the trip out to Wales, as mentioned before. This post is about a stop that we made in Bath, England on the way to Wales, as well as one of the walking tours we took to Three Peaks in Wales.

Loyal readers will know that I have an obsession with signage:

Plumbing is important

Bath was a nice place to visit. On our trip we spent maybe 3 to 4 hours there, but we could have easily killed a day there. The city is filled with some great classic architecture. Some of the more ancient features date back to the days when the Romans controlled the land. This stuff isn't from then:

Typical Bath street

Everybody take photos

A decent church on the main square

We ended up taking a tour of the ancient Roman baths. That's right, Bath is called that because it actually contains baths. Pretty cool?

A view of one of the ancient baths. The pedestals along the edges used to support a roof in the Roman times.

This one isn't too exciting, I just love that it demands to be touched.

Of course, the tour included two actors portraying ancient Roman workers. Here, the man on the left has a puzzled look. I can't remember specifically, but we probably just mentioned something like a telephone.

"Ipod? Sheep are my entertainment."

A great view of the skyline of Bath from down in a bath

After the tour, we had to jet out of there because we were a little behind schedule. Maybe we shouldn't have stopped for tea so many times, but whatever. It's England.

Roger leads the way

As mentioned before, we made it out to Wales. We stayed in a more rural part of Wales, which offered mostly walking tours. We did probably half a dozen walking tours, but they were all great. One of the best was a tour we took to this place called Three Peaks, which also had a ruined castle on top of a hill. Unfortunately, the only way we saw to get up the hill was to scale up this steep, sandy slope. My shoes were filled with sand by the time I got to the top, but the castle was cool.

A ruined castle

More ruins

A view of the valley from on top of the hill. This is what I imagine England and Wales looked like a few hundred years ago.

Scottish thisle, I believe. Don't ask me what it's doing in Wales.

And finally...Three Peaks

My other blog

2011-11-21T10:59:00.002+09:00

In case you don't know, I've started another blog to post my paintings. You can find it here.

UK Trip: Worm's Head

2011-11-20T08:05:00.006+09:00

Hello again, faithful readers. Here is the second part of my posts about the trip I took to the UK this year. This time, it's all about the time we spent in Wales, nearby a little town called Rhossili. It's a beautiful little town, and they are trying to keep it that way because nobody can build anything there anymore.

Roger's mother, who grew up in Rhossili

A wild Welsh horse

This post focuses on a geographical feature called Worm's Head. It is an island off of the coast for most of the day, though for about a 4 hour period, the tide comes in and people are able to walk to it. Here's what it looks like:

Worm's Head, as an island

We made the walk out to Worm's Head, which was open from about 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at that time. Apparently it's a bit dangerous. I think the danger is only if you try to make it across when the tide it too high and you can get taken out to sea. For us it was just a walk across a bunch of rocks and then scaling up the hill.

Danger!

Rocks, and a view of the island

A seal that was near the island

A pretty cool natural bridge on Worm's head. We didn't make it that far.

This is when the tide was coming back in. The waves would reach higher and higher, filling in the space in the rocks.

The view from higher up the coast as the tide was coming back in

A church in Rhossili

Most of the houses in the area had driveways installed with these cross bars. Apparently cars can traverse across, but animals cannot.

A giant beast dog we met. Its head is bigger than Summer's

Thanks for reading! I'll post again soon.

UK Trip: Peterborough

2011-11-17T13:59:00.005+09:00

It's finally here. The beginning of my series of posts about my trip to the UK that happened in August of 2011. If I properly blogged that entire trip, it would take about 25 posts or so. Instead of doing that, I'm just going to post my favorite pictures from each city that I visited. That will be much easier.

With that, I'm going to get it all started with Peterborough, England. The city is actually pronounced more like 'Petahbrah' to the locals. It was our home city, in a way. Summer and I stayed there for a while with Roger, a friend we met in Korea. He was nice enough to let us stay with him in England, and he also drove us around the country. It was really nice of him.

We stayed at his house with him and his mother. When we were there, the neighbor kids almost constantly were knocking on the back door to come and say hi and see what we were up to.

This is Summer enjoying a juice box while walking around the city.

Just a random building in Peterborough.

This was a pretty great Chinese restaurant that we ate at run by a man from Hong Kong.

Summer always did the ordering when we went to Chinese restaurants. She would usually order about 5 dishes, including appetizers, soups, and main courses. It always ended up being way too much food.

Peterborough has a pretty impressive cathedral. I don't remember why Summer is laughing here, but it made for a nice picture.

One day we went for a walk along these train tracks of an old timey train.

Here is a boat with a pub in the bottom of it and a Chinese restaurant on the main floor.

I'm not even sure why, but I like this picture of the sky on the day we went to Roger's son's wedding.

Here is a picture of Isobel, you may remember this picture from when I posted it as a painting.

A lot of confetti was strewn about while we had drinks and socialized in the yard outside of the wedding hall.

Roger, dressed in his salsa dancing outfit before he performed during the reception.

Summer, dressed in her salsa dancing outfit before she performed.

A picture of our pint glasses at the Peterborough Beer Festival. It was a nice time, and over 300 'Real' ales were available for drinking.

This the immense wine aisle at a Tesco. Tescos are all over the UK. The larger ones, like here are a bit like Walmart on crack.

UK Paintings, pt.10

2011-11-10T12:47:00.004+09:00

I'm going to try and finish up these painting posts, so I can get on with some other stuff. I have three trips during my recent vacation time that I would still like to post some pictures of. Then, more posts are sure to follow as I go back to...wait for it........Korea. Keep reading and I'll keep writing.

This painting is from a wedding I attended in Peterborough, England. The groom is the son of a friend whom I met in Korea. The bride, pictured is attempting to remove the part of her dress which got caught in a chair while walking down the isle. It made for a great photograph, and a decent painting:

I love how all of the texture turned out in this, but her face came out way too dark. I kept trying to put some yellow color on her face, which caused it to turn out green. Oops.

UK Paintings, pt.9

2011-10-13T07:16:00.003+09:00

This is my favorite painting from the set. This painting is of my girlfriend, Summer. She invited me to go on the trip to the UK, so she's the reason I went. Here she is blowing a dandelion seeds into the summer breeze as we walk along the Thames River in London. This painting just came out so well and I really love it.

UK Paintings, pt.8

2011-10-12T12:16:00.003+09:00

This was cool. Located in Wales near the city of Swansea is a village called Rhossili. It's a picturesque place, recently featured in the drama Torchwood. My favorite part was the island of Worm's Head. It's actually only an island for 18 to 20 hours a day. The other few hours, it's a peninsula because the tide lowers and allows daring visitors to brave the rocky passage out to the island. I recommend it.

UK Paintings, pt.7

2011-10-10T13:55:00.002+09:00

This one is a fairly famous site in England, Stonehenge. I think that the grayish rocks reflect the grayish sky nicely, though I changed the rocks to liven up the color.

UK Paintings, pt.6

2011-10-08T04:58:00.001+09:00

So this paintings isn't my favorite because the colors didn't work out, but it's here. It's a cow. A cow from Wales.

UK Paintings, pt.5

2011-10-06T05:12:00.003+09:00

It was another rainy day in London, probably the 400th of that year. I think it counts twice if it's rainy then sunny then rainy again. The guards at Buckingham Palace still had to guard it, though there was no changing of the guard ceremony that day due to the wet weather.

UK Paintings, pt.4

2011-10-06T01:31:00.003+09:00

Roger smiles, he is at the Peterborough beer festival. Over 300 real ales to choose from, and he has the secret weapon in his pocket.

UK Paintings, pt.3

2011-10-05T06:20:00.003+09:00

Back with another painting from the UK trip. This is a picture of Marlene, looking upon the area she grew up from a hill in Rhossili, Wales:

UK Paintings, pt.2

2011-10-04T09:31:00.003+09:00

I wanted to put this one up because it turned out really well. This picture was taken from the front row of a double-deck bus on the way to London Bridge.

UK Paintings, pt.1

2011-10-04T06:33:00.008+09:00

It's been a while to post on this blog, I know. I want to post something from my recent trip to the U.K., but I have so many pictures. Since there are too many pictures, I'm just going to post 12 small postcard paintings that I made from pictures taken on the trip.

I'm going to start with one of my favorites. It's a painting of the Scott Monument. It's very gothic:

The monument was always lurking in the skyline of Edinburgh. I didn't believe that people could climb to the top because it didn't look like there was any entrance to it, but there was. A very cool monument.

A Giant Fortress

2011-07-13T11:00:00.004+09:00

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

2011-07-09T05:33:00.006+09:00

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

2011-07-06T04:40:00.005+09:00

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.

Sports Day

2011-05-07T10:08:00.006+09:00

Well, it's spring time. There flowers, warmer weather, and everything; so we had a nice day where our school forced a bunch of little kindergarteners to do some sports related activites. To do this, we headed to a fortress in a nearby town, Haemi. It's basically this giant stone wall, but it's very scenic:

Once inside, we were greated with large, open, green fields where the 'sports' happened. This is a really awesome tree that was inside:

I didn't include a lot of photos of the kids engaged in physical activity, but there is a video. I decided to put in photos of the kids making cute faces. This girl is easily one of my favorite kindergarteners, Karen:

All of the kids had to form into lines in order to do some stretching. During this part they were stretching out their necks, but Sean decided it wasn't for him:

The 'sports' included tug-o-war, hula hoops, an obstacle course, and some jump roping. My favorite part was probably the tug-o-war (is that how you spell it?) because it was a bunch of tiny kids falling all over each other:

Now I just have a few pictures of the kids, so enjoy. This is Jasmine, she is one of the most mischievous little girls ever:

This is Antony. He is completely adorable, but he can't speak even a word of English after three months there. I liked him because when he first got there I had to show him how to hold a pencil. He's really handsome, too:

This is a goofy looking little kid named Willy who kept making faces while taking a class photo:

So after that we had a nice lunch. There were some musical performances going on in the fortress. My boss told me that the people are apparently from Pyong Yang, North Korea, so that was pretty cool.

