My wonderful sister gave me iLife ’11 for Christmas, which is great because I was not liking the the photo management tools I had been using, Aperture and Picasa. In the last few days since Christmas, I’ve been working with my pictures on iPhoto towards something that might be called “organization”. Not being familiar with the term “organization”, I’m still a bit uncomfortable with the process. But I have unearthed some interesting random pictures that my friends and family at home might enjoy.

Asia in general has provided a wealth of humorous English translations. In Korea, these are called Konglish, and they are so numerous that I wouldn’t even know where to start. For example, our favorite pizza place, Mr. Pizza, has a slogan that reads inEnglish, “Love for Women”, posted all over the restaurant. In Japan, there are also strange English translations, but on our trip in September I noticed that they are far less clumsy, and sometimes even poetic. The public street sign above illustrates this well: “The thing was littered because it was unnecessary. To other people, it was even less necessary.” In case you didn’t get it the first time, the hilarious illustration drives the point home aptly.

This picture is from the very beginning of our time in Korea. The country has a wonderful public transportation system anchored by frequent and inexpensive inter-city buses. On long trips of over two hours or so, like from Andong to Seoul (3 hours), the bus stops at a gas station / strip mall complex so people can use the bathroom and then buy more water and snacks. Invariably, it seems these places are advertised with multicolored fake palm trees, which are found nowhere else in the country. I have no idea who, what, why, or when, but it’s strange and yet charming, in  a very Korean sort of way.

Check out all the options on this public toilet in Japan! I didn’t use any of them, but who does? Are there people out there who actually use a bidet? And who would say, “Ah, the bidet isn’t for me, I prefer just a general spray”? I was most attracted to the “flushing sound” option, but decided just to actually flush instead, with the authentic noise accompaniment. I would like to mention that several times a week, during regular bank hours, I sneak into the downstairs office bathroom at my work and take advantage of the heated toilet seat. It’s better than squatting, which I still haven’t actually done, save for a few “dry runs” to see what it would be like.

This is just a Korean landscape picture that I happen to like. Coming to Korea, I pictured the country as flat and unassuming, but the actual landscape is quite varied, of course. Andong, and much of the country, is framed by large hills. The actual mountainous areas look much like mountains of Colorado, and the coastal areas look in many ways like northern California. There are agricultural plains, and many rice fields, but they are on a much smaller scale than what I have seen in western Nebraska. Farms in general are smaller, and much more varied than in Nebraska, often growing multiple crops in small adjacent fields bisected by hills or streams.

As a teacher, I naturally spend most of my Monday to Friday time either in the classroom or planning to be in the classroom. For my own amusement (I like to think the students also benefit), I like to come up with teaching ideas that challenge the students in some way. In the above picture, you can see a student activity that involved sixth graders coming up with a “newscast” idea and then presenting the newscast to teh rest of the class. This particular exercise went well, and the next day I took it a step further, constructing fake microphones out of balsa wood and large styrofoam balls. There aren’t any pictures of this subsequent activity, because the students used most of their “interview” time to hit each other on the head with the microphones and then fall out of their chairs laughing. Win some, lose some, I guess. Notice the resemblance of my “Channel 7″ news logo to Omaha’s own Channel 7 logo!

I love old things. I love rummaging around antique stores and seeing old things. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but I love Antiques Roadshow, Pawn Stars, and may latest favorite, Storage Wars. All three shows illustrate the history of old and valuable things. All kinds of things. I also like old houses, and some of the oldest houses I’ve seen are in the Bukchon of Seoul. I don’t have much to add to the article from the New York Times below, but it is amazing how narrow the streets are, and how many tourists are all over the place taking pictures. People really live in this neighborhood, and people are snapping pictures everywhere and peeking around fences.

It’s still a really neat place and I support the efforts to maintain the essential quality of the neighborhood, especially since a lot of the housing being built recently around Korea is unappealing and uninteresting. I think a lot has changed architecturally in the last decade or so, but there are a lot of dreadful looking apartment buildings dubbed “chicken coops” that look to have been built in the 1970′s and 80′s. Anyways, this article is great, and heads up to my friend Adam for finding it, and escorting Ann and I around this neighborhood on a visit to Seoul in November. Adam keeps an excellent and frequently updated blog at http://adamsribs.us/

From the New York Times, December 13, 2010.

