Koreans in U.S. Slam Japan’s Claim to Dokdo

The kids at school will occasionally quiz you over “Who owns Dokdo?” The safe answer is to say that of course Korea does. If you want to razz them, you can tell them that the North owns it. Me, I’ve started just saying that I own Dokdo.

For more info, check these out. It’s a long, and mostly pointless read. Unless you’re Japanese or Korean, I guess.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liancourt_Rocks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liancourt_Rocks_dispute

It was the end of my AP1 class. David, a particuarly useless student had become unresponsive and began to doze by the end of class. I wrote the homework on the board, signed kids’ homewook books, and was about to go beat David about the head and shoulders when he suddenly got up and bolted out the door. I was annoyed, as I often am if students leave without asking.

Then I (and the other students) noticed the quickly spreading lake of pee beneath his desk. Delightful.

I turned that problem over to the Koreans.

Teaching is awesome.

Anyway, he got married last weekend, so several of us went down to Busan to see a Korean wedding. Most of the time, Koreans don’t have weddings in churches, they have them in ‘wedding halls’. Some of the larger wedding halls may have several weddings going on all at the same time. Opens up all sorts of neat opportunities for wedding crashing, I would think, but whatever. The wedding hall we were at only had one wedding going on.

We left early-ish on Saturday morning, and the school had provided a bus to take us down in. So after several hours riding, and trying to sleep some on the hot bus, we made it into Busan. Busan is a rather big city on the coast. I’ve only been there twice, but it seems pretty nice, and if I decided to do another year in Korea, I’d consider going there.

We eventually get to the wedding hall, which is in a large building called the ‘Busan Marine Building’, near the shipping port. We go up, lounge around for awhile as best we can, then file into the, uh… chapel, hall, big marriage room… whatever. There aren’t enough chairs for everyone, but we manage to get some for us. I thought taking pictures might be impolite, but apparently nothing at Korean wedding is considered impolite. All through the ceremony there were people talking, using their cell phones, wandering in and out, and I’m pretty sure drinking in the back. It was quite the experience. I took pictures, and some video, but as I can’t seem to sort out how to get the video up you’ll just be getting the former.

After the ceremony we went up another fifteen floors, and ate at a big buffet. That was the reception. All in all, very interesting, and reasonably entertaining.

Me? I lose workshop notes, phone numbers, and occasionally my mind.

Jason, he loses children. At least he did Friday.

What apparently happened is he drew a stick figure on the board, and put the name of one of his more obnoxious students next to it. His student took exception to this, and started to cry. For twenty minutes. Jason let him sit there.

After awhile, the kid freaks out, tears up his book, and runs out of the room.

Then he runs out of the building. Our front staff didn’t do a particularly good job of catching him, or even catching up.

Around 8:30 the school calls the parents to see if they know where their kid is, because we don’t. The parents were less than impressed by this.

Around 9:30 or 10:00, I gather the child showed back up at his house.

Jason, for his manifold errors of judgement, questionable teaching practices, and general ineptitude has managed to avoid getting in any real trouble with the school management. We’re really not sure how, but we have some theories (most not discussable in polite company). However, we’re not sure how things are going to work out this time.

I just keep thinking “two more months, only two more months…”

We were all told we had to be at the Dunsan campus at 9:20 so that we could leave by 9:30. With much pissing, moaning, and general bellyaching we complied. After they’d packed us into one of the ReadingTown buses, we got on our way. They passed around some Krispie Kream doughnuts (yes, they have those in Korea), and small boxes containing red, ReadingTown-branded towels. The whiteys sat in the back of the bus and discussed the things that interested us, such as recent pay discrepancies and predictions as to when this would end and we’d get to go home.

We arrived at the base of the mountain, were divided into “teams” based on school (which nobody bothered to stay with, and were never mentioned again), and they distributed snacks. We got a half-liter bottle of water, an orange, an apple, and a smallish cucumber. The initial ascent was deceptively easy, and spirits were reasonably high.

An hour later, closer to the top things were getting steep, rocky, and the trail had enough ups and downs that we were wondering if we might not be walking around the mountain, instead of up it. I had to stop twice, as I’m apparently out of shape, and Brett and I eventually found where everyone had stopped. We were mid-pack.

Where everyone stopped wasn’t quite the summit, but it was reasonably close. There was, it turned out, a pair of stone pagodas and a Buddhist shrine there.  There were also hundreds of Koreans, in dress ranging from ‘casual’ to ‘full-costume hiking commando.’ That’s the thing about Korea: if you decide you want to get away from the city and go take in some nature, you can be guaranteed a thousand other people are going to be doing it with you.

Fortunately, nobody felt like making any sort of speech at the top. We just took a couple group pictures, and were directed to the path we would be taking back down. This path was a mile and change of decent path, with a questionable addition of slanted, slick rocks. I’m glad it was dry, as if the stones had been wet I would have assuredly broken open my skull and died a tragic death in a foreign land, which I told several people I wasn’t going to do, and I don’t want to be made a liar.

I really should have taken more pictures of the ajuma (아잠마) on the trail. Their clothes were the absolute best: Visors, face-masks, and hiking poles. The Korean ajuma deserves an entire post, and I’ll try and make one happen.

