Seoul and Moak-San

Last Tuesday I took a bus to Incheon airport to meet Bobby. I had no school the next day, so we stayed in a cool guest house near Hongik-De in Seoul that night and spent Wednesday walking around. Since then we have been in Jeonju and climbed Moak mountian today.

Bike ride videos

Bike ride pictures

I was feeling better today so I took a bike ride north from Jeonju to Samnye. Much of the trip was along a river bank. In an area just past a small dam in the river I came across a group of blue herons. I counted 19 and there were surely more out of view. These were all taken with my old camera but they came out well.

Bought a bike.. shouldn't have since I'm not going to be here for very much longer but I kind of need it during the week and want it to ride outside the city on weekends. Hard to imagine, but this is my FOURTH bike. My first bike got stolen, and the next two were bad quality getting flat tires almost immediately, so I decided to just spend the $150 to get one that wont get break or get a flat. It is basically the same model as my first bike but with one more gear for going up hills.

Sick today

Today was a hard day with school and flu symptoms. Monica was planning to come to Jeonju but I asked her not too as I am not feeling well. The first one is of the soccer field and Jeonbuk-de that I often play at. The second is just one of the buildings on campus in the evening. The last are from a Japanese restaurant in Yongsan in Seoul that Monica and I have gone to three times now.

Korea is making me lose my cool...

Korean driving. The lady that gave me a ride in the morning on Tuesday was a bit late so she ran several red lights, including one where there was other traffic stopped so she went over into the left turn lane around everyone and through the intersection at fairly high speed. She seemed to think putting on her caution blinkers made this ok. Mind you, her two kids were in the car as well not wearing their seatbelts. later there was more traffic stopped at a light but no way around on the left so she turned right, did a u turn and then turned right back onto the road after the intersection. My next door neighbor saw a pedestrian killed a few months ago in Jeonju when the bus he was riding in ran a red straight through the crosswalk.

Ambulances. Today I saw an ambulance with its siren and lights on stuck in traffic. It is Korean law to pull to the side of the road, just as it is in the US. But, everyone acted as if it were not there at all. Someone could be dying inside the ambulance and all the other drivers could think about is whether they would make it through the intersection on the next cycle.

In Jeonju, I can't walk down the street or ride a bus without people talking about "foreigners." Usually it's just comments on my height, or just saying, "look it's a foreigner," but other times they are nitpicking the way I do things. I opened the window an inch on the bus the other day and immediately the ladies sitting next to me started talking about how foreigners open the window too often because they get hot too easily. The stupid thing is there were already two other people, Koreans, with their windows open. Yet, somehow my opening the window was reinforcing their stereotype of foreigners.

On Tuesday, some of my students, as usual, were not studying but were running around hitting each other. So, I asked them, "why do Korean kids hit each other so much?" The response I anticipated was, "oh teacher, it's just a game." But what they said was this, "Kids in the US fight all the time and they hate blacks and asians." I said it is not the case, but they didn't want to hear it.

Today I was walking home and two junior high girls laughed out loud talking about my wearing a Nike jacket over my shirt and necktie. Seriously? You are going to nitpick me over THAT?

Kids Playing

This is a video taken at my Mon-Tues school several weeks ago. The kids are pretty good outside the classroom. Inside? well....

I think at first the boy is trying to convince the girls to have a race but the girls say they don't want to. Later they have a screaming battle.

Samcheok

This weekend was great but also very tiring. Monica and I went to Samcheok, which is about 4 hours from Seoul by bus. Adding the time for my bus from Jeonju to Seoul, I rode a bus for over 13 hours in two days. Samcheok is on the east coast, with pine trees and a mostly rocky coastline with clean water. There are some soft sandy beaches as well. We first wend to Maengbang beach on Saturday. There happened to be a flower(rapeflower) festival there this weekend too so we saw that too. Then we went back to Samcheok for dinner and headed out to Samcheok swimming beach after walking around for a while. On Sunday we walked along the coast and then headed to the Hwanseong caves, apparently the largest cave in Korea.

The most interesting thing for me was seeing the razor wire guarded beachfronts and thinking about what the area would have been like during WW2 and the Korean War.