Saving a Korean District

Jean Chung for the International Herald Tribune

Jade and David Kilburn in front of their traditional hanok, at left, in the Bukchon neighborhood of Seoul, South Korea.

By MARK McDONALD

For all its outward calm and quietly elegant architecture, Bukchon is also a place of anger and suspicion. The preservationists, you see, are at each other’s throats.

“They want to kill my husband and drive us out,” said one resident, Jade Kilburn, a Korean entrepreneur, who, alongside her British husband, David, has battled their neighbors, the police, the courts and a range of city technocrats in an effort to protect Bukchon’s traditional houses from being tarted up or demolished outright.

One of the Kilburns’ rivals is Kim Hong-nam, a Yale-educated art historian and the former director of both the National Folk Museum and the National Museum of Korea. She lives nearby and finds Mr. Kilburn to be “overly righteous.”

“He’s a complainer,” said Ms. Kim, sipping at a coffee and smoking a cigarette in her sun-filled home on a recent afternoon. “The people here don’t like him.”

Ms. Kim and the Kilburns live — and proudly so — in hanok, the one-story, tile-roofed, traditional Korean houses.

Seoul’s hanok suffered badly under the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, when courtyard homes were divided and rebuilt as smaller dwellings; the Korean War from 1950 to 1953, when many were destroyed; and a building frenzy that started in Seoul in the 1970s. While they are not exactly ancient structures, Bukchon’s refashioned hanok from the 1920s and ’30s are what pass for historic residential architecture here.

Not so long ago, Bukchon had 2,500 hanok. Now there are barely 800, and only one street in the whole neighborhood remains untouched. Preservationists believe the original hanok are now as endangered as any whale or panda. Bukchon, for them, is the last rain forest in a city of chainsaws.

Mr. Kilburn, who has a gentle and courtly manner, said he was photographing the demolition of a hanok in 2006 when he was struck in the chest by the project’s supervising architect. He fell back into the street, cracked his head and spent a month in the hospital. In the end, he himself was convicted of assaulting the architect.

Feuds between neighbors are mostly banal, whether they occur in Seoul or Paris or New York. But the enmity in Bukchon also speaks to larger themes, like whether Koreans are so smitten with the new that they have ignored or debased their own architectural heritage. The parallel, perhaps, is Beijing’s wholesale destruction of its own traditional courtyard houses.

“People here would willingly destroy these houses to build up, higher and higher, to increase their floor space and get higher rents,” said Doo Jin Hwang, a noted architect in Seoul who has restored hanok, written a book about them and developed an iPhone application about the Bukchon houses.

A national obsession with modernity and a mania for fancier buildings, Mr. Hwang said, has led to the destruction of thousands of hanok. Seoul has too eagerly razed the old and raised the new.

“You can lose your history,” he said.

Even Seoul’s mayor, Oh Se-hoon, is aware of the hostilities in the tiny wedge of Bukchon.

In an interview, Mr. Oh dismissed as “quite exaggerated” the Kilburns’ view that a conspiracy among municipal officials, property developers and a well-connected circle of wealthy women (including Ms. Kim) led to many old homes being snapped up through deception and intimidation about 10 years ago.

In the Kilburns’ view, this campaign has turned Bukchon — once a residential area for courtesans and royal hangers-on at two adjoining 15th-century Chosun dynasty palaces — into a Potemkin-like enclave of third or fourth homes for the rich. Postage-stamp lots with 900-square-foot, or about 85-square-meter, houses can go for $2 million or more.

Architects say there is no precise or accepted definition of a hanok. But there are common design elements. The homes are L- or U-shaped, with high exterior walls that create private interior courtyards. They have pine beams and framing inside, under-floor heating and paper-covered doors and windows. Old hanok also featured mortise-and-tenon construction, rather than nails and screws, and each home was essentially handcrafted by experienced woodworkers and tradesmen.

