Love Land

Ranell and I spent the Lunar New Year holiday on Jeju Island, which is known as the "honeymooner's island." Our first stop was a theme park known as Love Land, which deserves its own separate post. I'll let the pictures do the describing:

this was one of those "claw" games you usually find at an arcade. Except they usually don't have prizes like these!

That's Scooby-Doo!

is this position even possible?

now I KNOW this position isn't possible..

See the little kid in the background?

morning wood makes for great bag hangers

and now for the WEIRD part of the park:

I think I'll pick a different chair..

goodbye, Love Land, I love you!

Busan

Busan is the second largest city in Korea, and only 45 minutes away from my home by bus, so I spent several weekends there. I love this city. Love, love, love it. Being large, it has most of the amenities a foreigner would need (except proper Mexican food). But it also has a sort of little-brother, used-to-be-a-shithole-port-city-but-is-rejuvenating-itself sort of vibe to it, which gives it a sort of charm. As opposed to Seoul, it lies on the water, so it has beaches and such. It also has my favorite Starbucks in the world, right on Gwangalli Beach:

 

my sister's friends took me to this awesome part of Busan

Shanghai

I spent my winter break in Shanghai. I intended to go to Malaysia for a couple of weeks, but I was unable to get the extra week needed off, and my traveling companion from back home didn't have the spirit to join me. Since I had a dual entry visa to China from my trip to Beijing, I decided to see Shanghai. Good choice. Shanghai was the opposite of Beijing; where Beijing was generally a dirty and unremarkable city with great tourist sites, Shanghai was a clean & modern city with fewer tourist sites. In other words, they are both great cities for different reasons. Since I had almost a week to stay in a city I could have seen in 2 days, I dedicated most of my time to getting the perfect shot of the famous Shanghai skyline. Not sure if I succeeded in that, but I had fun trying. I also experienced a blue moon on New Years Eve. That only happens every billion years or something. My 2 most memorable experiences: first, falling for the (apparently) infamous tea room scam: some nice, friendly, English-speaking young ladies decide to show their incredible hospitality by inviting me to an authentic Chinese tea room. The tea was great, and the tea presenter was entertaining in her presentation, which was more like Tom Cruise in Cocktail than a normal tea server. However, when it was time to leave, the bill was up to me to pay. There was nowhere for me to run off to, but oh well. So I paid (can't remember the amount) a  steep price for some tea, it was a decent experience and just something to chalk up to inexperience. I should have known something was up when they wouldn't let me take pictures. My second experience came while waiting for the lights of the Oriental Pearl Tower to light up so I could take some skyline pics. I wandered around the neighborhood and found a hidden coffee shop. The owners were young kids who just returned from college in the States; they spoke English and were thrilled to have an American there (probably thrilled to have anyone, I was the only customer). Their hospitality was wonderful; they gave me a laptop to use, and made coffee with cool little designs in it:

On my way home, I had the pleasure of having a 5 hour layover in the BFE town of Dalian, which was remarkable only for the plastic flower forest just outside the airport:

 

walking the glass walkway in the Oriental Pearl Tower

I'm in Shanghai!!!

The view I spent all week trying to get

Christmas

Christmas is celebrated in Korea as a national holiday, but it's more on par with Labor Day in terms of significance. Nevertheless, the big department stores here put up Christmas trees, and they play "Last Christmas" by Wham, and it is the start of the week-long Winter holiday at school. Ranell and I celebrated Christmas in my apartment by watching Christmas Vacation and making ginger bread cookies (Ranell had enough foresight to bring gingerbread cookie kits from home. Brilliant). Christmas day was spent traveling to Seoul for a day before jetting off to Shanghai!!

my angry gingerbread cookie

Mexican food in Seoul, this was actually of "back home" quality

White Trash Thanksgiving

Due to a lack of proper American Thanksgiving options, my Irish friend Ashleigh and I spent the special night at Pizza Hut. A night at Pizza Hut is always a special occasion; despite tasting the same as a Pizza Hut at home, you get to pay around $25 for a pizza! It should be noted that whenever an expat eats greasy pizza on a holiday that centers around wonderful food, that expat must wear the worst clothing they have:

pop songs!

I let some of my classes have a weekly "pop song day," where we just sing American pop songs. It was my favorite day of the week at the school. Enjoy:

Love Motel!

Love motels were maybe my favorite part of Korea. Here is why:

Autumn Trek

NOTE: I stopped updating my blog after the last entry. It is now almost 3 years later and I'm adding posts as if I was writing them at that time. So all of the blog entries from now until July 2012 are written from memory, with my pictures as a guide...





Ranell and I decided enjoy our Chuseok (Thanksgiving) holiday/long weekend to trek in the mountains to see the Autumn foliage. Our first stop was an old castle in the town of Jinju. It's always nice to end up in a town that's only meant to be a stopover on the way to your journey, only to find something really cool you never knew about. We did have a connecting bus to catch, so we didn't spend too much time here, but it was a nice break:

From Jinju we made it to our destination: Jirisan National Park. Our destination was a supposedly large and beautiful waterfall, set in a glorious Fall setting. After perusing the Buddhist temple at the base of the trail, we made our way up. Several miles in, we stumbled upon a little hermitage, where someone was blasting "Unbreak my Heart" from Toni Braxton (haha) through the speakers. Only in Korea. We finally ended up at the waterfall, which was nothing but a trickle. Damn. It was still a great experience, as I was able to take this picture, which has become one of my all-time favorites:

From there it was off on another late-night, multi-stop bus ride to some podunk Korean country town called Suncheon (hooray for memory!) and a stay at the BMW love motel (hooray again for memory!). The next day we trekked to one of my favorite temples, Songgwangsa, which I had visited my previous time in Korea. Unfortunately, they had put a footbridge over the old cobblestone walkway, which ruined my epic photo spot that was the purpose of going there. However, it's still a beautiful temple in a great setting. Here I was able to get my other all-time favorite pics, the red leaf in a bamboo forest one. There are only 2 pics from Korea that I have kept in my portfolio, and they both came in consecutive days from the same trip. This one has won me a couple awards and made me some money:

the new view at Songgwangsa, see 3/08 entry for a  pic of the view I was hoping to re-create:

 On our way back home, we stopped in Masan to try out some Mexican food we had heard great things about. Ranell and I were both dying of Mexican cravings for months, and we finally had the chance to get some. Now that I've been home for a couple years, this meal would probably taste awful to me. But at the time, it was the best we had, and it was an awesome experience:

The MIGHTY falls of Jirisan

Temple Stay

(Golgulsa temple)

This past weekend a few of us spent the weekend in a Buddhist temple called Golgulsa, which means "Stone Buddha Temple." It's a small, yet fascinating temple which gets its name from a 1500 year old Buddha carved into a cliff. It also has some small caves, one of which has a temple built into it, and has been used since the 7th century. The most unique thing about this temple is martial art they teach called Sunmudo. This martial art had existed only at this one particular temple for hundreds of years, being only taught in secret among monks, until the 1940's (when they decided a war of fighting monks was unlikely to happen). They call it a "meditative martial art," meaning they never spar, and any contact during training is accidental.

(our sleeping quarters)

The temple stay consisted of a couple hours of Sunmudo training. The training was fun, but the best part of it came after we finished, when we got to watch the monks training. It was kinda entertaining to watch Buddhist monks, with their robes and all, kicking and jumping around the place.

(practicing the moves on my "bed")
(monks practicing sunmudo)

The temple was very quiet and serene. After the training, it was dark outside, which made it even quieter. It was the calmest I'd ever felt in Korea. We went to bed early, since we had to get up the next morning at 4AM!!! for a chanting session and meditation. The chanting sounded more like singing, it was really cool sounding. I didn't know the chants so I couldn't follow along, but I could do the bowings (after each verse).

(cave temple)

After meditation we had some free time. The sun was just starting to rise, so I planted myself on a rock next to the Buddha and soaked it in. When I got hot, I went into the cave temple and just sat there for awhile. It was very quiet and nice.

(buddha carving)

Next came breakfast. The meal is eaten in a very special way. You are instructed not to talk, or to look at what others are doing, just to think about your food and where it came from and what it took to get it to you. You get 4 bowls which come in a Russian doll-like container; you take the bowls out smallest to largest using only your thumbs to minimize sound. Each bowl has to be in the right spot on your mat; largest bowl in the lower left corner, and descending in size clockwise. You put water in the largest bowl, swich it around, then pour it into the next bowl, repeating this until you put it in the last bowl, where it stays. You eat the food, but not a single morsel of food can be wasted, so you must eat every speck. When you're finished, you take the only thing remaining, which is a piece of kimchi (after having been washed of pepper flakes in your soup), and use it like a washcloth to clean off the last remnants of food. After this, you get more water, and you rinse the bowls again, and you drink the water and eat the kimchi. Then you take the cold water that was sitting in your smallest bowl this whole time, and rinse AGAIN, but this time the water goes into a bucket. That bucket gets dumped into the stream, but there can't be any speck of food in it or else it's considered to be polluting the water. So, if the water you pour into the bucket has any crumb in it (like mine did), they pour that water back into your bowl and you drink that too. Needless to say, the meal was more stressful than peaceful, but it was still an interesting experience nonetheless.

All in all, it was a cool experience. I'm glad I did it, and I might even consider doing it again. Maybe.

tea time with a monk