the HAPPY NEW YEAR post !!
(and probably the last one before my trip)

Ahoy, 2006! It's here and I'm happy. :) 2005 was spectacular, and I can't wait to see what 2006 may bring ...


The homestizzles pose before we all head out to the Hyatt.

Yes that's right, I spent New Year's Eve at the Hyatt on Jeju Island. It was sort of a free dancing / singing / variety show for the community. Posh though.


The elevators, and the interior of the Hotel. It's like a donut, with a big pond and stage in a covered courtyard center. Architecturally droolworthy.


Traditional Korean ... belly dancers?


Kyeong-Hwan and Won-Hee visit the fortune teller. She told me (the kids translated) that my students would respect me next spring. Huzzah!


Happy New Year!!

As this is the first day in a New Year, it has an almost magical, glowing quality about it. 2006 sure is full of promise. In fact, I can say with confidence the following:

number of drinks: 1 (champagne at the countdown)
number of days in which I forgot to floss: 0
mobile phone minutes used: 0
money spent on frivolity: $0

Isn't it wonderful? I mean, I'm sure all of that will change in due time, but for now ... model citizen. :)

And in the spirit of New Year's Resolutions, which i am almost certainly NOT too cool to ignore, here's mine for the year, inspired by largeheartedboy, a man whom I have never met but respect enormously. 52 weeks, 52 books. Can I do it?? Why not. :) Here's the rules: they can be any book, long or short - so I'll have to choose carefully for when I know I'll more or less time. This week's book, which I started after the party last night, is Stranger in A Strange Land by Robert Heinlein (thanks to Jennifer for sending it all the way out here!) :) Has anyone else read this book? It's AMAZING! I'm taking book recommendations by the way, what do you think for next week's book? And does anyone want in on this project with me? :) I certainly don't read enough - and reading is one of those things that makes you think "man, why don't I do this more OFTEN!" when you're actually doing it, but is rather hard to make the effort to actually DO, at least for me. Reading a book doesn't fit well with our sound-bite-sized bits of information we get in this fast paced world, and to me almost seems unproductive (whatever THAT means) to sit in a chair and read a book for an hour - but then again, I'm sure all this rushing around isn't really doing me much good anyway. :) Anyway, happy new year !! My host family tells me it's the year of the dog, and that can't be bad. Enjoy!

It was a beautiful sunny day today for the first time in ages, so me and Claudette (the scooter) decided to go on a little adventure.


Halla-san on the road from Sinsigagi (my town) to Seogwipo City


The view of Halla-san is amazing from certain parts of Seogwipo, here it is from the main rotary in the center of town (I haven't tried Jesus Day coffee, but I need to) :)


I then just started to drive east along the coast past Seogwipo and ended up climbing an oreum (large hill) that overlooked the sea ...


... and had a really good view of Halla-san


There was a line of squat little traditional houses, surrounded by Jeju rock walls, not 50 feet from the ocean line ...


Went exploring a little on the coast and found this secret cave ...


... and the stairs back up to the adjoining hotel were beautiful. :)

Later tonight my vice-principal and my coteacher Kim Soo-hee took me out for a fabulous dinner at a restaurant with architecture that looked right out of the Choseun dynasty. He's a marvelous man, a devout Protestant who doesn't drink (quite admirable in Korea given the social pressures) and is fond of bursting out in classic English songs - he was an English teacher before he got into administration, and is conversationally nearly flawless. His all-time favorite song is "Perhaps Love", which he requested from the lounge singer when we went out for after-dinner tea at the Hyatt Hotel in Jungmun, the tourist complex on the island. I had Jeju Yoo-Ja Citron tea, which is actually made from the Yoo-Ja citron fruit peels so I suppose its not truly a tea, but it was tasty anyways. :) Definitely not sweetened, which in my opinion was a good thing for this one, the natural taste of the peels on the bottom of the cup wasn't covered up. We then walked over to the Lotte Hotel for a fire and water show outside ... wish I had brought my camera for this one, there were fireballs shooting up into the sky and a mechanical but scary-real looking dragon that came out of the water and breathed fire!

Magnificent day. :D

Merry Christmas, everyone.
It's currently 7:02 here. I'm sitting my pajamas, listening to Christmas on my iTunes and (still) wearing my Santa hat. It's been quite a week.



Without even intending to get much "learning" done, I brought my camera in to school and had the kids take pictures while they made English Christmas cards and snowflakes. I think they know the word "fold" very well now. :)



Their cards were of course heartwarming.





