Ganghwa-do and a Few Other Little Things

Hello everyone. I have a few pictures to share! I went out to Ganghwa-do, since it will soon be cold and less fun. I visited the island last time I was in Korea, and I was very glad to be able to get back. I went out with a friend, and it was a good time. We had some issues finding the right place to catch the bus out, and spent too much time waiting for busses in various places. Even though there were some annoying issues, it was a really good day.  As I'm feeling pretty lazy, I'm going to let the photos guide me through this. Hope you enjoy them!

Fall's here, and the leaves are all changing and falling. This is a spot between the school and the Museum of Art that you can see below.

I walk along this road on my way to work. The ginkgo trees are really dropping their leaves.

I was given tickets to a special exhibit at this art gallery by one of my coworkers. I went one Sunday. It was really cool. The art was all very abstract, which is usually not my favorite thing, but it was really good. There was an art student from Incheon who works at the gallery, and she showed me around. We talked about the pieces, and she told me about the artists and what they were trying to convey. It was a good experience. The gallery is really close to my place, so it was very convenient.

This is another picture at the school. I took it as I was coming in in the morning. You can see the A and B wings of the school, and the Dorms are just out of shot to the left.

I finally stopped by Hyehwamun to get a few pictures. This is a few blocks from my place, on the way to Hyehwa. It was a smaller gate, but it looked really cool lit up at night.


So on to Ganghwa. I made this little Tripline trip to illustrate the trip!

We bussed out when we finally found the right place to catch the bus, and then we bussed to the port of Oepori. We jumped on a ferry to take us across to Seokpori.

Inside the ferry. We didn't sit inside during the trip there; there were too many interesting bird antics to watch.

The birds followed to catch snacks thrown from the boat.

The birds would even swoop in really close to the boat to grab snacks directly from people's hands.



I took a video of the birds and their crazy snack-catching antics. Disappointed that I talked during the video, but it still turned out pretty well.

Also on the ferry was this sign, which reads: "Jump and clear all the steps for a bonus prize!"

I got a few pictures of myself at the temple. One of the bonuses of touring with other people! This is near the entrance to the temple. To the right is the second or third largest ginkgo tree I've ever seen!

Here you can see the entrance to the cave room, a juniper tree that looks like a dragon breathing fire (which was news to me, but I was able to see it very clearly once learned this). You can also see the platform up on the cliff where a buddha's been carved into the wall.

Here you can see me with a carved buddha and a large number of monk statues. The monks were stored in a huge class case last time I was here, because this part was still being built. It was really cool to see it finished, and I was happy that I could get a few pictures of myself here. You can see that it was a popular place for people to get photos, and also the family on the right were trying to throw coins up onto a pagoda.

I was also able to get a photo of myself alone here. Thanks to C. for being a willing photographer!

The pagoda mentioned above, with coins visible. Both my friend and I were able to toss coins up and have them stay. I hadn't seen this kind of thing before, but I bet it's lucky! There is very little area on the structure that isn't sloped, so it was a bit of a challenge for us.

I suppose this sort of ruins the attempted anonymity I've been shooting for, but oh well, it's worth it. Here you can see a roof tile that we paid to write on. We decided to share one since it was 10,000 for each tile. We wrote simple messages. The tile will be used at some point when they retile the roof of one of the buildings. As my sister sais, it's got to be good Karma. It was a fun thing to do, and was another first for me!

After the temple, we took the ferry back to Ganghwa island. We wandered close to the ferry landing point, as we had heard that we could have good crab stew here. We found a place that looked good, and got some good food! You can see the stew cooking in this picture.

And here you can see the food after it had cooked. This is after we had eaten some of the crab already. It was quite good, and nice and spicy. It was kind of difficult to get at the meat, but all the work was worth it!

After this, we spent some more time waiting for a bus, and we ended up grabbing a taxi to get back to the Ganghwa Bus Terminal. We then caught an intercity bus back to Seoul.

As I mentioned it was a good trip, and I am glad I got out before winter. I am sure I'll return again in the spring or summer, since I still need to see fortresses, and I'm sure there are other things I haven't yet seen.

I hope you are all doing really well, and that the weather is staying relatively warm so far! Let's all get ready for the cold of winter!

Fall, School, Palace, Lanterns, and War Memorial

Hello everyone! I am going to share some pictures with you! Some are connected to the previous imageless post from Friday night, but others are from events after.

It's fall! I'm really enjoying the changing leaves. The ginkgo trees are always my favorite. There are a ton of them along the street on the way to work. I have been bringing leaves to work occasionally, to keep on my desk. I am considering trying to head out to Ganghwa-do next weekend, and I'm sure my favorite temple would be great with the changing leaves.

This is just a picture from school. It's the view from the B Wing, towards the dorms, and with the space between them.

The fitness center at the school. I have started to go somedays after school. I am hoping to get back into shape, and with the free access to these machines it shouldn't be all that difficult.

BBQ place I've been to a couple times. I need to eat at cheaper places more often. I am good at eating cheaply, but I've been eating relatively more expensive stuff recently. I have to be more careful with money this month since 500 dollars were taken for my apartment deposit, and I foolishly sent 900 back to put against my loan. It won't be a huge deal, but I should be more thrifty for a bit. :)

Morning near work. There's been some pretty strong yellow dust the past few days. I'm sure part of the obscurity is due to that, though it may be partially fog as well this morning.

A photo at the palace. As I mentioned, I visited Changdeokgung (visit their website if you want) for the first time with a group of students from Seoul Global. It was interesting, though I didn't really get to spend the kind of time I would normally spend at a place like this. It was a good time, though. I'm sure I'll be back sometime. I might try to catch one of the English tours. This makes 3 of 5 Seoul palaces visited for me.

