World Cup Fever!!

Hey all,

I know it's been a long time, now I'm coming back home.  I'll chalk up the long absence away from the blog to a relatively busy schedule after school as well as the beginning of the World Cup and the absolute mayhem and pandomonium that started with South Korea's first game 10 days ago.  These pictures are from downtown Seoul, taken during Korea's first game with Greece.  The whole country has been swept up in the "Shouting Reds" mania!  And for good reason, the South Korean team, possibly underrated going into the tournament, has played pretty well so far.

They handled Greece fairly easily in their first game, but ran up against a much tougher opponent in group leader Argentina in their second game.  Unfortunately, their last group game, against Nigeria, doesn't start until 3 am in Korea tonight/tomorrow morning, so I'll find out the result tomorrow morning.  Hopefully it's a win; teaching on Friday after the loss to Argentina last Thursday night was not an easy task, made all the more difficult by the lack of A/C at school. 


Oh, and how could I forget the other important team I'm following:

Two weekends ago it worked out very nicely that the South Korea-Greece game was the early game on Saturday night, which acted as a nice warmup to the main event later that night (or early Sunday morning, however you look at it), England vs. USA.  We headed into Itaewon to watch the big opening match and the atmosphere was electric, although I don't think it could compare to the delirium that took over for South Korea's first game.  For the USA's second match, a group of us got together in Suwon and camped out outside the GS25 convenience store (a true Korean experience!) and watched the game on the big screen outside a restaurant on the opposite side of the street.  Another draw for the USA has given them some control of their destiny heading into their last group game against Algeria.  It would be great if South Korea and the USA could both advance to the knock-out stage (the next round, 16 teams).  Thankfully, the USA-Algeria game is on tomorrow night at a viewable hour and it goes without saying that I will be watching.

Outside of the World Cup Fever that has swept across the nation and most of the world, I have been pretty busy keeping up with tennis, playing some pickup basketball at a local university, and slowly learning some more Korean.  Last Saturday, a few of us took a little trip out to Chinatown in Incheon.  I was in search of some authentic dim-sum and was sure that if any place in Korea would have a selection, Chinatown was that place.  But, to quote the movie Chinatown, "Forget it Jake, you're in Chinatown."  I was literally awed that Chinatown, of all places, did not have any dim-sum restaurants.  They had plenty of Chinese restaurants though, and we settled for some Peking duck (I say settle very loosely) after watching a Chinese dragon parade.  The overall Chinatown experience was pretty good, it was enjoyable and worth the trip and definitely worth the freebies, the best of which were the sticky rice balls (no Chinese hot dog though).  The weekend adventures have slowed down a little bit, but they should pick up again very soon.  Whitewater rafting has been thrown around as a possibility, as well as bungee jumping.  I still need to go to my first Korean baseball game.  July will be a big month for some escapades, including the Boryeong Mud Festival and the Jisan Valley Rock Festival.  I can't believe it's already nearing the end of June, this past month has just flown by.  Almost a month until I'll be back in North America, which seems a little unreal to me right now.

That's all for now, time for the birthday shout outs section, being that it's that time of year.

Happy Birthday Bubbie!  I wish I could come to Toronto to celebrate with everyone, but at least I will be in town not too long from now.

Happy Birthday Mom & Dad!  I'm not sure whether I'll have a new post up by the time your birthdays come around, I'm guessing probably not since they're both this week.  Anyways, hope you two have a great time celebrating!

What I'm listening to:  "Shadow of a Doubt (A Complex Kid)" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Back to Busan and Other May Adventures

Hey all,

I'm finally back with what I promise will be, an epic, mega blog post.  It's been a while since the last time I sat down to bang out a new post and I apologize for that, I didn't want to write something new without having the pictures to accompany my writing, but now that I have my camera back (and all 8 pictures I was concerned about), here goes the new post!  The pictures above were taken at Haeundae Beach in Busan during Buddha's Birthday weekend (May 21-23).  Most of you may know from reading this blog that I had gone to Busan twice before, once last October for the International Film Festival and this past February, because it was our departure port for our boat to Japan.  Like last October, foreigners and Koreans from all over Korea flocked to the beach to enjoy the nice weather and the long weekend.  We got in to Busan lat Thursday night via the KTX (Korea's equivalent to the Bullet Train in Japan, except it's a little bit slower) and proceeded to make our way straight to the beach.  We found a motel about a block from Haeundae that was relatively cheap, dropped our things off and went to enjoy in some nightime revelry.  Unfortunately the jjimjibang that we had wanted to stay at (the same one we couldn't get into last October) was under repair this time around, so it didn't work out again.  Anyways, everyone packed it in relatively early on Thursday night to get the adequate sleep needed to properly enjoy a long and leisurely day at the beach on Friday.  The initial weather forecast for the week looked great, but halfway through the week the forecast changed to rain on both Saturday and Sunday so Friday became officially designated as our beach day.  The weather was great on Friday, temperatures were in the high 80s (low 30s C) and the beach was packed.  There was plenty of badminton playing, frisbee throwing, and even some beach rugby.  The water was cold, but refreshing after hanging out in the sun and on the hot, hot sand all day.  Everyone got there fun in the sun time and by the late afternoon, most of us were ready for dinner.  Given that we were in Busan, a city famous for its seafood, the men (Dave, Alex, Peter, and myself) decided it would only be appropriate to indulge in some local cuisine.  The following pictures do our dinner more justice than any amount of words I type ever could.  Needless to say the clam dinner was excellent.

