Peripathetic Playground

Traci's Underwater Adventure

2008-09-19T05:34:00.002+09:00

During a peaceful dive, Traci reads a plaque and learns a frightening secret.

Raspberries

2008-07-20T08:48:00.006+09:00

Last night, as Traci and I walked around Bellingham, we devised a brilliant plan of touring Lynden's Raspberry festival.

This morning, it came to fruition. Our first stop was the all-you-can-eat raspberry pancake breakfast. We were both hungry and excited.

Traci had to excuse herself a few times during the meal:

(for details go to www.cleaningthecolon.blogspot.com) Luckily, there was a woman who lived in Rwanda for a while to converse with.

Afterwards we looked at old cars polished up new.

We took advantage of a bus that brought us out to this small winery where we went on a walking tour of 10 meters. We tasted a hazlenut wine that we later put our names on a waiting list to buy--it was surprisingly good.

And to the berry farm, where we

saw a picking machine

resisted the temptation of a pulled pork sandwhich by fleeing into the fields

and gorged ourselves on raspberries

Opon our arrival back in Lynden, we promptly ate raspberry smothered ice cream.

A fruitful day it was.

2008-07-12T11:47:00.003+09:00

On Wednesday we played in boats.

Jeff lost his shirt in a boating mishap. Here he shows off the consequences.

Nice Form

Cousin Steven readies himself for a flip.

I can't remember if I landed this one

Cousin Steven and Uncle Wray did some snorkeling

Today, Dad and I visited the Spiegal Grove.

We made our safety stop like good divers

2008-07-09T05:42:00.003+09:00

Sunday, we got 4 dives in--two on wrecks. Afterwards, we were wrecked. Due to Jeff's lack of Mac skills, the photo's are currently unavailable. They're spectacular.

We got home and

Jeff shaved his head.

And the next day, after my long day of rescue diver classes, we went fishing. We bought 3 dozen shrimp (36, according to the sign on the door; if it wasn't for the sign showing the muliples of 12 from 1 to 20, I don't think I would have been able to figure out 3 dozen) put a bunch of beer in a cooler and packed some cheap nasty cigars down to the dock.

Lots of little bites. And then I pulled this guy up.

and kissed it.

Fish on!

Drats! The manatee let go.

Jeff caught this badboy

As we exhausted our supply of beer, cigars and shrimp, we lost interest in the camera and stopped documenting our catch. Unfortunately, the sharks, stingrays and manatees we caught and released never got photographed.

2008-07-06T08:06:00.004+09:00

Kicked off the dive boat by NOAA and customers, Jeff, Dad and I drove up to the the Everglades to drive around. Quickly, I became friends with a lubber grasshopper. After assuring Jeff it wouldn't bite me, it bit me; startled, I shook my hand causing it to forever walk in counterclockwise circles.

We saw a few turtles

and lots of holes that looked just like this. Some had alligators in them. One alligator hissed at me because I got real close to take a crappy photo.

We drove down a road that looked like this for a while through the Fakahatchee swamp (The Orchid Thief, I swear they shot Adaptation here)

Feeling somewhat triumphant for some reason

then running from the mosquitoes that left blood all over the car, our clothes, and our appendages.

Dad and I watch Jeff scout some airplants from the car, having learned our lesson over the last few stops.

2008-07-05T11:29:00.003+09:00

The 4th of July, diving the Duane. No current, which is unusual. Jeff thinks he's superman.

I think I'm an underwater gangsta

Kendall's got a good narc going

A school of grunts

Coral

We headed north to Fort Lauderdale to spend the afternoon with the fam. We tried to pick up fireworks along the way, but the line was alarmingly long, intimidating us up the road.

We got to Sharon's just in time for the parade.

And the flag-waving hot dog shake.

Jeff was a watcher

So was I, but I got this cool red visor

2008-07-04T09:18:00.002+09:00

Long after getting baconified for breakfast

we went diving

we saw a friendly stingray eating something in the sand

things got a little out of hand

but it ended fine.

2008-07-03T11:20:00.001+09:00

I'm Amish?

2008-07-02T09:40:00.001+09:00

today we went sailing

FL

2008-07-01T09:48:00.002+09:00

Got to FL after sleeping in George Bush Airport in Houston--a fantastic place to spend the night; a nice lady even gave me a blanket at 4am. Chilled with some family. Chit chat.

Went to a wedding

Here comes the bride

Here's Aunt Judy and cousin Christie

I think I look good here

Then I found my twin in a storage locker in Miami.

Afterwards, Dad, Jeff and I raced some go karts--yeah badass go carts with the possibilty of injury--and I dusted them with my pedal pressing gitterdone attitude.

Ricks a Kick

2008-03-11T09:16:00.002+09:00

I just linked my friend's site--look to the right--Ricksakick.com. He's got some cool stuff on there about Kenya, even some baskets you can buy to help support a small village.

And of course, there's a funny video of Traci doing a faceplant, entertaining again and again.

Yo ho ho

2008-02-08T03:03:00.000+09:00

America, Fuck Yeah!

2008-01-28T06:23:00.000+09:00

Thats right; It's a chicken in an oven. Our oven.

Borneo

2007-12-18T18:39:00.000+09:00

I couldn't sleep last night. I kept thinking about whip scorpions whenever I lay back down after waking. I kept thinking they were only moving out of the way enough so that I could fall back asleep. A parting of seas of them. Then they . . .

I woke quickly when the alarm went, having had enough of the buggers in my head. I brushed my teeth and got out rather quick, even got to the bus station for the 515a bus. It was supposed to take 20 -30 minutes--some obviously misinformed taxi driver told me--it took an hour. When I arrived to the terminal, big sign greeted me "Air Asia Now everyone can fly."

And everyone does.

There was hardly room for people to leave the checkout counter after checking in. I swear half the city came with me to the one runway airport I later flew into. A police officer was position near me. It was her sole job to keep a walkway open so people wouldn't have to go through the same security screening twice.

I checked in at the scheduled time of departure, was directed to another line to pay more money for excess weight and made it to the line for a very late takeoff.

I arrived in Semporna today sometime around midday, not having eaten. It's a small town and not particularly scenic. I walked to the waterfront and have stayed there since. I booked a few nights at budget dive resort on an island somewhere offshore here.

Critters at the night market

2007-10-02T13:08:00.000+09:00

At Donghwamen night market we found some tasty and other not so tasty critters.
These scorpians were quite good, I considered going back for seconds.

This centipede was one of the less tasty.

First of a few videos

2007-08-17T00:24:00.000+09:00

Vacation

2007-08-05T16:44:00.000+09:00

So I finally have some pictures up of the 1500 km (maybe, I didn't keep track like I should have) motocycle tour we took of Jeolla province last week. After my test on Saturday we made a valient effort to get to the Byeonsan Bando on the west coast by nightfall. We ended up in Jinan a little ways away. It was good we stopped, because the roads the next morning were terrible and would have sucked late at night. Byeonsan beach lacked some qualities but we got on well there. Ate chicken that was freshly killed. Saw the next round's throats cut in the parking lot on the way back to the room after dinner.

We rode around the peninsula (bando in Korean)and took in the sights. One of which was Cheiseokgang.

This is not it. We took a wrong turn. Only one of many.

But we eventually found it. And this prehistoric looking bug.

This family found them just as fascinating as I did.

Ajeossi in the background there was more concerned with fanning himself than with the bugs.

And here are; we fit the 'biker' image rather well I'd say.

After our brief stopover at Cheiseokgang--which we didn't have to pay for, the buy just waved us in--we continued on the little road until we saw a sign for an open air sculpture park. We found sculptures, but more importantly we found GRASS!

Traci demonstates a very rare luxury in Korea.

Then she demonstates what a pervert she is.

AHHHH! where'd he wee wee go? She pointed this out to me too.

Drying fish near the salt flats on the southern shore of the peninsula.

Coming hopefully soon is the mudflat experience video. We stopped at this place where you could actually experience a mudflat. It was something photos insufficiently represent.

We gave our friend Billy a call, and asked him to send an email to our phoneless friends living just south of where we were. Then drove until the urge to eat ice cream overtook us. It was there that we consulted our map and shit! we'll be there in twenty minutes. Another call to Billy and we were off.

Hong Nong is a small small town. Rob and Joan are the only foreigners. Our arrival doubled the population.

We knew they worked at a hogwan and were finished with work at 230. It was about that time. Our plan: drive around and at each English hogwan we spotted drop in and inquire about our friends. After 5 minutes and 23 seconds we found our first academy. We walked in, asked and were misunderstood. The director seated us down, gave us each a tomato juice and offered us jobs. We explained that we didn't want or need jobs, but were looking for our friends, who had only been in town for two weeks. "Oh no he said, I need you to work for 4 weeks." We had to get up and leave. Fortunately the bombshell that worked reception at the place upstairs knew what we were talking about and gave us directions. We arrived at their school, but they were already on their walk home. A man, whom we later found out was named Superman, gave us directions and we found them.

They live by a bar that uses this as advertisement:

We shot the shit, and drank a few beers. He is Joan posing in front of her place of employment just before showing us where they might have lived.

Traci trying out the shower, where they might have lived.

The 7-11, supplier of the beer we used to take the town by storm that night. It was strange to be in a town small enough to let its streets completely die at night. We saw next to no one, save a few hootchies scanty-clad coming out of a norae bang. But we did see the place were toilets go to die. And quite a nice moon.

The next day we said goodbye at the school. Rob teacher even had the time to teach me a little English.

We rode far the next day. Down to Jindo to see what all the fuss was about. Nice island, not enough time. We looked for raw fish on the beach where the parting of the sea happens, but wouldn't shell out the 85 bucks for what we found.

Then over towards Wando. On the way I made a friend

And had a freak dinosaur encounter

We found a field of sunflowers and I figured out how to take cheesy photos with my camera. Finally--gawd!

We got a real cheap room at a beach near a place called Land's End. Land's End was overblown crap but the room was interesting, rustic you could call it. While most places were going for 40 or 50, this was 25. I tried to placate Traci by telling people pay more for places like this in traditional folk villages. Plus the 70 year old lady actually ran, trying to secure our stay.

She wasn't so impressed when she saw that the shower area looked more like a garage or tool shed than a place you go to get clean.

And there's the happy camper, going to clean off the grime of a long day's ride

After showering we had some fish--only 40--in a place that had ambiance, and watched people shoot off fireworks irresponsibly. Two guys were actually shooting them at each other with remarkable accuracy.

The next day we met Jason for a chicken brunch in the port of Wando, then crossed a bridge and got ourselves to another beach. Here we loafed and read. Later we got hungry, but there was next to nothing besides (most likely expensive) fish head soup. On a little sign, nailed to a tree was our savior. Fried chicken delivery. Yum. Traci checks the sky to see if it's time for dinner:

"It's blue." That means it's chicken time.
After a little bit of explaining--we're the only foreigners here, standing next to the no parking sign by the campground--he said OK that he would call back when he was looking for us. We stood out enough to obviate any further phone calls.

It grew dark. We walked out a jetti where some guys were fishing and drank some beer:

Then went back to the 50$ 8' X 8' room with no bed or TV and went to sleep.

We rode through the green tea plantations of Boseong and I at least was less than impressed. It was a nice ride, but I'm real happy we didn't try to make a weekend of Boseong alone. We drank some tea that tasted like clam broth, didn't get charged for it. We checked our map and we had enough time to make it to an island where an active leper colony remains.

Traci did some posing.

After a good bit of riding, we got to Nokdong, or Doyang depending on what sign yr looking at. Got us a hotel on the harborfront and went for a walk to find something to eat. We went through the fish center, because fish are cool, and I saw a sign that said one fish was a gwangeo. It looked like a flounder. So I asked the woman about it. Instead of answering or even acknowledging my question, she comes on real strong with the sales schpiel. We didn't want it, which made her come down even lower. As luck would have it, it was part of system. She sells us the fish, fillets it, and gives us it and the carcass in the bag. We walk upstairs and they staff upstairs, for a nominal price, cooks the carcass into fish head soup and provides tasty beverages. We got twice was much as two nights before for a little less than what we paid.

Stuffed we walked up to the top of a hill where a shrine to two War hero naval commanders from the 1590 Japanese invasions was and watched the sunset.

This guy showed up with a naked little boy in tow

Then Traci became enraged over the amount of insects biting her and it was time to go back to the room.

Squeezed the bike on the ferry the next morning. Again, waved through, maybe because they didn't want to deal with us. This vehicle's driver was visibly angry. But was he going to do? If he opened the door it would have ding ding danged up his car.

Traci points to the island of the lepers--Sorok-do. A lot of other people were also going there. "What is it, hug a leper day?" Traci said heartlessly.

We disembarked and figured we would go towards the leper colony to satisfy our curiosity then go find the beach.

Find the lepers we did. We were waved through the checkpoint for some reason (this is a loud loud bike, would you wave us through?) and found ourselves amidst many people in wheelchairs, some with bandages and others missing appendages. What seemed to be students with name tags on a field trip were calling out to us the ubiquitous "Where are you from?" that echos throughout this country. We take a turn towards a church and man in wheelchair is moaning, standing with his arm reaching out towards us as we pass. It was like we were in a zombie movie. We turned around quickly, at a safe distance and left, didn't go back.

We found the beach. It was the best we'd been to all week. Pine tree lined with a steep drop off and nice blue water. And best of all, there were very few people--probably due to the close proximity of the leper colony. We stayed for only half a day because Traci wanted to go to a space center, which didn't turn out to be a space center at all, but a lame festival. Upside: we did see some scorpions in a glass cage.

After the space center bust, we decided to make some time north. The week was drawing to a close and we wanted to avoid a 12 hour journey home. We thought we'd stop in Gwangyang, but that turned out to be an industrial hell, so we continued on to Hadong which was pleasant surprise. We fled a mosquito poison fog

and watched the sunset from a promontory overlooking a river. Then it was tank time. So we walked down the hill, stopped by a mart, ate some hog flesh and enjoyed what we could of the town.

2007-07-09T18:57:00.000+09:00

Saturday, after a morning spent superficially studying with an undeserved hangover, I left Gumi with a group of climbers I go to the gym with. It took three hours to get to Seonoonsan, a provincial park in Jeolla province on the west side of the country. We arrived, set up camp and immmediately set in on dinner. Those who'd left the day before returned from the rocks just as Junsu arrived with the makkoli. Yum, camping with rice wine, fatty fried pork, some pig intestine soup--nothing says living like such a situation. There was even a kind man in a truck, patrolling the area keeping us safe by keeping the local mosquito population in check. You could hear his truck coming, the motor pumping out an impenetrable cloud of poison that trailed behind. In case any of the winged pests might have lived past his first pass--they did--he circled around a couple of times.

After that, the mosquitoes seemed to want revenge. A perimeter of mosquito coils, citronella patches on our clothes and numerous baths of repellent hardly deterred them. Hakseok and Junsu's use of epeu killa, something that looked terribly noxiousm, prompted jokes about epeu killa showers and the like. Hakseok slept outside in a bivy prone to the whims of the beasts. In the morning I left my tent to find him sleeping with the aerosol can of bug spray under his head. His feet took the brunt of the damage, with over ten bites below the ankles.

The older members of the group said it was time to go to bed around 1130, no more drinking, because we had to get up at 6 to eat breakfast and get on the trail. Not tired, I assented. There was no booze or water left to drink.

Atypical of me, I woke at 530, unable to sleep longer and feeling ready. The rest were rather hung, actually trying to stay in the tents was they were struck. A breakfast of rice and we were on trail.

We took the back way into the park, using a right of way on an old couple's green tea farm to avoid paying the entrance fee. I like these guys more and more.

We stopped by a lake before the final km to the rocks.

In the back from left to right: Mike, the only other foreign climber in Gumi, JeongSun, and Hakseok In the front: Bongjun, me, Minho, Jun, and Jaehan. Junsu took the picture.

Mike showing impeccable sartorial sense as he makes his first ascent of the day. Jeongsun kept pointing at him and saying fashion, and giggling. I couldn't tell whether or not this was a good thing.

Bongjun was too hungover for most of the day to climb; he spent most of the time belaying, sleeping or grimmacing.

Mike displays his lack of camera skills, thereby minimizing the visibility of my lack of climbing skills. Can you see it?

Mike starts off "Zoo," my first attempted 5.12a. We both made it a little more than halfway to a tough move where you look up only see more rock above your head. Did wonders to destroy the roll I was on.

Me just starting out Zoo.

Hakseok, a far better climber, just below halfway on Zoo. He got just below the final bolt

and fell. He had drunkenly told me the night before that it was his project for the day.

Gladiator's Helmet Rock, above the other faces, had a bunch of routes too difficult for most of the climbers there, so it was nice and peaceful with only the droning of the cicadas.

Down below, the Konglish cheer fighting! was too prevalent for peace. When I explained I had never heard it in the States, they were a little surprised. I suggested a more authentically American cheer. For the next hour a barely recognizable "gitterdone!" prevailed.

Breaking News!

2007-07-05T21:48:00.000+09:00

Walking through Lotte Mart one recent night, this radioactive-looking bottle caught my eye.

Green bottles--usually reminiscent of skunked beer from far away lands--usually hook me. Stella, Pilsner Urquell, Heineken, St Pauli Girl--all get an enthusiastic open gullet.

Here in Korea Exfeel comes in a green bottle, though it's of a different league entirely. For one, it's degree of quality comes from not being as bad as its parent company--infamously known as "The (s)Hite." Exfeel is usually sold in individual 12 OZ bottles costing from 1000 won to 1700 won in stores and marts. A six pack is exactly that, (? won) X 6. One of the main selling points to this beer is its witty slogan: "Excellent feeling of the genuine sense of low caloried beer with twist off cap first in Korea."

It gets me every time.

So you can well imagine our excitement at the radioactive green bottles crowding a prominent display.

Traci doing two of her favorite things, reading and drinking beer.

What would make beer better? someone recently asked. The answer:

FIBER! Not only is this beer stylish, but it is chock full of bowelmoving fiber. In drinking circles, we call that a bonus.

