ChasingDonguri

Jordan and I spent the last week traveling in and around Busan, Korea's second largest city (with a population of about three million).  We spent the first day visiting Jordan's old friend Ben in Ulsan, a town about an hour away from Busan (home to Hyundai) and his wife Na-Young and their son.  They were nice enough to show us around the city and take us to a temple out in the country.  We had a very enoyable day with them. 

In Busan highlights included pointing to things in the fish market I would not eat:

Watching the other tourists enthusiastially point at the things they wanted to eat:

We also went to famous Haeundae beach and swam with thousands of our friends. 

The big aquarium on the beach was also great, it was more impressive than our guide book led us to believe and some of the tanks had creative embellishments.

We also enjoyed lots of great shopping in the neighborhood around our hotel.

In the end I didn't want to leave Busan as it reminded me of Hong Kong with the large ships sailing in the distance, the lush, forested mountains coming down to meet the beach and the busy streets filled with people and market stalls.  Back home in the Dream Hub things are quiet and hot.  Jordan has finally gotten a video game to work after a month of trying, but hopefully he'll pull himself away to post video of the hip hop festival we saw one evening at the beach in the rain.  And I'll spend the next week or so working on a scrapbook of our trip.  You can see the rest of our pictures here. 

This last week we went up to the far north-eastern province of Gangwon-do to take party in the largest and longest-held Korean cultural festival, Danoje. We spent the night and were taken on tour as part of the special week-long foreigner program (the festival itself is a month-long afair). 

Here's a little video of the experience (pictures will be up shortly):

We're on the final leg of our Turkey trip. We're currently ensconced at a rather nice hotel on the Mediterranean in Southern Turkey. The hotel offers buffets all day and stunning views of the water, in between which we are doing our web design work.

We finished a two day tour of Cappadocia, an area in central Turkey known for its unusual rock formations and cave dwellings. The scenery was quite fantastic, it's low season since it's cold and often snowy, but snow always lends a magical quality to any scene, and places that are already named after fairies take on an other world feeling. The seemingly carefully eroded Fairy Chimneys of Cappadocia take on various shapes, like rabbits, camels and Napolean's hat. We toured cave dwellings used by early Christians as monasteries, dug into the strange rock formations in order to hide and protect them from their persecutors. The Christians were eventually joined by the Muslims and you can see churches side by side with mosques, all dug into the rock and often painted with frescoes of scenes from the Bible (as our tour guide said, the story of Abraham is in the Koran too, it's just different). We also visited an entire underground city that was dug by hand several stories into the earth. Safe from invaders and cold weather, the people slept, cooked and made wine below the surface. Walking around in this underground city was like experiencing a location right out of a fantasy novel. Driving around Cappadocia was like being in another world; many locals still use the caves for storage, work or living. Everywhere you go you can see doors dug into the rock, including the hotel we stayed in.

Our hotel room was a converted cave, made quite comfortable by beds, heat and running water. We enjoyed spectacular breakfasts (the traditional Turkish breakfast is bread, cheese, tomatoes and cucumbers, a far cry from the Korean breakfast of rice and kimchi) and were amazed by the fact that the cave had wireless. The hotel animals were quite friendly. We were joined by a dog one evening as we sat outside playing backgammon, and a fancy white cat was determined that it should be living in our hotel room and made its way under our beds several times, even meowing loudly outside the door to be let in.

Our picture collections are just about finished, so be sure to check them out. The Istanbul set has had many recent additions.

This last weekend we decided to go visit Matthew Fisher in Chungju, instead of cleaning our apartment, or buying bookshelves for our apartment... or setting up picture frames in our apartment. Or crafting floral arrangements for our apartment. The trip started out a bit, well, painfully, as the stomach issues which I had been dealing with the night before (I'm not sure my system agrees with any amount of Soju, as both times I've had it I've felt ill the next day) cropped up as soon as we got on the bus, but all things ended well.

As you can see on the map we traveled northeast, traversing about half of the width of Korea, and roughly a third of the length. The bus trip took about 5 hours total, which included many stops and a short layover; a straight shot by car would probably be under two hours if you didn't hit traffic in the cities. We returned by train in about 4 hours, with two layovers. Both trips were about 18,000 Won a person, which, with the currency doing so poorly at the moment, translates into $12.50 USD.

Photos from our trip can be seen in the slide show below, or by visiting our flickr album.

We got in Saturday afternoon and spent the night at Matthew's, on our camping mats. Chungju is beautiful (nestled by mountains on all sides), so we had a nice walk around the place. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to play board games and drink gingerale with a couple of Matthew's expatriot friends (one of whom is of course named Matt); I had been on boardgame withdrawal for several weeks.

Anyway, here's a little video from our walk. The free exercise equipment appears to be a standard Korea lakeside feature.

This last Saturday we took a bus up to Seoul (about a three hour ride) to see Matthew,* and do a little electronics shopping (we weren't actually in the market for anything ourselves, but we thought we'd go ahead and tag along). Seoul is massive, teaming, and spreads over everything; about half of South Korea's 49-million inhabitants call Seoul their home, making it the second most populated metropolitan area in the world behind Tokyo (and equal to Tokyo in density--my previous home of Cairo, I'm pleased to say, is the most densely populated of the world's largest city areas).

