Cherry Blossoms

In April the cherry blossoms bloomed and it coincided nicely with voting day, on which most people have the day off from work. I took a car ride with my family to the Gyeryong Mountain where we took these pictures.

A little piece of heaven I like to call Jeju

Eighty-five kilometers south of the Korean peninsula is the volcanic island of Jeju, a province of South Korea that Koreans like to say is famous for rocks, wind, and women. It also has nice beaches and tons of citrus. Most of the close friends that I made when I first arrived in Korea moved to this island in August and so I've been meaning to visit for awhile but haven't gotten the chance until F-bright flew us down to the island for a conference this past weekend.

Thursday afternoon I flew from Gunsan airport with three of the other F-brighters that live in Hongseong. After an hour we arrived in the cleanest Korean city I've come across and the capital of the island, Jeju-si. Its amazing how fresh the air on the island feels right now compared to the mainland, with spring yellow dust storms pummeling it from China. The first night we visited a famous rock that is shaped like a dragons head and watched as people sat on rocks and ate raw seafood that old women had just fished from the sea in front of us. Close by the dragons head was a gorge/ sea-inlet where governors used to picnic. I would love to post pictures of all of these things but unfortunately I ran out of camera batteries and didn't have a chance to get new ones the whole weekend.

That night I stayed with my friend Tom and his host family, where we made cookies with his host mother. I fell asleep early and while Tom was off to school for the morning I took a bus to the southern end of the island to look at Sanghang Mountain before our conference began. I enjoyed the bus rides almost as much as getting out and looking at things. The island is lush green right now, the cherry blossoms had just bloomed and lined so many of the roads, and all of the land is broken up by fences made from volcanic rock. Sanghang mountain was a wide, rocky pinnacle that sort of just jutted straight out of the ground and then leveled into a relatively flat top. While I wasn't able to hike up to the top -- its not really possible without gear -- there was a set of steps that led up to a pretty amazing cavern where Buddhists had built a large Buddha statue. I was about to leave to catch an earlier bus but don't called and convinced me that I should walk down by the water. I'm glad I took his advice -- the waves eroded the rocky shore line away so that it was a bunch of pock-marked rock faces. Old women sat with tubs of raw fish and soju for anyone that wanted to stop for raw seafood and drink alcohol.

From the mountain I took another bus into the southern town of Seogwipo, where our conference was being held in a nearby hotel. We had conferences throughout the afternoon and caught up with each other. That night we went to a western-styled bar that played a good mix of 90s American r&b and had decent but overpriced red wine. The next day we had more conferences and then traveled to a village with traditional Jeju houses and then to an extinct volcano named sunrise point. We were able -- maybe illegally -- to walk through the center of a big crater that dotted the center of this volcano. It was a pretty amazing sight -- a solid, grassy field with rocky peaks at every corner. When we got to the far edge of the crater, it looked over a 200 foot or so drop to the ocean where rocks jutted out from clear blue water. On the outside rim of the volcano, people rode slabs of cardboard down the grassy, but slick hillside and did somersaults to the base. We caught a bus back to the hotel where I drank too much rice wine and wandered around a garden path that wove around our hotels property, next to the shore.

I woke up with a bad hangover, three hours of sleep to add to the previous night's five, and the biggest mountain in South Korea to climb at 9 o'clock in the morning. With my friends Rosie, Laura, Emily, Amber, Ariah, Jeremy and Jen I climbed the 1900+ Halla mountain. This was by far the best hike I've had even though it rained, half the mountain was covered in snow, and I developed a large boil-like sore on my back from lugging a pack poorly on my hips. Maybe because Jeju wasn't bombed heavily during the war and because its warm enough year-round on the island that people don't need fire wood, the island has large trees and tons of seemingly undisturbed plant life. On Halla I saw the biggest pines I've ever come across in Korea, but the interesting thing about the mountain was how quickly the flora changed as we went up. Eventually the flora gave way to a bare peak and a stair case the last few dozen meters to the top -- a nice reprieve from the snow. Usually, you are supposed to be able to overlook a huge crater lake with tons of odd forests surrounding it, but we were in the clouds and the fog was too heavy to see. Nonetheless seeing the louds swirl and dip down along the bare top were worth sitting at the top for a few minutes.

