Blogs from Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea, Asia - page 7

Over the long weekend in early May we decided to spend our time island hopping in Chungcheongnam-do province. We started our trek on Anmyeondo, the largest of the islands. One of my students had written a journal about a beautiful flower festival that was happening on the island so we decided to check it out. "Floritopia 2009" turned out to be a collection of different flower displays and a few showcases of flowers from around the world. All in all, Flowertopia was just like strolling through a public park back in Canada. Only with a few thousand of our closest friends. As evening approached we decided to head down onto the beach to scope out a potential camping site. I like to think I was a great sport about camping, but Jeff might tell a different ... read more

The weekend before mom and Shan came to Korea, Jonathan and I went to Songnisan National Park with his two co-teachers. We partook in a 6 hour hike. It was pretty serious. After 3 hours we finally managed to reach the top. There was an extra 200 meter hike to a higher outlook. I thought, hey, I made it this far and now we only have to go down, of course I should run up there. Glad I did; it was a lovely view. Although it was a perfectly clear day the visibility was a little poor. We were told that it was yellow dust. Sand blows off the Gobi desert and ends up in Korea. It's called yellow dust season here. We were for warned of the horror stories of yellow dust season. Other English ... read more

Unless the pictures say otherwise, they are from the Korean Folk Village (ie. Korean colonial Williamsburg) If you happened to notice that the location has changed under the title of the blog, it's not because we've gone anywhere, it's because I've finally figure out exactly where we are. :P The campus that we are staying at is right outside of the city of Cheonan. There are 543,309 people in the city so it is very small compared to the 2.8 million person city of Daegu that we will be going to live in next week. We have not gotten our school placements yet, the person from our metropolitan office of education (MOE) is coming Thursday afternoon to talk to us and give us our placements. I'm excited to find out what age of students I will ... read more

I am very sorry it took me so long to write this entry. The explanation is at the bottom. Please forgive me. Anyway, I went with a group called Adventure Korea - which arranges English speaking tours around the country - on a day trip in Chungcheongbuk-do, the only landlocked province. We started with a ferry ride down a river. You can see some of the foliage starting to go. For a country that (supposedly) has the same winters we do, they're a little late getting to the actual cold part. The scenery was absolutely gorgeous. I may have mentioned this before, but Koreans have a tendency to ... read more

A travel book I read on the plane told about a Canadian soldier who had experienced Korea during the Korean War as nothing but lots of mud. What he did not have in mind, of course, is the Boryeong Mud Festival. The Boryeong Mud Festival has become justly famous for its somewhat wilder side, especially with the American GI's there on the last weekend. This year there is also an all night RAVE. There are lots of good pictures on the web of Americans looking silly, but they mostly seem to be having lots of fun haming it up for the Korea photographers. They are great pictures. But I feel that the pictures which are shown on the web are somewhat unrepresentative. For example, there are a lot of Koreans doing the mud thing during the ... read more