It's the little things at work.

On Friday something astounding happened. One of my classes got switched for a really bad class--a class that nobody knew what to do with--so they switched teachers and gave the class to me. The coteacher and my boss were talking about the class, and she said how she was maintaining order--if they lost a certain amount of points, then they would be in trouble. But my boss said "no, you should add points when they do good things" (though this was all happening in Korean, so the only thing I picked out was 'minus' and 'plus', but I knew what they were talking about.) So then I said "Yeah that's how I maintain order, just because they don't understand why I get mad at them." But my boss chose MY SIDE on a debate about how to teach. MY SIDE! Dear people who think "The Korean is Always Right". My boss supported MY teaching style instead of my older, more experienced Korean co-teacher.  (Or at least, that's how I took it. Because I needed a victory that day.)

It's been a slow week.

I haven't been doing much here. I've been trying to save money. Mostly because I got the idea that I could go to India for a month after finishing my contract. On top of all my other plans. That means that I really need to start putting away money. But I think I can do it. I'm writing down all the money I spend, and I'm being more careful.

On Saturday I went to the Daejeon Art Museum again with some ladies that my recruiter introduced me to. It was good fun, and we saw some interesting stuff and some not so interesting stuff, and then had a good chat in a random Buy-the-Way with tables and pizza.

On Sunday I visited Suwon with Stephanie. It was a good time, except for the part where my CAMERA DIED because I'm not intelligent enough to charge it before a trip, haha. It was a low key trip. We met in Suwon and walked along the ancient fortress there.

Suwon is a really interesting place. It's close to Seoul, and it is basically part of the sprawl that Seoul has become. There isn't really a break in the "city". You can take Seoul city buses in Suwon, and use your Seoul bus card. But there is something different about Suwon, and that's the fortress. It surrounds the inner city--a cluster of small buildings and homes that are fully functional. Pavilions and an earth wall keep the inner city separate from the high rises and the development on the outside of the wall. It used to be a fortress against invaders, but now it seems like a fortress against modernity. From the top pavilions, you can see the inner city and the outer city--pillars of concrete perfectly placed, rising up from the ground.

Oddly, I was reminded of the Japanese gravesites that I saw when visiting in 2005. Japanese gravestones are stone pillars, and they are collected like little forests of perfect stone, since they are always attempting to save space. They are all the same shape and same color, but they are placed not exactly in rows--just in the place where they will conserve the most space. Looking out from the Suwon fortress, that was the only thing I could think of to compare all these buildings too. An endless sky of those little clusters of pillars.

The fortress had some good construction and a wonderful walk. It was good to visit Stephanie and see what there was to see. I really enjoyed Suwon because of it's duality--the inside and the outside of the fortress--then again, I really like just about everywhere when the sun is out.

Tomorrow I'm planning a day trip to Jeonju, and today I'm staying in to write an article for the newsletter than my recruiter's company is starting. I'm excited to be writing for it, and I'll pass it all on to you once it's published.

Oh, and one last note--on Tuesday I went to drop off my sad one-ear-only ipod at the repair person. He said he could fix it, if the sensor was still live, for free. When I went to get it on Friday, it was clean, wrapped in a little plastic protector, and it looked like a brand new ipod. In fact, he also reformatted it--so it could have been a new ipod and I would have no idea. And you know what? It was completely free. These are the things I LOVE about Korea.

This Weekend: Chungju, Danyang, and Gosu Cave

[In this episode, we wander aimlessly until an ajumma hand-feeds us, get on a boat, and spelunk.]

This weekend, Kristen, Tom, and Lee, and I headed out to Chungju, a town (or tiny city), northeast of Daejeon. Chungju is the proud owner of the Chungju Dam, a hydro electric extravaganza that has created one of the most beautiful lakes in the country. There are regular ferries on this lake, too, so it's an excellent opportunity to see the Korean countryside at its (mostly) unspoiled best. The lake stretches through to Danyang, a tiny little town that is best known for the surrounding caves.

Now caving is not my usual bag, so I was pretty excited when this opportunity popped up. (We went through Adventure Korea--I wanted to introduce the 'new kids' to the wonders of weekend-tour programs, and also it seemed like the easier thing to do.) I vaguely remember tromping around in Tennessee's Cumberland Caves when I was a wee one, and I remember enjoying it immensely, but I also remember it not being nearly as cool as this.

In order to be ready for the bus in Chungju at 9:10, we decided to head into the city on Saturday night and stay in a cheap room. We didn't get out of Daejeon until about 4:00, so we didn't really have anything to do in Chungju except wander and eat. We made our way through the market, which is always intriguing. As always, I took market pictures... (I think my fascination with market pictures comes from a deep guilt of never taking market pictures in Ghana.)

