Team Spirit

In my capacity as an English teacher I facilitate a lot of games.  A LOT of games.  A while ago I started letting the kids pick their own team names.  I've noticed a few that are pretty frequent, namely myself and Obama.  They come up with some other pretty good ones, and a lot more ridiculous ones.  Here's a small sampling:

Korea vs. China vs. Turkey (the Thanksgiving kind)

Obama vs. Osama bin Laden

Tyler vs. Super Tyler

Fire vs. Ice vs. Tomato

George Washington vs. Obama vs. Tyler

Shooting fire vs. Cute Dog vs. 4

Genius vs. Brilliant

1 meter vs. 10 meters vs. 11 meters

Star vs. Heart vs. Chicken

Galbi (Beef Ribs) vs. Yummy vs. Girl's Generation (Kpop band)

Piggy vs. Bear vs. Squirrel

Lincoln vs. Obama vs. Lee MyungBak

WiFi vs. WiBro vs. 4g

U.S.A. vs. Dagger vs. Bea$t

Handsome vs. Die vs. ㅋㅋㅋ (This sounds like the "k" in cake - kk-kk-kk, which is how they write "hahaha")

That's a nice little sampling, I think, and just happens to be all I can remember just at the moment.  If I see any other gems, I'll let ya know.

Some Cultural Factoids

Korea has many customs, traditions and superstitions similar to the U.S., and many that are unique to Korea.  Here are a few I've learned, though I'm sure there's many more:

For birthdays, instead of cake or ice-cream people make myokgook, a seaweed soup.

You don't, however, ever eat seaweed soup before an exam.  It's slippery texture will make the answers slip away.  Instead, it's traditional to have yeot, a sticky rice candy.  It's believed to have effects opposite to seaweed.  It's common to see yeot springing up in all the stores this time of year, as kid's are taking their high-school and college entrance exams (i.e. the ABSOLUTE MOST IMPORTANT EVENTS EVER THAT WILL DETERMINE THE COURSE OF THEIR ENTIRE LIVES. Got to have luck on their side.)

You also don't wash your hair on the day of a big exam, since the answers might end up swirling the drain with the shampoo.

If you sleep in a closed room with a fan on, you will die.  This is a phenomenon called "fan death," and even though no-one is quite sure what causes it, (spot cooling resulting in hypothermia, suffocation caused by the air moving too fast for proper inhalation, or the spinning blades breaking apart the oxygen molecules are among the theories posited) a few cases are reported every year by the mass-media.  Infants and the elderly are most susceptible, as is common with most made up ailments.

If you write someones name in red, they will die or you want them dead.  This comes from the Buddhist practice of writing the names of the deceased in red, on gravestones or otherwise.

Koreans have an aversion to the number four, since the pronunciation ("sa") is the same as the word for death.  Buildings will sometimes skip the fourth, fourteenth, twenty-fourth, etc. floor, just like Vegas casinos will skip the 13th floor.  Or in some elevators you'll see an F in the place of the number four.  But just like in the western world, seven is a lucky number.

It's bad luck to break a bowl or plate.  It's worse luck to eat from a bowl or plate with a crack or chipped rim.

There's an expression, "Sam han sa ohn," which means literally three hot four cold.  This is the perceived weather cycle when the temperature is changing, three warm days followed by four cold days.  I want to vet the system but I can't be bothered to keep track.

There's just a few I've picked up, if I hear of any more I'll jot them down!

Ko Phi Phi paradise, much delayed

So I believe I mentioned like eight months ago that I went to heaven on earth.  I needed some time to register what happened.  About time I posted some pictures though, methinks.  This, friends and family (and strangers who've happened upon this blog), is Ko Phi Phi, Thailand.

 

On the approach.  I'd estimate these particular cliffs to be at least three hundred feet.




Tourists arriving at Phi Phi Don.





Ridiculous beach, completely enclosed in horseshoe shaped mountains.  The water was  bathtub warm and crystal clear.  You could walk out for hundreds of yards with the water barely reaching past your waist.  I don't know why the sky looks so gray in this picture, it was never anything but clear blue.





Click on this picture.  Our hotel was a thirty second walk from this spot.  Thus the week was spent primarily shoe free.



This monkey has developed a taste for Coca-Cola.  A palpable example of humanity's befouling interaction with the natural world?  Or awesome.



Snorkeling trip to Phi Phi Leh.  Our boat looked just like the wooden one on the right.




