As I mentioned a few days ago, I spent my Lunar New Year (Sol Nal) in Pohang at my mother-in-law’s house.As this was my first sol-nal to spend with Koreans, I was anxious to see how they celebrate the new year.

Just like most holidays, it’s centered around family. MyeongHee’s neice and nephew came to our house on Friday evening and we spent Saturday and part of Sunday playing Wii games. We had recently bought Wii Fit so we had a number of active games to keep them occupied. Like most kids, watching TV, playing computer games and video games occupies the majority of their time. Her neice, MinGyeong, is in her first year of high-school, just like DongHyun. They get along well together. MH’s nephew, ChangHyun, is about 5 years younger and is still in elementary school. He’s a playful little guy who excelled at the sports games on the Wii.

On Sunday afternoon, we packed up all the kids and drove up the coast to Pohang where MyeongHee’s brothers and wives had already arrived. Sunday evening we spent watching TV and playing Wii games which we had brought along with us.  Around 10pm, one of the brother’s friends brought over a large box of steamed crabs. Yum! I love crab and it’s just about as expensive here as in the States, so I don’t get it very often. It was interesting to watch how Koreans eat them – no shell crackers and clarified butter – they use kitchen scissors to neatly cut things apart. Eating crab legs was never easier with the legs simply sheared off – just suck the meat out of the tube like a straw. MinGyeong and I feasted on the legs while the rest of the family ate legs and guts mixed with rice. I’m not a big fan off guts so I simply watched them eat their yellow, gray and pink rice mixture while hiding my revulsion as best I could.

Early in the morning, we held another ancestor worship ceremony for MyeongHee’s father. That’s the same ritual they do during Thanksgiving (Chuseok) and I’ve learned that they do it at all big holidays. They’ll do it again one the anniversary of his death. Ancestor worship is a huge part of Asian, not just Korean, culture and it figures heavily into their traditions.  At the crack of dawn, we got up, dressed in our finest and bowed in front of the table filled with traditional foods. Then we went to my mother-in-law’s younger sister’s house just down the beach for the same thing (her husband had also passed away) and ate breakfast there. Then we packed up and headed to the military memorial to do another ceremony for MH’s father at graveside. I took this opportunity of bright sunshine, for by then it was 11am, to take some family photos.

This is the whole clan at the graveside of MyeongHee’s father, Kim CheonDo. In the background are a couple of other families doing the same thing – bowing and eating lunch by the graves of their fathers, brothers and uncles.

After we arrived back home and had another lunch (Koreans and food just go together) it was time for a nap while the kids played with the Wii. Dinner time was the traditional New Years dish of ddeok Guk, a soup made of doughy rice. While I was in Texas in 2005, 2006, I made manDu Guk, a similar dish, but with meat and veggie filled dumplings. Most people loved my mandu guk and would probably love ddeok Guk as well.

Last fall, I went to a festival and watched them make ddeok,

the rice dough, which is made my pounding rice and water into a sticky paste.

During the holiday, the kids are supposed to do their “sehbeh,” or bow, to their elders. This is not just a simple bow, but a knees-and-nose-on the-floor bow expressing their respect. Afterwards, parents, uncles, and grandmother is expected to give them money. I gave them each 30,000won (about $35) but I declined the bow. Being a westerner, I’m a little uncomfortable with being bowed to.

Otherwise, it was a pretty typical family holiday. With only a small 4-room house for the 10 of us, it was hard to find any real privacy. The girls, therefore, put on their makeup and curled their hair in the main room while the men shaved along side them. While the bathroom has all the western plumbing, it was added on after the main house and doesn’t have heating. Its too cold to spend too much time in there, especially if you have to put on a cold mask as MinGyeong does.

Again, it was another few days of agonizing on the floor without any furniture other than a small cushion to sit on. My legs ached for a decent chair. Were only there for 48 hours, but I was more than ready to sink into a chair just to get my weight off my legs. SaTang was ready to come home, too. With so many people in so small an area, she had more than enough people willing to throw her a ball or give her a snack. She didn’t sleep much and has been in her bed almost continuously since we came home 18 hours ago.

Lunar New Year, that is. In many parts of the western world, it’s known as “Chinese New Year” but that doesn’t sit well with all the other Asia culture who also celebrate the event. The official new year day is next Tuesday, January 27th. But since it’s normally a 3-day holiday we’ll start on Monday and have through Wednesday. So, I now have a 5-day weekend. This is a much bigger holiday in Asia than January 1st (or December 31st) and is a time of family gatherings.

This year, I’ll be going to MyeongHee’s mother’s house on Pohang. Although I’ve been in Korea for 3 years, I’ve missed all the official New Years rituals. In 2005, MH and I weren’t dating long enough for her to take me home to her family. My friend Kim Wheels had come then and we spent the holiday wandering around Seoul trying to find restaurants that were still open. In 2006 I was living back in Texas. In 2007 I had just barely returned to Korea and went skiing with friends. In 2008, I took two weeks vacation during LNY to come back to Texas and see my family and friends. This will be the first LNY, or  “Sol Nal” as they call it, in which I’ll get a chance to see how the Koreans do it.

We’ll leave from Ulsan on Sunday, so when I come back I hope to be able to type a few paragraphs on what LNY means for the Koreans.

I’ll be sitting on my ass on a comfy sofa until we go to Pohang. Once we get there, its three days of sitting and sleeping on hard-ass floors.

Have you been to Ulsan online yet? I’ve been speding lots of time lately on the site writing code, formatting, editing and even writing articles. I hope to write more articles, but lately its been down-and-dirty geek stuff. I’m not complaining, because as a geek, that’s fine for me.

The work I did for the Ulsan Pear and, briefly, for the Korea Sun, were all volunteer. This one has been, too, so far, but that may be about to change. We’ve reached the point where we have enough content to get some of the local businesses to pay for banner ads and other forms of advertising. I might actually make some coin in this venture. Not enough to get rich, but it might be enough to buy me a beer or two.

One perk I get so far is a discount on the bar at Benchwarmers, a local sports bar and one of our partners. I also get to advertise for MyeongHee’s hair shop, listed on the same page.

Check out the site and tell me what you think.  Should any of you actually want to visit me here, it might give you a decent idea of what living here is like. This blog has only my experiences, not the breadth of experiences of dozens of expats like me.

I keep waiting for the Korean Won to come somewhere close back to reality. It’s still hovering around 1350 won to the dollar. It was nearly 1500 late last year and then dropped to the mid 1200s after a cash swap deal with the US. But whatever reality has set in now somehow believes that American dollars are worth more than they were.

Trying to plan for a flight back to America in May of this year is proving to be a daunting task. Should I buy now and try to get a cheap flight? Or should I wait and hope the won increases in value and makes it a better deal for a guy with no dollars but plenty of won?

One would think that will the billions of dollars being printed and distributed by the US Treasury that each would be worth less since there’s no gold backing it up. But somehow, the Korean government thinks just the opposite: more dollars in circulations means they are each worth more. I suppose they’re hoping that enough exports of Hyundai cars and ships, LG and Samsung TVs and memory chips will buoy the local economy with an influx of cash. Maybe they’re trying to make up the shortfall in American purchasing with a higher exchange rate.

Whatever the reason, it’s going to cost me a bundle to come home unless it comes down soon. 🙁

Just a little bit. Upon awakening this morning we were greeted by a heavy flurry of snow. Not near enough to accumulate, but enough to cause a flood of little kids to swarm into the park and await enough to build a snowman. SaTang wasn’t sure what to think of it. She tried to bite a few flakes. Things weren’t cold enough to stick and most of it melted as it hit. I went ahead and rode my bike, thinking it wasn’t going to be a problem but it quickly proved me wrong. It became a real snowstorm. By the time it started to get wet and slushy, I was too far from home to just walk. So I had to carefully navigate my way on the simply wet parts. I only got in 20 minutes of riding before I decided it might cause me to slip and get hurt (I’m a puss – I hate that) and I called it quits. Within 2 minutes of taking off my riding gear and getting ready for a shower, it stopped. Now, the sun is out and things are drying out. So, our one “snowstorm” lasted for about 1 hour and is now nothing but memories and a few pockets of snow still left in the shadows.

The passenger side headlught went out in the car this week. Having only American manufacturers as experience in having to change a light I was mentally prepared to spend $50-75 to change the entire assembly. In the foreign cars I had in America the only light I changed that was more than a mere bulb was in my BMW 740i – that cost me $275 for the taillight assembly. All the other cars with headlights gone bad cost me a decent bit of change to change the whole thing. I just had the headlight changed here for $5. Just a bulb and 2 minutes of labor (no charge). They build things for easy repair and maintenance and I have trouble understanding why anyone would have built them different. If American cars are now built with this mentality, then great. But the last American car I had was a Ford Explorer SUV. Just about everything on it was a bitch-kitty to repair or replace.

I had brought a large sheep skin with me when I came to Korea in 2007. Circe had given it to me a few years ago as a Christmas present. Its great to sleep on in the winter when its really cold at night. It’s snuggly. I had it stored above an armoir over the summer and during one of the heavy rains earlier this  year the room leaked and it got wet. I hadn’t noticed for a while and when I did it was too late – a large chunk of it was mildewed and funky. Large chunks of the hair just fell off the skin.

For a while, I wondered what I could do with this half sheepskin, half moldy skin. I cut off the moldy part and what was left was too small for a bed and the sofa. Too big for the one chair we have. This Christmas it came to me. I took a large box from my recent trip to Costco and threw in the remains of the sheepskin. Since it used to be on my bed, I’m sure it still has some of my smell (funk?) on it. SaTang immediately jumped right in a made herself home.

Probably one of the quieter ones – ever. MyeongHee has been hit hard with a nasty flu/cold and spent most of Christmas Eve and Christmas in bed. I entertained myself with a few movies and books and some lovely naps.

My grandaughters are doing well, although they are very tiny and premature. My daughter has done a fabulous job of taking care of herself throughout her pregnancy and, if that’s any indication, she’ll be a fabulous mommy, too.  The excitement of their early arrival has not settled into anticipation of meeting them when I return home in May.

I’m off work until January 5th and have no plans other than to relax and catch up on some writing I’ve been meaning to get back to. My second book, “The End of the Road” is not coming along as quickly as I would have liked. Things like the Korea Sun (now dead), a new Ulsan website for foreigners (some writing, editing and programming work) and a short story (writing) have taken up my time. There’s only two things I have planned this week: a trip to Daegu for some western grub and a day trip to Yangsan for a little skiing.

As of  11:49 pm on Dec. 20th, 2008 I am a grandfather. That’s the same date as my daughter’s wedding anniversary. Twin girls, Jillian at 2 lbs 15 oz and Jenna at 3 lbs. 2 oz were born almost two months premature. However, they are both breathing on their own.

My prayers speed heavenward for the health and wellbeing of both girls, their mother, Jessica and their father, Jared.

My zang mo nim, my mother-in-law, is back in the house this week. She’s been here since the weekend and will stay another few days before heading home. She’s no trouble and spends most of her days cleaning, mending and doing odd jobs around the house. It’s like having a maid, except I feel guilty if she’s cleaning and I’m sitting at the computer or watching TV. She must be learning something by osmosis, though. When I came home from work today she said ‘Hello,” which is the first utterance of English I’ve ever heard from her. She always spoken to me in Korean. I don’t expect any conversations in English, but its nice to know she’s trying a little to adjust to her waygook side of the family.

Sure, I’ve got time on my hands. I didn’t come here to bust my hump. Life is easy teaching my native tongue. So, I read. Sometimes, books, sometimes websites. One of my favs is wiredscience. They had a nice article today on the 10 greatest space videos of all time. Debatable as to which 10 are truly the greatest, sure, but I have my own favorite. It was humbling to watch. I felt compelled to paste it here, too. I hope you’ve got 6 minutes to spare for some geeky space junk. they billed it as the “most important image ever taken by humanity.”

A boy has got to stay warm while riding his bike in winter.

Whatever it takes to stay fit and trim, despite the cold weather.

Way back in August, I mentioned that I was the new Editor-in-Chief of the ex-pat magazine “The Korea Sun.” I signed on, worked with the existing authors and photographers, recruited a few more and had put together a fine looking set of articles. It was all for naught, however.

The publisher had set up the magazine on a advertising-paid basis. The magazine, which was free, was distributed to many of the places foreigners and tourists go. The advertising never seemed to take off and he could not generate enough ad revenue to cover printing costs. I didn’t quite understand that since they had never approached any of the advertisers of the previous foreigner paper, the “Ulsan Pear.”  Regardless, with revenue off and costs high, publishing was put off for September and the October issue was targeted. Before that could even happen, it was then slated for a January release and meant to go quarterly. That never happened either and the publisher has since tried to sell the Sun to a Korean news tabloid that would charge around $2 an issue. The all English magazine would be relegated to the back pages of an otherwise all-Korean paper. I have no idea of the financial terms he was asking for the paper. But since all the writers and photographers and even the editor were volunteer staff whatever price he was asking must have been too high. It never sold and The Korea Sun has set.

Meanwhile, one of the former Ulsan Pear founders and rock-climbing buddy, Fin Madden, has started up an online foreigners magazine. I’ve joined him in the effort and have begun editing and writing articles. The new publication, is UlsanOnline.  I’ve already contacted the authors I worked with on the Sun and have been re appropriating the stories they wrote for print to online. Small now, but we hope it will grow.