Unfortunately, all of the fiber and style couldn't remove the Shite from its ancestry. It tasted like normal Korean beer from a 1.6 liter plastic bottle--bad. But it is summer, and hot, and humid, and the beer was cold. I can't be too picky in such conditions.

Maisan Ride

2007-07-01T13:15:00.000+09:00

Yesterday--a day without rain and work, Will and I met halfway between Nonsan and Gumi in Yeongdong. Or, were supposed to at least. I underestimated the speed of my esteemable steed and arrived at 1030, 30 minutes ahead of time. Around 11 I got a call from Will saying he got lost--it's not a normal ride if you don't get lost or nearly die here--and to meet him in Geumsan another 30 minutes down a beautiful windy road.

After a lunch of snails and beef we hit the road, whipping through curves, passing the Sunday drivers (mistakenly out on Saturday) and hitting the straightaways with a cacophonous blare. I still win with respects to sound, though I can't keep up when the curves dwindle.

We rode south to Maisan, mountains that Jason told me are called the horse ear mountains. Two pinnacles towering over the surrounding terrain, seemingly quite different. "It's like someone took a big dump here," Will eloquently stated.

The rock consisted of pebbles and other stones cemented together, almost like it was man made.

We paid our parking fees and our entrance fees and hiked up a bunch of sweaty stairs to this cave where Will decided to be a poser and pose for this shot. Supposedly there is some unsolved mystery with the water that is drawn from a spring in this cave.

We saw no mystery and walked back down to the saddle between the two peaks where we saw this:

Here we saw mystery and suspense, danger and thrills. All the elements of a tragic Korea Times article about two naive foreigners falling to their deaths from a cliff in a southern province. We also saw three men with climbing equipment come down through this blockade. We had 1/3 bottle of lukewarm water and some quickly rotting plums and figured we too were sufficiently equipped. Besides, this guffawing horse encouraged us.

After a short set of metal stairs and badly washed out trail we came to the crux:

A few hundred meters of vertical ascent, hauling ourselves up on ropes such as these. Will's big bike couldn't help his weak body here; I dusted him on the ascent using my superiour climbing ability.

Here, he pauses to take in the view

of the neighboring spire to east.

About halfway up the rope section we found a shirtless man at the top of a small cable car setup. Despite the fact we were where we shouldn't have been, he welcomed us with a friendly 어서오십시오! He still looked serious, making me think better of asking him what he was doing.

It seemed to me that he was hauling his these sand bags filled with a grass seed mixture up the mountain in stages. Every few minutes another load would come up. He would yell once, the cable stop and yell again for the cable to resume. He stacked what arrived at the bottom of the next stage.

Lower on the mountain, the grass was bushier, more lush.

The cairn at the peak, both of us dripping sweat. 676 meters, most of it in 25 minutes.

Beyond this rope, as this signs states, there was a significant amount of anger.

Braving the anger, and the ants, we crossed the line to take this mediocre photo of the other pinnacle. To the right the anger increased precipitously. We thought better of going any further.

A flower we found inpiring:

Though not nearly as inspiring this this old yangban. Will is pretending he is hopped up on ginseng too.

Close up of the man whose climbed the top of my most wanted to meet list.

We rode more, welcoming the cool breeze after such exertion in the sun. We found a rocky valley, a steep stream running through it that would have been real nice had we found it earlier equipped with bathing suits and beers. There were crowds of Koreans of all ages camped out on the rocky banks. Some throwing balls around, others grilling pork products, and one guy doing backflips off a rock. Alas we had some distance to go, still hoping not to get caught in a sudden downpour.

We sat overlooking this lake as the sun burned our skin on its downward path. Then the ride back to Geumsan and Will going west, me east.

A great start

2007-06-26T13:16:00.000+09:00

One kid lost a tooth, having something to do with another kids foot. They both cried. Traci's hard drive came back from the service center missing 20gigs and I'm still without a proctor. But its Tuesday glorious Tuesday . . .

loyal animals

2007-06-24T22:48:00.000+09:00

I have a terrible time with this blog. When I'm in the middle of something and have actually remembered my camera and care to take it out and use it, I think 'this would make a good blog entry.' This is the exact same as a few years ago, when driving or drifting off to sleep--sometimes at the same time, true moments of inspiration--I would think of a great idea for a story or an article for a paper or magazine, only to forget it.

Thus I forgot the glorious day when Traci and I rode the blue steed to:

For those of you unfamiliar with a landmark such as this, it's remarkably close to:

These next 8 photos recount the story of the heroic bovine dazzingly.

A farmer is plowing his field, minding his own business, unaware of the evil tiger lurking in the background.

The furious cat soon set upon his cow. The farmer brandishes a stick with all his might, though to no avail.

The tiger pounces upon him too.

The cow, being a might stronger and more heroic than our poor farmer, deals the tiger a counterattack the likes of which it has never seen.

The tiger is forced to flee, while the poor farmer lies dying.

Due to its bovine-inflicted wounds, the tiger also dies.

After the farmer dies, the cow is so grief stricken that it spends its next three days lowing instead of eating and also dies.

He and the farmer are buried next to each other and lie there happily ever after.

Further down the road we stopped and walked through an ancient cemetary of mounds the road mercilessly bisected. Larger, yes, though it lacked the heroic grandeur of the first grave.

And here is a random picture of me with a plate of food, taken during our children's day fest by the photographer the school hires for each event.

I videoed this same place when it was a kids photo factory, though I got greedy and it's too big for youtube. You're all probably beating your chests and gnashing your teeth in misery.

장마시작한다

2007-06-22T12:51:00.000+09:00

It begins--a month of rain being a constant nuissance. More than one person has said that it will only last 2 weeks, but they, I believe, are too optimistic. Last year, the rain fell for 5 or 6 weeks, seeming never to stop. Intermittantly, the tail end of a typhoon would aggravate the showers, turning them into downpours.

I rode my motorcycle every day last year, donning my waterproof hiking boots, ski pants and jacket before heading out. This year, my bike with one uncovered tailpipe has already claimed the lives of two pair of synthetic pants. Neither of them mine though.

So last night I made a relatively short jaunt across town during a lull after the first downpour I was caught in. As luck would have it, on my way home the rain had resumed. Not a part of me, from my socks to the inner recesses of my wallet, was dry. I took it rather slow due to my fishtailing through puddles whenever I hit my rear break. At one point, however, I tried to pass a truck that was moving slower than me. The overtaking coincided with the passenger side of the truck hitting a lake in the middle of the road. This sent a tsunami into my eyes, blinding me, knocking my fogged up visor down. Surprised to find myself still upright, I lifted my visor just in time for another wave and an increase in rain. It hurt more than I remember rain hurting. For the rest of the ride home I was preoccupied wondering whether or not I had black eyes.

Procrastinator

2007-06-11T12:33:00.000+09:00

I just ate lunch in a noodle stall of questionable sanitation where the woman manhandled my noodles with her possibly washed hands. I wanted to eat in one of the restaurants that surround the open area of the market near our house, but thought different of it. First meal of the day and though lovely in a visceral way the smells just weren't doing it for me. Outside these restaurants there are usually old women washing or boiling skulls, or doing some other handicraft involving bones, offal or other parts people in America don't consider worth eating.

I ordered a cold dish--it was damn good, but left me hoping my immune system is up to par. We'll see what happens.

Just like we'll see what happens at 3:30 when I see Jack again. His schedule coincides with mine, so that I'm going to the climbing gym and he is crossing the intersection just outside of school when I am. Dressed in his hapkido clothes, he usually gives me a full bow before one of our lights turns green. Friday just after he bowed deeply, neither of our lights turned green, though no one was in the intersection. Impatient and proactive I did the only responsible thing a pillar of the community should and would do. I blew through the light with my unmuffled pipes ringing off the surrounding buildings.

Sunday, I went climbing with a few of the guys from the gym. We first went south to a rock in Uiryang-gun.

I just climbed the same route as the uppermost guy in the middle. I had to rest, and put a little weight on the rope at the crux move, but it was the first time I've made it to the top of a 5.10d. 5.11 is just around the corner; my goal actually seemed in sight. (I want to be leading 5.11 by the time I leave Korea, our friend Daeyoung's definition of a good climber)

It was nice area, and not too packed, but the manure smell got to the rest of the group and we had to flee. A little cow dung scared them off and yet this country eats makchang which reminds Traci and I of a pig farm, but in your mouth.

After some ice cream and driving and invitations to noraebangs we arrived at Doyakdae, a site infinitely more crowded than the first.

The middle route here a mere 5.10b, did wonders to deflate my sense of accomplishment from the last wall. This rock was much less textured than the other rock. I could feel the sweat building on my holds and my hands giving way. I fell a few times swinging across the face and hitting other climbers with my rope, something I'm sure they loved. I made it to the top once, but it took me a long long time and lots of advice aimed at my poor technique shouted from below.

And it's Monday. Still no math studying, no shower. Traci is even muttering things about it being a Jenga Monday.

Online School

2007-06-09T12:48:00.000+09:00

It's not that easy; and I haven't even started yet.

I registered for two classes this past week. One seems to have gone through difficulty free, though the example of the second causes me alarm. Two separate phone calls at 1:30a, got me registered and paid up (my online pin did not work, precluding the easy method--will this be a recurring problem?) Emails and web searching found my books (during which one stock of half-priced used books ran out) They are usually shipped in 24 hours, but Friday morning's devilish powers ran interference and I received an email saying they would be shipped on the twelfth, still 50-some odd hours hence. Even express takes a long time to get here. 50$ gets me 14 business days, which gives me my books, hopefully, the Monday of the second week of classes. The email also informed me of unnamed tariffs I may be subject too upon arrival. Maybe the books will be held in some warehouse for another week while I sort out where they went. And now I get an email from one of the Profs saying I will have 4 proctored exams. The websites didn't mention proctored exams, only that I needed to be able to use certain software on a daily basis.

I was under the impression that many foreign teachers in ROK went to school online while working. If two classes for me is this onerous, what type of horsecrap do people have to go through to get a degree this way? And who are the people who get online degrees anyway? Are the majority students who live just down the road from the University but are unable to make the class times?

Aside from hoping that pans out without much difficulty, it's a nice day today--somewhat clear, with large white, grey and silver clouds rolling across a vivid blue sky. I was going to ride to Daegu to fix the seat on my motorcycle, but I'm not feeling it.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

2007-06-03T18:49:00.000+09:00

The Good
I wasn't as hungover as I was yesterday. I wasn't hungover at all really. I watched a zombie flicked that could only be described as rubbish, and found some nice sites on the internet. My favorite: http://wafaabilal.com/ Really--copy and paste the link. An Iraqi performance artist locks himself in a room with a paintball gun attached to a webcam. You can participate in the performance by shooting him. Unfortunately he seems to have left the room for the hour my trigger finger has watched.

The Bad
Today sucked, in that the answer I've been waiting to hear for over a month turned out to be a bad one.

The Ugly
Will was here all weekend.

Teachers Day

2007-05-15T08:06:00.001+09:00

No school today and yesterday I was showered with expensive gifts.

The first really took me by surprise. Rachel, five years old, came to me with Claire teacher. She usually does this just to wave and say hi, but this time she gave me a bottle of wine. I was perusing the schedule trying to decipher whether or not I had to fill in a class for one of the teachers gone on a field trip and didn't notice it was a bottle of wine until I got back to my desk. Still a little shocked.

Then a large bundle of roses and carnations arrived in the classroom, so I did the only logical thing available to me--spend the entire class convincing the kids that there is a monster named Basky living in the bouquet. (Last week Basky was named Basky-Carla and lived just outside the classroom, waiting to bobble up the children if they misbehaved. I guess when it moved into the flowers, it dropped the last part of its name.)

Then a cake bigger than some of the children arrived.

Then a late students mother handed me another gift that I didn't pay careful attention to until I got back to my desk. Actually, it was Traci that said "Is that Chanel?" And it was. Aftershave and moisturizer. I wonder if it's a hint.

The Day Before Children's Day

2007-05-09T19:02:00.000+09:00

Last Saturday was children's day, a national holiday here in Korea. So, on Friday we celebrated by having something called market day. In class, we give out points to students who behave and participate in class, and take them away from those that don't. On market day the kids trade their hard earned points in for xeroxed dollars at the lousy rate of 10 points/1 dollar. The currency comes only in one denomonation--Hamitons. It was a good start to what ended up a bad weekend.

Here I am working the exchange with John, one of my students from the aptly named Dinky class. He's about 4 years old.

Traci helping Bob, one of my small conversation class students. Recently, he changed the fringe of his mullet from blonde to red. Way-to-go Bob!

Sunny and Claire try to keep a handle on the chaos, while not leaving the doorway.

I don't remember if Danny is hitting Jasmine, or giving her a pat on the back. Both are in my Dixie class. Jasmine is sweet and Danny is a devil.

Ryan is making some tough deals with the merchants to my left.

In the afternoon, the market dealings were all scheduled during the Korean teachers classes, so the foreign teachers had their own celebration of the imminent children's day. Traci played Jenga. And I played Uno.

This class is normally crazy; Claire Teacher once said they were among her craziest. But get 'em in a game of Uno and look how orderly they can become.

Lucy takes her Uno very seriously. Here she is yelling ya! at one of the boys, possibly for skipping her.

Shorter thereafter, Amy (middle) made a spectacular play, a red six on a blue six, thwarting Jenny's (right) attempt at going out.

The last class Keith, Traci, Rosaleen and I all brought our kids outside to the lovely park across the street. Traci tried to do a relay race; Rosaleen jumped right into tag; I let the kids "expend energy" before finally deciding that tag was the best way to study English that period.

My kids are not in the best of shape. Terry lay down, exhausted, while whoever was it was at a safe distance.

Owen kept coming to me winded, calling time and hoping I would protect him from someone less out of breath than he was.

It was going well until, after evading my panting pursuer, I looked over at Keith's kids and saw that one of them was looking at his bloody hands and bawling. I thought immediately that game time was over in the future, that one of the kids had actually slipped and fallen hands first in a pile of broken soju bottles (one of the prominent fixtures of the park). But nothing has been said. Apparantly, he cries over everything.

On Sunday, I get up early to go to the artificial climbing wall at the mountain only to find that, piece of crap that it was, it burned down the night before. So I introduced my new friend to the bouldering gym I go to (no ropes). I come out to find someone hit my bike, leaving me a 170,000W repair bill in the front end. And then there is the matter of my ignorance possibly costing me more money than I wish to talk about.

Rooftop Garden

2007-05-03T13:32:00.000+09:00

Attack of the Yellow Sand

2007-04-01T22:37:00.000+09:00

Every year in the spring, about this time, China exports a thin layer of dust and sand from the Gobi Desert on eastbound winds. I was oblivious to it last year; Traci and I going for a long walk on possibly the worst day without any precautions. I remember Geumo Mountain shrouded in a yellow haze across the river and merely mentally noting it. I was sick on a pretty much regular basis for three months after that. Today, because of the nasty, nasty yellow dust storm, I actually considered buying a mask. One of those surgical masks you saw plastered all over CNN during the SARS outbreaks. The masks I always considered more psychological than physical in their powers of protection. I didn't. But I did tie a bandanna around my face when I had to spend more than a few minutes outside. I did wash my hands and face as the Korea Times suggested: http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200704/kt2007040118472910440.htm It's evil stuff. My throat hurt after a short walk without the bandanna. Coming home on the bus you could barely see more than bleak outlines of mountains. My bike was covered with a layer thick enough to distort the color.

Farting Game

2007-03-30T12:57:00.000+09:00

Possibly the best game ever created--out of its way Mario, or it'll fart on you

Hide the Fart

Defensive Walking

2007-03-29T13:00:00.000+09:00

My Seoul residing friend Krista brought this video to my attention. It does not pertain only to Seoul but is sound advice for most of Korea. Though they need to catch on video some of the events they warn against.

Old photos, just developed

2007-03-21T12:44:00.000+09:00

Traci brought a waterproof camera in to get developed, a camera I forgot we even had. Most of the pictures were blue and underwater, but some came out.

Floating down a river outside Vang Vieng, Laos.

As you can see, it made us very happy.

Stupidly, goofy, giggly happy

Partly because I just swung off this thing after losing count of the beer I consumed, and didn't die.

Traci, underwater, making her trademark sound, a nasally euennggg

and here I am, looking sophisticated, as usual

It's Sorta a Wrestling Move . . .

2007-03-17T12:14:00.000+09:00

It was a beautifully passing week for me at school. Some minor irritations chaffed on Monday, mainly the notification that I would have a new conversation class on Tuesday/Thursdays during one of my much-loved breaks, but the rest of the week seemed to flow by in a tired river of kids.

The new class turned out ok. Usually these two-student conversation classes more resemble romparoom than anything to do with education. In one of my previous classes--now moved over to Traci's jurisdiction ha--the two 6 year-old girls most productive use of the English language was squirming around the floor saying "I'm a worm!" Or hopping around saying "I'm a rabbit." Writing activities and even games quickly deteriorated into princess drawing sessions followed by "I'm a princess" repeated till the phrase had no meaning.

But the new class of Philip and Stephanie seems different. They stay in their seats; they participate; the speak English, even though at 7 they have no command of the language. Thursday, they became quite animated, somewhat scarring me into a realization that maybe it's me. Maybe I make kids crazy.

Maybe. But I generally do not make kids cry. Keith, our roommate and colleague on the other hand . . .

Yesterday, Traci and I were joking with Olivia Teacher, a new hire who speaks well and has a small son at the school, about how, just maybe, I do make kids crazy. Keith stepped in with "I think I made a kid cry today."

No cause for alarm. Kids cry all the time, especially in this country where they're coddled and babied through their first 22 years of life. A kid flips you the bird, you take away a measly amount of "points" that amount to a fraction of a notebook they could buy with change found in a gutter, and they cry. They get thrown out in dodgeball, and they cry. They don't win a writing game when they thought they would, and they cry.