Snorkeling.  I still haven't developed the pictures from my underwater camera (surprised?).  You can see some fish if you look carefully.  They really liked to eat pineapple (the floating bits).  The guides would toss it out and they would come swarming.




I got bit by a fish (maybe it thought I was a piece of pineapple?).  Jaclyn thought it was funny 'til she saw me bleeding.  Then she thought it was hilarious.


 



Us on the beach where they filmed The Beach.  I put on sunscreen probably 4 times a day (spf 50) but I still ended up roasted, as evidenced in this picture.  That's what you get for being so close to the equator.  A small price to pay.



Jaclyn is always at home on a boat, even a jankity wooden skiff.



Me, not so much.

This is the view from the top of the mountain (panorama below).  The beach to the right of the isthmus is the one in the pictures up above.  Almost everything on the isthmus was swept away by the 2004 tsunami, but sprang back up quickly thanks to tourist dollars and donations from good samaritans.  Around the island you could find signs thanking the donors that helped businesses to get back on their feet.  Our hotel survived the destruction and was used as an impromtu hospital.

 

Quite the vista.



One more for good measure.

Valentine's Day dinner in paradise.  It was a really nice restaurant, with our table directly on the beach.  But for whatever reason the food was crap.  We got a pizza afterwards.





Sunset on the water.

EPIK Life

As I sat in my office, clipping my fingernails while I watched Monday Night Football on a chilly Tuesday morning, I got to thinking.  This is strange, I thought.  It's strange that I'm watching football in Korea on a Tuesday morning.  It's strange that I'm clipping my fingernails at work and no one is batting an eyelash.  It's strange that I'm getting paid for this, and handsomely at that.  

Don't get me wrong.  I do a lot of work, and I work hard when I am working.  But there is a lot of downtime as an English teacher in Korea.  A LOT.  We are contractually limited to 18 teaching hours a week.  Anything beyond that and the school has to pay out the behind, so my school treats extra hours like an ebola outbreak.  An hour translates to one 40 minute class.  Yet we work 8:30 to 4:30 every day.  If my math is right, that means we're teaching roughly 10 percent of the week (I don't teach math).  So what do I do with all those other hours?

Number 1:  Lesson plan.

 

This is a no-brainer, of course.  With all the extra time, there's no excuse for not being on top of your duties.  But there's only so much lesson planning you can do.  I'm finished with my official curriculum classes.  For the year.  That's through December.

My situation is atypical.  Not in terms of free time, but concerning what I'm actually teaching in the classroom.  My head-teacher has requested that every other lesson I teach non-curriculum material.  Sounds cool, but it's pretty tricky.  Since the desired effect is to develop the Korean kids familiarity with western culture, I started with western related things.  Realistic greetings, western food, extreme sports, etc.  After a while, and with two western teachers planning these extra classes, the idea-pool gets shallow.  In my last three lessons I've taught fortune telling, the sign language alphabet, and origami.  I always tie in some kind of key language that I think could be useful (future tense, parts of the hand, and geography respectively (don't ask me how geography and origami are related, I don't want to explain it)) but it's come to the point where I find an activity I want to do and assemble the language around the activity.  Maybe not the most effective method of language instruction, but I'm working within the directives handed down to me.

The fact is, the kids don't care. And they don't need to.  They know as well as I do that these "elective classes," as I call them, aren't applied to their grades and are, generally, nihil ad rem.  This leaves me with a conflict of interest.  Do I teach the language that I think they need to know, or do I try to keep them interested.  I make a solid effort to do both, but I definitely favor the latter.  Particularly because if they're not interested, then trying to teach what I consider critical language is just lost on a bored, rowdy classroom.  I've had it happen before, and it's not fun for me, it's not fun for them.  Their retention is nil and I leave feeling deflated and frustrated.  Thus, origami is good for everyone.

I forget what I was talking about.  Oh, right...

Number 2:  Practice origami.

I'm getting really good.

Number 3:  Facebook

I hadn't been on facebook for months before I got to Korea.  I use it a lot more now, but I've kind of forgotten how.  I'll use it to organize soccer games or get in on trail rides.  But sometimes I'll open my homepage and just stare at it.  "What am I supposed to do?  Why is this a cultural phenomenon again?"  The loop opened up and I fell right out.  Sometimes I'll aimlessly click around and wonder why I'm looking at a friend of a friend of a friend's wall.  "Who is this person, and how did I get here?"

