Back on the Blog...

..after a two month hiatus. Chris has come and gone, fall is here, it's crisp outside and I'm wondering if a walk at English Point with the doggies and my camera is in order.

I could do a thorough recap of what I've been up to back here in the States, but I don't want to, so here's the five minute version:

• Came home and had two glorious weeks of weather left, in which it was still warm enough to boat and enjoy the lake...how wonderful that the summer waited to give me just a little bit of itself before leaving for good.
• Got down to my lowest adult weight again (that I can remember) for the first time since 2006, and promptly gained five pounds wandering around the restaurants of the US with Chris.
  
• Chris and I visited Portland, American Falls, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and the Grand Canyon while he was here, as well as Silverwood Theme Park and riding the Hiawatha Bike Trail (soooooo recommended to anyone who is remotely interested on climbing on a bicycle for 10+ miles!).
• Have gotten much more serious about my jewelry crafting, and have even posted some of my items for sale at faelfe.etsy.com.
• Acquired a seasonal job at Target. What fun! At least it gives me something to do, some of the time...not to mention making some money rather than spending it.
  

That's about it. I have 57 days til I fly out for Australia, and in the interim I hope to refine my photoshop skills, work out regularly and eat as clean as possible (to lose 15 pounds...doable? I think so.), create and hopefully sell more jewelry, and make 90% of my Christmas gifts for this year. I would also like to reach a point of blogging twice a week, about something.

With all that said, I really need to get out for my run while the day is warm enough, so here are a few pictures...and I'm out.

Barbed wire along I-87, somewhere just past Register Rock.

Dressed up for the funeral in AF.

At the Grand Canyon!

Old rowboat on Avondale Lake.

One of my new pieces of jewelry.

Halloween!!

Just a couple more things I'll miss...

I'm in a much better place mentally than I was last week...I hate that temporary weird morose-ness I get occasionally. One week from now I'll be on a plane home, I'm looking at hanging out with some great friends this weekend, and Chris and I just finished a two-day detox that has jump started my metabolism and left me feeling much healthier. Life's good!

I just wanted to add a few more of the things I'll miss when I leave here...it's hard to believe that I do actually feel a LITTLE bit sad that I will most likely not return. But, while it's been a tough year in some ways, it's been a great year in others. So I suppose it's understandable.

Anyhow I've been doing a lot of hiking around Pungam dong lately and just really noticing the way Korea makes a strong effort to have areas for walking and hiking built into their cities. Obviously I can't speak for all cities, but the ones I've seen have lots of nature areas. While I think that Koreans' understanding of physical fitness is very skewed and inaccurate (I'm sorry, but if you don't think you should sweat and breath hard while exercising, I don't think you're achieving real cardiovascular fitness), I do really admire the efforts made by each city to create safe, beautiful places for citizens to walk, hike, and get in some exercise. Near Chris' place in Pungam, there are a few really great spots. My favorite is a nice walking path around a pretty reservoir near the World Cup Stadium, but the other day I wandered onto a hiking path that led to an amazing view of the Stadium at sunset. These pleasant little surprises turn up randomly in the most urban of spots, and it's really lovely when you find them.

I will also miss the spontaneous little "markets" that spring up on nice days...as far as I can tell no license is required to just park your truck on a corner and sell your produce. There is a sidewalk near the post office here where at least ten to twenty women set up a canopy and sell everything and anything...veggies, fruits, seafood, socks...leads to an interesting walk down the way, and some awesome photo ops.

Life as a house-girlfriend.

As you may know, I've not had to work since mid-July. That first couple weeks of not-working was filled with many fun activities...Cody and Dez's wedding...Jeju...Bigeum-do...Daewonsa...Chris was on his vacation, so we went places and did things. It was great.

Now though, I've been done working for over a month, and I'll be honest...being a house-girlfriend in a tiny Korean apartment does not have me particularly enamored. In a typical day, I:

• Facebook stalk for at least an hour;
• Read my daily blogs and news;
• Clean a little bit around the apartment;
• Go somewhere to pick up food for dinner...usually I take my camera with me in hopes of finding a good shot along the way;
• Watch some Law & Order: SVU if I can find it on TV;
• And a couple times a week, I go to the nearest high-rise apartment complex and walk up and down their seventeen flights of stairs a few times for exercise.

