Hwanseongul... the 2nd Largest Limestone Cave in Asia

I figure it's time to start blogging again since I've been back from vacation for two weeks and have had the same post up here for over a month now. Actually, I kept it up because it turned into a great discussion of what prospective teachers in Gangwon-do's EPIK program can expect.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago, Tom Cruise, our favorite of all the teachers at our school, invited us to go with him to Hwanseon Cave. Hwanseongul is the closest thing we have to a tourist attraction out here near Dogye, and as one of the largest caves in Asia, it's a pretty decent draw. Scientists have mapped out over 6km of it, and there's still more they haven't gotten to. All of the large caverns are accessible to tourists, and for scope, if nothing else, it was quite impressive.

The hike up to the entrance is only 1.6km long, but at an average grade of over 15%, it was trying (and tough on the knees on the way down). This whole area is quite beautiful, and the valley the cave is situated in is a nice example of that. Here's Melanie posing in front of a waterfall on the way up:



The beauty of the hike was tempered by awful music being played at stupidly-loud volume all the way up. Here's a little sample... try to catch the lyrics. ;)




I guess the water flowing into the cave is flowing too fast for stalactites and stalagmites to form, so instead there are lots of "flowstones," which look largely like curtains. Here's nice formation that was called something like "Shapely Woman Flowstone:"




And another one that was supposed to look like a statue of the Virgin Mary. I thought the semblance was striking.




Here's a picture of Melanie and I in front of one of the myriad caverns:




And a heart-shaped formation that made for an awkward moment. Melanie is leaving next week; we've decided to go our separate ways. But when we came to this formation Tom Cruise said he would take a picture of us in front of the heart because "Michael and Melanie love forever."




Melanie really wanted a picture with Tom Cruise, but thought it might be awkward to ask for it. So instead, she told me to point the camera at them with the flash ready, and she would get him to smile for the camera. And it worked:




All of the formations and constructions had names like "Melting Turtle" and "Palace of Dream." There were also two bridges, "Bridge of Heaven" and this one:




The "Bridge of Hell" was actually really wobbly, and quite scary with a many-hundred foot drop beneath it. Beneath that was a water pool so deep scientists haven't been able to determine its depth. Scary, but well worth the fear to be rid of our sins.

And finally, back down near the start of the hike:




The rock pinnacle in the upper-left corner of that last picture shows how dramatic the mountains can be around here. Many, if not most, are unclimbable (for me at least) because they're too steep to be hiked and too covered in dirt and trees to be climbed. Awfully good for looking at though.

It was well worth our time to visit the cave, mostly since it's less than half an hour away. We had a good time with Tom Cruise, who has decided to quit the teaching job that's obviously been making him unhappy for the last fifteen years to "follow his dream." He's a smart, caring guy, and we sure wish him luck in finding it. Thanks Tom Cruise, for being our one friend at Dogye Elementary School.

K-Style Christmas

Huge thanks to our friends Kate and Chad for throwing an excellent Christmas party last night. I had mostly been ignoring the fact that it was Christmas until then, to try to minimize the feelings of homesickness, but we had a great time with all our Samcheok friends last night. It really felt like Christmas.

Great potluck... good job with the food everyone. And thanks to Chad's Mom for the cookies, and Chad for sharing them!


Some friends during the Dirty Santa gift exchange (I always thought it was called White Elephant):


























And on the way home, we saw two dogs, erh, stuck to each other, and a third sniffing out the situation. Here it is, your moment of zen...

School Opening Day

It's not what it sounds like.... Dogye Elementary School seems to have been open since at least the Korean War (1950 - '53). Instead, yesterday our school was "open" to teachers and administrators from all around Dogye Eub (an administrative region somewhat smaller than a county).

For days, everyone at school had been freaking out making artsy name tags, cleaning every last shoe-locker and polishing every last trophy. When we arrived yesterday, it felt more like we were walking into a sales convention or wedding reception than our school.


The entrance to the gymnasium.


Inside the gymnasium were scores of displays of students' artwork and stories, and teachers' methods, like the games we use in English class.


There were also a couple of banners (Koreans love banners). We were surprised to see that this one featured Melanie! And no, that's not a prison behind her. Those are the gym's offices.


