Is it that big a victory? (Snoopy Dance!)

Oh man.. I've been trying to get the last book in the Modern Korean Short Stories collection for about a year. There are 10 books in all, and I've picked most of them up here in Korea at used bookstores.

The book is Early Spring, Mid-Summer.

Unfortunately, the only swine selling it wanted $318.50 for it, and when another copy popped up the other swine priced it at $318.51.

I see what you did there.

However, randomly cruising Amazon today, I seem to have found a victory.



3 Dollars.... if true, that's epic. I've ordered it and it is being sent to the BKF's house.

Crossing fingers!

LOL... my students judge me..

It is nearly beyond belief

At about noon this morning (Sunday in the land of tomorrow) Yvonne and I and a friend who had spent the night headed into Itaewon for breakfast at Sam Ryans. It's a good place to eat, because you can order everything a la carte.

Which Yvonne took advantage of in spades.

Yvonne ordered...
4 eggs
4 pieces of bacon
4 pieces of toast
Large orange juice.



The waitress then asked if this was the order for both of us!

As it turned out, it wasn't enough, and Yvonne added another 4 slices of toast and two cups of tea (as they did not have hot chocolate) to the mix (there is the extra toast in the background):





The waitress asked Yvonne if she were pregnant, and came by after Yvonne left to call her a "really big customer."^^

LOL.. maybe it's true it's the students who keep you going?

My mystery ability to have birthday every day on Facebook causes a student to post this to me:

WoW! Happy birthday first before everyone else post on your wall!! wish you all the best!. I was talking about your positivity with other friends. how enlightening you are. great spirit. Thats what Koreans need..God bless you..!

Now.. that's either a student who really likes me, or one who knows how to get an A+!

Well, an A. There should be an apostrophe in "Thats." ^^

Yes, this means YOU!^^

Grandfather watches the grandfather clock
And the phone hasn't rang for so long
And the time flies by like a vulture in the sky
Suddenly he breaks into song

I'm waiting by the phone
Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone
I'm waiting by the phone
Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone

Hello, speak up, is there somebody there?
These hang-ups are getting me down
In a world frozen over with over-exposure
Let's talk it over, let's go out and paint the town

I'm waiting by the phone
Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone

Cause I want somebody to shove
I need somebody to shove
I want somebody to shove me

You're a dream for insomniacs, prize in the Cracker Jacks
All the difference in the world is just a call away

And I'm waiting by the phone
Waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone
Yes I'm waiting by the phone
I'm waiting for you to call me up and tell me I'm not alone

Puttering Saturday

After an awesome Friday and a night of sleep that was good except for.. well..

{Yvonne enters room at 3am}
Charles: "You're going to need to go out and get a blanket."
{Yvonne snatches blanket from off of Charles}
{Charles curses and snatches blanket back }
{making as much noise as humanly possible, Yvonne goes out and gets a blanket she tosses and turns for 15 thoroughly awakening minutes then leaves to sleep on the couch}
{Charles spends 2 hours trying to get back to sleep}

The good news is that I then slept til nearly 11! Then we both headed down the street to get a coffee (mine a delicious double shot) and shop for plants. I bought some green-looking one, for that is what I favor in plants, as well as some fertilizer (비료). The entire project looked like this:



With the project successfully concluded (use your imagination - it's that plant in a larger pot), nothing was left but to continue to monitor the chicken stock from Wednesday night's chicken dinner.




Yvonne is off to Gwangwhamun, so I'm at home to do a bit of cleaning, and write a couple of articles that are coming due.

Windows and shades open as it is a lovely day in Seoul...

Forget dogmeat.. eat a stupid horsie!

Over at Roboseyo's website, some cultural imperialists are arguing it is wrong to eat dog meat. These folks are mainly vegetarians (LAME!) and vegans (LAMEST!), who I will not judge, for judgment is wrong (THEY ARE LAME AND DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THEIR TEETH ARE FOR!). Then there are the idiots who claim that dogs are different from other meat because they fetch our newspapers and can lick their own balls (these anthropomorphists, I believe, are jealous of that and thus over idealize dogs).

But forget dogs... you can eat an animal that is a pet, a source of travel and in Black Velvet.

Yup, on Jeju you can eat stoopid horsies!



We got in the restaurant accidentally, because it said "Galbijjim" (Imagine that in Korean, if you can). But we sat down and I noticed there were "course" meals that included all kinds of weird things that are NEVER together in a normal Korean restaurant: sashimi, galbijjim, some soups, etc). The galbijjim landed and was very gamey... I then looked over my shoulder and saw 말고기 (horse flesh) which is a way a live horse is never described..