The business model for going online is so much more compelling. We ship only electrons, not protons (there’s a geek-of-the-week explanation in there somewhere.) We needn’t cut trees for paper. There’s no printing costs. Deadlines are non-existent since we don’t have to publish on a regular basis. The only cost is computer hosting, which for a year’s service is a fraction of the cost of one month’s printing cost. The only drawback to online publication is that you can’t roll it up and take it with you. But even that is rapidly changing as more and more mobile phones and other gadgets have internet accessibility. Some even have a “read-it-later” feature that lets you download an article your iPhone. I don’t think print is dead, but there’s becoming more and more reasons not to use paper, especially for limited life-span articles and news.

So, check out UlsanOnline and see what the other foreigners (and me) do in our spare time.

I made a slight diversion over the past few days and veered into a new story short. It’s on my my writing blog if you care to look.

Yesterday, the weather was bright and sunny, if somewhat cold. After a vigorous bike ride to get the blood flowing, MyeongHee and I decided to take a short drive and enjoy whatever we could find. It was long before we found something worth getting out of the car for.  GyeongJu is probably one of the highest-travelled tourist spots in Korea and its just a short 30km from our place. We didn’t intend to drive that way, but the roads just kind of took us that way.

We stopped at a man-made waterfall just inside the main tourist loop and took a few pictures.Perhaps a little tough to see, but there’s ice on some of the rocks.

What’s not tough to see is MyeongHee’s shoes. High heels, no socks or stockings and jeans. That’s a fairly common style among the women here. No matter the temperature. Maybe not apparent also is that my hair has relaxed somewhat from the perm last weekend. It’s not quite so “poodly” and is looking a little more like the rock-star look I wanted.

Adjacent to the waterfall is an enormous water wheel. Never really in use, the wheel is a mock-up of how Koreans used to pound rice grains to separate the grain from the husk.

She’s so photogenic. She loves to smile for me.

Next to the waterwheel is the grind house, where the gears cause a huge log to pound up and down on a conical stone filled with rice. The later afternoon sun prevented a clean shot of the whole place, particularly the pounding stone. But it was cute and rustic.

Almost nine months after getting a package of hair perm from my sister-in-law Marla, I’ve got the ‘Do.’

Early this year, I had MyeongHee try the perm stuff she uses for her Korean customers, but that didn’t work. We suspected that since Asian hair is quite a bit thicker than my thin Caucasian hair it the goo was just not going to work. Marla shipped me some of the stuff she uses way back in February but by then I’d cut my hair too short for the look I wanted. We finally got around to doing the perm with the new goo.

Here’s the results:

The kids at the school either laugh (mostly the girls) or think it’s cool (mostly the boys).

You decide.

Although it’s only Wednesday in America as I write this, it’s Thursday here in Korea. Happy Thanksgiving. I’ve been a good boy with regards to shopping and I planned well. I have some turkey and cheese from my last trip to Costco and I plan on having a nice turkey sandwich. Sure, it ain’t like having a big-ass stuffed bird, but it’ll do.

Tomorrow, I’ll get up early and call to wish as many people as I can a Happy Thanksgiving.

I’ve written before on how lousy Korean drivers are. That’s not some stereotypical rant, but an attitude born of experience. Nearly every day I get on the road is an experience in incompetence, ignorance and even vehicular effrontery. While the average Korean driver that violates what most would consider decent driving is merely ignorant or not paying attention, its the taxi drivers and bus drivers that earn my particular scorn. They are truly malicious in the pursuit of their daily bread. Everyone needs to make a living, I understand that. But to treat all others and all rules with the disdain and lack of respect they do is beyond belief.

Since July I’ve been riding my bicycle several times a week to stay in shape. While I try to stay on the side roads, mountain paths, farm roads and walking/biking paths, it’s not always possible. Sometimes I have to get on a real road. Nearly everyday that I do, I watch a taxi driver or bus driver run a red light, turn left from the right lane, turn right from the left lane, cut someone off or turn a blind corner without so much as slowing down. Buses are actually the worst, for their 50 ton bulk would crush any that oppose them and they drive with that in mind. But taxis are more numerous and therefore their violations more frequent.  Many times, I watch from a distance and just shake my head as these bastards and shitheads run roughshod over the roads.

Sometimes, despite my vigilance, it is I that am the victim of these road warriors. More than once have I been cutoff, forced to the curb or come to a screeching halt. I remain unintimidated. I have taken to carrying protection: bricks, bats, flamethrowers and grenades – figuratively speaking, of course. Force appears to be the only thing they understand. Most won’t even get out of the protective surroundings of their vehicle. Being six foot and 230 lbs seems to act as a deterrent. Even if one does I am not terribly worried, even though most of them have studied Taekwondo or some other martial art. Most Koreans have studied English, too, but few can actually speak it. Without providing incriminating details, I’ll just say that more than one taxi and bus driver has left the scene humiliated. The shitheads.

While cruising through some of my usual news sites, my interest was piqued by a news blurb that said only 44% of US elected officials could pass a civics literacy test. Of course, the news site was a Chinese newspaper, China Daily, and its methods of how they came up with that number are unavailable. They just quote some bureaucrat on whatever number he gives without revealing who took the testm where they are placed in government and their education.

I, too, took the test. And found that the average for November was only 77%.  Even that is likely skewed and not a serious statistic of American civic knowledge. Participation is “self-selected.” In other words, it isn’t a random cross section of Americans, but those who a) see the site and b) those who opt to take the test. A person who doesn’t read many internet sites or has low confidence in their ability to do well might never see or take the test. I doubt the 44% number as a measure of ALL of American elected officials. The 77% for all November seems a much more believable figure.

So, I challenge readers here to the same. How much do you know about American civics, government and history?

My score? 88.78%  Not bad for a ex-pat computer geek. Take the test yourself. Put your score in the coments below.

I just sent 750K Korean won over to my bank in America. I need to buy some things in the US and have it stay there rather than buy here and ship home. Unavoidable. The exchange rate is up to 1450w to the dollar, so I lost close to $200 just in one transaction. I hopefully won’t have to do that very often.

I don’t know whether it was a virus or food poisoning, but for the last several days I’ve felt like hammered meat loaf. It started out with a headache and mild indigestion on Thursday afternoon. I struggled through work that day and again on Friday (which is game day, so I didn’t have to concentrate too hard.) But, by Saturday morning I felt bad enough to go to the hospital. My head hurt, my guts ached, my legs, arms, shoulders and neck moaned with every movement, I had started having bad diarrhoea and I had a fever.

The last time I felt this bad was when I had pneumonia and even walking to the bathroom was a chore. At the hospital they took xrays, sonogramed my guts, took blood and urine tests, poked and prodded me. And that was just the diagnostics. They they administered multiple shots – my butt, arm and an IV. MyeongHee and I were there for about 3 hours through all the tests and whatnot. It would have been tough without her as I wasn’t up to the mental tasks of translating from Korean. That was amazing since English is a requirement for college students including Doctors and Nurses – only the Doctor spoke a few words of it. The pharmacist afterwards spoke better English in describing how/when I should ingest the drugs she’d given me.

The good news: The entire visit to the hospital, including all the tests, xrays, radiologists, internal medicine guys, IV, etc was only around $160. Another $13 for the drugs. MyeongHee was astounded when I estimated the American health care equivalent cost at an order of magnitude higher. I’ve already submitted the receipts to the insurance agency (AIG), and unless they’ve already spent all their money on another lavish retreat for their execs I should get most of that reimbursed. I still have a hard time comprehending why this level of health care at this price cannot be made available in America.

I still don’t feel 100%, but better than late last week anyway.

“Miguk” is the Korean word for America and means “the beautiful country”  – or something like that. “Bap” is the word for cooked rice but generally means food or a meal.Together, the two words mean “American food” which has been sorely missed around the house.

We haven’t made a trip to Daegu’s Costco in a while and I was completely out of anything resembling American food. All I had left was a box of instant oatmeal and I had grown tired  of it. I tried variations of oatmeal with raisins, bananas, walnuts, cinnamon, raisin and walnuts, walnuts and bananas and various other combinations, but my palate longed for something else.

Yesterday, I stocked up on cheese – real cheddar cheese. Not the single-wrapped, plastic-tasting, inner-tube texture, orange-colored pond scum they try to pass off as cheese in the markets in town. And some beef jerky – yum. And real bacon – not the tasteless strips of fatty pig meat sold here. Other things I brought home included bagels, granola cereal, pasta, some American brats (jeez, you wouldn’t believe the vile things they sell posing as sausage or hot dogs here) some ceasar salad dressing.

And I got some real corn tortilla chips – made in San Antonio! Last night I made a big-ass bowl of fresh salsa (no lack of tomatoes, garlic, peppers and onions in town) and we chowed down on a favorite snack while watching a movie.

Today, its bagels for breakfast and tonight I’ll make some bean and cheese nachos. Or maybe spaghetti. My mother-in-law, still here and cleaning ferociously everyday whether it needs it or not, likes my nachos.Who cares if they’re technically not from “Miguk?” They taste like home.  The Koreans think they’re exotic.

It must be obvious to the casual reader how big a deal food is here. Almost everything else available in America I can get here, but not food from home easily. Sure, I like Korean food. And I eat it once a day if not more. But a man’s got to have something from home and my biggest dilemma now is to decide what to eat when.

Just a white guy in a dishdashi? Or a middle-eastern man of mystery? You decide, baby!

The kids did most of the masks at home. Store-bought costumes weren’t eligible for the big prizes.

We ended up going out to the foreigner bar on Friday for a costume party. I didn’t bring a camera, but wished I  had. The winner was a girl who dressed as kimchi – she had the smelly stuff draped all over her.

This past weekend we drove across the peninsula to Korea’s west coast to Nae Jang San. Famed in Korea as one of the best of the national parks, Nae Jang San boasts a fall spectacular of color. It’s been warm up until very lately, so the park was still quite green. I could imagine that in a few more weeks, things would peak and be truly amazing. Only some of the maples have gone completely red, some only on the fringes and some, particularly in the lower elevations, are still green. The huge white oak trees were also a mix of green and yellow. The ginkgo trees, however, were a very pretty yellow.

The picture above is of one of the outer buildings of Bae Gyang Sa temple and Nae Jang Mountain in the background. Probably one of the better pictures I’ve taken this year. The temple is at the base of the mountain and entrance to a large box canyon filled with the now emerging fall colors.

The temple has been there for hundreds of years. The trees surround it are nearly as old. Many of the maples they say are 300-500 years old. The white oak behind MyeongHee and SaTang is enormous

Quite a few people were scurrying around under the oak collecting acorns which they make into a tofu-like jelly.

I have complained much in the past on Korean furniture. Minimal would be the best description. I’ve learned this weekend, however, that minimalist furniture can be quite an advantage at times. We went on this trip with two other couples and another woman – seven of us total. Rather than go out to eat in restaurants, we saved money by eating in. And Korean women can pack some food! What Americans might call a carpet picnic is very common in Korea. Just pull up a piece of the floor and dig in. On Saturday night, we spread a few newspapers on the hotel floor and used a small camping stove to cook pork. Kimchi and other side dishes travel well and were copious. On Sunday, after cruising through the park and fighting the huge crowds, we stopped the car on the side of the road and had another picnic. Who needs a table? We just spread out a pad that seems to be standard equipment in everyone’s car and sat on the shoulder. While it may be uncomfortable, it’s convenient as hell to just eschew the table and embrace the floor or ground.

Way back in February when I took a trip back home to Texas, the Korean Won was running nice and high around 930 Won to the dollar.  I could treat every 1000 note (their smallest paper currency) like a virtual dollar. Indeed, I even called them dollars among my foreign friends. That 1000 won note brought me about $1.07 when I exchanged it. Bring enough and you can make a few bucks.

These days, however, the extremely volatile markets around the world have worsened the exchange rate. Today, it’s trading at 1408 Won to the dollar.  That doesn’t really mean a whole lot for the guy just living here as living expenses here haven’t risen. It does mean that sending money back to the US is a bad deal. For every 1000 won note I would now bring over, I could only get $0.71.  Bring enough and you could lose a few bucks.

I hope it gets better by the time I go back to Texas next year. My youngest daughter, Teri, will graduate from the university and my oldest, Jessica, will have given birth to twin girls: Two momentous events I would not miss for the world. A poor exchange rate is not enough to stop me from coming, but it might make the trip expensive as hell. Last time, I ate sushi and steak and big-ass hamburgers. This time, I might have to make do with cheese sandwiches.

Yesterday was another gorgeous day and we decided to do some hiking up on Munsusan. There’s about a half dozen major paths up the mountain and numerous smaller ones. Yesterday we went up near a cascade of waterfalls and then took a path up the ridgeline. Rather than a series of switchbacks across the face, we went directly up the backbone of ridge. That was a hard climb.

When we reached the top, MyeongHee wanted to take another path down that she knew of. It, too, was a major path but  three-way junction half-way up fooled us. We spent an hour or so following paths that either eventually went back up the mountain or paths that led to dead ends. We ended up following a creeek bed strewn with boulders and scree and we scrambled our way down.

By the time we made it down the mountain and into town again, it felt like we had done less of a hike than a death march. We stopped at the grocery store for some dinner makings and then hibernated the rest of the evening. A hot foot-bath and early bed time meant we were just setting ourselves up to be sore today. And we are. We stiffened up quick and it might take a day or two to loosen up again.