After lunch, Kim Sun and I taught a demonstration class for about twenty other teachers and the elementary school supervisor for Samcheok County. Kim Sun - who just finished her "English Education Degree" - had planned this down to the last word (even my words), and was visibly nervous before we started. She's actually a great English teacher, and with her more than any other Korean teacher, we have a good natural dynamic in the classroom - both letting the other teach in their style and being there to support the other on pronunciation or complex directions or whatever. But yesterday she was just putting on a show, and had me relegated me to the talking stooge. In all of the feedback I heard, from Koreans and foreigners alike, was that I should have more of a role in the class. I don't know why Kim Sun set up that class the way she did - to show off, I suppose, but she is actually the one co-teacher I work with that doesn't need to hear that I should have more of a role in class... several of my other teachers really do need to hear that. Oh well. Hopefully she impressed whomever she was trying to impress.


After the demo class, we went into the freezing cold gymnasium, and Chantel (one of the three other foreigners who lives in Dogye) was asked to give a speech about her impressions of the demo class, the school, teaching in Korea and Korea in general. No need, apparently, for preparation, or for a translator. I would guess that less than 10% of the audience understood more than 10% of what she said.


Nevertheless, here she is trying to take the task seriously.


And here are the other foreigners trying not to laugh at her attribution of the children's good behavior to their nutritious lunches.


After two hours of not understanding anything in the gymnasium, we had had enough and scurried away to this restaurant for an awesome dinner. All of that, including drinks, for 8,500 won each (US$6.36).


And a bunch of happy campers after a good meal.

Seoul Trip

Judging by what we lugged back, our trip to Seoul was a great success. We came home with a kilo of oatmeal and four of chickpeas, along with enough tahini to make hummus of all of it. We got lentils and spices galore and coconut milk and baking soda. We got guitars, each; paper lamps, each; and some nice artwork for our apartment's barren walls. Pictures of the booty later, for now here are a few from the trip, which was great fun in itself. Six of us went together, and we quickly found over a dozen others that had come from Gangwon-do, land of nature and quiet, to Seoul, the promised land of foreign food and nightlife, for the three-day weekend.


Our home for the weekend - the Golden Pond Hostel in Haehwa, Seoul - a nice clean place with internet and English-speaking staff. Not far from the action (Itaewon, Dongdaemun, Insadong) but on a subway line that made for a lot of transferring between trains.


Just down the street from our hostel, David poses in front of what must be a big draw for this movie theater. As an aside, Korea is so short on land that everything tends to be built vertically. Next to Gandolff is a box office, above that concession stands and six theaters stacked on top of themselves. After you buy your tickets in a Korean theater, you get on a (usually very crowded) elevator to get to your show.


Melanie lost in a sea of guitars at the Nagwon Arcade. There must have been over a thousand guitars in this shopping center, along with hundreds of pianos, woodwinds, and strings. How do you choose a guitar when there are a thousand at two dozen shops to choose from?


Many of the venders were just reselling goods made in China or Indonesia (I picked up a Korean-made acoustic electric, a "Mass," that I'm very happy with), but some, like this guy working on a flute, made studios of their little shops.


Breakfast! Itaewon - the foreigner district - was like heaven for all of us. We started off with an Indian buffet that had me moaning through the meal. This is Saturday's breakfast at the "Flying Pan" (pretty clever - Asians can't differentially pronounce R & L, so frying sounds like flying), which was soon followed with some Middle Eastern fare. After six weeks of kimchi, it's hard to explain how good this all tasted, though I suppose the smiles on our faces are something of a give-away.


This is in the subway. The superiority of Korean technology, and the integration and availability of it, never fails to amaze me. This woman is watching TV on a portable television, and she's doing it in the subway! What's most amazing about this to me though, is that the TV uses an old-school antenna, like the ones we had on our black and white TVs before cable was ubiquitous. Who would've guessed that that would be whats needed to watch TV on a moving train 80 feet under the earth?


My favorite shop in all of Korea.


When the others decided to go to the fashion district for some shopping Saturday night, Melanie and I broke off and headed for Seoul Forest and the 2008 Seoul Drum Festival. We got there a little late, but were impressed both by the festival, and by Seoul Forest - a nice, big park in a city that doesn't have a lot of them. Videos to come later.


I don't think this means what he thinks it means! I know articles are tough when your first language doesn't use them, but if you're printing thousands of copies of something to sell, don't you think you'd find someone to proof read it? Then again, for Koreans, all that seems to matter is that it has what appears to be English on it.


Finally, here's a 20-second video taken just off the main street in Insadong, the traditional-arts district in Seoul.

Chusok Lunch with Park Jung Sun's Family

Last Monday was a national holiday because of Chusok (Harvest Moon Festival) the day before. Our K-friend Park Jung Sun invited us to do something (we weren't sure what before hand because we can't communicate very well in either language) at 11:00. She showed up with her grandmother, sister, niece and nephew, the last three who had lived in Vancouver for a couple of years, and so could communicate with us!