Ms. Kim has restored half her hanok in the traditional Korean manner, using handmade materials and old-school carpenters. The other half is more Euro than Asian. The small kitchen is sleek and stainless. A Frank Gehry cardboard armchair is the signature piece in the sitting area. It could be Milan or New York.

“I have an immense love and respect for our Korean things, yet I’m also a contemporary person,” said Ms. Kim, who said she wrangled with Bukchon’s design-review board for more than a year to get her renovation plans approved.

“I’m not going to be a monk or an 18th-century Chosun woman. This house is a summing-up of my life, my sense of taste and beauty. You can keep a balance between the traditional and the modern.”

The “modern” part is what really seems to get to Mr. Kilburn. Gutting the interior of a hanok, adding a basement or putting on a second story are the kind of architectural insults that he abhors, and he worries that the purity of the hanok idiom is slipping away.

“Everywhere you can see exceptions being made now, one at a time,” he said. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”

Mr. Kilburn rails most angrily against any sort of demolition or tear-down. A moldering and neglected hanok being replaced by a new house, even one that alludes to the hanok style, is beyond both his understanding and tolerance.

He can barely look at the hanok that have morphed into coffee bars, pizza parlors and trendy shops for jewelry and folk art. He points with contempt at a new garage with carved wooden doors that attempts to mimic hanok design features. The garage was built, he harrumphs, to stable a neighbor’s Lamborghini.

“We just want to retain the architectural heritage of Bukchon,” said Mr. Kilburn, a journalist who chronicles his preservation efforts on his Web site, kahoidong.com. “The fine for demolishing a hanok is only $300. So people just pay it. It’s a tragedy.”

But Mr. Hwang, the architect, said that if something traditional no longer makes practical sense — clay and dirt as insulation, for example — he is willing to update it with a modern material, such as Tyvek insulating wrap.

“The traditionalists think I’m ruining every house,” Mr. Hwang said.

“Sooner or later I am going to offend someone in the architectural community here,” he said. “But you can’t preserve everything on every level. That kind of symbolism doesn’t work for us anymore in Korea.”

The city government began fiddling with preservation laws in Bukchon about 35 years ago, initially ruling that no improvements could be made to any hanok there. Roofs went unrepaired, concrete outhouses were built in courtyard gardens and heating systems fueled by charcoal bricks were defeated by Seoul’s notorious winters. As a result, Bukchon turned shabby.

Even deliverymen avoided the area because of its confusing, twisting, narrow lanes.

The city’s overzealous protectionism eventually led to organized protests by the residents, many of whom were elderly or working-class. In response, in 1995, most previous restrictions were lifted, resulting in hundreds of hanok being demolished, replaced by blocky medium-rise apartment buildings and suburban-style houses that clashed badly with the elegant style and proportions of the hanok.

By the time the city reversed itself six years later, the damage had been done.

“More than half the village was gone,” Ms. Kim said glumly. “Six years was enough to ruin the place.”

On this, at least, she and Mr. Kilburn agree. The neighborhood, now heavily promoted by the city as a historic district, is overrun most days by nosy, noisy tourists. At night, because of so many absentee owners, it feels deserted.

“It used to be a living village,” Mr. Kilburn said. “It didn’t feel like a movie set. It felt genuine. People were living their lives.

“But now, neighbors never stop by. If you need to borrow a cup of something, there are no neighbors to go to. Walk the streets at night, and there’s not a single light in any of the houses. No kids. No little old ladies trudging up the hill carrying their cabbages. That’s all gone.”

Original NYT link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/world/asia/14iht-houses.html?_r=3&pagewanted=all

The peaks aren’t that high (all less than 5000 feet), but the skiing is really good in Gangwon province in South Korea. In fact, this area is one of the three finalists to host the 2018 Winter Olympics, winner to be announced in June 2011.

We spent a day at the High 1 ski resort and had a great time. My expectations were pretty low, since I hadn’t heard much about skiing in Korea other than that the ski season is pretty short, and that “Koreans ski like they drive”. But my low expectations were thoroughly exceeded. The mountain we were at had maybe 3 different gondolas and at least 6 different lifts. We spent most of the day in beginner/intermediate terrain, but the snow was surprisingly good, although it did ice up a little at the end of the day.