Despite the hard climb, I got some decent pictures of harvest time in Korea. It’s not the kind of heavily mechanized affair that America endures. Its rather a manual labor thing with only small motorized carts and splitters.

A man drives a load of rice past a small village of traditional farm houses. Field in the foreground have been cut by hand with a scythe. Some of the stalks of rice still lay on the ground drying while others parts of the field have been processed and grain recovered. In the background, another field still stands, the rice heavy with seads.

The weather was fabulous today, a Sunday, and we decided to make a day of it with a trip to Mt Shinbulsan.  The Mountain is listed as another of Ulsan’s 12 Secenic Sites and in all this time I’ve not been there before. The tourist brochures list it as the “Four Seasons of Mt. Shibulsan” and rightly so as each makes a very distinct impression. The fall season, one might think, would be the changing of the leaves. But then, thinking only the mundane and forgetting that in Korea things are just different, one could be, well, quite wrong.  During Autumn, the reed plains of Shinbulsan take over. The reeds, really tall grasses with 6-foot willowy seedheads, cover an entire mountain side and bring  almost as many Korean hikers, although those are somewhat smaller in stature.

The reeds cover the flank of this mountain wherever there aren’t rocky outcroppings or paths, both of which are many.

We drove up with MyeongHee’s good friend, UnZung, and her guy pal, Hye Da. Hye Da drove his car and it was nice to sit in the back for the ride through the mountains. It’s not quite peak color season, but it will be soon. We plan on going to a “pension” or “min-bak”, ( a Korean guest house) with them and a few others in two weeks I hope the color is really hitting it by then. In the meantime, the reed plain was well worth the arduous journey.

Driving through the heavily forested mountains, one is afforded few vistas. Once we got to the end of the road, we could see the wide plain, nestled in a saddle-back ridge between two peaks. Below us, the valley, villages, and small towns dappled in sunlight and cloud shadows. Shimmering in the distance, Ulsan. Above us, the surrounding peaks with hoards of hikers and several hang-gliders.

Paths upwards onto either of the peaks teemed with people out enjoying the weather and exercise. I was immediately struck by the resemblance of the paths, most of it rough-hewn wooden stairs, to the Great Wall at Badaling, near Beijing. Although its a little difficult to see in this web-sized picture, the stream of people goes to the top, and the outlines of many people are visible along the upper ridge.  In the foreground, another hang glider prepares for liftoff.

Being the energetic young lad that I am, I took my dog and bounded up the trail for a better look at things. We stopped at several of the outcroppings along the way to catch a view of the view. On our east side, the hang gliders dominated the air.

This is the same guy I saw earlier about to take off. He swooped in and around on the currents for a long while. When he came overhead, SaTang barked at him. They really excited her and she, in turn, freaked out the Koreans walking hear us, a good percentage of whom I now know are afraid of dogs.

Most everyone I saw today hiking was outfitted in the their best technical gear. No cotton for this crowd – only the best polypro shirts, hiking boots and other acoutrements. Many of them get all duded up in the gear, complete with pants tucked into socks and professional walking sticks – with usually only a stair-step trail or just a road to hike on.

Check out the ladies in orange and in pink mid-way up the stairs in this shot – they’ve got two walking sticks each, so you know they’re serious about their sports.

After hiking, its common to get a snack. Conveniently, plenty of places are nearby to satisfy a hunger and thirst. Some are just beach-umbrellas put over the Korean equivalent of a hot-dog stand. Others are full tents. We went to both. Our first snack was Pa-Zang, or green onion pancake. That just wasn’t enough, so we got some O-Deng, or fish ham. One hasn’t experienced Korean culture until eaten O-Deng at a roadside umbrella stand.

O Deng fish ham, is made with – you guessed it – ground up fish, rice powder and sometimes little veggies. It’s kept in a big pot of hot fishy broth and eaten off the stick, while standing, sometimes dipping it a soy-sesame-pepper sauce. It’s tasty, but you probably don’t ever want to know how its made. I don’t.

That wasn’t enough either, so we stopped at one of the tent-style roadside stands on the way down the mountain. These places serve any number of things, but are known for their traditional Korean food rather than any fads.

They all have the simple wood-burning stove for winter warmth, but that can also be taken care of with soju. We had dong-dong-ju, a rice punch that punches back and a table full of kimchi, radish greens, tofu and minori leaves.  Toilet paper napkins hang by each table, but Hye Da wanted to hide them so he stuffed them up in the rafters of the tent for this shot. He almost managed to hide them all.

Both up and down the mountain on the roadway we encountered problems. Like many rugged mountain roads around the world, this one was only a single lane. Should a driver come upon another driver headed in the opposite direction, the proper thing to do is try to find some way to resolve the head-on conflict. Not Koreans. Rather than backup or back down (both literally and figuratively)  they would sit in their cars and wait. And wait. Wait like Samurai  for the other to blink and reverse and allow them to pass. While this goes on, other cars come up from behind in both directions and further compound the problem. Sometimes, like this idiot, he simply got frustrated and left his vehicle.

When I came up on these cars, I had gotten out of Hye Da’s car to walk up and see what the traffic jam was all about. I saw almost 20 cars in each direction stopped. The woman in the SUV in the foreground could not back up for the cars directly behind her and the sedan kept gunning his engine and running up as if to ram her. Of course, he had nowhere to go either, so both stayed put. I had gone along and convinced the drivers in the rear to back up and park to make room and then I back the other way to do the same. The sedan driver simply abandoned his vehicle until he was done with his hike. No one was moving for a long time. Several times along the way up and down from Shinbulsan I got out of the car to negotiate a way out of their Mexican standoffs. Many understood and complied, but one old man refused to budge. I was about to yank him from his car and do it myself when his wife smacked him and he pulled over.

Despite the minor annoyances of the drivers, the day was awesome. Beautiful mountains, weather, scenery, buffoonery made it a pretty damn good day.

A while back, I wrote on the trash problem here in Korea. At the time, I was told that its is mostly middle-school and high-school students who leave the majority of trash. I wish that were true. It’s simply not and I suspect those that told me that lie wished to deflect the truth away from the real truth: Koreans just have little respect for their environment outside of their own home.

I went to the park last night and saw a group of adults and children at one of the picnic tables. The children crowded all around my dog, yelling and throwing snacks at her. She didn’t want any of them and left them on the ground. One of the mothers came up and scolded the children but not for littering, but for yelling at the dog. She picked up the snacks and just threw them in another direction. Meanwhile, the kids, each with their own pack of snacks and small bottle of juice, had left the wrappers and bottles on the ground. She got nasty when I mentioned the kids were leaving their messes on the ground while there was a trash bag not ten meters away. This morning, I went out to the park again and the same table was filled with trash, the same snack wrappers and bottles from the kids on the ground, the same things that littered the table with the adults last night was still there this morning. Almost every morning, now that the weather has changed from the hot and humid, I come out to the park to be greeted by piles of trash and litter from the previous night’s impromptu picnics.

As I walked back to my house from the park, a man on a scooter went by. As he passed each building, he threw stacks of business cards on the ground. I looked up the street and it was full of the brightly colored cards he was throwing. That’s just a form of Korean advertising, so I guess he’s excused from any littering charges.

I’ve tip-toed around the issue for this long, but my patience with their filth is wearing on me and I’m beginning to despise their lack of respect for their own city. I may not have a crying Indian to wield, but I’ll come up with something that takes this battle to the source.

Persimmons are in here in Korea. This time of year is great for these fruit. I never ate them in America. I don’t recall ever seeing them in the grocery stores I shopped at. Tasty little things though, and they make for a nice variety from the apples and pears that are also in.  They’re called “gam” (rhymes with “mom”)  or “?” here. Back in 2004, I thought they were pale, orangish tomatoes and until of the teachers I work with brought in a bag of them I’d have likely never tried them.

I wonder why they were never a big seller in America? They grow them everywhere here, and I often see the trees full of truit as I ride the bike around.

Along the many paths I take while riding the bicycle is Seonbawi, or Standing Rock. I had decided that along as I was spending so much time cruising the Korean countryside and getting my heart rate up I may as well take my camera.  There are numerous paths to ride on near my house. Some are paved one-lane roads for the farmers to use to get to their rice paddies, some are gravel/dirt paths and some are city-developed paths for exercise and pleasure. Seonbawi (the ‘eo’ in Korean words is pronounced like ‘ou’ in the word “enough”)  is accessible via a city path on the Taewha River just a few kilometers from here. It’s one of the 12 Scenic Places that Ulsan advertises in its brochures. Its a large outcrop of rock, maybe 10-15 meters high, that didn’t get eroded by the river while the other rocks surrounding it have melted away over thousands or perhaps millions of years. It’s one of the regular places I like to ride for its beauty. The path to it takes me along the river which is lined with a multitude of small gardens tended by the old folks who live nearby.

Fall is soon to come and small hints of the color are visible on the rock and adjacent hillside. Already, the gardens are coming under the scythe and rice paddies are being cleared. Fall is spectacular here in Korea as the weather is usually sunny days and cool nights. I’ll try and capture a few more pictures of the countryside on my rides around town.

Our September was nice and warm. Not hot, but warm and muggy. Nights were cool, but still very humid. Beginning late last week, the weather has finally turned and it feels like fall. Cripsly cool nights and bright sunny days. Fall is probably the best time of year here in South Korea. Soon, it will be time to take a few pictures of the foliage as it turns from the the lush greens to bright yellows, oranges and reds.

Lately, my time has been occupied by some serious bike riding. I had gotten a nice layer of fat built up over the spring and by my birthday in July it was intolerable. I bought a bike then and have been riding it pretty hard ever since. I’ve slimmed down considerably, but not enough – when I wore a suit for the Chuseok holiday two weeks ago, a belt I had worn for years would no longer fit.

I’ve also been reading the news sites vociferously since the financial crisis began. The news here is filled with it, just like everywhere else. I, personally, am not in favor of any bailout, but rather a free market correction. Reading the news at least goes faster than watching since I read fairly rapidly.

Between working, riding, reading and living in wedded bliss these days, I seem to have little time for writing. I’ll try and do better than I have lately.

My mother-in-law has tuberculosis. Apparently, she’s not contagious, but has the bacteria. Two more weeks in the hospital for her, but the doctors say she’ll be feeling the effects of the disease for nearly a year.

Yesterday we went down to Busan to go to the hospital. Over the Chuseok weekend, MyeongHee’s mother complained of being overly week. So, after everyone went home, she got checked out and was diagnosed with pneumonia. I’ve had it – twice – and it ain’t fun. It leaves you feeling weak and exhausted with just minor efforts.

In Korea, a visit to the hospital is not just a short visit. Its hours. In the small room she shared with four other older women, I watched sons give massages, daughters change bandages and daughters-in-law change bedpans. Nurses came and went and checked on IV tubes and gave meds here and there, but families did just about everything else. Just as during the holiday, MyeongHee’s older brother wife did most of the work. Apparently, the oldest son’s wife spends her life taking care of his family including holidays, preparing ancestor memorials, and caring for his sick parents.

This was my first visit to a Korean hospital and I must say it was quite shocking. Whether they’re all like this, I have no idea. But the crowded 5-bed room (same size as any two-bed room I’ve seen in America) was just one aspect. We went down to get her a CT and patients lined halls, some ambulatory dragging IV bottles along, some in wheel chairs and some in wheeled beds. And with nearly all of them, was their families. Children ran around and played amoung the patients and visitors. Nurses dodged all manner of things on their various errands. It was a mad jumble of people, beds, carts and wheeled thises and thats. This looked like a scene from a disaster movie, minus the blood and gore.

I can’t say anyone wasn’t being well taken care of or neglected. But it was a very different world from the orderly places most western hospitals seemed to me.

I hope I never have to use one of these places personally.

Yesterday, MyeongHee and I went to the Korean Immigration office to get me a new visa. Mine is still valid until early next year, but it’s an “E” or employment visa. The new one will be an “F” or family visa. Now that we’re married, I have some rights here in this country. With an E visa, one is beholden to the company which brought you over. Now I can work anywhere. Not that I’m thinking of changing, as I like this school, but it gives me options. But, we can live where we want, work where I want and not worry about being deported for some small infraction of the law.

The “E” visa process, has also undergone some strange rules for background checks, and health check-ups. With the “F” visa, I’m free from that red-tape.

On the down side, it probably means I’m going to be liable for more taxes.

Chuseok is over and I can rest easily on my sofa at home again. I really hate the floor and couldn’t wait to get back in a chair. Seriously – I challenge any of you westerners reading this to try and do that. Just sit and sleep on the floor. Small cushions are allowable, but big-ass 6″ sofa style cushions aren’t. Try it. I’d give you 4 hours before giving up in disgust and wondering why you tried it in the first place.

