Broey in Korea!

~~ Obviously travel is about going new places; but the more you do it, the more you realize, it's so much more about the people you meet along your way. ~~

Which brings me to Friday, February 18^th ; 3AM.

I was awake well before dawn and on my way to the bus station heading north to meet good old cousin Joe at the Incheon Airport! He thought that he would be meeting Sarah for the first time (in person, although they had talked and exchanged messages online for months) there in the terminal when he arrived. What we didn't tell him though was that Sarah, being the incredible and selfless person that she is, offered to cover work for me so that I might have the honor!

When he came out of the terminal, I snuck up on him with my camera rolling and gave him a loud, “Let the mayham!!.....” In his delirious and jet-lagged state, it took him a long moment of staring at me blankly before he realized what was going on. After about 5 seconds, he smiled and said in a confused voice, “Begin!?” - That's an old thing we picked up from our first back-packing venture years ago. :)

Joe was reasonably WIPED OUT, but we had a serious errand to take care of before we could get him to our hostel in Seoul to relax. We had exactly a one-day window to get our India visa applications turned in and on their way to approval. We had to leave our passports there for 'at least a week' which meant if things went perfectly, we'd still only have a one hour opportunity to pick them up the day before we were scheduled to leave for Vietnam. We had very little room for error.

It ended up taking us a full four hours to get through the whole process. We couldn't find the office, Broey had the wrong passport photos, and the lobby was PACKED, but we toughed through it and nervously left our passports with the embassy just 8 days before we were leaving for a two-month excursion.

Finally, we checked into our hostel, ate a big traditional Korean lunch (including Joe's first real experience with chopsticks) took a long nap and then showered. We felt like new men and were ready to go and meet Sarah at the subway station. She had finished her day covering for me and everything had gone wonderfully smooth!

We decided to dedicate some hours to partying with our new hostel-mates we had met – namely, Luce from France and Leena from Finland. We guzzled 3-foot tall margaritas, sang in our karaoke room for hours and headed for Shisha in the busy college town area of Hongdae, Seoul. This particular shisha house had a new trick for us though and brought us a small dish of bubble soap to blow giant smoke bubbles with. We found this to be wildly entertaining and stayed there into the early hours of the morning. We were enjoying the company of our new-found friends so much that we ended up continuing the party at our hostel until 6 something in the morning.

Finally stumbling to bed, we'd left ourselves about 2 hours to try and sleep before we needed to be at our bus pick-up spot for our scheduled Adventure Korea temple stay at Geumsan-sa. This would be a totally new experience for all of us and we were excited for it, but left ourselves little chance to be feeling good for the event.

Luckily, I was sleep-talking so loudly that I woke Sarah up across the dorm-style hostel room which caused her to note the time and the fact that we had completely overslept. We drunkenly threw our things together and ran to catch our bus. We made it, but in a very fragile state of life.

It turned out to be a really unique and eye-opening learning experience for all of us where we learned some of the ideas, customs and moral-sets that drive the Buddhist lifestyle. We practiced bowing, meditation, and traditional eating style. I had to beg out of a couple of the activities to get my hung-over self caught up on sleep, but overall really enjoyed the first day at the temple.

The main temple at Guemsan-sa. Adventure Korea temple stay February 19th, 2011

After a long morning of similar activities, it was time for everyone else in our group to go, but we stayed behind. Since we were already very near to Daejeon, it didn't make sense to take the train all the way to Seoul. Our plan was to take a city bus from the temple into a near-by town where we could get on a train to Daejeon, but then Stonehead (our grandmaster monk that had been our host all weekend) invited us – in very broken and limited communication – to stay for a quick scenic hike and then tea in his personal chamber! Although we were more than ready to be on our way, there was no way to pass this up. This little bonus quickly proved to be the overwhelming highlight of the weekend for all of us!

Broey and 'Stonehead' up on the viewpoint above his temple complex.

Homemade tea in the grandmaster monk's personal chambers! A really unique experience!

