America is not the world.

I seem to continuously forget that just because something is commonplace in my life does not mean that other people would find it the same. I went to dinner last night with the other teachers at the school, as well as our director and her two kids.


(clockwise left to right: Julie, James, Aly, Cherita, Gina, Me, Sylvia, and Eric)

Julie had to stay late at work, so the six teachers were actually halfway done with dinner when she and her two sons got there. At one point, we were discussing odd food, probably when I was trying the ice noodle soup:


I mentioned to Gina that none of my lemon kids had ever had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and that I had made it for them to try. At this point, James interjects that he's never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. "Why would I? Who would think of a sandwich with peanut butter and jelly on it?" This is coming from a man who eats bacon sandwiches for dinner. I told him I'd make him one to try, and his response was "I may not like it". I decided later that I wasn't going to make him one and bring it in like I did for the kids, mostly because they're better fresh, and it just seemed silly since we get a snack and lunch at work.
Regardless of if he ever eats one, I keep having to be reminded that what Americans find normal is not, in fact, universally normal. James likes mayonnaise with his fries, I like ketchup. So be it.

Saturday and Sunday: reprise

On Saturday morning we slept in until noon, when we got a call on the room phone in Korean, supposedly telling us it was check-out time. So James went and re-booked our room for one more night since we were going to leave from Busan on Sunday morning to head back to Uijeongbu.

It had taken us a good 2 hours to get transportation home on Friday. First we tried to get the KTX (Korean Transport something-or-other) train back, but there were no seats left for Sunday back to Seoul. So we asked about a bus, which we were able to book straight to Uijeongbu instead of Seoul. The only problem was the express bus terminal was miles away from the train station and they don't sell tickets over the phone, so we had to get on the subway again to get two tickets for noon on Sunday. 

We decided to take it easy on Saturday, and wandered around Busan a bit, first looking at "Foreigner's Street", which was really more like Russia street, since most of the signs were in Cyrillic. Then we headed to the Jalgachi Fish Market, the largest fish market in the country.

It's  a long street covered in colorful umbrellas with people sitting outside with every type of seafood imaginable for sale or consumption on the spot. Some of it was pretty normal; crabs, clams, etc.

Some of it was normal for Korea, such as mounds of dried little fish.

Some was a little hard to find, like shark.

And some of it was downright gross. Like the dried turtles and the dog:

The people there were very sociable; trying to get you to buy whatever they were selling. I think most of them thought since we were foreign we didn't know that you could eat the fish they had swimming around in tanks. They kept trying to tell us that they could cut up the fish and feed it to us, and it would be delicious. 

After the market, we decided to head up to Busan Tower, which is 120meters tall and has a great view of central Busan.

On the way to the base of the tower, we heard some good music (which is very rare here) and decided to check it out. About 20 minutes later, we were rewarded with a break-dancing competition with dancers and DJs from Korea, the UK, the US, France, and Germany.

James used to break-dance, so he was having a great time, and I was fascinated by some of the things these people (guys and girls) were able to do with their bodies. The setting itself was also amusing to me, as the dancers were performing in front of a traditional pavilion.

After watching for a few hours, we headed up to the tower.

It had a great view of the dancing competition we'd just been watching,

as well as the rest of Busan.

After looking around for a few minutes, we headed back down to find some dinner. We tried to find s0-galbi, but were unsuccessful, so we had samgyopsal again before heading down to Dadaepo Beach for the International Rock Festival that's held there every year. We got there rather late and only saw one band, T-Earth, which was pretty, well, boring. I think it was a bad 80's Korean rip-off of Aerosmith, but not entertaining in the least. We ended up meeting up with some other foreigners (one of which recognized me from Vinyl Underground the night before - we'd danced together for a little bit) and spent the rest of the evening with them.

After the rather disappointing concert concluded, we all headed back downtown in a couple taxis to go dancing. We ended up back at VU around midnight, where I suddenly ended my night by dislocating my knee dancing. Luckily (I think), I had dislocated my other knee back in 11th grade at the Homecoming dance, so I knew exactly what had happened and what to do - I knocked it back in to place. I had to have someone help me to the nearest chair, where I spent the rest of the evening putting ice on it, telling James I was fine and to go dance, and trying to keep a rather creepy Russian guy from hitting on me when I couldn't really move anywhere to get away from him. We got back to our hotel around 4am with a taxi, set the alarm to get up in time to catch the bus, and went straight to sleep.

Either we both slept through the alarm, or my alarm-setting skills at 4am are rather lacking, because we didn't get up until 11:42 - with 18 minutes to get packed and get to a bus station that was 45 minutes away. James was (understandably) very upset, so we packed our stuff as quickly as possible (I was hobbling pretty badly at this point) and headed to the train station near us to see if the tourist info center could help us get another ticket. They told us that we could exchange our tickets for a W10,000 fee, which was fine with us, but the next bus wasn't until 5pm. So we grabbed some food, and took the subway to the express bus terminal, where we waited for a few hours for our bus. (We waited outside because, as most public buildings in Korea, the bus terminal didn't have air conditioning, and at least there was a breeze outside). 

We left on time, but getting closer to Seoul the bus got caught in some pretty bad traffic. James and I were amazed at how many people got up out of their seats to come to the front of the bus to tell the driver where to go to avoid the traffic. There were at least 6 people sitting on the stairs and in the aisle-way trying to tell the driver what to do. He let about half the bus off somewhere outside of Uijeongbu, and we finally made it into town around 11:30, about 2 hours after our scheduled arrival. We grabbed a taxi from the bus stand and went straight to my apartment, where Cherita brought me a knee brace for my knee. We talked briefly for a bit about what our weeks had been like, and then I sent James and Cherita packing because I had work the next morning.

I'm very thankful that I didn't hurt my knee until my last night of vacation, otherwise the week would have been ruined for me. I've been going to an acupuncture clinic (on the advice and insistence of my boss) for the past week to help it, and it may be working, though I'm not completely convinced. I've also resolved next time I have a vacation to give myself at least 1 day to recover. We should have gone back to town Saturday night instead of Sunday morning, but now I know. And knowing is half the battle. 

Strange and Wonderful Things

I made a few discoveries today that I have to share. The first goes under my mental list of "awesome" things here that don't exist back home.
I'm usually bad with money, but I'm actually very good about keeping up with my check book. I'm not one of those people that will stand at the checkout and enter the total into my book, but I will go home, sort through all my receipts each night, and check what's in my checkbook against what's cleared on my account online. So after having to switch to a different bank, KB, because the first bank, ShinHan, wouldn't give me a check card, only an ATM card (which really defeats the purpose of having an account, don't you think?), I stopped by the ATM to check my balance since I got paid today. As I'm carefully looking through the menu options, I notice an 'Update Passbook' button. And I look a little more closely at the ATM, and notice that not only is there a place for cash, for your card, and for the receipt, but a place to enter your passbook, which is like a checkbook, but has your account information printed on it. So I hit the button, insert my passbook, and without even inserting my card, the ATM scans my passbook, determines what's already been printed and where, and then prints all of the transactions on my account since the last entry! How cool is that?!? Imagine being able to go to a Bank of America ATM, inserting your checkbook, and having the bank print all your missing entries. It's almost like a portable quickbooks or something.
Completely unrelated, but also wonderful, I found a tiny little shop in the metro station that sells body jewelry. They also do piercings, but it can't be sanitary. Imagine getting pierced in the subway station... uck. Anyway, they have a bunch of earrings that are my size (they go by millimeters here and not gauges), so if I loose mine, I know where to get replacements.

So tomorrow is Friday, and then I have to be at the metro station at 5am on Saturday. We're going with Adventure Korea to the Mud Festival. We're taking a chartered bus from the express bus station to Boreyung, where I'm going to spend the weekend at the Mud Festival. I'm really looking forward to it, and if I can keep my camera from getting too muddy, I'll post pictures next week.

Edit: I forgot to write about the Strange Things I encountered as well. It was in my lunch. Or to be more exact, it was my lunch. What was it you ask? Minnows. You know those little tiny fish that swim in shallow water? Yeah, those. They're dried, and caramelized. In soy sauce. I ate them in my rice. Other than the obvious squeemishness I encountered while eating little dried fish with their eyes still intact, they're actually not that bad on rice. Much better than the sponge-like substance that was in my soup today. When I say sponge, it was like they cut up a dish sponge, baked it in mushroom water, and then handed it to me in a bowl. Lovely.

Once a month

The school takes field trips with the morning classes about once a month. We also go out to dinner, just the teachers and Julie once a month. Today it was both. 