Here are some various kimchi dishes for sale--I don't think it's regular kimchi because I believe that there are fish inside it.

And here are some pajamas and various Ajumma clothes for sale. I was pretty happy with the way that these pictures turned out. They are quite delightful. Anyway, after leaving the market, we wandered through a more hip district, where it seemed like all the young people were, and then we stopped in a random SamGyeopSal restaurant--which turned out to be the best decision of the trip.

SamGyeopSal is meat that you cook on your own little barbecue plate, and they bring it to you raw. Or--in this case, you retrieve the meat that you want from a buffet in the center of the restaurant, and you pay a flat price. (This one was less than eight dollars.) Here is Kristen stirring up our first batch of meat.

 However, it soon became clear that the owner of our restaurant, a wonderful enthusiastic middle aged woman [or, ajumma] , didn't see many foreigners. She decided to come talk to us, to which I sort of responded--but she had NO English, and I had only very limited Korean. (As in, I answer yes or no to what I THINK the question is.) But she was so happy to see us that she just wanted to help us understand how to eat SamGyeopSal. The whole time she insisted that the men at our table needed more garlic--to become strong men. "Maneul, MANEUUUL!" As with  all Korean dishes, there is a proper way to consume SamGyeopSal. The meat should be eaten with a tasty red sauce, with a piece of garlic and wrapped in a lettuce leaf. The wrap should be eaten in one bite, so as to avoid lettuce-wrap explosion. Anyway, Lee didn't really get it, so she did it for him--and then PUT IT IN HIS MOUTH. We were laughing hysterically as we watched him just sit there with lettuce poking out of his mouth, a look of utter horror on his face.

From there the night descended into uncontrollable laughter (it actually bordered a little on hysteria), too much food, and one seriously amazing good time. She even took a picture with us.

(from Left to Right, we have the woman, Lee, Kristen, me, and Tom.) She insisted that she was fifty five but I didn't believe her. By the end of the night, we were calling her Ommah, or mom in Korean, and she gave us delicious glass-bottle pepsi, apples, and literally fed us until we were insane. Kristen and I were laughing so hard we were crying, and it was really over absolutely nothing. We decided we'd have to get out of there before someone offered us alcohol, because we were already so far gone that that was the LAST thing we needed.

After leaving the restaurant, we walked all the way across town, back through the market, along the river, and towards the bus station so we could find a place to stay near our departure point. We ended up staying in the Love Motel district, at a neon-lit, blinking cluster of buildings that cater to Korean couples. These buildings attract patrons through sheer gaudiness, and decorate the buildings with neon lights that make them look more like a cake than a hotel. Ours was named Titanic. Quite excited about the potential sinking that we were going to do, we booked two rooms at the unbelievable price of 35,000 a night. For this 35,000, we got a working computer, a huge tv, an amazingly clean room, a bathtub with JETS, and all of this fancy madness....

Anyway these types of hotels, if you don't already know, are designed so that couples who either a. both live at home, or b. have spouses, can spend some time away from it all for cheap. These are extremely discrete places. The hallways are dark. Cars license plates are covered with blue wooden planks, in case anyone is looking for them. Keys are left in a corner in the elevator, not with the desk woman when the deed has been finished. But for travelers, these things are the best thing in the world--because they really are paradise for half the price.

Our night was uneventful. We watched a plethora of English tv, like Scrubs, and then we crashed out early. We woke early and headed back to the bus terminal, met our Adventure Korea bus, and then headed to the Chungju Dam, where I aggressively played a broken "Wack a Mole" until our ferry was ready to depart.

On the lake it was frigid, because we were traveling so fast, but it was beautiful. The water was very low, and so layers of rock were exposed, with the most intriguing coloration from years of water rising and falling.

The mountains in this part of the country are jagged, with exposed rock. They look fuzzy in the winter, because there are no leaves on the trees. The cloudy day made things seem awfully sinister, and the freezing wind on the deck added to the feeling. It was invigorating.

As we got closer to our destination, the water became greener and greener, and there was more and more rock standing there, strong, still, and perfectly straight. Like I said in my last post, there is something inherently 'Asian' in my head when I see those kinds of rock formations. It just doesn't seem to happen elsewhere, not like this.

Our final destination was a ferry terminus some ways away from Danyang, situated inside this gorgeous valley. It is a part of Korea's "Eight Famous Sceneries", or things in this area that Koreans have uniformly decided are beautiful. That includes stone pillars, climbing mountains, and an all around glorious display of rock, mountain, and water.

From the ferry terminus we left these mountains and moved onto new ones--this time mountains that we could go inside. We visited Gosu Cave, or Gosudonggul. I was really unprepared for how beautiful it was inside--I had no idea how much the earth could do in its spare time.

The cave had been developed with rather precarious looking metal stairs, but they didn't move or teeter, so I was happy. There was a course which we should take--as there always is in a Korean tourist destination--but it was not a disappointing one. Stalactites and stalagmites were everywhere, forming in groups, forming in patterns, forming in enormous organ-pipe shapes that took my breath away.

The cave walls were one thing, but the ceilings were the most impressive. Looking up, row after row after row of dripping stone could be seen, stretching up into black forever. It amazes me how long this took, and how long it went on doing this without any eyes to watch it. There are so many things under the surface of the earth that we don't know about... so many beautiful things that we won't see until we look under the barriers.

I was also extremely pleased with how my camera behaved. I switched it over into Manual and actually felt like I had some grip on the controls for the first time since I've had it... and I didn't use flash for ANY of these pictures. Props to my awesome Canon. Switching cameras before coming here was a 100% good decision. Now if only I could get up the courage to do more people shots....

Anyway, more about the cave... inside the cave there were certain points where men with digital cameras and huge flash umbrellas waited to take pictures of couples and travelers tromping the cave course. They stood in front of some of the more famous stalactite formations, and it was kind of intreguing--these older men (adjoushis--the male version of ajummas), just sitting in these boxes with cameras, attached to the metal framework of our course. It must be an odd underground job. Despite the fact that they were doing tourist things, their little booths looked industrial to me, and I got a rather cyberpunky feeling from the whole thing.

The course was wild--curving through the cave, spiral staircases, wet with water that dripped from the top of the cave--at one point my friends were twenty feet above me. Tom said he thought that the cave was overly 'sensitized' and 'touristy', but I rather liked the course and the lights that lit up the different formations. It helped me get pictures, and it helped me appreciate everything.

Anyway Gosu Cave is a must see. It's not really a day trip from Daejeon, as it took us 2 buses and about 3-4 hours to get home, but if you made a weekend out of it, you could hit up some of the other caves in the area as well. (Gosu is extremely popular for tourists, and so in the summer months may be more crowded. There are others.) Also in that area, which I plan on seeing soon, is the famous Guinsa Temple.

Mokpo! (And Daejeon loses something feirce to FC Seoul.)

Last weekend was Korea's independence day (March 1, 1945--from the Japanese), and it's a national holiday--which means that I had a very exciting day off.

To pass the time, I went to a soccer game with Tom, Kristen, and Kristen's friend from Suwon. Daejeon was playing FC Seoul, and we lost terribly--a whopping 5/2. But the first goal of the game was scored by a Weiguk, so I was a little bit excited about that.

Soccer fans are pretty nutty, which is good for some quality entertainment. I think maybe the reason Daejeon lost is because our side didn't look like THIS. (This is FC Seoul.) They were dancing and throwing these banners around the entire game. And there were Weiguks in their traveling crowd! Whaaat? Our team's supporters looked a little dismal. Sad.

The next day, I headed out to Mokpo, feeling a little frazzled by the idea of traveling alone. So far I haven't actually done it--I went to Seoul alone a couple times, but Mokpo is DEFINITELY not Seoul. It's a whole different world, and for that I was quite grateful--when I finally arrived.

When I got to the Daejeon Station, I was promptly told that I was at the wrong place, as the Daejeon Station does not sit on the Mokpo line, and thus I needed to go to the SeoDaejeon Station. (Which prior to this day I did not even know existed--but a quick check in the guidebook could have fixed that.) On the way to SeoDaejeon station, my cabbie almost got in an accident, but I wasn't paying attention (because I was NOW reading the aforementioned guidebook.)

I arrived at around 1:30, which was quite late for a day trip, so I had already decided that I was staying the night, regardless of whether or not there would be anything to do in Mokpo, which was described as having "coastal grimy charm". (Just my kind of city.) However upon arrival at the station, I misinterpreted the posted times and thought that the 'arrival' time for the train was actually the 'departure' time from Daejeon, so I thought that the next train to Mokpo ran at 4:30. So instead of waiting around for three hours, I bought a ticket to Gwangju, which seemed interesting.

And then I sat down to wait for the train, and I was flipping through the guidebook, and realized that there was nothing to see in Gwangju, and at that time I also realized that I had read the sign wrong, and so I waited in line AGAIN behind this adorable baby so that I could switch out the tickets. The whole time I kept thinking "everybody is watching me be an idiot right now."

But I exchanged my ticket and ended up getting on the MOKPO train as planned (at 2:10, not 4:30, which was actually sooner than the Gwangju train. Haha.)

The train ride was fantastic. Once we passed a certain point, the Korean countryside just changed. It became something else. Square rice fields lay flat and then mountains just exploded out of the earth for miles and miles--they piled up on each other forever. And the farther south we went, the farther away from Seoul we got, and I felt like I was farther away from whatever it is that makes this place look all the same.

Once in Mokpo, I was also in love with the difference that seemed to be prevalent in the city. Mokpo was at one time the seat of the main opposition party in Korea. Development funding was deliberately cut to stifle the political activity here--but the result was that Mokpo looks distinct from other Korean cities. It has 'grimy coastal charm' and a kind of liveliness that other cities didn't have. I smiled at people, and they smiled back.

Actually, within five minutes of my arriving at the Mokpo train station, I was invited to drink with the best native-Korean English speaker I have ever met. And although I didn't take him up on the offer, I was pretty excited, and I felt welcomed.

Other than being an intriguing place, Mokpo is on the ocean, and it is on the mainland overlooking a spectacular cluster of islands. I was planning on taking a cruise around some of them, but the rain on Monday prevented me. How sad. However, Sunday evening was sunny and I headed straight from the train station to Yudalsan, a park in the middle of the city, from which there are spectacular views.

(Note the lack of identical high rise apartments in this photograph.) Yudal park was spectacular, and I climbed higher and higher, even as the sun was getting lower and lower. (Though I took note of the street lamps, placed even on the most precarious of stone steps.)

Pavilions like these stood at the various ledge points so that the ajummas and ajoshis could rest. Or drink--whichever was more logical, but these men decided to drink not on a pavilion, but on a big rock that was sticking out of the mountain.

(Also possibly someone's grave.) Anyway as I climbed higher up the mountain, the path began to snake up around the large rocks that sat at the top of the mountain--a kind of rock formation that seems to me to be quite Asian--bare, white slabs with almost no features. Like enormous boulders that just happened to fall from the sky.

I sneakily took a picture of two young gentlemen sitting on one such outcropping, but this is not the one at the top of the mountain. As I moved farther up the mountain, the stairs became more precarious, and the path more like a real trail, and below me I kept seeing more and more of Mokpo--and farther out into the ocean. It was simply a photography paradise, so I took all the pictures I could.

As you see, just because Mokpo was once undercut for development funding, it is not so now. A number of large projects are under works, like this strange diamond shaped land bridge. Who knows what it is designed for. One of the 'nicer' sides of town is built on 'reclaimed' land (who decided "building" land where there was ocean before should be termed "reclaiming"--that makes it sound like it was ours to begin with!). It is an odd metaphor for how I see most of Korea these days. The 'nice' things, the new Korean 'good life' is built on a fake foundation. A man made, tangible--earthy, real, yet fake foundation. The grimy, swarthy, saline world is the undesirable world, but it is the world that is built on real soil.

Anyway I reached the very peak of the mountain, a perch on top of some enormous bald boulders, and sat with about twenty Koreans who were just minding their own business. The sun ducked behind a cloud and refused to give a good sunset, but I was content with being at the top of the world for a little while.

On my way down I captured this spectacular shot of the city lights starting to come on. I am not sure who the statue is of, but I am assuming that it is Admiral Yi, man of the naval hour, who saved the Koreans from the Japanese with Turtle Ships.

Heading back around the city, I got something to eat, and then I sat in a coffee shop and drew for a couple of hours--something that felt good to do, even if I could do it at home. It felt nice to do it somewhere else. Then I searched for a super cheap motel and found one. I paid 15,000 for a room--with it's own bathroom facilities, which is something like 12/13$. However, when you pay that little for a room, you should expect facilities of about the same quality.  Please, examine the photographs....

The room seemed alright--not too dirty, not too clean, with a working television (and CNN in English!) and a heated bed (since the ondol didn't appear to function.) However it was the bathroom that really did a number on me. Something had melted the bathtub. Like actually corroded the plastic enough to melt it. The shower barely worked and I was actually afraid to flush the toilet because of plumbing reparations. But it wasn't a problem at all. Everything worked out. Until I woke up in the middle of the night to a sound that sounded quite like someone attempting to force my door.

Now this is probably one of the reasons that I know I have been in Korea for WAY TOO LONG. Instead of assuming that someone was breaking into my room in order to steal things from me, I was convinced that the landlady had seen that I had left my bathroom light on, and was attempting to break into my (indoor locking only) room so that she could turn off the light and thus not waste her precious electric bill.

After a few moments of horrible fear passed, I realized that in fact no one was attempting to break into my room, and that the sound was coming from the opposite end of the room, and above me, so the only logical conclusion was that someone was having a VERY good time in the room above mine.

I woke up the next morning, departed the yeogwon (guesthouse, not even a motel) and went on my way--only to find that there wasn't much to do, because it was raining. So I explored, took pictures, ate some delicious bibimbap, and then went on my way. It was a wonderfully relaxing trip, and I got some great photographs and some great stories, and even better, I spent some quality time with my pens and markers.