Just Some Blossoms and Bees

2011-04-26T20:33:00.004+09:00

So this post has no exciting news...just that I bought a new camera last week. It's a long story how I lost the other one, but let's just say I was pretty drunk and ran into my friends head with my lip while we were chasing someone. I'm pretty sure that's the moment that my old camera flipped out of my pocket and was lost forever.

Anyway...I took this new camera out to take pictures of the cherry blossoms that have recently bloomed in Korea. It makes this place so much brighter, and it draws attention away from the trash and junk on the street. Also, there were a bunch of bees on this tree that I took photos of, so check them out:

More later....

Iron Kimchi, Finally!

2011-04-24T23:53:00.002+09:00

It's a great day for this blog, as I am finally able to add some concert footage of the last Iron Kimchi show featuring our original singer, Jake. You may remember him from previous posts about the band, as well as the time that I dressed up as him.

Our concert went really well, I think our band ended up playing about 20 songs in total. The instructions from the management was that we could play as long as we wanted, but we couldn't take a break. So that's what we did.

This first video is of us playing an A-Ha song, 'Take on Me'. It's one of my favorite songs, and Jake sings it well:

Near the end of our planned set was that song 'Maps' by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We didn't have a drummer, so Lucas played percussion by just beating on his guitar. The guy who was taking video just left the video on me, which I hate, but here it is anyway:

So after the set we played a bunch of songs that we wrote out the guitar chords and printed out the words for. There was at least one John Denver song in there. We played a Gwen Stefani song 'Holla Back Girl' which I sang. From what I remember it was good.

Here is the best photo I have of the second lineup of Iron Kimchi, together for the last night:

Lucas, Jake, Me. Iron Kimchi.

After that we went to noraebang, and we forced Jake to sing about another 20 songs over maybe a 4 hour period. He said he could barely talk the next day, so I consider that a victory.

What's to come of Iron Kimchi now, you ask? Well, for the remaining two months that I am here we plan to play with a reformed lineup. We now have a drummer, Joe, who has been appearing in the blog. We also have a new singer. She's pretty good. Also I got a bass and Lucas still plays guitar. We should have some new gigs coming in the next few months, so keep an eye out for that. Oh, our new singer is Kelsey, so that's pretty cool, right?

I Got PAID

2011-04-21T23:53:00.005+09:00

I thought this would be exciting news for my readers, that I got paid for something other than teaching. Well, it's not a lot of money, but I got paid a comission for a painting of some dogs for my friend Jackie. I'll just get on with the painting:

I just had to paint her three little dogs. The only catch for me is that they are so ugly...but in kind of a cute way I guess. Oh well, I only had to stare at this picture for about 10 hours:

One noteable change is that I did not paint the penis of the dog on the left. I thought that was the classy thing to do. I also changed the background to a more soothing blue color, because I really hated the yellow. I think it turned out well, and Jackie says that her mom may comission me to do a large family portrait for them. We'll see how that goes...

A Bungeetastic Day

2011-04-11T12:51:00.005+09:00

Last Sunday was quite a day. Seven of us woke up early and caught a two hour bus ride followed by a half hour bus ride. This brought us to a park ourside of Seoul which features bungee jumping; sweet, sweet bungee jumping.

We got to the bungee jumping stand at about 1:25 and booked reservations, which ended up being at 1:30. At least this way we didn't have a lot of time to think it over before we took the 45 meter drop. That should be about a 15 story drop, which is from a platform above a lake, pictured below:

We decided the order by a large, elaborate round of rock-scissors-paper, which I lost every round of and hence was set to jump last. Kelsey and Lucas ended up going up to the platform first to jump. Unfortunately Kelsey jumped while I was in the elevator so I don't have any pictures of her. Here is a picture of Joe, looking really nervous for his jump:

And the girls, Farinaz and Rachel. Farinaz didn't jump because heights aren't really her thing.

Heights aren't Spencer's thing either, but he still jumped:

Before jumping, we decided to each shout a catch phrase while falling. This way if we died we would have last words for others to remember us by. Spencer yelled "I'm a big deal," I yelled "Zeppelin rules," and Joe yelled "Durka Durka." Lucas didn't prepare his phrase, so he unintentionally said "holy crap" while stepping off of the platform. By far the best was Rachel's because we encourage her to yell some swear words.

Anyway, here is video of my jump:

It was definitely a great time to make the leap from the platform. Really exhilarating. The most awkward part was landing in the boat because I wanted my feet to land and stay there, but I was still bouncing.

Now here is Rachel's jump, you can hear her swear words pretty clearly, so cover up any children's ears while viewing:

Rachel defnitely looks proud of herself after her jump, as she should:

A Mustache Update

2011-04-11T12:44:00.005+09:00

I know everyone who reads is curious about the status of my mustache, I just know it. Anyway, as you can see below it's much fuller and looks pretty great now. It's weird, though, the response from Korean people is usually that it looks dirty and they don't like it. I did get a few remarks that it is an interesting shape and that it looks good, so that was nice.

Most definitely my favorite part was last week when Kelsey caught me coming out of the bathroom stall and two of her five year old boys were pulling their pants down to pee. She asked how it was going, so I responed, "pretty good, just a dude with a scary looking mustache hanging out with two small, naked boys in a bathroom." It was my favorite.

Wow! A Korean Wedding

2011-04-03T16:30:00.007+09:00

I want to spend some time getting blogs out today because I have a quite a few back-logged. I guess you could say I have a lot of back-logged blogs cloggin my noggin.

Anyway...this post is about a wedding I went to two weekends ago. The bride is a kindergarten teacher who used to work at my school. Here English name is Michelle, I don't know her Korean name.

I showed up with my neighbor Joe, and we were able to take a photo with Michelle right before the wedding started. Joe and I had both learned to tie a tie from watching internet videos about half an hour before this photo was taken. I think we both did a good job. Oh, and Michelle looked very beautiful in her dress:

The wedding took place in this massive wedding hall a few blocks from my apartment. The complex is about 6 stories, each with a waiting room and the wedding room. The wedding room isn't big enough for everyone, so when the ceremony started a lot of people just waited out in the other room and kept talking. It was pretty loud and I couldn't really hear what the minister was saying. It was just strange to me that everyone just stood out in the other room and didn't really care what was going on. People were even talking inside the wedding and it didn't matter. I guess that is just a cultural difference between Korean and the U.S.

The wedding hall had this super nice ceiling ornamentation:

The ceremony went maybe half an hour, then the bride and groom walked out and were shot with streamers:

There was a slight problem when dozens of the streamers stuck into the ceiling ornaments:

After that was photo time, so the whole family got together. There was also this dress maintenance lady who hovered around the bride and groom to make sure that their gown and tux were absolutely perfect for the photographs. She was dressed in jeans and an old t-shirt, but it didn't really seem to matter:

The photographer was another dude dressed in jeans, an old sweatshirt, and a backwards baseball cap. It didn't really seem to matter.

The whole wedding process took about an hour from the ceremony to the photographs with the family, and then there was another wedding ready to take place immediately afterward. It seems like with six stories of weddings in the place at an hour apiece, they could crank through about 50 to 60 weddings a day if they need to. To me it's like a wedding factory with no real sentiment to it, but I think in America it's also a bit overplayed so that they can sqeeze every last dollar out of you.

Despite everything that put me off about the process, it was still a nice time. I like Michelle and her husband, but I can't remember his name. We also had dinner which was all this weird seafood and unfortunately no cake.

Yet Another Costume Party

2011-04-03T15:38:00.007+09:00

Last night the foreigners of Seosan found another reason to get dressed up in ridiculous costumes, this time for a birthday party. It was John's birthday, a guy who I've known for over a year and a half now. He picked a superhero themed dress-up which led to some great costumes.

I don't care a lot for superheroes, so I picked a real life hero named Jake who used to sing in my band until he left about two weeks ago. I think our faces are shaped pretty similarly, so my biggest task was to grow some facial hair and turn it red somehow, as well as getting a seahawks hat and some glasses. I spent about a week and a half not shaving to grow some pretty thick chin warmer, and then shaved it into this:

This is a picture of Jake:

And me...I did an OK job, but the beard is maybe a little too red. I painted the seahawks hat with some acrylic paint and wore a shirt that used to be Jakes.

I'll get to some of the other costumes anyway. Kelsey, Farinaz and Rachel dressed up as the power puff girls, three cartoon-girl-superheroes.

Here is John, dressed as Lex Luthor:

This is Joe, who always looks handsome in a photograph no matter what he wears or does. He is dressed as a costume Dwight from 'The Office' wore in an episode:

This is Larry dressed as Ryu from the street fighter video games:

This is Jacques as Hunter S Thompson from 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' and two girls whose names I don't know and custumes I don't recognize:

And Kinsey as Quail Man from the TV show 'Doug':

Actually the best costume of the night was a guy named Josh who went as Doctor Doom from the Fantastic Four. I unfortunately don't have a photo of it. Oops.

I wasn't going to let all of my facial hair go to waste, so I shaved a sweet trucker 'stache:

A Quick Note

2011-03-31T00:16:00.002+09:00

Hi, sorry it's been a while, but I'm trying to load videos on here of the recent Iron Kimchi concert and it's not working. I'll post again real soon when I either figure out how to get the videos to load or give up and write about something else.

