Kyle in Korea

This year marked the second straight February that my American vacation immediately coincided with a blizzard. It’s OK though, secretly I kind of like being snowed in. There’s no better way to visit family than get trapped inside the house with them, right!

Our dog Frank is terrific. He’s the sleepiest, most mild mannered, gentlest dog you could imagine, save for the vicious snoring.

I’m so convinced America has the greatest frozen foods section in the entire world that I’m not even listening to arguments otherwise.

I checked in in on the state of Nebraska basketball. It wasn’t good.

I spent an extra-long weekend in the Bay Area visiting family, and it was awesome. I got into San Francisco for a day, but just missed the Segway tour. My California family all reminded me to at least occasionally update my blog , but better late than never, right? What’s a few (7) months between posts?

A quick flight up to Portland to see my buddy Steven (middle) was the last stop of my West Coast week. Highlights included sneaking down to sit within eight rows of the TrailBlazers bench in the second half of a blowout, an ill-fated attempt to drink all the India Pale Ales in the city, and a beautiful hike in the Columbia River Gorge.

Some annotated pictures from Taiwan, back at then end of January.

We flew into Taipei on the day of the Chinese New Year, somewhat accidentally. After checking into our hostel, we went in search of an open restaurant, in the rain. Down a small alley, Ann saw an Indian restaurant with people in it and ducked in. I had kind of resigned myself to 7-11 dumplings, but she came out with two other people, who led us into a Tibetan restaurant across the street. Inside were a small group of Tibetan refugees who were taking advantage of the Chinese New Year to have a party. They graciously invited us in, filled us with wine and delicious Indian food and told stories all  night about Tibet, a country which they can never return because of oppression from the mainland Chinese government. That rainy, deserted night in Taipei ended up being one of the best of the whole trip. I’ll never forget the wonderful and generous Tibetans pulling people off the street for a random feast, or the intense, pained look in their eyes when they talked of their country.

For Ann’s birthday I got her a massage and lunch at one of the really nice downtown hotels in Taipei. The five course lunch with a good bottle of wine was undoubtedly the best meal of the trip.The window seat view of downtown Taipei from the 35th floor didn’t hurt, but I really think in this case the old adage about steering away from restaurants with a view was false.

We went into this store that sold nothing but pieces of mounted coral for incredible prices, like $10,000 for the big piece. The feeling of complete befuddlement at the prices paid for various plants and animal isn’t actually that strange a feeling in Asia. I have no idea what makes a piece of coral so valuable, but I similarly have no idea how a piece of ginseng root the size of your hand can be worth up to like $30,000. It’s one of those reminders that unless you grow up with the values of a culture, I don’t think you can ever really understand it.

After 3-4 days in Taipei we took the high speed train to Kaoshiung. Trying to save money for our adjoining trip home to America, we had booked private rooms in hostels for most of the Taiwan trip. Somehow we ended up with an amazing river view apartment downtown to ourselves. It was the kind of place that made you want to stay home, but the kind of view that sucked you outside. Also, my experiment with growing a mustache, seen here in its nascent stage, did not go well.

We used Ann’s camera for our third and final stop in Taiwan, the beach community of Kenting. Somehow, I still haven’t got the pictures from that, but the day we rented a motorbike and explored the beaches on the southern tip of Taiwan was my favorite. Anyway, we had one more night in Taipei before our flight back to Seoul ( which was one night before our flight home to America), and we went to a delightfully absurd restaurant called “Modern Toilet”. the entire restaurant is toilet themed, from the seats to the decoration. The food and drinks came in either mini-toilets, or mini-urinals, and was plated to resemble, uh, toilet waste. The food, we got an ice cream thing, was OK, but the place didn’t seem too busy.

Of course, we’re always doing things around Andong. As in Nebraska, fall is my favorite time of year here. So we’ve been trying to get outside more, but due to random scheduling problems and an epically rainy summer/fall, we haven’t got out as much as we’d like.  But even small walks and excursions can be interesting. Here’s some things we saw and did on small little trips around town.

The picture above is a traditional house near the dam. The tiles on the fence attract a really interesting lime green like moss that’s really beautiful.

There’s several Buddhist temples around. This one’s called the Watermelon Temple, I think, because there’s maybe watermelons growing in the area? I didn’t see any watermelons, but the walk up to the temple is cool, with lots of little farms dug into the side of a mountain overlooking our neighborhood in Andong. The view from near the top:

And here’s a picture of what a typical small farm looks like. Farms, and agricultural areas in general, in Korea are more interesting to me than farms in America because they are smaller and more varied. Nebraska’s fields are just enormous squares, stretching for as far as the eye can see, almost uninterrupted on the landscape. Usually you can’t tell much about the people who farm the corn, wheat, and soybeans in Nebraska, just by looking at their farm. In Korea, you often see the person, and each square acre of arable land is utilized and cared for. People have to be more resourceful on the land because there’s so little of it (Remember, Korea is overwhelmingly mountainous, and approximately the size of Indiana).

