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.

Korea is full of flowering trees on full display in spring. The cherry blossoms are the most famous, but there’s all kinds of different blossoms all over the country. I’m really disappointed because despite my best efforts I couldn’t get my camera to capture the vibrancy and beauty of the trees.

Yesterday we walked across the river and went to the cherry blossom festival downtown. It was a beautiful day and there were tons of people out roller skating, biking, and walking around. The blossoms fall off in the breeze and get into everything, your hair and clothes, the food, and all over the ground. It’s really pretty.Here’s those same trees from a different angle.

Spring is also noteworthy in Korea for the occurrence of “yellow dust” storms that originate in China. The dust storms have been happening for thousands of years, but have become more hazardous recently due to Chinese industrialization and pollution. The government issues warnings when it gets really bad, and you are supposed to stay inside during those days, kind of like a smog warning in Los Angeles. It seems like most people don’t really pay attention (you can’t really see the dust) but I do see more face masks, and I definitely hear the coughing. And the carwashes do unbelievably good business.

This is the view of campus from my office balcony. In the foreground of the picture, you see three people walking up the path? Just to the left of those people there is a shady clearing and on really nice days the students have a picnic and drink beer, soju, and makgeolli.

In the background, you see some good sized hills, which actually frame the campus on three sides, with a big road and a river just beyond that forming the other boundary.

Below is a map of campus I pulled from the university website. I’m in building 12, the Language Center, and the picture above looks out on building 2, the Social Sciences College.

Lots of changes this last month. We finished our one year contract at Avalon and moved across town to teach at the local university. Instead of starting my first class around 3:15 pm with 5 year olds, I now start at 7:40 am with 18-20 year olds.

The best things about the new job are that I’ve got a few less classes now, a big office at work, and live in a bigger/more social apartment building. The worst things about the new job was that it was really hard to leave Avalon.We’ve had a wonderful experience teaching English in Korea, and the biggest reason is the people and students at Avalon.

Really the work isn’t that much different, though, which surprised me a little. Many of my hagwon (private school) students speak much better English than my current university level students. One reason is that students with a strong command of English pass out of the required introductory English classes that I teach. So alth0ugh I didn’t really anticipate it (though I should have known better), I’m teaching many of the same lessons that I taught before: introductions, numbers, basic grammar, tenses, verb and noun vocabulary, pronouns, pronunciation, English language motor skills, some basic Western culture, and so on. The classes are called conversation English, so although most students struggle to express themselves fully in English I’m doing a lot more role play and partner speaking activities.

The last week at Avalon, one of my favorite students (the only one really fluent in English) wrote a short paper about Americans and the relationship they have with their houses. He wrote about how people in America are so interested in houses, that it’s common for Americans to come to each others’ houses and look in all the rooms, even the bathrooms!

So, American I am, here’s some pictures of the new digs (even the bathroom!)

The dining room, with a big stand-up air conditioner back right, and a patio with a desk, laundry, and recycling.

The kitchen, next to the dining area.

The second bedroom, where we watch TV occasionally and do internet things.

Of course, the bathroom.

Korean gas stations aren’t much like American ones at all, and there’s far fewer of them around. The biggest thing is that people don’t get out of their car during the trip. They don’t even open the door. You pull up in your car to a pump, and a gas attendant hops out of his stand and comes to the window. you crack the window a bit, tell him how much gas you want and then wait for him to fill it up. The gas nozzle is different, too- it’s perfectly round and doesn’t seem to have a lever on the handle to control the gas flow. I think that’s done from the pump station itself, but I’m not sure. When the guy is done, he comes to the window and gets your cash or credit card. Prices fluctuate of course, but today I checked and the price of gas was 1860 won per liter. This translates to about $6.35 per gallon!

Some places give you a free car wash for filling up. But that’s it, really. Once I tried to walk into the gas station office, thinking I could buy a water or something, but they don’t even have that. There’s nothing inside the gas stations I’ve seen that you can buy. Probably not even a public restroom.

So, where do people buy their sodas, chips, newspapers, lottery tickets, cigarrettes, and so on? At convenience stores, located seemingly on every corner. Often the convenience stores are located right across from each other, or there might be three on one corner or block, just like with gas stations in America. One popular chain is 7-11, which is also popular in the U.S. The other big chains are Family Mart and GS-25, although there are some smaller ones that you see only rarely, like Buy the Way. My favorite named convenience store is “Gag Story”- I don’t know what they were thinking with that one!

There’s lots of little parks in our neighborhood, and most of the parks have workout equipment side by side with kid’s playground stuff. This park is just down the street from our apartment and has four exercise machines. Notice the apartment complex in the background? 80%+ of Koreans live in buildings like those. I don’t use the machines much, but Ann hops on them quite a bit if we’re passing through. Check her out doing this one, where you stand on a small round platform and rotate your lower body.

In our neighborhood we have lots of little relationships with the various Korean people around, the shopkeepers, delivery drivers, mailman, and so on. Probably the strangest relationship we have is with our Korean landlord, or apartment manager. He lives in our building on the top floor, but we see him maybe only once a month. He helped us a lot with our garden last summer though, and we are friendly in a non-communicative way.

One night I ran into him outside our apartment building, and struck up a conversation consisting mostly of pointing at things, bowing, and making exaggerated facial expressions. One thing led to another, and we ended up in the park across from our apartment using the exercise machines. I was just following his lead, just to be polite, but we both ended up exercising pretty seriously in the park, getting like three reps of each machine done and counting for each other, using each others languages. It was nice to be friendly with him, but I was definitely happy when it was time to go home. Ann was especially happy to see me, since I’d been gone 30 minutes, and it only takes 10 minutes to get the convenience store and back.

“What were you doing?”

“Oh, just exercising in the park with the landlord”