Kindergarten Graduation 2011

2011-03-16T22:37:00.007+09:00

A few weeks late, here is my post on the JungChul Kindergarten graduation of 2011. This time at graduation I had been with the kids for the entire year, so it was just a little more exciting and endearing for me to see the little angels (and the devils) celebrate another year passed.

As people should know who read my blog, the graduation ceremony involves some plays and some dance routines by the kids. This year musical preformances were also included, so everybody had the chance to enjoy dozens of kids playing ocarinas, xylophones, and castanets. Anyway, I'm just going to get straight to the photos, AND VIDEOS!!!

Here are all of the kids set for the musical numbers:

Kelsey got to MC (master of ceremonies) with a teacher named Evelyn:

Here is the Aries class performing. They first did the "No more monkeys jumping on the bed," which was super cute, and then topped it with this song about reaching for the sky or something:

As they were walking off the stage, the smallest girl in the class, Kelly, decided to stop behind and wave to everyone. It was incredibly cute:

Next came the Snow White play, and this is Jessica looking very beautiful as the witch in her dress:

A few of my favorite students, Jenny and Anna. Anna is Snow White:

I was allowed to watch from the audience in the beginning, but after 45 minutes or so my boss Jay asked me to help backstage. I of course said OK, knowing full well that there would be nothing for me to do back there but to take pictures of the kids. Anyway, I got a few nice photos, although I had to miss the rest of the show.

Here is Lucy, but my favorite part is Ella and Rex behind her with very bored looks. Part of me wonders if they really know how demeaning their costumes are:

The Polaris class did a very well choreographed dance to a K-pop song, which I missed. I did, however catch a rehearsal earlier that morning. I like the video even though Jay and a teacher walk in front of the camera at the end:

Here is Tiffany with the Aries class:

One of my favorite photos is Louis. I'm not sure what his costume is, but he was in the Pinocchio play:

Here is Tom, looking handsome as the prince from Cinderella:

And a shot of the two foreign teachers at our school, AKA me and Kels:

Well, once again graduation was very fun (way more fun that teaching anyway). I was glad while it was happening, but also very glad when it was over. We also didn't have to teach Kindergarten classes until about a week after that.

Keep on the lookout for another post with more photos of the kids from the ceremony!

Piano Concert

2011-02-21T00:38:00.006+09:00

A few months ago, our Korean town was lucky enough to gain a world class pianist. His name is Philip Thomson, who studied at Julliard and is on sabbatical from the Univeristy of Ohio in Akron. Philip played a show at a local church in Seosan, and many of us foreigners were lucky enough to see him preform a lot of Franz Liszt pieces.

I thought it was cool just to be able to see a guy play who has a picture like this:

He played his Liszt songs, which were really amazing. His hands flew all over the keyboard. Unfortunately, the video quality of what I took is not very good, so I won't put it on here. There is one video at the end, so keep reading!

The only problem during the show was that these Korean people would not shut off their cell phones, despite being reminded to at the beginning. At least four different songs were interrupted by ringtones. I have a message for the people of Seosan, Korea:

Grow up you freaking idiots. You are listening to a world class musician who is nice enough to play a free show for you and you can't put your phone on vibrate? Not even after a warning? Not even after one, two, three other phones go off? How are you dense enough to not just hold down one button on your phone for three seconds to enable vibrate? Get a clue and pull your heads out of your asses because you people disgust me.

Anyway, nobody from Seosan will probably read that so I might as well move on with more pleasant topics. At the end he took a group photo with the other performers; a pianist on the left, two singers, and then on the right was the MC. I think he is a pastor there or something:

Many of the foreigners got to take a photo with them as well:

And I took this one while he was playing a short song:

He did end up playing an encore for the people standing around after the show, which I taped. I don't know the name of the song, or the composer, but I do know it's by a Brazilian. Anyway, enjoy:

Souvenirs and Christmas Gifts

2011-02-13T21:41:00.004+09:00

So now that the amazing Packer Super Bowl victory is out of the way, I'll have some more time to blog. This post is about all of the souvenirs that I brought back from the trip to Vietnam. Knowing that goods from Vietnam would be relatively cheap, I did nearly all of my Christmas shopping there.

First, a few gifts for me. This is a three-stringed musical instrument that sounds a lot like a banjo and has snake skin on the body. I have done a little research to try to figure out what it is called and what frequencies to tune it to, but so far have had no luck. It's still pretty awesome:

I picked this up in the same music shop, it's a bamboo xylophone:

These are a few lanterns I picked up for myself:

For my dad I got every episode of Seinfeld in a DVD box set. I wasn't sure of how good the quality would be for a few reasons. First, the box claims the complete season 1-10 although there were only 9 seasons. Also, who thinks Seinfeld is "A good-hearted tween comedy"? Apparently the people who made this box:

It did end up being good quality, so it made a nice gift. I also picked up Mad Men seasons 1-4 for my mother among other things. Here is a nice action shot of her opening a lantern:

And the lantern in expanded mode:

For my sister Amber I got a few things including a lantern. Here is a picture of her opening a nice vace with crushed egg shells on the outside and a nice lacquer finish:

By far, though, my favorite gift that I got for anybody was this finely embroidered silk Japanese samurai kimono for my brother-in-law Dave. The second I saw it I knew it was perfect for him, and he said that he will use it as a lounging jacket when he has friends over. That made me feel good.

Well that's most of the Christmas gifts I gave, next I'm going to write a few posts of the time that I spent with my family in Korea.

I'm Still Painting

2011-02-08T03:58:00.002+09:00

I want to take a break from the vacation posts and put a few of my paintings on here. I have completed these recently, within the past few months. Actually I'm going to have to do another post with lanterns I have painted recently because there's about a half a dozen of those as well.

Here is 'Sunrise, Sunset':

'Yellow Elephant':

'Bar Snacks':
This last one is an orange monochromatic painting I made after a picture taken of my friend Joe and I while pretending to smoke some bar snacks in a bar in Seoul. Anyway, keep reading and I'll post about my families trip to Korea soon.

Vietnam: Leftover Photos

2011-01-30T17:10:00.002+09:00

So this final post on Vietman is not too exciting, but I wanted to add some more pictures that didn't fit in with the other posts.

Come to think of it, there is one story I meant to tell which I forgot:

While in Hanoi on our second night, Kelsey and I were heading back to the hotel. It's easy to find, but we would occasionally walk right by it because there is just so many other things to look at. That night, we walked right by it, but for good reason. A gate was pulled down over the front door. This presented a problem, that we couldn't get to our hotel room, and we had a flight the next morning. We searched all around the building for another entry and tried to pull up on the gate, but to no avail. This is one problem that we could not have possibly forseen. How can you plan for your hotel to disappear? You can't.

So we walked looking for other people, hoping that someone out there could help us. We walked to a cafe where a few people were eating, and finally a waiter at a restaurant was willing to talk to us. We communicated through a series of gestures, pointing, and noises that the gate was locked at our hotel. The guy, very polite says "oh, just knock on the gate!" Well he didn't actually say this, but he communicated it with gestures anyway. We went back to the hotel, knocked on the gate, and sure enough, it opened. We walked into the darkened hotel to find two sleeping mats where hotel employees were sleeping. I am guessing that this is fairly common in Vietnam.

I'll get to the photos anyway, now. This one is is a potato chip logo that I enjoyed. The man, Mister Potato, is very similar to another American tube contained potato chip mascot, but with a hat:

I have a few more photos of Halong Bay. It was a bit overcast so the colors aren't as vivid as I had hoped, but it's still pretty cool:

And another ship and mountain:

This is the houseboat where we went kayaking. On this boat lived both a cat and a dog. I'm wondering what the life of a houseboat cat is like:

Just the back of a hat that I liked on one of the bus rides:

A great sign, "Say no with smoking for your health!":

Riding in a taxi in Danang on the way to Hoi An:

This is a Vietnamese crosswalk sign. They were all blue and white, but every single one was a little bit different from the other ones. I'm not sure if each one is hand made, or what:

A chicken in a park we went to in Hanoi:

This is just a giant worm, nothing more:

I'll blog again shortly!

Last Day in Vietnam

2011-01-23T19:26:00.005+09:00

On our last day in Vietnam, the train pulled into Hanoi at about 6 in the morning. We went to our favorite spot, Lake Hoan Kiem while the sun was rising and walked around it probably three times and watched the sunrise. We just literally had nothing to do and nowhere to go, so this seemed like a good idea. We saw some workout classes going on, including one of all middle-aged people dancing to 'Where do you go, my Lovely?'. Here is a nice picture of a tree:

Luckily, we were able to keep our bags at the hotel that we had stayed at a few days prior. They lady there, Bella was amazingly helpful. Without our bags, we were able to go and check out a few sights. We made our way to the Temple of Literature, a Confucius temple commemorating famous scholars and learned people.

First, though, we stopped at a park right across the street which required jumping a fence to get into. This place was so secluded, which was a nice break from the constant motor bikes whizzing past every second in most other places of the city. Oh, here's the park, it's basically a giant circle with a lake and an island in the center, which you can't see in this photo:

This is the gate to the Temple of Literature:

A super awesome vine-filled tree within the temple area:

A nice pink flower, feel free to comment if you know what type of flower this is:

The temple featured the biggest gong I have seen to date. I'm sure it can produce an amazing sound but no implements were present with which to strike it:

A nice photo of the buildings on the premises; I like the curves at the corners of the roofs:

Afterward, we headed back to the lake area and did some finished our shopping. While I was shopping, I left Kelsey by the lake and she ended up meeting two different guys who asked her to help with their English. The second guy we met and ended up going out for a few beers. I bought him about 60 cents worth of beer, he paid 10 cents for me to use a nearby bathroom. When I say nearby bathroom I actually mean alleyway where some guy lets you pee for a small fee.