Mrs. Kim, my boss, didn’t have a hiking pole or a face mask, but she did have an enormous, pink visor. It’s perhaps one of the very best ajuma visors I’ve seen. You’ll be able to pick her out in the pictures below.

Colin and I eventually made it down the mountain. He and Brett then went off to find a cab, or a bus, or something and disappear towards home without informing anyone. Nobody seemed to notice they’d gone. The rest of us were treated to lunch where we had a spicy bibimbap, and they served us all makgeolli. It was pretty decent, considering I was sore, sweaty, smelly, and wanted to sleep more than eat.

Then we walked probably another mile or more to find our bus, and went home. All told, it was about seven and a half hours of adventure. It was an alright time, but I’d prefer they not get it in their heads to take us on any more mandatory, unpaid Saturday outings.

The light show is synced to music, with pulsing lights, and colored beams. From the Kowloon side you can see the row of lit up buildings on Hong Kong island. The show lasts around a half hour, as I recall.

I took many more pictures than this, but lacking a tripod, and being dark, an awful lot of them were pretty blurry. So there’s only a few that really look decent. Enjoy.

The city is densely packed, and there are great stretches of slum apartment buildings to contrast with the shiny, expensive areas. The bus ride took about a half hour, and we got off very near Chung King Mansion, where we were staying. We navigated the building, got a room and dumped off our stuff, then wandered around. Properly speaking, we didn’t spend any time in Hong Kong proper on our first day. We were on the peninsula north of Hong Kong island, in an area called Kowloon. Kowloon is packed with people from all sorts of places. Many Indians, Africans, Europeans, etc. An extremely diverse area. It would appear that the majority of the Indians are in the business of trying to sell you fake watches, and tailored clothing. Either that, or they run guest houses (the place we stayed was run by Indians).

Anyway, here’s a couple dozen pictures. Next time: the harbor light show.

Though this is Korea’s “big holiday,” nothing really happened in Daejeon, so I shan’t dwell on the festivities, or lack thereof.

What I will talk about is how this holiday was another fantastic opportunity for my school to give us all poorly thought out presents. If you recall my post about Chuseok, I related that they’d given us a box of vitamins for that holiday. We were all unimpressed with those, but our gifts for lunar would up the ante significantly.

All the guys in our school recieved a box containing the following: ‘Fresh Cleansing Foam’ (“Coach your skin with aqua active complex.”), ‘Foot Cream’ (everything else is all in Korean, so I’m not certain what it’s supposed to do for my feet.), and a “soothing sheet mask” which appears to be only one part of a six part “weekly care system.” Awesome.

I suppose it should go without saying why these are poor gifts, but perhaps they just figured that foreign men were as “metro” as young Korean men, despite the fact that we aren’t carrying man-bags. I suspect they didn’t put much thought into this at all.

Supporting this theory is the fact that Nicole (one of our few foreign ladies, she works at one of our Dunsan campuses) received bath salts. She quite aptly pointed out the main problem with this gift when she said “I don’t own a bath. They should know this, since they gave me the apartment.” She apparently now has a special place in her cupboard where she keeps all the bath-related gifts she’s received, and has no way to use. I said she could probably just wet herself down, and rub the bath salts right onto her skin, but she was dubious.

Makes the socks I was gifted by a student seem incredibly useful, and thoughtful.

Having decided that it would take just as long to get to Incheon (where Korea’s major international airport is, a bit west of Seoul) by taking the KTX, and then the subway, and it would probably be more expensive and would certainly involve more hassle, we opted to get bus tickets. We wanted to leave an hour or more before our flight to check in, and grab some breakfast, and the bus ride was about three hours, so this meant we had to be on the 5:30am bus. I was not excited about this, and don’t think my travelling companions were either. Nothing like getting up at 4:30am, showering, and being out of your house and into the cold by a smidge after five.

Here’s us waiting for the bus. The gentleman on the left is James.

As we were only going to be there for a few days, we’d managed to pack everything we were bringing into backpacks. This way we wouldn’t have to deal with any check luggage, pickup of said luggage, and the chance of it getting lost.

The bus ride was comfortable, and there were only a few other people with us (guess the early morning isn’t popular with Koreans either). I tried to sleep, but didn’t manage it.

Here’s some early-morning throwing of the horns.

The sun came up around the time we made it to Incheon, and I took some pictures from the bus. We’d been wondering where the Koreans worked, since there really isn’t any industry around Daejeon, and not everyone can work in a bar, barbecue place, or noribong. It would seem that the factories are up in this area. I was also unsurprised to find that the Incheon/Seoul area also boasts fields of unattractive, identical looking apartment buildings. Good show, Korea.

Having finally arrived, we ate some McDonalds, navigated the terminal of the airport, and camped out by our plane. This is where Marlena (pictured below) parted company with James and I, as she had to catch her own plane for Japan. How was Japan, you wonder? Depending on who you ask, they either had a good time, or they all got food poisoning and had a lousy time. We may never know the truth…

Anyway, photos of my fishing something out of my pocket, and of our airplane.

And that’s that. Keep a look out for part two, which should happen with significantly less delay than part one.

I’ll have a great big post about Hong Kong up really, really soon. Pinky swear.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser…