Korean Kontradictions, Aircraft acrobatics and aquariums

So before I go into details about this past weekend, let me first say this: for those of you unaware, I happen to be married to the greatest person ever. Just thought I ought to clear that up.

Secondly, I'd like to share with you something I've learned about Korea. This place is a land of contradicions. For starters, I present this picture, which, although it is most likely simply another error in translation, presents a good example of what I'm talking about:



Another aspect of Korean society is that it is incredibly contradictory about body image and sexuality. For instance, although there is a word for sex in Korean, it is rarely if ever used. They almost always speak in inuendo rather than say the word sex. Also, despite the fact that relatively provocative images are still seen in the media, conservative is the word when it comes to standard Korean dress, especially for women. All of this was what made the following display at the entrance to a housewares store that much more surprising.

A housewares store, don't forget.




So these are cushions on sale that are supposed to be representations (apparently) of the breasts of Cameron Diaz and Beyonce from Destiny's Child. So weird.

Anyway, on to the actual events of the weekend. Becca had prepared a surprise for Saturday, which was amazing since she doesn't particularly like all the logistic stuff involved in things like this, especially in another language. This weekend was the Seoul International Air Show, which she (correctly) thought that I would be interested in attending. It was awesome. We got there a little late since there were a couple accidents backing up traffic on the freeway, adding an extra 45 minutes to the bus travelling time, but we still got near enough to the airfield to watch (for free!) some acrobatic flight teams doing some neat tricks. Observe some of their sky art:




On our way back to the subway after the airshow, we witnessed an interesting thing about Koreans: their absolutely screwed up (non-existant?) taste buds. I mean, any country where the children thoroughly enjoy the taste of rotten cabbage covered in red pepper paste has obviously got its share of culinary difficulties, but this crap completely takes the cake:



What's that, you ask? Well I'll tell you. That, my friends and family, is a big pot of boiled silk-worm larvae. And the kiddies LOVE it. That's an actual Korean child (no paid actors here, let me tell you) digging into a paper cup full of the little wormy critters, served piping-hot and nauseatingly aromatic at roadside stands in various corners and events all over Korea. Yeah.

Right beside the pot above is another pot serving up cups full of river snails. This guy sat down right beside us, slurping away on them. They're really tiny, and you need to just suck them out of their shells. I've actually tried them, and they're not *bad*, per se, just useless. They're so small that you can hardly even notice them before you swallow them. Not a lot of point, in my opinion, but this guy seemed to be enjoying them:



But enough about horrendous "food". The next place we went was an incredibly pleasant surprise. Becca had read about this place called the COEX mall, where they've got loads of neat interactive stuff to do and see, including (according to the book she was reading) a couple sound-proof booths containing drum kits that you can wail away on for free. She figured that it'd be fun (which it would have been) so we decided to mosey on down and see what was available. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find any such mythical place in the mall. We did see the housewares store with the interesting array of pillows seen above, and we did see something you wouldn't see in Canada, store-wise:



Yup. It's a board game cafe. You go in, order a capuccino and sit down to play a round of your favourite board game with your friends. They're also all over the place here.

Anyway, the really cool part was the aquarium that they have in this mall-thingy. I wasn't holding out too much hope for it, being that it's an aquarium inside a mall, but we paid the 14,000 won each to get in and started on our way.

It started out fairly dull, featuring various forms of tiny, household-pet-sized freshwater fish in household-pet-sized aquariums, so we were getting a little worried, but it turned out to get better and better the further along we went.

Before we got to any really big fish, we entered a little room where they had a bunch of installation-art-esque aquariums set up. Like so:



They also had a Coke machine, a fridge and a couple TVs (185 channels -- nothin' but fish). Overall a pretty neat way of caging fish.

Then came the really rad stuff. They had an amazing array of fish from all over the world in this aquarium. Stuff ranging from huge (and apparently irrisistably attractive) river fish from the Amazon:

to awesomely huge moray eels:

to incredibly cool things called sea dragons:


They also had a couple of those really big aquariums featuring full-wall windows and sharks, sea turtles and marlins swimming around inside (so freakin' cool) including those neat plexiglass tunnels you can walk through and have sharks etc swim right over your head.

They also had a tank with a few giant spider crabs inside. These things are terrifyingly huge. For anyone who hasn't heard the story, I've developed a healthy respect for the strength of crabs since I saw a medium sized one snap a thick, hard, plastic ashtray in two with its one big crushin' claw. *shudder*

That said, it's easy to understand how I found this a little unnerving:


For size reference, the body of this jerk is about the size of my outspread hand.