So we joked "How? What'd you do this time?"

"Well," Keith said slowly "it's sorta a wrestling move."

Quite easily the best line I've heard in a month. It was poetic in it's timing, the silence that enveloped it, and the bursts of acerbic laughter that followed. I think Olivia, being a little older and not so into WWE etc., was more puzzled than uncomfortable.

He began to explain. "He was standing on the chairs looking out the window," not paying attention.

I guess he does this a lot, but Traci told me he is one of those kids that's a little out there, seemingly somewhere else but able to respond to whatever question he's called upon to answer during class.

So Keith gave him a choice either minus three points--a terribly insignificant amount--or something else. Something undescribed.

Naturally the kid took the "something else." Not gonna lose three points over something insignificant . . .

"So, I took him and" Keith demonstrated the backbreaker.

Laughter growing, jaws dropping, pointing, kids are looking in the door to the teachers office wondering why

"Then, I threw him on my shoulder," he continued "and spun around really fast. And made like I was going to throw him out the window." The same window, minutes before, the kid was placidly looking out.

"When I put him down, he had tears streaming out of his eyes."

"Keith, you can't do pile drivers on yr kids," I derided.

"That one's next," he said with a smile and laugh.

"Pretty soon parents are going to be calling the school, saying my son's talking about WWE and backbreakers . . . what's this about?" Traci laughed.

I can see Jane Teacher, the scatterbrained receptionist, puzzled and asking Keith "uh, Keith Teacher, uh some parents, they called, and uh, they are uh worried about 그뭔데 wrestling?" and the uncomfortable silence after.

Keith didn't explain what happened after that. The bell rang ding dong and we had other classes to go to, Keith, other kids to conquer.

Saturday Walk

2007-03-11T12:44:00.000+09:00

We found the trail that each of us discovered in two seperate walks was one in the same yesterday. We followed it to an end, what we were hoping would be an easy route to Jenny's apartment in the neighborhood we lived last year, but found what smelled like a nightsoil field that had to be crossed.

Before leaving I took a picture of Traci at the start of the trail from our roof. She was puzzled by the navy blue man sized object that she couldn't remember putting there. Then she turned "oh a piece of garbage . . . " and forgot all about the strange sight until I showed her the picture.

The trail wound up and over a small wooded hill covered in graves and small vegetable plots. Some new holes were dug, seemingly ready for someone, and labled with what you could see in two different directions. One reason for the absence of bodies may be that the views are of somewhat dilapadated vegetable hothouses and a gas station.

Down one hill past the scrap metal heap and up the other side.

Where we found more grave mounds and small vegetable plots

and passed by the school and playground where I took my first tentative steps on the yellow dirtbike last year. It was where Greg and I made slalom courses and figure 8's of trash to practice tight turning. Having done that for a while I tried to see how fast I could get it and nearly crashed.

We saw a woman working her rows overlooking the fields that stretch north from Gumi towards Seonsan. They are just starting to look green and alive, the harbinger of spring when Korea sheds it's shit-feathers and actually becomes a beautiful place.

We jumped a small fence after walking through the aforementioned nightsoil fields and ended up in our old complex, now known as shitville. It was a ghost town, eerie and like something out of a bad horror movie. Doors were flapping and banging in the wind. Garbage was left everywhere as if people fled some plague (birdflu?) Adding to the atmosphere were the red circles painted on all the empty apartments signaling to passersby the contaminated units, the places to be left alone.

We started digging through the trash, of course, looking for gifts for Jenny or a table for our rooftop lounge now in construction. We found both. A car pulled up to one place, actually displacing us from a particularly interesting pile of trash. An old couple got out and went inside, giving us maybe a glance. I told Traci they were the stubborn ones, not willing to give up their homes to some developer owned by one the massive conglomerates that run the business of this country. I even compared them to the Saved by the Bell episode where the kids help save their favorite resort in Hawaii from doom by developer. Sadly I don't think this old couple has the ingenuity of Zach, Screech and AC Slater to lend a hand.

The place creeped Traci out, though she couldn't pull herself away

We found a nice broken mirror to take a serious self-portrait in. It may be holiday card material.

And more broken shards littering the ground behind an overfilled dumpster.

One place we looked into and found an onion, though sporting a green shoot, still quite usable, laying in the middle of the plethora of ajumma shoes. There was other trash about and a black plastic bag of bean sprouts a little past there prime. I expected someone to jump out at me, some big guy with tattoos going up the back of his neck and arms lined with sunken veins, telling me he was squatting this pad and for me to bugger off. No such thing happened, though a little later a man with a broom did come from around the back of another building--a terribly scarry thing indeed.

Around the backs of the apartments, you might still think they were lived in, albeit by sloppy sloppy families.

We walked through one place, not trashed inside, but not left in a condition anyone would be proud of. Even the floor seemed empty and hollow.

We had finally had enough. It was a little sad. When we moved out in August we were under the impression it would all be torn down to make room for new apartments, something not so ghetto. Instead, it's still there looking more like junkietown than ever.

We started looking at this pile of garbage and realized that just behind it was the courtyard where we barbecued all last summer, where children were still riding bikes around in circles, and adjoining that our old building. Our old place is the one with the fan in the window on the first floor, near the center of the image, if you can see it.

Taking pictures, to us then seemed a gauche and tactless thing to do. We went up to the mart where we would buy our beer, sometimes several times in one day, and bought some beer. It was like giving water to a dying person. The shelves were all nearly empty and on those products remaining a patina of dust told us how long they'd been there. There were mainly things that nobody buys from a small mart: five gallon jugs of a variety of soy sauces, massive bins of pepper, ironing boards. And there were products that people still buy on a daily basis in a dying area, at a failing local mart: beer, soju, chips, chocolate. Just past the door on the way out I took this picture on the sly--it's a little blurry--further evidence the old neighborhood's quietus draws near.

2007-03-04T17:46:00.000+09:00

the first thunder I've heard since SE Asia just spread through the sky putting a cap on any and all plans I had to leave the house today. I was merely drizzly before and I was itching to get outside and walk along a path I just found yesterday that leads from where we live now to where we lived last year. It leads through an area you might even call woods, with some nice views of the farmlands that stretch north of here. But the possibility of mud held me off and the thunder woke me to the fact that I would not be leaving the house.

It's been that sort of weekend. Yesterday I read and farted around house, went out for two beers, came back and watched Apocalypto with Keith--It didn't have much substance to it--and that was the Saturday.

I may have found some pots, Greg delivered me some seeds, all I need is some dirt and a little good weather and I''l start my rooftop herb garden. Keith wants to plant some tomatoes and possibly other veggies.

farting is still funny

2007-03-03T14:14:00.000+09:00

Graduation

2007-02-26T23:12:00.000+09:00

Saturday was preschool graduation. It was a major event held in Lotte Mart, upstairs in the kids theatre. The classes practiced plays and dances for weeks. The school rented several costumes and the place was packed with parents, some beaming others expressionless. There was mention of all the teachers doing some sort of belly dance. We said no, if not so forcefully then repeatedly in a truly serious tone. I guess it was scrapped. Supposedly last year the foreign teachers had to participate more than we did. Possibly the unforgetable performance of one precluded our participation. "Well, they all did their best . . . my name's Andy. (and said with shoulder pressed forward, scooping fist and flexing bicep) Thank you."

I had one class that graduated, which unfortunately was my favorite. They were sorta behaved (they misbehaved in English) and were a little nuts. Here are a few pictures:

Here is my graduating class dancing:

After another dance. From left to right Jenny (the perfect student) Daniel (could jump off a tall building and be fine; kid's got more energy then most small countries) Grace (sings and dances in just about every class) Jeff (jumps and lands full body to the floor just about every class) and Cherry (prone to cute gibberish)

Sunny Teacher directing her class's Jungle Book play

Jack (Ca)Leo (Shere Khan) and Mike (Baloo) in the Jungle Book

Everybody except Rosaleen dressed well. She wore a casual billious green shirt with what looked like Britney Spears on it. She adamently defended her sartorial choices and even insulted the green shirt Traci was wearing. Afterwards we celebrated by watching the Trailer Park Boys movie, then going to Psycho and staying till they kicked us out at dawn.

Lunar New Year's Day

2007-02-19T14:44:00.000+09:00

This weekend was the lunar new year, giving us an extra day to do absolutely nothing. But rather than waste time like most foreigners in this country do when presented with such a large amount of time, I went for a hike and did some exercising.

Hiking up Yuhaksan, Jenny, Will and I came to this place a few minutes above an expensive looking grave.

Wow! It's time to exercise, work out, pump some iron. I immediately got to work on my lunar new year's resolution--becoming Mr Universe and kicking Kevin Costner's ass for making "The Postman" and wasting so many people's time. My companions were not nearly as enthusiastic as I was.

For serious Costnerkicking pecks I did some bench press. I really worked it. You can't ask for a better workout.

Then to better pull him to the ground and make him beg forgiveness for making such a terrible movie, I did some pull ups.

Then for shear power, I did some of these. I learned the technnique from Chuck Norris--I needn't say anymore.

On the way down I saw this and found inspiration in it--it was the setting sun of terriblylongterriblyboringpostapocalypticshitmovies everywhere.

Good Idea!

2007-02-14T22:09:00.000+09:00

Hey check out this page:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070213/ap_on_re_us/dolphin_defenders

good reading; this was my favorite:

"Sea lions can carry in their mouths special cuffs attached to long ropes. If the animal finds a rogue swimmer, it can clamp the cuff around the person's leg. The individual can then be reeled in for questioning."

That scares the fuck out of me. But how long are these ropes? Do the sea lions carry the length of the rope in its mouth too? Or do they drag that behind them in a specially designed bag? Still scares me. Not gonna go swimming around any navy installations, maybe the army ones will be a little more friendly to rogue skinny dippers. Or maybe I could get some friends and lift myself out of the rogue category.

Random pictures

2007-02-11T15:32:00.000+09:00

Random picture of where I work:

Random picture of a place I miss living in:

The Snow Festival

2007-02-06T09:46:00.000+09:00

Yes I've been lazy and am still in the midst of the spell. This past weekend I actually left the house with an entourage of waegookins and travelled north to the little town of Taebaek to see an ice festival. From the beginning the trip sucked. We all met at a little intercity bus stand in Gongdan, a neighborhood in Gumi with only banks and factories, a little before 6a. We needed to get to N. Daegu by 7 to catch the first bus for another 3 1/2 hour ride north through the coastal mountains. It was cold and the place was deserted. We waited; the man who worked there showed up and said ah-i-go--the equivilent to 'oh, brother'--at the sight of us. This completely contradicted all hope we got from the solitary Korean man waiting with us. He was supremely early too. We waited an hour, in the cold, and missed the first bus in Daegu. It gave us time for breakfast at least. On the bus sleeping. Off the bus at a rest stop and an unfortunate episode that left me weaker for most of the day. Sleeping, or trying to. The bus winding through the switchbacks, driver accelerating through each turn. Koreans are reading newspapers. The foreigners are sick. First laughing about it, them all are quiet as everyone tries not to vomit. We get off the bus; I sit down by a pile of trash, the first semi-clean place I found, and the Traci tries to figure out another way home. None of us wanted to take the bus again through those turns.

A bus brought us to the festival, past our hotel. We got a taxi back and had to argue our way in because the Irish girls didn't come. The lady was not happy about the decrease from two rooms to one and charged us more for the room we did have.

Walking back, the wind bit us and lashed muddy dirty snow in our faces. Walking backwards proved easier. Lexis gave us and went back with Tibha after 100m to call a cab. We put our thumbs out for anything that passed and a tour groups shuttle bus stopped and picked us up. They asked us where we were from then said to each other " two good countries; ours is a good country too." They refused payment when they dropped us off--in the midst of a shitstorm two strangers brighten things with a trivial kindness.

Seperated from two of our group we had little to do but wait. So we grabbed some beers and huddled in the lee of a small cabin and watched what really appeared to be excrement flying down from the pass above us. They never showed and we went in. The sculptures looked ok in the half light, the flying feces obscuring the melting and blemishes. The highlight was sitting on ice blocks at ice tables in the igloo drinking beers.

The next day in the brilliant sunshine, the sculptures lacked appeal.

The trip back was long, though the tedium was ammeliorated by a cute kid with a plastic sword. He kept stabbing at us, until Traci stole the sword and stabbed him and the other random kids around us. We got the cute one, who sorta became Collins son for a spell, to attack Zach at the other end of the train, though at first he made a mistake and attacked sleeping Tibha.

And the weekend was over. Back to work.

2007-01-23T22:56:00.000+09:00

Little new. Last weekend went hiking with Traci's old hagwon and went ice climbing at the same place with Gisu. He told me I've got bad form. This time received a little cut on my face when a chunk of falling ice connected with me. At the time I didn't feel it; the bigger chunk that got my helmet did no damage but was far more noticable.

Stole some art photos from my friend, but didn't get away with his hat. Went to a new restaurants second night open. Looking forward to the next time, and conveniently it's just across the street.

Last week school dragged on by. This week is going a little better, but I lost my notebook with a bunch of funny happening's notes in it. Depressing. At least it wasn't the one with my contact info in it.

Wikimapia Rules

2007-01-17T00:15:00.000+09:00

That tall sort of tan building near the middle of the picture is where I work. Pretty cool eh? Pan in and out and look at the city. Can you find where I live, it's by a gas station and the river, southeast of a bunch of fields relatively close to there.

Ice Climb

2007-01-14T14:32:00.000+09:00

After a long tiring week and all I wanted to do is sleep, I got up at the buttcrack of still-dark dawn to drive to this place

We got there about 9a and got some breakfast, which was to my horror was Soondae Gukbap, sortof a Korean sausage soup with rice. Soondae is intestines stuffed with rice noodles and other stuff. It smells a little off and doesn't really taste like sausage. I've never liked it, trying it a little at a time when Koreans order it, but not wanting a second bite. This time I liked it. There was other meat in the soup and I finished off the soondae without eating it.

Then we got to climbing. It took a while to set up the anchors up top, and after that the dudes with equipment climbed until they wanted a break.

My turn.

Nice Goofy smile there. Moments later I got smacked in the head with a falling chunk of ice. It took some getting used to the crampons and the ice axes. I was gripping the axes so hard that by the time I was near the difficult section at the top I'd lost feeling in my fingers. I had to turn around, but didn't feel so bad--another guy got to a little above me and came down. When he passed me he said "fighting!" a now well used cheer in Korea.

I took a little walk in the frozen river and watched the cracks form beneath me.

then ate lunch where Choei fed me more Soju and told me it was good for men. He fed me a lot of it. Then magically some sort of a ceremony started. A bunch of guys in suits were there and speeches were made and this one person climbed up alone after the national anthem played

The party broke up immediately. I crossed the river to climb again and when I looked back, the tents and guys in suits were gone.

The booze must have been good for men because after lunch I went out and climbed up twice rather easily. I adjusted to the fact that I really could put a lot of weight on just a toe hold or a meager point in the ice. The crampons were sharp enough that they punched a hole in my snow pants rather easily, too.

The guys asked if I wanted to go again the next day, and I did, though laziness got laziness got the best of me. Faced with a choice of waiting hours in the cold to get a climb or two in, or sleeping in, eating pizza for breakfast and sitting in a sauna for a good part of the day . . . I hope they go again when I'm not so tired.

Sledding, or as they say in Ireland Sleighing (so it's not confused with something a little more lewd and indecent)

2007-01-14T13:02:00.000+09:00

Thursday, the soon-to-be graduating seven-year-olds went to an English Village up in Seoul and did something, probably involving English. We took the younger younger kids sledding in the morning.

Here are Bob and Ted. Both real cute, neither are my regular students. I was their minder for the day. In the beginning they followed me well, well enough to play crazy train where I walk in circles around trees and benches and other people and they follow me grinning.

Bob gearing up for his first cruise down the big hill. It was actually really little, and policed by men with whistles, blowing them for just about every occasion. tweep! ready tweep! sled tweep! stop tweep! standup tweep! too fast! tweep! legs out tweep! don't eat the snow .

Ted Gearing up. He's a little hellion, Traci tells me, eating anything he can get his hands on, including but not limited to pencils, plastic bags, erasers, anything made out of paper. He chose to go down the side where he could run into large chunks of frozen snow until he got the whistle blown on him. Then he started to try to transfer snow from the bottom of the hill to the top using his sled. He may make a good miner someday.

Seon, one of my small conversation class students, showing her appreciation by sticking out her tongue.

And he are Traci Keith and Rosaleen after our mad dash down the adult hill. There was no going down a second time because we flagrantly broke the rules. When we got to the top, dude told us to wait for the kids, all fair, then gave us this schpiel about keeping our legs out to the side (great way to tear something in yr knee) and sitting far back and keeping our hands on the string. He said "let's go" and Traci and I immediately tucked our feet in, dropped the string and started pushing. I went sort of fast, Keith and Rosaleen got a lot of snow in their faces. We all got a whistles. There was no going again, though we think all the employees were secretly applauding us.

A Night at the Climbing Gym

2007-01-06T14:45:00.000+09:00

Ate dinner, rode the bike and ended up in Hyungok-dong at the climbing gym. It was a little cold out, but still enjoyable to ride the new bike anywhere. Inside, there were more people than I expected, all sitting in a group on the pads at the opposite end from the door. They were watching someone move through a new looking route marked with red tape around the holds on the moderate overhang. "Na-ee-ssuh" and similar exclamations proliferated. One man, one of the guys who gives Me the beginner (it's supposed to sound like a name such as Alexander the Great, or Catherine the Terrible--doest it?) tips on moves I obviously need help on, approaches and tells me it's bouldering game. There are teams. I can tell that from the white board and the routes, though difficult, look easier than the routes some of these climbers routinely do.

