Nami Island in Fall

Michael and I went to Namisum a couple of weeks ago to check out the fall colors. We went a little early, but we had other things planned for later so this was the only open weekend. My camera was kind enough to take a few pictures before the battery died, so I will let them do most of the talking.

Grilled Sausage. We were expected some more street food since this is the season for cart vendors. I ate some grilled ddeok on a stick drizzled in honey. It was weird.

Wild Korean chickens. We also saw one squirrel. Michael was disappointed with the lack of wildlife, I felt pretty meh about it since I didn't expect to see any wildlife (Korea doesn't have any).

Korean ducks.

There were lots of kindergartens on field trips this day. Also on field trips were middle-aged people. They played Duck, Duck, Goose in a field and danced to K-pop.

This going to be it for a while for excursions. Michael and I are going to hunker down and save up some cash. That and it's getting colder and colder each day. Cabin fever may or may not affect a halo-addicted individual and a shut-in loner.

A Love Motel, a Little Test, and Some Burgers

We spent our weekend in Seoul, trying to make it to my GRE in time. At the point now that I am wondering why  I'm even taking it, we set out to the concrete jungle at 9 pm with nowhere to stay. I would have been freaking out about our impending homelessness but we were too busy. I didn't know where the exam was being held, we didn't have train tickets, and we had to get through "Speech Day" at the hagwon before we could head out.

We checked homework, graded about 20 spelling/sentence tests each, filled out our weekly reports, completed the speech evaluations and sent in our lesson logs by 8:25, the end of the day. Our kiddos performed admirably - no one cried (well at least during the speeches), no one was sent to the principal, and everyone remembered at least a few words from their pre-written by a Korean teacher who doesn't fully understand the English language.

We quickly squared away the location of the exam (thanks to three or so phone calls made by the director in Korean), bought two one-way train tickets online for 9 pm, and the director told us that there were some benches in Insadong (an outdoor folksy shopping area) that we could sleep on! Great! The head teacher wished me good luck and we ran back to our apartment, fed Gizmo, lectured her about fire safety, grabbed our luggage and headed to the train station. We arrived with 8 minutes to spare and started eating our prepacked dinners of gimbap and cooked apple slices. The train arrived at Cheongnyangni station a little before 11, and with some minor hiccups we made it to Anguk station via subway some time before midnight.

So there we were in Seoul, at 11 pm with nowhere to stay. I looked up a couple of love motels during my 25 minute break at the academy, so we went to Anguk (near the testing site) to check them out. We ended up in Insadong and the two motels I had located online told us to get out as soon as we walked in. Michael was starting to freak out. We both have had two colds in the past few weeks and he is taking a bit longer to heal with this last one. Tired, frustrated and about ready to collapse on the street, he finally gathered the last of his strength to walk to Hotel Tomgi.

We thought this might be a long shot, but as we walked in, we were welcomed as warmly as any other Korean businessman with a Russian prostitute/Korean mistress. The rooms available were on display on the wall in the entryway for us to pick out. We opted to walk to the front desk where margaritas and popcorn were waiting for us if we so chose. The desk woman was very nice and asked us to choose between 70,000 and 90,000. We chose 70,000 and she took our money and handed us a card. We took an elevator up to the 10th floor where we were greeted with dimly-lit hallways and a haze of cigarette smoke. As we opened the door to our room, a maid came running at us with an extra roll of toilet paper - she had just cleaned our room. At 12:30 am, you also might be wondering why our room was just cleaned - our room previously held guests whose checkout time was midnight. You make the call what kinds of people this hotel serves.

After figuring out how to close the door, we checked out the place. For 70,000 won, we were awarded a giant bathtub, a massage shower, a 56 inch flatscreen with a DVD player and a Wii, and a computer with free wifi. The place was a little smoky, but after running the A/C and an air purifier for a few minutes, it was a lot better. It was a shame we didn't get to enjoy much. Unlike most of the guests at Hotel Tomgi, we were just looking for a place to sleep. The sheets were clean, but there was what we called a "stripper light" flashing above the bed that we couldn't figure out how to turn off. The next morning we checked out around 7:30 - apparently the quitting time of partiers since there were two "couples" in the hallway picking out their rooms.

As we walked out of the motel and headed toward the test site, street vendors were cleaning up their carts before heading home and girls still in their sequined tops were making their way into the subway, finally calling it a night. The walk to the test was not difficult. We went through Insadong and along a busy road then finally down a road that led to a palace. Just past the entrance to the palace was a gate to the University. Outside of the gate there were many vendors handing out brochures for their GRE cram schools, giving us folders and pencils on the way in. Duksung Women's University is nice. We walked through a garden-y area and up 5 flights of stairs and we were there.

We arrived around 8 and I was supposed to check into the room by 8:30. Well, the check-in process took quite a while. I got into the room around 8:35 while people were still checking in around 9. After going through the instructions in both choppy English and Korean, we filled out the massive bubble sheet and booklet with signatures, and finally started the test around 9:30. Two hours and twenty minutes later, I had completed all four sections and was finished!

We headed back to Insadong for these:

Hoddeok: Sugar-stuffed fried dough

Around 1 we made it to Itaewon, which is like the designated foreigner section of Seoul. We hit up Kraze Burger with one of Michael's old roommates, Lauren, and her boyfriend, Nic. We had a delicious meal (their tofu burgers are pretty awesome) and hit up the Foreigner Mart before heading back to Chuncheon.

