Just another day in the capital of the land of Kimchi

I went to Seoul again this weekend to celebrate the birthday of one of the teachers from my school, she has some college friends who moved to Seoul last week and she wanted to visit them to go out for her birthday. I got to Seoul late Friday night and I ended up staying in Itaewon, I didn't even get a cab at Seoul Station until 1am, there was a 40 minute wait in the cab line in the pouring rain, my train arrived at 12:10. The hotel I usually stay at was booked, the person in front of me in line got the last room. All the other hotels I know about in Itaewon were also booked so I ended up staying in the worst hotel I have ever been in next to the grand ole opry bar. It was unpleasant and smelly but only $30.I survived and got a hotel in Sinchon for Saturday night, it was $60 but it was really nice, marble, bath robe, free drinks in the fridge, extremely clean, etc. The name of the hotel was the Anytime Hotel. It is located behind the McDonald's and Burger King In Sinchon near the #2 exit from line 2 of the subway. I did get to eat at Pitas for lunch on Saturday, I had a delicious hummus and falafel pita wrap, it was the first real pita bread I've seen in Korea. It is across the street from Burger King in Itaewon which does have the best collection of western restaurants in Seoul. I didn't do much Saturday afternoon, all I did was rest since I didn't get much sleep Friday night. On Saturday night I took a 50 minute subway ride to COEX mall to meet some teachers and their friends at the COEX Mall Intercontinental hotel. We had some drinks in their hotel room and then they went to dinner but I took the subway back to Sinchon so I could meet up with Yubi when she got off of work and then go to Hondae to meet Robyn and Lisa and go out with them for Lisa's birthday. We met at some Hof(bar) above Starbucks and had a few pitchers and waited for everyone else to meet us. Once we had a crew of about 15 people,mostly Canadians we went to we went to Tinpan a western style bar/club where there was hip hop music and people dancing on tables. It was just like a college dance club in the states. Also Hondae is very dirty theres trash and puke all over the streets. 3 of Seoul's largest Universities are in the area so its just one big party town there. It's like nothing I have ever seen and I have seen a lot!

Pink Eye or The Eye Disease

In Korea they treat Pink Eye a little different than we do in the U.S. In the U.S. if you have Pink Eye you are sent home from school until you are no longer contagious. There are some schools in Korea that do this too, but many of them including my school apparently do not do this. I was told by my director that she tells students to stay home if they have Pink Eye, but I was told by several of the students that they were told they should still come and they can be put in a separate room, the truth probably lies somewhere in between. Regardless of the policy of my school it seems that in general many schools in Korea allow and expect students to attend school with this highly contagious disease, this isn't surprising to me because of the high value Koreans put on education. I was also told by a student that her middle school makes students come because many students would infect each other on purpose so they could get a few days off of school, this probably happens in the U.S. too. So they just make all the infected students go to a large room and they have a separate class for them. I guess its not really a big deal to go to school with Pink Eye, you don't get fatigued or dizzy, the only issue is that you are contagious and will spread the disease to others. I can't say that I am thrilled to be working with contagious students and I will also say that if I get Pink Eye or as they call it in Korea the Eye Disease I won't be coming to work until its cleared up, but hey I guess I would get to use my 3 sick days then. All I have to say about this is TIK (this is Korea), that about sums it up!

