38 Things Other Than the 38th Parallel

So this a Part II of sorts, since the honorable author wanted to split up the post and if you haven’t read the post previous then you should go do that at a point before you, a reader feared and respected by other readers of blogs for how passionate you are for checking this, your favorite blog, forget about it. Follow? Good. The author, other than liking to refer to himself in the third person, likes commas, which separate his thoughts, sometimes his thoughts from his thoughts, and then allow you to reenter the normal stream of continuity that you were really hoping for, and making any English teacher the author ever had, assuming they read this, cringe at his willfully, flaunting disregard for the proper usage of punctuation. Now on to the excitement of Filipinos, fish, and Pepero!

So post DMZ, on 11/11, as a nation, South Korea celebrated a holiday more corporate, capitalist and frivolous than Christmas, Easter, Halloween, and yes, Valentine’s Day combined: Pepero Day. Pepero, also known as Poki in Japan I believe, are kind of bread stick lightly coated in chocolate. Well on 11/11 every year since whenever someone had some sort of mad-genius epiphany, little old South Korea has been celebrating a holiday in which you go buy one brand of candy and exchange it with friends (and teachers) just because 11/11 looks kind of like 4 Pepero sticks (or one could argue 4 sticks of dynamite, or 4 buildings, or mathematically the number 1 since 11 by 11 is 1.) and somehow this god amongst men was able to sell the idea to an entire nation so now every November the stockholders of Pepero Inc. do very, very well. One of the boxes I received, under the name of Danny Teacher, is featured as a photo in the photos on the right. ----------->

I still go to Korean class and to do so I must take the subway to get to class and I have to transfer in Dongdaemun which is a fairly large station. Rushing through the station is akin to being in Logan’s Run, underground running to see Carnival, while dangerous ajuma, little old Korean ladies, elbow you and ride the trains for free so you’re like, “Yo lady! What’s your problem? I had to pay to get on this train and you ride for free so stop giving me death stares after bruising my rib cage, what did I do to you!?!?” At least that’s what goes through my mind.

So today, today today, not a day from two weeks ago, which means this entertainment is more current than movies at the North Bend Theater growing up, I went to the No Rayng Jin fish market in Seoul with my buddy Minha. Pike Place in Seattle: Get a life, you ain’t a market or if you are you’re a mere child. I have been to several major world markets and Seattle is hurting for something so wonderful as this temple, this Costco of seafood. I want my readers to think of ANYTHNG from the ocean and that, whatever you’re thinking of, is something you can get and eat at the market. King crabs, lobster from Maine, sting rays, clams, mussels, tunas, salmon, and virtually anything that isn’t a mermaid and edible is available at the market. I even saw two fish chosen by a consumer and then beaten on the head with a pokey stick on the ground by a helpful fish vendor. Not for the animal activists out there. Unfortunately I didn’t get video of this.

Minha and I wandered around taking photos, avoiding the aggressive fish hawkers, and eventually decided to buy a whole halibut to eat raw. As shown in videos on the photo link, they killed it—more humanely than the other vendor, and cut it up right in front of us. They then put it on a plate of radish shavings that soak up the toxins that may be in the fish and wrap it in plastic. This plate, along with a baggie of the skin and bones, is then brought up to a restaurant of your choosing where they compliment your fresh, fresh fish with kimchi and side dishes and make a spicy fish soup from the non-sushi parts. We ate the fish raw, known as hwea in Korea—crazy delicious and if you haven’t had just-live halibut raw you haven’t had one of the top ten best dishes or fishes I have had the pleasure of consuming. I can still feel the texture in my teeth and it is good. Other dishes in the top ten in case you’re wondering are tacos in Mexico, baguettes in France, fried clams on Cape Cod, steak in Argentina, and empanadas in Chile. Admittedly, I gets [sic] around.

Last and probably least on this epically proportioned blog entry times 2. I went to Hyewa to get coffee with Minha after the fish and visited a Filipino market on the sidewalk which had sausages, pork rinds and people who spoke very good English and said excuse me!—which is kind of a big thing here in South Korea since the Koreas don’t seem to have a word for it. I enjoyed it and will be going back. Also to the fish market if you can’t tell that I was in love with that place.

Anyway, again the photos I took can’t in anyway make you seem like you were there with me but the videos might do a little better job. Last I leave you with a question: Have I been here 3 months already?