In our parking lot, we did introductions, grandma (who didn't live in Canada) said "Nice to meechuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu" and laughed and laughed and laughed, we gave them some pears, and we had a lengthy discussion about what foods we liked. They decided something and off we went to get lunch, except that, being a big holiday everything was closed. So after a half hour driving around Samcheok, we went 6km up the coast to the slightly larger town of Donghae, where they had heard a restaurant that would be good for us vegetarians would be open.

The restaurant was good for us, and it was good. The theme of the place had something to do with mineral water and dolsot (the hot stone pots). The lunch we were served was amazing:

[Click on the picture to get a better view of what we were served.] That's a fish, a whole pike, I'm working on with my chopsticks there, and it really is hard work. (We're really more pescaterian than vegetarian.)

We were served rice (cooked with yams, pine nuts and a jujube) in little hot stone pots. After scooping the rice into a bowl, we poured hot water into the pots, covered them and set them aside. After the meal we went back to those pots, which then had hot water and rice that was simultaneously mushy and crispy coming off the sides. We drank the water and ate the crispy-mushy rice. It was delicious, and apparently good for health and digestion. We were also served some sort of cinnamon tea, with a single pine nut floating in the middle of each cup, that tasted incredibly good.

After lunch we were asked if we wanted to go shopping. I told them I was excited to go to E Mart (the biggest department store within an hour of our apartment). So we walked around town for a while:



We shopped for shoes for the kids and went "eye shopping" in the fancy Nike store and took lots of pictures:





We eventually went to E Mart, by which time everyone was pretty frazzled from trying to communicate across the language barrier, so we went shopping separately (and found cashews and unsweetened yogurt!), but not before Park Jung Sun, who is something of artist, took some arty shots:





It's always a treat to get to hang out with Koreans (especially since they have to struggle to speak our language, even though we are guests in their land). to get to hang out with a grandmother and a whole family and go to such a neat, traditional restaurant was really extra special. Happy Chusok everyone.

Dinner, Communication & Korean Manners

As we were leaving school yesterday, one of the teachers, who we've taken to calling “The Matriarch,” said to us, "7:00, my house, meeting." "Tonight?" "Yae. Park Jung Sun... your aparte... (Konglish [a mutant language made up of words taken from English and made to suit the Korean tongue] for apartment) go." "Uh, okay."

So we get home just before six and complain to each other for a bit about being told without notice what we're doing, not having any control over our lives and in general how easily exhausted we are these days. Then, being hungry five hours after our lunch of rice, potatoes and kimchi, we ran down to the neighborhood restaurant for some bibimbap before our meeting. We rushed back to our apartment and were picked up at 7 by our friend Park Jung Sun, her “mother, English Teacher, Samcheok Elementary School” and about seven small children, three of whom I was to sit with in the back of Park Jung Sun's little Hyundai.

After a quick nightmare fantasy about how we were going to be made to have conversation with these kids, we dropped them off on the way to The Matriarch's aparte, where we found spread before us a full-on feast, laid out beautifully across a traditional Korean table (6" legs, for floor sitting). Koreans, like, it seems, everyone outside the US, know how to treat guests. There were five dolsot bibimbap (hot-stone pot rice and vegetables), doenjang jigae (a soybean paste stew), kimbap (Korean sushi), fried pumpkin slices, all kinds of steamed veggies and kimchis... basically all our favorite Korean foods. Unfortunately, we had gotten snarled in a language trap earlier.

When we were parting ways with the Matriarch after school, Melanie asked “should we have dinner at our apartment?” The Matriarch can understand slow, classroom English, but not so much “everyday English”. I'm guessing she heard “dinner”, thought about the fact that she was about to prepare a massive feast for us, and so said “yes”. When I saw what she had done, I wanted to cry. We had just been kvetching about how how inconsiderate everyone is toward us, and here was a feast, vegetarian none-the-less, made just for us.

We met the Matriarch's husband, a Math Professor, sat down, tried to explain, she apologized, we apologized a lot, Park Jung Sun called her cousin that speaks more English and had him translate “you can leave food remaining”, I put some more bibimbap and doenjang jigae into my already very full belly, and we toasted over very sweet wine (Manashevitz style). They didn't eat much beyond the bibimbap, as Korean politeness dictates, and we felt terrible. Melanie's eyes watered periodically through dinner.