I get changed and stretch out, watching others try the route. Some fail some succeed. I find an easier route, a yellow marked one and complete, somewhat surprised me. It was short enough to exclude my weakness--no stamina: I should eat more bundaegi. Try the red route, and familiarly I'm falling off again. One move I just can't get the balance or maintain the hold to pull off. I try it and other moves a few times with the guys who I would later find out were my "younger brothers" still have similar difficulties.

And then they call my name, tell me to come sit down. Choei, the guy who told me it was a bouldering game, holds up a large bottle of Soju and nods his head enthusiastically. I tell him I'm riding my motorcycle and can't. He's says one-shot. I tell him I have to ride home. He says ok, one-shot. I say fine, just one.

On the floor, not the protect-your-fall-pads, they spread a groundpad and on it put styrofoam plates of raw fish and to-go containers of dwenjang, red pepper paste, soy sauce and wasabi and lettuce and sesame leaves. And chopsticks lots of chopsticks. From this point onwards a person would enter every so often, join in and sit down. They gave me some sort of wine from a plastic bottle, a relief. Something I could drink slow, something with little alcohol in it. I also knew what I had got myself into. In Korean society, once the drinking has started it's rude or disgraceful to just break up the group and leave alone--the oldest says when to quit or the matter is decided as a group. Here I was with raw fish and a lot of booze and some very very enthusiastic people. What I've learned about climbers in the past, especially climbers in Korea, is that they really enjoy a good binge drinking session. And not that I don't, however this was completely unexpected and I had a motorcycle to deal with. My game would be a stall and wait game.

We ate raw fish and gwamegi, a dried and seasoned fish from the east coast, and they talked about things I couldn't understand. At times I would believe I was following, but either they laughed, or someone broke in with a very fast interjection and all was lost on me.

Then the wine came. "It was the wine they used for the toast at the APEC summit" the woman sitting next to me said. She spoke the best English there and from time to time explained the gist of the conversation. Choei insisted on putting some in my still half full glass of wine. The resulting concoction tasted like cough syrup, not the intention of either distillery I'm sure.

Then came some other liquor that I successfully dodged.

I had to laugh when I heard the word poktanju. It's what they call boilermakers here, and when I looked at Choei he was uncapping a pint of Dimple Scotch Whisky and mixing it with some beer. Guess who the first one was being passed to--me the beginner. Though I'm no stranger to the binge drinking or even the boilermaker--I actually liked it, whereas the others cringed after downing the paper cup--but I've got to get home. I tell him the boilermakers and motorcyles are a dangerous combination. It doesn't matter. One-shot! was the reply I got. So I held it there, looking at it, them looking at me, and I drank it.

Then they brought out the soju and I quickly got a cup of the low octane wine to set in front of me: my shield. Some other man came down, an older guy and everybody stood up for him. He sent one of the youngens to get more raw fish, which he didn't even touch after it arrived, and more soju came out from behind people. By now the beer pitcher was depleted enough to allow Choei to pour the rest of the whisky straight into it and dish it out from one bottle.

Faces were turning red, and Choei was saying "I love you" to me and making the heart above his head with his arms. We made speeches of introduction. Mine could be pathetically translated: My name is blah blah, and my handwriting is terrible. Finished. I hate speeches, especially introductions.

In between introductions the talking grew more fragmented and frenzied. The owner told me he was going to Everest with the top climbers in Korea in March. And though I really wanted to say "can I come?" I didn't and what followed was a long uncomfortable silence amidst a din of drunken words. I think I was suppposed to say Jogetda, meaning something like wow that's cool or good for you, or the ubiquitous "I envy you" in Korean English.

More drinking. "What are you going to do when the cops breathalize you" they asked me. "They all go home at midnight" I joked, and they flipped out saying 3 3 3 3. The funny thing about it is that it seems to be true. I've never seen a road block after 12; it's like they think that because people have to work in the morning nobody drinks past twelve, so they can go home having kept the streets safe one more day.

It's about 12:15 and they're talking about round two, a singing room somewhere in the vicinity of Geumosan, or possibly coming back to my house. This is my exit. Though it was tough I managed to convince them that I had to go home. After dudes sat on my bike and cranked the throttle and told me to be safe many times--I think they assumed I was as trashed as they were; haha my plan worked--I rode home, seeing few cars, none with the flashing lights.

Helmet Received!

2007-01-04T21:05:00.000+09:00

Got the helmet back today. It came to Daeyoung's hagwon and I was able to pick it up after school before going to the climbing gym. I went for an hour or so, tired myself out sufficiently and am now wasting my time on the computer. There is always enough of a problem or task to keep me here at my desk for hours each day without being able to truly justify the time spent.

I received my first complaint of sorts today. A mother told me she was concerned about her daughter, concerned that she didn't understand what was going on in class. Her class in particular has a textbook so below their actual abilities that the comment surprised the hell out of me. In class today we talked about "how many____?" It's really easy. Normally we use the terribly boring book, Hip Hip (shoot me please) Hooray, but today we looked at cars and trucks and buildings out the window and counted them instead. She said I don't understand a few times, and we went over again. "look two cars. how many cars? two cars."

And here are some random New Year's pictures. Traci accidentally erased her entire card, so there are no embarrasing pictures of me. Too bad.

Traci sures knows how to party.

Here she is giving beer to the elderly. She's so kind in that way, always looking out for others.

Joe thought he was real cool that night. It's too bad he wasn't. I've got a video of him finally getting the prancing down after much practice. Any takers?

Who's got the Mullet?

2007-01-03T01:03:00.000+09:00

Traci blew up on Joe for some reason that we all forgot while we were waiting for our Chinese food to come. It was past midnight on New Year's. I told Joe that I didn't care what she was angry about and chowed my fried dumplings. Wasn't really up for the small talk, paid and left saying I'd be outside. I found Traci chilling with the homeless, so I joined in the party. Soon Joe came out and left and returned throughout the next few hours; he doesn't know a good party from his butt. We bought a bunch of beer and drank with the bums. Then we bought a pack of smokes, and smoked with the hobos. And then we bought them some food and some soju. During that time, some guy kept coming over and acting a little angry, but kept giving us cigarettes, and even one or two to the bums. Yes we smoked a bunch of coffin nails, but when the kindly vagrants were burning plastic bottles and anything else that drifted their way, I think a little tar was the least of our worries. I guess these transients were an eyesore or a parking nuisance or something intolerable and we were half the reason they continued to peacefully burn there garbage. At one point the man asked if we had a room in the area; he suspected us of being homeless too. I think I may have answered him rudely.

Pictures

2007-01-03T00:37:00.000+09:00

Here are a few bad photos of the steed. I'll get some better ones when its light out.

The Steed

2007-01-02T19:06:00.000+09:00

My poor heart. Pumping blood at a pressure I'm not sure my arteries are strong enough to hold. Minutes ago I got off the phone with Dae young, the man who saved me from certain arterial explosions or at the very least an angry train ride to Busan to extract vengeance.

It was completely my fault in the begining, though not in the end: in the end the fault lay entirely in their lap; they messed up. Normally, I think everyone except a few people are out to do me harm, either maliciously or inadvertantly, but for some reason I thought it would go smoothly. Never nervous, just excited about getting my new motorcycle.

In Busan maybe four days ago, I bought a motorcycle--a beautiful motorcyle. It's a blue Honda Steed 400 from 1997. My original idea was to ride it back home, maybe 3 to 4 hours in the cold. Laziness, weakness, or wisdom got the better of me, and I decided to send it back to Gumi by truck rather than suffer in the cold--not as cold as the past few days, it would've been fun in hindsight. They offered to send my helmet with the bike, and since I was sick of carrying it around and not going to need it until I got the bike, I thought it was a great idea. At first. He said it a second time--the bike, the key and the helmet. On Tuesday. Somewhere between 6 and 8pm. I was quite hesitant as I gave him my helmet, the helmet I spent hours in Daegu trying to find, trying on nearly every helmet in two or three shops until I got it. But that initial moment of hesitation was all I got. Afterwards, over New Year's, the beach, the aquarium, back to Joe's place way out in the boondocks--no worrying, no doubt, just the sweet anticipation of my big Christmas present to myself being delivered by an unlikely Santa Claus.

Dude was not one of the guys from the shop like they said would be coming. We had to ask a passerby to help us lift the heavy bike down from the flatbed, because he had no boards or other method of unloading it. I'm surprised nothing was broken in the process. He gave me the papers, the key and made to go. "What about the helmet?" "There is no helmet," he says. "But the helmet." I was not at home, rather, I was at the hagwon and had to ride home. A short way, but I still like to protect the ridiculous investment I made when I went to private college in the US. "Here, call the shop," he tells me. Easy enough. The guy who picks says there is no helmet, and to not call back until someone who speaks better Korean than I do can help. I ride home, without incident and little things are getting to me. The pipes get too hot; I made the wrong choice in bikes, maybe it's going to overheat real easy. Weren't there mirrors on the bike? So furious about the helmet, I notice this only when I try to look in one and see the tail light of a guy in front of me. There is new concrete on my regular way home--not on my new bike.

I've been trying to call Daeyoung for days, just a casual call to wish him happy holidays, and today I finally get a hold of him. Sucks that it coincides with a favor I gotta ask. He calls, calls me back. Calls again and finally it's left at them sending the helmet to him when the guy who recognizes gets back to the shop. Turns out they thought I was asking for a helmet too, after I talked them down 200,000W for the bike, and were politely telling me to eat it. On my side I was ready to spend the 30,000 going there and back to give them a piece of my mind in broken Korean, and demand my helmet back.

So I should get it back later this week.

wonderfully pathetic argument

2006-12-27T10:27:00.000+09:00

I guess this makes me a loser, but this argument, stemming from an article in the Korea Times about foreigners facing possible fines or deportation over a play, is just too good. There is one Korean-American, or so says her name, that has a major chip on her shoulder. She's up late at night, hitting the keyboard, entering comment after comment, sometimes to no replies, and dominating the conversation. Unfortunately, what she is saying isn't all that on. She rambles off-topic trying to bring it misunderstood progressive arguments from the states. It's funny, though I feel a little debased from reading it. Have a go at it yrself:

http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/200612/kt2006122617295710230.htm

copy and paste the link into yr address bar. Blogger sucks for link posting.

Friggin Brilliant

2006-12-17T12:26:00.000+09:00

This morning, after voraciously eating cheese crust pizza and opening my laptop I stumbled upon a link for a video of an Ipod in a blender. I couldn't resist, since I would never put my Ipod in a blender, but am still amused by such frivolous displays of lunacy. It was beautiful:

www.spikedhumor.com/articles/72218/iPod_in_Blender.html"

I recommend watching it; but I deeply recommend going further to

www.willitblend.com

to see what they do put in a blender. Cell phones, oysters, tilapia, hockey pucks, chicken. Most of it blends because the blender they use is a 1500 watt monster they sell for 400$ on a linked site. The advertising is brilliant; I want one. If I need a blender I know which one I'm going to buy. I'm going to the buy the one that enables me to blend my computer if it pisses me off, or possibly the self-help books I found in this apartment. Reviews on different websites having customers praising its blending virtues, though good as they be can never touch the marketing genius of willitblend.com

Reading the comments at the bottom of the page brought me to yet another interesting site dealing with ipods. www.smashmyipod.com Here, a few bored Canadians fish for people to sponsor their smashing of ipods on video. One video shows them buying a new ipod at the Apple store and then nonchalantly smashing it at the counter. They're escorted off the property and banned from the mall for a year. Pretty good, and if yr into Chuck Norris there's a link to a page of roundhouse related humor. Here's one: "The grass is always greener on the other side, unless Chuck Norris has been there. In that case the grass is most likely soaked in blood and tears."

Updated Map

2006-12-16T18:01:00.000+09:00

So, If you look at the bottom of this page, you will now see that greatest form of traveler's masturbation--the map of countries I've been to or lived in--updated. Look at my expanded international coverage! How traveled I must seem. Maybe someday it will look as if the Soviet Union won the cold war. One can only hope.

2006-12-16T14:01:00.000+09:00

Me and my Special Testes

Thanksgiving dinner

Traci's big video debut

2006-12-09T23:27:00.000+09:00

Here are a few short movies, starring Traci. I think she shows excellent promise as an action-adventure star. Leave a comment; tell me what you think; write a petition to Hollywood and tell them you've found the next Sigourney Weaver.

Hanoi and Cat Ba

2006-11-17T14:12:00.000+09:00

Easy flight, easy in trip into town from airport. The van dropped us off in the Old Quarter near a guesthouse we wanted to stay. Our money blew like the wind in Hoi An, so we prepicked a place that supposedly had 4 to 6 dollar rooms. A helpful kid was there when the van stopped, grabbed Traci's bag and insisted on carrying it for her saying he knew where it was. His English was good, but not good enough to explain that the guesthouse in question was closed for expansion--cheap rooms are popular--so he showed us the English sign posted on the closed door. Then he said his father owned a hotel, cheap and only a few minutes away. He raced to the other side of town carrying Traci's pack, all the time saying it's only a few more minutes and asking if I was OK. "I'm very strong," he'd say thumping his chest and seeming to imply he'd take my bag as well. He couldn't have been more than 100 pounds. When we got there, I noticed we were where the bus was dropping other passengers off. The kid threw down Trac's bag and collapsed at the reception counter.

Rooms--9$, but with a TV and A/C. On a nearby corner, we found more bia hoi, that curiously good cheap potion we've come to love, and had a few before embarking on our pilgrimage to the temple of literature. There was no literature in the temple, but a few statues of guys who were into it several hundred years ago. Also were the names of all those receiving doctorates from the late twelfth to the late fifteenth centuries. Traci and I were rapt with this intake of haute culture, but we still found the bonsai exhibit temporarily on display for more interesting.

We went to an island honoring a guy who defeated the mongols, walked a little bit of the walking tour in Lonely Planet and ended up going back to our corner to drink more of our favorite potion and watch passersby till dinner. Afterwards we deposited ourselves back, this time sitting on the plastic chairs in the street because, due to the popularity of the beer, the corner was too crowded with locals and tourists. He we drank and talked, and drank and talked until we realized we had to go to bed.

The next morning's bus sucked. Hot, packed, queasy stomach and no room for our bags, our misery was only ameliorated by talking to the couple sitting next to us about their experiences in the Phillipines with Peace Corps. We took a boat, first to a cave, then through some of the most beautiful scenary I've seen. Halong Bay ranks up there with parts of southern Utah as places that make most destinations tourists flock too as drab and bland. The water is green with jagged teeth of limestone jutting towards the sky. In sheltered coves, there are multi-colored floating villages filled with fishing families, complete with several dogs per household. At first we were rankled with the fact that we couldn't get a fast boat to Cat Ba Island, but were glad to take our time.

Cat Ba town this time of year and week is dead. Few tourists and locals contribute to a generally peaceful atmosphere. One constant annoyance is the music playing from loudspeakers. Not overbearing in volume, but its the same two songs, about 20 seconds each, over and over again. One sounds something line a cross between Celine Dion and the slower parts of the Braveheart soundtrack, the second, and far worse, reminds of a movie I never saw, one of those supposedly uplifting ones that shows the audience some redeeming quality in life. One with Steve Gutenberg playing a counselor at a summer camp for kids with social problems. The whistling song is played overtop a montage of camp activities and chubby kids hiking with green hats on. Played over and over again this song is torture. It most likely is some "revolutionary" song about the heroic exploits of Uncle Ho. Unfortunately the summer camp image has stuck.

Our first day we spent reading on cushioned chairs on the beach. There was talk of us pretending we were rich, drinking fruity drinks and eating a large fish dinner at a floating restaurant. These plans were partially dropped when we saw the prices of the mediocre sounding fruity drinks. We did however have some fish at a floating resaurant, where two days later we found a floating dog. Pictures to come.

Yesterday Traci was sick from either the bia hoi or the nasty and expensive sandwich she had for breakfast--comfort food gone terribly awry. I rented a kayak and stroked my way to monkey island where I met someone who had been accosted my the monkeys (one of my fears as I pulled up to the then deserted island) The guy also claimed to have seen the monkeys take the water I'd stashed, something the absense my water sorta confirmed. I found a deserted beach and many cartons of cigarettes that had washed ashore, some still good. If I only smoked . . .

So, sadly these travels are at an end. We fly out of Hanoi tomorrow and have our first day at our new school on Monday. But there are redeeming qualities to Korea, and I'm looking forward to them. From one set of pleasures into another. I would love to hear from anyone who is reading this (comments email). I haven't heard from anyone living in a long while.

Hoi An

2006-11-12T23:08:00.000+09:00

We didn't make it up for sunrise. In fact we got a later start than we did the day before, but still not so bad--10a. It was due to the massive quantity of "fresh beer" we drank and also our apathy concerning sunrises. It's the sun, and it's slowly coming up over the water--Boring! If you're lucky that is. Most of the time you lose sleep to see it coming up over a nondescript cloudbank.

The beer was better. I'm not joking, I prefer it to the canned beer.

Today we rented a better motorbike, one that had a working headlight and horn--a must in this country where you need to alert just about everyone to your presence by constantly leaning on it. We tried to go to My Son, Cham ruins--they were an ancient people that like you I'd never heard of either. They fought Angkor and the Vietnamese and lost--somewhere around here. Our map didn't show where they were except for a little direction arrow off the corner and 30 km. We found out we took a wrong turn when a woman rode up next to us and said "Hi, where are you from?" We're moving along at maybe 40 kmh (our speedo didn't work this time) and we say America. "Totally Awesome!" And we continued this conversation as we drove with trucks passing us with other motorbikes and bikes congesting the small two lane road. She complimented me on my driving, probably because we weren't dead, and told us we missed our turn but would take us to Marble Mountain instead. Ok. It was near China Beach and we wanted to go there, too. Traci still watches reruns of the TV series. It's her favorite, so this was a really big deal for her.

