I'm Back!/Bijindo Island

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And closer to sunset it looked like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iron Kimchi, Finally!

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?

A Bungeetastic Day

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:

Wow! A Korean Wedding

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.

Kindergarten Graduation 2011

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!

That Time at The Saigon Train Station

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

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.

The Road To Vietnam

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

Me

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.