Having little to do has gotten me into a certain sort of lethargy that I desperately want to break out of. Each day I wake up with these fantastic ideas of things I could do with my time (work on online language lessons, write some interesting blogs, etc.), but somehow by the time Chris leaves for work, I lose interest in these things. I think it's partially a lack of real structure in many different aspects of my life, and partially that I am so looking forward to getting home that other things I could do kind of pale in comparison. What I would most like to do is some exploring of random areas in Gwangju, but the problem remains that I either don't know of any, have explored the ones near me enough that I'm not really interested anymore, don't want to spend the money it will potentially take to get to them, or don't want to go see something interesting without Chris, when he would probably like to see them too.

Basically I've mentally boxed myself into a corner...this whole situation is my fault really, so I shouldn't complain. My grandma used to say that "Only boring people get bored." I don't completely agree with this statement, but in the case of me right now, I think it's true. I am fully capable of entertaining myself and so I suppose I'm making a renewed effort to be less bored...less boring.

Anyway I found a blog recently called The One Minute Writer and it is more or less what it sounds like. A blog of writing prompts designed to get people writing for just one minute a day. I'm going to try to write to the prompts I find interesting as often as possible...starting tomorrow, hahaha!

I hate Korean commercials.

I know the quality of this video is quite terrible, but I needed to show the commercial that wins Fallon's award for most ridiculously annoying on TV.

This commercial is for Rush & Cash, which I believe is some sort of title-loan sort of thing (I only think this based on the name of the company, haha). They have had notoriously obnoxious commercials in the time I've been here, but to me this one takes the cake. I especially hate the weird pelvic swipe the girl does about halfway through. WTF is that? I have seen this commercial be shown back to back more than once, and typically it plays at least twice in every commercial break. I hope every time this girl sees this commercial, she dies a little bit inside. Even Koreans find this commercial painful.

Just want to say that...

I've got less than 20 days to go til I'm on a plane, leaving Korea, heading home to my family, friends, delicious food, and all the good things that come with going home. That's less than 480 hours to go...

And you know, I'm not really sad. At this point I'm so eager to go home that I don't think I'll feel sad that I'll never see Korea again until I've been gone for awhile. Life's been good to me here, it's been an adventure, but I'm ready for a new one. Still, in the time til I get to leave, I'm going to try to notice, appreciate, and capture as many of the small interesting things about this country that I can, since I'm sure I'll miss it........someday.

I will miss...

• My Viyott yogurts.

• The kindergarten students and the way they would yell "Yongha songsaengnim!" (English teacher) every time I entered the classroom to teach, and run to hug my legs.
• Super cheap travel all around the country...usually less then $10 to most destinations.
• The neat tech stuff they've got with their banking system...checking your bank balance by phone in an instant (though I didn't get to use this) and sending money from acct to acct in two minutes by ATM.
• The cool Koreans who've picked up a bit of English and want to practice with you in a friendly, non-obnoxious way.
• Noraebangs (singing rooms).
• Dak galbi (spicy chicken barbecued at the table in front of you)...omg, how I will miss dak galbi!!
• Milkshake in a pouch.
• Korean street food (primarily while drunk). Also known as "tweegim."
  

More to come as I think of it.

New Camera, woot!!

After hanging out on Jeju with Cody and Dez and seeing what fun could be had with Cody's bridge dslr camera, I decided I needed one of my own. Went to Kumho World the day we got back and picked up a Canon SX10IS for a pretty decent price, and have since been playing with it. I can't wait to use it at the Grand Canyon! It has some pretty fun features, particularly a color pick one that allows only the color chosen to show up in an otherwise black and white photo.

Anyhow, I want to get more into photography...so here are some of my favorite pictures taken with the camera so far.

Korea's loveliest temple

Well, in my opinion, out of those I've seen.

On Tuesday, Cody, Dez, Chris and I headed up to Daewonsa, a temple Virginia had told me about and highly recommended. It's heavily influenced by Tibetan Buddhism and other countries as well, making it at least a little different from the normal standard Korean temple. By this point I'd come to the conclusion that with Korean temples, once you've seen one, you've seen 'em all. It's a real shame, as I think the main source of this was the Korean war. Many of the temples I've seen were destroyed during the war and rebuilt, so I'm guessing the reason they're all so strangely uniform is because they were rebuilt by the same people.

So, anyhow, we headed up earlyish on Tuesday morning and spent two or three hours wandering around the temple grounds and checking out the Tibetan Museum nearby. After that, we bussed it back to Gwangju, had Chinese at the bus terminal for dinner, and went our separate ways.

