Ski Weekend Redux

Nana and I will be heading up to Vivaldi Park again this weekend, so we'll be out of touch for a few days. Expect a post from us Sunday night, replete with more mountainside shenanigans.

School of ROK poll; Please vote!

Vegetable soup accidentally left on counter for 24 hours: safe or not safe?

Although, seeing as our dinner was conveyor-belt sushi eaten in the basement of a department store, maybe this is kind of a dumb question.

Puppy Peril, PS:

Here's the link I forgot to put in the first version of that last post: (link).

Puppy Peril

I have no idea how many weiguk here in Korea are reading our blog (if they are, they're certainly not posting comments), but if any of y'all are out there, Nana and I have heard tell of some dogs in Daejeon who are in serious need. A large no-kill shelter in Daejeon is being shut down on February 28th, and the volunteers there are desperately looking for people who can adopt or foster one or more of the dogs. Any dogs left at the shelter after the 28th will be sent to the Daejeon pound and likely euthanized if no homes can be found for them. Nana and I are hoping to foster, as are (possibly) some of our colleagues at the school, but that will still leave the shelter with a good four or five dozen dogs on its hands. If there's any way you can help, check out this link (I know it says the shelter closed in October--the Feb. 28th date is a last-ditch extension) or and send a note to the e-mail address listed there. (NB: I'm not about to shoot some well-meaning fellow's e-mail address across the web.)

In the meantime, Nana and I will be trying to figure out a way to get down to Daejeon and help out. Our little place and two walks a day may not be the best life for a puppy, but it sure as heck beats the alternative. Wish us luck!

OMGHOLYCRAP Part III: "Worthy," indeed!

While I was back home, several people asked about the status of "my" romance novel - aka, Carla Kelly's upcoming romance novel in which the heroine has been bestowed with my name (for earlier installments in the OMGHOLYCRAP series, see here and here.) The title of the book has been approved - it will now officially be Worthy, after the hero Oliver Worthy (Massie, after the heroine, would have been my personal choice, but I suppose the secondary meanings are a tad more limited). And as to its release, here is the very latest word from Ms. Kelly herself:

Hi, Nana. Just wanted you to know that "our" book has been approved by the publisher. I'm thinking it will be out next November or December.

And I'm thinking I'd better get moving on Book 2!

Thanks again for the loan of your name.

Best,

Carla

Everybody, mark your calendars! I expect absolutely everybody I've ever met to purchase at least one copy of this book. All the cool kids will be laughing at the sex scenes with my name in it.* You don't want to be uncool, do you?

I didn't think so.

*Note: book may or may not have sex scenes. I promise nothing.

Mailing/Shipping Address

Nana and I have had several inquiries about sending letters and/or care packages here to Seoul. If you're interested in sending something to us, the best thing to do is to send it to the school--we can't get packages here at the apartment, and our mailboxes aren't really secure.

To reach us at the school:

Justin/ Nana
Asia-Pacific International School
820 Wolgye 2-dong
Nowon-gu, Seoul, 139-724
South Korea

As for postage, the USPS has a flat-rate international airmail box as well as flat-rate international air-mail envelopes. You can find basic rate info here.

As for contents, food is by far the most useful thing to us--when you have a mild pepper allergy like Nana does, it's really hard to keep a healthy diet when 80% of the local food is super-spicy. Some items that we use almost every day:

Manischewitz dry soup packets
Rice-R-Roni
macaroni and cheese
whole-grain pasta
energy bars (especially Powerbar Harvest)
instant oatmeal

(Remember, perishables and liquids are strictly verboten.)

Thanks so much, everyone, for being so interested in sending us stuff!

General Robert E. Kim

Teaching 5th Grade about the Second Continental Congress:

Me: So the resolution on independence couldn't be introduced by somebody from Massachusetts. It had to come from someone from another colony. And the man for the job, from the colony of Virginia, was Richard Henry Lee.

Student (sounding puzzled): Was he Korean?

Ski Trip: Vivaldi Park

As some of you may have heard (here or here), Nana and I went on a short ski trip with Dr. Kim this weekend, to Vivaldi Park, about an hour and a half east of Seoul. (Vivaldi Park is owned and operated by the same folks as Sol Beach, where we stayed on our East Coast tour.)

