Although there are a lot of trails around the house for me to ride, most of them are mountainous and extremely arduous. There are numerous, easier trails along the river where a guy can get up a good head of steam.  Those trails, however, are not so accessible for dogs unless you pack up the bike and dog in the car. There’s just too much traffic between the house and the river for us both if she runs.

Now, it’s no problem to take SaTang running along the river. I bought a nice rack this weekend and the grocery store we frequent gave me a shopping basket which I strapped on with a multitude of cable ties. She was a little scared at first, but once we got a few blocks she decided it wasn’t so scary. Then, once we got to some places along the river where she could run along side me she was really happy.

So, now I can ride to our favorite spots and she can run when we get there, too.

This was a sweet spot for pictures, right along the river where I usually ride my bike. On Saturday, Fin and I rode almost 30km around town. Although I’ve seen this house and the horse before, it somehow didn’t stand out as well when the cherry blossoms were still tucked in their little buds. Now that spring is in full swing here, flowers are everywhere and seemed to frame this beaufitful horse. The house has rounded doors and windows which gave it a Hobbit-ty feel. Having just read Lord of the Rings that’s what imagery it recalled for me.

The horse was actually quite a poser. I whistled while he munched his lunch and he obliged me a nice picture.

While out on a long ride on Saturday with my partner-in-website, Fin, we stopped at a local mountain bike shop. The owner has agreed to advertise on our site (and pay us $.)  While we talked about his ads, placement, duration, etc., I had his service department give my bike the once over. The previous few weeks I’d been rather hard on it and the gears were badly misbehaving.  Last week’s  run along the river to avoid the streets really took a toll.

Anyway, his service boys did a complete breakdown of the front sprocket set and realigned them, pulled out and reset the gear cables, adjusted the brakes and just generally did a complete system check. About 30 minutes worth of work while we talked advertising.

Total price: $5.

Oh, and the website – ulsanonline.com – has gone into the black. Expensives have all been paid and everything we make now is pure profit. Not bad for a part time gig that, for me,  is just enjoyable to write, edit, program, etc.

The exchange rate that is. It’s been ridiculously high for months and it finally coming back to the merely aggravating range.  The Korean won has been in a slump for a while but yesterday dropped below 1400 won to the dollar. It was nearly 1600 earlier this month.

While I am happy it’s down, I’m not holding my breath – or changing all my won for dollars just yet. One quick look at the exchange rate graph will show that this, too, may be a temporary thing. It could be, as Wall Street folks are wont to say, a deat cat bounce.

I’m only hoping it continues to go down, hopefully below 1000, before I head back to the States in May. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

I still ride my bicycle frequently. It’s done wonders to take off and keep off the weight I gained in 2007/8.  I ride, depending on the weather, 3-6 days a week, anywhere from 40 minutes to 1.5 hours and usually at a pretty good pace.

In an effort to avoid the bad drivers that are common on the roadways, I tried a new route along the river.  The biking/walking paths the city has created along the Taewha River extend for miles. It reminds me of the path around San Francisco Bay. When I worked at Silicon Graphics in the 90s, visits to the corporate offices in Mt View would often mean a chance to rollerblade a few miles along the bay.  The Taewha River paths are similar, although not near so grand. With the recent addition of the pedestrian bridge across the river, one can ride all the way from down in the harbor where the Hyundai cars are loaded on ships up to Seonbawi, or Standing Rock, just across the river from my neighborhood.

With one exception. A small gap in the path from Guyeong to Daundong. For about a mile, I have to deal with a major roadway and the bad drivers. I hate that part. It’s got good shoulders to ride on, but going past the bus stops, gas stations and schools is a real hazard as drivers don’t always look going in or out of these places.  I often watch them pull out and then look to see if traffic (me) is coming.

I thought I would try this new path that appeared along the small farms and gardens along the river bottom. I have a mountain bike. I could do it. No problem. It turns out though that it’s more mountain than biking.

Parts of the path are nice and wide. More than enough room to maneuver along the rocks without plunging down into the river.

Other parts of the trail are sheer madness. Barely enough room for the handle bars and the path itself slopes precariously down the hill.

I tried several of these areas on the bike before deciding that I suck at extreme biking. I did a couple of endos (end over end crash) and slid several times down the right side into the trees. I walked several parts of the path afterward. Even on the flat bottoms, the going isn’t easy. The trail is strewn with small, baby-head sized rocks that will cause an endo. The small farms present their own hazard with stakes and small fences delineating the various plots, sometimes only enough room between for a pair of legs.

When I finaly made it to the next portion of a viable path, I did damage assessment.

The south side of the river is no better. Paths exist but all terminate at the edge of a feral bamboo forest. Of course I tried this, but never again

I suspect I’ll be dealing with the bastard drivers until the city finishes the path on this section of the river.

It’s no wonder sometimes that the kids I teach have difficulty mastering English. Although some have been studying English for 3 or 4 years, a chance meeting on the street with a student won’t produce much more than “I’m fine, how are you?”