So, I was busy marvelling at the size and potential bone-crushingness of this little fella, when I happened to look up and see the following. Again, for size reference, the rock to which this particular monster is attached was roughly the size of my torso, if not a little bit bigger. I don't even care if you believe me. I still shudder a little to think about it.



Ridiculous.


Oh yeah, and before we left, I got caught in some sort of weird undersea vortex.



I got out safely though. Boy was *that* an adventure!

Anyway, once the aquarium experience was finished, we decided to go and eat at an Indian restaurant that Becca had read about in Itaewon. It was delicious, but not quite as delicious as the last (cheaper) Indian buffet restaurant we visited, which was good cause now we know we can save money and have incredibly excellent Indian food at the first place. Anyway, the food was still spectacular. Afterwards, we decided that we had most likely missed the last bus back to Cheongju, so we'd better get a room somewhere so we didn't have a repeat of our last little Itaewon experience. Wanna see what 30,000 won will get you by way of a hotel room in a grubby area of Seoul? No? Then would the concerned parents involved kindly look elsewhere while scrolling down to the next bit of this post? Thank you.

Here's our room (note that Becca was at the doorway and was still too close to even get the opposite wall fully into the picture):


I'm lying across the bed sideways, so don't think that. It was a regular double bed, but it stretched the whole way from one wall to the other, and probably would have done the same the other way. However, the room did have a decent shower in the bathroom, clean sheets/bedding a tiny TV (that actually worked once I fiddled with the cable connection a bit) and an air conditioner, so it really wasn't that bad.

Here's the grand entrance:


I would've taken pictures of the surrounding neighbourhood (at night) but I was afraid that our parents may have some sort of coronary, so I figured it'd be best to try to catch it at its most flattering. What do you think?

To those of you currently worrying about parental mental health, I know for a fact that both of my parents have stayed in places of the same, or lesser, quality, so they'll be alright. To the Sheppards, if there are any lasting psychological injuries as a result of these pictures, I offer my heartfelt apologies.

So that brings us to another incredibly long, potentially boring, post updating y'all on our weekend wanderings. Hope you've enjoyed the retelling, and there are more pictures of the aquarium available if you would really like. I'll most likely wait until I talk to you on MSN or until we get back though. HAHAHA!

I'm going to bed. G'night.

Our trip to Songnisan

So last weekend was our first non-Seoul-related experience with Korea outside of Cheongju by ourselves.

Shut up! It was a big step!

Anyway, we went to a national park near us called Songnisan. It's about a 90 minute bus ride away, and due to the wonderfully cheap transportation here, only cost us 5600won each, one-way.

This trip showed us a couple things:
1)It's interesting to be in a place where Buddhism is an actual religion, rather than mostly just a fad.
2) Korea can actually be a beautiful country, once you get away from the relatively dirty, crowded and noisy cities:


3) Buddha is always *HUGE*

Seriously:



The latter is a relief of Buddha carved into the side of a huge rock. The former is sortof the main attraction of Songnisan, but before I'll get into details in a second. I found it odd that we paid admission to get in to this park (a meagre 8000won each, but still) when it is a fully-functional place of worship for Buddhists in Korea. All the pagodas surrounding the huge Buddha statue had other smaller (but still enormous in their own right) statues, and places for people to light incense/candles and mats for prostrating yourself in prayer. I just wonder how the pilgrims feel about being charged upon entry. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, technically, it's a lot closer to here, if here is where I'm writing, and there is where most of you are reading, but that's irrelevant too.

So, about that huge statue...

It's apparently the second biggest statue of Buddha in Korea, and I swear it wasn't Maxwell Smart who told me. It's 33m high. Until a couple years ago, it was made of bronze, having been completed in this most recent incarnation (GET IT? HAH!!!) in 1994. In 2002 it was covered in solid gold. For some very peculiar reasons....



Does anyone else find at least one of those reasons a bit out of place? I mean, it's tenuous at best to link world peace with laying over 160 pounds of solid gold onto a 33 metre Buddha statue, but "to commemorate the successful organization of the 2002 World Cup"? I don't know much about the specifics of "guardian Buddhism", but I'd be willing to hazard a guess that whatever's involved in its "inheritance" may have actually been the driving reason behind this little endeavour, and the rest are just "Miss America"-style filler reasons, but that may be just me.