Please drop me off at 38th and N. Korea

This humble raconteur has let another week go by without updating you, the loyal reader, to his whereabouts and otherabouts that have been going on here in east Asia; this of course is all you, the loyal reader, have been thinking about since you remembered that the author had a blog and you should probably check it but then when you finally got there, there was nothing to see. The author offers an apology and will not waste more text in third person as so that he might get to the meat of the entry, known in literary terms, as the “body.”

This body will be filled with tales of excitement, intrigue, and awesomeness and will no doubt be knee deep in extraneous commas, to boot. To start things off, I went to the 38^th parallel last weekend! I went with two coworkers and met up with David and Abby and some friends of theirs for the tour. While the tour is entirely worth doing and one of the most bizarre and surreal places I have even been, it was just plain odd to be frank.

For one, Koreans aren’t allowed to go on any tours that get all that close to the actual middle of the Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which just in case you haven’t kept up with major world events from the 20^th century or watched an episode of MASH on the Hallmark channel with my mom… then you should know that the 38^th parallel is where the Korean war came to a ceasefire and a truce is held between UN forces and North Korea. Set against this backdrop tours of westerners and Chinese come through every weekend and take photos. Photos have been uploaded and they have promised to try and can’t quite do it justice.

We were led around very quickly and the whole thing was only a couple of hours long. We got to go to a stone’s throw of the actual line between the divided nation, though I wouldn’t recommend throwing any stones near the line. There we saw UN soldiers half-hiding behind UN buildings staring down one or two North Korean soldiers who would come and look at us through binoculars and then hide behind pillars on their building, repeat. After this we were led to a see a video with the most stereotypical, shop class safety video of a narrator telling us of the importance of the DMZ, least of which is the fact that it is a default nature preserve (filled with landmines…).

All in all I don’t know what to really say. It was filled with soldiers and tourists who outnumbered the combined armies of North and South Korea and I thought a lot about Alan Alda, whose show ran for longer than the war it portrays. It was a weird contrast from the UN Memorial Cemetery in Busan. There we surrounded by the ghosts of the past and in the DMZ we were surrounded by a weird commercialization of a conflict over 50 years old now defended by the grandchildren of that war. Besides the CCTV which is everywhere in South Korea and watching your every move, you couldn’t ask for a more perfect, living example of Orwell’s 1984 in which the 3 nations of Earth are constantly at war with each other.

More updates with a more cheery tone above to break this up and for gettin’ ya down, up top.

3 Weeks Late/ 2 Rag

Illness, lethargy, and toil are possibilities that the author would possibly proffer for why neither he nor a suitable ghost writer has been able to recount the accounts of late, lately. It has been a long few weeks but the man behind the keys has now finally gotten around to tapping them for you once more and will do his best to tell at least one anecdote of note that he finally got around to and wrote.  So coughing and waiting to go to the doctor at least one more time, this sophisticated, soju drinking Seoulite will get scribbling so that you can be finally up-to-date with his fate.

So about two weeks ago I had acquired bronchitis from some unknown entity which left me coughing and hacking like an 80 year old smoker. The doctor was great apart from having the thickest accent in English imaginable—at least he spoke and understood English. He prescribed some medicine which I picked up at the pharmacy downstairs. The whole process (from the check-in at the doctor to the pharmacy) took 30 minutes and cost $6.50. If that is considered socialized medicine then I want it! They didn’t need to know a extensive history of all the medical problems of my entire family. They just prescribed medicine and it works. I wish I had that in the US. I really do.

In school news I had my open class—which promised to be scarier and more dramatic than a Twilight novel. It wasn’t. Open classes are times for the parents to come see what we are doing in the kinder program to see if they wish to continue to send their children to our school, basically a commercial for the school. My bosses were terrified and very nervous for especially for me since I seemed to not feel the same sense of fear that they did. It went very well however; I made jokes, the kids did good and the parents seemed to enjoy it. I ended up getting high fives from one boss afterwards and all smiles from the other one—so I think it went okay enough. Highlights included playing “red light, green light” and making jokes about how one kid was on his cell phone texting which is why he wasn’t moving during the “green light” portion of the game.

Since then I have gotten sick again and had monthly evaluations due for the majority of my kids. This has also kept me from writing you, my adoring fans who don’t leave enough comments for needy blogger in me. Halloween was fun. I dressed as Zorro, using a du-rag I picked up in Itaewon for the mask and a plastic sword I acquired in Sadang.  I was a really cool Zorro—though I wish I had had a hat or a cape to go with the outfit because as you can see from the photos I could have been the “Dread Pirate Roberts” from “The Princess Bride” just as easily. The kinder kids did a good job dressing up considering there are almost no costume shops in the Republic of Korea. We went trick-or-treating as several of their houses which was fun. I’ve never had fruit and cake while trick-or-treating before…  I was also the host for the costume fashion show which primarily consisted of me talking gibberish while the kids posed for a photo. I earned my pay that day.