There were some shredders on the mountain, but not very many. About 80% of the people on the mountain were snowboarders. Most surprising, and strange to me was the amount of people either sitting or laying on the runs. There were plenty of beginners to be sure, but the slope was absolutely littered with people. It seemed like for every person upright there were five people sitting. At not like off to the side, but all over the place. It was strange, but not really annoying, and I just treated the people like flags to ski around, which was actually fun.

Just like everywhere we go in Korea, we met friendly and cheerful people, and had a really nice day.

In many ways, eating at restaurants in Korea is difficult for foreigners. Often you must sit on the floor for uncomfortably long times, use chopsticks, and try your best not to act totally confused by the menu. But really, this is part of the fun of going out to eat in Korea. Eating out at restaurants is one of the best ways to get out and observe/meet people. From what I can tell, most Koreans do very little socializing/entertaining at home. For one thing, most people live in apartments. Another factor is that entertaining requires sometimes dozens of “banchan”, (little side dishes) that require a lot of time and room to serve properly. Anyways, most entertaining and socializing is done at restaurants, and they are everywhere. Our neighborhood in Andong is more restaurant dense than some, but still we have (not joking/exaggerating, I think) over 100 restaurants within a 10 minute walk.

The majority of restaurants specialize in one type of thing or the other, usually a protein. Earlier I mentioned some difficulties for foreigners. Well, finding out what a restaurant serves is not one of them. It’s quite easy because generally each restaurant serves only a few main things and they are pictured on the outside. If it’s meat, there will be a picture of the animal. If it’s fish, there will usually be fish swimming in a tank outside the restaurant. If it’s something more complicated than meat/fish, there will be a detailed picture on the front of the restaurant.

Yesterday, Ann and I took a 10 short walk around the neighborhood and I took some pictures of restaurant signs. Can you tell what each restaurant’s specialty is? Which restaurant would you visit?

Korea doesn’t really celebrate Halloween, but that didn’t stop us from celebrating! Ann dressed up as a unicorn, and I was Dracula.

One of the best moments was when we walked through E-Mart, which is a big department/grocery store. The store was packed, and quite a few people there were perplexed, to say the least. Lots of cell phone pictures were taken of us, and at least one small child started crying, although I can’t say for sure whose fault that was.

Mostly, it was just a normal adult Halloween party. There were some seasonally inappropriate costumes, carved pumpkins, punch with ambiguous contents, faux spider webs, a dead rat, and some good conversation. The interesting part was that it happened in Korea, which happens not to celebrate this particular pagan holiday. I think this actually made the weekend better. Many of the kids at school seemed genuinely frightened of my lipstick blood and cape flourishes. The locals were confused. It took WAY longer than normal to hail a cab.

A couple weeks ago we bought a little 50cc scooter/moped. One of the interesting little things about life in Korea is that a lot of the restaurants employ delivery drivers, who ride scooters all around town. McDonald’s has a scooter fleet that delivers Big Macs. The pizza and chicken places also have scooters. Two doors up from our apartment there is a jajangmyeon (Chinese noodles and black sauce) restaurant. Occasionally we walk the 100 feet up and order jajagmyeon. We pay and then leave, and in 15 minutes our bell rings, and it’s the delivery driver. He walks the food up in a shelved metal container and drops it off, silverware and all. We finish eating, and then  walk the bowls and silverware back to the restaurant. It always makes me laugh how the delivery driver comes over on his scooter, even though it’s like a 20 second walk.

I’ve always thought that being a scooter delivery driver would be fun. Now, I’ve got a scooter, but the only thing I deliver is groceries from the store. Anyways, it’s a fun little toy and cuts down on our taxi charges a little bit. And yes, mom, we wear helmets!

Andong is just a little town by Korean standards, a touch under 200,000 people. I’ve heard lots of people complain about it being so small, but really it hasn’t bothered me at all. Since Korea itself is like the size of Indiana, it’s not difficult to get around to the bigger places if you like. Andong is well known for several things like jimdauk, super strong soju, a traditional village called Hahoe, red peppers, some old temples/ schools, and also as the place where Queen Elizabeth II spent her 73rd birthday in 1999. But Andong is only truly famous for one thing: the International Folk and Mask Dance Festival, held every year in the fall.