Stonehead brought us to the train station personally and saw us onto our train. Hours later, for the first time, we brought Joe into our temporary hometown of Daejeon. I still had a busy and VERY full week of work left in front of me. Sarah was done with work but had precisely one million things to do in terms of cleaning, laundry, packing, moving out of apartments, sending boxes home, travel plans, doctors' appointments, etc. We felt a little bad that we couldn't be better hosts to Broey during his visit. It turned out to be less vacation and more witnessing our daily lives in Korea as he helped Sarah while I was at work, shadowed me at school for more than a full day, partied with my co-workers and sang plenty of Karaoke.

It was a full, action packed week. We partied lots, worked hard, slept very little but somehow in the end... we got it all done and got to enjoy a nice farewell party with most all of our Korea friends on Thursday night. We had a great dinner at Taco K and one last hurrah at the Shisha House. It was a fun, but very emotional night of memories and good-bye hugs. We were truly blessed to have met such incredible people all year and we'll not forget you guys!!

One last go-round at the Shisha House; Aussie Nic, Northwest Vin and BC Woody. Our going-away party, 02/24/2011

Friday, I headed into my last day of work with backpacks strapped on. Sarah and Joe would later wake up, polish off my apartment (which was THE apartment at this point – tight fit!) and head up to Seoul. They had to be at the Indian embassy between 4 and 5 pm in order to pick up our passports. If there were any hitches in that, our passports would be locked up in Seoul for the weekend and we would be forced to miss our flight to Vietnam and rearrange the first bit of our Southeast Asia trip.... naturally, I was a bit nervous about something going wrong, but I wouldn't know the outcome until they sent me an update online or I met them in Seoul later that night.

School was a laid-back last day. We had our graduation ceremony where I barely got 4 words out of my mouth before I started to cry while Tommy and Sannah giggled to see me reduced to tears. We gave a few tests, played a few games and said many tearful good-byes to my little tykes! I checked facebook one last time to see if I had any updates from Sarah and Joe. Nothing. The embassy had been closed for an hour and they didn't send me anything?? That didn't leave me overly settled but I tried not to worry about it before I knew what the situation had become. Suddenly, the day was over and I was no longer employed by Kids College. I was on my way to Daejeon station for one last time – indefinitely at least.

Me with a big pile of kids taking a break from my last class at Kid's College. Man, I miss these little guys already!!!!

The train station was as jammed as I had ever seen it. I barely got standing room on an already over-booked train and had something of a miserable ride. I hadn't slept all week, was hung-over, worried about the visa and now was to be wedged tightly between 4 Korean strangers for the next hour plus. One nice side-effect of being so crammed in there was that I could actually fall asleep standing up; and did! Soon, I was in Seoul and heading for our hostel.

It took about 40 more minutes of subways and a short walk, but there were Sarah and Joe in the lobby waiting for me; visa'ed passports in hand!! It was a major relief, and they gave me just a moment to enjoy the fact that we had them before adding the details of just how close we came to blowing it! All trains had been sold out, they had to transfer across town the other station where they were able to beg and connive their way onto their own over-booked train. They had to borrow cell phones to contact the embassy and tell them they would NOT be there before closing time. Luckily, the merciful people there agreed to stay open for them. Joe had to run from the taxi and bang on the door frantically, but in the end; we got our passports back at the LAST POSSIBLE MOMENT! With that massive weight off our shoulders, we enjoyed our last night in Seoul (ever?) with our same friends from the week before in that same hostel, Luce and Leena who happend to be back/still at that same hostel!

The next morning, it was off to the Incheon Airport to begin a brand new chapter! Our hope would be to meet Muc at our decided hostel and let the mayhem continue, but a LOT more still had to go perfectly our way for that to happen.

Vacation in Korea!