Halloween weekend we went out and had a lot of fun which was nice but didn’t exactly improve my health. My friend Colm, who I hear is an avid reader of the blog, was a horse and quite popular with the kids as well as the bar crowd. To paraphrase one of his stories: one fellow bar guest was not surprised to find out that indeed the horse was Irish. I want what he was drinking, seems to have been working.

Since then I have gotten more medicine and felt better but not perfect, contemplating going again. They will only give you three days of medicine. All of which is divided into individual servings in little easy to open plastic baggies making it ludicrously easy to figure out what you need to take. I feel bad for my grandmother and anyone else who has to take quantities of pills and the real trick is dividing them up yourself.

I promise I will write more soon. I will try and not have any more lapses.  For I am but a man.

Anyoung he kay seo.

10 Second Toast

Admittedly this is the greatest and most well-written blog you have ever laid eyes upon; despite this fact today's entry will be kept shorter than the members of the lollipop guild, for our champion of the English language is still feeling kind of sick. Sick still after several days, he cannot help but sing the praises of sudafed and must find out if they sell it here in the Orient or if our fearless author will succumb to the use of elk horn shavings mixed with ginger and other meticulously weighed and chosen ingredients to heal his sinuses. We now continue our epic along this yellow brick road, better known as South Korea...

Today, Sunday, I did absolutely nothing except sleep in, nap, and eat and drink things that are good for me. So we should look at the rest of the week for something slightly more entertaining.

Other than going to the gym once and trying a bowl of absolutely terrible Vietnamese pho soup this week flew by. Taking Korean classes means that I have even less time to myself but slowly I am starting to understand Hanguk-mal, literally translated: Korean talking. I really enjoy the classes and it should become pretty helpful when taking taxis, ordering food or when I get invited to go hang out with Kim Jong Il and he gives me his favorite pair of sun glasses and it's totally cool and we have mojitos. Enough about my fantasies of sugary rum-drinks with narcissistic dictators-- I have much more interesting things to talk about.

Friday night I went out for a little with some coworkers, exacerbating my symptoms slightly, and during the taxi ride over and in the midst of our trying to communicate which bar we were headed to the taxi driver randomly asked if we spoke Spanish. I was more eager than one of my students, I was like: I do! I do! You've got to be kidding a Korean taxi driver who speak Spanish?! Better question, why not English? It turns out he has been listening to Korean--Spanish language lessons on tape while he drives around all day and spoke Spanish fairly well. Using Español I was able to get us to the right place much more efficiently than if we had used very broken Korean and hand gestures.

Saturday was the wedding of one of the receptionists of the school and it was held at a Catholic church and was not dissimilar to a Catholic wedding anywhere else in the world. We arrived a little late but snuck in and sat next to our other coworkers and sat through an hour mass that culminated in the part where they say they do and they kiss and all that stuff. I take it you understand the concept of wedding and I don't need to go into too many details. 100% in Korean so we only knew what was going on due to the rythm of the chants or through certain motions carried out by the priest. Colm and Rosie were both raised Catholic and took communion while I just watched from the ubiquitous hard, wooden pews.

Shuffling outside we were part of some photo ops before going down to a banquet hall to have some delicious foods. I'm sorry that I didn't take more pictures but I think I would have gotten a LOT of weird looks for taking pictures of their food. Options included prawns, sashimi, jellyfish noodles in a mustard sauce, chestnut noodles, small baby octopi that may have been boiled but they tasted pretty fresh as well as the less exotic like spaghetti, salads and egg salad sandwiches.

After we had sat down with our food we were treated to the first toast and strangely the only toast of the wedding which lasted for all of 10 seconds. It was not your standard toast after toast after toast and you're not sure if you can be eating or what. Great! More time to socialize and eat with my coworkers. Wrong. The whole lunch hour lasted maybe 45 minutes and most people sat, ate, and got the hell out of dodge. No dancing, no drinking bottles and bottles of champagne, no awkward speeches, a lot of things which I guess I kind of liked about the American style weddings I'm used to. It just seemed so anti-climactic. After, we had coffee then hopped back on the subway back home.

