A Giant Fortress

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another picture of the dragon bus driving along the fortress:

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

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

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

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

I Went to Busan in August

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy 100th Post!

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!!!!!!!!

Japanese Deliciousness

One's first thoughts on Japanese food are probably sushi. Love it, hate it, never tried it, it's raw fish, a fact some people can't surpass. Sushi was all I really knew about Japanese food going in, so the recent vacation was a nice surprise. This post is somewhat of a walkthrough of the meals our family ate in Japan, including delicious sushi.

Food in Tokyo, Japan is a lot like it is in New York City. There's food from almost every culture, and top-notch chefs are there to deliver some great tastes. While on the trip, our family tested food from Turkey, India, Korea, as well as Japan. This is not to mention we also picked up a snack from Wendy's so I could have my first Frosty in 6 months.

Anyway, I'm just going to walk through what pictures I took from the experience, which mostly delves into the Japanese side.

An interesting meal was breakfast. We found a restaurant which offered a full breakfast, being a large piece of toast, a hard boiled egg, and a cup of coffee, for only 450 yen.

I didn't get any pictures of what ended in my favorite meals, which was mutton curry from an Indian restaurant. I did get a picture of our trip to the Turkish restaurant, which was maybe middle of the pack. Middle of the pack is still pretty good for this trip. At this restaurant we all tried to order something different. The meals ranged from some loose meat on a plate with side dishes to the one I ordered: a pizza. It's kind of a strange pizza because it looks like a fish.

One day in Harajuku, we stopped at the conveyor belt sushi joint, as mentioned. The sushi was so incredibly good there, I don't think I can get anything quite like it in Korea.

This one is fish eggs inside of the seaweed wrap:

Kelsey after eating wasabi:

Dave after eating wasabi, I think he is on what he likes to call a "wasabi experience".

We destroyed some sushi in this place, this is only about half of what we ate:
So after all of the meals, my favorite ended up as the Shabu Shabu beef. For anyone who doesn't know, this is very thinly sliced pieces of meat which are boiled in a pot of broth until brown, then put into a cup of sauce to cool and eaten. We ate at a restaurant which offered a 5 course shabu shabu meal, for quite a pretty penny. We ate the cheapest type of meat at about a quarter of the price of the most expensive one, which was still quite expensive.

This meat was ridiculously good:

Cooking in the broth:

This orange sauce was absolutely amazing:

Ironically, a few weeks after this meal I found a buffet restaurant in my town in Korea which offers all the shabu shabu you can eat, among other things. My first time there last week I ate about four plates of it, and I have plans with another friend to spend an entire Saturday afternoon there sometime.

My last meal in Japan, also one of my favorites, was Okonomiyaki. This is a mixture of eggs and vegetables among other things I don't know, and then a bunch of toppings. Some of the dishes are prepared in front of your eyes. All of ours were brought out after being prepared because there wasn't any space next to the table. We were really crammed into this table.

My dish had squid and octopus on it, which was awesome. All of these dishes ended up being really excellent.

Well, that's thats all I took for pictures of the food, which is kind of a lot considering that I took about thirty pictures of food over the trip.

Konichiwa, Japan

Ahh, the vacation was in full swing with the parents and little sis in Korea, and after a few days that meant it was time to hit up Japan, noted rival and sometimes hated enemy of Korea. Japan: the land of the rising sun, bullet trains, tasty sushi, giant sumo wrestlers, and pokemon (unfortunately). Here's a song to get you in the right mood while reading this post:

We had an early afternoon flight, and with Japan being Korea's neighbor, we were in Japan by mid afternoon. My sister and her husband were on a plane just a few hours behind us so we decided to kick it around the airport until they got there. Unfortunately, Tokyo Narita airport is vulnerable to some ridiculous bottlenecks (my trip back!) and we spent a great deal of time at the aiport. This did leave me a generous time period to stare at my newly acquired yen:

It's pretty cool money actually. The center oval is a solid creme color, until you hold it up to the light and then another image of face to the right of the oval appears. The money is, however really wide so it doesn't fit right into western wallets.

After Amber and Dave finally arrived, we were on our way to the series of train rides that would take us to our hotel. Here's a picture of the family together at last at the train stop. Kelsey's checking out the strange Japanese candy she bought. I bought some orange flavored M&Ms at the same shop.

After a switch to Japan rail from the airport line, we arrived in the district which contained our hotel, called Shinjuku. It's home to a nice electronics and shopping district, plenty of bright lights, and the busiest subway stop in the world. This is one of the first pictures I took of the scenery in Japan:

Luckily for us, Amber married a man with a great interest in all things Japanese. Dave did some careful studying of various maps, including Google maps to find our hotel. He served as somewhat of a navigator for our entire trip. Thanks Dave!

He lead us almost directly to our Hotel, the fabulous hotel NUTS. This picture was not taken the first night but rather on a different day.