Seoul 2, The Adventure Continues

I went to Seoul about a month ago, it was my second trip to Korea's capital city. Every time I and anyone I know goes to Seoul we always want to go back the next weekend because it is so much fun, this time was no different. I arrived around noon on Saturday. I took the KTX train from Gumi with a short transfer in Dajeon. When I arrived I met my friend Yubi and we went to Itaewon to eat Mexican food, I love Mexican and you can't get it within 100km of where I live. We went to a restaurant called Poncho's, it was good, I had a burrito, taco, enchilada combo platter and a ultimate margarita. The food was great but it was expensive, for 2 people to eat Mexican in Cleveland where I am from it would cost maybe $20-25 and $5 a margarita, depending on the size. In Itaewon it costs $40 for the meal and $10 for each margarita, but it was worth every won. After lunch we headed off to COEX Mall. This is a huge mall that is below the trade center in Seoul. I have never seen a mall this big before, I think I saw maybe half of it and it took most of the day. I got to get a picture on the Simpson's Coach at the movie theater at the mall. I bought some popular science magazines at a book store and did a lot of window shopping. I am a mallrat and I love to see a country's malls. We also ate at Pizzeria Uno, which to my knowledge is the only one in Korea and it was delicious. I had a real caesar salad and a very good pizza, with no corn.(for some reason a lot of pizza's in Korea come with corn on them, I don't know why but I don't like it) After the mall I went back to Itaewon and got a room at the Itaewon Hotel. I then walked around Itaewon and ended up going to the Reggae Bar and met some cool people from Minnesota who had only been in Korea for 3 days. I drank their until about 3am and then I went to bed. The next day Yubi took me to Insadong an outdoor market that sells all sorts of things. We went to a toy museum, which I loved because I love toys. They had a ton of old Voltron and GI Joe memorabilia and hundreds of other cool toys, it was a lot like Big Fun in Coventry, Ohio but you couldn't buy most of the things. We then walked to the Cheong Gye Cheon river. It's a really cool park on the banks of the cleanest river in Seoul. You can swim (more like wade, but its Korea, Koreans don't really swim)in it and many people do including the two of us. After playing in the river and walking for a mile or so we ended up downtown near city hall. Yubi took me to where she works and then we took the subway and went to Sinchon where she lives. There are several Uni's (Universities) in this ares, so it is all 18-25 year olds, its like a really, really, really big campus. It's one big party. We went to a PC room here and then headed back to Seoul Station where I hopped a train back to Gumi. It was a great 2 days in Seoul, I loved my time there with Yubi!!

White Water Rafting Trip

3 weeks ago I went Rafting in Korea on a local bus trip with the Waegook Cook Bar. It was a good time. There were about 40 people who went, about 25 foreigners and 15 Koreans, it was a good mix. We left around 9:30 in the morning and it took 2-3 hours to get to the river. No one really drank on the way their, a few people might have had a drink or two but for a Waegook Cook Bus the drinking was kept to the lowest possible level. When we arrived the instructors tried to organize us into groups based on sex and size but we didn't care we wanted to be with our friends so the whole raft organizing took over 1/2 an hour. Then we met our guides and got our gear and rafts. My group had Derrick in it, the owner of the Waegook Bar and a crazy South African man. He was jumping out of the boat and attacking our poor guide all through the trip. We had a blast, we splashed all the other boats around us, jumped out and threw all the girls out of our raft many times. Our guide seemed to particularly enjoy tossing the girls off the raft. The river itself was pretty tame. There weren't any rapids that I was worried about and maybe only 1 or 2 that I wouldn't have swam through. It was a few class 3's and mostly class 2 rapids but the trip was still a lot of fun because it was a good group. The best part was a huge rock that we got to jump of off, the river was maybe 20 feet below, I did this a few times. We also got to use the raft as a slide into the river off of another rock, these were both a lot of fun to do. I also met May a beautiful Korean English teacher on this trip and I also got to hang out with many of my friends from Gumi. After the trip we had a Korean barbecue which is when you take strips of meat, I think it was beef this time, but they also do this with pork and you fry them on large skillets in the middle of the table. We also had rice and my favorite Korean food, kimchi(cabbage fermented in a red paste). We started drinking at this time and continued to drink on the bus trip back to Gumi. We also stopped at a famous dam in Korea on the way back, it was very scenic. All in all I would say it was a great trip, if your in Gumi during the summer I recommend going on the Waegook Rafting Trip, the river isn't that great but the people make up for it!!!

Thailand

Thailand was an amazing place. My adventure was a short one. I finished work at 9pm on Wednesday and had to be back at work again the following Tuesday at 1pm, well at least I was suppossed to be there at 1pm as usual things in life don't always happen as we plan them. We left Gumi at 2:30am on the night bus to Inchon Airport in Seoul, its a 4 hour bus ride. I slept most of the way, my traveling companion Mike slept the entire time, for that matter he slept the entire time on all buses, trains and planes that we took on our trip, I'm happy he was able to sleep so easily, I wish I had the same ability. We arrived at Inchon Airport 3 hours before we were to board our plane so we had a lot of time to kill. We couldnt get there any later because the next bus didn't leave Gumi until 4:30 am and this would have been to late. So we ate some breakfast, exchanged our won(Korean dollars) for baht (Thai dollars), then we started the line to wait to check in, we waited a minute for the Thai Airlines staff to be ready then we checked in, their was some problem with our e-tickets so our extremely tall(6 feet) and gorgeous Korean attendant took us to another line and sorted out the issue, after about 15 minutes we were checked in, we then went through security and went to our gate.