The first part of the adventure involved me DRIVING (gads!) Dr. Kim's car (double gads!) at night, while trying to follow both Dr. Kim's stealth Dodge pickup and our car's Korean GPS (kudos to Nana for figuring that contraption out). On the bright side, the trip did involve a long stop for a giant country-style Korean dinner: spicy stir-fried pork and big bowls of barley topped with tofu and assorted veggies.

So, Vivaldi Park. If we can take Vivaldi Park to be anything remotely representative, then skiing in Korea is so different from skiing in the States that it's hard to know where to start. First of all, Koreans ski (or board--honestly, the skier/boarder breakdown was about 50/50) like they hike, which is to say that they dress the part no matter how little actual skiing or hiking they plan to do. (Though this person in a cow suit would beg to differ--she's taken the apparent trend towards wearing cartoon-animal ski hats to a new and disturbing place.)

Also, night skiing seems to be more popular than day skiing (the techno-fetish?), and the vast majority of Korean skiers seem to stick to the beginner slopes, which also fits with the dress-the-part no-matter-what theme.

Anyway, take a look at this (shamefully low-quality video) of the hill: a writhing mass of humanity at the bottom, desolation on the more advanced slopes at the top.




The obsessive technojoy also spilled over into the lift system: below you can see Vivaldi Park's utterly unnecessary gondola, which serves the dual purpose of looking cool and helping drunk people get back down the hill without stepping into their skis, and below that the insane conveyor belts they had to help people get on the lifts.




Bonus: These crazy air-guns you could use to blow the snow out of your skis. . .




As for the skiing itself, it went pretty well. The place had a couple nice runs, and the mountain was nearly deserted for most of the morning. More importantly, the knee held up, and Nana made some pretty huge strides. She even managed somehow to pick up a flock of little Korean ducklings in a lift line, who then proceeded to follow her as she made her increasingly graceful S-curves down the slope.




(As evidenced by this clip, Koreans seem to ski like they drive: you can see several near-disasters, including a snowboarder careening in from the right.)

Anyway, overall, the trip was a huge success, dotted with important firsts: my first time driving in Korea, our first trip to a zzimzilbang (more on that later? maybe?), and Nana's first time having fun on skis. Here you can see me beaming with pride, and below, the celebratory hot chocolate I promised Nana if she got through the day.

Update

Apologies for the lack of posts this week, but it's been a doozy. The semester just ended on Friday, so grades are due, and we're getting a bunch of new students in on Monday. Add to that the fact that we were trying to get enough planned for this coming week so that we could go on a weekend ski trip (I'm working on the post) and there just wasn't time to write.

Just know that we survived the week AND the weekend, which was no small feat, considering that I DROVE (yes, I drove--eat my international driver's permit!) all the way to the mountains and back (with Korean GPS, no less).

Yeoju, Part 2: Shilleuksa, Sculpure Garden, and King Sejong's Tomb

Alright. Nana and I have been sitting on these pics for well over a month now, and there's really no good excuse for us not having them up. So here they are, without further ado.

[PART ONE: SHILLEUKSA]

After Queen Min's Tomb, the second stop on our Royal Asiatic Society tour of Yeoju, a small town on the South Han River, was Shilleuksa, Korea's only riverside temple. Shilleuksa packs a bunch of historical oddities into its fairly small grounds, including two freakishly old trees, one of which, a 500-year-old juniper, you can see below.

The first temple building we contemplated during our visit was an odd little shrine to the Buddhist judgment of souls, personified by this cast of colorful characters (yes, the guy on the left has a book on his head--kind of a St. Peter, sans podium):

Those, by the way, are only about a third of the figures in the shrine. For instance, seated next to the aforementioned chap with the very flat head is this cheerful old fellow who holds a record of lovers' infidelities and by all indications gets a real kick out of his work. And at the doors of the shrine, of course, lurk the obligatory temple guardians, one of whom looked a bit like a cross between my grandfather and the Notre Dame leprechaun.

Meanwhile, his compatriot threatened to pounce upon our unsuspecting guide.From this first shrine, we moved on to the parts of the temple with actual historical significance. The building below is Josadong, the oldest building at Shilleuksa (built sometime shortly after 1405), and home to the memorial portraits of three revered fourteenth-century monks (whose cremated remains are interred on the hillside above).


