Cave of Wonders

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

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!

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

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!

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

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

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!

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

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

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.