And all over the countryside, and in town too, you see people making kimchi and fermented bean paste in the traditional way, in large stone pots.

We also saw of first Korean snakes. The first one was just inches from my foot, hidden in some weeds along the road when I heard it rustling and jumped up. It was at least five feet long and thick. The second snake, which I got a picture of, was dead in the middle of the road, and smaller- maybe two feet long.

Here’s a view from the dam area. Nothing too special, it’s just nice to have the river and dam area only minutes from our apartment.

And of course, no discussion of the Andong outskirts would be complete without a mention of the ice storage cave. I have trouble imagining how the ice didn’t melt in the summer, even in the dugout cave, but I guess it worked. Inside the cave there were hundreds of spiders, some graffitti, and  grated fence prohibiting entry. Even though we didn’t get very far in, Ann still though it was very cold.

The International Mask Dance Festival is the biggest event in Andong each year. I had a cold for much of the festival this year, but still got out to some cool things. I saw dances from 5-6 countries, but by far the most interesting was Israel:

Ann almost got sucked up an teleported or something by one of those grey tubes that invaded the crowd.

At all the festivals in Korea there’s roasting pigs. Somehow I still havn’t tried it.

But I did get my picture taken with some enormous beer can mascots that were wandering the festival grounds, shaking the hands of children and mugging for cameras.

Here we are sitting in stands of the mask dance stadium. We had a small brush with fame after one of the local news networks filmed us watching a dance in the crowd. On Monday we were famous at school. And then on Tuesday we weren’t.

Ann wasn’t kissing me when they filmed us for TV, though… Actually, on second thought, maybe that’s why everyone was laughing on Monday when they said they saw us on TV!

Here’s some video of a couple other mask dances we attended. Here’s India:

And here’s Taiwan:

And finally on the last Saturday of the festival there’s a fireworks show at Hahoe Village, which is a small village of traditional houses about 30 minutes outside of Andong. It’s a beautiful place, almost like an island wrapped up by a river with a small land connection. On one part, on the other side of the river there’s a tall bluff and cliff.

It’s an absolute travesty that the lights didn’t show up properly on my camera, but they rolled “boulders” of fire down the cliff, and stretched five lines from the banks of the river to the far side of the cliffs, and lit the lines on fire, which miraculously burned for well over 2 hours, dropping a steady stream of orange embers onto the beach below. It was breathtaking in person, but hardly registered on camera. At the end of the night, after most everyone had gone home, we stayed and walked around the village. The firework lines had been left to burn out, but were still going strong. We walked underneath them and just looked up, standing in between the lines. Looking up, the embers took over my whole field of view, and the sky was filled with snowflakes delicately aflame.

The core of my summer vacation was a trip to Hawaii to meet my family. There were lots of stops before and after but there’s nothing like family. And nowhere like Hawaii.

We stayed on the west end of Maui, Napili Bay, just a couple of minutes from a beautiful beach and ocean. The picture above is just before we descended Haleakala volcano on bikes, dropping down over 7,000 feet.

The beach was awesome and I spent a lot of time just sitting.

Check out this incredible tree we found on the famous Road to Hana. It looks fake, but in reality the colors were even brighter and more absurd. They’re a special kind of eucalyptus tree, but I don’t know what makes them streak technicolor. The Road to Hana was an awesome drive, switchbacking 46 miles around the rugged east coast of Maui.

Here’s my favorite of the dozens of waterfalls we saw during the Hana day. It looks like it’s falling from the sky, right?

And just hanging around the condo. It was great having a three bedroom place opposed to separate hotel rooms because it was like hanging out at home, even if that home happened to belong to someone else. My mom described it as a week of Christmas Eve’s because the whole family was together, safe, and giddy with excitement for the next day.

(The guy on the right is Andy, my sister’s boyfriend)

I hated to leave Maui both then and now, but I want to share a picture and a memory from some other places I visited this summer. After Maui, Ann and I went to Honolulu for three days before crossing the Pacific again. We went for a nice long hike one day, went stand up paddle boarding for a morning, crashed happy hours at expensive hotels, saw a rare Hawaiian monk seal in the middle of Waikiki beach, and took in some gorgeous sunsets.

From Honolulu we went to Guam for a night, and then tried to layover in Tokyo to meet some friends there, but that didn’t work so we ended up home in Korea at Incheon airport. Our next flight to Singapore wasn’t scheduled for 3 days, since we had been hoping on staying in Tokyo, but since we got to Incheon early, we decided to standby and got to Bangkok early, before catching up with our original Singapore flight that laid over in Bangkok. So we got like 2 and a half days in Bangkok, which was great. We stayed in a wonderful hotel booked from the Incheon customs line, and had a great time. Thailand is one of the few places in Asia that hasn’t been conquered, so it mostly retains all of its original cultural artifacts and buildings. Since we stayed close to the river, our main method of travel in Bangkok was boat, which pleased me because I love boat travel, especially when 30 minute trips cost the equivalent of 40 cents!

We also saw some amazing temples. Our tour guide taught us the various poses of the Buddha, but I was constantly forgetting them, and failing the impromptu tests he gave.

From Bangkok, it was on to Singapore. We did some neat things in Singapore, but I didn’t really care for the place. We had a terrible hotel that wasn’t even inexpensive, and the city itself is sort of sterile and antiseptic. You can be fined, caned (like actually beaten with a stick in public) or imprisoned for doing things like spitting, smoking cigarrettes in undesignated areas, or carrying the wrong kind of fruit (durian) onto the subway. The city is immaculately clean, but it’s also wildly expensive. Beers were (no joke) 15-20 dollars in many places.

We visited an extremely strange park built by the guy who invented Tiger Balm. The highlight was the Chinese Levels of Hell. “Abusing books” resulted in a disembowling, which was vividly illustrated with miniature figures, like every other crime you can think of.

Following the cave of hell, we had a surreal experience at the park pond. We were just walking around the pond when we noticed that there were several turtles following us, swimming alongside our path. We stopped for a moment and noticed that there were actually dozens of turtles following us. We stood for another moment and soon there were over a hundred turtles swimming towards us, slowly, but purposefully. A little bit freaked out, we walked across a bridge, but it didn’t matter because the turtles just followed us there too. Here’s a picture of them piled up underneath the bridge. My theory is that the hundreds of turtles have been trained over the years to follow people because maybe they feed the turtles like that, but it could just be we have some sort of strange turtle power after swimming with giant turtles in Hawaii.

From Singapore we left for Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and met up with a couple friends. The highlight of this trip was feeding the wild monkeys at some sacred bat caves/ Buddhist temple. They peel and eat little bananas just like humans!

And here we are in front of the world famous Petronas Towers. From Kuala Lumpur… back to Thailand! Phuket island, this time. We wanted a nice relaxing beach vacation at the end of our summer travels. It was nice and relaxing but also rained the whole time. We mainly just lounged around our hotel, ate good food, and wandered around. I rented a motorbike one day and that was fun.

There’s hundreds more pictures and dozens more stories, but that’s it for now….

I had kind of a last minute vacation last week and so I snuck off to Hong Kong for four days. Mostly I just walked around the city soaking it up, had some good food and drinks, and went to a few tourist locations. I’ll let the pics do the talking!

I did the audio tour at the Hong Kong art museum and it was amazing. I was most impressed upon by the ceramics and pottery, much of it thousands of years old. It was incredible to me to see these beautiful ornate objects that have survived for so many years and to thik about the places they have been and the things they must have been used for.

Sadly the lighting for this picture was terrible, but it’s a “Thousand Year Egg” that I ate (some of) at a nice Chinese restaurant. In my picture the egg is the dark stuff at the far left, but in reality the egg was a translucent caramel color around the shell, and the yolk had turned a blue green color that I’ve never seen in  food. Thousand Year Eggs are goose eggs that have been wrapped in either plaster (traditional method) or plastic (modern method) and left to soak in a highly acidic mixture. There’s a picture on the Wikipedia page for “Century Egg” that looks a lot like what I ate. It’s the picture in the “Use” section, to the left side. Eating the egg itself was unpleasant. The texture is very strange because the outside is like jelly and the inside is pungent tasting, but slippery also. My favorite Chinese meal on this trip was a dim sum breakfast, but I didn’t have my camera with me, although I wish I had taken some pictures of the steamed pork buns because they were incredible!

Here’s a picture from my hotel room 0ver looking the light rail station (the two long orange-ish rectangles middle right in the picture). My hotel was in the New Territories, which is pretty far (30 minutes+) from Kowloon and Hong Kong island, where I spent most of my time. Luckily, it was really easy to get around. It was maybe a two minute walk from my hotel to the light rail station and then three stops to the subway and then eight subway stops to Tsim Sha Tsui in southern Kowloon, which was kind of my home base. Notice in the picture it’s raining, which it did everyday I was there. The rain and high winds were from tropical storm Haima, which was cruising by to the east of Hong Kong when I was there, and later caused a lot of flooding in southern China. I was a little bit worried my first day there because I kept seeing signs all over the place, on the streets, subway and in business warning about a tropical storm.

At the very southern tip of Hong Kong island there’s a place called Stanley and one day I took a double decker bus there. Hong Kong itself is so metropolitan and packed together it was kind of strange to discover this place with a real tropical island feel. I lucked out weather wise, since the day I went was the nicest I had. Stanley also kind of shows the strange mix of British and Chinese that is Hong Kong. Placess have British names, like Stanley and Austin, but stand next to things with Chinese names. Chicken feet restaurants next to things like horse racing betting outlets and imperial style tailor, things like that.

Here’s a view of Hong Kong from its most famous scenic point, The Peak. That’s Hong Kong island in the foreground and Kowloon in the background, separated by Victoria Harbour. You get to the top of The Peak (really just a big hill) by taking a tram, which goes disconcertingly straight up. At the top there’s a bunch of shops and a viewing platform. I walked down these really steep roads shortly after taking this picture, into a hauntingly blue sky.

An issue with moving to Korea, and then living here for an extended period of time is that lots of people ask you (or you can tell they are thinking it) Why Korea? What’s in Korea?

There are, of course, lots of great reasons to live in Korea. Friendly people, beautiful country, excellent food, tremendous job opportunities, travel, and so on.

The second question is more problematic. There’s lots of things in Korea. I think what people really are thinking is: What do I know about Korea?

If you are anything like me before I came here, your knowledge of Korea is pretty limited. There’s like 200 countries in the world and you only have so much room for international trivia.

Anyways, when you bring up Korea there’s about seven general responses, about seven preexisting pieces of information about Korea that your average American citizen has at their disposal. Here they are, in order of frequency:

1. North Korea is very scary. Kim jong-il is crazy. I’m concerned for your safety.

2. The Korean war. I have a family member/friend/neighbor/person I know who was involved in the Korea war.

3. The 1988 Seoul Olympics. The Olympics, at the very least, installed in Americans that Seoul is a very big city, and it is located in South Korea.

4. My friend/family member/person I know teaches English there.

5. South Korea is a technologically advanced country. My cell phone/ TV is from Korea! I think it gets lumped in with Japan here a little bit.

6. Something about sports. The soccer team, Kim Yu-na, or Shin Soo-choo.

7. Korean food is delicious and/or trendy. Kimchi!

I’m going to add an eighth PG-13 category here:

8. Like many peninsulas it vaguely resembles a part of the male anatomy, if you want it to. (I’m looking at you Florida!)

And maybe a ninth category containing insensitive and culturally inappropriate remarks.

That’s it, I think? Can any of my American friends/family think of any other things you knew about Korea before you knew someone there?

I just want to reiterate that I don’t think this is bad, if you fell into one of these categories. Korea is but one of many countries in the world, and after Canada, Mexico, Russia, China, Japan, and a few European countries, your average person is probably doing really well to be able to locate it on a map without help. That’s certainly the case for me.

Anyways, as an American living in Korea, people sometimes ask me about what it’s like. I have a feeling that most people kind of envision seizure inducing flashing neon lights in the cities and acres of rice paddies out in the country. Also, at a dinner party someone once asked me if Korea was like 20 years behind America (Bonus answer: it’s not). After being here for a year plus some time, I see Korea everywhere now, even in Western media. I see it in the news. I see Korean products and influences.

Because I’ve grown to love the country, and also because I function to many of my family and friends as a source of information about it, and possibly a stand-in for the entire place, I’d like to share some links on the internet where you can learn more about Korea. These are all places I myself have used to learn about Korea.There’s tons more to the country besides the above bullet points. I can’t really figure out how to add live links to my blog, so I guess you’ll have to copy and paste if you’re interested.

Here we go:

Like just about every topic in the world, it’s a great idea to start with Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea

The New York Times has a “Times Topic” section about Korea. It’s got a brief introduction followed by archived articles. I especially like the restaurant reviews. http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/international/countriesandterritories/southkorea/index.html?scp=1-spot&sq=south%20korea&st=cse

The Korea Society, located in New York City, hosts lectures about Korea and later puts them on iTunes. This is a great resource, especially for podcast listeners. Organization website at http://www.koreasociety.org/, and just do a “Korea Society” search in iTunes for the podcasts.

Korea4expats is a website lots of people use once they’re in Korea, but it also has a lot of good general information. Go to http://korea4expats.com/ and then click on “About Korea” on the top blue bar, and after that check out “Working & Business”.

I also really like Slate.com’s archived stories about Korea. Try this: “http://www.slate.com/default.aspx?id=3944&qt=south+korea” and then do your best to wade past the North Korea stuff, if you’re like me and don’t want to think about it too much.

This is another site that people mostly use after they’ve arrived to search for jobs and use the community message boards, but Dave’s ESL Cafe has a cool Korea Q & A section of saved discussion topics and so on. It’s located at http://forums.eslcafe.com/korea/viewforum.php?f=7

Finally, they say a picture says a thousand words, and I haven’t broken 900 yet, so you probably should have just skipped to the bottom, and checked out “http://www.trekearth.com/gallery/Asia/South_Korea/” where you can see thousands of pictures of Korea and its people.