Phrasal Konglish #1

From wikipedia:

Konglish (Korean: 콩글리시) is the use of English words (or words derived from English words) in a Korean context. The words, having initially been taken from English language, are either actual English words in Korean context, or are made from a combination of Korean and English words.

I find the phrases and sentences that are printed on Korean stationary hilarious. Because they are actual phrases and sentences, and not single words, I don't think they quite fit the above definition of Konglish. More often than not, there are few or no technical mistakes in these sentences, but they are hilarious nonetheless. They're often unnecessarily dramatic and sappy and way out of place on stationary.
T-shirts and sweatshirts also sport very strange sayings, and these are far more apt to be riddled with vulgarity and grammatical wormholes. You can understand what they say, you just don't understand how you understand. I'm going to start posting collections of these bizarre and entertaining sentences and phrases here, and for the sake of convenience, I am taking the liberty of creating a name for them - Phrasal Konglish.

I could possibly be responsible for any spelling/grammar mistakes you notice, but more often than not, what I copy down here will be exactly how it's printed (quotation marks [" "] added to set apart the "title" of the notebook/page when applicable).

On my (Barunson brand) notepad:

"Haroo's city night"

"TREASURE OF MEMORY"
ALL THE MEMORIES ARE SHINING IN THOSE OLD DAYS.

A happy world is made up of happy hearts.
We invite you to the joyful world of Barunson.
Refresh your happiness with us everyday.
Upgrade your happiness, Barunson.

I always think of the goreous city night
with your wonderful smile.
It was an American dreaming time.

On a bunch of students' English notebooks:

"plain living"
Living leisurely is wonderful.
A simple life makes our mind rich.

You're gonna make yourself proficient step by if you do your best.

"Travel all over Europe"
I'd like to try taking a trip to whatever places my fancy leads me.

"Avenue of memories"
There are few things that are more
important for the happiness of life than to
form a habit of taking a cheerful
view of the circumstances
in which one is placed.

Be of practical use

"Greentea"
TAKE A RESTTIME WITH GREENTEA

"S"
It is only with the heart
that one can see rightly;
what is essential is
invisible to the eye.

SOMETHING THAT IS BLUE IS THE COLOUR OF THE SKY ON A SUNNY DAY.
THERE ARE WERE SWALLOWS IN THE CLOUDLESS BLUE SKY.

"Make a Sketch of the World"
My heart throbbed with joy.

Free Fridge Art Revised

There has been a significant change to the direction in which my proposed free fridge art will take. For awhile now, I have been taking all the flyers that I get stuck on my door, which I have previously just stuck on my fridge, and been stripping them of their magnets and staples, and then cutting the hell out of them until they are in tiny pieces. These pieces I keep in a bag.



I don't really remember what gave me the idea for this, but I plan on taking all of these tiny pieces and making a large colorful mosaic on a piece of white paper I bought and cut to fit exactly underneath my glass kitchen tabletop.



I had to do something similar, though on a much smaller scale, for an art class I took in college when I was studying in Utah. I recreated a picture I had taken of the Sydney Opera House, which I later wound up giving to Alissa for a birthday present since we had gone to said opera house together.

Whatever gave me the idea for this, probably just boredom, once I thought of the idea I knew I would be a total pussy if I didn't at least attempt to do it. So far I have half-filled that bag on my table, and I don't even think I'm half-way through cutting up my flyers. I usually cut them up when I am watching a movie on my computer, or playing poker online or something like that. If I made any point to dedicate time to this, I'm sure I would've finished by now, but I just wind up doing it now and again. I plan to start the actual creation of the mosaic once I am done cutting up the flyers. I may just be setting a goal for myself that I can't reach, but we'll see.

As for the actual design of the mosaic, right now I am leaning towards making a Korean flag, for lack of anything better to do. The design is simple, using only red, white, blue, and black, but having each aspect of the flag made up of tiny pieces of delivery menus will surely add a whole new dimension to the otherwise straightforward flag.

Thinking about what it will be like when it is finished, I realized that pretty much any piece of art that takes a ridiculous amount of time to create, especially when the creation involves hours of a repetitive mind-numbing procedure, is impressive and admirable simply for the fact that some human or group of humans put such effort and time into menial and dull groundwork for the sake of turning mountains worth of that very dull groundwork into something exceptional and remarkable. John Funchion's hollow ball of hundreds of sanded woodscraps comes to mind. All the stuff that Yayoi Kusama made with thousands of dots comes to mind too.



I learned about her from a program I watched on TV in a minbak on Jeju-do during the first night of my cycling trip there. That was during the short time between cycling and and conking out. I'm sure there is an endless amount of other examples to this sort of art. I don't know if there is a term for it. Maybe obsessive, or accumulative, or OCD art. Those all seem like they would fit. I think it's the artistic equivalent of turning lead to gold.