It’s going on right now, and Ann and I dashed down to the festival grounds by the river for a walkaround on Sunday. I knew it was a pretty big event, but I was surprised at just how big it was. No less than 5 side by side tents featured pigs rotating over coals. There was a guy form Peru playing some sort of flute to the tune of Hotel California.  More foreigners than I have seen in all of my seven months in Korea. Hundreds of tents. Thousands of people.

I would like to say we discovered the ancient mysteries of the mask dance, but really we mostly just walked around, taking in the sights. The sights were good though, and so were the smells. Here’s some pictures:

I especially like the teeth on this one, above.

This one was surprised to see me!

This one was angry it didn’t get a spot in the shade.

This is inside an auditorium way bigger than I imagined could exist in Andong. The colorful scene in the middle-left of the picture is some sort of Lego competition that I gazed upon wistfully. Legos were my absolute favorite thing in the world for several years of my pre-adolescent life. As a young serial-obsessive, I think I moved on from Legos to either the Oregon Trail, tropical fish aquariums, coin collecting, or the seventh grade. Hard to remember.

One time when I was about eleven years old, my dad took me to a local Lego building competition. I sat at a round table alongside like 5 other kids, with a whole mess of assorted Lego bits in the middle. You had like an hour to build something cool and then you could advance to the next round, start again, advance again, and so on. I had a flash of brilliance and announced to the table I was going to build a skyscraper with an elevator going up and down the middle of it. I set to work, but after an hour I had just two sides of a building, a few strings tied randomly to some Lego blocks clumped together, and a defeated look on my face. The kid across from me just built a skyscraper, and he was the one who advanced to the next round.

I remembered this story, looking down at a totally new generation of 10 year olds going to town on a huge pile of colored blocks and thought, “Legos are awesome”.

Last week was a three day holiday in Korea called Chusok, which is kind of like the Korean Thanksgiving. It’s a harvest holiday and everyone in Korea returns to their family homes. The holiday was Tuesday to Thursday and then we got Friday off, too. Since we don’t have any family in Korea to return home to, we went to Busan for a day and then Fukuoka (foo-quo-ca), Japan for three days.

Fukuoka is a pretty big city of about 1.5 million people. We stayed downtown, just across a canal from the central park. The flight from Busan to Japan was only about 40 minutes, but Fukuoka seemed like a world away from Korea. It is really, really beautiful. All of the public spaces are super nice and well maintained. The city is located right on the oceans and is veined with beautiful brick lined canals. There’s flowers and decorative trees all over the place. Japan is very quiet. Even downtown, cars almost never honked their horns. People don’t really yell, there’s no loud advertising, no construction noise, and it even seemed like people talked quietly on their cell phones.

In fact, cell phone use is not even allowed in many public spaces. We saw signs discouraging cell phone use in restaurants, buses, and trains. This is in stark contrast to Korea, where cell phone use is similar to America; constant, omnipresent, and loud.

Fukuoka has a major league baseball team called the SoftBank Hawks and we went to a Thursday afternoon game. Tickets were about $25 each with a free team flag, and we sat in the outfield, behind a glass partitioned walkway. The Hawks play in a huge stadium called the Yahoo! Dome, which seats about 35,000. One funny part of the stadium experience is that the beer vendors walk around with small padded kegs worn like oversized backpacks and they fill cups from the tap. As for the game itself, the home team jumped ahead in the first inning 8-2, and each team tacked on only a single run each the rest of the way.

We always seem to eat really well on vacation, but we had some especially great meals in Japan. Of course, we had to have conveyer belt sushi where you get color coded plates of sushi where the price of the plate corresponds to the color. But the culinary highlight was Japanese ramen. I’ve always associated ramen noodles with salty college junk food, but Japanese ramen is totally different from your preconceived notions. It’s a delightful Japanese institution found on every block, consisting of a thin mess of noodles in an amazingly flavored not salty broth, topped with thin slices of pork and green onion. It’s cheap, quick, delicious, and addictive. We had ramen all three days in Japan.