As much as I'd like to avoid advertising how much of a dork I am, I can't help but post this picture as well. Here's me at the palace. Oh, I got a haircut! It looks a lot better, and it a lot easier to manage than the long hair that I was getting.

Also at the palace. I learned that because the king that lived here was old and had joint problems, they built bridges between buildings that were on different levels so that he wouldn't have to go up and down stairs. This is a picture of one of those bridges. I assume there's a ramp inside, rather than stairs to make it easier on the king.

I mentioned that I went out for coffee and visited the lantern festival on Friday night. This is the hot-air balloon that was repeatedly raised 10 or 20 meters into the air, and then let cool so that it would lower itself. There were a lot of people there, and my friend and I had to constantly vie for good spots to see and get photos.

Turtle ship lantern. These lanterns were just as cool as the ones for Lotus Lantern Festival back in 2007. There were a lot of them and they covered a wide range of themes. Some were cute kiddy cartoons, others represented participants in the G20, and others were more traditionally Korean. It was great.

One of my favorite of the lanterns. It was very colourful and beautiful, and very detailed.

On Saturday I helped to administer the SAT tests at our school again. I really quite enjoy the job. It's simple, easy, and gives me time to read. Afterward, a group of us went to the War Memorial (more info. here). It was good to get back after 3 years absence. Much was the same, but they had put in a boat that wasn't there before. It is a replica of a boat that was attacked by the North in 2002. There was red paint to mark where damage was taken. Six men were killed in the attack. It was very interesting and touching to be able to walk on the ship and try to imagine what it would have been like to go through an attack like that.

From the ship I was able to get an interesting shot of some of the other machinery. As always there were a lot of other visitors to the museum. We wandered outside for a little bit, and then went inside and managed to see quite a bit of the inside stuff.

After the War Memorial, a few of us went for food, and then went out for a couple of drinks. It sure took a lot of time to actually get to a place, but once we finally did it was worth it. We went to a place called Traditional Korean Sound, where they played a lot of classic Korean rock. It was good; I might wander back at some point.

Well, that's all. I've gone back to the smaller pictures, and I'm not formatting the text below the photos as I used to. I've realized that the extra-large photos will sometimes interfere with the stuff on the right, so this will be better I think. You can always click on the photos to see larger versions.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy. I hope you're all having a good fall and enjoying the change in weather.

No-Photos Post!

Hello everyone! I hope you're all having a good November so far. I am going to do my very first post without any pictures. I had a great day today, and I wanted to share. However, I need to be up pretty early tomorrow (proctoring SATs again) so I don't feel I have time to transfer photos, sort them, and plan a post around them. So I'll post the photos separately a little later!

In the meantime though, here's my day! In the morning I was able to go with one of the second grade classes to a palace. It is called Changdeokgung, and it is pretty close to the school. It is one of the palaces that I hadn't seen before today, so I was glad to be able to go. I learned some interesting facts, like how the palaces in China are paved with stone, but in Korea they are covered with sand instead. This helps because then you have sand available if there's a fire, and it's more difficult for assassins to sneak around the palace easily. It was a good time. I got some good photos. I actually brought my real camera, and didn't just use my phone!

Then I came back to the school, and worked on a few things. I spent a bit of time looking into travel to China. I'm hoping to head over there for a bit during winter vacation. I was quite annoyed that I will have to go through a travel agent to have my visa application submitted. I would rather be able to just fill the form on my own and submit it. I'm not sure why, but all the individual visa submissions for some of the visa types now have to be done this way. I will have to get that sorted over the next week or two.

During seventh period, I went to the fitness center for a bit. It took me a while to get in, because when I arrived at the outside door, it was locked. It's not locked when I got after class, but because students aren't supposed to be in there during class time it was locked. I had to go back up 4 floors to my office to ask a coworker for the door code. I ran for a bit, and did a little bit of lifting. While I was running I got a text from my new friend. We arranged to meet for coffee after supper. After a short workout, I ran upstairs to be on time for the monthly English language staff meeting. Sadly, my punctuality was for naught, because the meeting was cancelled.

I was just about to pack up my stuff and go down to meet my American student-teacher friends, when they walked into the office. I quickly packed my stuff, and we headed out soon after for dinner. We went to Hyehwa, as is our wont. We ate at an Indian place that was pretty good. We chose it because others from work were going there a little later, and we were able to see them for a couple minutes. We went before them, and we were just finishing as they came in. We left soon after, since the girls and I both need to be at work tomorrow morning, plus I had to run home to drop off my stuff before I went out to meet my education student friend.

The friend I mentioned planning coffee with above I met last week at the Gansong gallery with the school Librarian and one of the Nutrition teachers. My education friend is the nutrition teacher's sister. [NOTE: this not-using-people's-names-in-the-blog thing is actually quite difficult. Would be a lot easier, but I want to be careful about people's privacy]. I was happy to see her again. We met at Jonggak and after a bit of trouble meeting (I was late! I felt so bad.) we got to have coffee together. It was a lot of fun, and then afterwards we walked to the Cheonggyecheon stream to see many beautiful lanterns. There was a lantern festival on, to celebrate the G20 summit. I was so happy that my friend suggested we go see them, because I would have never found out about it otherwise. We spent a long time walking and looking at the great lanters, and we got to take some photos as well! I look forward to sharing them with you all. After seeing a lot of really cool lanterns, and not even once falling into the Cheonghyecheon, we had to part and I jumped the subway to head home. Just before I left my friend's friend came, so I got to meet him too.

I had a really good time today, and I will definitely share some photos with you guys soon, and I'll put a few on facebook soon too. I hope you are all doing well, and I wish you all the best for the remainder of your fall and the start of winter! Later!