Yellow Dust

Spring has come early to Daegu. The weather has been super warm, maybe the low 70's. It's unseasonably warm for this time apparently. Along with the warm weather though, the Yellow Dust/Asian Dust has come. Every year in the spring, the prevailing winds in this part of the world shift and Korea gets covered (I've actually been told it can accumulate on the ground, like the dust on top of your TV) with a fine dull yellow dust blown from the Chinese and Mongolian deserts. The 'hwangsa' sometimes can be really bad, devastating air quality and causing serious problems for kids and the elderly. Fortunately I am young and healthy and indestructible. According to a Korean weather website, when the hwangsa density gets too high(400㎛/㎡ for over 2 hours), it's a bad idea to exercise outdoors, and if it goes even higher (800㎛/㎡ for over 2 hours)then

The old, the young, and those with respiratory diseases are prohibited from going outside.
· Kindergarden and elementary school students are prohibited from outdoor activities and their class should be dismissed
· Everybody is prohibited from outdoor activities.
· Outdoor sports event should be rescheduled.

It hasn't been bad yet, in fact it's been very low for Daegu, especially since this weekend was rainy. It reminds of living in Salt Lake City, when the stagnant air would get trapped in the valley from a lack of weather blowing in from the west to clear it out. They called it 'inversion'. I called it disgusting. There would be a phlegm-colored cloud hanging over the city, even completely obscuring the ground if you were up on a mountain looking down on it from above. One day when I was working at Litza's Pizza, making pies while staring out of the plate glass window towards downtown, I couldn't even see the skyscrapers six blocks away. That was gross, I hope this Yellow Dust clears out before it gets that bad here.

Spring Break

Winter break ended the day after I got back from the Philippines. I went to school on Monday and taught classes for three days before they had the graduation and school closing ceremonies on Thursday and Friday. The graduation ceremony consisted of the third grade students sitting in their classrooms with parents and family crowded in the backs of the rooms and outside, watching through the open doors while the ceremony itself was broadcast on the class TVs from elsewhere in the school.



The students are usually really shy, beyond shouting "mahTEEN HI" and giggling, but the third grade students were clearly excited to be graduating, and a lot asked me to take their picture when they saw I had my camera. I didn't really know any of them since I taught only the first and second grade students. Easily the funniest part of the day was when I went up to the fifth floor, where there are only third grade classrooms. The smell of egg and vinegar and flour was instantly noticeable. Throwing this concoction on each other is one of their pranks I guess, and I was pretty impressed how the girls covered in it weren't freaking out that they had egg yolk smearing their hair, or fussing over all the flour on their clothes.



I was told that they didn't hold the ceremony communally in the gym because people complained it was too cold last year or something like that, which seemed like a lame reason to put everyone in classrooms, but I guess that's what you get for complaining. The year closing ceremony consisted of a farewell thing for the teachers that were leaving after that semester, about fifteen of them. In Korea, teachers must transfer schools every four years, no exceptions. Both days were really half days with some random cleaning and so forth in addition to the ceremonies.



That's me and most of the other English teachers, two of whom, including my main co-teacher, left. It was a pretty light week to deal with before I got another two weeks free for spring break, before the new school year started up in March. I considered going on another trip abroad, checking out Japan, China, Hong Kong, or Taiwan if I could find a cheap flight, but I only looked into it half-assed. The five day wait for a Chinese visa didn't really entice me to put much effort into it either. I wound up coming up with a plan to fly to Jeju-do for four days during the second week of spring break, the last week of February. The idea was to rent a bike and ride a loop around the island, a distance listed in my guidebook as 250 kilometers, and estimated by my friend Jeff, who moved there specifically to train for triathalons, and thus bikes around the island frequently, as slightly less.



I got into Jeju-si on Tuesday at 9AM after a one-hour flight from Daegu. I was at the bike shop recommended to me by Jeff by 9:30. The sign said it didn't open until 10AM so I sat down to wait as the owner was getting to the shop. He let me in right away and had a bike prepared for me since one of my co-teachers called to inquire about bikes the day before. It was 20K per day, which was more expensive than the places listed in my guidebook as renting bikes for between 5K and 8K per day, but I figured since Jeff takes his shit real seriously, and of all the bike shops on the island, and this was the one he told me to go to, they would hook me up with a good bike. It was a good bike, too. A Cannondale mountain bike frame with road tires put on, as per my request. Turns out it was the owners personal bike even, and he was renting it to me because the other frames would've been too small for me at 17 inches. I packed up the spare tube and whatnot he gave me and took off.

It was a gray day in the morning, but the sun came out for a bit mid-day only to disappear again in the afternoon. It took me some time to work my way out of the city and to find the 1132 (listed as the 12 on the above map). On my way there I tried to take some coastal roads once I got towards the coast, and wound up getting turned around like three times and performing such poor shifting techniques on some hills that my chain came off a couple times, leading me to believe I had some shitty gear at my feet. I eventually got on the right road and was able to detour off the bike path that runs alongside it onto smaller and less-trafficked coastal roads that, as the name implies, hug the coast for the most part. I stopped to eat some kimbap at a beach which turned out to be covered by a tarp above the high tide line. My only guess is that this prevents any of the beautiful white sand from washing away during the off-season.



The strip of sand that wasn't tarped over contrasted nicely with the jet black volcanic rock that the island is made out of, and the light green water. It looked like it could've been a tropical beach despite the fact that the air was chilly and the wind was blowing strong and steady. Probably the coolest local distinction on Jeju are the rock walls that crisscross the farmland and surround the houses. It's all made from chunks of the same black porous volcanic rock that stick out on the beaches, and almost none of the walls use cement. Some are just kinda thrown together leaving holes here and there that you can see through, and others are placed so tightly that they look solid and pretty much have dead flat tops.