After sitting and sleeping on the floor since Saturday evening, I decided on Monday afternoon to take the kids for a ride in the car. Ostensibly, this was to just see the sights and listen to some modern music (they dig my taste in tunes) and I used it to sit in a real chair for an hour. While we drove along the eastern coastline, I spun the iPod as fast as the wheels on the car. I’ve come to like some of the Korean pop stars, but hte youngsters also know Eminem, Britney Spears and oldies like the Fresh Prince. The kids sang along to the iPod while we drove north from the little fishing village where MyeongHee grew up along the coast to the next big city. Although it wasn’t very large, Goryongpo is a quaint, picturesque town with a bustling crabbing business. Nearly every restaurant boasted crabs and the port was filled with large crab boats. The town itself was nestled among the rocky shore and around a small peninsula. I wish I had brought my camera because it was very pretty, especially from the mountains heights as we drove in towards town. Instead, we inspected the crab boats and walked around the docks briefly. We found two boats named “Dong Hyun,” which MyegonHee’s son Dong Hyun found quite amusing.

Back at the in-laws, it was the same old Thanksgiving. Up at dawn, arrange the food beautifully on a short table, lets the spirits come eat, bow a few times and then put the food all away and eat something else. Afterwards, we visited the gravesite of MyeongHee’s father and had the same, albeit smaller, ceremony. It still is a little disconcerting to eat in a graveyard. Western and Eastern sensibilities are really different in that regard.

I was really feeling out of sorts this weekend. The first time I went there to meet her brothers, they gave me the once over and quizzed me on my intentions, etc. In other words, I was somewhat the center of attention. This year I was old news and they ignored me. Not their fault, since their English and my Korean is good enough only for simple pleasantries. It was Korean food, Korean talk, Korean TV,  Korean customs, minimal English and damn little western anything. Not that that was surprising – I’m in Korea. But at home we speak a good mix of English and Korean, we share watching TV programs in one or the other language and I can read English news on the internet. We also have chairs, a sofa and a real bed. I guess the moral of this story is that while I like it here in Korea, no one should have any illusions about me becoming Korean. I’m still an American boy at heart – and butt.

This week is Chuseok in Korea – Thanksgiving. It’s one of the two biggest holidays (the other being Lunar New Year.)  The official “day” is Sunday and many people were off Friday and will be off tthrough Tuesday. A large portion of the population will be on the road, back to their hometowns for the holiday. The roads will be jammed and a trip that should only take 4-5 hours will be 9-10 hours.

We’ll be going to Pohang again where MyeongHee’s mother lives. We’l probably leave on Saturday evening after MH cuts a hundred heads of hair. She’s been really busy the last few days with lots of folks getting prettied up for grandmother. She’ll likely be busy again tomorrow, so we’ll leave around 6 or 7pm.

I’d personally rather delay going as long as possible. Its not that I don’t like her family – they’re all fine people. Its just that it’ll be an entire weekend of sitting on the floor. The only furniture will be the short table we’ll sit around while we eat. My ass just can’t take that much hardwood. I plan on carting my bicycle up there for the weekend. At least I can sit on the small cushion while I pedal my way around the mountains.

Look how much weight she’s lost

Actually, MyeongHee was just clowing around. While doing laundry, she decided to try on my big-ass jeans. I’m a bigger than average guy, but she’s really just petite.

Yeah, that’s it. She’s real petite. That’s the ticket.

Yup. Haven’t written much here. Not much going on to write about – personally, anyway. This week has been “crunch week” with many of the writers on the Korea Sun sending in their articles. Deadline is this week, so I’ve been busy editing their pieces as well as researching and writing my own. I’m still expecting a couple more articles to be sent in, but once those are in the bulk of the work will be done. At least for me, although I hope to help in the layout and learn more about that process. The final magazine should be completed in two weeks and ready for approval by the Korean Government.

I finally put a few clips together of the small snail-fest from last week. I’ll eat a lot of the things the Koreans eat, but not this. The green slime algae on the shells just made my stomach roll.  On this trip to Pohang, there were two girls, grand daughters of MyeongHee’s friends. I thought it interesting that both would scream at the sight of a spider in the house but slurp down the juice from a slimy snail shell and then eat the bug inside.

After watching this, go back and check out the really beautiful wedding photos in the previous post. I’d hate for you to leave a website with a bad taste in your eyes.

On Friday we got out wedding photographs back from the studio. Despite the fact that we spent almost nine difficult and hot hours dressing, posing and smiling, the photos came out beautifully and it was well worth the effort.  We are both really pleased with them.  Maybe I’m prejudiced, but I haven’t seen anyone’s wedding shots done as well. For our money we got a leatherbound album, a large framed 20×40 print that we’ve hung on the wall and a stand-up partition filled with a half-dozen 8x10s.

Check out the photographs and see for yourself.

One amazing little side note. MyeongHee had been saving her money for these pictures. They cost around US$1500. How long had she been saving?  She started a layaway plan with the studio almost three years ago. Unbeknownst to me, shortly after I went back to the US in 2005, she decided that she and I would marry and would begin saving. Premonition? Sixth sense? Or just love? I tend to think the latter.

Back in my first tour in Korea in 2004/05, I wrote a few articles for the Ulsan Pear.  That paper is now defunct but a new medium has risen to fill the void. The Korea Sun is a new, all English, Korea-wide publication that will focus on the arts/entertainment, festivals & events, travel, night life and culture. Not just a paper rag like the Pear, the Korea Sun is a slick-glossy magazine style full of interesting photographs of this country. Although it’s written by foreigners, the vast majority of readers are Korean.

The Korea Sun has been out since March or April of this year. They’ve only published a few months so far. I took a wait-and-see attitude and sat on the sidelines and just read the magazines as they came out and I didn’t contribute. The photos are always great, it has news on events that I otherwise never would have heard of and reviews of restaurants I might never have even found. But the writing, mostly done by English teachers like me here in Korea, was hit or miss. Some of the grammar was really horrid. When the July issue came out, I found enough errors in the writing, some of them egregious, factual errors, that I felt compelled to write the editor. I expressed amazement that some of the writers actually teach English here. What I thought would result in merely a letter to the editor in the next issue resulted in a face-to-face meeting with the publisher. We talked about his vision for the magazine, his problems with motivating the (mostly) young writers and how he needed someone to ride herd on the process of writing, article selection and editing. We decided I could be that man.

Beginning this week, and starting with the October issue of the Korea Sun, I am now the Editor-in-Chief.  I’ll be organizing and motivating the writers, and writing my own articles as well as the editor’s page in the front. No pay. It’s all volunteer. But it’s something to add to the resume, the scrapbook and the memory banks. And a bonus, it keeps me out of the pool halls.

Stay tuned for more news.

Two days later and I still hurt. My own fault, of course, so I’m not bitching, just reporting the news. MyeongHee put cucumber slices on me last night to help cool the heat. Today, we have lots of cucumber kimchi to eat.

I’m still kicking myself in the ass for not putting on sunscreen.

Or damn close to it. On the tail-end of my week vacation we spent the weekend at MH’s mom’s house on the coast. Like a dork, I spent about 1 1/2 or so hours in the sun with no sunscreen or shirt. I might have a picture later. Right now I can’t imagine even moving enough to pose for a picture. My back is really red.

It was fun, though. Her house is just a few steps from the beach and we played in the surf for a while.
We also ate a lot. We went with three of MyeongHee’s friends and two of their granddaughters. We had 7 people in the car! Like most Korean women they all planned food/drinks and whatnot so there was lots to eat. I ate everything they made – except for one thing. The Snails! I still squirm at the way the women, even the little girls, plucked these spiral wormy-looking snails from their green mossy shells and drank the juices from it before devouring the snail. I couldn’t get past the slimy moss on the shells. I couldn’t think of eating one. My dog wouldn’t eat it either. I have that on film.

Remember this one?  If you’re around my age or older and American, you probably do.  I was only 11 years old when this commercial came out. It had a profound affect on me. I remember watching this man crying and then, from the back seat of the family station wagon as we drove to various places, I saw it. I’d never actually thought about it before. The Trash. But there was quite a bit of trash in America back then. I didn’t cry at the realization like the man did, but it changed me. That was 1971. And I have to say that while America is no gleaming example of cleanliness, we somehow figured out as a nation that pollution is not doing us or the planet any good.  Whether we can get our government to agree and help protect what’s left is an entirely different discussion. But, I digress.

I’d been very hesitant to write about this, but it’s been bugging me for a while. I figure it’s their country, I’m a guest in it and I shouldn’t disparage the people with whom I coexist and earn my living from. Our recent trip to Japan, however, really made me see things clearly. I had gotten desensitized by seeing so much of it in Korea that the lack of it in Japan surprised me. The return trip, of course, surprised me again, as if I were seeing that same crying Indian commercial. This time, though, I felt a little sad. The Trash. It WAS Everywhere. Our eyes burned from the dirty air in Busan and Ulsan, something we hadn’t even realized we had escaped from. This place needs a little self respect for community. Just some examples that I captured over the months.

The picture above looks better than it is. Despite the presence of a trash bag, quite a few can’t seem to get things all the way into the bag and not just near it.  Even more disturbing, there’s another bag just 20 steps away. Can’t take the trouble to go too far in either direction. But at least they moved somewhat towards the bag.

These filthy late night snackers couldn’t even be bothered to take their trash towards the bag when they got up from the table.

And it’s not an isolated incident. Above is the same table, two days later. The previous trash was just kicked under the table and stepped on. But it’s not just the tables. In fact, it’s everywhere.

Piles of trash accumulate in the streets and sidewalks. It’s common to see someone exit a convenience store and as they unwrap their newly bought snack the wrappers go straight to the ground.  Vendors may sweep their storefront, and even wash it with a hose, but it goes no further than the street. Now, that’s not to say it’s everywhere and that all Koreans are at fault. Not at all. But it’s enough of a problem that I can’t address it one by one (and I’ve done that often enough when I see it.) I watched one kid at the park finish his plastic bottle of juice and then just whip the empty across the park. His father sat  right next to me said nothing, either to the kid or to me when I told the kid to put in the trash bag. It’s an educational thing.

Moreover, the trash is such a paradox for me. From my experience, Koreans are very fastidious folk. Their homes, whether simple or splendid, are always tidy and clean. As for their personal hygiene they are squeaky clean. Why so much attention to self and home and such utter disregard for the shared space between us all?

Koreans haven’t apparently figured out their pollution solutions yet. As it happens, I just yesterday saw a public service anouncement on one of the local TV stations that people should pitch in and clean up. None of the pathos evoked by the 1970s American commercial, but it’s a start. Someone has reconized a problem and has begun addressing it, although the outcome is far from clear. They still seem apathetic about littering.  I’m hoping that a few Koreans actually read this and maybe see for themselves so much can be done by ourselves simply by just not throwing it on the ground in the first place.When that’s done, we’ll worry about the air.

Koreans need a crying Indian of their own that they can identify with.

I’m addicted. I know just enough to get to the 11th stage and then I lose it.

What’s your Traveler IQ ?

August is vacation time for many in Korea. My school closes down and I usually get half of my yearly vacation in the first week of August. While last year was a fabulous trip to Beijing, this year was a much more scaled down trip to Japan. We left on Friday, August 1st and went to Fukuoka on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu. It’s pronounced “Foo Koh Ka” in case any of you foul-mouthed readers wanted to say something else. I would never stoop to such middle-school behavior <grin>.

Rather than fly, we took the jetfoil boat out of Busan. That was fun as the boat was both smooth and fast.  Same sort of terrorist prevention applies, however, and baggage Xray, metal detectors and immigration/customs red tape provided the usual fun.

One of the first things we noticed about Japan was how clean the place was. Korea is nice, but rarely do people go out of their way to find a trashcan and rubbish is everywhere. Not a speck of trash was anywhere in Fukuoka. I may write another post on Korea’s trash as it’s something that’s been bugging me for a while.

The second thing we noticed was the cost. Everything was more expensive, from the buses, taxis and subways to the food and other shopping. Gone were the noisy open markets of Korea and in their place we found gleaming malls and glitzy department stores.  We’re used to a decent lunch costing $3-4 per person but the cheapest we could find was 2x that for just noodles. Substantial meals were substantially higher. We spent a lot more than we thought we would. Bummer, but it didn’t damper the fun.

Once on land, we quickly started checking out the sights. We visited the a Zen Buddhist temple, a shrine (I still don’t understand the difference as they look the same to me) museums and gardens. The peacefulness and tranquility of these was a fabulous change from the hectic travel of just getting there. At night, we went to Higashi Nakasu, a neighborhood in the city famous for its restaurants and clubs. Most of the clubs we found were the type for men. Lots of bar girls there to keep them company. Not necessarily bad girls, not strip clubs, just their culture that men are more likely to stay and buy drinks if there’s a friendly, pretty girl to keep them company.  We saw hundreds, dressed as graceful geishas, or glamorous gals or just plain cutesy.

Then we went shopping. I have yet to find a “mall” in Korea, but Fukuoka’s Canal City mall was fabulous. My favorite was the houseware/cooking store that offered cooking classes.

These two cuties were in the middle of their lesson. It apparently turned out pretty good as they wasted no time in cleaning their bowls.

We spent a lot of time shopping at the mall. MyeongHee bought several tops for herself. Reminded me of home to be in one large mall again. The prices were ridiculous, but what the hell. She makes her own money.

We also spent some time at Ohira park. We rode a paddleboat around what once was a part of the bay but was closed off nearly a hundred years ago. The pond was modeled after China’s West Lake in Houngzhou, which Marco Polo made famous in his travels. I thought there was some similarity from my visit there in 2004.