Marble Mountain was cool--caves filled with incense smoke and buddha statues and chimney cracks to climb through to viewpoints over China Beach. (Traci was thrilled) We rode down the coast, had to make sure the clothes we had made fit us and went back out to the beach where we sat down and drank some beer. Several women tried to foist their wares on us and two succeeded. Fish sandwiches--yum--and Mentos because we liked the woman. She talked to us yesterday and we refused every time she passed. Today she just squatted down and told us that she sold two pineapples today. She was cute, saying "see you later alligator" and don't worry, be happy" trying to win affection and money. She left and a young girl sat down. "My turn!" We didn't buy anything from her, despite the beautiful line: "Try to open your hearts and your wallets."

Tonight only a few beers and early to bed. We booked a flight--the last bus ride sucked so bad that 61$ to cut out a 16 hour journey seemed perfectly reasonable--and have to leave before 7am. On to Hanoi.

Mui Ne

2006-11-11T19:55:00.000+09:00

So Traci and I continued a few hours up the coast to a little fishing town called Mui Ne. It's a very boring story to relate. The town has excellent winds yearround but Mr Proactive (me) didn't get around to renting any of the equipment--sailboat, board, kitesurfing rig etc--to enjoy it. The place is also famous as the Sahara of Vietnam for its large sanddunes. We didn't go see them. We did nothing but sit on the beach and read. Occasionally we ate some fish. One night we found ourselves in a deserted restaurant with better than average ambiance. The food was cheap, 3$ for what would have cost 20 in the states. But alas it was so empty the the bored owner/chef came out and played Gin with us for an hour before we left. He was pretty good.

We took one walk. It was blissful after visiting temples and museums of war crimes. On the way out we noticed how easy it would have been to rent a motorbike and go to the dunes ourselves, but the regret quickly turned into boredom then discomfort as we twiddled our thumbs through 16 hours of bus travel to Hoi An. It sucked. One all night bus ride too many and we booked plane tickets to Hanoi from here. 60$ or 16 hours overnight. We chose to part with the former, gladly.

Hoi An is quite nice. This is merely a quick update before we challenge ourselves to Fully enjoy the 20 cent beers several eateries have to offer and wake up for sunrise tomorrow morning. For a full update on this tailor town, check back soon.

Saigon II

2006-11-09T14:03:00.000+09:00

Saigon is a nice city, one we could call home for a little while if given the oppportunity. The scooters are intense. Previously I thought a lot of people rode scooters in Korea, more in Thailand and even more in Cambodia, but nothing remotely prepared me for this city. Imagine a the crowds in Times Square celebrating New Years Eve, now put them all on scooters and beat up old Russian motorcylces, a lucky few on newer model Japanese bikes. Then put them in motion, all at different speeds surging through the city, tides to some unseen force. Crossing the street in such mayhem can be a tricky deal. Some suggest praying. Sometimes a kind communist police officer, clad in green, is there to play Moses, blow his whistle and part the sea. Most of the time you're on your own. Intuition says flee across each street and intersection for your life, but this confuses the drivers causing them to slam on their brakes and dodge you. Walking slowly facing into traffic, sorta like fording a river, seems to work fine, although some seem to brush past you like the water in the analogy.

Everywhere we went we stood out as people who seemed to need lift on a moto or cyclo. Guys followed us yelling which vehicle they had, until the 27th "no,thanks" at which point they preyed on some other fellow walking the other way. At times we'd be eating at a streetside table and someone would come over and try to convince us that we needed their help in touring the city. "very cheap!" they'd say. What seemed to convince them best was to grab a hold of my belly and say I'm too fat. I need exercise. They'd laugh and agree and walk away. What sucks is that a lot of the cyclo guys are disenfranchised intellectuals who chose the losing side in the American War. The government cut short their careers, sent them to reeducation camps and now they're forced to earn a living peddling the streets. And we really did want to walk.

We did the tourist things like walking to the Reunification Palace (reunified with boredom) Benh Than market (not as cool as I was expecting) and around the river area (expensive and hip). We had beer in the Continental, we had too, and almost had one in the Rex Hotel but couldn't find a nice enough table to justify the price. (On coming out I was horrified to think I wouldn't spend 2.50$ for a bottle of beer on a rooftop garden terrace, but 37,000 dong seems just so expensive when the going price is 10,000) We went to the Cu Chi tunnels where we watched a one-sided presentation on how the Americans came in and sundered a peaceful way of life, while slaughtering innocent civilians, which is probably more or less true. But it was still a little over-the-top considering the gloating murals of GI stepping in nasty traps of spikes. (pictures to come)

Saigon

2006-11-05T12:30:00.000+09:00

We bought tickets to Siem Riep Cambodia from a guesthouse that had a great big sign advertising them for 30 US$ each. Every guesthouse travelagent etc had the same sort of sign, some larger than others so what could be wrong? We found out while we were crossing the river to get to our bus that the trip would take a day and a half. Naturally we didn't believe them, and naturally they were proved completely correct at about noon the next day when we arrived in Siem Reap. The border was a little dodgy--a singletrack dirt road, cratered and potholed leading through forest with little else than the landmines I imagined inhabiting it. We had to drive down a road, take a right to go stamp out of Laos, than drive back the same way and take another right down the dirt road. 15 minutes later when we arrived at the cambodian side we met another group of 4 Africans trying to leave Cambodia. All had overstayed their visa, and the border guards were trying to extract some enormous sum of money from them. They were swearing up and down it was misunderstanding and that there must be some other way of handling the situation. The border guards said 10%, which was still outrageous, and the men went and continued to sit in the shade near the station. Traci and I paid 25$ for an arranged visa because we were skeptical of getting a visa issued at small forest outpost border station. A mistake. The service we received was the man handing our passports and 21 of our dollars over to the border guard doing the paperwork. We jealously watched as our Dutch bus companions handed theirs over themselves. Traci found a blank page in her passport and got through, but my only pages we the one's dedicated to modifications and endorsements in the back. The man wouldn't issue me a visa--despite my vowing it was ok with my government to use those pages in just such a case, that it happens all the time--until he placed a 5$ call to his boss, at my expense. "otherwise, it my mistake." I argued and just gave up after seeing the Africans sitting in the shade and clarifying that the phone would ensure my visa. I got my visa, he got his money and I had to pay another 1$ to get my last remaining unblemished page stamped. You'd think the dolts would realize what they were doing.

Into Cambodia. The potholes and desultory state of the roads you hear is no exageration. Our driver took us through some village on a shortcut dirt road where we needed to dish out immodium to two of our bus mates after two seperate emergency stops, both times me wondering about landmines and the Aussies searching for a modest place to pinch a loaf. We stayed Kampong Cham, a city famous for it's barbecued tarantulas. Sadly, I couldn't find any to sample.

I can't sing the praises of the temples of Angkor loudly enough and description and pictures do nothing for it. I never fully grasped how immense the place was from pictures. After three long, long days of walking around a dozen temples in hot dust, we were ready to leave. The kids hustling the temples are cute and pernicious. Some of my favorite quotes:

kid: buy book for boyfriend
woman: i don't have a boyfriend
kid: becuase you don't buy my book. no money no honey

kid: where you from?
New Zealander: New Zealand
kid: you buy my book?
NZ: no
kid: you give me money?
NZ: no
kid New Zealand bad. hope you fall down temple!

One kid outside a temple near Srah Srang resevoir started his postcard pitch 10 for a dollar, the same ten for a dollar that 573 other kids are passionately trying to get you to buy, and was counting them. I was about to say sarcastically to Traci that wow the kid can count, when he launched into German, then French, the Spanish, then Dutch, and some others I didn't know. Traci asked "how about Korean?" "il, i, sam, sa, o, yuk . . ." was his immediate response. He told us his mother and tourists taught him and asked again to buy his cards. We relented, bought them and some are on they way to Korea and the States now. The random kids speak better English than our most advanced students in Korea do.

Phnom Penh is a city that grew on me despite the way people looked at us as if we were meat on a stick, despite the nastiness of the killing fields and S-21, the dust and noise and begging children trying to get you to buy anything--at the killing fields kids would ask "take a picture of us, 1,2,3 smile?" When you refused they would just start moaning like thirsty zombies in the desert "muhhneeeey . . . muhhneeey" and following you. We heard later that some of these kids will pose with you next to the tree the Khmer Rouge used to smash babies before tossing them into the pit, holding them over it. "They don't care, they just want a dollar," the guy who told us said. I liked it despite the constant attention of cyclo, moto and tuktuk drivers trying reel you in.

Drunk and wandering the streets of the water festival on the Tonple Sap river we sat down to get something to eat and of course some more beer. (This was shortly after my bug eating experience where my courage failed me after eating a cricket the size of my thumb. I did, though, take a deep look into its stirfried eyes for reassurance before biting its head off.) We ordered and three kids walked up to us and just pointed at their mouths. When the rice soup came and we gave it to the children, we immediately drew the ire of the vendors, but the kids ate it all, the little girl even chewing and cooling the food for the infant she carried on her hip.

We got visas, dodgy dodgy visas paperclipped into our passports for Vietnam due to the fact we had no pages left. And they worked! Without even a little bribe. The ride sucked, but who would expect anything less. We had to wait 3 hours to cross the Mekong by ferry where there was no bridge, seems there was an exodus scheduled for that day. But we're back where things are cheap and have two weeks to make it up the coast. Too little time.

2006-10-31T23:00:00.000+09:00

(all pictures to come--these computers and this program prove to be too unreliable a combination)

Luang Prabang, the four thousand islands in the Mekong near the Laos Cambodian Border, and now Siem Reap.

Luang Prabang was cool; a relaxed town we toured with an Irish guy who was a little off his bicycle. He hadn't talked to many people, traveling as overland as possible through the middle east to Asia over the past 8 months, and exploded seemingly, as we drank beer in a little noodle joint just outside the old town. He had a shaved head and an 18 inch braided beard that kids in Nepal chased him yelling out the name of some goats hair for. He was a gregarious guy and got drunk on one beer more than we drank: we're sitting there drinking big beers but only two and he drinks one quicker and manages to get down three and he's singing Kevin Barry, though he hates the revolutionary songs he says. The town has many monks, many monks and goes to bed early, nothing really being open past 10 or 11. We find the Hive, a bar that pleased neither Traci nor I, because it's the only thing open. It's full of western white people and pumping music that is just short of obnoxious. Everyone's drunk and the overheard conversation is discouraging deep to the soul, but we buy expensive--relatively speaking--beer decide to leave afterwards. This dude, Alex, is drinking Smirnoff straight from the bottle--to which he periodically adds 7up--and plain jaded looking. I try to make the inane small talk--do my part to participate in the soul-discouraging conversation--and yeah it's small. Then, I forget the lead up, he yells at Traci, saying she came there to see all the foreign people, that's she full of shit when she says otherwise.

We don't take this well. We argue and make fun of the guy--he was there before us and had obviously been there awhile--and have a good time at it. He asks me about eating and I tell him his best bet is street meat. Immediately he's trying to get me to go with him, standing up and falling over chairs and tables. He no longer trusts me to help him up and stumbles off to some group that cheered his fall. Traci and I leave.

We ride bikes around the city, it's quite nice. Relaxing and provincial, tons of monks in bright robes everywhere you turn. I went to a waterfall without Traci--she wasn't feeling well--and did a twisting sloppy flip off this 5m waterfall.

It was nice that I didn't hurt myself.

Bus ride to Vientiane--long windy vertiginous roads made this 10 hours of hell for some. The little monk boy was nodding his head to the music at the beginning, but was soon hunched over, his father's hand on his back, vomitting and remained so until he got off.

Vientiane to Pakse--not seemingly as long despite the assseats at the back of the bus we shared with these rich dudes fighting over a blanket or laughing at the Mac laptop one of them brought. They fed us. Then stopped the bus and threw the trash out the side door.

We took another bus to Si Phan Don, one that stopped to wait an hour for to fat backpackers who wouldn't pay the 50 cents or a buck for the few mile tuk tuk ride to the main road. Dudes didn't give nor receive any smiles.

But we're smiling anyway, as soon as we reached Don Det. 3$ a night accomodations, 2$ meals 1$ beers etc. We crisscrossed the two islands Don Det and Don Khone on bikes under a burning sun, sweaty hot and happy. Drinking beers where we wanted watching the Mekong thunder over rapids or shelter water buffalo from the myriads of bugs plagueing them.

The not so smiley was the funeral. The day we got there we were walking to rent a bike and saw this truck being offloaded onto the island. Imagine Huck Finn with a Korean-make truck on his raft pulling into some hillbilly river town and you got the scene. It was a spectacle. Everybody watching and engrossed. We returned our bikes and found a congregation by the loading area (I can't call a slope of dirt a dock) a woman wailing, and men sitting around a fire. We passed again and no wailing but we saw the little girl on a platform by the fire. We thought this was maybe some elaborate ritual to break a fever. She didn't seem dead. We found out later that the two year old girl fell in the river and was lost for 30 minutes or so. They tried to revive her; westerners tried CPR but the family refused. She'd been under too long. So the family was drinking and trying to carry on like normal. We learned the severity of the situation over drinks at the Monkey Bar, which earns it's moniker from the chained up monkey out back that towards the end of the night tormented us by bouncing around, jangling it's short chain. It was almost closing time--the time when the generators on the island stop running and everything goes black, sort of like a horror movie except with more Australians than monsters--and this guy Floyd had a bottle of Lao Lao to drink. Lao Lao, for the uninitiated, is vile shit. Traci and I were anything but initiates. We thought we were tough with the soju, but were proved terribly terribly wrong. The stuff is brewed at home nad comes 50 cents for a 10 ounce (sprite) bottle. Floyd wanted to play quarters and after Traci was suckered in by a crunk Australian named Abbey, I wasn't far behind. I did well, until Abbey started cursing my name and telling her boyfriend that he was going to have to hold her hair and I held up took pity and lost my groove. Then Traci started sinking them, inadvertantly, we were a team, and it was nasty. Finally, lights went out, things got weird and we had to go. We had to walk straight through the funeral, which we now knew was a funeral, and things got a little weirder. Traci asked what we could do. Guy-named-Andy said sit down and drink. And so we did, the group of Laos, one of whom spoke English, Andy and us. They fed us more of that vile nasty petulant liquid. We learned the details, sad and sat awhile trying to carry on with the folks. When the father left we did. It was only too soon . We'd each smoked two cigarettes, and we don't smoke.

Vang Vieng

2006-10-22T14:54:00.000+09:00

We stayed in a nice bungalow overlooking the river and the jagged limestone mountains to the west of us. We argued a little over the price--8 dollars or 80,000 kip. The bus dropped us off at the place after circulating a color flyer on the way up, rather than at the airstrip just to the east of town as normal buses do. The coersion turned me off, but we were just outside of town; the place was quiet and the view was more coersive than the connected bus drivers had been.

Into town looking for something to eat, waiting for Christa to show up. We eat at this organic farms cafe that seemed to have a pretentious hippie feel lurking in the shadows, but days later I'm mulling over a fantasy of working there for a week or two in exchange for room and board.

Vang Vieng is a tourist town. There is no way around that. It's anything but 'offthebeatentrack' and by the end of our soujourn there I was convinced it was the land form of a cruise--Royal SE Asia. People arrive there in droves and the one local that I was able to hold a conversation with told me the only traditional Lao food you could find in town was on the street. The restauarants all catering to western tastes. In the bars along the main street, TVs play constantly, most with a DVD of Friends reruns on repeat. One showed the Simpsons, one showed Family Guy.

Possibly the most enjoyable part of Vang Vieng was tubing down the river that runs alongside of town. 4$ gets you a tube and a ride 3 km up the river. You put in and in less than 100m there is a guy with a long stick beckoning you to come and enjoy a Beer Lao and his zipline built out from a tree with bamboo, running into the water. How could you resist that. Nevermind the fact that it's 11am, it's hot! A short while later, perhaps another 100 200m and another guy has a rope swing and a long bamboo stick with which he brings in his catch. This continues down to the town with some smaller some larger makeshift bars and ropeswings, places to jump out of and shacks to get food at. A few of the ropeswings are rather large, one of them Traci biffed off of (video coming shortly) and some are so hopelessly small in comparison that I feel bad for the solitary guy sitting on his dock shouting at the disinterested passersby. By the end Christa, Traci and I were a mess, as was everyone else on the river, but decided to stop off at the bar on the way home, aptly named the Happy Cafe. It was such a merry place that the owner even named his daughter, 4 months old, Happy.

Vang Vieng wasn't all bloating and floating. One day I rented a bike and toured some of the local caves on the opposite side of the river. The lamps given to me by the guides and other locals sitting in the bushes trying to make a buck were dodgey at best. One I had to twist two wires together to get it to turn on. That was a cave I didn't go very deeply into. The next cave, however, I realized my guide periodically pulled out a lighter to melt some of the inuslation off his wires so he could twist them together. We were already quite some way in, light being a faint glow behind us. This cave was large, with slippery ledges abutting gaping chasms. I ended up jumping out of a tree with a Lao boy and swimming in the lagoon with a slightly pompous rich Israeli. Good times.

I also went climbing, coincidentally behind the bar on the river that did me in two days prior. I was the only one with the guide, but wish I could have had a little more time to rest in between climbs. I kept falling off the last route at a difficult part because of hand failure.

Then we left, went to Luang Prabang for a few days of walking around the small city.

It's a chopper baby

2006-10-17T17:00:00.000+09:00

We took one of those forms of tourist-cattle transport from Koh Tao to Bangkok. We bought the ticket on a whim from the place we had our laundry done and later got reprimanded by the dive shop we'd been using. They sell the same tickets. She didn't hold it against us though and arranged for a taxi to bring us into town to catch the boat. It was about 24 hours of ferry and bus travel with an ear infection and a hangover (we met this Irish couple who introduced us to the bucket--A pint of Thai whisky a drop of coke and a a red bull--and a laid back bar on the beach--before we got to the little hickish town of kantharalak. We met Les, a man who'd gone to High School with my mother and has lived here for 13 years or so. He picked us up at 8 am and we spent the next two days with his family, Ya, Benz, Jackie and Tony.