I finished the first day around 4:30 at Sungsan Ilchubong, or Sunrise Peak listed above on the map. The owner of the bike shop said it was only a two-hour ride but that estimate must assume that you are in shape and know where you are going. I was pretty beat and had been planning on hunting down a jimjjilbang to stay in for cheap, but as I was rolling through the little town below the little mountain an ajumma kinda pulled me into her minbak, and I took the private room there instead of having to find a jimjjilbang and sleep in an open room with a bunch of strangers. Plus the minbak was right below the mountain and I figured I could do a sunrise hike the next morning since it was called Sunrise Peak. I couldn't even finish a bottle of beer that night I was so beat. I woke up at 5:30 to make sure I caught the sunrise. I hiked through the darkness up to the top of the peak, which isn't really so much a peak as one part of the rim of a raised crater made by volcanic activity about 5,000 years ago. It was misty and windy and there was no visibility whatsoever. I was the first one up there but a few other people came up for the sunrise which was noticeable only due to the mist and fog getting lighter. No beautiful colors creeping over the horizon like I was hoping for but oh well.



Day two I rode from about 9 to 6, with a nice lunch break to gorge myself on pizza and relax in a PC room in Seogwipo in the middle of the southern coast. My ass was killing at this point. When I tested the bike out I didn't realize how uncomfortable the seat would be after extended riding. I felt like my ass was fully bruised and sunburned, and I was sitting on a two by four. I must've made it 80 kilometers that day, from Sunrise Peak in the east to Sanbangsan in the southwest. I made a few stops along the coast to take in some nice views of the rugged coast line, and only got a little lost once trying to follow a coastal road. I wound up having to ride up this steep-ass hill with a switchback or two towards the end of the day when I was pretty beat, and at one point I had to get off and walk the bike up for about ten minutes, which I thought was pretty lame but better than killing myself. The good part about that was just before I got some pretty killer photos of the sun dipping in the sky over some coastal farm land.



I had nearly made it to Jeff's town of Museolpo, in fact I could see it from the temple on Sanbangsan, but I decided to just get another minbak below the temple and meet up with him the next morning. Thanks to my lack of functional Korean, it took me three tries to get a place. It's much easier when ajummas are standing out on the street waiting to give you a room like the night before. Anyway, I found a place, and the owner gave me some mandarin oranges, which are a big crop on Jeju, and I got some dinner and slept a solid eleven hours. In the morning Jeff and I met up by the temple on Sanbangsan and he brought me north up the west coast of the island. It was good to have someone who knows the island show me around because we went on some tiny roads I would've missed on my own. He's pretty much the only foreigner in his little corner of the island and so he just trains all the time so I know he was grateful for having someone to talk to too. He was on his mountain bike, with much bigger tires than I had, and was having a leisurely tour with me as a break from training, but I still had to push myself to keep up with him. I guess that's what happens when you ride bikes every day. Previous to leaving for Jeju, he recommended I tour the island clockwise with hopes of getting a tailwind for the final leg. That didn't happen though. For the first part of the day we were pushing right into the wind which didn't make things easier. Fortunately, my legs were in decent shape. I had been expecting them to be sore as hell after the first day, but they weren't. Then I thought for sure they would be sore after the second day, but they still weren't, so I was pretty happy about that. My knees were a bit achy though, with the cold wet wind on them all day as I was pedaling, but that's a small price to pay I suppose. We made it within a half hour of Jeju-si where Jeff and I parted ways, Jeff going back home, and me going on to the city to see if I could get an earlier flight back home since I had looped the island with one full day to spare. I rode straight to the airport, which turns out to be pretty sketchy on a bike since I was riding on the access and approach roads, but I made it alive and got a flight for the following morning, Friday, instead of my original flight on Saturday morning. Next I had to get out of the airport, which was just as sketchy as getting in, but I made it all right and went back to the bike shop to return everything and get my unused rental fee for Friday back. I went downtown, ate some Mexican food after spending fifteen minutes in a drizzle looking for the restaurant and asking confused Koreans where it was until some foreign girl saw I was clearly clueless and pointed me in the right direction. I threw some darts in an empty bar after eating, and then went to a jimjjilbang for the night. It was great soaking in the hottubs and getting all clean and fresh, but trying to sleep was miserable as there were kids running around and giggling all night long and one room was too cold and another was too smoky, and there were old dudes snoring all over. Should've brought ear plugs.

I got home at 10:30AM Friday, leaving me the whole weekend to relax which was nice since it would've sucked to go to school exhausted on Monday. My legs finally got sore at this point, making walking up and down stairs a dreadful event. My last significant event of spring break was shaving my beard. It was a big decision, since that is one of the only ways my students recognize me from other white people, and because beards are awesome and I had a pretty good one, but I thought it would be fun to mess with them by getting my hair cut (the previous week) and shaving. Also, no Korean girls would dance with me last time I was out at club, probably cause I looked too much like Jesus. Also, it was just time for some change.



I only kept the mustache for a few minutes to take the picture, but it's pretty badass, so maybe I'll grow one for real.

Winter Break Part 2 - The Philippines

I'll do my best to avoid a chronological play by play of my trip to the Philippines, that would take too long and would get old. The best thing I did in my two weeks was snorkeling with butanding, the local name for whale sharks. They are actually sharks, not whales, and are the largest fish in the world. They aren't dangerous unless you are plankton, but when you jump off the boat into the path of one of these fish that are the size of a city bus, and you are looking around through your goggles to try to see which way it is coming from, and all of a sudden you turn your head the right way and a whale shark is two meters away heading straight at you, you can't help but think: Oh. Shit. I went out on the last boat of the day with my cousin Jesse and his friend and fellow Peace Corp volunteer Sean. At first there were three other boats trolling around the tiny bay that whale sharks frequent during a certain time of year, including some topless Europeans which provided nice sightseeing while above the water, but by early afternoon we had the bay to ourselves. This was good cause we weren't racing any other boats to get in front of a whale shark once their shadow was spotted, but it was also bad cause there were less people on the lookout, so there were a few long spells of just driving around. All in all, I probably swam next to twelve or fifteen sharks, and I was almost always the first one to get out to them, frequently directly in front of their faces, which I think freaked them out and made them dive soon after, which sucked for all the people that were behind me, which were most of the the other seven people on my boat. Sadly I got no photos since my camera is not waterproof, but instead I bought a sweet souvenir T-shirt for $4, a huge rip-off in the Philippines, and I also got a sunburn whose sting and subsequent peeling lasted me a solid two weeks.

All this swimming with whale sharks went down in a tiny town called Donsol, and not even really in the town but outside of it. The whole area would remained untouched if there weren't giant fish swimming around off the shore. There was only one small road, sparsely spotted with tourist resorts and restaurants. These two terms are used lightly here. Most of these resorts are tiny clusters of cement or thatch houses, and the restaurants match. After our boat trip out to see the whale sharks we wandered along the beach until we came across a restaurant and bar called BARacuda, and we got the royal treatment from the chef and owner, a Filipino/German/American who cooked ridiculously good food, was quite hospitable (we were the only guests), and even accepted Jesse's offer to bartend for the evening in exchange for free beer. There weren't many people besides one large dinner she was having for investors, so me and Sean just made Jesse bring us beer and played cards while he was working, and got another meal of fresh-caught fish and prawns and pasta with homemade pesto sauce. Both Jesse and Sean insisted it was the best food they had had in the Philippines, and I believe it, especially after I tried a typical Filipino snack called balut. This is what I looked like after I ate balut:



For those of you fortunate to be ignorant of what balut is, let me ruin your appetite for the next week. To put it simply, balut is a hard-boiled duck abortion. In more detail, you can order this innocent-looking egg by how mature the fetus is; I ate an 18 day-old balut, which I am told is a standard age. Then you break open the end where the fetus' waste juices have accumulated, and you drink them. Then you continue to remove the shell until you hold some standard-looking hard-boiled egg yolk that is topped by a duck fetus the size of your thumb. You can see the little head, and the eyes that will never open, and then you shove the whole thing in your mouth and chew if you can, trying to ignore the random crunchy parts that may be a tiny beak, or maybe underdeveloped bones, or maybe just stray pieces of shell that you didn't notice since you were too busy trying to cope with that fact that you were going to put this abomination in your mouth. As for the taste, I'm not really sure, I think my brain blocked out sensory data from that experience. I do remember that the yolk that the fetus was sitting on tasted like normal egg yolk, and fortunately there was a fair amount of that compared to the fetus itself, but other than that I don't really know. I think most of my revulsion was psychological, but I don't plan on trying it again to be sure. I have Jesse, who refuses to eat one, to thank for this experience, as he ordered it for me.

To be honest though, since hearing about balut on my first night in the Philippines, when I met some of Jesse's friends that were in Manila, I did sort of want to try it just for the experience. "Be careful what you wish for." Yeah yeah yeah. That culinary disaster occurred as we were sitting outside a restaurant, waiting for dinner in a small city called Legaspi on a Sunday evening, where I first met up with Jesse and some of his other friends the previous night. It was a pretty fun little city actually, although I think for too much longer than the two days I spent there, it may get boring. In two days there we: shot each other with pellet guns in some random park while hordes of Filipino kids looked on, went to an Australian Day (?) party, sang videoke at some random bar, at chopped pig face at the same bar, went on a mountain-top zip line, played The Settlers of Catan, the best board game ever, and looked at some ruins of a church below an active, never-before erupted, and perfectly cone-shaped volcano that you can apparently only hike half way up because any further and your shoes would melt to the steaming rock and you would die from the noxious gases. A cool little city, but I think I got the most out of it.

Boracay is a much more famous destination than Legaspi. I guess it's probably the most famous destination outside of Manila. It's a small tourist island with a long white sand beach lined with palm trees and beachside bars and restaurants. You can get hour-long massages for under ten bucks or ice-cold beer for under fifty cents. After my first two days in Manila, I flew here to meet some teacher friends of mine from Korea. I spent about three full days here, and much like Legaspi, I think I got the most out of it, despite much of my initial time being spent running around to various airline offices and tourist centers trying to get a flight off the island to Legaspi. I guess I'm just retarded for leaving my flight plans for two days before I wanted to leave, like I did in Manila getting a flight to Boracay. Pretty much every flight anywhere in the country goes to or from Manila, so I had to fly back to Manila from Boracay in order to get to Legaspi, and after exhausting every option for two days, I finally found an open seat that would get me to Manila, except it was too late to get the connecting flight to Legaspi. It all worked out in the end, and I've already gone into too much detail when I can just say it was a fucking debacle.



Anyway, outside of laying on the beach, getting massages, boat tours, snorkeling, and eating and drinking to your hearts content, there isn't a whole lot to do on Boracay. I thought it was going to be a built up perpetual shit-show like Cancun, but I was pleasantly surprised to find it much much quieter and small scale. There are a lot of smaller secluded beaches that are practically empty and only a short trike ride away. I went to one called Puka Shell beach with Eric, one of my friends from Korea, and apart from a couple boat tours that stopped there, there were only about six other people laying on the beach. That evening, back in the more populated part of the island, we went to a bar that serves a 15 shot challenge. If you can finish all of them, you get your name on a plaque on the wall, and one tally added onto the international scoreboard - Philippines was in first of course, with Korea, USA, and Canada all near the top somewhere too. One group of Western teachers on vacation from Taiwan I was with did this that night, and though I left, apparently they finished, and were drunk enough to think they could do it again. One dude apparently got pretty sick, big surprise. I also knew a hot Taiwanese girl that was on the island whom I met in Manila a couple days before. Being the small place it was, I ran into her a few times, and she was super flirty with me, but after hanging out with her a little, I found out that she had some serious ex-boyfriend issues, namely that she used to date the dude that got really sick doing the shot challenge, and though she would act really interested in me a lot of the time, she would end up running off to hang around him at other times. I felt it a better decision to leave her problems to her.

Jesse had his own problems with women in the town that he lives in. More specifically, he's not married, and there's a woman in his office who is the same age and also not married. This pair of coincidences seem to be the Filipino equivalent of a proposal. The three days I was in Sagnay with Jesse, he was constantly pestered with questions on when he was going to get married, that he was going to be on his "final trip" soon - this is something having to do with the fact that a calendar only has 31 days, and after you turn 32 you're off the calendar or something like that. As a spectator, this was quite fun to watch, but it sure sucks for him, hearing the same jokes and innuendos for the past six months, and presumably into his next 18 in that town. Also during my time in Sagnay I followed Jesse around while he was "working." By that, I mean on the first day, I went into his office, met people, got head-butted by some grizzled 75 year-old Filipino, heard jokes about him being single, left the office, watched a cock fight, and drank some instant coffee before going to a barkada (drinking circle) where we passed around a bottle of cheap brandy with one shot glass until the bottle was gone (an activity known as tagay tagay) and then went to the only bar in the area which just happened to be a stripper/hooker bar run by baklas, or lady boys, or tranvestites, depending on your preference for nomenclature.

The second day consisted of taking a boat out on the local river/bathroom to get to the ocean, then going to a sparsely inhabited island a couple kilometers off the coast where Jesse is working on getting a new fresh water reservoir installed. The settlements here were devastated by a typhoon a few years back and haven't had electricity or much fresh water since. I took a lot of pictures since I was a professional photographer due to my possession of a brand new and impressive-looking camera. A bunch of kids followed us around as I took pictures of the water system they currently have, and some scenic stuff for potential tourism ads. We also tried to find some cave that was on a different part of the island, but that just ended up being a wild goose chase across a jagged swath of wet and ridiculously dangerous rocks alongside the ocean. It was so dangerous that when we finally gave up looking for the cave, Jesse decided to swim back to the shore, and me, a pudgy and jolly man in his late 30's named Noly whose hobbies are sleeping and eating, and a woman in her 50's named Hilaria, both Jesse's coworkers, decided to scale a hill made of mud and take the high road through the jungle back.



We had another barkada that night, but with a videoke machine I had so graciously rented for everyone. It cost only about $10 but seemed to be a rare event. We went through three bottles of Matador brandy between six or seven of us. The song singing went on into the wee hours of the night, ensuring a fun day of work early tomorrow.

Day three at work: Since I was a professional photographer, we were granted the services of a van and a driver to drive around and take more pictures for tourism posters and websites and so forth. Apparently having a driver is big deal since almost no one drives anything larger than a scooter or a trike here. Jesse, Noly, Hilaria, myself, and Ninette (Jesse's single coworker who is the same age) drove south down the coast, in the direction that Jesse is normally not allowed to enter due to the infestation of rebel militants called the NPA hiding in the hills. Our first stop was to check out a waterfall that was a couple kilometers from the road.

"Hey Jesse, we aren't gonna get kidnapped are we?" I joked.

"Nah, not here."



Apparently we hadn't gone south enough to make our hike a bit more exciting. A guide from the local neighborhood brought us up the trail along a stream fed by the waterfall and past some small huts. When we got to the waterfall I had time to take about five pictures before we turned around. We had planned to eat lunch but whatever. On the way back the Filipinos were yakking amongst themselves and walking out of distance as I was stopping to take photos.

"Hey Ethan, they say walk faster and don't stop to take pictures. We need to leave now."

"Okay. Wait, seriously?"

"Yeah."

It turned out that there actually was a chance of getting kidnapped. Our guide had seen someone or something of the NPA around the waterfall. Jesse said that you know it wasn't good if Filipinos canceled their lunch plans. We drove on further down the road that Jesse was never supposed to go down, stopping at a few scenic lookout points, snapping a few photos, and driving past the scorched frame of a box truck that had been firebombed by the NPA within the last week. We went all the way to the next town for some halo-halo at a famous halo-halo place. If you're wondering, its a sort of nasty desert involving ice, fruit, gelatinous blobs, and shredded cheese. I slept on the ride back, so I didn't get a picture of the burned out truck, but I don't think that would've been the best sell to potential tourists anyway. The rest of the day we went to various beach resorts in town and took photos of the thatch open-air huts and rooms they offered for the future Sagnay tourism website. We even graciously took photos of the resort I was supposed to stay at, except they tried to overcharge the hell out of me. I wound up staying with Jesse's host family, and Jesse made sure the people at that resort regretted it after they realized he was giving all the resorts free publicity and threatened to blacklist them. They even went so far as to come to his house to try and apologize and offer him free rooms whenever he wanted them. That was pretty much the end of the third day at work, a day which had been full of marriage jokes due to Ninette's presence with us all day, and Jesse teasing her about being his Valentine's date. This all fueled the gossip around town that was to come in the following days, of course.

Only about an hour away from the gossip-saturated, internet-bereft town of Sagnay is Camsur Watersports Complex. This is a world-class wakeboarding park with artificial lakes with cable systems that pull you around a wakeboarding and waterskiing course. People come from all over the world and stay here for months at a time and just wakeboard all day. It's a pretty rad place, and super cheap. I'm sure an equivalent facility in the states would charge about 10X as much. You can rent a wakeboard and equiptment for like five dollars, and do an hour of wakeboarding for three. This is also where rich Filipinos come to hang out and watch the silly white people either face plant in the case of beginners, or launch like 10 feet in the air and pull all sorts of crazy flips and spins if you're one of the pros or semi-pros that lurk around CWC. I wakeboarded for about two and half or three hours even though I only paid for one. I guess they just don't check. Thanks to my long years of snowboarding, I was able to stick 180s and boardslides pretty consistently by the end of the day.



I paid for it over the next few days though, as I was so sore I couldn't believe it, though I knew it was coming every time the tension on the line jerked me around a corner or off of the start platform, or when I caught an edge or nose-dived off a jump and landed ear first while my body twisted in all sorts of unnatural positions above me. Take, for example, this photo of Jesse to illustrate the level of exertion needed to control the tension of the cables that pulled you around:



CWC also had the nicest accommodations I stayed in during all of my time in the Philippines. Two beds, made up everyday, cable with movie channels, a flush toilet with toilet paper - much better than simply a bowl and a bucket of water to flush/clean yourself with - and hot water and AC. All for around $25 a night, about what a hostel in Europe charges for a flimsy bunk-bed in a dorm room with a bunch of strangers.

I'll end this on the subject of Manila. Nevermind about the the great cover band in Naga, or the questionably oriented Filipino known as Mr. T, the marriage inquiries on a a jeepney or any of the thousands of details that filled in every minute between everything mentioned above. I started and ended my trip in Manila, naturally being the capital city and having the biggest airport. I stuck to one neighborhood called Malate, on the western edge of the city, by the bay. There are a fair amount of tourists around that area, and a ton of Korean restaurants and shops. I guess they come here to learn English. One old white guy I ran into that had been living in the Philippines for ages told me, when I mentioned I was a teacher in Korea, that I should teach them to stop coming to the Philippines since Koreans apparently "buy everything up". He was weird. Anyway, not far from the hostel I stayed at was a mall that's normal by Western standards, but upscale enough by Filipino standards to require armed guards and security checks. This fit with the armed guards in front of banks, travel offices, Seven Elevens, and so on and so on. It's nice knowing that when you take out from a ATM what is a fortune to most Filipinos, you won't be robbed (immediately). There is all sorts of shit going down in Manila. The traffic is hard to believe, and if there are some traffic laws in theory, there are none in practice. Any number of varieties of vehicles get from here to there however they can.



There is a huge sex industry, and I figured it was safe to assume that 95% of all Western guys with a Filipino girl who had the frame of a twelve year-old on his arm was a certifiable dirt bag on a sex holiday. One woman stopped me on a corner to chat me up in English for a good five minutes before delivering the proposition which we both know was coming:

"Are you looking for a woman? I know many."

"No."

"Are you sure? I can get you a good price."

"No." I begin to walk away as she calls after me,

"I can get you very young...!"

I was a little disappointed I only got that one proposition, I guess I'm not as handsome or rich-looking as I think. Although I guess there was Jolie, the bakla on Boracay, and some random hookers hanging around the doors to bars I walked by, so maybe there were a few more, just none that put forth as much effort.

The second day I was in the Philippines I took the train to the Chinese Cemetery on the recommendation of an Austrian guy I met at the hostel. I brought my brand new $500 dollar camera to get some pictures, and as evening was falling, and I was lost, wandering through random neighborhoods looking for the entrance, I thought dangling said camera around my neck wasn't the best idea, but oh well, I had already begun. Some of the neighborhoods were actually really amazing. Poor, certainly, but there were kids playing in the street, and music coming out of the doors and men and women sitting around chatting, and bright colored clothes hung everywhere. They were truly lively, and when a bunch of kids pointed me down some random alley after they correctly guessed I was looking for the Chinese Cemetery, and some old dude even escorted me partway there, I realized they were actually pointing me in the right direction and not even trying to rob me or beg money off of me for their help, which I certainly appreciated.



On my way back from the cemetery, well after dark, I figured I would walk to a different train stop from the one I first got off at since I had to walk a long way away to get to the cemetery and I thought I might be closer to a different one. I was wrong, and I wound up walking maybe two kilometers in the dark down some filthy road getting called "Joe!" and "Hey Joe!" every time I passed groups of shady Filipinos. I thought for sure the robbery bait hanging around my neck was going to get snatched, and maybe I'd get a knife in the stomach for good measure, but I made it back to the neighborhood I was staying in with no problems. When I got back to Korea after my vacation had ended, I did realize I was missing my older, compact, digital camera however. I guess if something had to get stolen from me, it might have well have been that piece of shit. I suspected that the cab driver who brought me to the airport had been a little too friendly, and suspicions had already been cast upon his character thanks to the broken seal on the meter, the attempt to start the meter too high, and his suggestion to take a route alternate to what I knew was a direct way to the airport. Let him have it though, and good luck trying to sell it: the flash doesn't work, the battery doesn't last, the case is coming apart, it's scratched to hell, the memory card is tiny, and half the time the lens doesn't retract automatically. I know that during my time in the Philippines, I overpaid for a fair amount of things that still wound up being cheap to me, but just for the sake of getting even, I'm glad that whoever thinks they got a nice camera off a tourist will find out it's a piece of shit and maybe they'll feel screwed too.

*Photo Update*

Check out the slideshow to the right. I finally got around to uploading more photos. This set covers many of the things I've done over the last three months. You can click on the pictures to get you to the album of full-sized photos with captions, or the link below will get you there too.

Winter Break Part 1 - Korea

Winter break began at the end of December and runs until February 9th. That's a long break, but there's more. After the break ends, we have one week of school, that week of the 9th, and then we commence spring break until March 2, when the new school year officially begins. Why we have one week of school in the middle of a two month span, I'm not really sure. I've gotten some vague explanations of making sure teachers have enough time to finish all the paperwork from the previous semester, and prepare everything for the graduation ceremonies which will take up the last two days of that week. That means I have to teach only the first three days of that one week during these two months.

Sounds like a sweet deal, and it is, but I still have to do some work. My contract, and the contract of everyone else in my program, stipulates that we get only seven days of vacation over winter break, officially speaking. We are required to do English camps, which aren't like sleepover camps, thank god, but just a few days of special classes for smaller groups of kids. Both of my camps were during the first week of January. Monday and Tuesday at my school, 20 advanced students, and one other foreign teacher. It was super easy. My second camp was at the elementary school right across the street from my school. It ran the rest of the week. There were about 80 students and three other foreign teachers, and we finished by 1pm everyday. Plus for both camps I got paid for the materials I prepared which was a nice and unexpected bonus. The camp at the elementary school was great because I have never worked with younger kids before and they were really enthusiastic and funny, and were better at English than I had anticipated. The other foreign teachers at that camp were nice too. There was one guy, Andrew, who struck me immediately as a religion enthusiast.



I figured I was being overly and unfairly judgmental based on his protruding, balding, forehead, his blatant lack of social skills, and his bulging eyes that seemed to always be unblinkingly staring at you with The Word until we had the following conversation during a break period the first day:

"So, Ethan, what brings you to Korea?"

"Oh, I don't know. I like traveling and I figured this would be a good way to have a good job and do some traveling. Basically, 'Why not?' And yourself?"

"Missionary work." As he bulges his eyes at me, probably trying to read my soul.

"Oh really?"

"Yeah, I was in China before, but it was difficult. I didn't find very many Christians..."

I interrupt, "Well isn't that the point?"

"Well yes, but..." Blah, blah, blah. Then he quickly mentioned how he felt he didn't connect with the other foreigners around him as his eyes bulged and he told me about one particularly sinful scene: "And there was one party I was at where I actually saw marijuana being used!"

I nearly laughed in his face at this but managed to hold it together. On the last day he asked if he could have my phone number, I think he felt there was some holy connection between us. I told him I was an atheist and would really enjoy discussing religion sometime. I think this surprised him. Either way, I haven't gotten a call from him yet. And now that I think about it, he looks quite similar to Jeffrey Lewis.

That was the extent of my English camps. I had only one week of camps, both within five minutes from my apartment, and I got them over with nearly as soon as vacation began. I know other teachers in Daegu who were not as lucky as I was, and in fact, I don't know any who were. The weekend before the camps I was snowboarding, as I previously wrote about. That trip was actually Thursday to Saturday, which left me Sunday free. I took a trip to Busan, Korea's second largest city, which is on the coast about an hour away. I met some friends in the morning to do some bouldering in a new area. We spent a bunch of time wandering around, exploring potential climbs. Busan is much warmer despite the fact that it isn't too far from Daegu, so it was nice climbing outside for a change from the gym I go to twice a week.