Friday was Daesin's school festival, which is kind of like a recital and a talent show all in one. My homestay sister sang and played the flute, there was a lot of dancing and Korean skits, and some of the "bad boys" in my class strutted around to Korean hip-hop. This was the last time I'd see my kids until March ... and I was a little surprised at how sad I was to leave them. One of the moments I know that teaching was the right decision for me. :)

Last night I stayed up late talking to my family back in America, which was perfect for Christmas eve (but I still miss fireplaces!). My homstay family and I did our gift exchange last night, so today I got to wake up super late. :) I toddled into the living room and my homestay brother and sister were watching Love Actually on TV. I walked in right at the beginning and I didn't move until the end I may or may not have been misty-eyed. Don't tell anyone.

Much love and miss you all ... Merry Christmas everyone!!

So what's the weirdest thing you can imagine seeing when you stumble out of bed in the morning? How bout this : your entire homestay apartment torn apart, and three burly Korean men walking around with hacksaws and drillbits watching me come out of my room like the whole world had gone mad. And yes, it had. The living room piled with pretty much everything from every closet and nook and cranny, the entry-way covered in sawdust, the stove & sink & refrigerator -- completely gone. I quickly discovered breakfast was not in the cards this morning.


opening my door to find ... tools!

So I asked Kyeong-Hwan, my homestay brother, what was going on.
KH: "I don't know - father not tell me."
Me: "Is he changing something in the house?"
KH: "He make a new sink."


Well, the old one was gone, so I hoped a new one would be arriving soon. That goes for the refrigerator as well. Man, I remember when we had one of those! There was food in it.



Don't get me wrong, I don't mind them redoing the apartment. Just wish they had told me first. I mean, isn't this big news? My parents would have been deliberating about a doozy like that for months! This was an "Ahhh, Korea!" moment. For sure. Time to scavenge in the piles of debris for food ...

I can't believe I forgot to blog about this before! Well, better late than never. :)
So as you may or may not know, my host family are busy busy people. We very very rarely eat dinner together; since my host mom works as a cook in the Convention Center, she eats all her meals there, and my host father eats dinner at around 10 or 10:30 when he gets back from work. My host brother and sister keep real crazy meal hours. But Sundays tend to be fairly normal, and we usually get one meal (either lunch or dinner) together. So, this past Sunday, I decided to make my host family ... quesadillas!

Now, I'm not a bad cook or a good cook really. I would characterize myself as "enthusiastic and untested". So in all honesty, I've never actually MADE quesadillas in the sense of actually getting the ingredients and putting them all together, though I have gathered the ingredients in Chase Dining Hall and watched the cooking staff make me a quesadilla countless times. Soo, it's the same thing. :) Miraculously, they came out nearly perfect! We had a great time shopping at E-Mart for the ingredients, with my host brother sneaking samples of the raspberry wine when nobody was looking and both of us coming back at least 3 times to the chocopuffs cereal sample bowl, hahah. The best part - my host mother actually let me cook! In the kitchen! I even got to make homemade guacamole and Mexican beans and rice. Ohhh man, I'm getting hungry again ...

So, I can't tell you how many times I've googled "map of Southeast Asia" in the past week. Maybe like, 25. Thank ye gods for the google toolbar. Anyway, I thought since it's been on my mind quite a lot recently, I'd let you guys in on my super-secret top-secret very-tentative-and-also-secret travel plans for January/February.

Okay, here goes. You can follow along with the map, pretend it's one of those cool Indiana Jones map-with-lines and airplane photo montages. The green loop is to/from the farm right outside of Bangkok, blue means the sightseeing is over and I'm heading out, and ... don't ask me what the dotted line means. It just looked right. :)

January 19: Leave Seoul, stop over in Taiwan, arrive in Bangkok at 2 AM on ...
January 20 - 22: Explore Bangkok
January 23 - 27: Bus to and volunteer at Pathom Asoke, an organic Buddhist farm
January 27: Bus back to Bangkok, flight to Chang Mai
January 28-30: Trekking in the jungle
January 31: Travel to Chang Rai, book passage down the Mekong through Laos
January 31- February 5: Exploring villages in Laos, Vientaine
February 5: Return to Bangkok
February 6: Bangkok -> Kuala Lumpur
February 7: Kuala Lumpur -> Siem Reap
February 8-10: Exploring Angkor Wat
February 10: Siem Reap -> Kuala Lumpur
February 11: Kuala Lumpur -> Bangkok -> Taiwan -> Seoul
February 12: Seoul -> Jeju
February 13: First day of winter break class ?! (sleep?? haha.)