Although we were only there 3 days and two nights, we had a good time but were more than ready to come home. Neither of us speaks or reads Japanese and we found only a smattering of folks who spoke either English or Korean. It was sometimes difficult just to get around in the buses and taxis. Most people assumed MyeongHee to be Japanese and spoke to her in their language. She learned from last year’s trip to Beijing that a useful phrase to learn was “I am Korean” and she spoke that often. She did know a few words and phrases and she had a J/K phrase book with her that helped. Still, the difficulty of a language that shares nothing with either of ours was tiring.  I learned Korean well enough that I can read quite a bit and get around. It was frustrating not to be able to read street signs or place names and understand where we were. The bright side was that people were exceedingly friendly and helpful, even if they couldn’t speak either of our languages

Then there was the exchange rate to deal with. I still think in terms of dollars, which run about 1000 Korean won per dollar. Japanese Yen are about 100 to the dollar and more than once the number of zeros on a price made me think twice before buying. An ATM mistake cost me about $20 in exchange fees when I withdrew 10X more than I needed and had to change in back in Korea. Oh well.

We had fun but we resolved to go elsewhere next time we travel. Hopefully, that will be to America next year for Teri’s college graduation.

I made a short video of the highlights of the trip. Check it out and tell me what you think.

I like going just to look at all the strange things in the open markets. Going to a regular grocery store or department store is old and busted. I could have done that back home. Here in the open markets, who knows what you’ll find. Most veggies I can’t identify, some I don’t want to. SaTang likes going because there are several food vendors that sell ready-to-eat things like stuffed fried peppers, fish ham sticks and myriad other things. There’s always scraps on the ground for her to scarf up. Women’s clothes, particularly the t-shirts cast out by western clothes vendors, can be found as can children’s clothes. Household goods, fresh fish, chicken and pork, fruit, live animals of the pet variety – almost anything is here.

Yesterday at the market, I bought SaTang a gut pile – a mess (literally) of steamed liver, intestines, esophagus and whatever else Koreans keep and eat from pigs and cattle. She didn’t waste time in picking through it.

But aside from all the things in the market, what amazes me most is that they’re always crowded with people. In the Seoul market of NamDaeMun, it was just a Thursday, not a holiday. A work day. But it was wall-to-wall. Or rather stall-to-stall.  The Busan market of NamPoDong we visited on a Sunday and it was just a crowded with people.

Below is a short clip of the Korean markets that seem to go on for blocks and blocks. They fascinate me.

On Sunday we went down to Busan to do a little shopping. We could have driven all the way, but instead decided to save some gas and take the subway from the northern end of the line down to the coast. We didn’t save any time or money, but we got some entertainment along the way.

Along with all the billboard ads in the stations and on the trains themselves, there were several roving sales people hawking their wares. They’d stop in a car, bark their sales pitches for a few minutes and then move to the next car. At least I can turn away from the billboards if I’m not interested but some of these guys were obnoxiously loud. I guess you’d have to be to be heard over the din of everyone’s conversations and the noise of the train. Several of them were annoying, making it difficult to even have a conversation with MyeongHee right beside me. At least one, though, put a smile on my face. He was selling veggie slicers. Not for the kitchen, but to place cucumber slices on your face. Nothing like demonstrations to make one understand.  Sliced very thinly, he could slap them right on his face. And he did.

We giggled, but didn’t buy. Neither did anyone else in our car.

One the way back home, a nearly toothless old man walked up and down the car screeching about something. MyeongHee couldn’t even understand him. He looked right at several people, including me, and rambled on and on. Some smiled at this obviously senile old dude (not to his face, of course) but no one told him to sit, no one told him to shut up. Annoying but harmless. Old people are held in respect in Asia, even crazy ones. I can’t help but think that in the west he might not have fared so well; someone would have forced him to move on, shut up or both.

Nothing like public transportation to bring out the fun ones.

We got our second air-conditioner (they call them air con here) installed late last week. We had one in the bedroom, which made for good sleeping, but the livingroom and kitchen gets pretty intolerable in the summer heat, especially if there’s any cooking going on. MyeongHee bought a small split unit a few weeks ago when it started to get hot and they just recently were able to schedule delivery and installation.

A split unit is one with the fan, controls and vents on the inside while the compressor and heat exchangers are somewhere else, usually on the balcony. Below is the wall unit, mounted just above the door to the bedroom.

The wall unit has to have a couple of hoses and a cable go to the outside compressor unit. Another hose from it is the condensation line which drips any water that forms. They ran the cold/return air hoses and control cable across the kitchen wall and over the cabinets to the back balcony.Clunky, but not too terrible. Yet.

I figured they would drill a hole and run the lines through the wall to the outside patio. Nope. That’s too hard. Instead, they went in behind the cabinet and ripped up the stove vent and stuffed it into that. Now the hoses come out nice and neat on the outside, but I need to wrap and reinsulate around the stove vent/aircon hoses. Come winter, that’s going to be a helluva draft. They boogered that up real well.

The condensation line is another story. Rather than properly plumb that line (like I really expected more at this point?) they slapped on some flex hose, dangled it behind the fridge and drilled a small hole in the door.Then they inserted a small bit of copper tubing through the door. Not sure what will happen to the water that pools around the cooper tubing, but I’m sure that electrical tape is waterproof, too. Uh huh.

Then to make it “official” they put more electrical tape around the flex hose and copper tubing. Another lame wrap job on the outside to snake more flex hose towards the drain and they’re done.

This one on the outside of the door is a real bang-up job. I’m sure that tape will last a lifetime. I guess I forgot to ask them what the warranty was on the install job.

Not surprisingly, this isn’t very different from the way they build their hoses here. An American inspector would have a field day with Korean contractors.

Screw it. It’s cool in the house now.

One never knows what one might find at the open market.

The market happens about every 5th day and is just around the corner from my apartment. It’s amazing what’s there sometimes. SaTang wasn’t quite sure what to think of these chicks. They didn’t seem to care one way or the other. That’s the same reaction I usually got.

They don’t teach it. Period. Mirrors are all you need in your car, so you never need to check to see if there’s a car next to you before you change lanes.

That might explain why Korean drivers are so accident prone and I spend a good deal of driving time A) acting defensively and B) shouting at them when they encroach into my lane. It happens a lot. They drive as if they are shopping al Wal-Mart and go from one side of the aisle to another for whatever they’re interested in. A two-ton car isn’t nearly the same as a shopping cart. Actually, they’re worse at the store and you actually have to ram their cart to get them out of the way.

The past two days I’ve been driving with MyeongHee. We go to her shop in the morning and I drive back by myself. Next week, she wants to drive herself and just keep the car all day. Works for me, except I’m worried. She doesn’t look in her blind spot when she changes lanes. I gently tried to explain that mirrors don’t show all around your car, but she explained that her driving school doesn’t teach to look over your shoulder so it must be OK. When I explained further the field of view the mirrors provided and even drew a few diagrams, that wasn’t enough. I then had her drive up next to some parked cars and tell me when she could see them in her mirror. Ok, she finally acknowledged that mirrors don’t show it all, but explained she’s just a beginner and she’d learn to do that head-turn later, its too difficult now.

Maybe I’m being overprotective and overbearing, but I try to always look in my blind spot and am sometimes surprised that there really was someone there. I harangued her until she promised she would do the blind-spot check. Am I being a back-seat driver, or doing her (and I) a favor by trying to prevent an accident?

We’ve what? Got no Engrish? I’ve been all around this new construction site and I can’t figure out what it is “We’ve.”   Sometimes, the English employed by the Koreans is humorous, either in its misspellings or poor grammar. This one has neither of those maladies per se, but its puzzling. The Korean lettering next to the English is merely the construction company name, DooSan. They may as well have just written WTF. Any ideas what “We’ve?” Please clue me in.

After 23 years as an adult of driving age (19 is legal. You do the math), MyeongHee can now finally drive a car. Yesterday, she passed her final test and has obtained her license. Almost four weeks of getting up early and driving across town to the driving school is over. No small cost, either, as this little endeavor cost close to $1000 to achieve.

Rarely am I surprised anymore about how different things are done in Korea relative to America. Some are strange, some are, in my opinion, quite better here. Others, well, just different. A pattern has begun to emerge for me, though. It seems that when style matters, nothing is left to chance and no holds barred. When they go hiking here, they dress up in high-tech, fashionable sports wear as if heading out for a multi-day hike in the wilderness when really they’re walking up a well-worn wide path, usually a road or stairs. When they go road or mountain biking, all of their biking gear must match, from the shoes to the helmet.

Wedding photos follow the same rules. It’s all about how you look. The pictures are not of the wedding itself, but a modeling session on par with the best fashion mags of the day. Sometimes, they are done before the wedding day. In our case, we did ours nearly two months after. That was best we could schedule. It wasn’t until later I learned why.

Yesterday we were both subject and subjected to the wedding photo ordeal. We started at 10:30 a.m. and we were whisked into the dressing room to prepare. MyeongHee had two, sometimes three girls prepping her makeup and hair and clothes. I had a girl or two on me as well, although my makeup was significantly less.

I have to admit, it was a little fun to be pampered and taken care of. Being a guy, its rare to get the treatment most women get regularly when they go for the whole beauty treatment spa. MyeongHee doesn’t get that treatment herself much either. Being a hairsalon owner, she’s usually doing the hairdo rather than getting. It was fun and cute  – at first.

A little fun, however, turned into an interminable wait as more and more layers of makeup, touch-up and fine details were fixed on MyeongHee. The split mirrors made a nice frame for her face. I amused myself taking pictures of the transformation process. She was not amused. She’ll likely kick my ass when she sees I’ve posted this. I’ll calm her down when I tell her the other, worse pictures remained on my hard drive, to be kept in reserve for a rainy day when we need a laugh.

Part way through, she developed the Texas big hair style. Not knowing what the end result would be, I kept snapping away.

After my own, minimal coiffing and makeup, (Yes, I’m wearing lip-gloss) I emerged with a suave 007 look.

After what seemed like days later, MyeongHee emerged a queen. She was radiant. I think she’s a beautiful lady anyway – of course I do – I married her, for heaven’s sake. But I was completely stunned with the job those girls did with her makeup, hair and dresses. Yes, dresses. Plural. Multiple wedding gowns, multiple evening gowns, and multiple hair-dos.

Above is just my cheap (relatively speaking) Olympus camera photo. Its the best that I took, but I stopped trying to take photos of her or I. I focussed on the process and not the end result. The studio was complete with professional lighting, props and backdrops. None of that church background or occasional stray guest popping into the photos. Every one of the hundreds of shots was carefully lighted and choreographed.

MyeongHee’s friends came to the studio to help share the day. UnZung, dressed in a pink hanbok gown. They helped dispel the boredom of waiting out the set changes, new hair styles and dresses. But at various times throughout the day, they succumbed to the waiting and boredom. I likely would have napped as well, but in the set in the above picture I found some English-language books and contented myself with some light reading.

I can never remember this one’s name. It’s common in Korea for a woman MyeongHee’s age to just call a woman older than herself “Oni” which means “older sister.” I only know her as Oni. She crashed on the sofas a couple of times.

UnZung Oni had her own little nap in a chair

Half-way through the day, we stopped and had food delivered to the studio for lunch. It was a much needed break from the bright, hot lights and constant smiling. MyeongHee relaxes with a sample of poses in a dressing gown while the cameraman and his helpers setup for the next shots.

All told, it was a grueling NINE hours of dressing, makeup, photos and smiling for the camera. I was led to believe it was going to be closer to 3-4 hours. We finished at 7:30 p.m. Given that we took up the whole studio for a day, its no wonder the waiting list is so long. Nearly my entire Sunday was spent in a studio. Afterward, we all went out for some kalbi and beer. By the time we got home at 10pm, I was exhausted. I fell into bed and read a couple of pages of some books I’m reading and promptly fell asleep.

I have to admit there are some advantages to doing wedding photos this way. We weren’t limited to just the single tux and gown a couple might wear for their big day. MyeongHee was able to try many dresses and hairstyles and the pictures will be well lit, fabulously posed and, I’m sure, gorgeous! In addition, the stress of having all the pictures done on the “big day” was gone. Moreover, there was no making the guests wait while the bride and groom posed in all their finery. Of course, that still happens in a real Korean wedding, but to a far lesser extent, and includes all the family and friends not at the studio.

We likely won’t get the real photos for a couple of months, and I’ll post what I can when they do come.

Yesterday was a great birthday. After I went to school, I got a few cards and small gifts from the kids. They’re so sweet!  Then we had a nice steak dinner at home – a rarity with the prices for Korean beef.

Today, I got out and put some miles on the new bike. I let SaTang run alongside me for a while but she could only manage a mile or so. We went around the neighborhood  a few times and then she pooped out and wouldn’t budge from the park across the street. At least not until I said she could go home, and then she promptly got up and trotted off to the apartment. I merely let her inside the stairwell and then went off for a long hard ride. When I came back, all sweaty and deliciously tired, she was waiting faithfully at the bottom of the stairs for me. I went back upstairs to shower and gert ready for work and she crashed. She’s been been sacked out on the sofa ever since.

I rode quite a bit back in Texas the last year or so I was there. I haven’t ridden like that since. It might take a bit to work up to that level. Today was good, but it ain’t Texas – flat and lacking good hills. Here it’s just the opposite. Hopefully, it won’t be long before I work off some of this gut I’ve acquired eating the good food my wife makes for me. (It’s HER fault! Yeah, that’s it!)