In addition to the statue and carvings, there were a bunch of pagodas around, like this one:



...which is the tallest one in Korea. All of them were incredibly beautiful in design, inside and out, but we were informed in no uncertain terms (and without the slightest use of English) that taking pictures inside was a definite no-no. In fact, at the doorway to the above temple, the fact that I pointed to my camera with an inquiring look at an elderly Korean custodian was enough to convince her that at any moment, I was about to completely surrender myself to a veritable orgy of sacriligious shutter-happiness, and needed to be physically shooed away from the pagoda as rapidly as possible. The whole thing was quite amusing. I kept the camera hidden while exploring the inside of the other pagodas (which I was completely free to do).

The temple complex was imressive and everything, but was still only the second coolest thing we saw that day. As you may imagine, a national park (even in a country the size of Korea) encompasses a larger area that just a few pagodas and an enormous gold statue. There are several mountains to climb - with peaks all around the 1000m-high mark - and temples and neat things to see scattered all over the place. One of these was a little path where you could walk barefoot on little pebbles of yellow ocher, which is believed to be able to relieve symptoms of any number of things, including things that we weren't even aware were diseases.



The coolest thing that we saw was also the last before heading home that afternoon. On a big tourist map billboard across the street from the main bus station, there were marked all the main hiking paths up the mountain, to Bopjusa (the name of the temple complex with the huge statue) and around the little village. It also had temples and rest areas marked with little icons.

A bit away from everything else were two temple-esque icons with no marked paths leading to them, and not much in the way of labels. We thought it'd be fun to try to track one of them down. We were also thinking that there would be fewer people around, so it would make for a quieter time. Right on both counts.

We walked down a road that seemed to be heading in the general direction of the closest temple-thing. Keep in mind that apart from the big billboard thing, the maps didn't have these spots listed. After a while on that little road, we notice the village dwindling into widely spaced, more rural-looking dwellings, and finally just into fields of various crops. Then the road itself dwindled into a concrete bath just barely wider than one vehicle. After about 15-20 minutes walking down that path, there was a branch leading off towards the forested mountain, which was just dirt track. We followed that for about 15 minutes, now starting up the mountain, until it ended in a little cul-de-sac. Off from the cul-de-sac was a barely-cleared forest trail, marked by a string of paper lanterns hung through the trees. This was mostly where it started to get cool. The only person we had seen since the village started dwindling away was an old man sitting by the side of the dirt path with a little cart full of sticks and a little saw, smoking away at a pipe. He smiled and waved as we walked past.

So, we started climbing the path through the woods. This'll give you an idea of what the path was like:


Yeah, you see that little blue paper lantern. That's the trail marker. Anyway, we climbed that path for about 30 minutes and finally reached a tiny hermitage, completely nestled up on the side of this mountain. This is the view the hermits have:



It was amazingly quiet and really quite awe-inspiring to think that people actually live there, totally cut off from everything and everyone, just hanging out on the side of their mountain. I think anyone who lives that far into the wilderness deserves to call it "their mountain."

There was a building that was apparently the living quarters, a small garden, and a little temple area, much less ornate than the ones at the tourist centre:


Anyway, that was one of the coolest things we've seen so far. We decided to save the actual mountain climb, which takes approx 3 hours on the way up and 2 on the way down (probably significantly less if you're not picky about your physical well-being upon arrival at the base), for another visit where we can come early and take our time enjoying the scenery.

Is it unusual for me to have had the M*A*S*H theme song stuck in my head intermittently for the past 6 weeks?

First Air Raid Drill

That's right - Wednesday at 1:00pm in the afternoon we were sitting casually reading at home and a siren starts. Except that it is much louder than a regular siren, cycles at a much slower rate and did not fade away as an ambulance siren would have as the ambulance speeds off. Needless to say this is a very disturbing sound that makes one question how far away the end of the world really is. We look outside and there is no one on the street - no cars drive by. We called Betty, the Korean in charge of our happiness, who is indisposed at the time and does not answer.

Is there a bomb shelter we should go to? Where is this shelter? Should we go outside?

The siren ceases much to our relief only to be replaced by the sound of several planes flying low overhead - increasing our concern once again.

Fifteen minutes later, as there have been no explosions and the world appears to be in the same location as it was before all of the clamor began, we chose to ignore the interuption and file it away in our "So this is what it's like to live in Korea" box of extraordinary.