[HISTORY ADVISORY: Do not read the following while operating heavy machinery. Card-carrying dorks excepted, of course.]

The three monks memorialized at Josadong were pretty fascinating people. (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

1) Muhak was an advisor to King Taejo, founder of the Joseon Dynasty. Muhak's skills as a geomancer likely contributed to King Taejo's decision to move the capital of Joseon to Seoul;

2) Jigong (aka Dhyanabhadr) was an Indian monk who served at Shilleuksa and had his remains moved here after he died in China;

and 3) Naong was a Zen master who popularized chanting as a mediation technique. Naong's remains are interred in the impressive sari-budo immediately below, and he was purportedly responsible for planting the 600-year-old ginkgo tree (not pictured) by the river on the temple grounds.

[/END HISTORY. I mean, /HISTORY LESSON. History isn't over, by any means.]

Two things you notice quickly about Buddhist architecture: The folks have a sense of humor, and these folks have their priorities straight.
These guardians are painted on the doors to the mess hall. Clearly, it was important to make them fearful enough to scare any intruders away from the food. Cool fact: Traditionally, the guardian with the open mouth marks the door that's left unlatched.

Much spookier, in my opinion, is this chimney (conscientiously constructed of broken roof tiles) that really, really looks like some kind of homicidal marshmallow man blankly scanning the horizon for victims.

(Edit by Nana: It's an owl, fool. Which is intentional).

Anyway, back to Shilleuksa's many historical oddities. Below you can see a side view of the main temple building, illustrating the peculiar brickwork on the eaves.Even stranger, this close-up shows a highly-stylized face, the likes of which (according to our guide) doesn't exist anywhere else in Korea. One possible explanation for the face has to do with Shilleuksa's rededication in 1469 as a prayer sanctuary for King Sejong's Tomb (for more info, see below). The figure above faces directly towards the tomb, which is over some hills a few kilometers away.

Oddity two: a very rare brick pagoda . . .. . . overlooking the scenic South Han.
[PART TWO: SCULPTURE GARDEN]

Our next stop was a giant traditional sculpture garden put together by a local artist designated (how cool is this?) as a living cultural treasure by the South Korean government. Unfortunately, I don't have too much information about the artist or his work--this stop was spur-of-the-moment, when we found out that a local museum we were going to visit was closed.

However, there were . . .

PUPPIES!!!! Which totally made our day.

Oh, yes, and lots of cool art. (The artist specializes in woodcarving.)
That is, woodcarving and ginormous drums.

[PART THREE: KING SEJONG'S TOMB]

The final stop on our Yeoju tour was King Sejong's tomb, which, as you can see below, is tremendously un-photogenic.
The approach to the tomb, though, was really cool. What you see above actually sits atop another man-made earthen dome at the head of a small, partly-cleared valley dotted with twisted pine trees and surrounded by woods.

Plus, the tomb had a bunch of stone rams mooning the burial mound. Of course, they're actually supposed to be standing guard, but with that wall there, what does it look like to you?
Also, cool view:
The real highlight of King Sejong's Tomb, however, was the museum. As you may have already picked up, King Sejong was the guy who invented (or commissioned, depending on whom you ask) Hangeul, the brilliant Korean writing system, among other very useful but unfortunately rather boring things. The coolest invention of King Sejong's, however, might be the giant set of pitched stone blocks. (Think giant marimba, but upright, and with granite keys and huge hammers instead of mallets.) Totally cool.

So! That wraps up our Yeoju trip--just in time for us to accrue more photos (hopefully) on another Royal Asiatic Society trip in the next couple of weeks.

Korean Hospitality

Consider the following:

Yesterday, 7 AM: Justin and Nana awake to copious snowfall.

8:30 AM: Justin e-mails Dr. Kim, asking for advice for a staff ski trip he (Justin) wants to plan. The snow may or may not be to blame for this sudden urge.

5:30 PM, Dr. Kim: "I've booked a place for Feb 2 and I'm trying to get it again for Feb 16."

5:31 PM, Justin: "Sweet."

Yellow Dust: Update

The dust has abated, for now. But if you're interested, you can check daily dust levels in Seoul here: http://www.seoul.amedd.army.mil/sites/yellowsand/default.asp

Look on the yellow dust, ye mighty, and despair!