Here's a nice photo of the historic district in Hanoi:

So we had our last dinner and headed to the water-puppet theater for our show. We paid an extra dollar for VIP tickets and were in the second row. VIP tickets are $3, so it was worth it. This is a pretty famous show, tickets must be bought at least a day or two ahead of time. My favorite part was the musical accompaniment, which was absolutely sensational.

Kelsey and I ended up being a little tuckered out for the show since we had not slept for a long time. The show had no speaking, only music, and told stories such as when rice farmers tamed the water buffalo. I caught a few photos, but don't have a perfect memory of the experience. Here are some of the puppets:

Here is a well crafted dragon puppet that sprays water:

Our last day was also New Year's Eve, so we got to see a lot of bright lights but had to leave town by around 10 to go to the airport. We had a countdown in the terminal on my Ipod watch and then sang 'Auld Lang Syne' with some Korean middle school students who were also in the terminal with us.

Really, the rest was even more blurry from there with the lack of sleep. We left the Busan airport around seven in the morning, got into the car, and drove all the way back across Korea in the tiny car. I probably shouldn't have driven with so little sleep under my belt, but there were no incidents. I then had a precious few hours of rest before I had to go to Seoul, check into a hotel and meet my family the next day. Keep reading, my families trip to Korea is coming up next!

A Few Shots from the Train

2011-01-22T19:47:00.002+09:00

Riding the trains in Vietnam was a great experience. I really like the train as a form of travel across countries, or across continents as I hope to do some day. I discussed train travel with a French man and he much prefers it to traveling by plane because it imparts the feeling of traveling a great distance. While riding the train you get to see everything pass by out the window, and it gives you more time to think about what your next destination will be like.

Kelsey and I met some more cool people on the trip from Danang to Hanoi. An old man who was our cabin mate intently watched Kelsey while she was writing in a journal. She knew he was watching so she started drawing pictures to clue him into what she was writing about. When she pulled out tape to attach some tickets stubs to her book, he immediately went to his bag and got scissors to help her cut the tape. During her process of attaching the stubs, he sat there and watched and sliced the tape anytime she needed it.

We also met a French couple were actors in Paris, the man who I mentioned above. I had a nice talk with the girl, Roxanne. I mentioned about how in Korea people are always running into me and not looking where they were going. She went on a rant about how angry she gets and yells at people when they bump into her in Paris and don't say they are sorry. She translated what she normally says to people into English, and then I had her say it to me in French. It was very entertaining.

This ride started during the day, so I was able to capture some photos out the train window. It's a really nice ride through Vietnam because of the great jungle, mountain, and seaside landscapes. Here is a beach:

I stuck my camera out the side of the train and snapped this one:

And the sun set:

Hoi An, Vietnam

2011-01-21T19:42:00.004+09:00

The only stop on our train voyage through Vietnam that time allowed was in Hoi An. More specifically, the train stop was in Danang, and then we got a taxi ride to the ancient city of Hoi An, which is now basically a tourist resort. We only had 24 hours to spend, so it was somewhat of a quick stop.

The city of Hoi An is very picturesque because the buildings are so very old and have a unique architecture compared to the rest of Vietnam. It's pretty small, but I didnt' have too much time to explore the area:

One of the features of this town is that a river runs through it, making it even more beautiful. For some reason we witnessed a boat crossing the river completely crammed with motorbikes, bicycles, and people. I have no idea where it was going:

The river also included many entrepeneurs who offer boat rides for a cheap price. Kelsey and I caught a boat ride during the sunset, though it was overcast and getting dark so quickly. At least there was a nice pink hue to the sky for a while:

Me driving the boat:

The boat ride was nice, but we needed to refuel. Seeing a bunch of restaurants, we stopped at a random one and got an order of duck curry and duck rice. Here is my duck curry with a Vietnamese-style coffee on the side:

Our restaurant seated us very close to the street, so many street souvenir sales-people stopped by to greet us. This kid sold his small clay animal shaped ocarinas for quite a bit more than some places, but he was just so charming. He kept calling Kelsey darling, and she ended up buying a bunch of stuff from him:

I also bought a few things from him, as well as a few souvenirs from a girl raising money to put herself through school. Overall, the gifts sold in this town tended to be quite a mark-up from the rest of Vietnam. Hoi An did offer some great taylored clothing, though. Apparently a suit made in Hoi An is only half the price compared to Saigon or Hanoi. Kelsey used the opportunity to get a custom made dress. She ordered a dress at 8 something the night we got there, and they had it ready for her by 11 the next day. Pretty ridiculous, actually, for only about 20 bucks a dress.

We spent that night at a club with some other travelers and some ex-pats living in Vietnam. There were some interesting people from Russia, Belgium, Australia, the U.S., etc.

The next day was booked with walking through this market and getting breakfast:

This was followed by getting an hour long massage, picking up her dress, checking out of the hotel, and then eating lunch and getting out of town. It was a really nice place to visit, but 24 hours was a little too short.

That Time at The Saigon Train Station

2011-01-19T14:16:00.005+09:00

That was an interesting choice for a tile, wasn't it? Well a more accurate title for this post would be 'That LONG Time at the Saigon Train Station'. It started when Kelsey and I came back from the Cu Chi Tunnels and needed to catch a train. We didn't have any experience with trains in Vietnam, so our concierge tried to call for us. She probably tried to call three times and always got a busy signal.

With no other options, we headed to the station to pick up some tickets for that night. As I remember, we got to the station at about 5:30. There was no line at the ticket counter, so we walked up there and finally figured out that we needed to get a numbered ticket. The current call up was at number 630. We pressed the button and received ticket number 801. Duh Duh Duh.

What followed was an absolutely agonizing wait for tickets that took over two hours. There were only two clerks working and sometimes a group of people would spend over 10 minutes with a clerk. I cannot imagine what they could have possibly been doing for THAT long.

We did finally get our tickets, though, for the 11:00 sleeper train. That left us with another three or four hours to kill before the train. Our obvious first choice was to get some sandwiches and some beer. See Vietnam has these little French bread sandwiches called Bahn My, or something really close to that, and they are extremely delicious. They are one of my favorite parts, these sandwiches, because they are awesome and cost about 50 cents American. They look like this, by the way:

The sandwiches are loaded with vegetables, meat, and sauce. Although the meat sometimes looks like dog food, they are always delicious. Here's a closer look at the inside:

I also got a coconut milk that a small waitress hacked open with a butcher knife:

So we managed to kill another hour or so drinking and eating, and I caught this nice photo opportunity:

With a few hours left to kill, we decided to go inside the station again and use the free internet for a while. Unfortunately, two kids were using the two computers to play games on one, and use Microsoft Paint on the other. Kelsey and I then went and got some snacks. When Kelsey offered the boys these small bear shaped chocolate filled cookies, they surrendered one of the computers.

Another effect of giving up the cookie was that we made instant friends with one of the kids. We tested whether this kid knew rock-scissors-paper, and he did. The boys father, knowing that he had some free babysitters now, left for the canteen never to be seen by us again. We came up with new ways to play rock-scissors-paper, here he is up on a ledge playing against Kelsey:

I learned this kids name at one point, but I couldn't pronounce it and I quickly forgot it anyway. we tried to teach him a little English, but he refused to and just made some noises while we played games with him. We also played high five where he had to jump as high as he could, and then I tried to teach him the game Tetris on a cheap flash version of the game on the computer. We ended up spending over an hour with the kid, and he was pretty awesome:

So now it was almost time to board the train. We got the soft-sleeper class, which was really nice. There were four bunks in each room, so Kelsey and I shared with a Vietnamese couple who slept the whole time. The train ride was a great time because we played cards for a while, and then got to hang out with two Russian couples and two sons from a family of diplomats. So, you know, your average train ride.

Ho Chi Minh City and the Cu Chi Tunnels

2011-01-18T20:51:00.004+09:00

Having booked the flight to Ho Chi Minh upon entering Vietnam, Kelsey and I caught an early morning flight on day 3. The flight left at 8 in the morning and we arrived in Ho Chi Minh, which I will now start calling Saigon for typing reasons, at 10. This left us with a full day of exploring the city.

We originally decided to devote the day to a walking tour. This seemed like a really great idea because it's a way to see a lot of the city in 4 hours, but Saigon was somehow nearly impossible for us to navigate.

Anway, the walking tour started at Pho 2000, a restaurant at which Bill Clinton had eaten during a trip to Vietnam:

The pho was absolutely excellent, as was most of the pho that we ate the entire trip. Unfortunately, due to navigation problems, we were at the wrong Pho 2000 restuarant. Anyway, the walking tour continued and we did manage to find a market which was located on the tour. We bought a lot of nice things. I got some shirts and a pair of shorts, because it was really hot. Kelsey bought a Vietamese dress, among a few other things:

Up next on the tour was a roundabout with a statue located in the center. It looks like the roundabout is about 5 lanes wide all around, so it's somewhat daunting. Luckily, we knew the rules for crossing streets in Vietnam. The above all most important rule is to walk a slow, unchanging pace because motorists are especially skilled at dodging obstacles.

Upon crossing, we had a great view of the city and a relatively isolated place to hang out:

There was one vendor who was trying to sell us these lighters. We couldn't get him to go away until we started claiming that we were Korean and only spoke to him in our limited Korean. Somehow, this actually worked. We continued on our way to an art museum that was closed after getting lost some more, and then we found a welcoming sight:Located in the photo is a blue, white, and green sign that says 'Family Mart'. These convenience stores are littered across Korea, and it was amazing for us to find one in Vietnam. A policeman outside wouldn't let me take a photo, so I sniped one from a distance.