My daughters called me early and started my birthday off before I even got out of bed. That’s a great way to wake up. Then after dropping MyeongHee off at work I decided to splurge on something I’ve been wanting for a while. I went and bought a new bike for myself today. The old one was way worn out when I found it but stolen (in broad daylight!) a few months back.  I’ve been wanting a new one just to keep the fat off. I’ve put on a few pounds of belly lard since winter and its time to get busy. And, since I wasn’t paying the health club anymore, I reappropriated the money bought the bike. I only took a short ride today, but SaTang was right along side me, running  like an Indy pace car. She’s a mixed breed, but has some terrier of some sort in her and I suspect she’ll do just fine on a long run. Antje’s dog, Jenna, was famous for making long runs right along side her, too. In some ways, SaTang reminds me of Jenna, and she has the same frisky stamina. Tomorrow, I hope to get out a get a few miles on the new hardware and check out the dog as well.

Tonight, its steak dinner. I can’t wait for the US beef to start getting shipped in. Despite the protests that still rock the capital, shipping of US beef has begun. I hope it comes soon. I paid $24 for a couple of small strips of Korean beef. I’ll cook them on my little portable charcoal grill. Yum!

I’m off to school now, where I know lots of the kids wil have cards and small gifts for me. Korean kids are very sweet when it comes to teachers birthdays and such.  More on that later after work.

Who cares if we had to wait until the 5th, a Saturday, to celebrate our holiday. We had one just the same. I joined a bunch of foreigner friends here for a beach picnic on the coast on Saturday. We had lots of bbq meats, including fish, ribs, steak, sausage and salad, and of course, lots of drinks.

From the left are Morgan (Maine), Nicola (UK) and Murray (Arkansas). We were the first to arrive and set up on the public tables at the beach. Notice the “table” style; no bench seats, just a flat surface. Koreans are used to sitting on the floor. So too, will they sit on these raised platforms around their grills. We put ours in the sand and ate standing up, foreigner-style. Sometimes, they don’t quite know what to think of us.

As usual, SaTang had a great time chasing the ball and making friends with everyone. Again, the Koreans broke out their cameras to take pictures of a dog that does more than yap. I had fun watching her try to shake the sand out of her mouth everytime she chased the tennis ball.

More friends, From left David (UK), Matty (UK), Ray in the red cap (South Africa), Dave (Canada) and Kim (Korea)

Caroline (Canada) and Jennifer and Leanne (Scotland).

Its always interesting to hang out with people from so many different places around the world. Hearing the different accents, stories as to why they came to Korea, what they like, don’t like and always, what we find funny about Korea.

At times throughout the day, the fog rolled in making the whole beach seem eerie.  I took this photo of the beach when visibility was down to just a couple hundred meters.

Being kind and generous foreigners in our host country doesn’t always net kind and generous in return. This old guy who came around to talk spoke no English at all and what few of us understand Korean could only grasp a little. We suspected most Koreans probably couldn’t understand him either and we learned that once we offered him some of our drinks his true nature emerged – that of beach lush. He hung on me for a while and I had to shake him loose onto one of the tables.  Shortly thereafter, he pounced on Caroline. After we wrestled him off, he tried to blame it on her, saying she was too beautiful. I’m not sure what his deal with me was.

We ran him off quick after that, earning a huge WTF from Nicola.

Despite the old drunk dude, we had a great time. We ate, we drank, we played soccer. I came home with a trophy, too. While playing around with the ball, my face collided with David’s foot and my lip bled for the better part of an hour. No problem – scars are just tattoos with better stories.

The only real bummer was that MyeongHee didn’t come; She wanted to go to work. Still, it was good to get out and speak English for a day.

Dammit! Yet a seventh speeding ticket arrived in the mail today.  Woo frickin’ hoo!  Happy damn 4th of July and hooray for technology.

The good news I recently learned is that multiple speeding tickets don’t do anything but cost money. Other things like running red lights and such will earn you points. Earn enough points, I suppose, and you win a trip on the Wheel of Torture, a grueling 5 km ride of being pulled through the backwoods chained to the rear bumber of a Korean mini-bubble car.

This one was photographed last week, before the big haul of 5 in one day (That was a banner day here in my house, let me tell you.) It just arrived in the mail today, so its not like I haven’t been electronically spanked enough and am still driving fast. I’ve been driving like a Grandma this past week. Enough, already! I give! Uncle!

Apparently, they’re just going to keep rolling in. I got another little love letter in the mail today from the Korean police in the form of a speeding ticket. That’s six in less than two weeks.

I’m going to quit driving. I’ll just let MyeongHee drive everywhere. She should be driving soon. Today she took her written test and passed with a score of 90% correct.

I got a speeding ticket last week. In truth, I got FIVE speeding tickets last week.  Three of them in one day, one the following day and the last on another. You’d think after getting one, I might be chastened and slow down. But no, there was no flashing lights, no stern policeman to lecture me, no weedling or whining, no “yes sir, no sir” that has served me well in America. (My girls saw that – in the black BMW I got stopped multiple times but drove off with only warnings and an incredulous “you’re so lucky, Dad.”)

All five tickets were electronically produced from cameras high above the roadway. They snapped a picture of the car and the license plate along with the computer stats of where, when and how fast I was going. All computerized radar, photo id and address determination. I’m betting that no human hands touched the notices until someone put them in the outbound mailbox and someone else dropped them in mine.  I’ve always been a  fan of technology, but in this case a real human chasing me down with lights a-flashing would have induced that little adrenaline rush and the post ticket caution that might have lasted the rest of the trip, perhaps even a day or two. Instead, I got all the tickets in the mail and could only be more careful on the next drive.

So, we went out today, along the same path as two of the tickets, but today armed with foreknowledge of what I was up against. And, as expected, I saw the cameras perched along the roadway, waiting like hungry vultures for another victim. I also watched as every other car on the road near there slowed to exactly the speed limit and then sped back up again after passing the cameras. Well, I can’t polite my way out of these tickets, but I can be like the rest of the romans here drive as they do, slowing down only for the cameras.

My worldmap of visitors was recently reset after a year of collecting dots. No big deal, it’s to prevent the thing from becoming a big red smear if it goes on for too long. All the data is still there, just not displayed. I could go through the trouble of adding a second map with last year’s numbers, but it just isn’t worth it.

Still, it looks as if I have just a few visitors. Sniff.

MyeongHee started driving school today. In order to get a license in Korea, one must attend driver education. She’s never driven a car, which is a testament to the public transportation system in Korea. But, having recently bought the new car, she’s now motivated to learn.  We went down on Friday to sign her up and she plunked down around $500 for a month-long class of 2-4 hours daily.  Today, classes began and we left the house early at the ungodly hour of 7:50am. I’ve gotten used to a more leisurely pace and have been taking her to work at around 9:30 or 10 everyday. The traffic isn’t too bad then, but early mornings are wicked bad.

Above is their training course. God only knows what they teach in this class, for Koreans are among the worst drivers imaginable. For a long time, I thought I might be exaggerating that. My own experience is limited to just 14 countries, but my fears were well founded. Recent news proves it.  It could just be that the training course has room for only one car and they are on it alone. That would explain the Korean mentality of driving, which, from my perspective, is to A) turn/change lanes/pull into traffic because no one else could possibly be there and then B) look to see who’s honking. A full-up dashboard/steering wheel in front of a computer graphics simulation of a crowded roadway full of idiots might be a more realistic training course.

When she finally takes the wheel and drives off to work on her own, I’ll be as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Or Delusions of Grandeur?

There’s a couple of these signs along Highway 1 in Korea. This particular one is just outside the north loop of Daegu. I can’t decide if the road department is overly optimistic or deluded, but for Highway 1 to be the “Asian” highway seems more than just a bit of a stretch.

In case you’re seriously geographically challenged, Japan is about 200 miles away from the Korean peninsula across the Pacific Ocean. There ain’t no highway that would connect Japan with any part of Korea. And, if you’re politically challenged, South Korea is, for all practical purposes, an island. There are no roads that one can travel from Korean to China without going across North Korea. Although there are roads, folks just don’t get to drive through the place at will. The North Koreans get a little testy if you try.

In my estimation, therefore, Highway 1 is merely the South Korean highway. But it did give me a chuckle to witness their wishful thinking.

I just don’t know what to think of this. It is information? Advertisement? Or a Warning?

If whoever they are picking up really are D.O.A then why would they need EMTs, as the back window says? There’s no emergency anymore. Wouldn’t they just need a guy with a gurney and sheet? And if whoever they are picking up isn’t D.O.A, then why would they print it in bold letters on the side? Hurry get out of the way before they become D.O.A?

Words fail me. But damn little surprises me here in Korea anymore, especially when there’s English involved.

This time, a very informal one. MyeongHee’s hair-shop friends, a gaggle of women who gather, gossip and snack at her hair shop came over over today. We’ve talked about having another housewarming for her friends, but just talk. Today, they all came to pick MyeongHee up on their way to Pohang to pick raspberries. They dropped off this pyramid of toilet paper.

This is a very traditional Korean housewarming gift. No, it isn’t because we crap a lot or need to wipe our booties or noses more than usual. The toilet paper, with its endlessly long spool of paper, represents long life, long happiness and everything else good that one would want to last a long time.

Judging from the pile of paper we have now, we’ll have lots of happiness. We’ll also have paper for many many months.

Although quite a bit different from gifts westerners might buy for housewarming, TP is certainly useful. Koreans use toilet paper for dinner napkins, too.  We have a spool just next to our table and dish rack.

You know the rest…come flowers. Lots of flowers. Summers here in Korea don’t get serious until later in July. For now its either warm days and cool nights or rain and with it lots of color.

This is a tropical water lily from my own water garden on the veranda. It only blooms in the morning and afternoon and then closes up for the night. I took this shot with a 0.5 magnifying lens as the flower is just slightly larger than a silver dollar.

This is along the river bank of the Taewha River. The city peppered the place with zillions of wild flowers. Butterflies are everywhere.

This patch of beauty is also along the river bank. I have no idea what these flowers are, but their petals are delicate and resemble paper. The black centers make a beautiful contrast to the red. While most of these are red, we found a few  sporting white or even pink colors. They make perfect hair adornments for my lovely wife.

This didn’t last long. Apparently, only “wild and crazy” Korean girls wear flowers in their hair. She quickly took this flower off after I took the picture before any other Koreans could spot her and start throwing stones…or whatever is it that Koreans do with women labeled as “wild and crazy.”

Also along the river is an extensive bamboo forest. This is considered one of Ulsan’s twelve scenic areas. There’s a  great walking/running/biking trail that goes through and around the forest. Despite the fact that the river runs through the center of the city, the forest provides quite a bit of quiet and calm. Once inside, it feels cool, dark and and very “jungle-y.” For those interested in trivia, bamboo isn’t really a tree. It’s a species grass, albeit a very large one.

Is this a bleeding heart? In the middle of the forest floor was this delicate little flower, all alone, perhaps the size of a dime.

After an afternoon spent along the river walk, we headed home. We needed a nap. Just after dinner, the rains came again, this time accompanied by lots of thunder and lightening. Today, its clear and sunny, but that won’t last. It’s supposed to cloud up and rain mid week and stay that way for a while.

And you gotta do what you gotta do. SaTang is trained to go outside and if it’s raining all day like it has been for the past three days, well, you gotta make do. No quick trips out in the backyard for us. We have to walk across the street to the park. So, we got her a raincoat

The beef thing just keeps on giving. The past few days there have been enormous protests in Seoul over the US beef deal. Not much going on here in backwater Ulsan, but the capital is awash in ludicrous behavior. Thousands of people have swarmed into the streets to protest against the government for agreeing to import American beef. Why? Mad Cow and the possibility that one might get a fatal disease.

Here’s just one snippet of video from the recent protest in Seoul. Looks like fun – if you’re into pain.

And don’t forget – all of this despite the fact that NO Americans and NO Koreans have EVER died from Crutzfeld-Jacobs, the human form of Mad Cow. The incredible ignorance displayed by the protesting Koreans is stupefying.

But there might be a plausible explanation for all of this madness (pardon the pun.) A recent test of Asian countries using the International English Language Testing System found that Korea ranks 19th of 20 countries in English language ability. Were these ignorant masses able to read English better, they might actually get the facts about how safe American beef is and what hogwash the Korean news media keeps running about how unsafe it is.

Now, where’s my hamburger?

in case  you’ve gotten on the blog in the past day or two or three, you might have gotten a blank screen. I got hacked. Not sure it happened, but I noticed on Tuesday morning. Took me most of my spare time to track it down and fix it. My Korea blog is ok. Two other blogs are dead in the water. I might just let them stay there and start over.

With oil hovering around $132 per barrel, the price here at the pump is getting nasty, too. Today I saw two gas stations offering unleaded at 1899 won per liter. That translates into roughly $7.20 per gallon.  As many long time readers here well know, there aren’t many American things (other than the food) I miss here in Korea. The price of gasoline has become one of them. I’m sure most Americans abhor the nearly $4 per gallon cost they, but I’d trade it for mine in a heartbeat.

I saw this lovely t-shirt at the open market today. In case you can’t read it, it says:

Hello!! Mouse In your careers you will meat many people. All are significant. They desaeve your allantion

Doubtless, some Korean will buy it, not know what the hell it says or why. Almost everyday I see a Korean in some t-shirt that was either, like this one, poorly produced or a cast off from a western event/concert/sale that never sold.