By the time we came down the mountain we had done a 7 hour, 20 km hike. We took a bus back to Jeju city and I waited for my flight to Seoul, where I stayed in a bathhouse with Rosie, Laura, and Emily until we could catch a flight back to Hongseong at 5:30 the next morning. With another night of 3 hours of sleep, I was picked up from the train station and taught a full day of class.

Hiking stories

With spring here, hiking has resumed. I've been able to get out the last three weekend and two of those were spent at a nearby mountain named Yongbongsan. Its not a famous mountain, but popular throughout the region because its short (only about a 2 hour hike on the main path) and it climbs very quickly to jagged granite peaks. It attracts hiking groups who want a beautiful climb that won't take up an entire day and that is short enough that copious amounts of food can be lugged up top to eat at the peak. This gets to insane proportions: 2 weeks ago a group had a 10-pound rice cake, dozens of jugs of rice wine, and a pigs head on a spit that they were handing food from to everyone that passed. What I thought was a weird, one-time occurrence was there again this past weekend when I hiked the same trail -- a big group with a huge pigs head that they were offering to people that passed. Another interesting part of the trip was riding with a well-dressed Korean man who told me that he lived in Washington DC for two years, despite knowing very little English. He kept pointing at his tooth and I thought he was trying to tell me that he had gone to Washington DC to get his tooth replaced and wondered what kind of great dentist America has in Washington DC to attract international customers like this man. As he tried to talk to me about the election and I mentioned that I liked Obama I was able to make out that he saying an African American man who had walked across the street in Washington DC, punched this man in the face, and so he had to get his tooth replaced in Washington DC. This, he told me, was why I should like Hillary and not Obama.

This isn't the first conversation that I've had with someone who had this kind of sentiment and it gets into a whole other issue about how race is perceived here that I'll write about -- or point to someone else who has written about it here -- some other time.

Health

Suddenly it is spring and I am back in the country. Since returning to Hongseong and starting school again I've learned that it is Namul -- or wild greens -- season. Koreans believe that the winter slows down your metabolism from lack of activity and that eating wild greens in the spring helps to restore your appetite. My host family's dinner table has been filled with all kinds of interesting greens that are found in the mountains or creek beds and in the afternoon I can often see old women out there picking them to sell at the market. On a recent trip to Cambodia, my homestay parents also invested over $300 dollars in forty-year-old medicinal mushrooms called Sang-Hwang mushrooms (Phellinus Linteus). We now brew the mushrooms at night in a big crock pot and drink the tea in the morning. At least the immediate effects are pretty amazing -- the tea's really calming and dispelled a few big headaches I've had after stressful days with kindergarteners.



Koreans care alot about health. When local media published stories about GMOs and their ubiquity in soybean crops, tofu prices dropped dramatically throughout the country enough so that the government pushed through pretty liberal GMO laws that require products containing GMOs to be labeled. Organic foods -- while they are incredibly expensive here -- are also gaining major ground. This is a small town and even the local grocery store has an organic produce section. And while junk food is gaining quick ground here, people still that I've run into eat fresh food at most meals and reserve junk food for snacking in between. I've grown really interested in traditional medicine here and have been trekking down to the local traditional medicine shop to buy different herbs, mixing them together to see what effect they have (I do research about them first). Possibly unhealthy, but nonetheless an entertaining past-time. My current mix is fo-ti (an herb supposedly drank religiously by a chinese man that lived to be a 130, and renowned for its purported ability to return color to grey hair), Astralagus, and Polygonatum -- both supposed to do a bunch of cool stuff as well. Whatever the case, its a nice tasting blend to drink in the evening that has a vague coffee resemblance. Other herbs that I have been enjoying: Schizandra berry, Goji berry, ginkgo picked from the trees outside my school, cinnamon bark, ginger, licorice root, reishi mushroom, red and white ginseng, and local green tea.