Upon our arrival at work we were told by Betty that the ruckus had been an air raid drill as they are still in a cold war with North Korea. All Koreans are well aquainted with these drills as they are proformed approximately once a month. Everyone driving must stop while the alarm is sounding and those outside must rush indoors (although the rushing indoors is no longer as mandatory as these drills have gone on for years). Can you imagine air raid drills being a normal event in Canada?!

Another weekend. Funny how these things keep popping up...

So here we are at the end of another weekend.

This'll be a quick post, I promise, but it does have some neat pictures, so you'll want to read on!



On Saturday, we went to The Cheongju International Craft Biennal 2005 to see what all the fuss was about, and to snoop around for nifty Xmas presents. All in all, it was an amazing place, and we're going again sometime soon after we get our first paycheque (WHICH IS TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!). So many neat things to see, and so many cool things priced very very low (by North American standards).

There were two main sections that we went through. The first was the international craft trade show section thingy. This featured various countries displaying and selling various folk crafts and curios, and was thoroughly impressive. The second was slightly less impressive (only slightly) and featured craftsmen (inclusive term here, men and women represented) from all over Korea.

The first really interesting thing that we saw wasn't part of the show at all, but was a peculiar little creature we found zipping around a bunch of flowers that lined the footbridge, over the main road, leading to the festival. It was a really bizarre thing that kinda looked like a really convincing cross between a tiny hummingbird and a huge moth. Not including its straw/snout appendage thing (what are those called, anyway?), the thing was about two inches long. I hereby dub it the hummingmoth:



Either way it was very cool.

So one of the first things we see as we walk into the main plaza after buying our tickets to the festival (which only cost us 8,000 won each), was a pagoda housing an absolutely enormous bell:



The bell was rung using a huge log chained to the ceiling, which was at this particular time also chained firmly to the floor, immediately squishing any ideas of *someone's* to maybe have a go at ringing the biggest bell ever. I won't mention any names, but I'm sure you can figure out who I'm talking about. It may not be the biggest bell ever, either, but it was easily 15 feet high, which is pretty big for a bell, so quit your nitpicking.

Anyway, I'm not sure what country it was, but the first room we went to in the international display building had several incredibly detailed wood carved cabinet-type things. They were purely ornamental, as there was too much carving to allow for any actual storage space, but looked completely unassuming from the outside. When opened, they looked like this:



They also had a number of dining room sets made out of teak that looked very cool, and some other wood and ceramic crafts that were almost as impressive. Mom, we bought your Christmas present at this booth, but we're not risking shipping, so you'll have to wait until the end of January to get it.

Another room in the building contained one of the most extravagant/impressive things I've ever seen. Observe:



Yes folks, it's a queen size bed made entirely out of jade, with hand-carved head and footboards. Yours for only $30,000. I'm not joking about either of those statements. It was, in a word, unbelievable, so I won't hold it against you if you think that I'm somehow making this up.

So we saw a bunch of other really cool stuff (including an incredibly impressive female drum/dance troupe - ask me and I'll send you the video, pictures are useless) and then proceeded to our school's parent-teacher night, where we were introduced, and then spent the remainder of the event standing around being ignored by the Korean parents who were reportedly able to speak English, just entirely unwilling to do so.

After that all the teachers went out for an awesome dinner, on the director's tab, so that made it all worth it.

In the realm of getting stuff cheap over here, I've found a guy selling a 3-year-old 50cc scooter for about 500,000 won, and a place where I can get an enormous breaded pork cutlet with all the trimmings for about 3500won. Additionally, I found out that we can get a full, 160-channel satellite service package for 20,000 won/month. About 10-15 of the channels are in English. The jury's still definitely out on the scooter and on the satellite, I just think it's cool that you can get stuff for so little money here.

Anyway, that's it for this post. That wasn't so bad, was it?

Next weekend we're hoping to take off and check out another part of Korea, so hopefully there'll be interesting stories to share by next week, and if anything else exciting happens, we'll let you know. bye.

Last weekend

So this post is about last weekend, and since this weekend is rapidly approaching, we thought we'd post now, so we didn't get too far behind.

The delay is mostly because we had to wait until we resized and uploaded the pictures we're about to share with you lovely people.

Anyway, moving on. Friday night was pretty routine. We went out with the other foreigners for a few drinks and had a fair bit of fun.

