Song Lines

here comes the sun

2011-08-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

While Gwangan beach is clogged with umbrellas and floaty toys, the rocky Eastern end just has shellfish. There are bikinis in the distance, but the people gathering mussels wear hats, gloves and bandanas.

the boy in the bright blue jeans

2011-08-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of advertisements in Korean bath and body stores for men's products. My Korean boyfriend has less chest hair than I do.

(I think he's advertising face cream?)

Back to the top

2011-08-12T03:21:00.000-07:00

On the East end of Gwangalli beach (where Autumn lives) there are two big buildings that, together, kind of look like an owl's face. Like many tall buildings in Busan, they are mostly empty. Autumn and I went up to the fifteenth floor, just because we could.

Boris the spider...

2011-08-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Along Haeundae beach in Busan, there are a number of interactive murals.

(I don't know if I'm supposed to fear the future or the giant spider.)

donut

2011-08-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

It's become a custom for Autumn and I to spend weekend days (before and after the roller coaster rides, of course) people watching at cafes.

The Paris Baguette near Kyungsung University is an excellent venue, as it offers sandwiches and salads as well as tasty sweet things, and on very hot July days it is also air-conditioned.

(That delightfully shiny ring-o-balls on my tray is a mochi ring, which I highly recommend if you ever come across them in the States. They have them at Mister Donut and Dunkin' Donuts here, but I don't know if they do over there. It's chewy and sweet in the same way that you'd imagine Hello Kitty is chewy and sweet.)

Hail Caesar

2011-08-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

Centum City is the world's largest department store, according to Korea. I'm not sure I believe that, as a department store with a Cartier department and a Tiffany department (and a Gap department and a Bookstore department) very closely resembles what we call in the West a "shopping mall."

But I would believe that Centum City has the most elaborate subway station. It looks like Caesar's Palace!

hotel, motel

2011-08-08T04:00:00.000-07:00

Nancy Drew's got to have a mystery out there called "The Secret of the Navi Hotel."

I first visited it with Peter on Valentine's Day when we took a walk along the beach and he needed to use a washroom.

The open doors on the ground floor showed a shiny gold sign that says “Navi Hotel.” The front desk was on the fourth floor, so we took the elevator up and entered the dark, bare front desk area. Behind the desk there was sheet-covered polyhedron of chairs. This was not a bustling hotel. Pete wandered down the hall and managed to turn on the light for the bathroom. I wandered into the dining room, which overlooked the sea. A screen split the room in half, and the far side was piled high with unused furniture.

On the civilized side of the screen, there was a table with coffee service, and the stirring-spoon was in a dish of water with a quarter of an inch of evaporation. Someone had made tea and then tossed the teabag into the bin. The samovar was still plugged in. This place had recently been occupied.

The most unnerving sign of a quick departure was a turntable that sat spinning silently on a table by the entry. How many days ago had the record finished?

(This is where we danced to Roy Orbison. Come on, it was Valentine's Day!)

Anyway, I went back with Autumn last Saturday night. This time, we saw that the lights were on on the 4th floor, but the elevator was completely dead (there were actually spider webs.)

We climbed the stairs to the 4th floor and ended up in the outdoor patio area. This is the view of Haeundae beach.

Inside the dining room, there was a man sitting at a table. He didn't seem to notice us. When we left, we walked through the 3rd floor which is where the hotel rooms are. The elevator was stopped, gaping, on this level. All the doors were dark except for one that was open with a woman inside watching television. She looked up at Autumn and I and we hurried down the hall like really, really bad secret agents.

workin'

2011-08-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

Every weekend, I take a bus from my little suburb to Sasang station in Busan. For the last couple of weeks, the Busan bus station has been under construction.

Jumpin' Jack Flash

2011-08-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Much of the non-beach coast in Busan is littered with these giant concrete jacks, an attempt to subdue the waves that try to come over the walkways.

There are also public outdoor fitness stations which frequently have giant white hula hoops. This one looks so sad.

Rollercoaster (of love)

2011-08-03T02:24:00.000-07:00

This summer, Autumn and I have spent a lot of time on roller coasters. ME World is the amusement park at the end of the beach where she lives, and we definitely appreciate being able to say, "Breakfast was nice. Want to go ride roller coasters?" on a Saturday morning.

This is Me World:

The roller coaster thrills with sharp, jerky turns. Near the end of it, there is a big bird's nest right under the track.

(See the rusty ladder to the right of the yellow car? I dare you to climb it.)

Autumn and I rode the Merry-Go-Round picturesquely.

(Of course we dress like this on Saturday mornings!)

This is the drop tower

And this is the view from the top of the drop tower.

Autumn and I both appreciate how lucky it is that she lives on this beach! It's bittersweet that I will spend just one more weekend here before heading to Thailand again for my summer vacation.

walk the dinosaur

2011-07-05T05:15:00.000-07:00

I had heard that there were dinosaur footprints in Busan, but had never actually visited them. In June, for Peter's last weekend in Busan, we went to Igidae Park to find them.

And I'm pretty sure they're in this picture. It's about the same as the picture in the brochure, but I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at. Interpret away.

Igidae Park has a lot going for it, though. There's fishing!

You can see the *other* side of the Gwangalli bridge

And those potentially-dinosaur-footprint-puddles are full of tadpoles and little frogs!

There's a path that goes along the water and past this structure

Which is full of...

I've been told that stacking rocks is good luck. I think this looks like the set of the "chatty duelists" scene in the Princess Bride.

There's a cave.

And Pete was brave and athletic.

among the silent temples

2011-07-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

Tongdosa is the big, famous temple in Yangsan.

Peter and I walked there from Fantasia, on a path that took us along a creek surrounded by big, still pine trees. Someone was painting them.

These fellows were not amused.

There are rafter dragons.

And plants growing from the roof

At six, everyone gathered in one part of the temple complex

to watch this monk ring the giant bell.

Outside the walls, there was a skinny bridge

over a stream.

stop at the top of a Ferris wheel

2011-07-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

There's an amusement park in Yangsan called Fantasia. Pete and I visited.

There was a FOUR-D dinosaur movie. The fourth dimension was lightning, as expressed by a strobe light.

Pete models his glasses:

The rollercoaster at Fantasia is way better than the one at ME World in Busan. It has two loop-de-loops and a corkscrew.

This track goes around much of the park, and there are pedal-powered cars that you can ride around it.

Here, Pete and I are about to start our journey. It is only beginning to dawn on us how uncomfortable the seats are.

Like the one at Me World, this roller coaster never stops. It's so big that it just goes very slowly and you have to get on and off quickly at the bottom.

Peter and Pan!

And this ride was pretty cool. The lever controls the height of your car, and the wheel the direction. You have to make the "pew pew pew" noises yourself.

Cave of Wonders

2011-06-30T04:00:00.000-07:00

The Yangsan Dinosaur Cave museum is... a... science? museum in Yangsan. Pete and I ventured there one Saturday.

Dinosaurs greeted us:

Caves are cool. Dinosaurs are cool. This cave was used during the Korean war for something and looks like it was part of the Dharma Initiative.

Inside there were some fossils of things. There were also some minerals, which can still fit with the "Cave" aspect of the museum's name, if not the "Dinosaur" part.

As we walked further into the cave though, the exhibits stopped making sense. There was a room full of interactive paintings like the ones I posted about here. There were some things in jars.

There was a dead chinese man, pickled and divided into one-inch slices in a questionable knockoff of "Body Worlds."

There were three Santa Clause mannequins, one with a saxophone. There was a 3-D Dinosaur movie!

Yeah, that's a pirate back there with the dinosaurs.

Outside, there were pathetic, angry monkeys in cages. And raccoons. And this:

It's a tunnel that rotates around a catwalk. The inside of the tunnel is splattered with blacklight paint, and as it rotates, you feel like you're falling sideways. It's an amazing illusion and probably the most interesting thing at the Yangsan Dinosaur Cave Museum.

I have a lesson

2011-06-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

My second semester will end in three weeks, and I still haven't shown you my classroom!

This is the English room at Naedeok Middle School, where I teach on Thursdays and Fridays.

There are 36 seats, but I have a couple of classes with 38 students, so sometimes they have to share desks!

I wanted to share this. It's from an activity where I gave groups of students an answer (like "because it's fun!") and they wrote a question to go with it (like "Why do you play soccer?")

The answer here was "I feel happy."

(Monkey and People was the name of their team.)

Happy Birthday!

2011-06-27T03:55:00.001-07:00

It's been a month and a half, but I turned 28!

Peter and I had a picnic on Saturday by the river in Yangsan.

(Pictures of me in this post are taken by him.)

He brought bubbles.

(I brought water guns. It was fun.)

That evening, we went to the city and saw Autumn. On Sunday, my actual birthday, Pete and Autumn and I had ice creamy waffles for breakfast and then Peter and I explored a mostly-empty building at the north end of Gwangalli beach.

Here's the view from the 14th floor (there are business on maybe 2 or 3 floors but everything else is empty.)

And looking down...

And then there was a visit to Me World and the drop tower.

Autumn's gift was *another* picnic (I really like picnics!) for which we walked to Shinsegae, the world's largest department store, to buy CHEESE and SALAMI and WINE and CAKE. These are rarities in Korea. (Well cake is not a rarity, but good cake is.)

Pictures of

2011-06-27T03:44:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pictures of things.

A port-o-squatty, discovered while on a walk in Yangsan.

White fog on Haeundae, Korea's most famous beach.

One day in early May my walk home was interrupted by this...

There was a typhoon over the weekend, and on Sunday I passed a playground that had flooded, so kids were sliding down the slide in the rain, into a foot of muddy water. I didn't take a picture.

Narrative posts again tomorrow :-)

Go fly a kite!

2011-05-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

There have been a lot of festivals lately, eh? A couple of weeks ago Gwangalli Beach hosted the Oedong festival. I saw signs for this festival throughout March but they didn't give any indication of what the festival involves.

People brought their dogs, of course. This one not only has wings, but also a teeny tiny little bow on its head.

This is the best example of a dyed dog I've seen, and it's wearing little booties!

It was a windy day and lots of people had kites. Somebody took this further.

This line of kites stretched far into the sky, and there was a box on the beach with many more that he didn't put up (the existing line of kites swooped down and interfered with the "Oedong Festival" sigh that was suspended with balloons over the water.)

The festival included booths with demonstrations of pulleys and basketmaking, and free samples of kimchi and makalli (Korean rice wine--it's really good.) There was also a dance representing a bullfight.

The brown bull won.

Use a little muscle

2011-05-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago I visited the Cheongdo Bull Fighting Festival. It's nothing like Spanish bullfighting, and instead the bulls fight each other. Or sometimes they don't.

Korea really likes tourists. You'll see this if you arrive in Seoul, where the airport even has a culture museum and free arts and crafts for foreigners. I went to the festival with a few other foreigners, and we were greeted at the train station by people who handed us English brochures and told us how to get to the festival (a taxi is expensive--here, let me walk you two blocks to the bus station!)

The most inviting thing on the brochure was the "Magic Show of Levitation." So we saw that. The first part was this guy, who danced around regally while his mask changed colors and then disappeared. It's a difficult thing to capture in a picture.

Then some guys came out in bull suits to help with the levitation part. First, a little boy was levitated, but he started crying so they started over with another volunteer. The bulls removed the supports and look: there's nothing holding up the platform!

Also they had coconuts! Here is Pete using the official Coconut Skewer to make a straw hole. After drinking the juice, we broke them open on the concrete and ate with our hands.

And then my camera battery died... this is what happens when I start using my camera again suddenly. Shame on me.

Here's a good picture that I stole from the Internet:

So what happens is this: two bulls are led into a ring by handlers. The bulls are pulled together, face to face, by ropes through their nose rings. Like magnets, they suddenly lock horns and push each other back and forth until one of them turns around and jogs away. The other bull is the winner!

The bull fights were done by weight, so that the largest bulls fought last. For the last three fights though, the veteran bulls did not even fight. One bull would give up before they touched, and the other was declared the winner (to much booing.)

piggies

2011-05-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

There is a delicious aspect of Korean culture that you should know about. It's called "Sam Gyup Sal" which means "Three Layer Meat." I like to call it "Giant Bacon." And it's amazing.

Here are three varieties: Spicy (the rolled up ones in the back,) Regular (in the middle,) and Galbi, or Marinated In Delicious (in front.) Also visible: Hite, a terrible Korean beer.

You barbecue the meat over coals on a setup in the middle of the table, like so:

And you use meat scissors, a lot. I didn't get a picture of the eating, which involves wrapping meat, garlic, onions, bean paste, and a tasty mixture of spring onions and hot sauce into a lettuce or sesame leaf. Lettuce-wrapped giant bacon is good for your health.

Spring, spring, spring!

2011-05-01T19:23:00.000-07:00

Korea gets very excited about cherry blossoms every spring. I mentioned something about the cherry blossoms in Japan being famous, and my students were shocked that Japan even *had* cherry blossoms. It was as if I told them Japan has four seasons too. I mean, Korea *invented* having four seasons!

For a couple of weeks Jangyu was full of them. I didn't realize that most of the trees that line the streets here are cherry blossom trees until they all exploded in pink.

The blossoms blew away, and now the trees are green and the weather is finally warm. The yellow dust also blew in from China, so my eyes are burning, but spring's still better than winter.

Looking through a glass onion

2011-04-03T04:00:00.000-07:00

An onion lived on top of Pete's refrigerator for a few weeks. It pathetically reached for the window on the other side of the room, until we decided to make a home for it.

Pete poked some holes in the bottom of a plastic container, and then we went across the street and dug up some dirt. It wasn't very good dirt. It was dense, rocky dirt. But it was free.

Pete put Onion Friend on the window sill. Maybe we were too late. Onion Friend didn't exactly thrive, and most of his leaves fell off. But a few weeks later, the dirt was full of life!

trees

2011-04-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to blog, but I don't take very many pictures! This is Yangsan, where I went for a walk one afternoon.

There was a warning not to swim in the foot-deep fountain water because you might drown.

atomic dog

2011-03-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of things in Korea that folks in the States would probably find foreign and interesting, but I just take for granted. Then I act like there's nothing to blog about, but there is.

In Korea, they paint their dogs.

(This one would not turn around to show its pink cheeks!)

You see a lot of fluffy little white dogs with pastel ears or tails. Last summer around Kyungsung University, there was also a big fluffy white dog dyed to look like a panda. I never took a picture.

Also, soup. In America, I took it for granted that I could dig into a bowl of soup with a spoon and eat whatever I retrieved. In Korea, one is expected to take out cow bones, clam shells, or half a crab and dissect it at the table before eating.

This soup was pretty good.

sleeping on the sidewalk

2011-03-29T17:53:00.000-07:00

I had the brilliant idea of playing with sidewalk chalk down by the beach, but it doesn't seem to exist in Korea. I checked a couple of craft stores and asked my students if they'd ever heard of it, and they hadn't. I didn't give up.

Plaster is a cheap, easy way to make your own, so with the help of the art department at Neungdong Middle School, I ordered a bag.

It was 55 pounds. This seemed like a reasonable amount at the time, until it was delivered next to my desk and another English teacher had to enlist the help of a "very handsome PE teacher" to get it home for me. I have a feeling she was looking for a reason to talk to the very handsome PE teacher.

When I got it home, I mixed the plaster with poster paint and used dixie cups as molds.

Here is the finished chalk in a few colors.

Pete and I took the chalk out on a cold, sunny day at the beach.

We drew quite a crowd, and one fella asked me to draw him while he posed on the beach. It would look better if he was fighting something, so Pete drew a dinosaur.

Lots of kids came up and played with us too. I think this will be more fun when the weather warms up.

we'd just eat more

2011-02-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

This post is just a recap of the most memorable meals from my trip. I tend to take pictures of my food.

This was the strangest airplane meal(?) I've ever seen. It included hickory bits, dried radish, onion cookies(!) and chocolate covered wafers. This was from the flight from Shanghai to Bangkok.

The first night in Bangkok, my friend Jason showed me a great German restaurant. I had goulash, hefeweizen, and this. Sauerkraut is not at all like kimchi, except for the part where it's rotten cabbage.

Rice comes in shapes in Thailand. This was at the Hippie De Bar on Khao San Road. I think I had Pad Kapow (fried basil leaves and chili peppers--with shrimp in my case) with it. Yum.

Twice at Jep's on Ko Samet I have ordered Panang Talay (Panang curry with seafood) and gotten Panang Gai (gai is chicken.) Whatever. It's good.

This is the Christie's Mak Mak. I don't know if anyone ever ordered this cocktail before me. It's pretty, though.

But fried red curry with prawns and long beans at Bedrock is the best meal in the world. I felt sorry for everyone around me whose tongues had not just experienced what my tongue had just experienced.

And this was what Elle ordered for dessert on my last night. It's at a fancy place in Bangkok called Spring Summer. It's cake, which is thick and chewy like a brownie, baked into a cup with ice cream on top. Amazing. I ordered a chocolate souffle cake. It was not as good as this.

to Bangkok

2011-02-22T04:00:00.001-08:00

I spent my last night in Bangkok in this guesthouse room that is so very typical that I had to take a picture to show you exactly where you'll stay if you stay on Khao San Road.

(This is actually the Star Dome Inn on Rambuttri Road, one block from Khao San. It's much quieter and prettier and cobblestoney.)

This is the very typical view from my typical room.

Khao San Road runs left to right in front of that short, rusty roof.

I spent my last day at the park on the river that's near Khao San. There was some sort of school camp going on. These girls have pigtails with big yellow ribbons as part of their uniform.

In the evening, I had dinner and dessert with Elle! Do you remember Elle? She is one of the girls I went to Cambodia with last October. She's still working in Bangkok.

That dessert place was amazing, but honestly I took pictures of about 2/3 of all the meals I ate on this trip, so tomorrow I think I'll recap my gastronomical adventures.

I headed right from dessert to the airport, for a 2 am flight. My taxi driver...I think was drunk. He kept forgetting my name ("What you name teacher?") but he liked me enough that when he stopped at a light to buy a jasmine and rose garland for his rear view mirror (they satisfy the spirits of transportation) he bought one for me too! I tried to explain that I couldn't take flowers through customs, but he insisted, so I thanked him and then gave it to another taxi driver after he dropped me off. And then I came back to Korea where it was cold.

carnival

2011-02-21T04:00:00.001-08:00

In Ban Phe, I stopped at Christies in Ban Phe for some curry and to say hello to Oui and Chan and everyone.

Look, it's Oui! I forgot how tall I am in Thailand.

I went to Bedrock for the fried red curry with prawns and long beans (this trip is about 90% about the food, I think.) I also saw Aum.

The carnival was in Ban Phe too. Unlike last time, the carnies constructed the roller coaster with no extra parts, and there was *not* a baby in a hammock underneath it. There was a ferris wheel.

Then I went back to Bangkok.

her footprints make you follow, where the sky loves the sea

2011-02-18T04:00:00.001-08:00

Did I tell you about Fah?

Fah lives on the beach on Ko Samet, just past Jep's. She makes beautiful jewelry. And windsurfs. And has great hair.

I sat with her one afternoon and made a (very bad) bracelet and we ate fruit and talked.

Fah says that she pictures the kind of person who will wear each piece of jewelry she makes, and what kind of event they will wear it to. She has a gorgeous necklace she sees on an elegant woman in a black dress. I made a small bracelet that she says she'll try to sell for 100baht ($3) but I don't think anyone will pay that much. I asked her what sort of person she thought would pay 100baht for it, and she said "a tomboy--a girl who wears shorts and has short hair." It's a really ugly bracelet.

Then I took the ferry back to Ban Phe.

touch the distant sands

2011-02-17T04:00:00.001-08:00

When I lived in Ban Phe, these islands taunted me. There is a cluster of islands east of Ko Samet, and one you can see from way out in Laem Mae Phim. Autumn and I schemed to build a boat or to kayak out to them and have an untouched, tropical paradise to ourselves for a weekend.

I'm glad we didn't.

This time around, I signed up for one of the speedboat tours offered from Ko Samet to the neighboring islands.

This is Ko Thalu, the one that's furthest east, by Laem Mae Phim.

Then you come around and it's full of speedboats. You can rent beach chairs for 20 baht. There is a restaurant.

The island tour was good, though. There was snorkeling between a couple of little rock islands in the cluster by Ko Samet.

Even there, we were not alone.

On one of the islands near Ko Samet (with bungalows and a mini shop,) there's a nice little hike.

The last part of the tour brought us to the Ko Samet Fish Farm, which looks like this:

Some of the boards are a little broken, but it's fine.

There was a shark, which was far less frightening than the prospect of losing my balance and my camera.

on an island in the sun

2011-02-16T04:00:00.001-08:00

I caught the sunset ferry to Ko Samet.

And in the morning, I laid on the sand and practiced my "mai ao!" to all of the vendors walking up and down the beach, until she came by with coconuts and I asked her to slaughter one for me.

Oh, yes.

Then in the evening I had dinner at Jep's with a girl who's teaching English in China (and was on my flight from Shanghai!) we caught three fire shows.

And this is a ten-year-old Cambodian kid with a fire hoop around his neck. Because it's Thailand, and that's fine.

garden in the shade

2011-02-15T04:00:00.000-08:00

Another thing I missed in Bangkok the first time around was Jim Thompson's House.

You can read about Jim Thompson here, but he was basically an American businessman who fell in love with Thailand, collected some old Thai houses from all over that he put here in Bangkok, revitalized the Thai silk industry, and then disappeared into the jungle in Malaysia, never to be seen again.

This is his house:

It's full of antiques and there are all sorts of silk things for sale.

The garden is lovely too.

night in Bangkok

2011-02-14T04:00:00.000-08:00

I stayed on Khao San Road when I was in Bangkok. When you're on Khao San Road, you get your falafel here:

Notice the red Fanta for the spirits.

Also on Khao San Road you'll find some wacky performance art. I was out with Ryan, who used to work with me in Ban Phe, and we came upon this scene. I looked at the little baby doll (which is dancing to the music) and said, "wow, that's creepy." Ryan looked at the guy's white mask and said, "yeah, that's creepy." Then we each saw the other thing, and whoa!

Taxis in Bangkok sometimes have advisory stickers like this one:

That's no weapons, no sex, no animals, no alcohol, no durian, no cigarettes.

I still haven't tried durian. It's okay, since I think I'll always go back to Thailand.

elephants go by

2011-02-11T04:00:00.000-08:00

I never spent much time in Bangkok when I lived in Thailand. On this trip I decided to see some touristy things I hadn't seen before, and the Erawan Museum was first on the list.

It's a museum inside of a giant three-headed elephant.

This is obviously not my picture, but the detail of the elephant was lost in mine because they were so backlit.

There are three levels to the museum, the Naga level on the bottom which has lots of pottery, the middle, human level (in the base under the elephant) which has art from around the world, and the top Buddha level inside the elephant which looks like this:

The grounds around the elephant are also beautiful, and had sculptures of mythological creatures.

going to Shanghai

2011-02-10T04:00:00.000-08:00

For winter vacation, I went back to Thailand. I had worried about what to do with my coat and jeans (since I didn't want to carry them around Thailand, but I didn't want to be cold on the way to the airport,) but it's lucky I decided not to stow them at the airport here in Busan, because it snowed on me during the layover in Shanghai.

Because I was outside.

In Shanghai.

Which I don't think is legal.

Americans are supposed to have a $160 visa in order to get through immigration, but the Shanghai airport doesn't have a very efficient transfer process, so I went out through immigration and customs, and then back in again. In between, and with great trepidation, I went outside into the snow. I didn't, like, know of anything to see in Shanghai or how to get around or have any yuan, so it was brief but invigorating.

This is the Shanghai airport:

And this is part of an article in the English-language newspaper at the Shanghai airport. Busan had a 96-year low temperature and they shut off the water in my city! (Jangyu is a division of Gimhae.) (Luckily it was over the weekend and I was in Busan anyway.)

I'll show you the first part of my Thailand trip tomorrow :-)

this is a life of illusion

2011-02-09T04:00:00.000-08:00

In Thailand, it was fun to watch Korean tourists take pictures of one another on the beach with fancy DSLR cameras. Taking pictures of one another is a huge thing in Korea too (maybe I am in the right country) but here it's cold.

Bexco, a convention center in Busan, accommodates with an interactive art exhibition (inside, where it's warm!) I went with Pete in early January.

I've never felt short in Asia before...

It's very convenient to have a Pete around when a dinosaur bursts through the wall.

(You know he is very seriously singing "Wise men say only fools rush in...")

Everybody had a hard year, everybody had a good time.

2011-02-08T15:42:00.000-08:00

Yikes. It's been over a month with no blog posts at all. I've been to Thailand and back, but let's start where I left off, which was the start of 2011.

The start of the year was great. I rang it in at HQ Bar with some lovely ladies and live music...

(Yes, Autumn and I wore matching dresses)

And Pete.

(I was making that face in nearly every picture from that evening.)

In Korea, people don't pay much attention to midnight and instead the start of the year is celebrated by watching the sunrise. I was going to try...but couldn't stay up that long. It was still a good start to the year.

If you're tired of tea, then you're tired of life!

2010-12-31T04:00:00.000-08:00

After our visit to the reed field, the teachers of Neungdong Middle School went to a famous green tea field.

It's a very pretty place, and it's been the setting of many commercials and films.

I didn't know tea looked like this! I thought it was more grass-like, but it's a shrub with woody stems.

Afterwards we went to dinner, and I think I've only posted one other picture of a traditional Korean meal. There are lots of plates.

Come on, get happy!

2010-12-30T02:35:00.000-08:00

To celebrate the end of the school year, the teachers at Neungdong Middle School went on a field trip to Jeollanam province. We all got on buses and drove three hours to the province's most popular attractions. The first was a field of reeds.

Reeds! So many reeds! A whole field of them. The reeds were at Suncheon bay, the hometown of hooded cranes!

It was a beautiful day, but I did not see any hooded cranes. There was a big black bird flying, but I didn't get a good picture of it.

The sun was kind of blinding, but it was very cold. I was wearing leggings and longjohns under my jeans and a tee shirt and long underwear under my sweater (thanks, Grandparents!) and an awesome green scarf (thanks, Nate!) and a hideous leather jacket (thanks...Mother.) I was still cold.

See? The creek was frozen.

There was a small bridge suspended over the creek, and every teacher, regardless of age or gender, got some joy from jumping on it.

I asked my panting co-teacher which road we should take, and she said "let's follow them" up the hard road. And so it was.

And this was the view from the hard road:

And here's me on the observation deck.

I took the road of meditation back down, so that I could meditate on the difficulties I had overcome on the hard road. I didn't. I thought about how I should have worn tennies.

Also there was a windmill.

zombie eh eh eh

2010-12-27T18:14:00.000-08:00

Second semester is winding down and there is only one more day of classes before winter break. During winter break, I'll teach introduction-to-the-next-book and a week-long English day camp. The students will come back for one week in February for graduation (this strikes me as very weird) and then get two more weeks off for "spring break" before the new school year starts in March.

But exams are over, kids are restless, and they don't even seem concerned that there are zombies hanging out outside the school.

For the last week, I've had my students create zombie survival kits and plans of action.

One of the groups in a 7th grade girls class included this list, which made me happy:
"bomb, gun, tank, sweater, noodle, bullet proof full-body suit."

One of the groups in an 8th grade boys classes had a list of heroes:
Optimus Prime, Bear Grylls, Spiderman, the Best Sniper in the World, Iron man and Lee Myung-bak (the president.) I said, "won't you need food?" and one of the students said, "eat Lee Myung-bak!" Okay. These are desperate times.

it's a gas gas gas

2010-12-24T04:00:00.000-08:00

If you are on the subway system during an emergency, please wait patiently for someone to come with a key so that you can get one of the dozen masks available at some, but not all subway stations.

Also happy Christmas Eve!

the eagle in the sky

2010-12-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

This one time, Autumn and I took a taxi to Kyungsung University, where there are lots of bars and restaurants that are popular with foreigners. Instead, we ended up *at* the university, where there were two huge cages with giant birds of prey.

This sea eagle looks like it's wearing bronze scales of armor.

And there were three vultures, who liked to fight over the meat slabs in a way that's very amusing to mimic. I need a picture of Autumn and I playing vultures.

Sometimes

2010-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

There is a restaurant across the street from Autumn's apartment called "Berry Yam Story." This is totally adorable, but we are creatures of habit, and have a habit of going down the road to Breeze Burns for their brunch on Sunday mornings.

I wish I had a picture of brunch at Breeze Burns. It's fantastic. (I stole this picture from a review. It was important. You can read reviews of Breeze Burns by clicking on the picture.)

At first you might be impressed by the sheer volume of food on that plate. You get eggs, hash browns, green beans, toast, bacon, sausage (or in our case, double bacon,) tomato slices and...a quarter of a waffle.

The best thing on this plate is the waffle, and unfortunately Breeze Burns does not sell whole waffles for breakfast. Which is weird (in fact, they sometimes don't allow double bacon and instead insist on two different breakfast meats.)

Well. One morning, on the way to Breeze Burns, there was a sandwich board with photographs of delicious-looking foods. On one side, the bacon yakisoba and curry shrimp fried rice beckoned, but on the other...there were waffles.

Upstairs, I was grateful that it wasn't sometimes.

This is the cutest restaurant in the world. It has little plants, books, and pictures on window sills and in a tree. There are crayons at the table.

And then...there was this.

Oh, yes. That is breakfast. A whole waffle, smeared with cream cheese, with strawberries, blueberries, almost slices, powdered sugar, a big scoop of ice cream and chocolate AND caramel syrup.

I tried to explain "sweet tooth" to my co-teacher a few weeks ago. She asked if there was a different tooth for different days. I said no, there is only a sweet tooth.

you can get anything you want

2010-12-21T04:00:00.000-08:00

I didn't celebrate Thanksgiving a month late; I just wrote about it a month late!

Some rad people (from BELLINGHAM) hosted a Thanksgiving party on the Saturday after the holiday. There was turkey. And pie. (They have Costco in Korea, so it was a lot like home.)

Here we are, fat and sleepy:

Thanksgiving festivities included some party games (which went from charades to more "we don't have to stand up to play this!" question and answer games as the day went on) and American tv shows! We made a list of things for which we are thankful, and took a picture, and it was good. Happy really late Thanksgiving, all.

Great balls of fire

2010-12-20T18:46:00.000-08:00

Oh, it's been awhile. Sorry about that.

Back in November, there was a charity dodgeball tournament in Busan.

Normally I avoid things like competition, teamwork and sports but this is to send an orphan to college--so I signed up for a competitive...team...sport!

Our rockin' team played five games--and only lost four of them!

Look: teamwork!

My fabulous team.

(These pictures were taken by Ahnna. Thanks, Ahnna!)

'bout as high as a building oughta grow

2010-10-26T04:00:00.000-07:00

I stopped on my walk home and took pictures in four directions.