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Politicians lie;
The media hypes;
Meteorologists guess;
Trust your experience.
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Hey peoples and love ones of Earth! a ton to catch up on and i shall do my best before it becomes too big a task that i never do it, or before i just forget everything that happend altogether. well, now that i think of it, i've already forgotten most, but here's what i still have bangin' around the old noggin from the past couple of weeks.......
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to start off my vacation and finish Sarah's, we headed up to yet another beautiful and exciting camping/climbing area with Jake and Kyung Ah. The place is called Gahnyeon and seemed to be a haven for camping and swimming as any and ALL open grass or sand was pounced on and coverd up with thousands of tents overnight. we got our tents down late on Friday night and we were already forced to the more remote area where we were 2 of the only 3 or 4 tents there.... less than 24 hours later, we suddenly barely had room to walk since the place had exploded with tents like dandelions. A small string of shops and restaurants have sprung up over the years to accomodate all of the campers along the beautiful and perfectly swim-able river that runs through the park. camping was less than $2 per night for each tent and freshwater swimming seems a bit of a rarity here so the place was PACKED on a busy summer vacation weekend!!
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while the river, campground and shops were all nice additions to our situation, those were hardly the reason that we were there! each morning, we would pack up our gear and head across a long foot-bridge to the other side of the river where they laid a stunning chunk of rock!! we must have run upwards of 10 or 12 routes both days including busting out the headlamps for my first ever night-climbing session!! The weather did just what we needed it to, and we - once again - put in a bid for BEST weekend.......
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Sarah and our new climbin' bud/righteous schwenny, Heidi heading out to that breath-takingly sexy rockface you see in front of them. look close and you can spot a couple of other climbers already on the wall.
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the man, Jake, headin' up a tricky little start just to see if he could maneuver his body into the yoga-like position required to hit this.
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We were so thankful for Jake and KA to have brought us to this spot... seemed like a pretty well-kept secret since there were almost NO other foreigners included in the 1000's of bodies that were camping here. We even had a few of the Korean climbers remark to us in their broken English... "How did you find this place?!?" seeming to marvel that we had been in country only a number of months and were already at their secret gem of a crag!
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This picture shows nothing of the tents that sprung up. this is actually the more desolate area of the campground! if this were in the main area, there would be a tent or TWO stuffed between my red there and those other green ones next to it... you could barely walk between them!
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Down underneath the footbridge. easy to see why so many people head to this spot!!
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The majority of our crew here enjoying a traditional Korean BBQ dinner after a looooooong first day of climbing - but still with night climbing to come! left to right is Jake, Kyung Ah, Hyeon Ho (sp?) and Sarah, of course. :)

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i will be SURE to get back to this location before my time in Asia is finished!!! the trip was action packed and cause enough for a recovery day on Monday! luckily for me, i had just that while Sarah headed back to work, the poor thing!!
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part of my monday off would be to try to sort out just what I should like to do with my following days off - remember that I was truly just beginning my vacation time at this point since the previous had been crammed into just a weekend! as I was considering what to do, I noticed a post by my good friend and fellow Minnesotan, Marilyn - for the record, she is the one that first suggested the idea of coming here to me as a real possibility. Anyways, her post said something about traveling around South Korea, unsure exactly where, for the next few days.... i quickly sent her a text for her to let me know where she ended up and that maybe i could meet up with her somewhere along the line. She did me one better however in calling me right back to say that she still hadn't left and that I should just join her the next day heading south to Busan and Gwangju!

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I had been been to Busan only for a few drinks on an extended layover with a friend and never seen Gwangju, this seemed like - on no uncertain terms - the answer i had been looking for! I knew only of her plan that she had arranged 'couchsurfing' plans so we could stay cheaply - this merits an explaination, i know! http://www.couchsurfing.org/ is an utter fit-of-brilliance that helps you find FREE places to stay with proven, tested, vouched for awesome people that are willing to give you a key to their house and usually show you around the city too! you can search just about any city in the world and find a place to crash for nothing! I know what you're thinking (Mom, in particular ;)) it sounds crazy and dangerous, but it's tried, tested and true! I plan to be an active user of this site for years to come!!

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And so, easy as that, we arrived at our host's house the following day. He was a dood named Chris from the northwestern US, in fact. he showed us multiple sleeping options including a double bed for Marliyn and a matress on the floor for me! blankets, pillows, hot shower, kitchen, internet, AC... the place was fully loaded and it seemed to be Chris' pleasure to host us!! he showed us all the places on his googleearth map that we might be interested in and set us loose in Busan along with the one other couchsurfer who was staying with him....