The rest of the day was spent attempting to do the walking tour, then giving up and going to get some coffee and hanging out. We also got some pizza and did some more shopping, but it was a quiet evening in preparation for our trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels.

These tunnels are pretty famous because of their use during the Vietnam war, and we booked a tour to go see them the next day. Our bus left about 8 again, but again that included an hour or so of circling around various hotels until the bus was full. Again the drive was a long time and included an intermission at a gift shop. This time it was a shop where the goods were manufactured by the handicapped, called handicapped handicrafts. They were EXTREMELY expensive.

The tour of the tunnels was really worth it, though. It was really interesting to see this part Vietnamese history and marvel at how small of tunnels these people crawled through and lived in.

Our tour started in a house like this:

Our guide talked a while about the war and the tunnels, and we watched an interesting propoganda video. The video described a series of soldiers called 'American Killer Heroes'. Very nice.

Our guide then showed us a series of booby traps used during combat, including this revolving trap door with a pungee pit below, which looks like it may leave a mark:

He also showed us where exhaust pipes would be place for cooking and how some of the entrances looked. Then, it was time to actually explore a few of the tunnels. We got to crawl through a few for at least dozens of feet. I found it very difficult due to my larger size than the average Vietnamese person. Here is a flash photograph I took of one of the tunnels:

The pictures I took from inside didn't turn out so well, but it seems that the best ones I have is of someone else from the tour standing in front of one:

I have no idea who this guy is, but thanks for posing for the picture, guy. I think my readers can tell how difficult it may be to travel the tunnels.

Next was more of a gift shop phase of the tour. They fed use some potato-like vegetables dipped in some sugary substance that was pretty decent. Kelsey decided to shoot one of the firearms that was available for a dollar per bullet. Here she is with an AK-47:

So that was the end to a nice tour. We snoozed again on the bus ride back and then were off the train station for much more adventure, which I will get to in the next post.

Halong Bay, Vietnam

2011-01-16T14:27:00.004+09:00

Our second day in Vietnam, Kelsey and I visited a location on the Northeast side of Vietnam called Halong Bay. This is probably my favorite part of the entire trip because of the amazingly beautiful sites that we had an opportunity to see.

Halong Bay is a bay. What makes it amazing is that there are dozens of island-mountain-rock formations spread out around the bay. We booked a half day tour due to time constraints, and set out bright and early at 8:00. Unfourtunately, the bus has to circle around the hotels in the area to pick up people which takes more than an hour. Then its a two and a half hour bus ride to get to the bay, in optimal traffic. It was a little longer for us, including a stop at a gift shop for a while. We didn't really need one, but I think the tour gets a kick-back for taking us there.

Finally arriving at Halong Bay, a great and beautiful land was in store. We first boarded a boat for a short ride to where we would eat lunch and kayak. Our boat was really nice, it had two stories and was easy to get a view of the bay. Our boat was similar to the one pictured below:

It was so great to cruise around all of these tall, craggly rock formations peppering the bay.

On the boat, we met some interesting people. A girl who we shared lunch with, Hannah, was a teacher in Japan. We also met a group of three girls who were good friends. One each from Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, who all met while studying Japanese in Japan. We spent some time talking with them and learning about their lives. I also got a great photo of the Korean and Thai girl recreating a certain scene from Titanic:

Our cruise first stopped at a floating house where we could see some live seafood and buy from a mobile floating fruit vendor. There were two vendors there, and each had a cute little boy along with to help sell the fruit. Kelsey bought a few mangosteins from the lady in the photo. They tasted great despite the fact that the lady refused to give her the correct change:

After a delicious seafood lunch, we were taken to another floating house where kayaks and kayaking equipment were stored. This was the exact moment where I knew that I loved Vietnam. I managed to take some photos and video while Kelsey was paddling:

One of the other kayaks

A view of the bay, with Kelsey's head

This is a video I took while kayaking through a tunnel in one of the rock formations:

An interesting part of the experience was at the end of our kayaking. I was paddling again, and suddenly the paddle broke in half in my hands. I continued to paddle with one of the halves, and upon reaching the house again, I was demanded to pay for the paddle. I insisted that a paddle failure is due to many, many uses and routine wear; not one single use. They still insisted that I pay for the paddle. I was already sick of having every dollar sucked out of my pocket that I made a fuss and the tour guide payed for it. A minor victory, but I felt bad that it may have come out of his or the tour's funds.

With that occurance behind us, we set off toward a massive cave located within one of the rock formations. The group of girls, Kelsey, and I decided to sit on the front of the boat with our legs hanging over the ledge. On the left side is me, next to me is the Vietnamese girl, and then Hannah:

The cave was amazing, though I didn't like any of the pictures that I took of it. I guess if my readers are interested they will have to go and see it for themselves.

After the cave, we cruised back to the bus and then had a sleepy ride back to Hanoi during the sunset. Another fun part of the trip was when we stopped at the gift shop for a second time and found these kittens. I held on to this absolutely tiny little kitten who was the youngest kitten I had ever seen. I had to snap a photo of it because it was ridiculously adorable:

That night we went out for some pho, and had a fairly quiet night in preparation for our flight to Ho Chi Minh, which will be featured in the next post.

The Road To Vietnam

2011-01-15T15:08:00.005+09:00

Over the period between Christmas and New Years, I spent an action packed week in Vietnam with my sister. Somehow, one of the most action packed nights was on the way to the airport in Korea.

It started with poor planning. I booked tickets through a travel agent and I thought that our flight was leaving from Busan, in the South of Korea, and flying back into Incheon, closer to our town. Instead both flights were to Busan airport, and I did not forsee how hectic of a travel time Christmas Eve would be. Kelsey and I tried to book a bus ticket to Daejeon so that we could take the train to Busan, but the tickets were sold out for that night. Even worse, all the train tickets going to Busan from Seoul were sold out as well. Oops.

So we were in a pretty big jam with no way to get to Busan and a flight leaving at 10:30 the next morning. Luckily, our friend Michael had told us that his girlfriends car was being kept at his place while she was out of the country, and that we could borrow it for a short trip. I told him about my predicament, and he told me that the car may not be reliable enough to make it 5 hour trip to Busan, but that we were welcome to try if we wanted. Lacking any better options, we were on our way by about 9:30 that night.

We finally got to the airport at 3 in the morning after being lost for a while and almost running out of gas. With nothing to do until the flight, we spent a pleasant night of sleeping in the car while periodically running the heater to warm ourselves. We finally went to the airport at about 6 in the morning, and we were once again on our way.

We did have a nice stop at a rest area. Korean rest areas are top notch. They have restaurants, convenience and coffee shops, and sometimes batting cages. We were lucky enough to find one with a Santa, and took this photo just as midnight and Christmas day were upon us:

So from there the flight was comparatively uneventful, and we made it to Hanoi, Vietnam. Another weird speedbump was when we tried to change our money at the airport, and it turned out that the banks did not take Korean Won. I took some money out of an ATM to have enough for a minibus to a hotel where we could change over some Won into Vietnamese Dong. Somehow, I managed to leave my card inside of the ATM so that it sucked it back in and I lost my American ATM card within a half hour of being in Vietnam. Nice going.

It turned out we found a giftshop that would buy some Won at a semi-reasonable rate so we had enough money to pay for two nights of hotel and two plane tickets. From there we didn't really have any money problems because we could just change over money at the hotels.

The minibus ride was nice into Hanoi, and then I took a few photos of our first time walking around:

Some kids playing ball

An awesome church

The top-notch electrical infrastructure of Vietnam

I thought the money was really cool. It's called Dong and it has a tiny clear window on it

The rest of the first day was relaxing. We spent some time exploring and made some friends who were graffiti artists from Ho Chi Minh City while drinking at an outside cafe.

We were walking and this lady was aggressively trying to sell us fruit. She put her hat and carrying stick on us for a photo without even asking. So we got some nice photos:

Kelsey

After she pretty much forced us to buy some bananas, so I picked up four bananas for a dollar. Not really a great deal, but the photos were nice I guess. It was a nice end to a long day.

...And the Blogging Continues

2011-01-11T13:46:00.004+09:00

Welcome back to my blog. Sorry about this long hiatus, but I took December off and then had a visit from my family last week. These things did give me loads of new material to blog about, so continue reading because I expect about 10 new posts this month.

My first post is about the most recent Iron Kimchi show, which took place on December 15th, and featured the new lineup. Our new lineup basically just replaced Adrian from South Africa with Lucas from Michigan, who is an excellent guitar player. Here's some photos of the band:

Lucas on guitar

Jake on vocals

Me on guitar (not pictured)

Our show was a split show with another band, a Korean band that played a mix of originals and Korean songs, and one American song. I'm not sure what they are called but it was something like Hyundai Power Tech, because they work there.

Iron Kimchi 2.0

Iron Kimchi's set went really well. We used an electric guitar for the first time at a show, which we borrowed from a friend named Larry. My favorite songs that we played were Violent Femmes 'Blister in the Sun', When in Rome 'The Promise', and The Pixies 'Where is my mind'. I have video from all three of these songs but they are too big to post on this site. I made a prop for when we played the Foo Fighter's song 'Big Me'. I threw out a pack of mentos painted to say Kimchitos, which is a joke that at least two people in the audience got.

After our show we had some fun watching the Korean band play. Our favorite was the Green Day song they played 'Basket Case'. I don't have any pictures of them, unfortunately, because my camera was out of memory.

So anyway, thanks for reading and definitely keep reading this month because there will be a ton of new stuff about Vietnam and my family coming to Korea.

