Blogs from South Korea, Asia - page 339

Ok so about four weeks ago ( I work on a delay around here can you tell!) one of my wonderful 1A students (Kelly) and her mother Gloria took me to the place in the title (I'm not spelling it again and I can't say it either, trying to explain to people where I went just drew lots of blank faces). This vilage is one of the few remaining walled villages in the country and was first constructed as an earthen-wall fortress during the late 1390s. Inside there are many traditional thatched roof cottages, geometric rice paddies and ponds. I was picked up at 9am on a Sunday morning at my house and it took three hours to get there. On the way there it began to rain. And I mean seriously rain. Up until then ... read more

Alright, so karaoke is huge over here. Maybe some of you knew that, maybe some of you thought you knew. Karaoke isn't just for a random Tuesday night at a Mexican bar like Amigo's with cheap Tequila shots and townies doing their impressions of Barbara Streisand and Ray Charles. Oh no, my friends, one need not wait for Karaoke Night at the local dive just to "mix things up a bit." Karaoke is its own business around here. Any night of the week, at practically anytime. And, no, you don't have to know which bars have karaoke, all you need to do is walk to the closest Norebong which are more common than 7-11s. A Norebong is a venue set up strictly for the karaoke "lover". I put lover in quotes because I'm not sure the ... read more

The other day I decided to get ordained as a Buddhist monk. I figured, though, that before embarking on such an irrevocable course of action maybe spending a day in the life would be a worthwhile endeavor. Fortunately Korea offers just such a service: 24 hours of eating, sleeping, and meditating like a monk. I quickly found out that being a monk isn’t all about living the high life of enlightenment and inner peace. Monks spend decades struggling to eliminate suffering and other intrusions of the outside world. On a more practical level, they can’t blow off steam by attending the occasional soccer match; theirs is a life of sobriety and celibacy. Into this cauldron of mayhem and madness (naturally waged deep within the cerebral cortex), my friends and I temporarily but forcibly flung ourselves. Even ... read more

We have been pretty busy at school with report cards and preparing for parent teacher interviews, so we decided to take a break and check out Ppuri park on the other side of Daejon. It is fairly new park designed to honour the family names present in Korea, and so honour their roots. There are a series of monuments honouring family names (there are like 4 different Kim families originating from different places). So you walk around and look at the statues. It is on a hillside, and it is getting colder so the leaves are changing colour; it reminded us of fall back home. It was really nice to walk around. There were different paths through the woods and we walked, and they lead up to a a pagoda and a lookout, which were really ... read more

Hey everyone, just got back to Seoul on Thursday as Rob, Chris, and I went to Seoraksan National Park on Monday. Seoraksan is known for it's vivid colours during Autumn, so we wanted to check it out. Well worth the trip! Sensational mountain peaks and the colors of the leaves were spectacular, even if a lot of them were already on the ground. It was about a 3 bus ride on to get there so we didn't do much the first day, but on Tuesday we hiked up to the peak of one side of Mt. Daecheongbong and down the other side. When we read up on the hike it said it was very difficult but none of us believed it since they installed staircases throughout the hike. Well I was wrong because that was one ... read more