The area of Seoul we visited, called Yongsan, is very famous for having... well, everything in the world there is to buy. To my understanding it is in fact the largest electronics market on planet earth (and sells everything else as well). About half way through the shopping we decided to ditch the rest of the party (American friends of Matthew's from his province of Chungbuk) and see Quantum of Solace with Matthew at a fancy cinema to celebrate the fact that the movie came to Korea before the US (which still won't see it for a couple more days).We then almost missed our bus back to Gunsan despite having over an hour to make it to the station.

In short we had a fun time, and learned how to navigate the city: on our next trip we plan to see more of the actual sites, and do some shopping for ourselves (we did buy an incredibly cool splattering pig, though, which you can check out in the video).

*Matthew, if you don't know, is my former college roommate of four years, and very good friend, who got us into this whole wonderful mess: he discovered Korea's need for English teachers first, and we proceeded to follow him over here (and are very glad we did). I would direct you to his blog, but he has stubornly taken it down for the moment.

Marisa Says: I am pleased to note that it doesn't get any denser than Hong Kong. Also it is the best James Bond movie I've ever seen (and I'm not just saying that because the story focuses on Bolivia).

So my Dad always used to tell me before traveling that I should always travel with $200 cash, just in case. Me, in my wise generational wisdom, thought this was somewhat useless advice, since I have a credit card, and a debit card, where could I possibly go that would not be able to access my money? Afterall, "MasterCard, it's everywhere you want to be" right? Normally I travel with $20 so I can buy a hamburger at the airport.
But this post is to let everyone like me know that my Dad was right. You can travel to places that won't be able to access your money. Even places as seemingly advanced as South Korea. After being rejected from several ATMs around town, we learned that most of the Korean ATMs aren't hooked up to the international network. Suddenly, Jordan and I found ourselves with no money. I had to go to school one morning with only 2000 won (about $2) which needed to get me to and from school. Life is a bit different when you suddenly realize that you have no money.
The situation isn't as bad as I'm making it seem. Despite the one day when I only had $2 to my name, our credit cards do work in Korea and most places where we spend our money will accept them (the grocery store, the dollar store, and many restaurants). For the small things like the bus and taxis, we were lucky enough, despite my disbelief in my Dad's advice, to travel with a decent amount of cash, which we were able to convert and have been using stingily until we manage to get a Korean bank account, where all our hard earned money will be deposited and easily accessed by even the most Korean of the Korean ATMs.
 

We've been here for a few days now and these are the things that have impressed me the most:
I cannot believe this country exists. On one hand they are totally developed and part of the modern, western world. You can clearly see the western influence in the way they dress, the entertainment they watch, and even in some of the food they eat. However, they are often in complete shock to see an actual western person walking around. And it's not just the kids who act like crazy people when we're around, but the adults too. They will say hi to me and the run off giggling back to their friends, people who are older than I am! I don't know how they can be so westernized, yet completely unaware that we actually exist.
Everyone is very friendly, even if they may stop, point, stare and laugh at us as we walk by. Everyone tries whatever English they may know, and then talks away in Korean in hopes that we'll understand. Bus drivers have helped me to get on and off at the right place, customers have motioned us from inside the restaurant inviting us in and then helped us to get seated. Our landlord invited us over for dinner. Our co-teachers have driven us all over the city helping us to find the things we need.

Our apartment reminds me of Ma Hang, a big government subsidized housing complex near our home in Hong Kong. Despite having a relative large amount of space, all the Koreans still prefer to live on top of each other in giant high rise apartment buildings. Luckily, it's easy to find your way home because the only tall buildings are the apartments. So you can just look up and find your number. Just like Ma Hang, all the apartments are the same ugly, cement housing blocks that are definitely uninviting. But once you're inside it is very pleasant. I could not believe how large our apartment was. After living in Hong Kong and having a bedroom the size of a closet, I was prepared to have very little space. But we have enough room that we could play hide and seek (if we had some furniture, that is).
There are bakeries. I have never moved anywhere outside the States that has had tasty bakeries. I had determined from this that I would never move anywhere where there were tasty bakeries. Even when we went to North Carolina I was disappointed. To me there is nothing like a doughnut from Cub. In fact the Cub bakery is the standard that I hold all bakeries to. And few have compared. Here in Korea, while they don't perhaps have the same selection as Cub, I think the bakeries may still stand a chance in competing with Cub. (And despite my desire to move away from doughnuts, there is a dunkin' doughnuts right around the corner from our apartment).
There is no McDonalds. I thought all Asians loved McDonalds. I guess I will have to change this assumption to all Chinese love McDonalds. You couldn't go half a block in Hong Kong without coming upon McDonalds. And it was so good too, much better than any McDonalds in the States. Here we have Lotteria, the McDonalds stand in. But they don't have the popularity of McDonalds in China.
My parents would love it here. As I sit here writing, it's "cleaning time." There is a twenty minute break during which all the students get brooms and mops and things and clean the school. I'm not sure what the point of this is, since I think we still have janitors. I guess it's to instill good cleaning skills in the students. Some of them use it as an excuse though to come say hi to me (and tell me I'm pretty, which I guess is just as good a way to spend your time as cleaning).
Bowing has already become ingrained in my very being. It was practically instantaneous upon landing in Korea. I think there was one awkward time when I tried to shake someone's hand (thank goodness I didn't try to kiss them), but otherwise bowing seems to me to be perfectly natural. I don't know how I'll ever stop.
They have the perfect recycling method here. They have free recycling and really expensive garbage bags you have to buy for your garbage. Anyone with a brain then will recycle as much as possible. Now that I've experienced it, it seems like the perfect method for encouraging recycling.