Yes, folks, the dreaded yellow dust has made its first appearance of 2008--several months too soon.

For those of you who haven't heard of yellow dust (aka, Asian dust), it is not, contrary to popular belief, the antidote to Korea's ubiquitous self-whitener, but rather a meteorological phenomenon (with a dash of ecological disaster) that hits East Asia every spring. The dust is a result of seasonal winds sweeping from the Gobi Desert (think Mongolia) over parts of China, Korea, and Japan. Back in the day, yellow dust wasn't such a huge problem: the Gobi Desert itself was much smaller, and China's eastern seaboard was not yet, though it may have aspired to be, a festering stinkpot of industrial pollutants. Thankfully, by the time the dust reaches Seoul, most of the worst pollutants have shaken out (take that, Beijing!). Still, a fine layer of grit has never been and will never be a welcome addition to my lungs.

The good news is that the dust isn't too bad yet: at its worst, I'm told, it's like a sandstorm, but lately we haven't seen anything more than fog tinged with mustardy gray.

On another note, the last 36 hours have been bone-chillingly cold and damp. On the bright side, though, our students have been coming to class on time, as nothing aids student punctuality better than clammy, unheated halls.

PS: I promise a photo of the dust if it gets really bad.

Landing at Inchon is Harder Than It Looks, or How Justin and Nana Got Into a Medium-Speed Korean Highway Bus Chase

I have never been a big fan of General Douglas MacArthur. Too much of a glory hound, too willing to use nukes, and, according to my grandfather, nicknamed Dugout Doug by some of the Pacific WWII vets for ditching his men in the Philippines while getting himself the proverbial hell out of Dodge (or is it "the hell out of the proverbial Dodge?" Unclear). But I do have to concede that, having tried it without school support for the first time, landing at Inchon is much, much harder than it looks, and he deserves all sorts of credit for that one.

The root of yesterday's problem was California, as the roots of problems so often are. Although we flew through Chicago (miraculously, without any trouble at all, landing in Tokyo twelve minutes early), the plane we used for our Tokyo-Seoul connection originated in San Francisco and had been delayed for about three hours. Instead of arriving in Tokyo at five and landing in Korea a little after nine, we ended up arriving in Tokyo at 4:45 and landing in Korea at 12:05. We had to change the customs form because we'd filled the stupid thing out for January 5.

This is not the biggest problem in the world, except for the fact that Korea seems to shut down at night. Even on a Saturday no trains and no buses were running after 11:30. Our cunning plan to take the same shuttle bus we came to the airport on - a $13 ride that drops us off four blocks from the apartment - was suddenly and thoroughly thwarted.

Fortunately, the airline stepped up big-time, organizing three charter buses to run routes to the northern, central, and southern parts of the city respectively. I've never heard of an airline doing this before, and I thought it was quite nice. We live way in the Northeast, but the northern route was going to drop us off a $30 or so cab ride away, and we could deal with that. Not too much worse than our original bus fare, if more complicated.

But please remember that this is Korea, home of the 90% solution. Everything here is so close to perfect, but missing just one key feature (witness the toilets with four bidet functions that don't actually flush toilet paper). So it stands to reason that something really glaringly obvious was going to go wrong.

Let's recap: Three buses. Three routes. Three different parts of town. You already know where this is going.

You got it. In spite of asking three different people (we're big on three) including the actual bus driver, we ended up on the wrong bus, which we only found out as the bus pulled away from the airport and the driver announced that we were on our way to Gimpo Airport and Gangnam. Gangnam literally translates to "south of the river." We live on the north side of town. Not going to work.

Of course we panic. The driver pulls over to figure out what's going on, and our correct bus shoots by us and out the airport gate. Everybody on the bus is Korean, which means that everybody speaks some English, and they all rally to the cause, going up to the driver and translating for us.

And the driver rallies, too. In a literal, Rallycross kind of way, taking off after the red tail lights of the northern bus as it blazes away from us down the Inchon airport causeway. Switching lanes vigorously and speeding with enthusiasm, he gradually draws us closer to that precious north bus. As we get close, he lays on the horn, and all the Koreans on the right side of the bus start waving out the window at the other driver. We careen around a few Korean cars and pass the bus. Our driver pulls over in the striped space next to an exit ramp and the north bus draws up behind us. Victory!