Homeward

Back toward my school

Up the hill next to me

And across the street

This is how Jangyu manages to be such a small town with so many people!

Fire in the Sky!

2010-10-25T05:29:00.001-07:00

Friday and Saturday evenings I climbed onto Autumn's roof to watch the Busan International Fireworks Festival. It's the biggest fireworks show I've ever seen.

This is the beach early in the afternoon. It is roped off at the tide line; otherwise it would be completely full. There was a huge crowd, and I was glad to be on the roof.

That's one of the barges used for the fireworks.

The view was only obscured a little bit by buildings.

And here's a half-minute video of part of the finale.

chop it down with the edge of my hand

2010-10-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

Autumn and I went hiking a couple of weeks ago.

Geumjeong Mountain is a mountain in Busan. It has an old fortress at the top, and a cable car (um...aerial tramway?) to the top. We did not take the cable car and instead hiked to the top. I did not die. We took the cable car down and did not have time to explore the fortress (which is really a big stone wall... we will hike it another day!)

I didn't realize how far we had come until we hopped in the cable car to go back down. That bridge in the upper right is at Gwangalli beach, where I stay every weekend. And see the train track just to the right of the red cable-holder-thingy? We walked FROM THERE. There was no mid-mountain trailhead to which we took a taxi. Oh, no. We did the whole thing.

And then celebrated with milkshakes, like you do.

telephonin' me

2010-10-21T01:06:00.001-07:00

I know I haven't written in awhile, and I do have pictures of a beautiful hike I did with Autumn, and I'm still meaning to post pictures of both of my schools and all that, but today's entry is brought to you by my students.

I love my students.

I work at two large middle schools in Jangyu (small town of 100,000 people.) Each of my middle schools has a little over 1000 students, so my superior math skills tell me that just over 2% of the population of Jangyu are my students. The people on the street around my house after school are probably 60% my students. And it's great. Twice this week middle schoolers have taken time out of their day to help me with every day tasks.

First, on my way home Monday, in order to put some figurative soft, ruffly sunshine on my shoulders I stopped to finally buy the golden yellow ruffly scarf I've been fondling briefly on my way home each day. I asked the lady how much it cost ...and she didn't do the helpful "this many thousands" with her fingers and our misunderstanding grew and then one of my students said, "Hi, Emily" and I said "I want to buy this scarf. Can you tell me how much it costs?" just like any EFL dialogue I would use in my class. And then I bought a ruffly yellow scarf for 10,000 won and then the student gave me part of her donut, unsolicited!

Then, just now I got home to a "sorry we missed you!" sticker on my door from a courier. I'm expecting a package from my mom, and it looked like they were going to try and deliver the package again tomorrow. I went back outside where a few of my students were hanging out in front of a restaurant and showed them the slip. One of them called the courier for me and told them to deliver the package to my school tomorrow instead of my house!

Additionally, my students are funny.

Today in a lesson on giving advice, one pair of students submitted:
Problem: my pet dog is getting fat.
Advice: I think you should eat your pet.

Last week my students made telephone conversations. I told my classes to be creative, have fun, and stop threatening people with box cutters! Some gems:

Australopithecus called Homo Erectus asking if
he can make him a fire.

2MB called Obama to tell him that North Korea is
attacking and ask for help. And money after the
war is over.

(2MB is Lee Myung-Bak, the president of South Korea--2 sounds like Lee.)

God called the Undertaker and asks to wrestle.

God called a bee and asks it to the God-bugs
dance party that evening.

Spiderman called Obama and asks him to a
movie.

I hope my students brightened your day at least a fraction of the amount they brightened mine!

silver trays

2010-10-04T04:00:00.000-07:00

I took a picture of each of my lunches last week, in the hope that I could show you a typical week of lunches. Last week was kind of atypical.

Monday at Neungdong Middle School:

(Clockwise from top left) Beef with peanuts in a sweet sauce, tempura-battered french fries with chili sauce, KIMCHI, spincach soup, rice with the occasional red bean (for flavor and texture.)

Tuesday at Neungdong Middle School:

(Clockwise from top left) Sweet rice dumpling filled with red bean paste, KIMCHI, Korean grapes (suck out the innards--don't eat the skin!) giant bowl of noodle soup with vegetables and egg, fried prawns.

Wednesday was the first day of exams, so I went out to lunch with the homeroom teachers after school closed early.

(Clockwise from top left) (Actually I don't know what a lot of this was) Onion and greens with chili sauce, garlic greens, fish cakes with chili sauce, garlic cloves and sliced pepper, (partially visible) steamed cabbage, whole fish with chili sauce, greens with sesame seeds, KIMCHI, more greens...with onions, salad, fish with a radish, and in the center, soup with tofu and mushrooms.
The piece of wood in the lower right is the lid to my personal stone bowl of rice. After scooping the rice into a bowl to eat with the side dishes, you pour hot broth into the bowl and put the lid back on. When dinner is finished you have soup from the rice that was stuck to the stone. It's good for digestion.

Thursday, at Naedeok Middle School:

(Clockwise from top left) Fish in sesame soy sauce, KIMCHI (cabbage and cucumber!) garlic greens and ground beef, soup (potato, carrot, big mushy white things,) rice with beans and corn.

Friday at Naedeok Middle School:

(Clockwise from top left) vegetable pancakes, KIMCHI (cabbage and...radish maybe?) potato and beef stew (spicy and sweet,) spinach soup, rice with barley bits.

Korean school lunches are about as representative of Korean food as American school lunches are of American food. Still, one big difference between the Korean lunch and an American lunch is the prominence of rice. Korean food is rice plus side dishes, while American food tends to be meat plus side dishes.

Dancing in the streets

2010-10-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Dancing at the bus stop in Changwon
Originally uploaded by omgmuffin

On Wednesday, I went to Changwon (the capital of my province) after work with some of my co-teachers. We tried fancy perfumes and had delicious food, and then there was a dance troupe at the bus stop being awesome. At the end of the video, I started to say "Aw. My bus just got here."

It's getting near dawn

2010-09-30T04:00:00.000-07:00

Saturday was the last night of my extended Chuseok holiday. Autumn and I took a walk on the beach (as usual… I was so spoiled by this whole thing.)

It was like the last day of summer. When I got back to work on Monday the students had all switched to their Fall uniforms, adding sweater vests and switching from gray to black. But Autumn and I made the most of this, and she showed me this great Indian restaurant with little curtained-off tables surrounded by pillows on the floor.

They offered these appetizery things that resemble cheetos, but with caramel instead of cheese. They’re fantastic.

Autumn thought so too.

It was a great Saturday, with dancing and live music and pool and more dancing. When Autumn and I got back to her apartment, I gasped at the sky “is that the DAWN?” Yes, Emily. That’s the dawn.

we'll be singing when we're winning

2010-09-29T04:00:00.000-07:00

One of the best things in Korea is the noraebang. A noraebang is a karaoke place with small private karaoke rooms for you and your friends to wail into a microphone without disturbing strangers. Autumn and I visited one and paid our 10,000 won for one session. The timer in the room said an hour, but as it got near 20 minutes, the time started going up. This may have been because of our mad karaoke skills. Or maybe it always does that. After two not-really-an-hour sessions, we emerged from our room and realized that FIVE HOURS had passed. No wonder I sounded like Bob Dylan near the end.

And the next day… we did it again.

This was an experiment to help the people around us, as we tried out lots and lots of songs in order to determine what to sing when it wasn’t just us.

Also a reason to rock a lilac wig.

What do you eat after hours of singing? A balanced meal of circle cheese, square brownie and triangle kimbap!

The Autumn moon lights my way.

2010-09-27T21:47:00.000-07:00

Chuseok is the Korean Thanksgiving. I got four days off of school and spent the week with Autumn in Busan.

I worked just the Monday of Chuseok week, and the principal and head teacher gave me presents for the holiday. This was my Chuseok haul:

That’s six cans of tuna packed in oil, two bottles of canola oil, some hand cream and body wash. Most people spent Chuseok visiting family in rural parts of Korea, but I left on Tuesday to go make sandcastles on the beach.

Sometimes there’s a pirate ship.

The moon was full and Le Pot was magnificent.

Autumn and I took an evening walk to the fitness area at the end of the beach. Two of the giant hula hoops had mated, forming the biggest hula hoop ever seen ‘round these parts.

splish splash

2010-09-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

Autumn took me to the biggest jimjilbang in Busan at the end of August. It has a feel much like this picture.

The women's area also had frolicking children and it was a very happy place.

Last weekend we visited what might be the *fanciest* jimjilbang in Busan. The inside of the pajama area looks eerily like this:

(This is actually the set of Dollhouse. They zap your brain upstairs.)

It's located inside this:

The world's largest department store (with a Cartier department and a Bvlgari department) also has the fanciest food court I've ever seen. When your meal is ready, the number comes up on the screen.

My $7 soup was FANTASTIC and yeah, that's a little abalone in there. There were FIVE abalones, and I kinda kept the shells.

Best food court food ever.

After eating, we went to the jimjilbang and enjoyed the many casino-themed sauna rooms (there's a Roman room and a Pyramid room and a vibrating room and a "liquid dreams" room with a greenish light shining through a pool of water, making interesting designs on the walls and ceiling. Jimjilbangs are kind of amazing.

Korea seems to love rainbow lights, so this happened also.

heavy metal thunder

2010-09-20T21:57:00.001-07:00

Autumn and I went out last Friday, and were told by enthusiastic foreigners outside the Family Mart that the Best Drummer in the World was playing at a bar down the road. So we went, because you can't miss an opportunity to see the Best Drummer in the World.

He started with what I thought was going to be an enthusiastic sound check, but no. It was a song.

Here he is in action. It's only a fifteen-second video, but that's all you need. Note the enthusiasm of the crowd.

(It didn't sound any better than that in real life.)

So that was fun.

apartment in the sky

2010-09-17T04:00:00.000-07:00

This is Jangyu.

It's where I live. It's still really hot here (actually this is the first afternoon I've been comfortably able to leave the windows open and the aircon off.) I like that it's all highrises and mountains. This is why it's a small town with 100,000 people.

It's difficult to see in the picture, but there's a big retaining wall on the right. That wall retains another big hill. This picture is part of my walk to/from my second school, where I teach Thursdays and Fridays.

mushroom mushroom

2010-09-15T17:41:00.000-07:00

Sorry guys! It's not that stuff isn't happening that's worth blogging about; it's that it's all "I went to Busan this weekend and spent a whole day talking to Autumn about boys and clothes and traveling."