Number 4:  Streaming TV

Like I said, I'm watching the Jets play the Dolphins right now.  I do a lot of TV watching, but this isn't limited to my downtime.  In case you didn't know, I'm got a touch of the A.D.D.  Lesson planning in the awkward silence of my office just kills me. I need some noise, some distractions to try to block out.  Thus, I watch the Daily Show daily, sporting events frequently, and have watched I don't know how many episodes of Top Gear.  Fantastic car show from the U.K. if you're not familiar.

Number 5:  Keep up on current events.

I've never been so informed about events around the world.  A lot of the websites out there are yellow-journalism garbage more concerned with their hit counter than reporting events in an accurate and unbiased fashion, but you take what you can get.  

Number 6:  Blogging

Sporadically.

Number 7: Playing with my new Kindle

Before I got the kindle, I felt like I couldn't read because busting out a book is a conspicuous way of saying, "Look!  I'm doing absolutely nothing work related!"  But now with the Kindle, I can just put it on my desk and read away.  Pretty handy.  And If anyone asks, I'm using the built in Oxford English Dictionary to snuff up on some etymologies.  Cuz an online subscription to that thing ain't cheap.  It also has free 3g, various games, email, and a web browser.  Kin-dle! Kin-dle! Kin-dle!

I probably do more stuff, too, but I'm gonna go practice some more origami.  Got to get this frog mastered.

Do boayo!

I went to Shanghai. It was neat.

I will let this picture sum-up my feelings about Shanghai.

We were visiting Jaclyn's college roomate, Nicole, who is living in Shanghai getting an MA in design.  She lives in a very tall apartment.



It's really nice.

 I threw like 15 paper airplanes out of there.  Sorry, Gaya, I just didn't know when I'd have another chance to throw paper airplanes from 300 feet.  (Also, did you know that paper cranes are perfectly balanced and if you throw one from 300 feet it will float gently to the ground without flipping over?  Who'da thunk it?)



The view at night is cool.

 Shanghai has amazing architecture.  It feels like being in a future city.  Check out the skyline.

That mondo river is the Bund.  On one side is the future city, seen here, and directly behind is a bunch of colonial looking buildings.  The view at night is even better.



Neat

 This ranks right up there amongst the best vistas I have ever had the good fortune to behold. And I think that is saying something, I've seen a lot of vistas.  (Please forgive my braggadocio, I'm just trying to convey how spectacular it is.)  Here's another view:
 

Double neat.

 Here's one more example of some cool architecture.  There really were amazing buildings everywhere.  The place is truly an architect's wet-dream (sorry, graphic).

Can you feel the qi flowing?

But not everything was super-mod.  There was a radical garden called YuYuan with this cool bridge built on rocks and lots of excellent architecture of a more classical nature.



Garden



Building

We went to a really cool club, it was really fun.  Well, first we went to the "Obama Club," and it was empty, creepy, and (I'm pretty sure) a strip club.  And when I see empty, I mean literally empty.  They let us in just to look, then when we took a picture they kicked us out.

The poles are a dead give-away.

Then we went to another club called, "Rich Baby," which was really fun.  Can you tell by our gleeful faces?

This is Jaclyn's favorite picture.

There are also some killer dumplings in Shanghai.  We went to this place packed with locals where you could watch them cook through a steamy window.  The process is amazing, and takes way more people than you'd think.  In assembly line fashion, they cranked out, by my estimation, at least one dumpling per second.  Maybe faster even, there hands were literally a blur.  That could have been the condensation, though.

Hold still, I'm trying to take a picture.

They also have this really fast maglev train in Shanghai.  Needlessly fast really.  But it's the world's first, and it's kind of fun.  And it levitiates on magnets (hence maglev, Nicole).  Everyone was taking pictures of and filming this thing while we accelerated.

That's 268 mph.  Why does it go so fast?  Because it can.



And I'll leave you with this picture I took of a stairwell, because I think it's cool.

 



New friend

So I'm back to life in Korea, and things are settling back into the old routine.. teaching all day, having kimchi and rice lunches, playing soccer (or as I've come to call it thanks to the British influence, "footy,") and hanging out in my favorite Daegu locale (Costco, duh).  Things were going along swimmingly, and it looked like it would be a term much like the last, then she happened (cue foreboding music):




















         (This space is inserted to help build the tension.)




































