One of my favorite Korea photos of one of my favorite baseball players, Lee Dae-hyeong of the LG Twins, (out)standing in his field.
Recently in Small Bites Category
In Busan, one of Samuel's former students led us to the top of a mountain where we could see about 70% of Busan he said. I snapped this photo of the Gwanganli bridge on our way down.
Day 16 of my 365 project (1 pic/day for a year). Neon sign with moon in the sky, Guri-si. Taken December 25, 2009.
A tractor I found in a parking lot near my apartment. Taken on December 31, 2009.
Elise & John in the roof garden at Coex Mall, Samseong-dong, Seoul.
View The Paths in a larger map
I just finished putting together this Google Map, a small collection of geographic points of interest in Korea. It starts zoomed in on my town, Maseok/Hwado-eub, of which I have a more specific guide. Zoom out to start seeing other places and to get an idea of where I am in Korea. Hopefully, if you've followed along so far, this will give you a bit more perspective on my life.
View The Paths on my site, or click the link under the map above to view it in Google.
So Monday at school I had absolutely nothing to do, even though it wasn't a test day yet (the testing runs Tuesday through Friday) the teacher I am with in my Monday classes borrowed them to do test review, so I just got to sit around in the office all day. I told Tim I wanted to go to the kimbap shop at around 6:30 or 7, and he decided we should meet at the pizza place near his house and then maybe go to a real restaurant, and since Aldrin decided to come into Maseok too we ended up going to get shabu shabu, which Tim described as "Japanese fusion" with a mushroom and vegetable spicy soup to which we added thin slices of dried beef, and then once all that was gone we dumped a big bowl of noodles into the sauce to cook, and after noodles the meal was finished off with some eggy rice. Not surprisingly, this meal also cost us 11,000W each.
After dinner we dropped into a Family Mart to get some beer and ice cream treats, and then headed to Tim's apartment to watch TV. After a few episodes of Peep Show and one of Father Ted (British comedies), we watched a Louis Theroux (British) documentary about gangsta rap that was pretty funny and very interesting. Not really a very interesting night to read about I know, but it is notable because it completed the to-do list of restaurants in Maseok.
Tuesday was the first day of testing, so I did nothing at school except research the extremely evil hornets we encountered on our Cheonmasan hike, and then after school I Skyped with Hilary (at her camp in Minnesota) for a couple hours, taking advantage of the fact that I went home at 1pm because of the test half-day. I know that except for amazingly deadly hornets this post is really not exciting at all, so I'll use it as an opportunity to apologize for being such a lazy blogger and not writing about the past week or so until now, and also for double posting about Cheonmasan and Seoul because I had the pictures uploaded before I had written anything. I promise you, the coming posts about Wednesday and Thursday of this week should be very interesting.
After dinner we dropped into a Family Mart to get some beer and ice cream treats, and then headed to Tim's apartment to watch TV. After a few episodes of Peep Show and one of Father Ted (British comedies), we watched a Louis Theroux (British) documentary about gangsta rap that was pretty funny and very interesting. Not really a very interesting night to read about I know, but it is notable because it completed the to-do list of restaurants in Maseok.
Tuesday was the first day of testing, so I did nothing at school except research the extremely evil hornets we encountered on our Cheonmasan hike, and then after school I Skyped with Hilary (at her camp in Minnesota) for a couple hours, taking advantage of the fact that I went home at 1pm because of the test half-day. I know that except for amazingly deadly hornets this post is really not exciting at all, so I'll use it as an opportunity to apologize for being such a lazy blogger and not writing about the past week or so until now, and also for double posting about Cheonmasan and Seoul because I had the pictures uploaded before I had written anything. I promise you, the coming posts about Wednesday and Thursday of this week should be very interesting.
After watching the Mariners beat the Dodgers in the morning, I met Graham at 2:50pm at the Paris Baguette to go to Seoul. The original plan had been Guri but Graham decided we should go to Seoul instead. We got on the 1115 bus at around 3:05 and on the bus ride in Graham pointed out to me all the towns we were passing and what they had that was of interest, and also where I would get off and on the bus if I wanted to go there. We took the bus all the way to Jamsil in Seoul which is apparently where Hye-hyun lives, and then we got onto the subway to Samseong station.
At Samseong we went in the Coex mall where we found pretty much all American shops and restaurants, including McDonald's where we ate lunch and numerous Nike stores. Graham also showed me where I can buy English books, which may come in handy if I ever finish these epic Robert K. Massie WWI books.
We wandered the mall for a while, then took the subway back to Jamsil and wandered the Lotte mall there for a little bit until it was time to go back on the bus. Not a very exciting trip but I learned how to get in and out of Seoul and where I can go shopping if I need to, and where I can get delicious American food. If you check out my Flickr photo set you will see some of the notable and interesting things we saw, but it was a very short trip. One of the most useful things I found out on this trip is that the 1200 bus coming back to Maseok stops about 30 seconds away from my apartment, which means getting to and from Seoul/other areas will be even easier than I thought.