I'm (Slightly) Famous

2010-11-28T13:11:00.003+09:00

While shopping at my neighborhood convenience store last week, the clerk informed me that he is a newspaper columnist. He asked me if I would be interested in doing an interview and taking a few pictures with my students. I said OK, of course, so the man visited my school during lunch last thursday and conducted the interview.

I have a link to the online version of the article here, just click on the paper with a picture of a boat on the cover and go to page 24. It's also available in print, so if you are currently in Seosan just go to a paper box and pick up a free copy of 'Go Cha Ro Plus'.

He asked me maybe 7 or 8 questions, and he seemed interested in whether I would be willing to marry a Korean woman, have kids, and raise them here. I told them I am open the that possibility but I wouldn't want to raise a kid here. The school system is a little too ridiculous. He also knew I was a musician, so I told him about our band Iron Kimchee and how we have a show in a few weeks.

One thing I maybe shouldn't have said was when he asked me what is different about Korea and USA. I was on the spot and couldn't think of many things, and I told him that it's dirtier here. It got printed. Oops, sorry Korea.

Please, Stop that Racket

2010-11-16T19:49:00.003+09:00

We have this interesting problem at school: a shop two doors down is having some kind of amazing sale, and to promote it they are blasting ridiculous and loud dance music during my entire afternoon schedule. It is loud enough that we can hear every word of every song clear as day inside of my classroom. To make things worse (maybe better?) there are two girls who dance on platforms in front of traffic right in front of the store. All of the time it's either two girls dancing to music, or sometimes one of the girls picks up a microphone and starts yapping about the sale they are having. I went and took some video with my camera:

In the video I'm not sure if the girls just don't want me taking pictures of them, or if it's illegal or something, but I don't really care.

Today I was giving my fourth and fifth grade class a test, which is supposed to be silent. The whole time the music is just blaring, and I'm singing along in my head to Lil' John while he sings "shots shots shots...shots shots shots shots shots...everybody....etc." Please make it stop. Please.

It was a Monster Mash

2010-11-08T11:50:00.008+09:00

Following the children's Halloween party was a more grown up party for the near-adults that live in Seosan. We all went to the beach, this place called Mallipo which is about 45 minutes away by bus. It took place in what is called a pension. This is where a room can be rented with a kitchen and a bunch of blankets and stuff for sleeping. We slept about 20 crazy drunk people in the room.

The night included a lot of drinking and a lot of cool costumes. It was also the going away party for a popular foreigner in Seosan named Sam. I tried to load a video onto here, but it ended up being about 1 gigabyte of data, so sorry about that. I do have picture of some of the cooler costumes, so enjoy:

Terry as Aburahame Lincoen.

Jake in the tracksuit from Kill Bill and a crazy mask, with Jordy as a Scotsman.

Here is the beach and a beautiful sunset.

A very Harry Potter sunset with Kinsey and Larry

Joe as an Indian call center employee

Skeleton Kelsey and Sam as Kelly Kapowski

Megan and Rob as Luke and Leia

Michael as Santa and Wil as an Ahjuma

Jordy played a bagpipe concert for us outside of the room, which I'm sure the neighbors loved

Megan, Kelsey, and me as Zombie John Lennon

So those are the best costumes that I took pictures of, there were actually a lot of other cool ones that I didn't have my camera around for. The highlight of the night was when Kelsey kept getting texts from a Korean guy in Seoul, and then kept calling. We had Joe answer the phone as Indian call center guy, and had a conversation with him for about 10 minutes. I have about 4 mintues of HD video of it, but it's too big to fit on the site, so sorry.

That's it for Halloween, but I'm going to try to do a lot of blogging soon to clear out my backlog. Keep reading!

A Happy Halloween

2010-11-07T20:51:00.006+09:00

I figure I better use up the material I have from Halloween since I don't want it to become stale and its already a week past the holiday. Anyway, for those who don't know, Halloween is the biggest holiday of the year at my school. The school is decorated starting in October, then the week of more decorations come in, and then the day of it gets ridiculous. All of the windows are blacked out, a haunted house is made in our computer lab, and all of the kids dress up in costumes.

I'll get to some of the costumes first, and then more on the haunted house later. Here is probably my favorite costume of all the kids. This is a 5 year old named William as a vampire:

Here is 6 year old Martin as a Batman Zoro hybrid I think:

Tom, 7, as some kind of masked vampire (Rex is in the back picking his nose):

This kid as a toy soldier is Kevin, but I usually call him Candy to rile him up:

Lucy as something. Maybe a witch?

So now the haunted house. The kids brought in loads of boxes to make kind of a maze inside of our biggest room. We had about 150 boxes which were stacked to form the walls of the maze, then black plastic wrap is put over all of them. There are a few other decorations inside, including this fortune teller's head inside of a bubble that you can see below:

Anyway, for the haunted house, all of the lights are turned off and the kids are sent to crawl under table thing. Then waiting around a corner was Kelsey who jumped out and scared them. Then they came to the next corner and I jumped out to get them, and they had to go back and go past Kelsey. Then another teacher chased them around the rest of the maze, including one part where I could reach my hand through a hole in the boxes and grab at their legs.

So every kid in the school was forced to go through this thing, which I found somewhat terrifying myself. I would say over half of the kindergarteners cried for their mommies, but it didn't matter if they cried because they were forced to finish the rest of the haunted house. Here is a picture of Joseph while I am scaring him:

Most of the 6 and 7 year olds calmed down, but for some reason the teachers kept going with terrorizing the 5 year olds. One teacher ran into their room in a goblin mask to frighten them while Kelsey was trying to calm them. This went on for minutes, and Kelsey claimed that by the time they finally left them alone, her pants were soaked in tears. Soaked in tears.

So I'm going to leave on a happy note, anyway. My second favorite costume is this kid Alex who went as a male policeman stripper:

Look! More Mascots and Signs

2010-10-29T13:20:00.005+09:00

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

2010-10-19T22:36:00.006+09:00

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

2010-10-18T20:54:00.006+09:00

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

2010-10-11T22:23:00.005+09:00

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

2010-10-04T20:26:00.005+09:00

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.

This is Pretty Cool

2010-08-22T22:11:00.003+09:00

Sorry to not post all of the things I've been meaning to (vacation to Busan, more artwork), but I have these photos that I really want to put up here. I was walking around and taking random photos with my new camera, and happened upon a bee flying around this patch of flowers. I used the close up feature and took a few photos.

What I expected was something kind of cool, but I ended up with this:

Now this photo is kind of cool, but with 14 mega pixels, I am able to zoom into this:
This is a picture of a bee worth scientific study. You can see each individual bead of pollen, and my favorite part which is the structure of the bee wing. This is my favorite photo I have ever taken.

Anyway, I still swear I'm going to post more, so check back soon.

Rock Festival

2010-08-17T21:21:00.005+09:00

So what's this now, August? This is my first post of the month so many days in, but I still do promise about 5 more this month from my vacation and a few other things.

Anyway, this first post is about something called 'Rock Festival' that took place at the local park in my city, Seosan, Korea. The only reason I really heard about this is because the two other members of my band, Iron Kimchi, were invited to play with a Korean band at the festival. I decided to not participate though I got sort of a pity invite to play with them. They picked up Adrian because they wanted to play one of the songs he wrote, and they took Jake because he is really a good singer.

So this festival took place on this stage. I took a picture while they invited Jake and Adrian on stage to warm up the crowd:

One of the great parts of the festival was that they included Korean dance troupes. There were about 4 I think in all, and the youngest one featured one of my former Kindergarten students, Barbie. She's front and center of this photo:

Here is a picture of Jake and Adrian playing with the band Sojumok. The Korean musicians were pretty incredible and their set sounded really great. They played and original song by Adrian called "On Fire" and then a Nirvana song. I'm not sure about the Korean audience, but the English teachers present really enjoyed them.
There were a lot of other Korean bands playing that I didn't pay much attention to, but a few did play English songs. The cooler part was definitely the dance groups. Here's one in a photo I like:

One of the more hilarious parts of the evening was that kids would come and say hi to and harrass the foreign people there. Some cute little girls just loitered around and asked questions, which was OK. There was one little boy who somehow felt the need to break dance next to us for most of the night. Here is a picture of him:

He had some pretty decent moves:
It was a fun evening, and that's all I've got. I promise I'll get back with another blog soon.

Mud Fest, etc.

2010-07-29T22:47:00.007+09:00

So I'm guessing that regular readers of this blog know that I haven't been posting lately. I've got some 'splaining to do, definitely. Actually, I've been taking a break of sorts, which was motivated by the fact that I lost my camera a week or two ago, and haven't had any pictures to post because of it.

It all started with this thing called Mudfest. It takes place in Boryeong, which is near Daecheon Beach in Korea (this won't make sense unless you live in Korea). Anyway, its this giant festival devoted to the fact that this community has a special mud with cosmetic and healing powers. Actually I'm not sure about the healing part, but they do sell cosmetics with Boryeong mud in them. To draw attention to the mud, this community holds a festival called Mudfest in July every year. This event draws thousands of foreign English teachers, travelers, military personel, and a few Koreans, all looking to get muddy and drunk.

The festival takes place on a beach on the yellow sea, which is definitely awesome. Then there are all kinds of mud related activities. You have some mud painting (on the body), some mud wrestling, mud obstacle courses, mud slides, mud fights; basically put mud at the beginning of any activity and you have it. There is also some live music. I traveled to mudfest with some friends from my city, Seosan, and we all stayed in a hotel room right next to the beach (we packed about 12 people in this big hotel room). Some fun time was spent at the hotel room, as one of the teachers brought a beer bong.