But I'm not lesson planning right now, so let's talk about how crap I am at basic human functions like feeding myself.

I partly went to Thailand as an exercise in being a grown-up. I had never lived by myself or relied on myself to feed myself. It's different when you live with someone, because you can share those burdens. Or something.

Anyway, Thailand proved to be the land of $1 Pad Thai and housekeeping cleaning my room once a week and taking my laundry all the way across the street to be done every week. It was a challenge, I tell you. It made me laugh, because I was far less capable than I had been in the States. At least there I cooked for myself. Sometimes.

Now in Korea I realize that I am rubbish at feeding myself. I keep running out of food. Like, usually I have breakfast cereal with fruit and yogurt for breakfast…and dinner. But this morning, I didn’t have any fruit or cereal. Instead, I had leftover corn on the cob and blueberry yogurt, and now have no food again! This keeps happening! On the bright side, there is a once-every-five-days market near my house. I discovered this while on the way to the grocery store (I had run out of breakfast cereal again.) The sidewalk surrounding the grocery store was full of produce stalls, and the funny usually-vacant area behind the grocery store was now a bustling market!

In a way I'm spoiled (this time of year) because when I run out of food I can walk two blocks and buy overpriced nectarines or tangerines. Or other fruit but why would I buy other fruit when I can buy nectarines and tangerines? And the mushrooms—there are so many different kinds of mushrooms! Cooking real food is difficult because it’s hard to buy small quantities of produce, so my stir-fry is usually limited to two vegetables, which are always broccoli and oyster mushrooms. This is because, when told to choose two vegetables among all the choices at market, why would anyone not choose broccoli and oyster mushrooms?

Unfortunately, the market only happens every five days, so the rest of the time I have to go to the actual grocery store, which isn’t so bad because they do sell those corn flakes with the cranberries and almonds.

(I should note that I eat a hearty Korean lunch at school every day. The teachers are regularly impressed with my tolerance for spicy food--dudes, I lived in Thailand.)

This is my exciting life in Korea!

shiny and new

2010-09-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

Monday morning, I taught my first five classes. My main (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday) school is co-ed, but the classes are gender segregated. I taught three classes of boys and two classes of girls. My first week of lessons is just an “about me” introduction, a brief speaking exercise, and a game. I opened the floor for questions after the introduction, and every class asked my age (which is totally normal in Korean culture) and my height. And every class gasped when I said 178 cm.

Halfway through the day, a couple of girls giggled into the office and I received a really sweet letter/request to be teacher's pet(?)

I'm not sure if she's questioning her spelling or my hair color. Anyway, I survived.

around like a merry-go-round

2010-08-31T04:00:00.000-07:00

After testing the free fitness equipment, Autumn took me to a jimjilbang. A jimjilbang is a public bath. They're very popular in Korea. There were gender-segregated naked areas with pools of various temperatures, some with herbs in them. There were saunas, wet and dry, up to 80 Celsius. And in the jammy-wearing everybody area there were saunas with beautiful colored stones in the walls, a sleep area, and a karaoke room. Yes.

After getting all cleaned up, we came back to Gwangalli beach and walked up to the North end, where there is an amusement park. First, we rode the mechanical bull and each won a funny heart-shaped pillow.

Then we rode the Viking Ship!

And the ferris wheel, which is 103m high and takes fifteen minutes to go all the way around. Here's Autumn's look of terror at the top:

Then there was a shiny Merry-Go-Round ride.

Afterward, we went to restaurant and had awesome Gorgonzola and walnut pizza, with pink pickles and espresso salad and wine. We each took a bite of the pizza when it arrived and just looked at each other with expressions of “I am so lucky to be tasting this amazing food right now.” And we are.

let's get physical

2010-08-30T04:14:00.000-07:00

A great thing about my apartment is that I can walk two blocks and then catch a 30-minute, 1800-won ($1.50?) bus to Busan. I did this on Friday night, and met up with Autumn (who is another 30 minutes on a subway, but still.) It had been, like, over a month since we'd seen each other.

A great thing about Autumn's apartment is that it's a short walk from this:

Autumn showed me around her corner of Busan. There were chrome grapes.

And down at the south end of Gwangalli beach, there is a fitness area with the usual fitness area things.

And last of all and best of all, there was a selection of the giantest, awesomest hula hoops ever. They HURT.

In my room

2010-08-26T23:40:00.000-07:00

Wanna see where I live?

I live in Jangyu, which is a bedroom community of Gimhae, which is a suburb of Busan.

First, I don't have a key. Instead I have this. I don't want to think about the implications in case of disaster.

This is the take-off-your-shoes area. Please try to find an empty spot in those cupboards among my vast collection.

And this... this is my room!

There is plenty of room to hula hoop.

This is the kitchen, complete with a bag of moving-in waste. There is a microwave and a rice cooker under the table. I chose the pink rug myself. That door goes to the bathroom.

This is the bathroom. The shower head is behind the door.

This is my laundry room, which seems like a very inefficient use of space.

what good things mother makes

2010-08-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

Gosh, I'm sorry about this lapse. I'm going to lectures and eating kimchi a lot. I also had some European Luxury Waffles, which were tasty.

Additionally, corn. There was a bag for the cobs, but it went away. In Korea, we recycle!

all my bags are packed and I'm ready to go

2010-08-18T03:04:00.000-07:00

The computers at the airport weren't working, so the ticketing procedure involved the Asiana staff running back and forth with peoples' passports to a back room somewhere and hand writing boarding passes. Understandably, this delayed the flight since folks had to wait so long to check in.

Mistakes are bound to happen with handwritten boarding passes. I had the same seat number as another girl, but Asiana sorted it out. When we exited the plane she grabbed my TEFL International backpack for me, since I had stowed it a few rows back on account of the seating weirdness. She recognized the logo as she is also a TEFL alumni who has been working in Spain for the last two years. With a US passport, mmm hmm. Of *course* she's here for EPIK too, but she'll be teaching in Seoul.

The flight was painless. I watched some movies that I would not otherwise have watched, and some that I wanted to see (Date Night, with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, which was not as funny as it could have been; Valentine's Day, which I enjoyed but will later claim to have watched only because of the pitiful selection of movies available; Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which varied from the book but I dug it, and The Back-Up Plan with... um... J-Lo playing a baby-crazy woman who um... God it was awful. I knew it would be awful and I watched it anyway and it just was.)

I took a bus to Jeonju University where I will stay for ten days of orientation, and on day nine I will learn where I will spend the next year. I've been living out of backpacks and suitcases for the last four months, so I'm excited to get a whole apartment to myself.

every weekend at the Renaissance Faire

2010-08-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

I went to the Ren Faire.

The best fun to be had at Ren Faire isn't sweating in the hot, sunny faire in ridiculous garb or purchasing expensive silly things. It's lounging in Paisley Glen, complaining about the heat!

I'm not quite acclimated to Washington yet, so the heat didn't bother me much. Shortly after arriving at the Faire on Saturday afternoon, I got to ride in Tyler's fancy red convertible to buy water... and another thing.

There were cows and a mountain!

And when we got back to Paisley Glen it was time for fancy time, so everyone fancified and went for a promenade.

(Paisley Glen isn't quite Renaissance reenactment so much as it's Victorian Renaissance reenactor reenactment, and more than that just silliness.)

And then it was dark and the other thing I bought was an inexpensive LED hula hoop.

Hunger happened but was quickly slain by the fabulous ramen cart (and ramen) that Stuart made.

And that was Ren Faire. Today I'll cross the Pacific again, back to Korea.

a cup of the brown stuff, the shade of an acorn

2010-08-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

Ma, Nathan and I went to the Butchart Gardens. That's the sunken garden, which used to be a quarry, behind Nay and I.

Then we had afternoon tea. With trifle.

And then with a great deal of other good things.

Cucumber sandwiches were not under-represented.

Then we took the ferry back. That's the Empress Hotel, all covered in ivy behind me.

mighty...British Columbia!

2010-08-13T21:00:00.000-07:00

Nathan, mom and I took a ferry to Victoria, the capital of British Columbia.

We arrived in the morning and went to the Royal BC Museum right away. There were stampeding mammoths!

And other horrifying sights.

And Parliament!

(There was a street magician down below us who drew quite a crowd and inspired my theory that the real mark of a Capable Human Being is that the subject owns a vest. I do not own a vest. Yet. I do have grand plans for vest-ownership, though.)

The next day it rained for a bit, and that happened to be a bit while we were outside, so we sought shelter in a shopping mall with a vast, steampunky clock which says "Westward the Course of Empire Goes Forth" round the bottom and shows how the sun never did set on the British Empire, back in the day.

Then there was a wardrobe change, or possibly the sun set and rose again, and here we were in the rotunda of the parliament building.

it's twilight time

2010-08-12T21:00:00.000-07:00

I have not been to the Olympic Peninsula since Twilight happened. Since we planned to spend one night in Port Angeles, I thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to dine at Bella Italia, where Bella had her first date with Edward.

I don't know if I look sufficiently pale in this picture.

I shared an order of mushroom raviolis with my mom. That's the same thing Bella ordered, don't ya know? It's very good. They use various native Olympic Forest mushrooms. Or something.

After dinner, we went to see the latest Twilight movie at the Port Angeles Theater. It has five rows of seating!

Finally, here's my brother looking like a sarcastic 15-year-old.

he lifts his big foot up

2010-08-11T21:49:00.000-07:00

Nathan and I went to Pike Place Market one day. I bought a mustache. It was the best thing ever. It's difficult to wear in the wind, but when it's still it's my favorite accessory.

A few days later Nathan, my mom and I went on a trip. First we visited the Olympic Game Farm in Sequim, Washington. It's not a happy place

but there are zebras

and a number of sad-looking bears who still find the drive to reach under their electric fences to take pieces of bread to eat.

And sometimes I'm kind of immature and want to take my picture next to the intersection of Kitchen Dick and Woodcock. Mother's the one who pulled over for it.

Back in the US...

2010-08-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

In Seattle, people don't ride motorbikes. They pay for things with credit cards and they all speak English. There are no mangy dogs on the street. People wear shoes. It's confusing and strange!

My ma and brother picked me up at the airport on a Wednesday (my second go at Wednesday; the first one took place mostly in Seoul.) My body didn't remember how to sleep, so for awhile I was staying up for 24 hours at a time and waking up randomly at 2:00 am. It got better.

I got my Korean visa the day after I arrived. This task involved shivering on the Seattle sidewalks at 8 in the morning, with fake shoes (I only had flip-flops) and no coat (I didn't own one.) It was only like 70 degrees.

In the following days, I cherished the vast selection of English songs they have at karaoke bars here. I wore shoes. I went tromping around in the woods, confident that I would not be attacked by a viper or a cobra. There was a possible bear.

Tyler was brave and athletic, until the wood became "vibrating and spongy."

My mother left an assignment on the answering machine to make a terrarium. It was pleasantly specific about the location of the plastic geese. Nathan (my brother,) Tyler and I made a terrarium. And there was a frog who wanted to play.

The frog didn't want to play anymore so we evicted him from the terrarium.

Poor frog.

leaving home ain't easy

2010-08-04T15:46:00.000-07:00

I left Ban Phe at the end of July.

I spent a few days toward the end with Autumn in Bangkok while she got her Korean visa, and we spent much time at this sanctuary, in an alley off of Khao San Road.

It's an old house, with fabulous paintings on the inside. Perfect for a fabulous party.

When I did leave, I had a stopover in Seoul for a few hours before crossing the pacific. I saw some things in Seoul.

Gyeongbokgung Palace!

Another Starbucks!

And then I went back to the airport and flew over the ocean.

the best of my love

2010-07-26T09:10:00.001-07:00

You probably won't visit Ban Phe. If you do, you'll probably walk from the bus station to the dock across the street to catch a ferry to Ko Samet. But if you wanted to go to Ban Phe, or if you'll be here for a TEFL course at some point, I hope this helps.

I'm leaving Thailand tomorrow night to go back to America. I'll be in the Seattle area for about three weeks before flying to Korea where I will start working again in late August. It's been a nice three months of unemployed vagabondery, but I've got to start making money again.

Before I leave, though, I want to share the best things about Ban Phe.

My favorite guesthouse in Ban Phe is Bedrock. I like that the fan rooms are 200 baht a night now in the low season (that's about six dollars) and the restaurant has fantastic food (including the best Pad Thai in Ban Phe.) It's also got free wi-fi and they'll rent you a motorbike. The rotating selection of Old White Guys at the bar is the cherry on top.

My favorite restaurant in Ban Phe is "Naughtiness." It's actually called "S Land," but some folks refer to it as "Sunny's" after the adorable little girl who is the daughter of one of the employees (it's a family-owned thing.) Naughtiness has the best seafood curry in Ban Phe (which is saying something, since Ban Phe is famous for seafood.) They also have one of the few espresso machines in town. It's cheap and good.

My favorite massage place in Ban Phe is the place across from Christie's with the big reflexology foot diagram on the door. They don't always offer the ginger tea at the end, but they will let you take a nap indefinitely after your massage, which always ends with a satisfying "pop-pop-pop" of your back.

My favorite day-trip out of Ban Phe is Khao Chamao Park about 40 minutes away.

My favorite place to buy pretty much anything (mostly tee shirts, belts, and tasty desserts) is the night market on Mondays and Thursdays. It always has a great selection of produce, bootleg movies and clothing.

And I'm leaving. Tomorrow. Which is kind of weird.

I have to have a berth or I cannot get to sleep.

2010-07-21T04:25:00.000-07:00

Ban Phe, it seems, sucks the will to blog even about places I've already been to and enjoyed.

Well after visiting the two big temple complexes in central Java, I visited the Sultan's Palace. Central Java still has a Sultan, and he still lives at the palace, which means that you can't actually go inside any of the buildings. Here is a picture, taken from as close as I could get, of a hall of some sort.

I visited a market, and another market, and a batik place, and a Muslim hospital where a new friend's nephew was recovering from... "How do you say it in English? Blood fever?"

Wai-wai-wait, I thought. What kind of bizarre medeival illness will I take with me from this hospital? I went anyway, and it turned out it was Dengue fever. Oh. Dengue fever. I can deal with that.

(The first month in Thailand my TEFL class and I were all deathly afraid of Dengue. One fella thought he had contracted it but it turned out to be not-Dengue. The symptoms were described to me as "you feel like you will absolutely die, for about two weeks, and then you get better.")

Luckily, I did not come out of it with Dengue.

Other highlights of my Fabulous! Nine! Days! On! Java! (You really must go, you really must. I just can't write much about it right now in this Internet cafe...) include the bicycle rickshaw! I felt ickily colonial being escorted in a carriage behind a motorbike in Cambodia. But in Yogyakarta, the rickshaw drivers propel you through the streets by the strength of their worldly bodies. I took one trip on one, to the train station when I left, and all I could think the whole time was "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."

That's my bicycle rickshaw guy. He's cool. Then I took the night train to Jakarta, which is not suited to photographs. The trains on Java do not have berths and I had to try to sleep in a (very comfortable, Executif) seat. In the morning went to the airport.

Look, it's the airport!

And a handful of the 13 thousand Indonesian islands I didn't visit on my trip!

And then I was back in Thailand.

living rock

2010-07-19T04:00:00.000-07:00

After Borobudur, I visited the Hindu temple Prambanan by day. And I became a celebrity.

This is Prambanan:

The complex includes temples to different Hindu deities. I think this one was Shiva. Maybe. I should have taken notes.

This is Candi Sewu, another (Buddhist) temple near Prambanan:

In Thailand, sometimes people randomly ask to have their picture taken with me. It's always kind of weird, and I oblige. It doesn't happen very often. In my four hours or so at Borobudur and Prambanan, though, *seven* families asked to pose for pictures with me.

This is the only one where I asked them to take a picture with my camera too. One woman asked me to sit by her and asked where I was from, and then called to her family, "American! USA!" and they got all excited and this happened.

There was a little boy, but he did *not* want to go stand by the white lady.

And then there was a giant spider!

sing to the morning light

2010-07-18T04:00:00.000-07:00

Borobudur is the largest Buddhist temple in the world, and I woke up really, really early to go there at sunrise.

One can walk around each level of the temple, which is decorated with reliefs that make the journey up the monument mirror a spiritual journey of enlightenment.

There are depictions of the life of Buddha, of course, but I didn't understand all of the pictures. Like here's a pirate ship!

And some monkeys!

After the corridors of reliefs, the top three levels have hundreds of stupas, and inside each stupa is a Buddha image.

This stupa was left partially restored to show the Buddha inside.

Borobudur was worth awakening at the 4:30 prayer call. A+

Ramayana

2010-07-16T04:00:00.000-07:00

Prambanan is a Hindu temple near Yogyakarta, built in the 9th century. The temple is illuminated at night, and there is an open-air theater in front of it (from which the temple is visible at night) where the Ramayana ballet is performed almost nightly.

The Ramayana tells the story of Rama. There are pretty costumes. Rama was able to use a fancy bow left by Shiva, and as a reward he got to marry Sita, the fairest of them all.

Then stuff happened. Much of the epic involves Hanuman, who is kind of my favorite on account of MONKEYS! And there were little kids who played some of the monkeys and kept falling over and being cute. None of these pictures came out, so here are some pretty girls:

The ballet picks up with the part called Sundara Kanda, where Hanuman sets fire to Ravana's citadel.

But then it gets a little iffy in Yuddha Kanda, where Rama is unsure of his wife's purity so he sets her on fire. Like ya do. She survived, and they lived happily ever after.

(That is until Rama becomes doubtful of her purity again an banishes her, and then she gets swallowed by the earth. That part isn't in the ballet.)

off the rails

2010-07-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

My second day in Indonesia I woke up *really* early because it had taken a good hour to reach the train station when I bought my ticket. There was the sunrise, through my dirty window.

And this time, since it was so early, it only took 20 minutes to get to Stasiun Gambir.

I got on my train. It's an 8-hour train ride from Jakarta to Yogyakarta, and I chose to make the trip (at least the "to" part) during the day because it's supposed to have great views. The window of my train car was the dirtiest window I've ever encountered, but the views were very pretty.

It's a holiday here in Indonesia, and I hadn't made reservations ahead of time for a place in Yogya. Most of the guesthouses in the Malioboro area had "full" signs out front, and those that didn't just told me when I asked. My taxi driver was fantastic though and took me to the other backpacker area across town and tried a couple of guesthouses until I found a room. It will do. It doesn't have a hot shower, but it has two double beds and a twin, and it cost less than the guesthouse where I wanted to stay in the first place.

I didn't sleep very well, though. My windows don't close completely because I have a fan room. The first Muslim prayer call is before dawn, at about 4:30 in the morning. I awoke to that, and then slowly realized that there was a managerie of caged birds down the hall, which called from then on. Most of them just screech, but at least one says "wow-wow."

So I got up, and had some gado-gado!

Gado-gado is a big pile of steamed cabbage, green beans, sprouts, potatoes (and tofu, here) served with PEANUT SAUCE! The peanut sauce is in the gravy boat there. In Thailand I've only ever seen peanut sauce with satay, and I've only once seen non-meaty satay. Hooray, I say, for peanut sauce.

some Indonesian junk

2010-07-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

After a few days in Ban Phe, including a wicked-awesome karaoke night with Annie, who was back in town for a few days, I flew to Indonesia.

They turned on a fog machine for my grand rockstar entrance onto the plane and everything!

Because I would arrive in the middle of the night, I booked a room ahead of time. Behold!

I did not plan much about this trip. I knew how to get out of Jakarta (by train) and that I wanted to go to Yogyakarta and see the temples at Borobudur and Prambanan. I figured that Jakarta, being big and dirty and one of the most polluted cities on Earth, was not worth my attention. I was totally wrong.

I came back from Stasiun Gambir in a tuk-tuk after buying my ticket for the following day. Tuk-tuks in Jakarta have ragtops and cute little carnival-ride doors.

When I got back to my room, I took a bubble bath with an extremely overpriced Cosmo I had purchased in the airport. I went out to get something to eat, thinking I would eat dinner, go back to my room and pack, and then read until I went to bed. I was not interested in Jakarta, and I did not bring my camera. Such folly!

I visited a row of restaurant stalls next to my hotel, and passed one with plates of fried deliciousness that looked like meat in the window. I kept walking until a fellow beckoned me to try some cake, and I said I'd like some cake for dessert but was looking for dinner. Where should I go? He led me back to the place with the golden window-food and ordered a plate of vegetarian deliciousness for me.

The food, he explained, is from West Sumatra. I had a potato dumpling thing, a boiled egg, and a pile of vegetables on rice with chili. It was fantastic. I talked to my new friend, Said, about things I didn't know about Indonesia and Islam, which was a lot about Indonesia and Islam. I didn't have room for cake but went back to his stand for some guava-lemon juice and then he showed me around the old city and explained the big old Dutch buildings, many of which are now museums. Some are posh restaurants or bars, but a lot of them are just abandoned, with trees growing inside them in the middle of the city. I guess a city only needs so many museums, and Jakarta has a heck of a lot of museums.

I didn't have my camera, of course, but here's an example seen from my taxi the next day.

And then we had authentic Javanese powdered coffee on a sidewalk in the old city. (I had tea, actually. You know me.) It was illuminating. The moral of this story: learn something about a place before you go there. I did plenty of research on Thailand, Cambodia and Laos before visiting, but very little on Indonesia except for how to get around. I'm very glad that I met someone who showed me some of the city, but next time I would certainly plan to spend more time in Jakarta to see all there is to see.

i want a hula hoop

2010-07-13T04:00:00.000-07:00

Banteay Samré is my other favorite temple, besides Preah Khan. I like it because it's also fairly quiet, and very complete.

The doorways are short, though.

Even when collapsed into the double small hoops, it's a challenge to carry this sucker up and down the narrow temple stairs!

So we took the hula hoop out into the courtyard, and I finally have video!

Here's Autumn, being fantastic

And me, developing fantasticness, very slowly

And that was all. Cambodia offered great food, wine, shopping and massages in addition to the temples. The next day we spent a good fourteen hours on buses and standing in line at immigration before we reached Ban Phe. It was 11:30 at night on the 4th of July, and we remembered just in time to sing "The Star Spangled Banner" with Christian, who also existed. I'm sure that the other guests at my guesthouse appreciated it.

no one knows

2010-07-12T04:00:00.000-07:00

On day two of temple-hopping in Cambodia, Autumn and I styled entirely new outfits with scarves from the market.

We visited Pre Rup, a temple mountain with ridiculous steps.

And then we hula hooped at Preah Khan (this is a lot of the same stuff, isn't it?) Preah Khan was my favorite temple when I visited Cambodia in October, and I'm glad that it was one of Autumn's favorites, too. It's sprawling and has giant tree roots growing over it, like Ta Prohm, but it has far fewer visitors. It's quiet and serene and the grassy courtyards were fluttering with hundreds of little yellow butterflies. The butterflies were surreal, but not something we could capture on film.

There are other, less irreverent reasons to visit ancient temples, besides hula hooping and taking pictures of one another. These are not much fun to blog about.

Besides, Autumn swung on a vine!

And this!

Curiouser and curiouser...

Preah Khan is arranged in a very deliberate cruciform layout, with doorways getting smaller and smaller as one approaches the inner sanctuary from any direction. This building (the one I'm hugging) makes me happy because it's so random. Off to the side but within the walls of the temple, it's a two-story structure with big round columns. Nobody knows what it was for.

hey, lady

2010-07-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

After wandering around Angkor Wat, Autumn and I maneuvered our way past the chorus of "Laydee, you buy cold water/new dress/new scarf/fan/lunch/bracelets/etc." and visited Angkor Thom. The saleswomen are much like zombies. Slow moving, but when one sees you and moans, "Laydee..." it alerts all the others to your presence and you have a hoard of women and children trying to sell you things.

Angkor Thom is a big walled city, and home to one of the most famous temples here outside of Angkor Wat: The Bayon. The Bayon gives the general impression of a pile of rubble from a distance.

As you climb up into the temple, you notice the faces that adorn each tower. And the girls posing in window frames

and giving Eskimo kisses to ancient kings.

And then we fell in the mud!

It was tricksy mud, made to look like solid ground. We went down within the same fraction of a second, but kept going, up the steep steps of the royal palace.

And to Ta Prohm, where hula hooping happened

and America's Next Top Model posing happened.

A good day.

I'll write about the rest of our trip for next week.

two of us riding nowhere

2010-07-08T04:00:00.000-07:00

Autumn and I traveled to Cambodia together on June 30 (my blog is far behind--when this entry posts I will be in Indonesia.) It was great.

We took a minibus to the border at Aranyaprathet, and switched to a big bus on the Cambodian side.

It was raining in Cambodia.

We arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia in the evening and after checking into our guesthouse we went down to the wonderful night market where we got out first doses of "Laydee! You buy...?" (this chorus would haunt us for the rest of the trip.) We bought silk scarves with which to style ourselves the following day.

Our third mode of transportation is the Cambodian tuk-tuk, which differs from a Thai or Lao tuk-tuk because it is a removable carriage hitched to the back of a motorbike. Very colonial.

Our fourth mode of transportation on the way to Angkor Wat was not a decorated pony. Autumn made friends with it:

I did not make friends with the pony.

But that is my collapsible hula hoop on my shoulder! At Angkor Wat!

When I visited with Elle and Jamie in October, the central tower was closed for renovation, but this time it wasn't.

We admired the view, and then hula hooped in the courtyard.

Since there are so many pictures, I will continue with the rest of our first day (Angkor Thom including the Bayon, and Ta Prohm!) tomorrow.

right round

2010-07-07T04:00:00.000-07:00

I got to Ban Phe from Krabi on a Saturday, and spent the weekend on the island with Autumn and some other TEFLers. There was a big party at Sunrise Bar for someone's birthday, but before it got too busy I practiced my hula-hooping.

My travel hoop folds into itself to make two small circles. I took it with me on my travels after Ban Phe. I can say I've hooped in bus stations and in a mangrove forest, but I can't do most of Autumn's tricks yet.

Later in the evening, there was a highly organized pillow fight competition. I don't have any pictures of myself fighting, but mostly it was like this, until somebody's stool gave out.

The winner of the competition happened to be the boyfriend of the woman who organized it. Hmm...

how can I leave this behind?

2010-07-06T04:00:00.000-07:00

After surviving 48 hours without a camera, I was eager to document everything. The day after I replaced my camera, I took the bus to Ban Phe again. I cherished the sights on the bus from Krabi because I knew I wouldn't be able to look back at pictures. The trip to Ban Phe was less picturesque, but the bus was luxurious.

And I did snap this:

Heh heh.

two hundred degrees

2010-07-05T04:00:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of nights back on Khao San Road while I got my camera and recovered from a week in the sun.

On Khao San Road you can get clothing, tattoos, jewelry and fake documents.

I paid way more than 1000 Baht ($30) for my TEFL certificate, but I can make up for it with a $30 Doctorate in... Metaphysical Properties of Luminiferous Aether?

What possibilities!

all i got is a photograph

2010-07-02T04:00:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when I don't have a camera.

I took a bus to Surat Thani to catch the night train to Bangkok. The bus passed some truly beautiful scenery, which I yearned to capture but my camera is swimming with the fishes, figuratively, after swimming with the fishes, literally.

So I tried my hand at describing the scenery, and this is what I wrote in my little notebook (otherwise filled with to-do lists and guesthouse names.)

I couldn't take a picture of the palm tree orchards at twilight, casting perfect linear shadows on the pale green earth. They might continue forever, except when the road and the rolling of the hills meet with a subtle valley and the end of the orchard is visible.

Great fists of limestone, jutting into the orange sky! What impassioned you to stab mightily through the crust of hell, all angry knuckles and thumbs, and then to be still? To allow life, lush and dark, to creep over your hands and settle in the great crevices between your fingers? To allow to grow in the shadow of your fists a petty coconut field?

And this is what you'd have to deal with if I didn't replace my camera right away, which I did. You missed a couple of poetic scenes, actually. I highly recommend the road between Krabi and Surat Thani at sunset.

When I got to Bangkok, I went to MBK and bought myself a new camera, and took this picture on the way back. And hey I just noticed that I'm in one of the mirrors!

A thousand words, right there.

P.S. Tuk-tuk are funner than taxis.

we had joy, we had fun

2010-07-01T04:00:00.000-07:00

There is not an error message on my Fujifilm Z33 Waterproof Digital Camera which says,

"Excuse me--I can't help but notice that you're about to jump off the back of a boat and you're still holding me. I'm quite flattered that you'd like to make use of my advertised underwater capabilities as you have done many times in the past, but I wanted to let you know that those have ceased to be, and it would be best if you left me on the boat.

Regards,
Your Camera."

As there is not such a message, I naively dove in, and without warning or goodbye, my camera captured some fishes

and died.

tossed upon stormy seas

2010-06-30T04:00:00.000-07:00

I signed up for an island sightseeing-snorkeling tour thing while I was in Krabi. It's the low season, which means it's the stormy season, and if the weather was rough then the tour would have to be rescheduled. Luckily, it didn't rain that morning but the sea was wild. The first leg of the trip was to Bamboo Island, and normally takes about 45 minutes. On the choppy water it took us an hour of constant jolts as the front of the boat slammed back into the water after cresting each wave.

And you remember the story of Barf-o-rama, so I won't relate it here. I was not involved.

We made it to Bamboo Island alive!

This is the Viking Cave, so named because it has paintings inside of viking ships. It is closed to the public. :-(

And this is me on a boat!

Then we visited the lagoon on Phi Phi Lei.

And THEN I went to Phi Phi Don!

And there was snorkeling too, but that is a most tragical story which I will relate to you tomorrow.

everywhere a sign

2010-06-29T04:00:00.001-07:00

Having had enough confusion over prepositions, I left Railay for the mainland, and stayed three nights in Krabi, on Ao Nang beach.

It's a fairly empty beach, most of the time. The strip of road along the beach has guesthouses and massage places and delicious cheap food. (Actually most of my delicious cheap meals were from the same place where I had my laundry done--which also offers manicures, massages, hair cuts and bus tickets.)

But there's also this questionable bit of advertising:

And because it's silly to present one sign, I'll give you three, though the others come from Ko Phi-Phi:

Cutesy, serious, cutesy. Ko Phi Phi was devastated by the tsunami in 2004, and most of the islands and beaches on the Andaman sea in Thailand have clear evacuation routes.

dirrty

2010-06-28T04:00:00.001-07:00

Smelly backpackers don't set out to be that way.

I can live without air conditioning, and sleep on mattresses filled with what is probably sand. The luxury I can't do without, though, is a hot shower. I was lucky in Ban Phe that I got to use what I think is the only hot shower in the building. It was fantastic.

