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January 29th 2010
A couple of weeks ago I was sent to Xi'an, China to participate in a quality audit of one of our derrick equipment sub-vendors. It was a lot of flying for a single day of work, but such is the job. On the plus side, once business was finished with our hosts in China arranged to take our group out to dinner and to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. I was not a big fan of the city of Xi'an itself. It may have just been the winter season, but it was very brown and looked run-down and dirty due to dry, dusty air and poor construction quality of most buildings. It seemed like the endless urban sprawl was all under eternal "construction phases". The city is huge and I'm very grateful to my Chinese contacts ... read more
October 2nd 2009
Well, as usual, I've waited much too long to update the ol' blog. But moving along, last month I took a weekend trip to Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam with new-ish good friend, Malcolm. Malcolm is here from England teaching English with his girlfriend, Louise, who happened to be off on a girls' trip to Hong Kong, so Mal and I planned a boys weekend. It also happened to be Mal's birthday, an extra cause for celebration. I was fortunate to have Mal with me, since he and Lu have been traveling the world together for a couple of years now so he is used to dealing with foreign places. (Strangely, I no longer consider Korea "foreign".) We went with no set plans. Mal and I like to travel the same way, luckily, just "rolling with it". ... read more
August 10th 2009
The shipyard recently went on summer vacation, so I took advantage of the time and went to Japan for six days. The timing worked out perfectly, since my good friend Jevan also wanted to come over and visit another friend studying in Nagoya for the time being. It was a relatively short trip, but we managed to see TONS. In six fast days, we saw much of Nagoya, Osaka, Nara, Himeji (castle), Tokyo, and climbed Mount Fuji. Before entering Japan, we purchased Japan Rail Passes, which allowed us unlimited access to the JR rail lines all over the country. It was super convenient, and significantly cheaper if you plan on using the train a lot (and we used it a LOT)! I landed in Nagoya since that's where Jevan and Lauren were, but we only stayed ... read more
August 10th 2009
I've had quite a busy week. I've also decided to not wait for months on end to update my photos! It was a nightmare organizing them all, but I'm finally caught up. Anyways, I just got back from Japan yesterday, but that's for the next entry. Right before Japan, I went on a road trip through Korea with Malcolm and Louise, my British English Teacher friends. I was only able to go for two days or so, but it was still a lot of fun. It was really nice to get out of the cities and just explore. We didn't make any sort of itinerary and just "went with it", which turned out to be excellent. There isn't a whole lot to report, really. We just climbed into my car and headed north along the eastern ... read more
July 28th 2009
I happened to be browsing the Weezer website one day and noticed they had a tour date to play in the Seoul area. After digging a little more, I realized it wasn't just a Weezer show, but an entire three day rock festival! I've really missed going to live shows here, so naturally I immediately wrote all my friends here to start planning a trip. We got our tickets, rented and borrowed tents and piled into my car to head up to the festival grounds. It was held at a ski resort, to a lot of facilities were already there. This was the first annual event of this kind. Festivals are somewhat common, but this was the first one with so many western bands. The ones I was mainly interested in were Oasis, Weezer, Jet, Jimmy ... read more
July 28th 2009
At the end of their tour, the fam went to Japan. Again, I was working, so I took another long weekend and only had time to spend in Kyoto. (I am returning to Japan next week, so stay tuned!). I really liked Kyoto. It's probably my favourite city over here so far. It has a really nice vibe to it, where modern day living meets a variety of tradition. This city was just really clean and everything seemed "convenient", for lack of a better word. We saw the Imperial Palace (well, the outside of it), the Golden Pagoda (that's not the "real" name, but you get the gist), a national treasure of 1000 Buddha's, a Zen rock garden temple, a casino and some night life, to name a few things. The Imperial Palace was a large ... read more
July 28th 2009
Once the whirlwind of China was over, we all got on planes and headed to my temporary home. "Home base" was my apartment in Ulsan, but we ended up all over the place. Luckily, and with many thanks to NOV, I have a sufficiently large enough apartment to house those goons. Don't get me wrong, it was great to see them and all, but you could barely walk through the luggage in my place for two weeks! But I still had my own bed, and the couch was big enough for Doug to sprawl on. I must admit, it was nice to have mom and dad around to cook and do laundry. And Doug too, to... do whatever it is that Doug does. While I was working during the weekdays, they all took off on day ... read more
July 28th 2009
So I'm going to split up the Kennedy Tour by country. If you want every single little detail, talk to my mom! She's always thrilled to pull out pictures and relive it all! While Mom, Dad, and Doug were here, I took very few holidays from work and went to meet up with the fam whenever I could, and it worked out really well. They first arrived in Beijing, so I took a long weekend off and flew down. We saw the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven, the Empress's Palace and various other things. We booked guided tours for most of this, which was really nice, although expensive (for Chinese standards, anyways). I think it was worth it to not have to deal with finding transportation, etc. not knowing any Chinese. The ... read more
July 28th 2009
I took a very short trip to Seoul (my first time) and took a few photos. It was a fast trip with the sole (/"Seoul" HA!) purpose of renewing my passport. My advice if traveling through Seoul: DO NOT DRIVE!! The first bit of the trip was pretty miserable. The GPS unit in my car broke about halfway there (very convenient timing) and I had only one map in a little tourist book measuring around 6" x 10" to map out a city with over 10 million people. Not much help. It took around 6 hours to drive there from where I live in Ulsan, but once I got there, I got lost and stuck in the RIDICULOUS traffic for another 3 hours before I found my hotel. It was a tiring trip. I also found ... read more
July 28th 2009
First of all, I owe everyone following this blog a huge apology! I have been TERRIBLE with updates, and I promise to do better from now on! Anyways, the good news is that today I'm taking some time to get it all together and do a huge, retroactive update! I'll start with my first entry, which is a tour of Busan with my English teaching, globe-trotting friends, Malcolm and Louise. We took a weekend trip just to check out the second largest city in South Korea. There is a really nice and large beach there, the "Heaundae Beach-ee" (Konglish pronunciation!). These photos are from March (again, sorry!), so it was still fairly cold and no one was on the beach. These days, however, there are supposedly up to 1 MILLION people that visit this area. I ... read more
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