This is a lot for just a few days, and we know it. Actually only the flight to and from Bangkok and Seoul is booked, everything else is tentative and flexible.

this just in: my coteacher told me that they eat spiders in Cambodia. And they have a "Spider Forest". Am I biting off more than I can chew?? ;)

Bad mojo in Jeju City (or, the chicken that fell from the sky)

So today my host brother Kyeong-Hwan and I went into Jeju City, across the island, to see the new Harry Potter movie. We took the bus and were just ducking into Dunkin Donuts to get some movie munchkins when all of a sudden something large fell from the sky and hit my shoulder on the way, leaving a trail of feathers in its wake. We looked down to see a ... chicken! It was still kind of alive though it looked like its neck had been broken, it wasn't moving its head but its feet were still thrashing around. It was large as chickens go, not your average mottled brown and white little dirt scratcher, I think this guy's daddy was turkey. It was all sorts of different colors. We looked at it dumbly for a good minute, not knowing what to do. Should we put it out of its misery and kick it in the head? I wanted to help it, but I sure as hell didn't want to touch it. There were no open windows or anything from which it could have fallen or been thrown, and my mind raced to try and see if I could remember any snatches of prophesy or omens in the depths of my memory -- perhaps my crops will fail this year? Will my first-born child be born with webbed feet? It has been my policy never to touch almost-dead birds falling from the sky -- it's been a good policy thus far, and I'm sticking to it. One of the onlookers though, did not share my revulsion.

This woman picked the chicken up by its wings and started talking to Kyeong-Hwan in Korean. At this point I'm completely lost. She looked like a fairly normal person, and now she was holding a dying chicken up to us, speaking with a kind of fervor that communicated to me that since it had fallen on us, the chicken was somehow our responsibility. I caught little snatches - my host brother saying that we were going to see a movie and no, we did not want to carry a dying chicken around with us for the afternoon. Finally he ushered me into the store, we bought our munchkins, and when we got back the woman was still standing there waiting, with "our" chicken. Somehow we got out of that entanglement and went to the movie theatre.

The Harry Potter showing was dubbed in Korean and the next subtitled showing was in 2 hours so we decided to go see the Brothers Grimm instead, which turned out to be great but exactly the sort of creepy spooky mood that would amplify our already bizarre evening. We get in the theatre and there are only a few people with us - one of which, of course, is the middle-aged Korean woman, now obviously some sort of witch or conjurer. She's following us. I know it. After the movie we stick around and look at some of the video games, get lost in some of the stores (it's on the fifth floor of a mall) but of course the instant we get back on the street and turn a corner, we almost bump into Her again. I would laugh, cause hey -- it's funny! but I'm wayy to creeped out. My host brother asks her where we should wait for the bus, and she decides to lead us there. I warm up to her a bit now that she's helping us out and not trying to foist some diseased chicken on us, and we make a little small talk on the way. This of course evaporates when she leads us not to the bus stop, but instead to the chicken, dead now for over 2 hours, on the side of a flower bed. This time my brother picks it up and starts babbling about how we can cook it at home. The witch had clearly infected his brain with her foul magicks. He carries it back to the bus station and the witchwoman ducks into E-Mart and gets him a big bag to put it in. Would YOU eat a neck-snapped turkey-chicken that fell from the sky and then lay dead on the side of the road for hours? Am I being culturally insensitive here? No, I'm not. Luckily, after much frantic stammering on my part, I convinced him to throw it away. Makes that raw horse liver (yes, you read that right) I ate last week seem like comfort food. ;)

Okay, time to google for folk tales about chickens falling from the sky. I'm worried about my crops.

It's been raining and almost-snowing for days here in "sub-tropical" Jeju. I'm currently moping in my office, under the watchful glaze of two space heaters. I've been reading way too many weblogs. There's a sound coming from outside that sounds like the gnashing of teeth as the ghouls chomp up their dead victims on the battlefields in Warcraft 3. It's possibly snow melting from the roof.

I'm going nuts. ;)

A friend of mine just facebooked me this poem I wrote in junior or senior year of high school :

My name is Martin Sheen
I play the president.

My haircut sucks
My shirt is white
My glasses, they are bent.

My ghoulish features
Are like those creatures
Living in my vent.

Tea, good friends, and rice cakes. So ... Seoul last weekend was nice. In a few words: met the U.S. ambassador to Korea, had turkey and cranberries and pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving dinner at his house, went nightclubbin', shopping, and generally had a wonderful time with my ETA buds. You guys never fail to be awesome. :) 

A tea side street in Insadong. The Old Tea Shop is where we ended up. 

Seoul travelling - Forest in my new favorite tea shop. If you look REAL close, you can see a tiny yellow bird behind the red candlestick on the branch. There were maybe a dozen birds flying free all over the shop. Forest's hair is auditioning for a Strokes cover band in Seoul, hahah. 

A picture update this time! I know, it's been awhile. I was in Seoul last weekend, and once I get a little behind on things like blogging or emailing I get belligerent and don't do it at all. ;) Anyway, here's the doggies, I took them out for the season's first snow (Jeju?? Subtropical? Maybe not.) This is the Jeong's (the little one, brown and white) first time seeing snow.... 

My scooter across the street in the streaking snow. I know, I know, I'll put a better pic of it up here soon. :)