I've used cold showers. The ones on Ko Samet aren't bad, because I think the water tanks are heated by the sun. In/on/at Railay, they are not. If you'll recall, I arrived unhappily on a Friday morning after an overnight bus trip. I was greeted by mosquitoes and mangroves and monkeys, but I shunned them all and went to bed. When I awoke, my mood was so precarious that I tested the water and decided that today, I was a dirty backpacker!

Saturday I went swimming and laid on the beach and by the time I got back to my room, I was warm and sticky enough that I was ready to take on that cold shower. Unfortunately, the power was out, and that meant that the water was out. The only seating in my room was my bed, and I tried not to taint it with my sweaty, salty, sunscreeny self as I read a book and waited for the fan to tell me that the power was back. The electricity came back after an hour or so, but by then I had cooled off a bit.

When forced to take a cold shower, the experience is much like a very cautious "hokey pokey." While washing my hair, for instance, the rest of my body cowers away from the water. It is not very effective, but it did.

Sunday...I don't even have an excuse for Sunday. At the end of the day I hosed the sand off my feet and went to bed.

I think that I was looking forward to Monday, when I would come back to Ao Nang on the mainland and settle for nothing less than a hot shower. It wasn't heartening when the desk at my guesthouse had a sign that said, "no electric 9:00 to 17:00." Railay is connected to the mainland, and it's likely that power situations affect them both. I made it ashore around noon, and walked from the fancy beach to the backpacker beach (I would have been unwashed anyway!) along the way I passed a Burger King (they have Burger King here?!) with a sign taped to the door that said, "closed - no have electric." Blast!

I found a room with a theoretical hot shower, and it wasn't even one o'clock yet so I went for a walk and was adopted by a family of dogs on the beach. I don't blame them for being confused. I had lunch (mainland red curry with rice and an egg on top: 45B. My similar curry dinner [preposition] Railay was 210B--more than SIX DOLLARS.) At about four thirty I went to my room and anxiously waited for the electricity to come back, though in Thailand 17:00 could easily mean 19:30. It didn't! It meant 17:03!

Then, this:

As with all things, the moral of this story is to grab what you want when you can have it, because otherwise you might go four days without a decent shower.

diamonds

2010-06-25T04:00:00.000-07:00

Diamond Cave is the other cave in/on/at Railay. It's deeper and more interesting than Pranang Cave, but they're both special in their own ways.

It's 40b for adults and 20b for children. Cats are free.

And pictures inside caves, when taken without a tripod, look terrible. You should be proud that I didn't attempt bat pictures this time. Here, the inside of the cave looks like baleen.

There was actually a much more baleen-inspired formation, but my picture of it was even worse than this one. Very bad.

Just believe me that there were far more interesting formations than these.

This tree is growing under part of the cliff. When I took the picture, the air was sizzling with the sound of cicadas.

I'll follow the night

2010-06-24T04:00:00.000-07:00

West Railay is probably the most popular beach, and the biggest beach in/at/on Railay.

West Railay also (obviously) has the best sunsets. Here are two of them:

scoff at the monkeys

2010-06-23T04:00:00.000-07:00

While in/at/on Railay, it is a good idea to look up every once in awhile here, because there might be a family of monkeys eager to drop things on your head.

Or just be cute.

These are spectacled langurs. I ran into (under? I struggle so much with the prepositions!) a family of them on my way from West Railay to East Railay when I first landed. I was tired and hungry and when I looked down to maybe retrieve my camera, I instead noticed that each of my legs was providing lunch for a half-dozen mosquitoes and I kept going. The next day, there was a cluster of them in the trees near my guesthouse.

I also saw a group of macaques at pranang cave. I did not photograph them.

deeper the quicksand

2010-06-22T04:00:00.000-07:00

I didn't sleep much on the bus ride to Krabi, which ended before the sun came up anyway. I had free soft cake roll for breakfast and a donut for dinner the night before and was therefore tired and malnourished when I arrived in/on/at Railay.

Railay is a peninsula, isolated from the mainland by limestone cliffs. My lodgings were on the east side, which is a mangrove forest. I checked in, wrote in my diary,

"East Railay is a mangrove swamp full of mud and mosquitoes and my shower is cold and nobody loves me."

Then I took a nice long nap. When I awoke, I was in a better mood. Mangrove forests are cool!

They have orange-scented mosquito repellant here! I was looking at a whole new ocean! The Indian Ocean! And I remembered that karst topography is like my favorite topography of all the topographies!

The south end of Railay is home to Pranang Cave, which is all that remains of a beautiful princess after a quarrel and some turning-people-into-islands-and-caves business. You know. And I like that in the States, if I point out a stalagmite as looking very phallic, I'd get a "grow up, Emily." But here they tie pretty fabric around the dangling and jutting phalluses, so there. (I didn't take a picture of this.)

I spent my first day on this beach. There are karst islands and stuff too.

And right after I took this picture, a little yellow butterfly flitted out over the ocean, dancing a little too close to the waves for my comfort. Whenever it was hidden behind a swell, I held my breath until I saw it again. This is my life.

Giddyup or whoa

2010-06-21T04:00:00.000-07:00

After confirming that I'm well enough to hula-hoop, I left Ban Phe. Incidentally, I have things to write about.

First, the southern bus terminal in Bangkok is amazing! It's three floors of shopping, little karaoke rooms, and at least two Mister Donuts, of whose "Pon de Ring" my Dunkin' Donuts mochi ring is a pale imitation.

I bought one.

It was fantastic. And I don't like the frosted mochi rings, because they're really sweet, but this was the best donut I've ever had in my life. In a bus station. In Bangkok.

And because I'm classist, and don't like sleeping next to "aisle people," and also like reclining seats, I bought a ticket on the 24-seat VIP bus to Krabi, on the Andaman sea in southern Thailand. Only three seats across, and I didn't have to miss the World Cup game (I don't even know who was playing.)

And after a night on the most deluxe of deluxe buses in Thailand, I think I'm going to schedule my overnight travel on trains whenever possible. I just can't sleep in a recliner, as plush as it was. The service was excellent though, so I can recommend VIP for day travel. I got a pastry in a keepsake gift box!

And vegetable juice, and shrimp-flavored peanuts, AND water. And I woke up too early in the morning in Krabi and took a long-tail boat to Railay.

low

2010-06-15T04:00:00.000-07:00

On Monday I went to Ko Samet during the day, and the beach was empty. There were more sarong sellers than tourists. Thank you, low season.

Just a little pin prick

2010-06-14T04:00:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I don't write about things, in case I die. Like in January I got in a little motorbike accident, and I wanted to wait until I was absolutely sure that my foot wasn't going to fall off from gangrene before I wrote about it. And then when it finally healed it wasn't relevant so I didn't mention it until today. I did get a scar out of it, which is cool.

Well last week I visited the doctor for a regular annual exam and the doctor discovered that I had something that shouldn't be next to my uterus. It was about a 7cm round mass, as seen in this webcam picture of an ultrasound printout:

The little white arrow points to the mass, and the black blob above and to the right of it is my bladder.

We scheduled laparoscopic surgery for Tuesday the 8th to remove my Mysterious Mass.

This is my room at Bangkok Rayong Hospital. It's super fancy, and it's just a standard room. Actually about the same cost per night as a Super 8 in the States, and it includes food and sponge baths.

The surgery went well, and the mass turned out to be a dermoid cyst, which is pretty awesome. It was mostly full of *hair* but there was a *tooth* in it too. Not only did I get to take home a souvenir DVD of the surgery, but I also have a little piece of the cyst in formaldehyde. With some hair. Autumn is very grossed out by my little friend, but I find the DVD more disturbing (watching huge masses of hair being pulled out of my belly button...) I go back for a follow-up on Tuesday, and I may share the video if you're not completely disgusted by the prospect.

Sunday driver, yeah

2010-06-11T04:00:00.000-07:00

Ayutthaya was the capital of Thailand from 1351 to 1767. I wandered around the Ayutthaya Historical Park and Other Places in Ayutthaya and took pictures.

1767 was the end of the Ayutthaya kingdom, when the Burmese army sacked the city. They also beheaded most of the Buddha images. A few of them have been restored.

Headless Buddhas:

This little Prang chattered and squeaked with bats. I climbed up and tried to take a picture, but it looks just as bad as my last attempt. Bats are tricksy creatures.

moonbeams and fairytales

2010-06-10T04:00:00.000-07:00

I was going to go to Ayutthaya on Monday, as part of this grand, historical Tour of Ancient Capitals. I bought a bus ticket and got on the bus in Sukhothai, and it entered various cities along the way and stopped at their bus station. It didn't do this in Ayutthaya, though. It pulled to the side of the road and I didn't get off and ended up staying until Bangkok.

(I have a great distaste for Bangkok. I can't explain it.) To perk myself up, I said "Yes! This is a horrible idea!" when a motorcycle taxi offered to take me where I needed to go. There's nothing like an 80kph motorbike ride, swerving through Bangkok traffic at night, to help you feel human feelings again. ("Oh, shit; we're going to hit a bus!" is a feeling, right?)

I arrived safe and sound and shaken at a nice little guesthouse and made a day trip to Ayutthaya the following morning.

My first stop was Bang Pa-In Palace, which is nothing like the Grand Palace in Bangkok, all cluttered with dazzling golden temples. This one is like the setting for a fairytale. It's open and landscaped and dreamy. It was mostly used in the second half of the 19th century.

Rabbits! And the floor inside the tower is black and white tile. And this is not Wonderland.

But maybe it is, because this little building, which also has a checkered floor, has the strangest proportions. The ceiling is very low on the bottom, but not on the top floor.

it's a sunny day

2010-06-09T04:00:00.000-07:00

When we left off, I had had a crap morning in Sukhothai involving little sleep, ample insect bites, prickly heat and slipping in the mud! I decided to start over (having already visited the temples inside the walls,) and went to the museum. The museum was cooler, and even had a fan here and there. And I met a guide named At at the museum who interpreted things and then I hopped on the back of his motorbike and had another go at the day, visiting the temples outside of the city wall. This second attempt was much better than the first.

This is a ditch between the huge old city walls.

There are three walls, and the openings are staggered just like that cartoon documentary about the castle that I watched a hundred times in elementary school (and never tired of it.)

And now that I'm in the mood to appreciate life again, hail the low season! Praise empty guesthouses, cheap rooms, and being the *only* person (save At) at every temple I visited all day, including the part of the day where I was cranky and horrible and not in the mood to praise anything.

This is a much longer, steeper climb than it looks. Trust me.

The tone of the pictures is no different, but I assure you I was a much happier person!