There areT-shirts here in Korea that have terrible language. Some are terrible grammar, but some have terrible words that would get a child sent home back in the US. Many of those T-shirts are cast-offs from western markets; they either didn’t sell or never made it to the store shelf. Many of those T-shirts find their way to Asian markets where the imprinted English is secondary to the fact that its a cheap shirt.

In the classroom, however, materials with poor English abound and are not western market cast-offs. Most are produced here in Korea. Apparently, having English on the product makes it more saleable. Also, apparently, having someone on the manufacturer’s graphic arts staff who knows, understands or has more than a passing knowledge of English is a rarity.

Poor English shows up on pencil cases, pencils, pens, notebooks, bags – everywhere one could put text on a product. They range from the profoundly poor English to the profane to simple misspellings. I took a few snapshots this week of some pencil cases my students possessed.

Sometimes, it’s funny to read the stuff on the school paraphernalia the kids come in with. Sometimes, they wonder what it is I laugh about – which is really sad because they don’t understand the English or don’t understand why its not good grammar. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that some pencil cases I looked at this week at were just fine. Many T-shirts, notebooks and pencils are fine, too. The problem is that there are so many products with English and the kids and (most of) the parents cannot discern good from bad English. It bothers me that this country wants so badly for their citizens to learn English but does little to ensure they don’t learn improper English.

On my other website, Ulsanonline.com, we got the interest of a new Korean/English tabloid paper. We listed it on our partner page, but I want little to do with it. Just reading their introduction is painful. Their goal is to introduce English to their Korean readers. But they, too, have grammar problems. They want us to share some of our articles for their paper. I have no problem with that. They wanted some editing of their own English, too, but they want to pay next to nothing. Our goal on ulsanonline.com is to be a knowledge base for other foreigners. A place to learn about the country we live and work in and a place to showcase some writing, programming or photography talent. Our goal is not to help people learn English. I get paid to do that, so for a newspaper to want editing for free just doesn’t fly.

Sorry, there’s no free runch.

It took forever, but I finally got my book published. I finished my first draft of the book in June of 2005 shortly after I returned from Korea the first time. I let it marinate for a while and then went back in and made a second draft while I contacted God knows how many prospective agents.  I got tired of waiting for someone to bite and went on with the next book, which is still (slowly) being written.

In the past few years, a number of things have changed. The newspaper industry has taken a beating;  several big ones such as the Rocky Mountain News  have recently folded. The two foreigner publications, the Ulsan Pear and the Korea Sun, both of which I worked on, folded. That’s part of the reason I now write, edit and program for the online, UlsanOnline.com. The book industry, while not in exactly the same boat, I predict will be soon enough. NY Magazine has already made similar predictions. Printing and distribution costs are rising while electronic publishing costs are shrinking.

Amazon has come out with the Kindle 2.0 electronic book reader and by all accounts they’ve fixed all the poor ergonomics on the 1.0 version. That got me really interested in e-publishing. Even while I was preparing to e-publish, Amazon announced that Apple’s iTouch and iPhone products would be able to read their e-books.  I could no longer wait.  I had to jump on this train.

Well, now you wait no longer. I’m published. Amazon.com has a copy of my book.  It’s only Kindle-capable, which means you need a Kindle to read it. Soon, an iPhone or iTouch will suffice. I still have my own website with the PDF version for sale, too.

Go ahead, get yourself a copy. You know you want to.

I’m going to go back to gloating now. And, if enough people buy my book,it will give me enough incentive to finish the second book, “At the End of the Road.“

With one tire flat and another on a mini-spare, I couldn’t help but be amused by the advertising for “Special Wheels”

We went down to Gangeolgot this past weekend. Its a nice, breezy little spot on the south end of the city. Sunday was very sunny, but out on the coast it was just a bit too cold and windy for comfort. While we liked the view and crashing of the surf, we didn’t stay long and headed back to the warm car.

I try to strike a pose, too, but I come off looking a bit too “cool.”  My dog isn’t all as adoring as this picture might lead you to believe. I have her ball in my pocket and she’s just a tad OCD about playing with it.

Along the coast there are plenty of boardwalk vendors hawking their wares. Several were trying to sell their impressive strings of kites. They really were beautiful, but their usefulness back in the city would be limited with all the wires strung everywhere.

I went down on Saturday while MyeongHee was working and did a little exploring along the river. The city has made vast improvements in the parks over the past year or so and it was worth the extra effort to view it. I climbed one of the hills along the river where they’d built a small picnic pagoda overlooking the valley. Beautiful scenery, really. I snapped several photos to capture the wide expanse and had trouble putting anything of that size on this blog. Luckily, I have another website I author on, and I have more freedom to experiment. I put together some simple javascript code to show the panoramas of the river. I also, for the benefit of the other foreigners here in Ulsan, put some additional things in it that didn’t necessarily make sense to write here. A link to it never hurts, though. Check out my panoramic vistas on UlsanOnline.com (make sure you have javascript enabled to see this)