It was also a great time at the mudfest, except for one small mishap. I had my cell phone, camera, and a friend's cell phone in my pocket in a plastic bag which I thought would keep them safe. On going through the mud obstacle course, I got mud in my eyes and kind of freaked out. I held on to a friend's hand and we all went to the ocean to rinse. After a while I was able to open my eyes again, at which point I realized that the bag with my electronics had split. So everything in there was destroyed, and my camera actually got really hot and I had to throw the batteries onto the beach. Sorry environment!

All in all it was a super fun weekend, all things considered. Losing my phone and camera forced me to go out and buy a better version of each. I got a new phone the next day after mudfest, and picked up a camera the next weekend at a giant electronics store. I kind of splurged and got this camera with 14 megapixel picture taking capabilities. Let me demonstrate:

The camera takes an image like this:

And then I can blow it up to this due to the extreme amount of pixels:

This is incredible to me, who has had a 4.1 megapixel camera for about 5 years. Anyway, everyone can look forward to reading this blog in the near future. I have a vacation the first week of August in which I am touring Korea, and then the rest of the month of August is sure to be filled with great blogs and photos. Keep reading! See ya!

Another Year

2010-07-09T13:53:00.006+09:00

Well, some people may have noticed that I didn't come back home after my first year here was up. That's because I decided to stay here in Korea another year at my school. It really has been a great year, so many experiences, just read the blog I guess.

I'd like take this post to count down the reasons that I have decided to stay for another year in Korea. So here they are, my top 5 reasons to stay one more year:

5. Korean Kids are Cute

This is really one of the perks of the job that I get to work with these kids. I get them from kindergarten up to about 5th grade, which is great because they are still so innocent. Starting in about 5th grade or so some of the kids start to become jerks and sometimes get burned out from the overschooling they are forced into.

I think that Korean kids might be cuter than American ones

4. Korean Girls are Attractive

Nuff Said

3. It's an Easy Job with Health Insurance

Well I get paid decently for working only 30 hours a week. The health insurance is really great, the cost of living is super cheap, so I'm able to save a lot of money. The lack of vacation time gets a little old.

2. Korean food is really good

I have a theory that Korean food is just like a healthy version of mexican food. Mexican food is just various ways to combine meat, cheese, beans, vegetables, and tortilla; while Korean food is various ways to combine meat, rice, vegetables, and seaweed. The seaweed is much healthier than a tortilla and I think the rice is at least slightly healthier than beans.

They come up with some really great ways to do it, to. My favorite is triangle kim-bap (seaweed rice). Its just a triangle of rice and then a little bit of meat wrapped up in the seaweed. My favorite is where they put in a little triangular pork patty with the rice. Absolutely amazing.

1. My Little Sis'

As many readers should know, my little sister Kelsey is coming to join me at my school in Korea in September. The next year we'll be able to team up on adventures and picking on little kids. So, I'm definitely excited. I hope you are too, because there should be a lot more to come in the next year!

They Like Baseball Here

2010-06-27T23:20:00.003+09:00

Hey look at that, it's two sports related blog posts in a row. Don't like sports? So sue me. I made it to a baseball game three weeks ago actually, I'm playing catch up with old pictures and material.

Baseball is very popular in Korea. Actually, last year Korea competed in the World Baseball Classic and got second place. They lost to Japan, but beat the U.S.A. In Korea there are 8 baseball teams in a country of a little over 40 million people. I guess we can compare that to the US which has 30 baseball teams in a country of over 300 million people. Actually one team is in Canada, but whatever.

They baseball game I saw took place in Seoul, at a stadium located on a subway stop called "Seoul Sports Complex." I think that a few teams use the stadium, so there aren't really any markings of affiliation on the stadium that show which team plays there.

The game we saw featured the Doosan Bears vs. the Samsung Lions. It was technically a home game for the Bears, but it seemed like there were about the same number of fans for both teams.

Below is what the stadium looked like, a baseball diamond in Korea looks pretty similar to what they do in America:

There is one (very) important difference at Korean baseball games. At these stadiums, people are allowed to bring in any food or beverage. Yes, beer can be brought into the game and enjoyed instead of paying $7 for one in the States. Amazing! I forgot to mention before, but I went with a few people from my city. In the picture below is Steven, Jackie, then Michael and Jake are enjoying the chicken. My friends Kayla, Crystal, Brian, and Renzo are there as well but unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of them.

The game was fun to watch, but it's surely a different experience from an American baseball game. It feels a lot faster in Korea. In the US it's a leisurely pace, each player is announced and slowly walks up to the batter's box. In Korea I couldn't really keep track of each player going up because there wasn't any announcer.

So it definitely felt faster here, but the game we saw was ridiculous. They couldn't get anybody out. The first inning ended at like 4 to 4 and lasted about 45 minutes. It was kind of like watching batting practice, or a little league game. After the first inning they started getting people out more quickly, but they game still lasted a long time. We had to leave early in order to catch the bus, so I can't tell you the final score.

One great thing about Korea baseball, though, is that the crowd is so enthusiastic about the game. There are cheers going on pretty much all the time, and people have those stupid thundersticks, too, so it gets pretty loud. There are cheerleaders, as well, so that's definitely nice.

Here's a banner I like that was talking about voting day or something, but it covered up and blocked the view of an entire section of people:

Well, I definitely had a blast and hope to go to a game again soon.

They Like Soccer Here

2010-06-20T11:11:00.004+09:00

So the FIFA 2010 World Cup is here, and people around the world are coming together to root for their home nation. Maybe not as much in the states. Well, I don't really know how it is in the US since I don't live there.

Anyway, the games are an exciting national event here in Korea. It doesn't matter that the games are played in South Africa, because they are broadcast on giant screens around the country. Koreans act exactly as if they were going to the match; putting on face paint and red shirts, buying thundersticks, and then watching the game in a group on a giant screen. They root and cheer at the screen as if the players can hear them.

In Seosan, the biggest event is at city hall, where they project the game onto an approximately 20' screen in front of a giant open field. Everybody gathers, and there are even vendors selling food, beer, thundersticks, and these little devil horns that are so popular with the kids. I went to city hall this past Thursday night to watch the Korea vs. Argentina match along with most of the other foreign English teachers. Here is what it looked like:

All of the little red lights are the devil horns. The game was pretty exciting, but if Korea scored a goal things went completely bonkers. They would turn off the screen, flash lights, and spray this confetti all over the place while everybody screams. The picture below is what it looked like, but can't come even close to capture the excitement of the moment.

Half time was a spectacle, too. They had a few dance troups of 'ah jee mas' perform onstage to keep the excitement of the game going through half time. The term 'ah jee ma' is popular to refer to middle aged Korean women who wear giant visors over their faces during the day and are terrible drivers from what I hear.

My favorite part was when two of my friends, Adrian and Collins, headed to the stage during halftime to lead the crowd in chanting 'Dae han min guk'. I think the native Korean people were happy to see some foreigners chanting the official name of the Repulic of Korea. This picture is terrible but I put it in anyway.

Probably the most amazing thing about the night was the amount of trash. EVERYBODY there had wrappers, beer cans, broken thundersticks, etc., and not a SINGLE garbage can was located on the premises. Seriously. They did have a crack garbage removal team who ascended upon the field as soon as the game was over and had the place cleaned within a few hours.

So the game was a great time and its fun to feel the spirit of the people coming together for an event like that. The whole next day I was singing this cheer of 'Dae Han Min Guk, Korea' to the tune of a Beethoven song (the ninth I think?) to my students. I think they hated it.

Happy Birthday to Me

2010-06-17T13:31:00.007+09:00

And now.....finally....the awesome birthday post.

As some know, my 26th birthday was last Friday night (crap 26 is old!). A birthday is exciting enough, but for this day our band also booked a concert/open mic night at the local bar. It ended up being a decent night, so I'll break into the pictures and details:

Here's the band playing anyway, the only new song we learned for the night was 'Summer of 69,' which rocked the house. I think the picture below is while playing Toto 'Africa' because I'm next to the keyboard.

Here's another picture, where I think we're playing 'Sweet Child of Mine', because Adrian has to sit down in a chair to play the solo.

So this night we actually got some people to come up and sing some open mic songs. We had a song from Adrian and then a few songs sung by a girl named Melissa with Adrian playing guitar. She learned some Lady Gaga songs which sounded pretty good. Unfortunately I have no pictures of this, though. There were also songs sung by Crystal and Sade. Crystal sang a 4 Non Blondes song and Sade sang 'Tik Tok' with me playing keyboard.

I picked the Cat Steven's song 'Peace Train' which is a really good song, but I did it no justice. It was my birthday, though, so nobody could hold it against me really. I tried to salvage some dignity by playing a popular Korean song by CN Blue, which people liked. The bartender Hong ran to the stage to sing with me and it turned out pretty well:

So after some more songs from the band it was time to celebrate my birthday. Megan, who came to town for my birthday was nice enough to get me this awesome tiger cake. I pulled a pretty clumsy move and elbowed it off of the counter, almost ruining the poor thing, but some efforts were made to salvage it and it turned out OK:

So then they played a happy birthday song and I stood there:

The best part of celebrating a birthday in Korea is that the bars will put on a pyrotechnic show. So the bartenders did a dance throwing around beer bottles ala 'Cocktail', and then they waved around a stick with flames on the ends. There was also some fire breating where they spit out a mouthful of alcohol while lighting it on fire. Pretty over the top. Pretty ridiculous. Pretty awesome.

So they flipped some bottles around more and made me a happy birthday shot. It was actually a glass sized shot. They made Megan and I cross arms while chugging and then kiss afterwards which was pretty awkward since my face was covered some kind of pink mixture. Strange times. But really fun.