In a typical ramen restaurant like Ichiran, you enter by putting money into a vending machine, where you get a ticket for ramen and whatever else you want, like extra noodles, green onion, or meat. You sit down and fill out a small sheet of paper indicating what firmness of noodle you want, how much garlic, and how much spice. The always busy restaurant is filled with the sound of loud slurping.

On our last day in Japan, we took a two hour train ride to Nagasaki, where the second and final atomic bomb was dropped. The bomb actually exploded in the air above a small suburb called Urakami, and there’s now a peace park, museum, and monolith standing at the detonation site. As you would expect, the museum is heart wrenching to go through, but the surrounding neighborhood is beautiful and bustling, with a nice park, stream and trolley car system. Down the hill from the museum, Ground Zero is marked by a large black monolith.

The museum was a mix of educational and emotional. There was a big timeline about World War II and the development of the atomic bomb. There were also lots of artifacts from the explosion, like a melted glass bottle fused to the bones of the hand that was holding it when the bomb exploded. It didn’t seem right to take any pictures, so we didn’t, but it was amazing to see the evidence of just how destructive and powerful the “Fatman” bomb was. One thing I didn’t realize was that most of the actual destruction as caused by the unworldly heat of the bomb, which was measured in the millions of degrees Celsius. One poignant picture showed the side of a building far from the detonation site, where a watchman stood next to a ladder. When the heat wave reached the building, the whole side of the building was scorched, leaving the shadows of the soldier’s body next to the ladder clearly visible on the wall.

Just before we left for Japan, I read an article in the New Yorker about Uravan, which is the city in Colorado where materials were mined for the American nuclear program. Because of radiation concerns the entire city of Uravan was destroyed and buried, including the streets. Meanwhile, ironically, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were rebuilt and today are thriving modern cities.

Jimdauk is one of my favorite foods. It a sort of stew made with soy sauce, chicken, glass noodles, carrots, potatoes, cabbage, onion, peppers, and lots of spice. Sometimes the spiciness is removed for westerners because many Koreans are sensitive to the fact that their cuisine is generally spicier than western food, and so they try to accommodate you with blander versions of their dishes. Sometimes this happens with jimdauk, and it’s a travesty.

Andong is famous for jimdauk, which is actually a Korean Chinese fusion, I think. It comes in incredible portions, served with free soda. Like a lot of Korean foods, it comes with scissors for cutting the noodles and meat. The keys to success when eating jimdauk are to quickly identify the breast meat pieces, the potatoes, and the carrots, because those choice items go first. Secondly, DO NOT eat the bright red devil peppers. They will fucking ruin you. It’s best just to poke around the dish and remove the devil peppers before eating, because they will stick to the bottoms of things and make you regret leaving the house. Lastly, remove the boiled skin pieces- they are not good.

The only thing better than jimdauk is Kyo-Chon fried chicken wings, which rank somewhere between delightful and religious experience good. Unfortunately, they are also wildly unhealthy, so I get to eat jimdauk a lot more than I get to eat Kyo-Chon, although there’s absolutely no losers when it comes to either.

I’ve always been pretty particular about my, uhhh… bathroom business. I’m happy to pee just about anywhere someone’s not looking, but when it comes to conducting my bathroom business, I like it clean, quiet, and well-lit. It’s been a year since I graduated, so for everyone at UNL, the best places I found on campus are:

1. Third Floor Union, end of the hall

2. Third Floor Andrews Hall

3. CBA basement

The best places in Korea are places with seats, which are sometimes harder to find than you might imagine. I would guess 30-50% of public toilets in Andong are what we would call “squatters”, meaning there’s no seat, just a hole in the floor like you see in the picture above. There are also some additional complications in the typical public Korean bathroom. For example, toilet paper is usually bring-it-yourself.

Anyways, in 6 months, I still have not used a squatter for anything other than peeing. But then, last week, I read an interesting article on Slate. Check it out.

So, I’m rethinking my previous position (pun intended). Blog readers will be the first to know, should there be any breaking news.