We boarded a very large plane, it was probably a 747, but i never checked. Royal Thai Airlines has 1st class service, they even had 30+ options for in flight meals, I got the ovo-lacto vegetarian meal and mike got the fish meal.(he's Jewish and he wanted to make sure he wouldn't get any pork) The flight was only five hours and it wasn't very crowded so i grabbed a middle row of three seats and slept the entire way besides the first and last 30 minutes.

Once we arrived in bangkok, Thailand's capital city, we tried to catch a train or bus, but it was too confusing so we grabbed a cab and headed downtown to the train station were we bought train tickets on the night train to Chiang Mai, Thailand's main Northern City where all their adventure sporting and jungle touring is based out of. We had about 5 hours to kill before our train left Bangkok so we grabbed a Tuk-Tuk ( like a golf cart but faster) and we had the driver take us to a suit shop( The Brioni Shop). It would have been better if we new one in advance but we didn't so we took our chances, the tailor he took us too made very nice clothes but it was a little pricey but still way cheaper than US department or suit shops. Mike had 2 suits made, I just got 1 short sleeve button down shirt made, I cant get shirts in Korea very easily because my belly is just to big for them. After the fitting we paid and were off to get some authentic Thai street food, so after a quick stop for some supplies we headed to a street vendor that our driver recommended and we had some delicious pad-su-u (I'm sure this isn't how its spelled but it is how it sounds to me) its a thick noodle with a semi-sweet glazed sauce and vegetables, it was really good!!! Then we drove back to the train station wrote a few emails, mostly too our mothers saying we were alive and well.

Then we got on the night train around 7pm and headed off for our 12 hour train ride to Chiang Mai, we had 2nd class sleeper seats, which basically means we had fold down beds and a curtain for privacy, it was very comfortable and we met some cool people who work for a Thai non-profit company that runs a barge that goes up and down the river in Bangkok and they have children come aboard and they teach them about environmental education.

Once we arrived in Chiang Mai we checked into our hotel the Pagoda Inn (email: pagodainn2003@yahoo.com), its a really cool hotel, it was like $12 a night with air con( thats Asian for air conditioning), it was like a mix between a hostel and a hotel, it had very nice rooms with all the luxuries but it had that small traveler feeling, it had little areas to meet and talk and a small cafe, I would highly recommend it to anyone going to Chiang Mai.

We then got picked up by Jason who owns Siam River Adventures (Siam River Adventures Website) , he took us to the Siam River, pretty far upstream 1 1/2 from Chang Mai, we had to go on a dirt road to get to the village his base camp is based in, it was really cool, we found this company in the national geographic explorer magazine so it was very hardcore and expensive, but as Jason said he is the most expensive for a reason. It was totally worth the money, it was a great trip, we rode elephants on the way to the camp and then we rode the river back, it was a very good rafting trip 7 class 4 rapids and a lot of class 3's. Then we went out in Chang Mai. Then we went shopping in their night market and bought all sorts of cool things.

The next morning we went Mountain Biking down a mountain in the Suthep National Park, it was 1200m downhill, it rocked! We went with Chiang Mai Mountain Biking , we found this company in the same national geographic explorer article. After mountain biking we got massages at the most expensive and according to Jason the nest herbal massage shop in Chiang Mai. It was called Kradangnga, its located next to the Sian River Adventures Restaurant/Shop. Now when I say it was the most expensive it was but it still just cost us $15 for a 2-hour full body massage, I love south East Asia!!!!

Then on Saturday night we hopped on the night train again and headed back to Bangkok. When we arrived in Bangkok we stayed on Khaosan Road, the most famous street for backpackers to stay on in bangkok, its a street thats also a market and bar strip. it was one huge party 24/7. We stayed at the 3 son's Inn, it was cheap maybe $18 dollars for a room with 2 double beds and air con. We shopped and got 3 more massages in bangkok, in all we had 8 hours of massages for like $70 US. While in bangkok we also saw a few temples including the famous Wat Po where the worlds largest laying Buddha statue is located, its 50 feet tall and 350 feet long and bronze, it was ridiculously huge. We also saw a Muy Thai Kick boxing Fight actually we saw a whole card full of matches, 6 of them. We did a lot more shopping too.

Then we headed to the airport and flew back to Korea. We left Bangkok at Midnight on Monday and got back to Korea (45 minutes late) around 8am on Tuesday, we then hopped on a bus and got to Gumi (45 minutes late again) at 1:15pm, we had two 45 minute delays both our plane and bus were 45 minutes late so of course we were late to work and our bosses weren't happy but whatever.... It was a great trip