Well thats pretty much what a birthday party consists of in Korea, it's a special bonus we get being English teachers in this country. I got a gift the next day, too, from one of my Kindergarten students which was really sweet:

That's all for now, see you next time!

A Self Portrait

2010-06-16T13:20:00.002+09:00

So I'm guessing some readers are expecting a post about my birthday...and it's coming. I'm just waiting for a few more pictures from that night to come in. It will be soon, don't worry.

To hold you over until that post comes, I have a painting to post that was recently finished. It's a self portrait, obviously, well hopefully it's obvious. It's me made of about a thousand tiny retangles. Then I used only six colors to make up my face and hair. It think it turned out well!

Happy 100th Post!

2010-06-08T13:44:00.008+09:00

Hello, and welcome to the 'Brad's Korean Adventures 100th Post Extravaganza'! This is just something I put together to celebrate the fact that I have made 100 posts, which is really a ton of time sunk into this site. Lately has been a little slow because I wanted to make this 100th post thing, but I do have a bunch of posts I need to get out. It's like a garden hose when you pinch it and then it gets that giant bubble. Anyway, this post is unpinching so expect that mass evacuation of posts soon!

For this post I thought I would just look back at some of my favorite events I had posted about since I started. It's been almost a year now. A year filled with a lot of highs, a few lows, and a lot of craziness. Mostly craziness, actually. Without further ado, I present my top 5 favorite posts from the past year:

5. Everybody Was Pillow Fighting

This day of the pillow fight was easily one of the best days I've had in Korea. I was able to wail on an assortment of Expat English teachers with a pillow, and it was the introduction of my friend Megan, who is sure to appear many more times. I also appeared in a few youtube videos.

4. A Bug and a Bum

I wrote this post pretty soon after arriving in Korea, and one of my favorite new things was finding people passed out in a park with a 2 liter bottle of soju next to them. It's classic.

Actually, it turns out there's and entire blog devoted to this.

3. I've 'Made It'

This post was easily a favorite, when I found a message left to me by a student on the tip of a pencil. 'Brad Teacher Very Bad'. I think that the grammar used in this message helps to support it. I'm about 99% sure who did this.

2. Why Not, More Chusok Pictures

Being a kindergarten teacher in Korea will leave one with an abundance of pictures of adorable little kids. This was one of my favorties because they had to dress up in these traditional Korean costumes.

1. The Post in Which I Describe Eating Octopus

OK, I think this one is my favorite post just because eating live octopus is absolutely surreal. I command everyone who comes to Korea to try this!

I think it goes without saying that one of my favorite things about Korea is the amount of crazy mascots that are willing to sing, cook their friends, and sometimes cook themselves while singing just to lure customers into the restaurant. I've gone ahead and counted down my 5 favorite of those, too.

"I've studied hard so you can enjoy my large, delicous brain!"

"I am Korean Tom Hanks!"

"I'm drinking my own pee!"

"Oh, you know you cannot resist my sweet meat song! *wink*"

(Thanks Dave for the winning caption)

"I am two star general of sausage and pipe tobacco!"

Well, the items in the countdown have been my favorite items I've posted, but I'd like to hear what you, my readers, think. If anyone has favorite posts that I've left out, favorite mascots I forgot, or some additional mascot captions for these that you want to share, I would be delighted to read them in the comments section.

Thanks for reading and see you in the next 100 posts!!!!!!!!

Happy Election Day

2010-06-02T18:29:00.004+09:00

It's an exciting time in Korea as elections are today. Actually I'm way too ignorant to know what offices these elections are for, but I do have today off since everyone is supposed to get out and vote. YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!

Working up to this day off hasn't been all sunshine and rainbows, though. The Korean political campaigning system is one of the most annoying things in the world. Each candidate has a truck with a podium set up in the back, and the truck also usually has an LCD screen and a really loud speaker system. These trucks were driving around for the last few weeks blaring the candidates campaign songs, sometimes starting at 8am, right outside my window. One song was to the tune of 'If you're happy and you know it,' and it kind of drove me to hate the song.

The picture above was taken at night and unfortunately I don't have anything better. I did, however, take this photo below while walking to the grocery store. This candidate had some volunteers, mostly middle aged women, stand on this street corner and wave these fans with his candidate number on it.

I definitely miss the USA where the political commericals are just on TV where they can't wake you up in the morning. Well, at least it's over now.

The Fish Ate My Feet

2010-05-30T21:28:00.006+09:00

Warning, this post contains several explicit photos of my, and others feet. If you have a disliking or repulsion to feet, I recommend skipping this post.

Anyway, this post is about last Sunday, the last day of the Buddha's Birthday 3 day weekend, which was awesome. On Sunday I made the trip to Seoul to meet with Megan and her sister, Becky, to do something called Dr. Fish. There aren't really any doctors involved, but there are definitely fish. You basically put your feet in a fish tank for 15 minutes to allow a bunch of little fish to eat the dead skin off of your feet. The same fish that have eaten dead skin from countless other's feet. But it's best to not think about that.

So this thing was actually really cheap, it only cost 2000 won for the 15 minutes, although you have to buy a coffee or tea along with that. The first thing that happens is shoe and sock removal, and then a girl washes your feet in a sink. Who would want to have her job? Anybody?

Here is what the fish tank looks like:

So we started the clock and dunked our feet. One of the best parts of the experience is just seeing peoples faces and reactions to the fish. Here's Megan, surprisingly restrained:

Becky was a little bit more uneasy about it:

And me:

Let's just say that it really tickles and is super off-putting at first. It took me about 8 minutes to get used to it, but then the last 7 minutes I was able to sit back and enjoy the experience. Now here's some pictures of my feet:

The fish found a nice spot on the inside of my right ankle:

Why not, one more picture of my feet:
Afterward, my feet did actually feel really good and I was happy that I did it. Who knows, maybe I'll go back.

Korean Toothpaste

2010-05-25T12:50:00.006+09:00

After all of these sweet posts, it's time to clean things up around here. Luckily I have some of this excellent Korean toothpaste, 2080.

I was taking a look at the packaging, and noticed that they have a slogan translated to English on the label:

"Keep the 20 healthy teeth till 80 years old." Ahhh, that's nice. W....wait a second here. Isn't there something wrong with this? 20 teeth? 80 years old? I took the time to count my teeth, and theres definitely 28. And do I want teeth if I make it past 80? Maybe, you know. I don't want to rule it out.

Anyway, I think this slogan may just be way outdated, but it's one of those hilarious things you notice while living in Korea.

Happy Birthday to Bu(ddha)

2010-05-24T10:40:00.006+09:00

Last weekend was a really eventful one. It actually felt like about 2 weekends within one. Well, actually it was a long weekend of three days, so it was more like 2 weekends in a weekend and a half. Still, an eventful weekend.

It started Thursday night when the band was supposed to play a show. We unfortunately found out an hour before we were supposed to play that they weren't expecting us to play a show that night. Some kind of gap in communications. We were pretty upset and ended up drinking kind of a lot.

This becomes important because our singer Jake ended up setting up a show for us just down the street. So we called all of our friends over there and played a set with the three of us in the band being pretty hammered, and it didn't go extremely well. There were definitely a lot of missed notes, words, and some timing issues. It could have been worse, but we got a lot of sympathy comments which stung a little.

So with that over with, the next day, Friday, was a holiday in Korea because it's Buddha's birthday. I don't really know a lot about this holiday, but I still headed to Seoul to meet my friend Megan and her sister to go to a lantern lighting in honor of Buddha's birthday.

Our plan was to go on the bus tour, so we met around that area and there were a lot of fountains. I ran through one.

There was also this giant silhouette of a woman hammering something, which was cool.

And some strange giant shoe made out of a bunch of regular sized shoes:

The bus tour was booked for the rest of the day, so we decided to just play some frisbee and then walk along the river to where the temple is. Here's a picture of Megan and her sister Becky along the river walk.

So we walked over to Insadong where the Jogyesa Temple is for the lighting ceremony. They have a whole bunch of lanterns kind of like being under a tent or something. Next to the temple there were some monks and some women all bowing in front and then a man who did a chant for about an hour. There were even little boy monks who were super cute. One fell asleep and had to be carried away.

At the temple was this cutesy looking Buddha statue with happy anime eyes.

People were filing into the temple for something, but I'm not sure what it was.

We had gotten there a little after seven, and the lantern lighting happened after sunset. So we were waiting there until after 8 o'clock listening to a man doing chanting and a lot of people were singing with, but we didn't know what they were singing about. Finally, the lanterns were lit and and everyone was happy.

So actually the most exciting part of the night was after this ceremony when we went to this little hof (drinking place) called Johannes Brahms, themed after the composer. We ordered a bottle of wine. As the woman was at the bar opening our bottle, Megan says "Oh my god, there's something on her leg!" Megan had watched something run across the floor and up the woman's leg. I looked over, and it was this giant hideous cockroach bigger than my thumb. It continued running all up and down the woman's leg and we decided to let her know about it. So she inspected her leg and the roach ended up running up the woman's shirt. She finally saw it, and freaked out and brushed it off of her. At this point the cockroach ran behind a shelf directly behind my chair.

We all looked at each other, startled at this event, and Megan says "you guys, chug the wine we have to get out of here." I was a little freaked and couldn't drink anything for a few minutes, but eventually was able to down a glass. Another woman in the bar went to the bathroom and on the way back the roach was following her to her seat. It was a super aggressive Korean cockroach.

We stood up as if to leave and the lady just packaged our bottle for us to take it home. We got out of there as quickly as possible, but the lady still charged us for these nuts that we orded and didn't have time to eat. That stung a little bit, but at least we made it out of the bar without being attacked.