Here's what I had for lunch on Sunday when I went in to Seoul with Graham. Apparently in Korea the "meal" is called a "set," so I got a Big Mac Set and then 2 cheeseburgers on the side. Extremely, extremely delicious and worth every (won)cent. It had been a really long time since I had McD's anyways, since when I moved out of the BD in Madison and over to Doty I no longer lived 2 minutes away from one.
The beauty of this is that in one fell swoop I undid the exercise of climbing up Cheonmasan. Oh well, I'll be back to kimchi every day during the school week anyway.
Saturday morning I met up with some other English teachers from the area to go climb this mountain, I'll write more about it later after I've written about the past week, but my pictures are up on flickr so check out the set. Some of the pics have a weird streak visible on them, I guess I should've wiped down my lens and filter before going. Not a big deal though, you can still see the pictures.
Here's the lovely new curtain which Hye-Hyun ordered for me off the interwebs. Apparently she chose the design with a little help from some of the other teachers. Very soothing!
The school engineer came over to set it up and also the building manager came to see what the deal with my boiler was. Apparently the correct solution to my problem is to just unplug it and plug it back in, but never press the buttons I was pressing. Evidently, the boiler is silent when heating the water and noisy when heating the floor, so when I thought it wasn't working that's only because it was doing the water. Oh well, nice to know how things work!
This pic and another of my room with the new curtain are available in my Korea Misc photoset.
My photos from Namyangju on Flickr are now geotagged extremely unnecessarily accurately so if you want you can check out my map and see where stuff is. check it out:
Flickr Map
Or, if you're on a photo page and want to know where it was taken, scroll down on the right and under additional information click the Map link next to "Taken in Namyangju-Si"
Flickr Map
Or, if you're on a photo page and want to know where it was taken, scroll down on the right and under additional information click the Map link next to "Taken in Namyangju-Si"
My first weekend was pretty uneventful, I did the laundry on Saturday morning and then watched some episodes of Conan. The laundry machine was interesting, it weighed the load and automatically set the time, then it didn't do anything for a while and I realized I had to turn the knob on a water hose, there was a cold and hot one but the hot one sprayed water all over when I turned it, so I opted to stick with just cold. Considering the state of my hot water I didn't know if I would've got hot water from it anyway. By the time the laundry was done there was still a puddle of water on the (tile) laundry "room" floor, I'm not sure what from, and it was grossly dirty so I wiped it up with a grossly dirty towel I had been left behind, and all was better. Of course I had to hang my laundry up to dry so I did that and went back to the interwebs. I didn't want to take another cold shower so I just stayed inside and ate cereal and watched Conan, and fell asleep around 4pm I think. I woke up around 11:30 and was up for a couple hours before finally falling asleep again.
On Sunday, I did much the same, just sitting in my room not taking a cold shower and waiting for my laundry to dry. I was also inspired by how dirty my socks were and the dirt stirred up in the laundry room puddle to finally wash my floor, and also rearrange my room since I discovered another electrical outlet by my desk so I could move my computer off my bed. I also talked to Graham Farmer on Facebook chat about the lesson I had to teach to the third graders, and he said he'd share the lesson plan he used with me, and we talked a lot about various things (Korea/New Zealand) and he said he'd show me the good restaurants in Namyangju, as well as maybe go to a baseball game sometime, making him the third person to suggest it (the others were Sun Man and Hye-Hyeon). I mentioned the hot water to him and he thought that was kind of weird so I called Hye-Hyeon to see if she could find out anything more, but since it was Sunday she couldn't get ahold of the building owner. I resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably have to take another cold shower on Monday. Once again, I ate cereal and since I didn't have an alarm clock I went to bed early so I'd wake up early enough for school on Monday.
On Sunday, I did much the same, just sitting in my room not taking a cold shower and waiting for my laundry to dry. I was also inspired by how dirty my socks were and the dirt stirred up in the laundry room puddle to finally wash my floor, and also rearrange my room since I discovered another electrical outlet by my desk so I could move my computer off my bed. I also talked to Graham Farmer on Facebook chat about the lesson I had to teach to the third graders, and he said he'd share the lesson plan he used with me, and we talked a lot about various things (Korea/New Zealand) and he said he'd show me the good restaurants in Namyangju, as well as maybe go to a baseball game sometime, making him the third person to suggest it (the others were Sun Man and Hye-Hyeon). I mentioned the hot water to him and he thought that was kind of weird so I called Hye-Hyeon to see if she could find out anything more, but since it was Sunday she couldn't get ahold of the building owner. I resigned myself to the fact that I'd probably have to take another cold shower on Monday. Once again, I ate cereal and since I didn't have an alarm clock I went to bed early so I'd wake up early enough for school on Monday.