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.

Souvenirs and Christmas Gifts

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.

Drawing Day

Welcome, loyal readers to post number 6 of March. That makes this a productive month of twice as many as last month. Actually, come to think of it, I called last month a haitus month, so that's not too impressive I guess. I'm not completely sure anybody still reads this actually since nobody has commented for a while.

Lately I have sort of a backlog of posts I've been meaning to get out, so I literally have about 5 posts in my head that I'm just to lazy to write. Something happened today, though, that I have got to post about.

I called this day 'Drawing Day' unofficially because it started out with my first graders having to draw a picture of their family. To give them the idea (they dont speak much English) I drew a picture of my family on the board and labelled it. I think I did a pretty decent job for stick figures:

My dad did come off looking a little like Fidel Castro, but that's not too big of a deal. So next period, a bunch of my students had the idea to draw me, I think they had the idea because of the drawing that was left there on the board.

Anyway, here a few drawings from my grade 2 students:

beautifully captured my eyelashes

kind of a melancholy look

But theres actually a pretty funny story to this last one by my grade 2 student. He drew this, and I'm pretty sure he's not really fond of me. So flash forward 3 hours and I have a class with 2 students. I pushed one of the girls in her chair, and I wasn't sure what happened but she kind of sat there crying with her head down for like half an hour (Korean kids cry all the time-its not a huge deal). I decided to take these drawings out to try to chear them up, and I show it to the other student. She cracked up for about ten minutes. Literally ten minutes. The other girl decides to perk up and look at this and she gets a little kick out of it. They asked me who drew it and I went 'oh it's some grade 2 I don't know his Korean name but his English name is Derek.' They go 'Woa,' because it ended up that the kid who drew the picture is the little brother of the girl who was crying. So then we laughed for a another few minutes about it and the day was over. Here's the picture by the way:

So those events made the day end kind of weird, but it was OK overall. I did get this other drawing of me that I thought was pretty good:

See you next month!

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.

Sayonara Japan

Here we are finally, for they last day of my family's trip to Japan. I managed to milk it for about 10 blog posts, so I'm definitely happy. It was a great vacation, so there's that, too.

The last day for me was rounding up a few odds and ends. The rest of my family left two days later, but I still needed find some souveniers to spend the rest of the yen I had in my pocket. We also never got a chance to see any of the crazy dressing Harajuku girls, so the family trotted out to Harajuku because it's also home to an Oriental Bazaar where souveniers could be had.

Unfortunately, being New Years, the Oriental Bazaar was not open, and once again none of the Harajuku girls were out. This was a pretty big bummer, but we found a few things to do. First we went to check out a place called Meiji Jingu in Harajuku which is a shrine to emporer Meiji. Since it was New Years, this place was ridiculously crowded. Ahem, see below.

We walked along with the crowd close to the temple, then decided to turn back again since we weren't sure what to do when we actually got to the temple and it would have taken forever. This is a wall of lanterns we saw along the way, I'm not really sure what their meaning is though.

This place was home to a souvenier shop, which we did check out. This was my jackpot because they had just about everything I wanted as far as gifts from Japan go. I managed to blow most of the rest of my wad of cash at the place. Heading back to the subway, we ran into this group of four girls in traditional Japanese outfits. They were super nice.

We had our last family meal together for at least 6 months at this really good okonomiyaki restaurant I'll talk more about in a future food post. Here's a photo of the fam anyway:

Since we were there in Harajuku, which has a ridiculous concentration of ice cream crepe stands, we decided to see what the big deal was about.

In short, I recommend. Mine was something filled with custard, chocolate, bananas, and whipped cream. Kelsey enjoyed her's, too:

That was the end for me as we headed off to the subway station to say goodbye. A Japanese girl nicely took this photo of the family:

A quick goodbye to limit tears, and I was on my way out of Japan.

My trip back was a bit ridiculous, I got to the airport just in time even though I arrived two hours early. It was a big travel day and there was a big pileup at the check in counter. I made it to my plane about half an hour before it took off, so that was OK. I made it to the Korean airport where I realized that I had forgotten my Korean ID card, so I was really nervous about making it through immigration. This ended up not being a deal at all, so that was OK, too.

I next took the subway to the bus station where the last bus to my town had left about an hour before I got there. This meant I was going to spend the night in a spa under the bus terminal. I took a shower there, which was nice, but the sleeping room was like torture. It was about 90 degrees in there so I was sweating and these guys kept making a bunch of noise. They kept sighing in their sleep like madmen everytime I was close to sleeping, so I didn't sleep a lot. I caught the 6:30 a.m. bus to my town, which was even worse than the spa. It was really really hot on the bus, and due to the amount of snow falling the trip took 3 and a quarter hours as opposed to the 1:30 it is supposed to take. Just torture. It was nice to be home, anyway.

Stay tuned for my last two posts about Japan. One will be about the souveniers I bough and another about the food.

Japan: The First Full Day

All right now, Japan, first full day. What do we do? How about......a huge department store?How about......a palace? How about....electronics? All right, let's do all of these things. Here are some nice photos of our first full day.

We hiked over to Japan Rail (JR from now on) and headed to Ginza which has these pretty crazy huge and crazy expensive department stores. My family checked out this 8 story department store called Matsuya Ginza. Actually it's 8 stories with a roof garden. I didn't take any photos of the store because I'm always nervous about being suspected as a burglar when I take photos in a department store. Matsuya Ginza had a nice food court in the basement, and plenty of stores through all of the floors, but the best part was near the top where they had selections of Japanese prints and old books. I ended up picking up one print without any real information on it but I'm assuming it's not too rare or valuable because it cost me only 500 yen (roughly $6).

Here's a photo of the area:

From the store it was a quick walk over to the grounds of the Imperial Palace, aka where the Emporer of Japan lives. This next pic is a giant moat that surrounds the grounds:

It was a nice day and a few swans were out. This guy was a beast because he was about five times the size of the ducks in the moat:
Here are Amber and Dave in a candid shot in front of the Statue of Kusunoke. According to Dave, he was the ideal of samurai loyalty.
This is a picturesque view of the imperial residence. I would say I'm proud of the photo but I don't think you could take a bad picture from there:
We walked over to a park with these nice fountains in it. It was a great little park because it was somewhat removed from the big city, yet there were still the giant buildings to enjoy as a backdrop.
I sniped a photo of Amber and Kelsey over Dave's shoulder:
Next we were off to a gargantuan electronics disctrict, Akihabara "Electric Town". This district was basically one huge electronics store after another, which is OK but about a million other people wanted to see it at the same time:
Here's a photo of my mom, probably trying to figure out what some crazy sign says:
The street was also littered with these girls who dressed up costumes like little amine characters and shouted things and tried to hand you paper as you passed by. There were literally dozens of girls doing it that day. I caught this before she noticed me so she wasn't smiling or anything. These girls are getting paid, so obviously they should be smiling constantly!
I did pick up one souvenier from this day. Kelsey and I stopped into this store that sold ridiculously expensive collectible action figures, and they had a bin outside of these plastic bags full of junk. It turned out the junk was discarded happy meal style toys, and you could buy it for only 200 yen. I'll have a picture of it in my post where I show all of my souveniers.

We capped that day off with some delicious Indian food, and I got the amazing mutton curry. Kelsey and I went out later with some Australians we met from across the hall in our hotel. We went out for a few beers and sake and made some new friends. Another great day. Come back tomorrow for a post about Mount Fuji.