It is nearly 1 AM as we make the luggage transfer. The north bus is out of under-bus room so we have to heave stuff up the stairs into the passenger area. Miraculously, we don't leave anything on the highway shoulder or on the first bus. We make the first two stops on the route. Things are looking good.

And then Justin turns to me and says, "Why are we going south?"

You might be tempted to guess that it's because we got on the wrong bus, again, and the highway chase was for naught. But no. Justin and my travel karma would never stoop to using the same error twice in one night. That would be amateurish. No, the reason the north bus is going south is because the driver is completely lost.

It is 2:15 as Justin goes up to the front of the bus to talk to another passenger who speaks English. He is a German, traveling with his French girlfriend and a Korean colleague. He has just completed a six-month education exchange in choreography. I am not making any of this up.

The Korean, arduously, manages to talk the driver back on track. At this point, Justin and I suddenly realize that our luggage isn't going to fit in one taxi. The Korean guy, whose English is excellent and who really was our saviour, nevertheless balks at asking the driver if he could take us all the way to Nowon. Finally the bus driver pulls over and says that the cab fare to Nowon from that spot is about the same as the cab fare from his final location, and we might as well catch a cab here. We think he is just trying to get rid of us.

It is 3:00 as our hero helps us offload the bags and explain to the cabbies where we're going. Nobody ever recognizes our apartment building, so we go with the subway station nearby. To my terror, Justin and I have to split up, and my cab driver doesn't even seem confident that he can find the subway station. We spend some time fiddling with his GPS device to see if we can find the apartment (fail!) and then fall back on mapping to the station. We have a nice pantomime conversation in which I explain to him the travails of the day and he keeps saying "Yaaah," in a sympathetic tone of voice. Honestly, we met some very nice people.

And finally, at 3:25, we pull up outside Brownstone where Justin has just offloaded the luggage and paid his cabbie. Amusingly enough, the fares add up to less than our bus ticket, but frankly, I would have paid six dollars to shave two hours off the trip. I pay my cabbie (and, to my everlasting mortification, snag his upholstry a bit as I pull the bag out of the car) and then Justin and I commence the amusing process of having two hands to carry four bags each. Fortunately, our suitcases have backpack straps. This is our shout-out to Grandma and Ampa Eck, wedding-gift purveyors par excellance.

3:30, and we're back in the apartment for one last weird surprise: our modem is gone. Nothing else is missing, including the flat-screen monitor and cash we left out on a bookshelf. And yet we have internet running through the wireless router. ???? Our best guess is that the cable company sent somebody to pick up the modem and the building guys let him in. From now on, I'm flipping the deadbolt at night.

The moral of this story: getting two Americans with eight bags through Inchon nearly destroyed me. Getting the US Army ashore? You go, Dugout Doug.

And after last night, I think I'm also a little more sympathetic about the wanting to use nukes thing. San Francisco, watch out.

Video: Walnut-Paste Snack Machine

Just to tide you over until our Yeoju post is ready, here are some videos of a wacky automated assembly-line-style walnut paste pastry maker we saw at a highway rest stop. Verdict: Pretty tasty! (Much tastier than the black-bean variety, imho.)

Royal Asiatic Society Trip: Yeoju Part 1: Queen Min's Birthplace

The morning of the Royal Asiatic Society trip to Yeoju commenced, thankfully, with us actually finding the correct post office this time (although we did get there forty-five minutes early, just to be safe). We got on the tour bus and arrived a bit over an hour later at our first stop, the birthplace of Queen Min/Empress Myeongsong, queen of Korea at the end of the 19th century and wife of King Kojong, Korea's last king (she received the title of empress posthumously, when King Kojong declared the Daehan Empire).



Traditional Korean architecture is quite attractive, but because most palaces and old residences are displayed without furnishings, it's very difficult to visualize what any of the spaces are used for. Queen Min's birthplace featured little mannequin scenes that helped us picture these mostly-identical open rooms as actual living spaces. For instance, here is a woman doing... well, something. With sticks. Laundry, perhaps?


Okay, so it's not a total success. But it was still a help.