      (Is it working?)
























    (Probably not if you have a really big monitor.)



















    (Here it comes!)

AAAHHHHHH!

I was walking home from this little Korean joint called Starbucks, through the urban farm behind my house (see earlier posting) when I heard this pathetic little squeaking.  I looked around, and saw this little rascal trying to get to me through some thick weeds.  She was so small that she kept stumbling and getting stuck in the brush.  Well, I couldn't just go about my business in the face of such desperation, so I grabbed her and took her around to the neigbouring houses.  Everyone told me they had no idea where she'd come from, and I couldn't just leave her in the farm/trash heap, so she ended up in my apartment.

I was going to write about my vacillations, my doubt, my turmoil about having a pet in a studio apartment in a foreign country, how she'd undoubtedly put a hitch in my travel plans (i.e. world domination), be an added and unneccessary cost, and how she'd be bored in my apartment all day.  While all those things are likely true, I started writing this blog over a month ago (oops).  And in that month, she's grown on me a lot (and grown a lot physically.  She's more than doubled in size according to the vet).  It's come to the point where I can't imagine parting from her, even though she keeps me up all night and likes to destroy things in my apartment (boredom thwarted).  Fact is, I think I love the little rascal.  So, welcome to the family Goa!

Ch-Ch-Ch-China!

On my summer vacation I spent two weeks backpacking in this little place called China.  Maybe you've heard of it?  I'll give you a little overview of what I did.

I started off in Beijing:




It has really cool doorways.

 


Tiny alleyways everwhere called hutongs.





Some picturesque scenes if you look in the right places.

 



Really huge buildings everywhere.





The most crowded subways I have or will probably ever see.  You literally had to smash yourself into them.  A running start didn't hurt.

 


Some huge gates.




And, of course, Tiananmen Square.

 That's how I spent my first couple days in China: being lost, fighting the crowds, and generally wandering around one of the world's biggest cities.  From Beijing, I took two buses and rented a seat in a guy's van to get to a tiny town called Gubeikou.  It's a town that's supposed to be fairly true to the way of life before the industrialization of China.  It was certainly a welcome break from the hustle, bustle, and lung scarring way of life in Beijing (the air is so thick with pollutants the city is perpetually overcast.  Some days were so hazy I couldn't see the buildings on the other side of Tiananmen Square... and those are some big buildings).  Gubeikou is an incredible place.  It's tucked into a valley of lush, green mountains some 120 km from beijing, where a slow wide river bends around a steep mountain and past the town.  I'll lay off the overwrought sentences and let some pictures do the talking.  Oh yea, and there's that big wall there, too.

  

New wall, Great Wall.




Small town with guard towers (600 years old, unrestored).





This is the back wall of my guest house.  See the big stones?  Great wall.  Talk about efficiency.




Huge lily pads in the small river bisecting the town.  There were giant bullfrogs in there, too, but I was always too slow to get a picture.





Overgrown wall, the clump at the end, upon further inspection, turned out to be a collapsed guard tower.  I came upon several overgrown towers while I was hiking.




The view from my room.  That's a deteriorated section of the wall up there on the hill.





Big mountain with river.  The bumps on the hill are guard towers for the "Crouching Tiger" portion of the wall.  I did not make that up.





Unrestored wall, very long section.  It helps if you tilt your head a little bit when you look at this picture.



So that's how i spent my first day in Gubeikou, hiking and exploring original and untouched sections of the Great Wall.  The next day, I went to a touristy section of the wall called Jinshanling.  I call it touristy because it's a restored section and they've installed a cable car, but there really weren't many people there at all.  Pictures!!



Restored but rugged.




It's a very long wall.



As you can see from the pictures, this section is heavily restored (compared to the prior pictures) but still incredibly rugged.  It's also very steep, some sections I literally had to climb, hands and feet.  In other spots, the paths were marked with spraypaint: an arrow or an orange and blue circle, safe to climb.  Orange circle only, loose/dangerous stones.  Like this!



Oops I cut off the orange circle.

 It was incredible experience to see the wall, and I'm very happy with my two day survey.  It was great to see the state the wall is/would be in now after so many years, and how the wall was intended to be when it was more or less original.  It really is a magnificent structure.  It's dumbfounding to stand on a peak and see it stretched out in both directions, literally as far as your eye can see.  It took a lot of guts and a lot of man-power to build that wall.  It's truly a feat of engineering and persistence.  Or obstinance, I'm not sure which.