Why is it called hotel NUTS, you ask? The place IS NUTS. Or maybe the rooms are so tiny that you feel like a squirrel storing nuts in a small tree. There are many schools of thought on this top....oh wait:

Of course! The hotel is a new urban time and space. It was definitely something. It turns out it was converted from a love motel, meaning the type that was once rented by the hour. I liked it actually, it had a soda fountain where you can bath in the luxury of three complimentary beverages each day. The rooms are tiny, but the bathrooms are huge. And bonus, the toilets are sanitarized:

So nothing to worry about there. The TV was huge, and so was the remote:

Yep, thats got all of the buttons I'm used to. A 1, a 7.....wait....um, a 10, 11, and a 12? I've never seen that one before.

Once settled in, we ventured out into Shinjuku to find a restaurant for our first Japanese dinner. We settle on a place that had nice pictures on the menu. We each ordered a good looking meal. The meals were for the most part OK, but my little sister ended up ordering a dish with chicken gizzards, and my mom was served a dish which included the parts of the chicken that are a little chewy/crunchy. This was somehow the main part of her dish. It was literally that part of the chicken that is crunchy and chewy which was breaded, deep fried, and served with peanuts. She hated it. I somehow got myself to like it. This part of the chicken usually makes me gag/lose my appetite, but when I was expecting it I thought it was actually kind of good. The other dishes were at least edible, so there was one Japanese meal down.

Next was another small Christmas in which a few holiday cookies were eaten which Amber had managed to smuggle overseas, and gifts were exchanged between Amber, Kelsey, Dave, and I. It was a cozy Christmas to say the least. Amber and Dave did get me one of the best possible gifts for a Brewers Fan, this Bratwurst racing sausage bobblehead doll. Thanks Amber and Dave.

See you tomorrow for more Japan fun!

Museum of Korean War Stuff and Junk

So as this title implies, I made it to The War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul. Truthfully, I didn't take a lot out of it, so that explains why I called it "Museum of Korean War Stuff''.

As for the junk, I figured I would stray off topic and talk about how much my job has improved just this week. So I got a new student in one of my regular classes, and her parents put her in some additional private classes. Luckily, my boss put me on for teaching her, which meant that he would have to relieve me of a few other classes. Somehow he did about the best thing possible. One of her classes is scheduled during my most hated class, which is with middle school kids, so I don't teach that anymore. YES. I was also given Friday mornings off. NO FRIDAY MORNING. And all I have extra is one on one lessons with a student who actually wants to learn. Wow.

Anyway, heres the war museum stuff. Like I said, I didn't really learn a lot from it, so it's mostly just a bunch of pictures. I went two weekends ago now with my friend Daniel who was actually in the military and served in the first Gulf War. By far the best part of the trip to Seoul that weekend was that we ate at both a Mexican and a Thai food restaurant. To me, those are the two best food countries in the world. We also ate at restaurants that did a super good job. Mexican was at 'South of the Border' at a mall, and the Thai was at Thai Orchid in Itaewon. Let me just say that Thai Orchid makes a coconut soup that might as well have come from Thailand. Wow.

So here's the museum anyway. The first thing we saw when approaching was this statue of two guys. Is it just me or does it look like two people making out? It's actually called 'The Statue of Brothers,' so thats a little bit insensitive to two brothers who were separated in North and South Korea. But come on, they are totally making out.

The outside of the museum I found a little bit more interesting than the inside. They had this ridiculous collection of war machinery, I think mostly from the Korea conflict (the one from MASH). They had just so many tanks, airplanes, cannons, and really everything. This is a fountain made from a mine.

This is an artsy shot of the 'Korean War Monument.'

Here's the front facade of the museum. It's surrounded by flags and then a giant set of steps leading to the door. I was also impressed by the giant green cantilevered overhang over the doorway. I forgot some stuff inside of a locker on the way out, and then made it to about the point where I took this picture before I realized it. There were about five minutes until the place closed, so I sprinted all the way up the steps to try to make it in time. I tried the doors and the first two I tried were locked. They had luckily left just one open, and I made it in time.

Here's some of the airplanes they have outside the museum, with Seoul Tower in the background.

Inside they had some impressive murals, this one with some Korean soldiers storming out of a helicopter. I call it "who farted inside the chopper?"

This is a replica of 'Fatman' himself. 'Littleboy was right next to it but it wasn't impressive enough to make it on the website.

So this was a seemingly random face cutout thing, and on a whim had Daniel take my picture in it. It turned out to be one of my favorite pictures of myself ever. I kind of feel like I should have been in the military because of this shot.

The historic section had this neat armor from the various dynasties throughout Korea's history.

Here's the sun setting on the Museum, ahhhh, what a day.

So overall it was a nice visit and definitely worth the three bucks. I was a little bit disappointed because there's barely even a mention of the U.S. and their involvement in the Korea conflict. There's giant section where they have a life-size model of somebody from each country that came to fight in the Korea conflict, and the U.S. didn't get any special treatment. Oh Well.