Jon takes Seoul

The end of January is approaching and I've almost completed one month of living in the second smallest space I've ever lived in at Seoul's premier boarding house, the MAX Livingtel. Because Korea has a very long winter break I have January and February off and moved to Seoul at the beginning of the month to take Korean classes and work an internship come February. I'm living in the college neighborhood of Sinchon and while I have no view of it, or anything for that matter, from my windowless room, the neighborhood's frenetically beautiful, amazing in how much flashy stuff it crowds into such a tight space.





Living here reminds me so much of my freshman year in the college dorms. Like in college, there is a kid who leaves his door open and that I have never seen not wearing pajamas or playing video games. Also like in college, I can hear everything my neighbors do through the walls and even gone beyond that: I can actually feel the shape of my neighbors body when he leans against our common wall!

High points so far:
I visited Sanchon vegetarian restaurant, a buddhist mountain food restaurant run by a retired monk. The restaurant brings you out an enormous meal with dozens of side dishes to share amongst many people as you watch traditional dancing and singing.



I went to an ice festival near the north korean border. The river in the town freezes over and they split it into different sections for ice fishing, ice sledding, ice go-karting, ice sliding, and ice skating.







Trying to figure out the cities music scene and stumbling upon an amazing tribute show for Korean psychedelic singer kim jeong mi. From what I've been able to find on the internet so far, Korea had a pretty strong psych scene in the late 60s and early 70s. I also stumbled into a free improv show that turned out to be some one's birthday party. The place was also a gallery, but instead of the crackers cheese and wine for h'ordeurves they served boiled fish and meat on sticks with hard liquor.

Hustled in Bangkok

Before I describe my own experiences in Bangkok and Thailand, let's first turn to Murrary Head's description in his 1984 hit song "One Night in Bangkok":

Bangkok; oriental city –
But the city don’t know what the city has kept;
The crem de la crem of the chess world in a show with everything, but Yul Brynner.
Time flies -
Doesn’t seem a minute since the Tyrolean spa had the chess-boards in it.
All change –
Don’t you know that when you play at this level, it’s no ordinary venue:
It’s Iceland, or the Phillipines, or Hastings, or… or this place!
One night in Bangkok, and the world’s your oyster!
The bars are temples, but the bills ain’t free.
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister!
And, if you’re lucky, then the god’s a she.
I can feel an angel slidin’ up to me.
One town’s very like another one –
Your head’s down over your pieces, brother.
It’s a drag – it’s a bore to be lookin’ at the board, not lookin’ at the city.
Whaddaya mean?
You’ve seen one crowded, polluted, stinking town…
************
Get tied!
You’re talkin’ to a tourist whose every move’s among the purest.
I get my kicks above the waistline, Sunshine.
One night in Bangkok make a hard man humble!
Not much between despair and ecstasy.
One night in Bangkok, and the tough guys tumble!
Can’t be too careful with your company.
I can feel the devil walkin’ next to me.

Siam’s
Goanna be the witness to the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.
This grips me more than would a muddy old river or reclining Buddah.
Thank God I’m only watching the game – controlling it.
I don’t see you guys waging the kind of mate I’m contemplating.
I’d let you watch - I would invite you,
But the queens we use would not excite you.
So you’d better go back to your bars, your temples
…Your ‘massage’ parlors…
One night in Bangkok, and the world’s your oyster!
The bars are temples, but the bills ain’t free.
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister!
A little fresh, a little history.
I can feel an angel slidin’ up to me.
One night in Bangkok make a hard man humble!
Not much between despair and ecstasy.
One night in Bangkok, and the tough guys tumble!
Can’t be too careful with your company.
I can feel the devil walkin’ next to me.