When I first came to Korea, I was fairly non-materialistic. It was hard to justify buying anything non-consumable that wasn’t going to make the eventual trip back home. Even simple things like house plants were left alone.

These days, I guess I’m feeling more entrenched and less transient. Last year, we bought the big TV (better for my old-ass eyes, I reasoned) and a few weeks ago, we got a new car (the old one was really getting flaky.) But now I’m finding myself doing the simple domestic things that make a house a home.

For years I’ve had a fetish about water gardens. I built my first one in 1995 and have made several since. I’ve got another one now. It’s not the same being on the 4th floor where no access to dirt makes it an above-ground thing, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be beautiful and enchanting. Somehow, the sounds of water is soothing and MyeongHee and I both enjoy sitting near the new pond, watching the small fish and listening to the water music.

As with all of my water creations, they are a work in progress. Plants grow, die, get replaced and the falling water is altered to make new music. While this one has only a small fountain in the center, my eventual plans are for a cascading waterfall of pottery jars. I’ll also have some clingy, gangly plants that will hang over the side to obscure the basin for a more natural look. For now, we think it looks great. MyeongHee thinks I’m a genius. She’s right, of course. 🙂 Stay tuned.

My Zang-Mo-Nim, Korean for mother-in-law, left yesterday afternoon. She’d spent the weekend here, partially for a visit and partially to watch the dog while we went to Seoul for the marriage. It was like having a built in personal servant cum slave. She cooked, she cleaned, she organized, she ran errands. Definitely an old-style Korean woman. Few American women would  do the amount of work she’d done  without complaining one iota. I could barely stir my morning coffee with sugar and  milk and she’d have the spoon washed and put up.  That’s no exaggeration. She cleaned  and organized our refrigerator and it took me a while after she left to find all my western food like cheese and bacon and sliced turkey. She likely had no idea what they even were since none of them had any Korean writing on them. Today, as I got dressed I noticed my underwear drawer and sock drawer had been all organized and everything neatly folded.

I asked MyeongHee if her mother was bored and she said no, that’s just her style. She lives to care for others. She left for the oldest son’s home on Sunday and he’ll get the same treatment. That’s just her way of going through life- caring for her children, no matter their age or stage in life.

Now, if we had enough room to have her stay here without crowding out MyeongHee’s son and afford us our newlywed privacy, life would be even grander.

May23rd, 2008, MyeongHee Kim and Martin J. Rehder were married.

I had brought my video camera hoping to catch some of the ceremony, but there wasn’t one. Not a hand was raised in oath, no vow was uttered nor a ring exchanged.  No one asked if either she or I would take this man or woman to have and to hold until death do we part. The Korean marriage is a civil service and it encompassed all the love and warmth of getting a driver’s license renewed. We didn’t even get a smile from the two ladies who handled the paperwork, except when they knocked over a small desktop calendar in passing paper back and forth.  Often, people in Korea have a ceremony with all the guests, cake, dress and so on, but they still must undergo the official bureaucratic nightmare to make it official.

Ours, in fact, was doubly bureaucratic as we had to jump hurdles for the American government and the Korean government in order for it to be recognized in both countries. A vital concern for when we come home to US one day. The US Embassy in Seoul was better than I expected and the Vice Consul was especially pleasant. Standard red-tape existed, meters of it, in fact, but at least they were pleasant.

I was very surprised at the Korean side of red-tape. As a grown woman of 42, MyeongHee must still get “permission” to wed. Apparently, women are not allowed to make those kinds of decisions alone. She needed to have her older brother (now the official head of the family after her father passed away in 2005) and her mother (evidently unable to approve alone.)  Well, we didn’t know that part so didn’t obtain their approvals before going. But we didn’t need to turn back home in order to get them. Koreans don’t sign anything – they use stamps with their names engraved in them. So, no problem, we went across the street from the city office and had a stamp made. Viola! Both brother and mother now “approve.”

After the red tape was completed, I signed my part and she stamped hers, we decided to see a little of Seoul. Just outside the heavily defended US Embassy there were plenty of people passing out fliers on the “dangers” of American beef and how Koreans should not only avoid it but impeach their president for trying to get it in country. I crumpled up several fliers handed to me and tossed them back. One old man tried to force another flier on us and got his hands spanked for it. Some fist shaking and middle finger waving later on and we were shopping the open markets. For a non-holiday workday it was amazing how many people were there. Throng isn’t the right word, horde doesn’t come close, but perhaps cloud or swarm might suffice.  Whether its shoes, clothes, bags, cooking utensils, meat, veggies or prepared food, its all there. Cheap, too. I found a pair of sandals and MyeongHee found a nice lace dress. She also picked up a blouse for her mother who is here for the weekend.

We started our day early to fly to Seoul so we made a quick exit and left the city around 2:30 by train. We were home by 8pm but too bushed to even properly celebrate our wedding night. Maybe after the mother-in-law leaves.

well, not the chapel. But the US Embassy, the Seoul ward office and then the embassy again. All for the purpose of getting officially married, although we’ve  been living as if we were since February. Tomorrow, May 23rd, it will be official. We’ll fly to Seoul early in the morning and hit all the offices we need and then take a slow bus back home. Planes are fine, but their schedules are limited. Buses, meanwhile, run constantly and we can hop on one once we’re finished.

I’m bringing the video camera, so I’ll try to have some video of whatever ceremony a local ward office performs.

Ta ta for now.

It’s gotten really strange now. Today there was a van cruising through the neighborhood blaring its loudspeakers, exhorting residents to press the government to prohibit American beef. It’s still all about mad-cow, but where’s the beef? There isn’t any, as far as I can tell from the news I’m able to read here. Do any of my American readers know any different? And the big scare with mad-cow is that one might catch Crutzsfeld-Jacobs disease and die. Again, where’s the beef? The odds of that are damn slim – only one poor guy in England died of the disease.

One would think that Koreans would have more to worry about than American beef. For example, their economy slipped from 11th (based on GDP) to 13th. Or that there’s a bigger scare of bird flu in the northern and eastern sections of the country. Or that they pay me damn good money to teach their kids English, but outside the walls of the school damn few of them practice it and therefore still can’t carry on a decent conversation.

Yesterday we got a new car. Only new to us since it’s second-hand. But its a very clean, low-mileage car that we got on the cheap. We got a 2001 Hyundai Avante XD. It has only 60,000km (about 37K miles) which is quite low for a seven year old car. Engine size is the same, but newer technology and thus better kpd. I wanted to get something really small and fuel efficient like a Matiz, but they are so underpowered I couldn’t imagine getting a car load of friends and climbing gear *and* my big ass up a mountain. Plus it’s standard transmission.

The old car, a ’94 Elantra, still ran well, but was getting old and making occasional embarrassing noises. It was also a 5-speed and MyeongHee wants to learn how to drive. I tried teaching her, and she did very well, but switching gears was just a distraction she didn’t need. The big learning curve is learning how to avoid an accident in Korean traffic.

However, defensive driving skills alone aren’t the only methods of accident prevention in Korea. Last night I learned of a new one. I have no idea if it works, but I guess that will come in time. Many Koreans hold a new car ceremony when a new vehicle is purchased. They toast with makoli, a milky rice-wine, some fresh fruit and then bow deeply to their new vehicle in the hopes that their show of respect translates into the car avoiding accidents. We didn’t do that. We’re far to cosmopolitan and intelligent to think that bowing to an inanimate object will prevent accidents. Instead, we went out to a 4-way intersection and stopped in the middle. Then MyeongHee placed one raw egg behind each of the four tires. We backed up over the eggs making a nice mess. This is done, I’m guessing, to offer the breaking of eggs rather than any breaking of the car. I went along with it, in part, to learn Korean customs but also to make the missus happy. For the record, she thinks its a little silly, too, but customs are customs.

This is the new car:

This is the old, retired car:

And it’s already sold. I placed ads yesterday and went to one of the local foreigner bars. The first guy who saw the ought bought it.

One other thing…you might wonder why both cars are white. I’d estimate that 90% of the cars here are either white, black or gray. They aren’t for flashy cars here much. You don’t see many bright colors on the road. Asian culture does not emphasize individuality. Group or team togetherness is more important. So, a color that most will agree on is best.

This past Monday was Buddha’s Birthday, so we had a 3-day weekend to enjoy. We decided to go to GeoJeDo, an island just south of the main Korean peninsula. Had I realized it was both so beautiful and accessible, I’d have gone there long ago.

We left on Sunday morning and drove the long way around, past Busan and Masan in the west and around to TongYeong, a city on the island accessible via a series of bridges. We spent two fabulous days driving around a looking at the wonderful seascapes, flowers and mountains. Coming home, we took the ferry for a short 40 minute boat ride back to the mainland.

I made a short photo gallery of the trip, which can be viewed here. I also took a few short video clips of my and my gal. Check that out below.

Three-day weekends should come more often.

Korea is a very outwardly conservative place. Bikinis are not the norm. Neither are a lot of the revealing, sexy or clingy types of clothes. Even the panties are conservative. Being a good, old, red-blooded American male, I like a few sexy things on my woman. I’ve always been a fan of thong panties but women here don’t wear them. I’ve never even seen them in a store, magazine or catalog here, although they all know what they are and even call them that – thong panties – no translation required.

MyeongHee was interested in them (at my urgings, of course) but too ashamed to ask for them in a lingerie store in case they might be hidden somewhere. So, when I was in America back in February of this year, I made it a point to stop in at Victoria’s Secret and pick up a few pairs for her. Nothing terribly outrageous or see-thru, just some cute panties.

When I came back, she wore a single pair once but complained that they were uncomfortable.  I figured she can’t get used to the thong in her booty.

In doing some laundry the other day, I pulled out one of the pairs I’d purchased for her but she’d never worn. Just a nice little black and pink polka-dot thong with a bow on the back on the whale tail. I told her how sexy she’d look in them. So, she tried on a second pair and went to work. Last night when she came home she complained again at how uncomfortable they were and how they bugged her all day.

Without revealing too much about our private lives, I have to say I didn’t watch her get dressed or undressed. She’s modest and doesn’t like to show off too much. I had only previously seen her behind from the outside of her slacks or with the lights off. In either case, things looked just fine to me.

But when she bent over after changing into some jeans I couldn’t see the cute  little bow on the whale tail. That’s when I discovered the great clash of the cultures. She’d been wearing the thongs backwards, thinking the wide part goes in the back. Same with the cute little bow, which are up front on all Korean panties.  Had she been less modest, I might have discovered this aberration sooner. But despite her discomfort, she’d worn the things backwards – twice, mind you. As a man, I can only imagine the discomfort involved as the little rear end of the panties was not nearly enough to cover her koochie up front.  Imagine, if you will, a clam attempting to consume, length-wise, a fish twice as long as its own shell. That’s a lot of squirming going on.

Having rectified that situation, she’s now happy and comfortable in her new thongs. I am, too. Now I’m off to check on Victoria’s Secret’s web site and see what their shipping costs to Korea are.   We have some catching up to do.

As promised, a short video of when I took my dog to Ulsan Grand Park on Children’s Day. Although not all the city’s residents and their offspring were there, it sure seemed like it.

My dog always draws a crowd. But as Peggy sez, it’s cuz Koreans think its funny that we foreigners play with our food.

Now the teachers are getting into act, posting malicious nasties about US beef and poisoning young minds. Somebody stop the madness.

I chanced upon this quote from an article in the Chosun Ilbo online newspaper.

I asked a broadcasting official why the TV channels have exaggerated the issue so much. “It would be appropriate to regard it as a skirmish,” replied the official. Asked what the main battles are, he cited “KBS restructuring, MBC privatization and broadcasting market opening.” The broadcasters are primarily interested in preventing these efforts, and are in effect confronting the Lee Myung-bak administration over them. “The television channels are flexing their muscles in front of the government,” he added. If these remarks are true, we’ll be seeing more uproars like the mad cow disease one.

So, it turns out, the broadcasters are using this issue to pommel the president, Lee Myung-bak, by trying to 86 his efforts in the free-trade agreements he and Bush discussed.

Another Choson Ilbo article asks questions as to where the rumors of beef perils spring from, and it appears it’s a much more highly organized thing than just ordinary people. The above quote seems to support the theory.

So, Lee Myung-Bak pissed off some broadcasters and because of that, I don’t get a freaking hamburger. The real news, however, is that South Korea has reported instances of Bird Flu in the past few weeks, so even chicken may be getting harder to find.

The Koreans are going completely ludicrous with regard to ongoing negotiations to being American beef into the country.

Rumors run rampant about the quality of American beef, ranging anywhere from notions of all imported beef contains Mad Cow disease to utter lies of people already having died from contracting human forms of the same disease after eating the beef. Last night the TV was reporting completely crazy things about how American cattle herds care contaminating beef stocks worldwide. I thought only Fox News was capable of reporting BS in order to please political parties, but apparently here in Korea that happens to. I listened to some of the “news” reports incredulously and wonder where in the hell they get their “facts.” They’re saying the Americans don’t eat old cows (the ones susceptable to Mad Cow) but export it when in fact nearly all cows slaughtered in the US are less than 24 months. They also have been saying that Koreans are genetically more susceptible to MCD. Complete bullshit.

Some idiot-ass Korean, somewhere, has even popularized the slogan:

“I’d rather swallow potassium cyanide than eat American beef”

They’re even holding candlelight vigils in the capital to reverse the agreements the president sought when he visited GW Bush last month.

Somebody, somewhere is profiting wildly from selling only Korean beef and is doing a damn good job of feeding BS to the Korean public. Korean beef is some of the most expensive beef on the planet. No small wonder they want to keep it that way.

Yesterday at the park was excellent. The weather was simply unbeatable with bright blue skies and a cool breeze. SaTang and I played fetch for a couple of hours, attracting hoards of kids watching and wanting to play with us.

We sat in the grass in the shade of a maple tree for hours. It wasn’t until we left that I realized I could never do that back home. Between the fire ants and chiggers I would have been eaten alive in Texas.  Here there are neither. I hope the bastard whose boat brought them to Texas from South America back in the 1950s is rotting in hell with a daily dose of millions of the little shits biting his ass.

I hope to post a short video of the park soon. It was crowded with scads of people all taking their kids out and SaTang loved showing off for them.

Today, May 5th, is Children’s Day her in Korea. Lots of gift giving for the little ones. Usually they get more or larger presents than for their birthdays. No school and many business are closed, so there’s lots of kids in the street and in the park. MyeongHee went to work this morning, so there’s no much for me to do. I’ll probably take the dog to Ulsan Grand Park and let her run a bit. She’s too well known here in our neighborhood. So much so, that when we go to the park across the street she’s swarmed with kids who know her and want to play. I don’t get a chance to even throw the ball as the kids all crowd me out. At the big park, she’s an unknown so the crowd isn’t quite so immediate. Once we start throwing the ball, though, we’ll get a crowd of Koreans who evidently think it strange and fantastic to play fetch with a dog.

At some point in the past few days, I’ve stopped receiving CNN  on my cable TV. The channel it was on is now showing some local Korean channel with a mix of news, shopping and human interest. Although that was one of the few English language channels on the tube here, I’m not terribly upset. I can always catch it on the internet. But then, these days, why would I want to?

It seems CNN has gotten the same disease as a number of US news conglomerates: entertainment-itis. The media centers have mistakenly lumped lumped the news sections of their companies under the banner of entertainment where the goal isn’t to inform but to capture eyeballs. Check the headlines on CNN lately? The big ‘news” it seems is 1) who gets the axe on American Idol, 2) how much a piece of prehistoric poop sold at auction for and 3) a rare John Lennon copyright fight. Big whoopdie-frickin-doo.

I think CNN has lots its way. I think losing CNN off the tube here is no big deal. I’m guessing that the Koreans in charge of determining what cable content makes it to everyone’s home think mostly the same thing – CNN isn’t really news. Its ‘entertainment’, although even that is debatable.

I started placing ads on this site back in the end of December. As of the end of April, I barely made a month’s cost of the server that hosts it. Most of that was made in the first month or so when I asked for people to click on ads. Since then, my revenue stream has dried up. I don’t blame you, the reader, as I almost never click on ads myself. I didn’t have terribly high hopes to make my millions by placing ads (unless you count in Won and not Dollars) so it’s just not a big deal. In fact, it was more of a hassle to make sure updates to the blog back-end software, scripts or my own changes didn’t disrupt the Google ad code I placed. In the end, it just isn’t worth it. Ergo, you now can view my blog ad-free. If I missed removing ads and some still exist, let me know.

Lately, there’s been some news regarding Lasik floating around. CNN had a story today on the horrors of the surgery itself, affecting perhaps 1% of those who undergo the procedure. I had no issues with my own surgery and for years everything was just fine. The last year or two, however, I’ve noticed some deterioration of my vision. I doubt it has anything to do with the surgery and it’s just another sign of aging. My eyes had continually gotten worse before Lasik, although sometimes quite slowly. That appears to be the case again; Just continued degradation.

I finally admitted that time was simply catching up to me and decided to act. I went and got a pair of glasses. I don’t need them indoors or watching TV, but driving was sometimes a problem, particularly when I had to read highway signs rapidly to find my way. I was getting awfully close to some street signs before deciding it was or wasn’t the right way to go. When I realized MyeongHee was reading signs a good 100  meters before I could I figured it would be better to admit my aging rather than stay in denial.

Since I live here in Korea, I’m limited to prevailing Korean eyeglass styles. I probably would not have chosen these back in the States, but here…what the hell. I may as well look like a Korean.

Total price for these glamorous specs? About $95, including examination. No insurance, no discounts, no appointment required and 20 minutes later I was examined and had them selected. One day later, I’m a four-eyes again. At least only occasionally.

Today my director told me how impressed she was with the 1st level kids in our early class. They are the beginners, the kids who come to learn English knowing little more than the alphabet, some not even that much. This latest class began just a month or two ago and she told me that they knew quite a bit. She asked them where and how they learned so much. Honest little tikes told that “Martin teacher taught us.”  It’s nice to be recognized by the customers sometimes.

The US and South Korea have just signed a memorandum of understanding on visa-waivers for Koreans wishing to come to the US. In my opinion, it could have come a lot sooner as US-Korea relations have been pretty good for years. Currently, Koreans must apply for a visa through US immigration and customs, which can take months or even years to get approved, if at all. Long lines form daily at the US embassy. Expect all that to end – and see quite a few more Koreans in the US beginning at the end of the year.

We plan to take advantage of that as well. During the summer, we’ve decided to forgo a vacation in order to save money for both MyeongHee and I to come to Texas next year. She wants to meet my family and see what America is all about.

Sunday was fabulous spring weather so we headed out to Munsu Mt for a day of rock climbing. When I was home in February, Teri and I only climbed for a couple of hours at an indoor gym.  That was the only climbing I’d done since early last fall and it was great to get out on the mountain again and work the muscles on some hard climbs.  We met my old friend Jacek and his girlfriend, JaeGyung, and we all had some good climbs. I only did four routes, but I led three of them, even skipping anchors on one. Hopefully the nice weather will continue for a few more weekends and I can build up my climbing strength again.

SaTang spent the afternoon running between groups of climbers who gave her either attention or snacks. An occasional squirrel would put her into a fit until it decided to find a quieter tree to climb. She loves running around without the leash and was generally happy just to be out in the woods.

Afterwards, we went into town for some excellent beef galbi and beer before heading home for the night.

Today, MyeongHee has sore arms and legs from all the exercise. I think even SaTang is worn out as she hasn’t even wanted to chase a ball today. I feel pretty good today, but the weekend’s fun was tempered by a lame-ass bank that can’t seem to process deposits. We’ll figure that one out later.

One my favorite places to go to in Korea is GyeongJu. There are so many places of interest in that city it’s hard to select just one. The city was the seat of the kingdom from the 600-700’s up until the 1400-1500s and historically significant spots are abundant. So, too, are the flowers. Typically in the spring GyeongJu is thick with tourists during “flower season” and this weekend was no exception. It wasn’t the best weekend for flowers as the cherry trees had peaked the week before and were dropping soft pink petals like a late winter snow storm. Still, many of the trees carried blooms and the azaleas were just beginning their colorful displays.

But it wasn’t just the flowers that attracted so many. With all the history and culture there, a number of reenactments and dances added to the natural beauty. Within just a few short hours, we toured ancient tombs, walked among magnificently manicured gardens, watched beautifully clad dancers and actors, took numerous pictures and, of course, did an awful lot of people watching. That works in reverse, too, as I often get stares from adults and exclamations from kids of “Ooo, look at the foreigner.”

I snapped tons of pictures and took the best and put them in a photo album.

I also took a few minutes of video of some of the dancers. This was in a forest just outside the walls of an ancient fortress. The forest itself is very old and some of the trees are ancient themselves, although merely a fraction of the fortress’ age. Behind the dancers you can clearly see some of the gnarled trees. The forest is also famous as the birthplace of the Kim clan, of which my wife is a member. The story behind that is a little strange, so I won’t bore you with it. Instead, I’ll let you watch the dancers.

I’ve mentioned often in the past how inexpensive things are here in Korea. Sometimes, its a really good deal. Food is cheap, but it’s also delicious and nutritious. They eat relatively healthy stuff and even a really good meal for two is often $20 or less. A good lunch is often less than $4.

Some things, however, are just freakin’ cheap. And cheaply made. Since I arrived here in January 2007 I’ve replaced a number of household items. This house is not even four years old, but I had to replace both the kitchen faucet and the bathroom shower fixture. Both had sprung leaks. The shower is likely to get changed again soon as the one I bought (a measly $6) just isn’t worth a damn and dribbles water like a cow peeing on a flat rock. I had to replace the keyboard on my computer twice because keys simply stopped working. Yesterday, I bought the third mouse of the  year because one of the buttons stopped working. Granted I put my computer parts through their paces as I am an avid user for more than a couple of hours each day. But less than a year’s worth of use is far less than the MTBF (mean time between failure) I’m used to getting on parts.  You get what you pay for, I suppose, because the replacements I bought were all around $10 each.

I had nose surgery last year to correct a diverted septum. Only a couple of hundred bucks – far cheaper than America. But it didn’t do nearly the good I thought it would. I have little recourse but to go to another Doctor. They don’t do medical malpractice suits here unless things are really bad and the expense doesn’t warrant the trouble.

That’s not to say all things that are cheap in Korea are cheap-assed, though. I bought my car last year for $400, and while I’ve had to put a few hundred in repairs into it over the year, that’s not extraordinary given that it’s 15 years old. It still runs well although it, too, is approaching its end of life.  Hyundai cars seem to be decently made and when mine dies I’ll probably get another.

Just thought I’d inject a little realism into things lest folks think its all good and cheap here.  Just mostly good. But always cheap.

I used to worry about how many miles per gallon my vehicles got. It was a measure of not just the efficiency and economy of the engine but continued measurement provided insight into the engine’s performance over time. As it got worse, it was time to get it tuned up and checked out. It was always just a simple matter of resetting the odometer at each filling and dividing the miles traveled by gallons purchased to refill.

These days, its not so important how well the engine is running. Its more important to understand how badly I need to travel by car. Given the rapidly rising price of fuel, it makes far more sense to calculate kilometers per dollar.  I don’t even care how many gallons (or, here in Korea, liters) I purchase, its how much I spend. These days, I can fill my tank for about $90 and run about 550 km. That figures out to about 6 km per dollar, or kpd.  For you American types, that’s about 3.6 mpd given the price of fuel here.

Looking at how much it costs me to travel, it makes me more conscious of how expensive its getting to drive. Figure in maintenance, wear and tear and driving my own vehicle may soon become too expensive.  In Korea, we’re paying about $1.70 per liter, or around $6.40 per gallon. My car is already 15 years old and going south rapidly. When it finally stops taking me from point A to B, I’ll have to seriously evaluate what, if anything, I replace it with.

Tired of all the hair being shed and the weekly bath and blow-dry required to keep her smelling sweet, we decided to get SaTang shaved.

Before:

Summer is coming soon and the warmer weather will be much easier to bear than with the wool she sported before. She wasn’t terribly happy at first with the new cut, especially since the clippers irritated her booty some and made pooping a little painful. She’s gotten used to it now and is welcome on more laps than before. Bonus: Quite a few more people like having her up close and personal since she doesn’t leave behind a brown and white carpet wherever she sits.

After:

Last month I showed videos of family and friends back home to my new Korean family. I figured they should return the favor and offer a few greetings from here.

So, here they are, MyeongHee and her son, DongHyun. Don’t worry if it isn’t all in English – it’ll easy enough to follow.

A few months ago, I mentioned that the US dollar vs the Korean Won was dropping like a stone. I suggested folks back home send me their dollars and after the value dropped further I would send them back, more in number than before due to the falling exchange rate.

It’s a good thing no one took me up on that. You’d have lost money. Back then, the dollar was close to 900 Won.  It was great when I went back home in February because I got more dollars than equivalent spending-value of Won. These days, that isn’t the case. Although the dollar is still dropping like a stone compared to the Euro, the Korean Won is losing value to the dollar. Go figure. One of Korea’s biggest trading partners is the US. If their value goes down, so does the Won. As of today, it stands at 997 Won to the dollar.

Just to put some real numbers to it, when I came home in February, I had  4.9million Won that translated in US$5300.  If I made the same trip today my Won would only get me US$4914. I’d lose almost $400 dollars.

Ergo, the title of this post. I’m a geek and I can fix your computers (I fixed several while on that trip) but I obviously know little about high finance.

It’s Saturday and the sun is out and one can actually see across the rive to apartments and the mountains beyond. It rained Thursday evening and cleared a bunch of the funk out of the air, although there’s still some lingering dust from Mongolia blowing around. Most of the first part of this week has been nasty and it was difficult to see even the apartments across the river.

I guess I’m still stuck in my western ways enough to think that wearing a surgical mask outside as many Koreans do looks, well, dorky. But that may have cost me, as the dust has given me a gnarly  set of allergy and cold symptoms.

The air is thick with pale yellow dust again today. I can barely see across the river and the mountains in the distance are just a memory. I took MyeongHee to work and when I ran the washers on the windshield I got a nice little pile of the stuff on the edges of the window. I’m trying to stay indoors as the super-fine particles are bad for the lungs.

This happens every spring in Korea, some times more severe than at others. Last week they canceled school and today seems as bad, if not worse. That may have been more because last week was the first day of the new school year and lots of parents and kids were going to school to get everyone settled. It’s funky today.