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Enter, Peter. Peter is a Hungarian dood that has been traveling the world via hitch-hiking and couchsurfing for more than a year now!! WHAT A CONCEPT!!! his original plan was to invest 4 years of his life this way eventually circumnavigating the globe back to Budapest! a silent observer of people and cultures everywhere he went, he was brilliant, open-minded and experienced. These are the kinds of people you meet while you're traveling that really reinforce the sense that what you're doing is right!!

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The first few days blurred together a bit but were a mash up of beautiful - but as crowded as i've ever imagined - beaches, city lights, bars, games, sight-seeing and just all around great times!! one main highlight worth detailing: one night, while relaxing on Gwangali beach, we were fortunate enough to land next to a group of Sri Lankan men playing percussion on their recyclables, clapping and singing the night away with korean booze and fireworks. The seemed as happy and fun-loving as any group of guys could be so we eventually merged our group with theirs for a bit after we'd caught something of a buzz ourselves.

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After singing a couple songs with them and even my solo performance of Sublime's "What I Got", their story came out. They come to Korea for 2 year stints to work manual labor from 8am to 11 pm everyday. Except they get a break on the weekends and only have to work 8 hours Saturday and Sunday (slackers!!). These guys said they get a total of 5 days off each year and they were directly in the middle of that vacation the night we happend into their company. These guys blew my mind and if that didn't just blow yours, you're not reading carefully enough; go back and try again! 90-hour weeks for 360 continuous days!!! I just wish the world could consider that the next time someone would otherwise start to bitch about not having coffee provided for them at their air-conditioned office building in Anytown, Anycountry - I know i'll certainly remember them!

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The Sri Lankan guys! see the white food container with chopsticks in the foreground? that's one of their drums they were playing all night. ah, the enjoyment of life if refreshing, isn't it?? These guys will be considered rich when they return to their country because of the insane hours their pulling at the moment,... and why shouldn't they be!? You'd consider them rich already if you saw them enjoying their night!
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The next days, we'd meet up with dozens more AWESOME people including Ross and Kelsi who joined our couchsurfing crew at Chris' pad. They are also from the Pacific Northwest, but have had an experience entirely unique to the other foreigners i've met here in Korea. They are based on a tiny island with a few thousand people living on it and where they are the ONLY foreigners. They take ferries each morning to the different islands around theirs to teach English to kids who will most likely never need to know the language since they will probably spend their entire lives there as fishermen just as the rest of their families do and have done in the past. it was really cool to hear how vastly different of 'Korean' lives they've lived barely a couple hundred miles away! we plan to go and visit them on their beautiful islands soon so this shouldn't be the last you see or hear of them in this blog!
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top left is Ross, then across the front is Kelsi, Peter, Marilyn, Me, Sarah and our host, Chris on our last bar night in Busan. YUP, Sarah finally made it down there to meet us for the weekend!! :) oh, and you may have noticed that we still haven't left Busan... we loved it and Chris just kept being more than willing to host so what was set out to be a couple day stint, turned into almost a full week!!
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A fantasy of a little spot we found for some rocky swimming, sun bathing and just general observation of beauty! we spent almost our entire last day here at this spot off of Song-cheong Beach.
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just a few hundred meter from our rocky oasis was the insane-o chaos of Busan beach life as seen above. notice that you can't see any sand on the beach?? just umbrella tops as far as the eye can see!! this is a typical beach scene in the south! I'm glad they didn't seem to know about our spot!!

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Here is me, Sarah, Peter and Marilyn in Blowfish Bar. This is a spot owned by a New-Yorker right smack in the middle of Song-cheong beach and had the best double cheeseburger i've found in Korea by far!! track it down if you're ever in busan!
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It was an eye-opening, refreshing and beautiful trip eventhough i had at first been dispointed to not be leaving the country! who needs to leave when you have all this right at your fingertips??!?
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As I sign-off, i know that the majority of the people who read this blog are already up at Kilworry and the thought of missing that has made me homesick most of this week!! This is only the second time in my entire life that i've had to miss our August week at the cabin and it hurts just as bad this time as the first... maybe a little bit worse in fact! i miss you and hope that you don't get to read this until you come back after a long peaceful week of family, relaxation and NO COMPUTERS! Drink one for me though, if you do get this!! I love you guys!!!! :)
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breaking news to go out on: muc and I have formally booked Hong Kong for 5 days in late September and hope to be adding some schwennies to that party soon! LIVE ON!!!!!
aw

Time marches on.