My friend Tom and I began two days before Christmas --one of the busiest times for Korea-Thailand travel. Plane tickets can be cheap to Thailand and ours were especially cheap because our travel agent routed us through the Taiwanese city of Khaoisung for one night on each leg of the trip. Being someone who likes to cut costs, I thought it was a fine deal and assumed that Tom and I could cut corners even more by sleeping in the Khaoisung airport. American airports may be used to the sight of people strewn in various airport hideaways, waiting for an early morning flight, but Khaoisung was a well-organized city with a very small airport and an even smaller presence of foreigners. So when the security guards saw two dirty foreigners stretched across the floor and seats they didn't know quite what to do. We were asked for our passports and tickets multiple times and shuffled down to customer service and had an interesting evening of all sorts of these random, airport personnel encounters and various gifts given to us along the way, as they thought that we were too poor to get a hotel room. While we only spent 2 nights in the city, Khaoisung itself was a beautifully designed with wide streets, millions of motor bikes,a well-planned grid layout, and a seaside location. Walking around the city made me nostalgic for my trip through China in 2005 and made me remember the polite chaos of Chinese cities. I was very sad that we didn't have more time to spend in Khaoisung and the rest of Taiwan. But, flights are cheap enough that I might make a trip down there sometime in the spring.

Arriving into Bangkok on Christmas Eve was an odd movement between worlds: arriving into an ultra-modern, cephlopod-like airport with hundreds of rich tourists boarding through the most intense entry process I've ever had to go through; driving in a bus along a new highway with football-field-sized billboards and a view over Bangkok's outer-lying slums where people lived in shanties and cooked over outdoor fires; and the seedy tourist area that lies within the boundaries of the old city. Tom and I took a while to find a wonderful guesthouse and within a half an hour of putting our bags down and exploring the town we met the man who would haunt the remainder of our journey: a man we only now know as "the clock man."

He had five or six gold medallions on a chain that resembled clocks at first. and I wondered what a man could need with so many clocks and thought he was a bit suspicious. My next instinct was to figure out if each clock kept track of a different timezone, but later we found out that they are some sort of Buddhist pendants that Thai men occasionally wear. He told us that he was from a teacher in the north, educating the impoverished hill tribes that live outside the city of Chianmai, and that he had come to Bangkok to take a holiday and request more teaching materials from the government. We went to some of the main tourist temples and shrines within the old city together and then, checking another clock on his wrist, the man asked us if we wanted to go and have some Thai food and beer. These sorts of requests have become normal after living in Korea for 6 months and meeting old men on my hiking trips so we said yes and were ushered into a duk-duk (a motorized rickshaw) and driven a ways to an oddly placed bar that was outside of any sort of bar or restaurant district.

We were led into a dingy restaurant where large appliances were being auctioned off in one corner and girls were singing on stage. We were tricked into ordering Thai Brandy that was sold by the bottle and not by the shot and after drinking two bottles of it we discovered that we owed the man 4000 baht each, which totaled around $128. The man was banking on the fact that we didn't know the currency and while we did he, the creepy feeling we got from the restaurant he was probably hustling for, and our tendency to be overly culturally sensitive is what really lost us our money.

This put a damper on Christmas day but we still toured around the city throughout the day. While it may sound cool that a country has as many Buddhist temples as Thailand does, they lose your attention when you see the same sorts of gold plated shrines on every corner. The Temple of Dawn though was a nice relief from all of this since it hadn't been refurbished recently and had a much different sort of design than the other temples scattered throughout Bangkok.





The night of Christmas day Tom and I rode a 14 hour train to the northern city of Chiang Mai. After dealing with the pollution and traffic-crammed street life of Bangkok, Chiang Mai's slower pace was a much welcomed relief. Much of the foreigner district was within the old city walls crumbling behind a moat that surrounds the city. Chiang Mai is supposed to have the most temples of any city in Thailand and while they grew monotonous just as Bangkok's did, there was something amazing about seeing tiny ones hidden back in street nooks and around bends in the road. Better than this were the make-shift shrines that people built themselves near their homes. And Chiang Mai had so many colossal trees that just rose up alongside these structures and were sometimes 10 of me around.



After two days of wandering around the streets Tom and I found my old roommate Brad and his girlfriend Caitlin, who are both doing the JET program in Japan and were also traveling through Thailand and Laos during their winter vacation. We visited a famous temple on a mountaintop with them and then went on a hike through a national park to huge old tree and a waterfall.







Tom and I took off in a bus through the mountains to the small town of Pai. It turned out to be less Thai and more hippie than anything else we had yet come across. It was bizarre to be seeing tons of falafel stands, watching a bunch of Israelis watch a alien documentary in English, and find more access to western goods than in Korea. This all alongside earthenware pots of boiling herb teas, chickens running around on the streets, and old decaying shrines laid aside in small courtyards off the main road. However interesting it was though, Tom and I both got sick on the bus ride to it and since we had only one night there we didn't get to see very much.

We took a train back to Bangkok and got on the wrong train to the beach, where we had hoped to spend our last day in Thailand. So instead we spent it on the banks of a pond in one of Bangkok's parks. The coolest thing about the place was the number of people doing aerobics in it. We caught our flight back to Taiwan the next day and spent new years eve picking up our baggage as it hit midnight and watched a documentary about a plane crash through the rest of the night.

The Taean Oil Spill

As anyone who reads this blog probably already knows, I am horrible at timely updates. Because I've been busy playing santa, getting shots I don't need, sleeping in bathhouses and airports, and being conned in foreign cities, I'm just now sitting down to write about the Taean oil spill.

This you probably already heard about: On December 7 an oil tanker was pierced by a crane-carrying barge off the western coast of the peninsula, causing 10.5 tons of crude oil to escape and blacken 300 kilometers of coastline in Chuncheongnam-do province. The area is renowned for its beauty and diverse ecosystems which support many important bird and fish species. The area also supports a large fishing and tourism industry.

Finally I have a way to describe my location to people living outside the country. When I was traveling this past week I met an Italian man and was trying to describe where I lived in Korea. "Near the oil spill," I said. A conversation that usually lasts 6 sentences was reduced to one and I suddenly realized what useful landmarks disasters can be. South Korea could rename its map with environmental disasters from now on, and with a new proposal by the president to dig a canal connecting Busan and Seoul, there may be a lot to rename in the east of the peninsula over the coming years.

It took a little under a week for the oil spill to wash up on shore and show a visual impact on the coastline. So, I decided to buy some golloshes, hope on a bus on a Saturday morning, and head towards Malipo beach, hoping that I could find a crew to volunteer with.

Mallipo was one of the first areas to be hit and the scene when I got off the bus reminded me of when scientists quarantine Alex's house in ET: white oil-resistant suits everywhere; the streets blocked off with trailers and supply tents; people with clip boards holding down their papers as helicopters descend into make-shift landing pads. Within a minute of stepping off of the bus I was greeted by a volunteer coordinator and ushered off to an area where I could be of some help.

A famous beach and one of the first to be hit by the spill, Mallipo was pretty well cleaned by the time I arrived. Most crude oil had been wiped from the sand and water flowing up through the tides. Gas rainbows still shown almost everywhere though. And worse off were the rocks on the periphery of the main surf, where a black watermark showed where the oil had ascended up the rocks with the tide waters. For 3 hours I blotted gas rainbows until the tides washed up too high to continue working.

I decided to stay another night and was taken in by a group of red cross volunteers who were staying nearby. I shared a room with a kid who is a year older than me and studies Hindi in Seoul. The next morning I went with Red Cross volunteer support crews to help at the nearby beach of Sindori. Far worse off than Malipo, the top of the beach still had solid chunks of crude waste that grew thicker the closer to the water's edge you walked. I spent six hours digging up crude with a hand shovel and despite the small amounts you accomplish by yourself, within those six hours we all cleaned a sizable chunk of that beach.

Its amazing how many Koreans were mobilized by the event and saw it as a national concern. Estimates show that over a half a million people have already showed up to volunteer and the work isn't finished yet. Also included in those numbers was a sizable number of expats who showed up to help.