For anyone wanting to visit Daewonsa, you can get there a couple ways. One is by taking the 151 or the 217 from the front of Gwangju Bus Terminal to the end of the line (Hwasun Sapyeong), and taxi-ing from there to Daewonsa (15,000 won). That's the way we went. As far as I can tell, you can also take a bus to Boseong and then taxi or bus it from there.

I'd highly recommend this temple to anyone looking for something beautiful to see and photograph. I'm including a few photos in this blog.

Love the little red hats. There was one on every Buddha in the temple.


The orange lanterns were so cool and vibrant, so I picked out the orange in the photo and left the rest black and white.


Cute chipmunk! Only one I've ever seen in Korea...


Pretty reflection on the water. Cody found this shot.

In front of the bell at the temple.

Visiting Jeju

We’d had many plans for things we wanted to do over our vacation, but when it became for sure that Chris was going to come to the US in September, we decided to focus on saving money for his time there rather than spending lots of cash jetsetting around Asia. We did decide that Jeju was a must though, so on an early Tuesday morning, we met Cody and Dez at the ferry terminal to head to Jeju for a couple nights.

The ferry ride was about four hours or so, and once we landed in Jeju, we spent some time taxi-ing to various places in Jeju City in an attempt to find a hotel. Spazzes that we are, we got in a cab to the bus terminal only to turn around immediately and head back towards the seawall, where the first hotel we walked into was really nice and only about $35 a night. Once we settled in we headed to Loveland, a must-see for all of us.

Loveland is, in essence, a sex museum. It’s a park full of statues of people having sex in various places and positions, as well as a building full of dioramas of—you guessed it—people having sex in various places and positions. As well as some displays of sex toys. It’s really interesting that in Korea, a country that is extremely sexually repressed (worse than the US by a long shot), a place like this stays open. It’s a huge draw for foreigners (who doesn’t like to giggle about sexual positions?), and we saw a tour bus full of adjummas come in as we were leaving, but Loveland was not listed on any of the official Korean tourism websites and I definitely got the impression that it was something the Korean government would prefer not to have advertised.

Me with a tamer penis statue at Loveland.

We had some fun there for sure, but it was dampened (pun intended) by the monsoon-like rain that drenched us the entire time. There have rarely been times I’ve been so wet when I haven’t been swimming or bathing. As it so often does…Korea failed at weather that evening, and we were really worried that it would be the same all through our trip.

The next morning things looked much brighter. We’d arranged for a cab to drive us around for the day and had an itinerary of five different Jeju sights we wanted to see. We started with Minimini Land, a sort of theme park the boys had seen advertised on the ferry and were desperate to see. It was pretty funny; basically just a bunch of statues of different world wonders and buildings, but built to a much smaller scale. Saw a miniature Bayon and Forbidden City, which was fun since I’d seen the real things. Spent some time there taking some silly photos and continued to Sangumburi Crater, which had been highly recommended to us by a friend.

I'll see the real thing in January!

It was preceded by a much smaller and less impressive crater, which made the real thing much cooler. In the long run though, it was still just a crater and I’d say it was the least fun thing we did that day. We moved on after that to Seongsan Ilchulbong, a crater that had to be hiked to that stood on the ocean. It grew hot and sunny while we were there, hiking up a series of stairs to the top. It was a little hot but really gorgeous when we reached the top. Took some pics and headed back down, where we veered off to the side where we saw the absolutely beautiful cliffs off the side of the crater, and the black sand beaches that surrounded it. We climbed down and walked along, taking pictures and picking up bits of eroded glass and seashells. We also saw some of the famous woman divers of Jeju, who dive for three to four minutes at a time for shellfish and abalone.

Us near the lovely lava formed cliffs.

After the amazing Sunrise Peak, we got to check out the Manjanggul Lava Tubes, which were really long, dark, wet caves. It was chilly, but fun to wander along the tubes, attempting and mostly not succeeding to capture good pictures of the interesting lava formations. We finished up at a Hedge Maze, which was less fun than it could have been as we were a little short on time, and it was also completely crowded with running and screaming Korean kids.

Night vision pic in the lava caves, taken with Cody's camera.

Dez and I wandering the hedge maze.

We got home, cleaned up and napped, and headed on to Tom n Tom’s for a delicious pretzel dinner, then bought booze and wandered the streets with it. The weather was absolutely beautiful and we found a 24 hour McDonald’s that delivered and a small permanent carnival next to the seawall. Wandered through and found a large paved area near the seawall designed for recreation and completely crowded with Koreans at 10:30 at night.

Something we’ve noticed is how lively public places become at night in Korea. Take a beautiful park at two in the afternoon on a Saturday and it will be empty; the same park at 11:00 will be packed with couples, families, walking adjummas, and drunk adjoshis. It’s really interesting…honestly I kind of wonder when people sleep. Chris and I have also come to the conclusion that young Koreans generally get only four to five hours of sleep a night, so when they reach retirement age, Koreans sleep all the time. It’s not uncommon to see an old man or woman sleeping on a park bench or even in the middle of a sidewalk at one on a Tuesday afternoon. They’re clearly making up for sleep lost in their youth.

Anyhow, we wandered around the seawall area for awhile, met and talked with a man from Mokpo for a bit, ate cotton candy, watched a Korean guitar player, and bought wine to go back to the room with. The rest of the evening involved card games and McDonald’s delivery until we went to bed.

On Thursday we had an amazing (expensive) buffet at a really awesome hotel, then hung out by the seawall playing cards until it was time for our ferry to leave. Unfortunately the most beautiful weather waited for our last day, but we did get to enjoy some of it and got some really pretty pictures by the ocean. The ferry ride home was mostly uneventful and we got back to Gwangju around midnight, where we spent several days being lazy and I bought a new camera. Which is awesome, by the way.

My new favorite photo of us, taken on the seawall.

Another wedding in Korea...

After Virginia and Ty's wedding in December, who knew another would come up in July! Cody and Dez's wedding was July 18th, and it was very different from V&T's, but really beautiful as well.

On the 17^th I had my last day of school. It was somewhat underwhelming, but didn’t pass entirely without notice from my school. I walked to school that morning in the ridiculous humidity (seriously, 90-100% humidity is a regular occurrence) and as I walked through the door at about 8:50am, Mr. Koh frantically indicated that I was needed in the teachers’ room for an award. So I went down to receive it, completely covered in sweat…I mean, really just dripping, so much so that I dripped onto the box the award was in as the principal gave a speech, I nearly sweated onto the principal. It was kind of mortifying. Anyhow, they gave me a huge glass trophy, of sorts…basically a big paperweight. Then I had movie days with all my classes and I was done!!

Next day was a big one…Cody and Dez’s wedding. We were sooo worried about the weather, but while it was windy, it turned out fairly nice otherwise. Chris, Susan (a friend from Wando staying with me), and I got up at a ridiculously early time to head over and help the couple get ready. Susan, Dez and I went to get Dez’s hair done while Chris hung out with Cody. Hair finished, we girls continued on to Cody’s apartment to get ready, and then headed up to Yudal to take pictures before the ceremony.

Wedding party: Me, Dez, Cody, and Jason

My fave picture from the official photos.

Wim took the official wedding photos and did a wonderful job. Stephen, the officiant, had been up til 7am (for what reason I don’t know) and we worried he wouldn’t show, as no one could get ahold of him. He did show though, and the ceremony went off almost entirely without a hitch. I didn’t hear my musical cue to process, so the timing was a bit off…and I was very nervous, I think because it was the first time I’d ever been in a wedding and I wanted it to be as perfect as possible. Dez entered and looked really lovely and the ceremony began. Stephen seemed more nervous than I was, and made some funny little jokes and some not-so-funny ones; but he said some very beautiful things and overall I thought it was really nice. He did, however, keep saying Cody’s middle name wrong, which was kind of funny.

Mr. and Mrs. Gabel!

After the ceremony, everyone milled around by the big bell for a little bit, and Dez threw her bouquet (which all the single ladies seemed to diligently try not to catch), and then we headed to a local vegetarian buffet for the reception. Dez had reserved the entire upper floor of the restaurant, so we bought some wine and ate, drank, and were merry. I drank rather quickly out of the nerves from earlier in the day and gave a semi-drunken speech that I hope no one videoed. After we’d eaten our fill, some of us moved on for a drink at Ice Bar, and after that we all dispersed while the newlyweds headed out to Hotel Hyundai for their wedding night. They went on to Seoul the next day to get the official paperwork set out.

The week following the wedding I learned what being a hagwon teacher was like, and was quite glad that I hadn’t had to do it for a long term job….and the week after that, Chris’ vacation began. We had some fun plans made for those two weeks, including a trip to Jeju and a night on Bigeum.