The next stop on my trip, after a brief foray back to Beijing to visit with the Silver Fisher's, was Xi'an, home of the Terracotta army.  It is rad.



Here they come!



Sooo many.





And each is unique.





Check out the detail.



The army is truly spectacular, and lives up to the hype.  I learned a lot about this historical relic.  Fact 1:  It's over 2000 years old.  I did not know that.  Fact 2:  Only a small fraction has actually been excavated.  Most of the army is till undergound, and they do work every night to further excavate.  Fact 3:  Almost all of the soldiers have been rebuilt.  When they dig them out, they look like this:



Just a big ol' mess of smashed up clay.




In the "General's Pit," they have some separation.




They piece them together like this and fill in the gaps with new clay.



I guess 2200years of seepage and erosion takes it's toll.  Not to mention that- Fact 4: 500 years after the army was completed (around 200 A.D.) the current emporer didn't like that idea that this army existed, so he burned the whole complex down.  That's why, in the picture of the smashed up soldiers, the dirt is black just around the rim of the pit.  That is the scorched remains of the original wooden complex.  Fact 5 (last one):  There are actually three different excavation sites, organized in the manner of a functional army.  One, fully excavated, is a small area where the generals, royals and brians behind the army hung out and did there thing.  Another pit, almost entirely unexcavated, is full of the specialized soldiers: chariots, cavalry, archers and the like.  The main pit, the one we're used to seeing, is the bulk of the general infantry, divided into rank and file in accurate battle formation.  Fact 6 (last one, I promise this time):  The rank and status of the soldiers can be determined by what they're wearing.  The more armor, the hire the rank.  The position of their arms and bodies can tell you what they're function as a soldier was.



From left to right:  Infantry (archer), middle ranking officer, General, cavalryman.

 The Terracotta army is truly an incredible cultural relic, and I feel lucky to have seen it.  But like the Great Wall, it makes me wonder if it is a symbol of the people of China, or rather a result of one man's imperious egoism.  In any case, they're both awesome to see.

After all this historically significant exploring, I felt a longing to see some of China's natural beauty.  I went hiking on a mountain called Hua Shan, one of the five sacred mountains of Taoism.  Check out the views:



Oops, couldn't resist.




Incredible vistas at every turn.




This mountain has been an inspiration to Chinese artists or thousands of years, a tradition carried into today.




Sunrise hike.




This is how goods are transported up the mountain.  Good ol' fashioned people power.  It's also why a small bottle of water will cost you an arm and a leg, which makes hiking difficult (insert bad joke sound).

 Hua Shan is known for it's views, but it's also known for being one of the world's most dangerous hikes.  Considering I've already biked the world's most dangerous road, how could I resist??  To allay your fears (mom), the government has recognized that the popularity of the mountain and the state of the trails were in conflict, so they've been rebuilding the whole route for a few years.  I'll show you some of the new trail, and some of the old trail.


New trail. Steep.




New trail. Stairs.




Old trail next to new trail.




Old trail, from above.




New trail, picture failing to capture extreme angle of descent.



As you can see, this was no walk in the park.  And considering I was wearing my entire pack plus carrying water (about 35 pounds) the 14km total (just to the hostel) at an estimated average grade of 20 % was downright challenging.  When I got down, my pack looked like this:   



Sweaty.



 This is probably one of those things you don't want to know, but I actually sweated through almost all of my clothes (inside the pack) and destroyed a book (sorry Jaclyn).  It was tough going but extremely rewarding.

But wait, you say.  That trail is steep, and indeed dangerous, but the most dangerous trail in the world?  No, I answer you, not that trail, but this trail:



Ok, so you actually have to strap yourself to a guide wire to do this, so the actual risk isn't that great. Unless, of course, you find yourself overwhelmed by the heart crushing adrenaline rush you get from standing on a plank stuck into a 700 foot high sheer granite cliff.  Quite the experience.  And the two way traffic doesn't help either.



Sorry mom.



So after Hua Shan, I headed back to Beijing where I met up with Jaclyn and competed with all the domestic tourists to see the sights.  So that's my trip to China.  I have about a thousand more pictures, and some good stories for you all.  I can't give it all up in the blog though, because then what would we talk about when I make it home??

I'll probably get in trouble for this, but I'd like to leave you with this last image: