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Published: December 18th 2006
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(S)aint
Me getting made up for my (S)aint shoot... see my DPC profile for the image... 'Tis to be an update covering many a day... as I've been quite lethargic... There has been many an outing, many a meeting and many moments lost in swirl of time. I will recall as best I can and recount my adventures for your displeasure.
Moments recorded in time tell me that myself and Fiona discovered a section of the city under destruction, an entire block of old apartment buildings being systematically torn down, an excelent location for photography by any stretch. Many a shot has been taken there, some of which can be seen on my
DPC profile.
A short trip into Seoul and a random exit at a random station also led us to a wonderful memorial tomb of which the gardens were quite magneficent in Autumn (a word I've not forgotten, despite my usage of 'fall' during class hours).
We also went down to the furthest stretches of line 1 on the Seoul subway and found ourselves in Cheonan, home of a 15m high gold buddha, seriously amazing.
Now... for the mouthwatering juicy details you've been waiting for... It's official... you can buy VB, the one and only, in Korea!!! Normally I wouldn't poke a
Autumn
The aforementioned Autumn colours stick at the stuff... but feeling particularly Australian, I bought a 6 pack... which are mostly still in the fridge.
Some fairly spectacular shots were had in Namdaemun (one of the gates to old Seoul) one evening as well... some of which will be posted here. I also managed to try out the new Tokina 10-17mm Fisheye while I was there, a slightly disappointing lens... it doesn't really have the fisheye effect at the 17mm mark, unfortunate.
Our next trip, after many a beverage was Yeouido, a fairly famous area for photography. Some reasonable shots were had, most of which were Soju as the ones coming out of the camera were not as impressive.
We also made our way into Chagdeokgung, another of the king's old palaces. One can only enter on a guided tour most days and so we took one of those. A thing we found interesting was that tours are offered in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English... all of which we could go on and understand 😊. However, the only tour available at the time was Korean, so we took that option. It was a truly beautiful palace, one of the best (of the
many) I've been to yet. There'll be some photos of this at the bottom of the blog.
Busan was our next port of call, a port city in the South-East of Korea. Not knowing a thing about the city and arriving at around 2am we proceeded out of the bus terminal to a fire bin (like the homeless in movies use...) surrounded by qabis and caught ourselves a lift onto the beach front. After eating well too much, I decided I needed to snooze, and snooze I did... for two hours or so, and then we got up to make the most of our holiday. Asking the woman at the hotel counter where to go sent us a great distance from where we wanted to be... but we finally got useful information from the bus stop we ended up at... and made our way to Beomeosa, a huge, very famous buddhist temple, to have a look around. There were many wonderful sights to be had, beautiful artwork and buildings, collections of buddhas, and even a monk with a digital SLR. From there we made our way to China Town... which was mostly filled with Russian folk... and shady activity,
but we did find a Chinese dumpling house, the food went down very well. Next we went back to the waterfront and sat on the beach for a while. We were approached by an old man who spoke a little English and had been to Australia, but this was not the only person to approach us. At one stage or another, the bottle became empty and I needed to collect some more, so off I went. I came bounding back across the beach to find that Fiona had been approached by a buddhist monk... who wanted to know about her camera. After my arrival, we spoke for some time about the various walks of life and discovered that he was from the temple that we had visited earlier in the day and was interested in buying a digital SLR... Monks are high-tech these days it would seem. It seems that they don't even need to forget their worldly possesions anymore, quite a metamorphisis... Anyhow, to cut a long story short, we exchanged numbers and when he comes to Seoul we're all going to catch up for a cup of tea. The next day, we got on the bus to go
home and saw about half way home that the northern half of the country had been completely covered with snow in our absence.
Last Friday and today also saw me put in the spotlight, performing an open class for parents in each of my kindergarten classes. Gladly, those are over.
Our arrival back in Anyang was also shortly followed by an expedition for Fiona to make a snowman, which turned into a "snow chicken."
And that concludes my journey up to the present.
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good to see you have found a little bit of australia, did they import enough to keep you going is what i wonder!!?? intersesting that the monks have found enlightenment in this digital age, i just ponder what they would take photos of?