This picture is more helpful: it is a kitchen. But what you don't know is that it's also the heating system:


If somebody asked me for one area where Korea just vastly outclasses the West, I'd say, without even thinking about it, heating. We blogged about our tribulations turning on our ondol floor heating system, but I have to say, once it gets going, that is one sweet, sweet system that I only appreciate more now that I'm back home with forced-air heating. Ondol is under-floor heating. In our modern apartment, it uses hot water pipes, like a radiator that runs under the floor instead of against the wall. In older homes, it meant having a fire dug in under a house to heat the air beneath the floors. In both cases, it beats the heck out of Western contemporary alternatives: in medieval times, the fireplace against the wall that heated about nine square feet of castle, and in modern times, forced-air heating and its uneven room heating from vent placement or blockage, dirty vents and filters, and dried-out air.

To return to the kitchen picture, the engineering of ondol niftily double-uses an existing appliance. In our apartment, we have no furnace - our hot-water heater heats the ondol pipes as well as, say, the shower and the sink. In this picture, the double-duty appliance is the oven. The air heated up to cook in the kitchen is not wasted up a chimney or just to the kitchen ceiling; it is channeled into those under-floor vents to heat up the house. Toasty!

Another highlight of Queen Min's Birthplace was the stellar objective history.

Queen Min was, as I mentioned, queen of Korea in the late nineteenth century. Politically savvy and unusually influential, she played Korea's neighbors against each other to preserve Korean sovereignty. Ultimately, Queen Min was assassinated by a Japanese squad. Or, according to the signpost outside Queen Min's birthplace, she was "murdered by the atrocious Japanese."

Let's give this sign the benefit of the doubt and assume it's a mistranslation of "atrociously murdered." I could accept this. Murder is never particularly nice, and they made things extra tacky by killing her in a section of the palace reserved for women and burning the body.

But I'm not sure how to get out of this one:

From the filmstrip in the Queen Min museum, with a teacher and students:

Female student: "The Japanese are so evil! Why would they want to kill such a nice person?"

This is what we call, in the biz, a "teachable moment." The teacher could respond with, "All Japanese people are not evil," or some other lesson against generalization. But she does not.

And then:

Teacher: And after they killed Queen Min, they burned the body.
Female student: Teacher! Those bastards!

I can't explain that. I really can't.

Bonus: Those voices are recorded in clear American/Canadian English. Clearly, whoever voice-acted that dialogue spoke English. Did it not occur to them to point out that this is a very odd thing for a student to say?

edit by Nana: Oh, yeah. I wrote this one. Justin put up the pictures so it shows up as him.

School of ROK's Top 5 "Insights" about Korea

Well, Nana and I have been back in the States for a little more than a week now, which means three things: 1) Jet lag is wearing off, 2) We've delivered our Korea schtick about 35 times now, and 3) We've found out more people were reading School of ROK than we ever imagined. All of this adds up to a sudden desire to post something coupled with an utter lack of excuses. Hence, this post, and my out-on-a-limb promise to have our Yeoju pictures posted within a few days.

So, without further ado, here are the top five most-popular numbers in our already-getting-old act (in no particular order):

What are Korean schools like? Everyone we've talked to has been fascinated (read: horrified) by the Korean education system, or even moreso by how little sleep our students get. You see, in Korea, the chances of your daytime school grades ever mattering are slightly less than the chances of a Korean student staying awake through an entire class. Which is to say, appallingly low. (Don't worry, though, we've gotten our kids to stay conscious through the entire day.) In the Korean system, all that matters is your score on the next standardized test, which you study for at your nightly cram schools, called "hagwon," six days a week. What's worse is that families have started using the hagwon as a means of conspicuous consumption: Whereas in the States you're apt to hear yuppie dads beaming about their Beamers, in Korea they're bragging about how many cram schools they send their kids to in a day. All of which results in the high and rising cost of raising a child. That's why so many children are still adopted from South Korea, even though it's a very safe, politically and economically stable country: in a situation where dual-income professionals have trouble affording children, young couples and single mothers don't stand a chance.

What does Seoul LOOK like? I've had a few requests to compare Seoul to various other East Asian cities. Does it look like Tokyo? Shanghai? Beijing? Of course, never having been to any of these other places, I'm in no position to compare (though Nana assures me Seoul does not look like Beijing). The pictures don't like: Seoul looks a lot like this, with bits of this and this sprinkled in. In our part of Seoul, everything's new, and most of it is made of concrete. High-rise apartments everywhere. The defining features of Seoul, though, are the Han River and the surrounding mountains: the first cuts a wide swath right through the middle of the city and the second slice deep into the city from its edges. It's a clean town, pretty safe, with many unexpected great views.

Can you speak Korean? Sadly, the answer is no--we start our official Korean lessons in a couple weeks--though we have learned some Hangeul to trot out as a party trick, plus a few key magic words that can get us food, beer, bathrooms, and transportation home.

What's Korean food like? Ahh, Korean food--a bit of a touchy subject. If you want my advice as to whether or not you should go to that Korean bbq across town this weekend, I'd tell you heck yes. But if you wanted to know whether you should eat nowhere but the Korean buffet for three months straight, you'd get a very different answer. There is some really delicious Korean food and some REALLY gross Korean food. In other words, we've had to supplement the local fare with a lot of our own cooking and with pretty frequent trips to the little foreign enclaves downtown. I will say that there are two things you don't realize about American food until you live outside the US: we have an amazing variety of ethnic food to choose from and almost all of it comes with cheese.

This leads us to our final question:

Do Koreans really all look alike? No, though since it's a fairly homogeneous country as far as ethnicity goes, there are fewer general categories of appearance (ie, you've only got "fat guy" instead of "fat white guy"), fewer hair colors, really only one eye color, and almost no facial hair. But Koreans ARE shorter (possibly because they sleep four hours a night when they're kids). I mean, I feel like a circus midget back here! Though all these growth-spurting cousins certainly don't help.

Anyway, time to go help with our very American Christmas Eve: pickup football followed by piles of food either shot through with sugar or smothered with cheese. Yum!

You Better Not Pout...

A holiday song written by our 7th grade girls:

You better watch out
You better not talk
You better not pout, I'm tellin' you why
Mr. Goff is coming to class

He sees you when you're chatting
He knows when you are late
He knows if you've been speaking Korean
So be good for goodness sake!

You better watch out
You better not talk
You better not pout, I'm telling you why
Mr. Goff is coming to class!

Feel the holiday spirit!

A major discovery about jet lag!

Nana and I have been home for a few days now, so you can probably expect some very insightful observations on American reactions to our Korean experiences any time now . . . but it will probably have to come from Nana, seeing as my brain is in a deep fuzz.

In other news, it turns out that a very small percentage of travelers suffering from jet lag don't experience insomnia, but hypersomnia. Guess which of us is the hypersomniac! (Hint: Sure as heck ain't me.)

PS: We've also got some photos about Yeoju to post, but Nana's going to have to write that one, too, since she has some witty stuff to say about Queen Min's assassination. Interest piqued?

The Bloggers have Landed!

Home, safe and sound, in Pittsburgh, with only one minor (about 30-minute) delay getting off the ground in Chicago.
It's 9:24 Pittsburgh time. I've been up for an hour after sleeping eleven and Justin is, miraculously, still asleep. We did the math and here are some fun travel-related facts:

- We got up at 6:00 AM Saturday in Seoul, which was 4 PM Friday Pittsburgh time. We finally went to bed in Pittsburgh at 9 PM Saturday, for a total travel time of 29 hours.

- Our flight from Seoul to Tokyo took off at 12:30 (lunchtime) on Saturday, Seoul time. Our flight from Tokyo to Chicago landed at Chicago O'Hare at 11:15 AM on Saturday, Chicago time. So we landed in Chicago an hour before we started our trip.

We got singled out at Chicago customs but not overly harrassed, although one Christmas gift (we'll tell you which one after we give it) did raise an eyebrow. Our two pieces of checked luggage were in the first twelve pieces off the Pittsburgh flight, so evidently somebody up there thought we'd paid our travel dues and let us go home.

Our dog Kipper seems confused -he can't quite remember if he knows us or not. But since we pet him, he's okay with us either way. And we are definitely okay with him! He's a little bigger than we remember (ahem ahem KATHY) but his face is just as cute and his fur is still heavenly.

My apologies if this doesn't make a lot of sense - I've been sick for the last five days and I haven't turned the corner yet. Head cold, fever, joint aches, and a bit of, shall we say, King Sejong's revenge? Getting back here to normal food and, wonder of wonders, A BATHTUB will make all the difference, though, and we hope to get some catch-up blogging in over the next few days.