Saturday was when the adventures really started. Due to whatever holiday caused it to be a long weekend, there was a big to do at the park near our place. We went for a bit of a walk to see what was going on, and there was a stage set up and a bunch of seats on the lawn. The first act was unusual in that I have never seen 75-100 people entertained by small children skipping rope to English songs for at least half an hour. After returning from our walk to find these small children STILL skipping, we noticed that the next act involved these adorable children practicing sword form on the the grass nearby before their big performance started.



About 10 minutes later, the skippers left and the tiny swordsmen stepped on the stage. They had a much shorter performance than the skippers, but were quite good, managing to stay mostly together throughout their demonstration:



Once the tiny ones were finished, there was a group of adults who were demonstrating next. That was super cool. Almost all of their forms demonstrations ended with them slicing to bits either a bamboo stick about 3-4 inches thick, or a 6-10 inch-thick bundle of straw, with their various weapons. They also had a pair of archers who would stand with their backs to the target (in this case a picture of a tiger's head) and then spin around together and fire, never missing, which was important.

This guy:


...who doesn't necessarily seem all that impressive in this picture, was actually able, as a part of his form, stab his katana right through the centre of the bamboo staff with one hand, which is much more difficult than it might seem to some of you. Really impressive.

These guys were also really quite impressive. Big long-staff battle axe things (anyone out there help me out with the correct name for this weapon?) and much jumping around and spinning before finally slicing to bits their own hunk of straw. Quite neat. The guy on the end must have been super-important or something cause he had to cut three clumps, instead of just one.



So, after the stabbing coolness had ended the music volume increased and it was difficult to hear ourselves think even in our apartment as the music was so loud.

Why stay in Cheongju and suffer from very bad English music when you can take a bus to Seoul to eat dinner?
And in half an hour we were on our way in exceptionally comfortable, pseudo-airline seats as
shown below:



One of the first things that we noticed as we entered the Seoul subway system was a rather large warning sign above a glass cabinet-type thing.


In case you can't quite make out the creepiness of it all, it's a sign giving instructions on how to use the emergency gas masks that they have generously supplied. Observe a close-up:


I'm not sure what's creepier, the fact that they have complimentary gas masks in the subway stations, or the fact that there were only about 30 of them. I'll let you be the judge.

Upon arriving in Itaewon - the Island of English in the heart of Korea - we promptly found an Indian restaurant and proceeded to devour an incredibly delicious dinner of various curries, butter chicken, nan bread, rice and the best gulab jamin (Indian desserts) that have ever been tasted, anywhere. Thoroughly stuffed (this particular restaurant was an all-you-can eat buffet for around $12), we decided to go for a walk around town to give ourselves time to feel a little less huge before hopping back on a bus to come home.

As we were walking down the main street (just as a quick reminder, Itaewon is in Seoul - a city of over 11 million people) we hear some English folks calling after us. We didn't turn around, cause they weren't clearly talking to us. Until, that is, they yelled "Trent University!" which made us spin around quite instantly. The girls that were calling we had never met, but the guy looked vaguely familiar. Turns out that Ryan had an English class with him in 3rd year at Trent. The three of them were up visiting a friend of theirs that lived in Seoul, a guy named Simon that was at our TESL course in Peterborough, and who we knew from Trent as well. Very weird. We didn't even know that he was living in Seoul.

Such a small world. We ended up spending time hanging out with them which was tonnes of unexpected fun. Unfortunately, another unforeseen event was that of the subway and bus station closing for the night around 12:00. When we realized this at 2:00 am in the morning we decided to get a hotel room. Unfortunately the area that we were in at the time had hotels where rooms ran between 300 000 to 200 000 won. As the bus station opened at 6:00 the next morning we decided that our best option was to dance the night away in Itaewon as all the bars are open until around 4:00 and then a few stay open until 5:30. At 5:30 we waited for the subway to open with several other individuals, most of whom looked as though they had been out all night too.



After arriving back in Cheoungju we crashed for a few hours and then ran to the church retreat for the Sunday Monday. We stayed in a beautiful smaller country church that was overlooked by mountains.



The food they served was fantastic which was such a relief. We didn't get to do as much hiking as we would have liked but we have a few pictures.

The first is a tomb - they bury their dead sitting up into the side of the mountains like this:


This one was taken from the side of a mountain as we climbed up it. On the other side of the valley there was a ginseng field being overlooked by a hillside cemetery featuring more of the peculiar burial mounds. These ones had headstones, though.



Well, that was last weekend. There will be another post coming fairly soon, as we've accumulated several pictures and stories, but we don't want to bog down this post with anything else. So keep your eyes peeled.

bye!