I mean, look at the size of that bad boy!  So delicious!

Pretty much a smorgasboard of clams, all different shapes and sizes and they had pretty good side dishes as well.

And here is the aftermath of our dinner.
So that was Friday night's dinner and from there we made our way around downtown Haeundae, culminating the evening with a late-night trip back to the beach.








Unfortunately, the weather forecast was pretty accurate in its predictions (unlike my sports predictions) and the rain started to come down around noon on Saturday.  Dave and I had found out through the grapevine that there was going to be a little ultimate frisbee tournament being held on the beach, starting on Saturday.  Fortunately for the tournament, light rain is almost perfect weather because it cools the sand and makes it very soft and easy to lay out onto.  So, Dave and I headed down to the beach and played a few games in the tournament before the rain picked up and they decided to cancel the rest of the games.  I think the Beatles said it best (of course I do), when they sang, "when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads..."  This is precisely what happened for the better part of Saturday and Sunday.  We went for barbeque for dinner on Saturday night and then out to celebrate our last night in Busan on our mini-Spring Break.  Sunday brought more rain, so we went to see Robin Hood at the local movie theatre, which was pretty disappointing, but seemed to set up for a decent sequel (possibly).  After the movie we trekked back to the train station to take the KTX home, wrapping up a pretty good weekend.

The past few weeks, Korea has been swept up in election fever.  Election Day was this past Wednesday, although it was just midterm elections, so mostly city mayors and local representatives.  The midterm elections are usually seen as an evaluation of the President and the ruling party and the results from Wednesday indicate that the Korean people are somewhat unhappy with the job Lee Myung-Bak has done thus far, since his party lost a considerable amount of positions.  Campaigning in Korea is somewhat similar, but also very different from campaigning at home.  Every day for the past few weeks I would be awoken around 6:30 am to campaign dancers (mostly ajummahs, older Korean women) waving signs to the beat of campaign songs.  The campaign songs are rip-offs of popular music, with catered lyrics replacing the original lyrics.  Highlights include the Beverly Hills Cop theme, "This Land is Your Land," and "If You're Happy and You Know It."  The politicians ride around on stages propped up on the beds of flatbed trucks giving speeches, somewhat reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt's trip across America, giving speeches from the back of a passenger train.  I'm just upset that I didn't have my camera with me to give any visual representation/videos of how ridiculous this actually was.

Last Saturday, I hiked Bukhansan with a few friends.  Bukhansan is a mountain within a national park, located just northwest of Seoul.  When we started out the weather was pretty nice, but about 3/4 through our hike, it began to rain.  Overall, the hike was pretty good, we saw some small temples along the way, there was a nice stream that our trail followed for most of the way up and down.  We found out later that evening that it didn't rain anywhere else, just on the mountain (lucky us).  Other than that not too much is new here.  I'm still getting adjusted to teaching during the month of June (I'm not used to the school year going this late), can't believe I'm coming up on 10 months in Korea very soon.  This week the weather has been great, can't remember the last time there was such a long string of nice days in a row.  Now, the important news, I finally booked my flight home to Minneapolis in August, as well as my flights to and from Toronto.  I will be back in Minneapolis on Tuesday, August 3rd and I'm leaving to fly back to Korea on Monday, August 23rd.  I'm flying to Toronto on Friday, August 13th and flying back to Minneapolis on Tuesday, August 17th.  Please let me know if you will be around, I would love to see as many people as possible.  I know it's not a lot of time but it's the best I can do and I'm looking forward to seeing everyone.  That's all from this end.

What I'm listening to: the new Blitzen Trapper album "Destroyer of the Void" streaming on npr.org/music

Links:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqtlcHiSHTE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM2637_waoI