Once the intensive eating part had passed though, it was a great evening. They brought over a second table, filled with peaches with pink-marbled flesh, grapes, miniature bananas and Gyeongju Bread (pancakes filled with sweet bean paste), a specialty of the husband's hometown and ancient capital of the peninsula. We talked about whatever we could find the language for, looked at pictures of their kids, took pictures of ourselves (are they prouder to have western friends or are we prouder to have Korean friends?) and watched some baseball.

***digression warning***

Korean baseball takes sponsorship to a whole new level... where in the US teams are identified more less equally by their home town and a name, in Korea they are identified primarily by the company that sponsors them, secondarily by a name (always English), and almost not-at-all by the city they play in. So the game last night was Samsung vs. KIA. My favorite team is the Lotte Giants, because they are also “Giants”, because they play in Busan, my first home in Korea, and because Lotte makes these delicious chocolate-covered pretzel cookies called Peppero. As another example of the extent of corporate reach in Korea, November 11 is “Peppero Day” (Peppero are long and strait, hence 11/11), for which every child in the country buys cases of the cookies and gives them to their teachers and friends. Last time I was here I had a cabinet full of Peppero that lasted me well into spring. It's kind of like another Valentine's Day, except that they have two of those in the spring, but we'll get to that in time...

***end digression***

The husband took out an atlas and showed us around Korea, and then a newspaper, and we looked through the news together -- my favorite! We talked about AIG and the strength of the Korean market (three words – massive dollar reserves), what we thought of “Faline... uh, Alaska... woman...” I've been told over and over not to get into politics with Koreans, so I tried to tone-down my response as much as possible, but I seem to have a condition that prohibits me not expressing my social/political opinions. The most I could water it down, in simple English, was “I don't think she can be President.” When that was met with silence I remembered that they strongly identify as Christians and started wondering how much favor I had just lost.

All and all, it was a lovely evening. We were sent home with a massive amount of food (“Gift... Korean culture.”) and a determination to simplify our English even further when anything logistical is on the line.

This afternoon, The Matriarch pulled me aside in the hallway, apologized and said in perfectly polished English, "we would like to have you over for dinner again."

Assa! (Awesome!)

Taebaeksan Trip

We just had a 4-day weekend for Cheosok, so we decided to go up to Taebaek, the center of coal mining in South Korea, for a little climbing and relaxing with our friends Kate and Chad. Taebaeksan is one of the holiest mountains in Korea. Something having to do with the Dangun Wanggeom - the founder of Korea, whom we celebrate with the national holiday Gaecheonjeol (ie. day off work) October 3. So atop each of the mastiff's peaks there are alters built to Dangun Wanggeom. Exercise, views, friends and culture -- who could ask for more?



Downtown Taebaek - the most cosmopolitan environment we've seen in a while!


Evidence of the cosmopolitan nature of Taebaek!


Walking around Taebaek we found a bookstore with some western literature, perhaps turned pornographic?


We had dinner at a little ajuma's place. Clockwise from the top left: naeng kong guksu (cold, soymilk noodle soup... probably the least appealing vegetarian dish I've found in Korea), naeng guksu (cold noodle soup, only marginally better than the soymilk version), bibim naeng guksu (mixed vegetable noodle soup - that red paste made it less bland than the other two soups at the table, and the hot broth next to it made it warm. I wouldn't seek it out again, but definitely better than the other two), and bibimbap (mixed vegetables and rice, the old standby). Check out the size of the chunks of radish kimchi in front of my bowl! No one was crazy enough to try to put one of those down. Besides Melanie's bibimbap, no body ate much of their dinner, so Kate, Chad and I went out for pizza a couple hours later. I guess we can't claim to have it too hard here if we can always go get a pizza! ;^>


We stayed in a "love motel", a pretty modest one as these things go. It was nice, the elevator was trippy though!


This beautiful lonely red tree greeted us as we started our ascent of Taebaek Mountain (Taebaeksan).


About an hour into the hike we came upon this beautiful temple hidden in the woods.


Us inside a tree!


The top of one of the several peaks we summitted.


An airfield just off to the side of the mountain, with what seems to be a dirt runway and landing strip. Note to self: don't fly into Taebaek!


An alter atop another peak.


Us just beyond the previous alter.


At the end of the hike we found this lake, which is the shape of the Korean Peninsula, and has labels for each of the major cities, and Taebaek.

So that was long weekend number one. The next is only two weeks away, at which point we'll have been paid and will be running off to Seoul for chickpeas, Mexican food and exotic spices, like cinnamon.