I'm not sure if this was all that short but compared to some other posts I think it was.

Anyang hi ka seo!
Photos on the right------------>

2 Dudes Nude

With such a tantalizing title the author assumes assuredly that you will not be but drawn to read on to get to the unclad lads that is all but promised in such a provocative title. The writer of this rather humble internet entry device writes this as the sun sets silently almost unnoticed in such a teeming metropolis like Seoul; while on the other side of our small planet many of those kind enough to decipher the rants of a foreigner in need of attention, rise to a lazy Sunday morning which will apparently be spent, in part, reading this "web-log." So the man behind the keyboard will try and not start you off with something boring and hopes that you are not only here due to lewd references already alluded in the title.

Friday night finally came! Happiness is a word reserved for emotions far less powerful than what I might have been feeling when the weekend arrived one week too late. I have 10 classes on Fridays which only serves to motivate my feelings of flight. This week was however very interesting since I had two Korean language classes which I wasn't expecting to even have since nobody got back to us after we had expressed interest in taking them. The classes were very good and I am looking forward to learning some of this mysterious tongue which shares none of the qualities of the few languages I have tried my hand at. I hope soon to be able to order food and maybe even be able to count above the number two. Let's be honest, this is a tough language although the alphabet is pretty sweet and very easy to learn. The classes were also turnabout since I spend all days pounding English into children's heads and now I have willingly signed up for the same treatment with slightly more embarrassment since I am taking the classes with two of my better friends from the school, Gabi and Rosie.

Friday night I saw the movie Gamer at a very nice theater near the school and had an easy evening which was just fine for me since I was looking forward to a less exciting weekend with no crazy fish ladies or jaundice-men vying for my attention or money. Gamer was okay for the first half but the second just gets weird and lost me.

Saturday I hung out with a Korean guy, Minha, who works at the school as an aid of some sort and we went to an area called Insadong that is pretty touristy but we had some great food, lots of squid, pork, and kimchi, and some delicious traditional Korean style tea.

Though tea and squid is not why you have forged this river that is my babbling blog. The nudity! Yes, Danny, get to the part where there are naked  people! Talk about the naked people! Fear not young padawan for I will do so. This weekend I invited David and Abby to go to a jimilbang, which is essentially a Korean bath house. My friend Rosie is a big fan of the jimjilbangs so she came along as well. So after a hearty dinner and several bottles of liquid courage we headed to Yongsan to have yet another new experience.

We walk in and first lock up our shoes and are given some pajama shorts and shirt and several towels along with a wrist band that will charge us for anything we buy inside of the bath house. We part ways, David and I going to the mens' floor and the girls heading to the ladies'. Upon exiting the elevator we see at least half a dozen Korean men naked, just hanging out, watching TV or talking, stretching-- basically whatever they feel like doing. This is the part for which we have imbibed a few beers but also very curious about since the "bath" portion of the bath house is done completely nude. We go to lock up our things and both try and muster enough energy to not giggle too much or make things weird for when we both know that we are getting nakeder than we ever expected to be in the same room. We put on the pajamas and look around the area, discover the baths, and aren't really sure what we're supposed to do or when we have to disrobe.

We follow a friendly Russian guy down to a different floor that is coed and everyone is wearing the pajamas, we follow the Siberian into a sauna which made me feel like a pizza since it was essentially just a large oven. After the oven we head back upstairs and figure out that we were supposed to lock up the pj's as well and decided just do it. So we got to the business at hand and wandered over to the baths naked, naked, naked. I mean, David is a good friend, I just didn't think we'd ever be this unclothed together along with 2 dozen Korean men who seemed to be really comfortable with the whole situation and only startled by our presence because we were foreign.

I didn't feel as awkward as I thought I would but that's not to say I didn't feel completely strange at first. In that baths there were several pools of different temperatures: hot, cold, very hot. There was a wet sauna which made me sweat like nothing ever has and several other rooms for body scrubbing and massage which seemed pricy so we just stuck with being naked in hot tubs with lots of other dudes. Also I don't know if I'm comfortable getting scrubbed down by some nice jimjilbang employee just yet-- no, not just yet.

After seeing more Korean men in their birthday suits and not their business suits than I had ever wanted to see we changed and headed downstairs to find the womenfolk. We tried out the saunas again and even an ice room which felt very pleasant and sat in some massage chairs which were pretty fantastic for $1.80 for 10 minutes. We found the women poked around a little more and then went out for some drinks to debrief our brief experience of brieflessness.

In short-- when in Rome do as the Romans and when in Korea do as the Koreans. You'll like it.

Today I went shopping bought some things and also got a cool haircut. That's right, Danny changed his hairstyle which has largely been the same since late high school. It looks similar but the "designer" took some artistic license with it and I'm actually really pleased with the result-- especially for a haircut/shampoo/scalp massage that cost $13 and no tip!

I end this admittedly over-hyped entry with some idioms I read recently. The first which is for my friends, "Even if you have to crawl on your knees, get yourself to Seoul!" The second being for my parents is, "Send your ox to market but send your son to Seoul."

Anyang and good night. Comments are encouraged... :P

5 Days of Chuseok: Part II

The author would like to state that he has just come back from his first Korean lesson and was not aware that he would be having the lesson today since his employer, from whom the classes are offered, did not bother to inform him or his two friends that the classes began today. He is thoroughly confused but thinks that he is getting a handle of the 3 dozen kinds of “U” sounds but is feeling uneasy about the consonants whose sound seem to change with the wind.

But you the eager and well informed reader of this classy, little “web log” has not come here to necessarily hear about the author’s unplanned joust with the Korean language. No, not at all; you are here to complete the saga, the epic, the odyssey that was the Chuseok vacations here in the “land of the morning calm.” Fear not for we find ourselves in a new city, the city of Busan where anything can and does happen…

So Day one went down like any day in a new city; Rosie and myself asking each other where we think we should head and since neither one of us had ever been to this particular metropolis that didn’t seem to get us very far. We found the subway and were pleased to find that it worked very similarly to the system that we have in Seoul but not before I went up to a Subway attendant and asked a question in slow, English teacher English thinking he wouldn’t understand me and only to have him respond in fluent West Coast English. We then explored some, found a map to guide us, got lost and eventually decided to head to the beach since it was a muggy 70 degrees outside.

We took a taxi since the subway in Busan runs nowhere near the beaches and were pleasantly surprised to find that the rates were much less than in Seoul. We arrived at Gwang-alli Beach which makes a huge case for Busan being better than Seoul. See the link on the right for photos. We eventually started to hunger and made our way to a cheap looking noodle house with a very friendly elderly couple beaming at us as we entered their restaurant. Since we have little understanding of the Korean language, both of us, we rely on pictures and bad translations to order food. So we ordered #4 since they were all noodle varieties and everyone seemed to have soup and that seemed fine to us. We did not get soup. We received cold noodles. I’d like to state a fact: warm noodles > cold noodles. Okay, enough about the noodles.

After slurping up a reasonable about of spicy but very cold noodles we headed back to the beach area and took some amazing pictures of the bridge (and by amazing I mean I am still figuring out how my camera works so please forgive me) and the surrounding areas which give Busan a lot of charm—including its colorful “Millak Raw Fish Town”.

Come evening we headed to a bar on the beach and had some beers, played some darts, and eventually found a taxi back to our hostel to start again Friday.

Friday morning we explored the area around the hostel and eventually found ourselves starving but I love food so that was okay. We found a Korean pizza place (some of the tastiest pizza in the world is here) and split and overpriced half-shrimp and half-potato pizza. We ate the pizza with forks and knives (Koreans are the biggest fans of eating with one’s hands) as our neighbors are theirs out of little paper cups which seems to be the style especially for take-out pizza.

After the potato pizza (trust me, you want some) we got lost again but in 70 degree weather you can’t complain. I decided I needed to take out some more cash only to find myself in a similar position as I was in at the beginning of my time here in South Korea: hardly any ATMs accept foreign debit cards! I began to stress out as Rosie was also running low and had been covering things for me for the first half of the trip with the assumption that I would be reimbursing her. We tried what seemed like hundreds of different ATMs—even the bank that works for me in Seoul but only to be rejected by every single one. We made our way to the train station hoping that something there would work but even there none of the ATMs would give. We then asked some random foreign-looking girl if she knew of any international ATMs and she suggested down in the subway. I was about to give up all hope when alas! It worked! The nice lady candy vendor next to the ATM also celebrated my being able to take out cash and so we bought $2 worth of her candies. It was the worst tasting candy that either one of us has ever had but even that couldn’t ruin our elated state.