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Time is FLYING by as it always will do.
I figure the only way to keep up with it is to learn to fly too! :)
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I left off just before the Ansan half marathon a couple weeks ago and i think that most of you few that read this probably arleady know the scoop... but that's never stopped me before!
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Ansan is a 1.something million person city on the coast up outside of Seoul a little bit. We made it into town early in the afternoon on Saturday and had plenty of time to look around, eat a delicous carb-loaded dinner, relax and get a good nights sleep - all the opposites of my race prep for the last 'half' a month ago! I felt truly ready. I hadn't felt this poised for a perfect run since high school cross country.

The busy and dense downtown of Ansan, South Korea. Plenty to do and see as is the trend over here.
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Race morning came and everything was on track. We were the first ones there and felt fine. The rain was clearning up and I had nothing but a personal record in mind. Sarah had made a last minute decision to go ahead with her run eventhough she had the 2nd degree burn the size of a silver dollar on the top of her left foot from the 'hair straigtener incident' a few days before. the 10K that morning would be her first race in years! Both excited and ready to do something amazing, the race started and soon proved to have other plans for us.
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Here come the excuses: the most humid conditions I have EVER run in made everyone's legs feel like cement by maybe the 5 or 6 mile mark..... except we had no idea where any mile (or kilometer) mark was becasue there was absolutely NO indication of how far you were along the entire course!!! i've never seen anything like it. Those markers let you know your pace, give you short-term but significant goals to pick off one-by-one and keep you going. Never had a clue the whole race!! Top it off with only having five water stops on a half marathon course in July! AND the 5th one was OUT of water by the time the first 20% of runners came through! This was the first of my 5 half marathons that I ever walked even a step - and I walked much more than only one step.
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However; at long last.... the stadium and finish line came into view and the horrific course became a memory. I never even looked at my official time but it was around and hour and 51 minutes - right about the worst half i've ever run. Nonetheless, another half under the belt and many lessons learned!! Perhaps the most important thing that I took from this race is a serious hunger to run like a world champ in my next runs to make up for it! Sarah was able to fight through the foot pain and finish her 10K too! What a gal! ;)
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There's the exhausted finishers with their medals and great senses of relief.

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Next in line-

Aug 24: The King of the Mountain in the southwest of Korea: 18K up, along the top and back down the other side of a 2400 foot mountain! for charity and going to be a BLAST!

October 29: Chuncheon Full Marathon, will be my thrid full, but only the first where i'm even remotely near to prepared properly! can't wait to see how I actually do?? life goal remains.... QUALIFY FOR BOSTON.

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Then last weekend we headed for The Seonudo Islands along with Adventure Korea - our righteous tour group that we've found over here. This was a trip primarily planned as a biking trip since there are only a handful of cars on the islands. The islands are tiny, touristy and connected to a whole string of beautiful islands that are accessible only by narrow bicycle bridges. true getaway feeling, extreme beauty, some light hiking and biking all for dirt cheap! :) actually, the weekend was a gift from my lovely girlfriend anyways so even a better deal for me than most! ;)

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Easily the most extreme tides i've ever seen! the shores draw back almost a mile to the point where you can walk to other islands! on the islands, they call this the 'Moses miracle'. Really a cool thing to witness though! you can see the boat landlocked by more than a hundred meters is anchored down. :)
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excuse us little guy... just passing through and want no trouble! 3 inch spider that looked like one mean S.O.B!!

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A great little spot that we found as we ventured out to the little ports around the island. Was an awesome experience!

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What's next? tomorrow morning we leave for the Borean (spell check??) Mud Festival!! a giant party on the beach when the soils and clays turn into pure mud due to the raininess of the season. We are going with a group of about 60 foreigners on a bus that includes mainly everyone we know in Daejeon. it will no doubt be a complete and total RIOT! (but we'll be safe, Ma!) ;) tons of pics of mud wrestling and general mud-cakedness will be popping up on facebook in a few days, to be sure!