So that's it! I'm still deciding whether the GRE was worth taking. At some point, I will figure out what the heck I am doing, but for now I'll just keep winging it. A deli, Korea, something else will surely pop up.

* I do apologize for the lack of photos, unfortunately my battery charger on my camera has decided to stop working. Eventually, I will get a new one :)

The View from Mount Anma

Michael and I finally climbed up to the top of Anmasan about 3 weeks ago! I was a little down a few months ago when one of my students told me she could walk it in about half an hour and I still wasn't able to make it to the top. So Michael and I were determined to do what pretty much all Chuncheonians are able to do: reach the top of one of the tiniest mountain ranges in Korea. Yea! We did it!

All said, it took about an hour to climb to the top (that includes the walk from our house to the hiking trail). We were pretty exhilerated when we made it, and I thought the climb wasn't too bad. We've turned hiking into a hobby here now that fall has come and the mosquitoes are starting to die down (we made a tough call to forgo vaccinations before coming to Korea and apparently malaria doesn't just happen in the jungles of Africa). We went to Homeplus and picked up some ajumma and ajeossi style hiking outfits. The only thing we do not have to complete our new looks is the hiking sticks. If we weren't leaving in a few months, we would probably purchase those too. With the leaves changing right now, you can look forward to some more pictures of Anmasan in all its glory.

We're Going to Disneyland!

Well, not really. Last weekend we took off to Yongin, a suburb of Seoul, to experience Everland: Korea's watered down version of Disneyworld.

Our director likes to get involved in "helping" us and told us that the best way to get there was to take the train (for 2 hours) to Cheongnyangni Station in Seoul, take a 45 minute subway ride to Gangnam, then take a 45 minute bus ride to Everland on a shuttle. We decided to ignore his advice and took a direct bus from Chuncheon to Yongin. It took only 2 hours and we didn't have to do any waiting around for trains and buses.

We had to get up super early to make it to the bus at 7 am. Michael and I are not morning people and this was quite the hassle. There are actually taxis out and about in Chuncheon at 6 in the morning! Once on the bus, we slept a bit, ate some food, and played with our respective "toys" for a while (Michael: Ipod, Lisa: Kindle) and then we made it. We took a taxi to the park, which took about 10 minutes and we got to the park about 10 minutes before it opened at 9:30.

The park attendants were all wearing Halloween themed costumes. Dorky hats, old-fashioned Harry Potter - looking outfits and such...

The park was nice and empty so early in the morning. I just recently learned that Michael doesn't do spinning rides, so we really didn't do much in terms of rides. We went on "Columbus Adventure" which most people just call a Viking Ship. We also hit up their knockoff of It's A Small World from Disney, which was named something similar. It was pretty terrible.

The highlight of Everland for us was the animal portion. There were monkeys, tigers, fish, otters, penguins, you name it... I felt mixed emotions about some of the habitats that were too small or didn't look like they were managed properly. There was also a spot that had puppies. They had two poodles, a bulldog, a dachshund, and a shih-tzu. I wished I could have that employees job - she held puppies all day!

We finished up the wandering of Everland by about 12:30 and decided to get food. We ended up at a Burger Cafe that looked reminicent of a fifties era diner. Definitely not a fifties era diner. We both kinda wished we had waited to go to Lotteria at the bus station - and we don't like Lotteria.

We took the 2:30 bus home and that was that! I'm glad we didn't actually pay for tickets, although we spent $70 on transportation alone, so we probably should have just skipped it. Anyway, a Korean experience!

Chuseok!

Last week was the American equivalent of Thanksgiving in Korea. It's called Chuseok, and everyone gets three days off to celebrate. Most of the country fled the cities and went to grandmother's house in the country. Since my parents were here, we decided to hang in Chuncheon and found it to be almost deserted.

Last week was fantastic. The parents came, they took us to restaurants where we ate too much and had a relaxing time. I fear it may have been too boring for them. Michael and I took them to some of the "cool" places in Chuncheon - Soyang Dam, Cheongpyongsa Temple, the Sculpture Park and many of our favorite hangouts. They got to experience Tuna World, a restaurant that Michael and I went to about a month ago and were stuffed with sushi.

Chuseok day we went to Outback Steakhouse, one of the few restaurants open. The food was okay and they gave us a Chuseok gift - four mini loaves of bread with sweet butter. We really wanted to take my parents out to a movie at CGV so they could experience the joys of assigned seating and vast amounts of legroom, but there was nothing playing in English last week. So we enjoyed some movies at our apartment and ate some junk food.

Thursday we headed off to Sokcho. There's not a lot to do in Sokcho after the beach season is over, so we went up to Seorak National Park for a while. The leaves are just starting to change and the weather was cooperating for once. We did a little bit of hiking and made it to a waterfall that we hadn't been to before. We also ate some special pancakes - which my mom was calling cinnamon bread. They're called Hoddeok, a yeasty bread filled with cinnamon, peanuts, and brown sugar. They are sooo good.

We went back to work briefly on Friday and then returned to Seoul for some last minute fun before they left on Sunday. The apartment is empty now, and Gizmo misses her grandparents. We are a bit more homesick but we are also excited that our time in Korea is almost at 8 months! We can't believe that we will be back in the US within 5 months.

Check out the photo album if you are interested :

Chuseok 2010