We decided we needed some coffee or tea to wash out the bad tasted from the candy and to regroup our thoughts as well as to wake up a little. While drinking some “southern sweet tea” we found on our map a large Buddhist temple that was nearby and promptly took a taxi right to the entrance. We took a ton of photos but I’m not sure that I did it justice given out big and grand it was and how terrible my photos make it look. Inside I was able to take photos of some people chanting and from what we had read we think that this was prayer to the Buddhist goddess of mercy. It was pretty cool and we were delighted that we were able to take photos inside of the temple.

Again we found ourselves with that condition known as hunger and decided to head back to Gwang-alli so that I cook take part in Korean style sushi. We wandered around for a while and were recommended an area, by some young police officers (all police officers in Korea are young), which turned out to be the “Millak Raw Fish Town.” The first place we went to had a small platter starting at 80,000 won which is in the range of US$70 so we decided to politely back away slowly and look for another place. That totally would have worked except this particular fish lady seemed to have some sort of bet with the devil that she could get us into her restaurant or she’d lose her soul because she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She became a little louder and we tried to leave but found ourselves unable. Eventually I began mumbling at her in some Spanish and a fair bit of gibberish which confused both her and Rosie; so she turned to Rosie assuming that she understood what the crazy fish lady was saying. Rosie did not and soon the woman was grabbing Rosie by the arms hoping that she would understand, “eat my over-priced, uncooked fish” through the scientific principle of osmosis.

Somehow we MacGyver’d an escape which involved a paper clip, a hair pin, our collective shoe laces and some terrible tasting Korean gum. To be honest, I’m not sure how we made it out of there alive. We checked another restaurant—with a much less high pressure staff, only finding the price 20,000 won cheaper so I used the power of my imagination to remember what raw fish tastes like and decided that chicken was the meal for me. We found a small chicken restaurant, recouped from the crazy fish lady and had the world’s spiciest chicken along with the world largest pitcher of yellow Korean beer. All for less than the sushi would have been, especially considering that Rosie doesn’t eat fish.

We then headed back to the beach to join in the Chuseok festivities which were slightly underwhelming but ducked into the bar from the previous night to use the rest room. While having a beer at the bar we met a man with the English name of Terry who works at a savings bank in Busan. He was a lot of fun and had very good English. Several beers later he took us to his friend’s restaurant where we tried North Korean style dumplings with the owner of the restaurant. The dumplings were 4 times larger than normal and wrapped in chicken skin instead of dough. They were delicious. The pumpkin tempura is also something that I would recommend.

The next day, Saturday, was Chuseok and also our last day in Busan. In morning we were examinging a map confirming our way to our destination of the UN War Memorial at Busan and thinking about breakfast (since virtually everything is closed on Chuseok) when jaundice man appeared as if a specter off my right cheek. He was a pale color almost yellow-tinted and very thin. I didn’t notice him, given my love affair with maps, until he asked in near-perfect English where we were headed. I then noticed him hovering just off the right side of my face and took a step back and told him assuming he knew something we didn’t, like that it was closed on Chuseok. He then volunteered to take us there, which was only a little bit creepy, when Rosie saved the day saying that we needed to get breakfast first and we had to meet someone and probably a few other lies. The then turned around and descended into the subway like some sort of HG Wells inspired morlock.

 The UN War Memorial was very moving and we learned a lot—a lot more than I had ever learned in high school or college about the war. Things like the nation of Turkey fought in the war and suffered some of the highest casualties outside of the US and the UK. It was a very beautiful cemetery and guarded by one UN soldier—my first time seeing a UN soldier in person which was refreshing to see. I can’t go on too much about the site but please see the photos on the right for only some of what I was able to see.

Upon becoming tired from mild sun burns we headed back to the train station to nap and wait for our train since all of Korea seemed to be inside their homes celebrating. We kept hoping that some nice family would invite us in for some songpyon or other holiday refreshments but was a dream never realized.

After a brief nap in the train station we found “China Street” which happened to be located inside of a good sized Russian neighborhood and eventually went and had some more coffee across the street from the train station.

It turns out that our tickets for the 3 hour ride were in “seats” for 1 hour and for 2 hours we would be hobos of sorts in between cars in the standing room only section. This turned out to be more fun anyway as we ordered beers every time the attendant passed by and danced outside of the restroom, Korean staring at us all the while—which they would have been anyway since we aren’t Korean. At one point we gave up our “seat” which was a luggage shelf to a family, who was banished to the standing room only with us, to be rewarded with dried squid jerky by their young daughter which reeked of squid and ocean a little much ever for me.

The rest of the weekend in Seoul was fun too but this entry is already longer than the Bible so I will force myself to stop.

Anyang!

Comments please!