The weekend following my camps I went on an overnight trip with a small group of teachers, students, and parents from my school. One teacher had asked if I was interested in doing this trip before school ended, and I was hesitant at first, because he speaks almost no English so I wasn't exactly sure what he was inviting me to, or what my responsibilities would be, if any. It turned out it was just a day hike - take a bus two hours north Saturday afternoon, chill in a motel by the mountain, and then up and down Sunday, hit a spa, and come home Sunday evening. This sounded all well and good. In reality, I sat around most of Saturday evening while the food was being cooked in a freezing common area - that's one interesting thing about Korea: they save a ton on energy usage by heating only classrooms or, in this case, bedrooms, but hallways and the like remain unheated. Anyway, we ate and then I stood around while everyone spoke Korean. That night I slept on the floor in a room with four other teachers. Sleeping on the floor can be uncomfortable as it is, but throw in snoring and the realization of a hike in the cold the next morning and it suuuucks. I put on my iPod to try and relax myself into sleep, but halfway through Dark Side of the Moon I knew it wasn't going to help at all. I managed to get a few hours at some point, some how.

The next day we were up bright and early, and I was ready to go right away, but it took about two hours to get everyone up, eat, and get organized. The hike took about 3 hours up and wasn't too bad at the beginning. It was only very cold but the sun was coming out and we were still low enough to be sheltered from the wind. As we got higher up, it got worse and the sun didn't make a damn bit of difference, and the wind was absolutely deadly. There were patches of snow here and there, and some people opted for crampons at these spots. By the time I made it to the top, my toes were freezing, my hands were freezing, and I had spent most of the hike wishing I wasn't doing the hike. The view was okay, and there was an observatory located nearby, but it wasn't open to the public so I couldn't go in to defrost. I was one of the first ones up there, and one of the first ones down.



Later on, when everyone had come back down, we chowed some food and headed to the men's side of a spa - or public bath - where we all stripped down naked with a bunch of other strangers and sat around in hot tubs and saunas. This was my second time in a place like this, and it is of course very strange to us Western folk who have all sorts of hang-ups about being naked. I'm learning not to really care though, and it makes you think our reservations the first time you go in and realize you are probably the only person out of dozens there that think its strange that everyone is naked. These places are super relaxing and cheap and after spending all day on a frozen mountain it was great. I didn't get too many questioning looks about my tattoos, which, from what I am told, many people here think only convicts have.

The following two weeks, I had no camps, and my vacation wasn't scheduled until the very end of January. I still had some work to do though, two conversation classes per day at my school (that I was getting extra pay for!). Other than those classes I didn't have to be in at school, which, again, is more than I can say for some other foreign teachers, because according to our contracts we only have those seven official vacation days, so some people have to sit at a desk and do nothing all vacation if they don't have any camps scheduled. I still came in early and stayed late, using the time to plan out my next semester's lessons and so on. Regardless, compared to a normal school day, I still came in late and left early, so all was good. The classes themselves were okay. The levels of the students were very different, so if I was helping the really low-level kids, I was ignoring the high-level kids, and vice versa. Either way, I got the classes done with, picked up some extra cash, and got a lot of work done ahead of time for next semester.

The weekend in between my two weeks of conversation classes, I went up to Seoul for the first time since my eight-day orientation program in late August. I took the bullet train up and went to visit Seoul Tower before I met up with a friend of mine from that orientation, Eddie, in Itaewon for dinner. Itaewon is an area of Seoul that has a ton of foreign restaurants and clubs, and is apparently close to an American military base. As such, I saw more Westerners than I had seen since I left the states practically. We had Mexican food with a Korean friend of his (of limited-English abilities) at a restaurant where some soldiers were conducting some sort of event where they would go up on stage and congratulate each other for jobs well done. Maybe a going away thing, who knows. From there we went to Hongdae, a really jumpin area with a ton of bars and clubs, and not quite as Westernized as Itaewon. After a few drinks and watching people slip on the ice, we dropped Eddie's friend off at the subway (with a bit of convincing, he was set up with her by a friend and she didn't want to go home alone) and waited for his girlfriend, with whom we went out for a bit more before barely catching the last bus to Incheon, a sprawling city just outside of Seoul where Eddie lives.



One of the main points of my visit was a poker game that was organized for Saturday evening. We relaxed all day Saturday, taking a walk and watching a movie, until it was game time. The first game we got a little crazy and played Texas Hold 'Em with jokers wild with seven people with a 2,000 won buy in just for the hell of it. The real game was with eight people and no shenanigans with the jokers. I got third place which meant I got my 10,000 won buy-in back, which was good enough for me. Eddie took the 50,000 first-place pot, breaking a losing streak he had going. Then it was off to a different part of the city for a rock show, cheap beer, darts, pool, video games, street food, meeting random Koreans and going to a norae bang with them, and then witnessing a low-powered but long-running fight between a couple groups of Korean guys and girls in their early 20's maybe. The next day I forgot my iPod at Eddie's and headed back to Seoul to catch a slow train back to Daegu, reading a bit, but mostly sleeping. I always end up sleeping during bus or train or plane trips, I don't know why, its just become my traveling routine.