We took a field trip to a light museum, about half an hour from the school. I kept trying to find out details about how the field trips work, but was never really able to get that much information. So aside from not knowing that the kids have partners and walk two by two, I wasn't able to understand the person leading the trip through the museum since she only spoke Korean. This means I couldn't tell when she was asking a question, or when she wanted the kids to be quiet and still, or when she wanted them to move around and touch things. Not only this, but the Korean teachers didn't really seem interested in keeping the kids under control. So the trip started out ok, but about half-way through, the museum had turned into a 3-dimentional walk-through, where the kids were in hospital rooms, classrooms, kitchens and the like, where they were talking about mood lighting, light therapy, etc. So imagine 40 kids in a house, with couches, remotes, bedrooms, kitchens and dining rooms with the table set with fake food, and then a person in a corner trying to talk to everyone.

(This was the first time most of them had seen a real chalk board. And I'm pretty sure most of them don't really know what it is.)

(My lemon class in the little light village that I wouldn't let them run through.)

It took everything in me not to bring everything to a screetching halt and make all the kids sit on their hands and look at the speaker. The only reason I didn't was because I didn't want to interrupt the speaker since I had no idea what she was saying, and I've only been there for two weeks. I did make it absolutely clear to my 6 kids when we got to a place where I could pull them aside that they were to stay with their partners, they were not to run around and their behavior up until now had not been acceptable. And when the other kids were running through the displays when they were supposed to be waiting, mine were sitting quietly on the floor where I could see them. 

After class today, Julie took all of us to dinner. It was absolutely delicious. It was a bit of a walk, but apparently Julie teacher picked it because she knows I don't like spicy food and most of the food was tasty but not spicy. There were about three or four things I couldn't eat, but the rest of it was great. I have no idea how much it cost, but I imagine it was rather expensive, since there were 8 of us, and a lot of food. Afterwards James, Cherita, Gina and I had a beer at a bar down the street from HP and had a rather lively conversation. And then I headed home. All in all a rather interesting day.

They grow their own mushrooms. They're delicious!

My boss, Julie teacher, and the other Korean teachers at the table.

They put beef and about 7 different kinds of mushrooms into this stone pot on the table, and you cook it as you eat. 

And this is what passes for dessert - ice shavings, red beans, fruit, and some sort of powder that you mix up into a slushy type thing. 

Seoul Searching

James and Cherita were going out of town this weekend (they took a guided tour in North Korea), so I thought I would do a little bit of exploring on my own. I took the bus near my place to the subway, and then rode the metro for about an hour until I got to Seoul. I knew that the first English guided tour started at 11:30. I got there about 10:30, so I bought a ticket, and grabbed a bagel and coffee a few blocks away at a Dunkin Donuts (it was the only place with a menu I recognized). On my way back to the palace, I saw this sign:

I didn't go, but I will. How can you not visit a museum with a sign like that??

Then I went to the Changdeokgung, or Changdeok Palace (official site here). It was absolutely beautiful. The tour guide spoke English, but with a very think accent so it was very difficult to understand her. You can't enter the palace unless you take a guided tour Friday through Wednesday, which costs 3,000 won. The self guided tour is available on Thursdays, for 15,000 won. 

This is the entrance gate to the palace, called Donhwamun Gate. It was first built in 1412 and was restored in 1609. It's the oldest remaining palace gate in Korea. Donhwa means to "teach and influence the people". 

Injeongjeon Hall was used for official ceremones and was built in 1405. You can tell it's the most important building because it has the most clay figures pearcher on the edges of its roof of any building in the complex; there are 9 figures total.

This is the gate to the Secret Garden:

It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I'd love to go back on a Thursday and just sit in the garden and enjoy the tranquility.

This is the Buyongji area. It's a pond created on the traditional perception of the universe (that heaven is round and earth is rectangular). the recangular pond refers to the earth, and the round island in the middle symbolizes heaven. 

And this is the Aeryeonji Area. Aeryeon means "loving the lotus" which symbolizes the virtue of a gentleman. There are lotus flowers in the pond, but most of them aren't blooming right now. 

After I left the palace, I wandered down Insadong, which is a giant shopping street. There were some very interesting characters there. I don't know who the top one is, the bottom one is Dalki, similar to Strawberry Shortcake.

After Insadong, I stopped at Yongsan. You know how in department stores there's the little sections for all the different brands of makeup? Imagine the same thing on a scale about 10 times larger, and with electronics instead of health and beauty. And on 7 floors. This was about 1/10th of Yongsan. It took me forever to find somewhere to eat, because it had to have a menu outside with pictures that I could point to when  I ordered, since I can't read hangul yet. I managed to find a place, finally, and got some sort of dumplings that I couldn't finish because there was so much of it. And then I headed home.