As luck had it, Les owned two Honda choppers, and trusted my professed riding ability. Ya dropped the kids off at her mother's and we took a trip into town. Got some drops for my ear and that progressively felt better over the next few days. We rode around on some other business and finally decided to ride south to a curious national park that likes to charge foreigners inflated admissions prices at each new bend or rise or sight. It was flat and straight and devoid of the potholes that littered the road from Les's farm into town, so we got going. A stupid idea since the helmets we were wearing were unreliable at best and the paper thin clothing and sandals provided little other protection. But the speedo was broken, so each time I had to hold onto the helmet because we were going too fast, I looked down and saw that we were only in fact going 0 km/h. It reassured me.

The way people drive in this part of Thailand--right near the Cambodian, Laos, Thai border--is casual. If you want to pass someone, do it and don't worry about. The other cars and bikes and tractors and motorcyles and scooters and carts and trucks and buses will move towards the shoulder or slow down or some safe combination of both. Otherwise they will sound their horn and let you know they don't intend to do any such thing. The bike had some get-up to it, so I was able to negotiate this sort of situation and keep up with Les, who was givin her ahead of me.

We got the discount, two foreigners, one resident alien and a Thai citizen for the price of three Thais and one foreign child. Somewhere up the way we had to pay another 20 - 50 baht, this one confused me, before being stopped just short of the Cambodian border where Cambodian's wanted another 200 baht each to continue up to the ruin. Les was appalled by the racist principle behind it and I bought a pair of sunglasses so rocks would stop hitting me in the eyes on the way home. We settled for an overlook into the three countries where Les and Ya spoke to some Cambodians about dead bodies below the cliff we were standing on and Traci and I tried to follow and stared out over the vista.

Les's kids were great, if a little high-maintenance. A little standoffish at first, they lost all inhibitions when I started throwing them around. First with flips and then around in circles. I swung them in between my legs and around in poor dance moves. We played my favorite game of all, wheel-of-children, where they lie down and I spin them until their pupils become the size of soup bowls. They loved this game even more than I did.

The two girls are good dancers. They get it from their mother, who is great dancer, natural rhythm. Ya wanted to go dancing the last night we were there so we went down town and for a little while were the only people at a bar with a band playing maudlin rock anthems. At set break Ya got them to dance music and soon we were all dancing and drinking bad 'blended imported spirit' that was called whisky on the menu. At the end of the night, there was a fight, over jealousy between boyfriend and girlfriend. She hit him with a chair, he hit her. They went outside. By this time we were dancing on the stage, the whisky all gone. Transvestites were getting their groove on in these banistered platforms. Outside the man and woman are still fighting, then he hits her, grabs her face and throws her to the ground, kicks her. Now it's getting uncomfortable, the scene inside is not jibing with that outside. Nobody is doing anything. Our jaws dropped and getting down off the stage and going outside and Ya waving it off, then talking to the girl and soon everbody is outside, the party is over, the fight is over. The guy who was sitting on his scooter looking tough with his side crowded around him while his girlfriend yelled from the stairs amidst a different crowd was gone. Attention shifted to us. The lead singer called me handsome, I said he was too. One girl was calling us lovely, Traci a super star. The Transvestites were talking to us introducing themselves. The lead singer made sure to point out the obvious, to which one replied "noboby know, nobody know!" We droved back out the potholed road to the farm ending the strange night.

I loved staying with Les and his family. It was a welcome break from the backpacker trail where it seems we will spend most of our time. 6 weeks may sound like a long time here, but we feel rushed. a month for each country is a more adequate time. As it is, we're having to stick to few places, easy places due to long travel times between.

And now here we are in Vang Vieng Laos. More on that later, hopefull with pictures. No time left today.

Ko Tao

2006-10-10T16:09:00.000+09:00

On Ko Tao down in the south of Thailand. We travelled overnight by bus and boat to get here and it was worth it, though the weather sorta sucks. It was bright for half a day, then the rain came and hasn't really let up. Before that we managed to ride a little scooter, a piece of crap, like the dirtbike it wasn't. Still didn't make it to the remote beaches I wanted so we settled for a swim on the largest and most accesible beach. There are bigger bikes and now I know where to get them.

Today we dived. Rain didn't matter so much underwater. The first dive wasn't the greatest due to a massive current and an anxious girlfriend, but the second was great. Nice and comfortable. I goaded an aneneme fish into attacking me. Got guts for a 2 inch fish.

Bangkok

2006-10-08T16:42:00.000+09:00

We made it, as you may have heard from Traci. After a leisurely drive to the airport with Nicole down the east side of the Olympic penninsula, we had long but reasonable flight to Incheon, ROK. Months ago, when booking our ticket back we requested special meals thinking they would be special. Not so. We looked with envy as the other passengers were served chicken and beef dishes that looked only moderately bland while she got some eggplant sandwich and I a dish of rice with flecks of mushrooms on top. Now know not to say that we are devout muslims.

We stayed with Will at our future home, drank lots of Korean beer, the sweet nectar we dearly missed during our sojourn in the states. We received our expensive but already paid for last shot of Japanese encephalitis immunity. Nothing really was open do to it being Chuseok, the Korean Thanksgiving, but we managed to wrangle up a dinner of chicken galbi. Just before I called a friend's number hoping to get him to come along. Someone picked up and I said "I heard you been talking about my mom" in a somewhat threatening voice. He laughed a little uncomfortably and asked who it was. I said my name and he asked me how Busan was. This was my first clue that I did not know to whom I was speaking. It turned out to be Colin, one of the new Prime teachers who just got here. He was confused, but agreed that it was a good way to make each other's acqaintances.

We packed and left on the first bus of the day, at 230a. Still the highways had the most cars I've ever seen on a Korean highway. Half of Seoul was going home after the holiday in the country. The rest area was so packed that the lanes normally meant for driving were filled with parked vehicles. The exit ramp also looked like a parking lot. It took my special knowledge to realize the truth.

We discovered Thai airways to have the best service of any airlne we've been on. They forced beer down our throats for four hours before noon, a trick helped along by the fact we were passing receding time zones. They even tried to foist cognac on us before we politely put a stop to the madness. The bus ride from the airport to teh Khao San road to almost as long as the flight did. It was hot and sticky and endless. But here we are in the major tourist distract of Bangkok, "the decompression chamber" for tourists coming to or from Thailand according to a recent movie and book by Alex Garland. We didn't want to stay here long, nor did we want any hassle trying to figure anything out after so much travel and madness. It's what it is. We have food, a bed and a cold shower before our bus leaves for Ko Tao tonight at 8p.

Today we did the Tuk Tuk thing--getting ferried around to some of the major tourist sites as well as some of the major tourist shops selling jewelry and tailored clothing. Apparently the drivers have some great deal, because after going through three such shops and smiling a lot and politely saying we don't wear suits or jewelry, the guy dropped us off and wouldn't take our money. He'd originally asked only 10 baht, a little more than a quarter, but he took us to several other non-retail places and drove us around for nearly two hours.

Flowers in Buddhas hand

Look I can drive a Tuk Tuk

Here is our driver and Traci:

Meal at a street stall, notice the legs and shell still on the shrimp. The woman who cooked it had something large and hairy on her arm. Traci couldn't stop staring at it. It looked like a two and a half inch long hairy beetle was burrowed into her wrist, waiting to make it's next move whatever that is.

Port Angeles before our flight

2006-10-04T15:58:00.000+09:00

Last night we saw Derrick
and ate some fried pickles. Yum!
Night before our flight. We're in Port Angeles visiting Paullete and Dave, Traci's aunt and uncle.

We spent our last day running errands, some of which didn't need to be run. We waited at the department of licensing for too long to find out that we got fifteen dollar copies of what we already had and didn't need. We got out of town later than we planned and missed our ferry. But Traci and Nicole found time to defend America's borders.

Bellingham

2006-10-02T11:22:00.000+09:00

After a week in the FL heat we're now in WA. WE had a lazy day sandwiched by nights that defined the phrase rok n roll.

A bunch of people came over

We partied and barbequed.

Then did high kicks in the kitchen. Mikkel practices.

Zooey is still around, despite attempts to cook her.

Dave realized the madness early.

and Hardcore was consumed by it

It was rok bliss

Traci hits and kills a manatee

2006-09-29T04:03:00.000+09:00

Traci, having a great time driving the boat. This is her first time, does it look like she is going a little too fast for a novice skipper?

Traci grimaces as she sees something large and slow moving in front of her. But she doesn't turn.

The rest happened so quickly I was unable to document it. I'm surprised she didn't kill us too. The manatee proved to be a speed bump from which we took 2 or 3 feet of air. It was bloody enough, Traci felt bad enough that I kept my camera sheathed. She's still crying . . .

could it be?

2006-09-18T12:52:00.000+09:00

After a few months absence I'm writing here again, as if anybody is listening. Most of those this blog is intented for told me recently, in person, that they read it once or twice and never went back. Thats why you see all those "0 comments" at the bottom of my posts.

Traci and I are in CT for a few more days. We're making our rounds of the USA, visiting family and friends before heading back to Asia for some more free time. We spent a little over a week in IA with Traci's family with loads of children coming out of walls. They were everywhere. Luckily, I'm good with some children now. Since arriving in CT, however, my slavedriving aunt and uncle put us to work with the cider press. If this were my own, and not a stolen computer, I would upload the video I took of it when my overseers weren't looking. But my computer is still dead, upstairs in a bag far nicer than what it holds. Tomorrow we go the NYC to get our visas for next year. It'll be fun with Bush and all being there, clogging streets and being a general nuissance.

toasted hard drive and general laziness cause drop in posts

2006-07-23T14:14:00.000+09:00

about a month ago now, my internal hard drive died on me with a terrible screeching sound. I sent it home with Jen, thinking Dell would require me to send it in. There just sending a new hard drive that I get to install and configure myself. Traci's got her new computer, though I only use it to check the email account that never has anything important in it. So I'm going to continue the slacking for a while longer, unless something gives me the urge to update.

Last week

2006-06-27T11:27:00.000+09:00

Last week was a little boring. Nothing happened that hasn't already happened a few times, at least as I remember it. Went to the pool and gym, was still sick--I'm still blaming the yellow sand from china--had another random class sprung on me with two days notice, didn't drink any beer. This whole no beer thing is getting a little old. I don't even want to go to bars now that I'm limited to something vile--soju--or something absurdly expensive--whiskey and the like. Sunday is the final, and Sunday will be my first beer in a month. Saturday night in Busan, I was drinking KGB vodka drinks--those bottled beverages for people who don't like beer but want something that appears similar--because the only bar we could find that was showing the England-Portugal game served little else besides beer.

Jen and Sue got here late Friday night. Stayed late at Psycho and got a late start the next day because of it. Ate raw fish and sea slug and the like in Busan, went to yet another temple and looked for the fishermen unloading their wares at dawn. Unfortunately they weren't around.

Another week.

Defeat

2006-06-24T23:54:00.000+09:00

It's midnight, and Will's overdue. He was supposed to call nearly an hour ago, to make sure we were all up and going to Psycho. There's a good chance he's asleep, like Traci beside me. It is late by some people's standards. Traci's not going anywhere, and with the game already on, me comfortably in bed, I see no reason to move at this point.

We watched last nights game at Gumi Stadium (the people's exercise arena) in the hopes of seeing some mass elation firsthand. We saw something like that when we arrived, but the mood was entirely different when we left. It was a late game, real late. We arrived at the stadium around 330am, and it was already teeming with vendors and fans all decked out in red. Many had the red balloon rods to bang together and chant. Greg suggested we sit on the railing right in front of the screen in the stands. An excellent idea. We couldn't find the way up at first, but Greg managed to get pulled up into the stands by two dudes, one with a Korean flag on his back and the other with a Swiss flag. Greg then helped them pull me up. I could've easily imagined myself in some perilous circumstances in a warzone, sulphur hanging in the air, flashes from fireworks and explosions all around. Struggling to make it over the wall, where a fall could mean my ankle. Traci and Alice found their way up the steps as did the other folks. Rory insisted on a swig of 'the crayture' to give luck to Korea. An overzealous Korean man managed to give himself a hell of a buzz with no visible effect on Korea's playing. Unfortunately, he was dumped on me. He'd lean into me and wobble as I gripped the balcony wall and leaned forward hoping he wouldn't push me off. The drum section was right next to us, in the beginning really banging out the chants. As the game went on, though, they dwindled and soon it was a few of the originals and us foreigners whose respective countries had already been eliminated. After the second goal was scored, the leader of the band was standing there virtually alone, waving the Korean flag. France up by two flashed across the bottom of the screen and people started leaving the stadium. It was light out now, a beautiful morning. Traci and I stayed to the end. We had to walk home because of it, everybody pouring out of the stadium looking for cabs. It was peaceful walk through fields we didn't know existed, Traci drunkenly yelling "I'm in a corn field" as she stood among less then 10 stalks. I tried take a shortcut, leading her through a rice paddy and concertina wire on the backside of a bank, but she wasn't having it.

I went to bed, she didn't. She went straight to the Waegook soccer tournament over at the technical college, and continued the steady diet of diluted ethanol. It's really painful to be at these sporting events and not drink beer. Especially today, hot and sunny, with ten kegs available and little else to do. The soju just wasn't doing it for me, so I remained sober the entire day. The rest of the scene though was something else. The Gumi team was more sloshed than all the other teams put together, and lost the only game I saw--the other team was taking it far too seriously--but I think they managed to make the final.

Around 8 I got a call saying the dive trip to the South Sea was canceled, and now that I was freed from having to wake at 5am, most of my friends were thoroughly torn down from the day and the night before.

Competitive Eating

2006-06-23T11:06:00.001+09:00

A few years ago John Bonnauito--I'm hopeless when it comes to spelling that name--said something that will probably stick with me for the rest of my life: If your not eating competitively, you're wasting your time. Two nights ago we caught an eating competition on the Fox networks recent inroad into Korea. It was beautiful, so beautiful that at points I thought I was going to vomit. The competitors were introduced, then stood in a line as what they would soon consume at race-pace came tumbling out of a barrel suspended from the ceiling.

The butter was brilliant. We watched as Dan Moses Rather chowed 7 quarter pound sticks of butter. "He eats one meal a day, and he eats it competitively," the announcer said as Rather masticated away his competition's hopes of moving to the next round.

The next round put the Doginator in the same dish as Gaseous Maximus, some dude from Texas who ate 42 pickled eggs(I think he even called himself Cool Hand) and a bunch of others. Gaseous Maximus was decked out in Roman garb and not so competitely eating his whole cooked beef tongue. The "gluttoncam" gave us some great low angle shots of dude from Texas sweating and gnawing at his portion with difficulty. "You have to have the inner strength," said the announcer. The doginator had some competition in a man from Jersey, but with his inner strength put him in his place. One man was twitching, and the Doginator, well "he's saying hello to another beef tongue!" Afterwards, with his medal around his neck, the Doginator said "It feel great to be the tongue champion."

Then we witnessed one of the greatest in sports today, the Tsunami, the Prince, a 23 year-old, 130 pound Japanese guy who puts all the big fat sweaty gluttonous dudes in their places. He ate something like 31 hotdogs in a few minutes, twice as much as the competition while they shook their heads and laughed. Kobayashi's mechanical style of wolfing down the dogs was clearly no laughing matter.

Last night after I was asleep, Traci saw Kobayashi once again chew and regurgitate his 'competition.' This time it was brains. The doginator just stared, Rather tried and failed. With one minute left, the Tsunami was asking for another plate. That, my friends, is beauty.

Tests

2006-06-21T23:05:00.000+09:00

Tomorrow I'm going to take a scuba diving test. I haven't studied or taken any sort of a test in more years than I have fingers--so I can't count that far back--and don't how I'll do. If I pass I may go diving this weekend, somewhere in the South Sea maybe. Where exactly I probably won't know until I see a sign on the road as we exit the highway.

I almost inadvertantly ended up going this past weekend. A bag was packed for me and loaded into the van. I made sure that we would be coming back by 7 pm, the time I was meeting to go camping. He said, "no, tomorrow we'll return." Within minutes I wasn't going with them and we were both smarting from the miscommunication. But then I ran into an eccentric man on a motorcyle that likes to throw boomerangs--he sorta looked like he lived on his bike, a well worn suzuki 350 dr something or other with a blue tarp strapped across the back rack. He pulled up next to me at a stop light: I could hear his engine as he weaved through the cars. When he stopped he eyed my bike. I saw he was not Korean and raised my visor. "oh hey," he said. "you live here, you wanna pull off somewhere and chat?" Nice guy. He me a hot tip on a Kawasaki Vulcan 500cc in Busan for only 1.5 million. Seriously considering the upgrade, now that the 125cc is pulling two nonbeerdrinking fools up the hills around here--so it all turned out okay.

As for this test tomorrow . . . the 'test' on Sunday turned out poorly. I climbed up a real wimpy slope, most of which I would normally do without any sort of protection and acted all wussy about it. I blame it on the total confusion of not only strangers belaying me, but strangers whom I don't understand. Didn't know how to use a figure 8 descender so I could only do the wuss pitch of a multi pitch climb. I did learn the word for falling rocks though.

If that serves as a model for what to expect from previously shabby skills now atrophied from disuse, well then, tomorrow will be interesting. I do remember--now, at least--to dip my BCD into the water before strapping the tank into it. What else will I be tested on?

In other news Jangma--장마--starts today, the month long rainy, some call it it monsoon season. In other words I can expect to ride my bike in the rain or slowly bleed to death from cab fares. Or go back to taking the bus, turning a 15 minute commute into an hour each way.

The switch

2006-06-17T11:14:00.001+09:00

The other night while swilling the normal few pitchers of Hite, the Korean Budweiser, Traci, Will and I decided to give up the beverage for a month. This has several implications. One, obviously, none of us can enjoy our favorite libation for an entire month. And this during a time of Soccer matches every day or nearly so, resulting in more time spent in bars in close proximity to the bubbly beverage we're come to love. Did I mention that it's getting hot, too? Two, our alternatives in this heavily taxed alcohol market are limited. Basically we can spend our entire paychecks on good tasting booze or we can save our money and jump into the soju diet. We have done the latter, embracing the rotgut as if it's our long lost relative. Soju generally comes in little green bottles for very little money. If you want to, you can get wasted on a few dollars. Traci did Friday night. She spent a grand total of 8 dollars on food and liquor. And the only reason she spent so much is that one of the bottles she bought was in a restaurant (where I was busily consumming far more swine than I needed to)where a bottle is three times the cost of a store's.