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after that, i have two more weeks of work and then our 1 week summer vacation the first week of August! not sure what yet, but pretty sure something incredible has to happen! will work with the budget on that one!! After vacation, BOTH of my coworkers are heading elsewhere so we're going to shuffle the chips and see how things land at work! i'm optimistic. ;)

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thanks for checkin in with me! miss you guys badly, particularly on the 4th of July! better drink SEVERAL up at Kilworry for me next month!!!!

Overdue update!

Ah, my dear friends and family! Sorry for the delay if anyone's been checking in regularly hoping for an update (Mom :) )! I've been finding it tough to find time lately. There's always so much to do around here. Anyways, there a lot to say so I will try to sum it up as best I can without getting to wordy.


Last weekend Sarah, Muc and I packed up our things and headed to Seoul late on Friday night. We got there after midnight but still had enough energies to enjoy a couple of beers outside the convenience store that was near our hotel. We B.S.ed with some local peoples who seemed eager to practice their English along with their hospitality, and then we headed off for a few hours of sleep in our skeezy over-priced hotel.


The next morning, we met up with a group called Adventure Korea and sat in the back of their bus as it quickly flooded with foreingers - 'waeguk-eun' as we're called here. Our first stop was the Demilitarized Zone - famed as DMZ - which is the area surrounding the deadly border between North and South Korea. For an area a couple miles deep and hundreds accross said to be 'demilitarized' there sure is an aweful lot of military personell around. Can't say that I blame the south since the north was found to be digging invasion tunnels all along the border during the 70's. Four of such tunnels have been found over the years and the search continues for what they believe to be another dozen or more that exist!!


Although the media is continuously ominous about the Korean situation and there is a constant high strung tension at the border are, it has been years since any actual physical conflict there. The talks from both sides are wanting to unify so they have that in common! Only problem - which is no slight one - is that both sides want to unify with one condition... that their government system prevail.


It was an awakening and educational experience - truly felt like standing on a tower looking over into the Berlin Wall.




All able-bodied South Korean men are required at least two years of military service before their 30 years old. Most of them do-so straight out of secondary school so the DMZ - especially touristic areas of it - are manned with young guys like the fella in this picture who seemed to enjoy a good hug-five as much as the next reasonable person.


If you think that 2 year mandatory military service seems harsh, you should know that the north requires something more like 15 years!!! From age 18 to your early 30's in a military run by a communistic dictator (or so we were told by our South Korean tour guide). It warps your brain to know that people still live like this in our world!!!

Muc and Sarah in one of the infiltration tunnels - a very interesting thing to see, but when you get down there you realize one thing that should have been obvious all along.... it's just a tunnel. :)

A panaramic view from one of the observatories into North Korea. Here we are, free as the day we were born and to be two miles north means you have no life of your own - strange feeling!

Finally of the last things we did on that eventful Saturday was to track down this beautiful bridge....... and bungee jump off of it! All 3 of us got the job done - it being the first time for Muc and I. We all LOVED it and came out unscathed minus some popped blood-vessels in Muc's eyeball. It actually looks pretty cool and he's been able to torture his young students with it in the meantime! Here is a link to my video below if you haven't already seen it on facebook. listed in 'videos' on my profile, there are a couple more videos of the weekend too - one being of us trying to catch catfish with our bare hands in a rice patty swamp marsh; some kind of Korean rite of passage?? :)

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=185106315&v=app_2392950137#!/video/video.php?v=617182740532

I've been here for 2 and a half month now and have been with Sarah mostly everyday since day 10 that I arrived. She is fast becoming one of my best friends and we're really doing well aside from missing all of our family and friends back home!

I can't belive the wedding is coming up in a couple of weeks!! I have some big things to do in the meantime too however - including rock climbing and baseball yet today, Seoul next weekend to meet Sarah's mom and sister when they land to visit, a half marathon the following day and Jeju Island the weekend after that!!

I love you guys and will seen you soon!! Thanks for reading! :)