Soju is a clear alcohol, distilled from rice and other grains. For the last 35 years of the twentieth century, the S. Korean Government feared a rice shortage, so soju was made by diluting ethanol alcohol with water and flavoring. Yum. Most of the cheap brands are still produced in this fashion, though Traci and I are looking for brands that are actually distilled.

It doesn't exactly taste good, not the way beer tastes good, and I've never actually thought to myself 'man, I could go for a shot of soju right about now.' But it doesn't taste that bad. Certainly doesn't taste worse than turpentine or gasoline. It's somewhat like vodka, though usually weaker with it's own distintive difficult to describe taste. Traci says bad vodka, but something else is there . . . After the first few shots, they start to slide down, though those first few can wake you up.

And wake us up they did. Last night we went to Daegu with Daeyoung for his alpine club's 30 anniversary. We arrived to eating and drinking, becoming quickly bound in a bramble of soju and introductions. We met a man who climbed K2 back in the day. And drank several shots of soju with him. I met the first man who was a swimmer and could whoop me in 100m fly--he was jacked, and kept feeling my arms, probably wondering where the muscles were. We drank several shots of soju with him. We ate more, drank more, watched the ceremony where envelopes full of money were put into a pig's mouth--only the head was present--and at one point, ears. Towards the end of the night Traci was standing singing and we had to go to bed. We woke to dogs barking and all those still drinking when we went to bed, already up and beckoning us to breakfast. It was 740am. We were hiking within an hour.

So why would we give up beer and submit ourselves to the temptation of cold beers on hot days after hungover hikes?

Dae Han Min Guk clap clap clap clap clap

2006-06-14T09:24:00.000+09:00

So Korea won eh. A little tired and not wanting to deal with a massive soju swilling crowd, I went to Bryan and Greg's rather than the stadium. It was rather subdued and private, though Greg and I were in a pizza place, picking up yet another pizza, two actually, when the tides turned in the second half. All those present on the second level dropped their pizza and threw up their hands. The guys did at least. The woman were excited, rather than the soccer hating figures of Mr Kim's joke--Korean women hate soccer and Korean women hate stories about the military. What they really hate is stories about soccer in the military. Alice (I've heard her real name once, and can't remember it) was getting really into the game, screaming each time the ball neared either goal. We went outside after the game, Traci insisting that there would be parties and general jubilation. Christa insisted that Koreans had mastered the art of dispersal much better than N. Americans had. Ch was right; there was nothing happening in Bonggok dong. It was as quiet as a normal weeknight.

In about an hour my first Korean class will start. I'm excited to actually have some instruction rather than asking the other teachers questions as I come to them.

Fun riding

2006-06-09T22:42:00.000+09:00

Today's ride home through Indong and Gongdan was no commute, it was a rousing game of which fucker is going to kill me. There were many, and though a few idiots stopped in intersections, parked in obscene places, and pulled buses into oncoming traffic without looking, none killed me. I can tell the non-listening world about it.

The rest of the Funeral day

2006-06-09T10:40:00.001+09:00

So I went to the funeral the other day. It was nice in a funereal way. In the bottom of the hospital, it was in a room, seperated into two chambers. In the back chamber, Mr. Oh stood by an alter with sacrifices and a picture of his mother. We entered and bowed twice (full bow to the floor bow) to the alter and once to him. One of the Korean teachers lit a stick of incense and we went to the first room. We sat at one of the tables and ate ddeok (traditional rice cake) and some sort of pork and other side dishes. Mr Oh walked around and made some small talk. He seemed happy, maybe that we came, maybe that the ordeal was over and he knew his mother was not suffering. Envelopes came around with some characters I didn't recognize on them. Everybody stuffed some money into them and passed them on. Then they came back to us, people telling us to put out names on them. I was tempted to stuff another ten thousand in mine to show up everybody else, but something held me back. Parsimony?

Then the motorcyle called. Greg, Will and I took off through country roads at breakneck speeds, breaking the thin pavement while taking turns like animals, frightening the locals and running over animals. Well not so breakneck, but my motorcycle wouldn't go any faster so it felt like I was really tearing the roads down. We ran across a real nice set of roads northeast of here, some of the most pristine countryside I've seen outside national parks in Korea. We even went swimming in the Wicheon (위천) river. After a particularly nice stretch, after "blazing" across a bridge, Greg pulled over and looked at us, "The locals were swimming." We intended to swim someplace, though we didn't know if we would run across a river or lake clean enough. With the locals in the water, we figured it was a sure thing: some were wading, kids were swimming and some had nets possibly pulling food from the water.

There was a little film on top. And the eddies trapped some dark dirty looking foam. But by that time I'd been in up to my neck--self dunked, it wasn't deeper then my belly-button--and discovered a small cut on my foot. So I was the first to jump off the small cliff and slam my ass into the sandy bottom. Will and Greg followed suit. Afterwards, Will put on his change of clothes, a Batman suit complete fake muscles, but unfortunately we headed home before riding at slow speeds through sleepy towns. He did, though, pass a few cars at 110 km/h fist thrust forward as if about to save the day.

We ended the holiday with a barbeque in our apartment complex's back quad. We left the cheap little grills out there, too hot to bring inside, and they ran off by morning.

Funeral

2006-06-06T10:21:00.001+09:00

Here I am, an air raid siren has just sounded and I'm wondering what I'm still doing in Gumi. Was suppposed to be on the road by 9 this morning, riding east to the coast, but my partner's upsa, maybe went back to sleep, and now it's nearing the time of a possibly important event, that maybe I shouldn't miss. Yesterday afternoon my bosses mother died. She's been unwell, (in a coma for 8 months) for some time, and her time has finally come. Tradition here is all those concerned give money 20,000w or so, and bow twice to someone, the bereaved, the deceased, I don't really know. I'm thinking that I should go, maybe even shave before I do so, which gives me 35 minutes till we meet at one of the several hospitals in Gumi . . .

Nothing new

2006-06-03T16:28:00.001+09:00

Sunny Saturday and a looming barbecue in Hyeongok. Spent what was left of the morning running errands, one of which was shopping at Lotte Mart. I needed meat for the grill, and have been unable to solve the problem of getting video from my computer to the TV. No store yet searched has a cable converting s-video to rf(?). The problem is still unsolved.

As is the swelling in my jaw. One side receded somewhat and the other side blew up right around the time I went to see another doctor. He said the same thing--swollen saliva glands, that it wasn't serious, then gave me another script for antibiotics etc. Not so swollen, but aching. Add to that the pressure in my sinuses that never seems to subsibe and I'm constantly annoyed. Might be making another trip to the hospital when this set of meds runs out and the situation remains the same. Maybe this time they can just lance my sinuses with a vacuum cleaner.

The weekend and the morning that followed it

2006-05-29T12:15:00.000+09:00

I woke Friday morning feeling like hell. Through the night, I'd been waking every hour or so to expel the mucus that was cascading down the back of my throat. This has happened before and after waiting a week to see if it would go away, I got a sinus infection. The local doctor's office was filled with high school students getting their physicals, so I went to the one over in Gongdan, the University hospital where a friend works. Though I didn't see him, I did see the ear doctor pull out a marble's worth of wax out of my right ear. A present from my last week in the pool. I got an idiotproof strip of medicine packets with who-knows-what inside and had to run to work. (Sorry, Greg it took them a little while to dig the shit out of my ears, I didn't even have time to ride over and say I didn't have time. If you had a cellphone . . . )

I fell asleep at work repeatedly. When I got home I fell asleep in front of ROK beating Bosnia.

Despite feeling like it was a bad idea, I went to Seoul the next day. And it paid off handsomely. At Seoul Racecourse Park, I won a cool 900W. I was a high roller, hobbling around with a bad foot and nasty cough, wearing a shirt fit for the tracks, my chest hair protruding from the neck, suggestive of what lurked below. I put 2 g's on Mr Secret to win in the eighth, and he did. The odd's were real low, so I didn't get rich, but I did shout and urge as I stood by the finish, ticket in hand. After collecting my winnings, Traci, Joe, Christa and I went to Anyang for the night. Andy had to come later. He make a mistake and put a lot of money on the favorite in the last race. He had to stick around to see some unknown come and take away his money.

Anyang. Party with foreigners who never leave the Seoul area. There are twenty of so of them in one school, a little terrifying. I felt to bad to really participate, but the food was good.

Sunday, got an external hard drive, another 190 gigs to fill. It took me a year and a half to fill 30 gbs, this next 190 will probably go in a few months, but then I can always get another. It was rather cheap, about 110$, but maybe another would be just hedonistically greedy. Traci and I went to a Picasso show, both felt to tired to really enjoy it, but it was enjoyable nonetheless. KTX train back to Gumi, asleep somewhat early.

And this morning. I woke up, looked in the mirror and the left side of my face was swollen, still is. I went to the doctor who, after a ultrasonic scan, said it was a swollen saliva gland and I should come back in two days.

The terrible thing about that is, Wednesday is a vacation day and I was planning on riding my moto to a national park.

Procrastinate the morning away

2006-05-25T09:58:00.000+09:00

In procrastinating I put a little map of countries I've been to on the bottom of this page. It seems I've been to two dozen, though you can hardly see the ones in in the Carribean. If I go to the four or five largest countries, it would seem I've been everywhere. You can make your own, then paste it on your website. Or you could just play in the hosts website, creating what if scenarios and wasting time. A little bit of travelers masturbation. I've been here, and here, and here. Ooh what if I go there, then that continent will be a little more red. Look at that, Asia is filling in nicely, oooooh.

I've been swimming in a secret location. I can't say the name in public, because if I do, herds of people will appear, making it less than desirable. It's amazing I even found this place--a pool with nobody in it. Nobody. The most people I've seen has been 5 including me, and that was when one woman had just got in, and one woman was about to get out. It's loads better than the other pool I used before the accident, where at least 10 people, very slow, analagous to open beer bottle in the water people, drowned back and forth. In 30 minutes, if I was lucky and the drowning ajummas took a break from my agony, I could get in about 30 laps. In the new pool, I can actually get in 100 or so, the only limit being my terribly atrophied muscles. I pay for it, but not so much considering. The crowded pools come out to about 50,000 a month if I go every day and pay by the pop. 40,000 if I get a months membership. The secret heaven of empty swimming pool is 80,000. Worth every penny. Though now I've got a waterlogged right ear to deal with. I got a dropper bottle to make the homemade concoction friends of mine dowsed their ears with after every swim practice while growing up. Never needing the pretreatment myself, I never learned the recipe. Vinegar and water?

Haeinsa

2006-05-22T10:37:00.000+09:00

Monday after a great weekend. Saturday morning I woke, far less hungover than I should have been for the amount of soju I drank, to the my phone ringing. Will was asking what time we wanted to get going down to Gaya San. We were rolling within 30 minutes. The first half of the ride was pretty flat, going through Seonju, where all the little yellow melons you see in the street markets come from. Once we hit 59, the hills became dramatic. Gaya is a large block of land, imposing from a distance, protruding angularly out of the surrounding hills. Winding through the passes gave the new bike its first real workout. Traci and I on it are a little heavy and couldn't keep up with Will, who was riding fast. On the tighter turns where I'm used to leaning, the kickstand would scrape scaring Traci. It was her first time on the back on such roads. The roads were so twisting, and lush that I figure we'll ride back if we have the chance. It's close enough.

Inside Haeinsa. Built in 802 in thanks to the monks that cured the queens incurable disease.

Does this road go to Daegu or Gayasan? Putting my new map to use, the only time thus far. You don't really need maps in this country. If you get lost, it's not a big enough place to be really far out of yr way.

There are 80,000 of these blocks housed in Haeinsa, with the Buddhist cannon carved into them. The buildings are designed to allow air to circulate in such a way to preserve these 800 year old printing blocks.

We ran out of gas on the way home. A nice farmer gave us a lot, even when I kept saying it's ok. We only needed enough to get to the next gas station. And we took the long way home by poor judgement on my part. It was quite a nice road, though we missed out on an extra hour of the new all you can eat, all you can drink buffet in town.

I spent Sunday riding around country roads alone. Hot and relaxing.

Last of the last

2006-05-20T02:13:00.000+09:00

It's late night. I just got home from the last "class" with my morning group. As a morning group, I enjoy their company at night. All are animated and lively, quite unlike the morning, when all of us, including me, are just trying to keep everything straight, not worrying about the complexities or the English language. We ate meat and drank soju, too much soju (any soju is too much soju, because when you start drinking the stuff, there is really no point in stopping--you'll feel like death regardless. Then we went to another bar to drink a little beer. Not so much really. I was expected a lot more. I was expecting to be shown the seedy underworld of Gumi, the places some the students in the "running" club have been telling me about. But alas, nothing was seedy about the evening. I gave out my phone number, hoping that in losing the class, I would gain friends. Maybe, maybe not. One guy, just a little younger than me, is a drinker, getting wasted often on weeknights. He talked about beer with me tonight and is quite talkative on the subject, unlike class--morning--when he feels like hell. I do hope they contact me. While I didn't enjoy the class, early when none of us really wanted to do anything intellectual, I enjoyed their individual company, especially in a different setting, a more relaxed setting where we could be ourselves a little more freely.

Is Stephen Merritt a Racist?

2006-05-19T10:37:00.000+09:00

Here's a quote from the New York Times (quoted from Salon): "If the number of black artists in your iPod falls too far below 12.5 percent of the total, then you are violating someone's civil rights." There should be a link below, but Blogger (defective piece of crap) won't publish links for me lately. The URL is there for cut and paste for those interested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/18/arts/music/18rock.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

Stephen Merritt of the Magnetic Fields was accused of being a racist because black artists are underepresented in his musical tastes, because he said Zip a dee doo dah was a catchy tune. Does this logic carry through in that if you don't like klesmer music, then you're an antisemite? Does anybody else see this--the interpretation of one's personal artistic tastes, by others as bigoted behavior--as ridiculous? Am I misinformed on this? Underread? Please enlighten me.

The sky is falling

2006-05-18T23:33:00.000+09:00

Is something wrong? My student's today refused a game of bingo, the game to end all games here in Korea. Isn't it axiomatic that you can never go wrong with bingo in Korea? I suspect Bush may have bingo at the top of his unspoken new strategy to deal with N. Korea.

But today kids refused to play bingo. They wanted to play a game of my inventing. A game where they open picture dictionaries to a map of the world. I then call out countries, from easy (China) to very difficult (Kiribati) and they scramble to find them. The first finder receives a coupon, which with hundreds of such s/he can buy terribly overpriced goods on "Market Day." They love this game. Me: "Borneo B-o-r-n-e-o" Them: silence, then "teacher, one more time spelling," and eventually screaming me me me me me me me me and pointing frantically to the page. Today I had the students pick random countries for each other. Among the chosen were Qatar, Antarctica, Chile, Honduras, Tonga, Nigeria (twice) and others. When a student couldn't pronounce a name and tried secretly pointing it out to me of guidence, it usually ended up in the rest of the students looking for a hint--where s/he was pointing.

아쉽다?

2006-05-18T08:31:00.001+09:00

Second to last morning class finished. And my unmotivated, hungover factory-worker students were motivated enough to be upset at my leaving and get me a going away gift. The manager gave it to me, just pulled it from behind him, saying the company prepared something. It's a watch. Not an expensive one, but one with shiny silver casing around a face that displays two dials--one for home and one for Korea. The company's logo is in between the two dials, though small and unobtrusive. I didn't look very critically at first; the manager had to mention the name before I noticed it. Anna, one of the students, was expressing something that appeared to be shock, though I don't know exactly. (Over the course of the class, through my translating of strange and random words, words that most foreigners wouldn't know, it's been gradually assumed that I understand most things they say, Korean or English. As a result, little Korean is translated for my benefit anymore, leaving me guessing at a lot more than they assume.) Anna said earlier that she would come out to my hogwan to study, that I should wait.

As students over the last two months, the majority were unmotivated and lazy, or just to busy to care about learning English before going to work. But as a teacher the same bullet wounds me. It was too early for me to motivate them from the outside. I was trying to jumpstart my mind too, but didn't have the luxury of sitting back and letting one of my classmates speak while I deliberated a question, answer or explanation. I didn't have the luxury of being hungover from the night before, quiet in class (or like today, one of the higher level students made frequent trips to the bathroom between his sometimess politely lewd, but always funny comments) One or two students always came early and prepared, though.

And here comes a bit of Korean culture (it's the teacher's responsibility and fault) that somehow I've assimilated and internalized--As the teacher, I feel I let this class down, both in my style and my desire to end the class. In hindsight, I started the class wrong. With the momentum of precedent and the accumulation of time, changing the classroom atmosphere becomes more difficult until nearly impossible, if it doesn't start with the majority of the students. I was too easy, too relaxed for the students in the class. Most needed some form of discipline imposed on them, and I didn't provide it. I learn best informally, partly because I can't stop thinking about an aspect of language and asking questions about it, if provided the chance. (yeah, I'm a dork) My few adult classes in the past seemed to have benefitted from this relaxed, ball-in-the-students-court approach. One adult class no longer wanted me to teach them when I was too formal, too academic. I've since changed my style in that class with somewhat better results. The experience confirms my belief that a teacher doesn't teach subjects, rather a teacher must teach students--each case is different--in order to be effective.

I don't regret my decision, though. With Traci and I on similar schedules again, the inconveniences of noise, early and late, lack of good sleep, and irregularly spaced classes will fade. We'll argue less over what time we turn out the lights, about how late Traci is up pounding on her keyboard. I'll no longer have to worry about her staying late at the bar, coming home and opening our obscenely loud door, thus sending an unhealthy amount of adrenaline through my body, waking me and keeping me up. (I never got used to it, no matter the time, possibly because somewhere in my subconscious I believed someone or something was bursting into our apartment prepared to take everything, including my life)

Rednecks and Teachers II

2006-05-17T22:19:00.000+09:00

No one showed again today, though two were in Seoul on business. On a lighter note, I believe Friday is my last day of waking up at some uncomfortable hour to teach unmotivated hungover factory-worker students.

Rednecks and Teachers

2006-05-15T22:04:00.002+09:00

I was excited today. For one it was teacher's day. And I had an unconventional lesson plan--redneck culture--to test out on my advanced adult class. I emailed the adult students a link to a Colorado Springs Gazette article about the burgeoning popularity in redneck culture

The word came up last week, talking about country style coffee here. Inrae asked if English used 'country style,' and I lauched into explaining rednecks, hicks, and hillbillies. I touched on pejorative meanings and prejudices and stereotypes, and eventually even called myself a redneck at heart. I think I only confused them. This week was to set the record on rednecks straight. And hey, they want to learn English and a little about American culture. Articles about rednecks and country songs like "Redneck Woman" and "White Trash Wedding" seemed like a good break from the sometimes dull book we use.

No members of the class showed, nor did they call to say they wouldn't make it. I did however get to follow through on my first attempt at substituting the Dixie Chicks for the textbook with a lone woman--a housewife thinking about getting into teaching English again and considering a brush up--auditing the class. Poor lady. She came wanting to see the atmosphere of the class and got only the teacher, with an experimental lesson plan. I think, the article may have been a little difficult for them, but I only asked them to scan it if they had the time; we would go over it in class. The class meets again on Wednesday . . .

I received presents from two of my younger students, probably some of the only ones who genuinely enjoy class. But who wouldn't enjoy a class where we sing and make up our own words to the karaoke versions of the book's songs? Today we threw a paper ball around, practicing baseball vocab. In class, they got the syntax and structures better than the older students, though, in the hall as they left they relapsed into using an unnecessary 'are' because of the song's beat. Just hold the 'we!'

Relax

2006-05-14T23:05:00.000+09:00

Ahh, a weekend with no rain. Two days of outside lethargy, riding my moto, enjoying the absence of responsibility and rain. I make it sound as if we're in the middle of a flood. We're not, though beautiful teasing weeks are followed by gray, wet weekends, leaving another week of longing for weather like this weekends. I found this temple by accident yesterday.

I rode north through Seonsan with half a mind to continue all the way to Sangju, some 60 Km away from Gumi, but turned around to take pictures of Boshintang (dog soup) restaurants. I saw the sign, and thankfully anyone who did didn't care to go. It was nearly deserted, something rare in this dense country of hikers and day trippers. The only sounds were the wind, moving the bells, and birds and frogs singing from the woods. I felt I could actually go inside the halls. But I didn't, of course, and thought that I should've after leaving.
Today was Traci's first extended ride. I think she liked it, and we didn't even take one of the really cool roads.

Guns

2006-05-09T11:45:00.000+09:00

I guess guns are in. I bought one this weekend. Not a real one of course, that would actually cost money and involve more licensing and paperwork registration. I bought a toy that looks damn real for 3000W. It's the kind that would get you shot by a police officer in the US and is thus banned. They're easy to come by here, sold in stationary stores where school children can buy school supplies like pens, pencils, notebooks, erasers and occasionally throw stars--they were in style here in September 2005, when one of my students demonstrated how to throw one at a wall. How could I not buy one? For 3000W I felt I couldn't go wrong. It's useful for target practice, intimidating drivers that cut me off, and capping my friends when they don't expect it. And right now, before posting this, they don't suspect a thing. This will be an experiment in seeing how often they read this, in seeing how prepared they are. Knowing them, they're prepared. They live together, Bryan and Greg, and have 4 such replica guns in their small apartment. I believe Bryan sleeps with his replica Uzi, finger on the trigger, while Greg shoots passersby from his window. A few weeks ago, Bryan shot random tough guys--they standing around being macho and talking about their souped up cars under his window--and nearly incured a wrath the toy Uzi couldn't handle. They just may be prepared . . .

What is it with boys, men, guys, whatever you want to call us and guns? Even mild mannered, proper folks can get into shooting their friends after a few beers. This morning one of my adult students told me he spent 100,000W on a CO2 powered BB gun this weekend. He and his wife shoot at targets and sometimes his wife shoots him. I believe this, though of most of my students, he seems to be the one who most realizes that veering off the road of truth provides excellent language practice. In this same class I have another student who speaks English reasonably well. One day a few weeks ago he came to class a little early and told me that the night before he had been on the other side of town in a park. He went to use the public toilet. Before entering he heard some moaning, unintelligible and prolonged. He didn't care. Maybe it's common to hear moaning coming from a public bathroom after midnight on a random week night in this park. He walked inside not thinking anything more of it.

Greg and Bryan, at times, stalk each other in the park late at night. A few drinks and a few guns and there is a park just a block away. This particular night they had grown bored of stalking the other and had decided to act out a more interesting scenario. Bryan was to be a suicidal man, whose wife had just left him, and Greg was to secure the bathroom swat team style, shooting the man-over-the-edge before receiving any pellets himself. Greg was taking his time, concentrating on a window when he heard Bryan screaming and shooting. It was time--Greg jumped in shooting. In the middle of this was my student, Donghyun, shrieking and shielding himself.

Donghyun told me that if it had been a Korean with a gun he would have thought it was a toy. But it was a foreigner, a screaming foreigner with a real looking gun leaping out of a stall, shooting.

The old bike

2006-05-08T23:39:00.000+09:00

This morning I talked to the man who may buy my crashed motorcycle. He offered me 150,000W for it. I was hoping for more like 200,000 - 300,000 for it. It's a Hyosung RX 125 for those that care or know about these things, and in Gumi they sell for about a million won. I've seen or heard of at least two going for that price and briefly seen one other as I rode down a street in Sangmo Dong to meet a friend. His repair estimate was high, and now his offer is low. Sucks, because to get another estimate I have to move it to another shop. Without a front wheel it'll be difficult.

As for the new bike, I'm in the process of actually getting insurance this time. I figured it might be better to stay inside the law for a bit. Also, Traci won't ride very far on the back without it, and this weekend proved that it will be easier and more comfortable if we just drive ourselves wherever we want to go.

New Ride

2006-05-03T22:54:00.000+09:00

The new bike. Someday, maybe I'll have a picture of the wrecked bike, though it's not all that dramatic for those not involved. This one goes a little faster, though since it's so heavy it feels safer somehow. I plan on getting insurance for this one; if any of the myriad visitors to this site knows a good South Korean motorcycle insurance company . . .

Acrylamide

2006-05-03T08:44:00.000+09:00

According to what I just read, I've been eating cancer for breakfast for most of my adult life. The staples of my mornings--browned potatoes with vegetables and coffee--contain the carcinogen acrylamide. I discovered this during the morning; coffee in hands and potato breakfast on my mind, I was reading through the internet news and found this story:
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200605/kt2006050217464911970.htm
Several of ROK's fast food restaurants and potato chip manufacturers have products containing carcinogens. The real catch, after reading through the article, was finding out that the chemical is formed by cooking starchy products at 120 degrees C or above. It's not some profit driven corporate plan that produces the health risk, rather it's the simple act of cooking the food. Something we do ourselves. Reportedly consuming one small bag of McDonalds fries here in Korea (if it's different elsewhere, I don't know) is equal to consuming 2 litres of water containing the maximum recomended amount by the World Health Organisation for an entire year. Sign me up.
Supposedly most of the acrylamide in our diet comes from coffee, though coffee also contains anticarcinogens. Do they cancel each other out? If cooking a starchy food at high temperatures for long periods of time creates the chemical, then what about baked potatoes, cooked around 160 degrees C for 45 minutes. Is this seemingly healthy method of potato preparation in reality a cancer factory?
But according to Wikipedia, researchers don't agree that consumption of acrylamide causes cancer. In large doses, it's dangerous. But so are a lot of relatively benign substances.

A new red bike

2006-04-24T08:50:00.001+09:00

A weekend of decisions, some bad, some whose consequences have yet to be seen. I had planned on going into Daegu early on Saturday, but stayed out drinking till 5am or so on Friday night. I was starting to be able to walk normally again, something the alcohol probably helped, and dead set on getting a new bike the next day. Frasier and Nino showing off their new bikes didn't keep me calm and level headed about the situation, so the next day when no bike really jumped out at me, I simply chose the last one I was looking at. The major contender before that had fallen through as a possible dud and this one was looking ok. Smooth ride, good back brake electrical systems worked well--from a laymens check it seemed ok. So I bought it. With Frasier's help I talked him down from 850,000w to 700,000. He originally said 900,000 in that bullshit form of prediscounting something. It's rampant in Daegu. You're buying something and you try to bargain with the vendor and they tell you that the price is really 15% higher and that they already cut price. I was itching to get a new bike, though, and Will had already bought what seemed to be the best bike for the money that day. There was another that I had a bad feeling about, but it probably would have been just as good. 700,000w and it had a performance pipe on that sounded great. It accelerating better, but something didn't seem right. By the time we were all done, parked at the train station, and taxied over to Arianna hotel, we had about and hour and twenty minutes to take advantage of the all you can eat and drink buffet. I managed to get down two plates of food and six pints of their normally quite overpriced pilsner. 0 to 6 in a hour can call for an early night, and I was continuously amazed at the time whenever it was mentioned. We went to Z bar, an overpriced really mediocre place that didn't sell draft beer on weekends. Then we bailed and went to the Frog an overpriced mediocre dance club. Entrance and two beers=20,000w. After some pretty lame dancing, Traci and I ended up sitting on a bench drinking beer in the street, something we should have done from the start. The doorman with a mullet was getting down, dancing with anyone that would walk by. Some military guys showed him up and left. It was only midnight or so when Traci and I suddenly got up and left, trying to get a train ticket. Next train 4a, so we found a motel around the back of the train station. A nice cabbie took us there the long scenic way. I don't know how much we paid, but it certainly was more that the nothing we would have had we just walked around the block. Needed food, had 7,000w, got some beer instead. Only drank one before going to sleep. The next day I met Will at the station and we road back to Gumi. I was a little nervous, my new bike and Will having sat on a bike for the first time just the day before. He did fine though, a little shaky in traffic, turning neither smooth nor fast, but he made it to Gumi alive. By the end of the day I noticed the ajossi had polished the forks to hide the fact that fluid leaks from my forks. I noticed a bunch of other little things wrong it, one of them being the fact that I can't ride it off curbs and up small trails on the way to work any more. What's it going to cost me and should I have just fixed my dirtbike, possibly neglecting one or two of the repairs that brought it up to 730,000 friggin won. The guy who I bought it from said he could do it for less, and 400,000 or under and I could probably be persuaded to do it. Two bikes, maybe Traci would want to get on one from time to time.

Lunatics

2006-04-19T22:23:00.000+09:00

I've got a class of young students, just about my youngest in fact. There are three of them: Mini, Tommy and Jeremy. They have real names of course, but the English names are easier, and it's how I refer to them in class. Mini is a tiny girl who wears a lot of pink. Everyday she wears pink, though somedays the only pink things she wears are her pink framed glasses. But because of that, there isn't a day that passes where I don't see Mini in pink. Jeremy is a smart younng boy, seemingly typical, though tired often. Tommy is the newest to the class; he's been with us about 2 months. He's gone from shy to never shutting up in that time period.

Today was a day that is becoming typical. The kids shouted for most of the class, I got angry, and thus very quiet. I've learned that it does little good to shout all the time with kids. They merely mimic the behaviour or the grow immune to it. Rare surgical use is OK. They liked the song they sang yesterday, so today after the test, instead of starting the new chapter, they sang the the song over and over again. When they tired of that, they repeated whatever I said, fast and slurred. Then Tommy began to use the trick I taught him. The "what's that" trick where you point to someones chest until they look, they you bring your hand up to their face. Except he just just "look at this," and hits me. He does this repeatedly until I pick him up and put him in his chair. Then he does is some more. It's really cute, but very counterproductive to even the most minimal of lesson plans. Today Jeremy hungry for attention or fearing the load of homework threatened (it didn't stop the other two, nor did they blink when I assigned it) tried to do the exercises in the book alone with me, yelling be quiet every when Mini got real loud. I wonder what anyone outside the classroom thinks of it, screaming kids and a teaching begging for a bolt of lightening to bring an end to his suffering.

Bad week

2006-04-17T22:01:00.000+09:00

There is no joy when you crash your beloved dirtbike into some moron's expensive car. Especially not when such an event comes at the end of a week of teaching with sinusitis, and just before your boss telling you that your schedule is imminently changing for the worse.

The moron was making a slow left hand turn and thought it might be a good idea to just stop halfway through the turn, before actually reaching the road he was turning onto. I breaked and swerved, but not enough, and hit his car going about 60 kmh. Enough speed to get me airborne for a few seconds and seven meters of road. I was lucky. I fell on my back and ass, rolling just a little and snapping my right ankle on the pavement. My shoe flew off down the road, and I rolled around in pain, not knowing which hurt worse, my ankle or my heart. I felt something strange jamming into my ass and at first thought it was the top knob of my femur. I thought I dislocated my right leg. When I regained a little sense, I realized it was my wallet in an unusual position. I was still in the road and my bike was still going, the back tire spinning. The throttle must have been pinned on.

The cops came, a man I knew just happened to be passing by and helped with the translation and all. My bike wasn't registered so there was nothing I could do in terms of the law, even though the accident was almost entirely his fault. Had my bike been registered I may not be looking at the repair cost that almost equals what I paid for the bike. I went to the hospital, got some Xrays. The doctor found nothing broken, so I got a brace and the advice to keep off it for a few days. The plans to go to GyeongJu were canned, and the weekend that followed a terrible week was boring at best.

2006-02-23T23:00:00.001+09:00

I'd like to say that I'm writing from the depths of the week, but the week hasn't been that deep. It's thursday. Yesterday was Tuesday. The day before that was Sunday when I was tired and hungover from a night with more night than sleep.

So, it's gone by quickly with minimal kid-induced depression. And I've got the joy of commuting on a bright yellow dirtbike. I'm not yet at any stage of cutting through traffic, living up to my self-given Korean name--권칼로--I'm more at the stage of being cut off by people I'm cursing at beneath my helmut, trying to spend as little time as possible trying to understand how they can be that stupid and still operate a steering wheel. The road full of the other crackjobs deserves my attention.

Fuck You?

2006-02-16T00:13:00.000+09:00

Yesterday a 12 year-old student said fuck you to me.

He's one of my better kids. He pays attention some times, seems to enjoy learning if not studying, is able to communicate and tries to communicate ideas more complicated than "teacher, me homework no." He comes in to the teacher's prep room to ask me questions or sometimes simply to hound. Lately he's been taking things such as my bag and running away in a joking manner and only returning it after I give fake chase. Or pretending to punch me and giggling. Yesterday he went one step further.

He said it in a joking manner, not meaning any harm. And had it been just the two of us, I wouldn't have really cared. Possibly I would have told him that that expletive--my very favorite--in that form wasn't a really good joke. Maybe I would have illustrated far more colorful ways to use it, ways in which it beautifully and emphatically modifies objects not directly second person. But not likely. I can't bring myself to teach the kids that type of English until they have fully mastered the basic, intermediate, and some of the advanced stuff. But he did it in front of a class that I'm finding increasingly difficult to keep hold of. So I brought him outside to the counter teacher, told her what he said and calmly walked back into the room.

The other students were in an uproar. They all knew what it meant, generally, and were curious what was happening to him outside. I tried to convey that in certain situations, saying "fuck you" to a person can be a serious action--that it isn't a joke they should be comfortable with. I tried telling them it was akin to picking a fight. They just laughed, and acted out fights between each other. I tried telling them that in some places of the US, picking a fight with the wrong person could mean getting shot immediately--angry guy with gun--or getting shot later in some terrible massacre--Dylan Kliebold. They thought this equally funny and unlikely, joking with guns fashioned from pens and pencils.

The student, having received some weak punishment--he was still smiling--came back into the classroom and apoligized at the same time I was realising my stupid mistake of trying to reason with these children. The class was a wash; I entertained fanciful questions about what would happen if the student killed some important person then killed themselves.

Duh. You're dead.

But tell me, my myriad readers, was I wrong in theory or practice? I think it was only in practice, and here's why:

One--I was speaking in English, a language they don't speak competently. Possibly to a competent speaker of English I would have been more persuasive.
Two--They are children, though more importantly children from a very safe, and from what I've seen, non-violent country. They have lived short, sheltered lives, shielded from most mention of harm by their parents. Though generally relegated to an inferior social position, woman here can walk just about any street without fear of rape or assault. There has to exist in some larger seedier city an area that the general public avoids, but I haven't heard about it. The one area of Busan that I was told to avoid after dark I found tame. I think in most places in the US, due to the media and recent spur of violent school crimes, kids of the same age would think death, getting shot or knifed, and saying "fuck you" with a loose tongue would be a more serious act.
Three--I simply went about it in the wrong way. My students think everything I say as a joke is serious, and what I try to explain honestly is dreadfully funny. Hence, I'm 62 and killing people is fun.

The incident got me thinking about how different a place can be. What is considered dangerous here--swimming in a river--is something many others do without thinking. What is considered desperate and despicable is just unthinkable in some circumstances, the stuff of only movies. In a way it's commendable for parents here to keep their children from such information, as it prepares them to enter the sheltered society at large. But should they be so sheltered from such news that such news 10-15 years later becomes unbelievable, something they would only find in a video game or movie? Granted that 10-20% of Koreans travel abroad and such gruesome news from Africa, South America or the US is irrelevant to most Koreans, what part would they play in the world community if all things gruesome outside their borders were dismissed as fiction or exagerated?