Suddenly it all came together and I realized all the pictures of the noble horses running on the beach, nuzzling their puppies (or whatever little horses are called), and rearing up on their back legs?

That was to get my appetite going!

Yvonne ate it up like it was morphine-based candy!

Yvonne wAntZ dinARZ..

So, as we walk around the streets of of Jeju-si she asks if we can eat in the local restaurant.

Yeah, that's her food!

Jeju Day Three

After our rainy walk on Udo, we set off on the first "proper" section of the Olle Trail. We grabbed a cab from the hotel, which took us back to where we had been dropped off on our first day (a story that the Blogger ate, which I will repost shortly.) There, a few feet from the bus-stop, was the entrance to the first Olle Trail. On the other side of the road from it, there is an information booth that also sells small things like energy-bars and water.

That lovely picture is the beginning of the trail, and off to the right you can see the first 오름 (or "parasitic volcano' or 'small inactive volcano'). We walked for a bit, and then headed up it for a total of about 2.9 kilometers in. The views were ok, but not as good as from the 오름 we would soon go up. It was through pretty land, pastureland really, with lots of greenery, and occasional rain and cows. Also, of course, cowshit. Tons and tons of cowshit.

After a walk through the valley of the shadow of cowshit, we headed up the second 오름 the top of which had a brilliant view of Udo and a massive geographical feature that we weren't yet familiar with 일출봉, or "First Sunrise Peak." We'll get back to that.

Here is Yvonne trekking up the second 오름

And here she is triumphant, unaware of the evil that is to follow.

The first evil was that I, in shorts, managed to slip on the way down a relatively easy dirt trail. This smeared mud on my left calf to such an extent that the next day I had a differential sunburn. I tried hard not to contemplate what the cowshit % of the dirt was, and soldiered on.

Then the trail wandered down to a small store and then a flatish area with the traditional stone walls of Jeju (which I will post below this, because they are everywhere and kind of cool) and various plots of land. We wandered through this for some time, our packs growing heavier at each step.

Finally, we broke out of this (think of hedgerows in Europe) and came to a small village, in which we promptly became extremely lost, but unaware of the fact. We did notice that we were no longer seeing any of the painted blue arrows, or blue ribbons that indicated the trail, but we were confidently following a Korean family that had been on the Olle with us. One thing about the trail, if you're a "spaceout" hiker like I am, you can miss changes in the trail direction.

The evil town in which lostness ensued!

Anyway, we eventually got to a ferry port which was quite clearly NOT on the trail. By comparing a Jeju map to the Olle map, I figured out that we were on the "Shore Road" somewhere, and that by heading down it we would either rejoin the Olle, or figure out where on it we were.

Yvonne violently disagreed with this conclusion (an annoying thing she did at every opportunity) and it took some convincing to get her on the tread again. We walked a while and, sure enough, we eventually saw the reassuring blue ribbons and paint that marked the trail. Part of the reason we had got lost is that ALL road features on Jeju are marked in blue paint (e.g. gas lines, manholes) so it is easy to see false positives for trail markers. I'm not sure why the Olle folks didn't choose a different color?

Anyway, we were now on the "esplanade,' which just means footpunding regular old road. We walked past a bunch of squid hanging up to dry, and stopped for a beer and coke at a lovely roadside cafe directly after an equally lovely statue of a Haenyo (female diver for which Jeju is famous.


Then we plodded on, with so-so views of the ocean to our left.

An hour or so later, I was amazed to discover we had done a big loop... we were back at the hotel in which we had stayed the first night. Even more amusing, the guy who ran it heard our voices as we passed, and leaned out a 2nd story window and said hello to us (this story will make a bit more sense when I repost the first day). We trod on, until it became clear that we we going to end up about 300 meters from our hotel, before we finished the last 3-4 kilometers of our day.

The temptation was too much, and we headed for the hotel. ^^

We had meat for dinner, as we did basically every night that Yvonne and I were together. It's her all time favorite Korean food, though it sometimes wears me out.

The next day, Yvonne was to meet up with our friend Joy (Of the "Foreigner Joy" website) and the big geographical thing we had seen earlier turned out to be right behind the hotel. So, we decided that our next day would be hiking up that, retracing out lost section of the first trail, and then continuing on to finish the last bit of it.

At this point, I had begun to develop some awesome blisters, and a semi day off seemed quite appealing.

Olle Trail 1.1

On day two we headed over to Udo island to walk a 15 kilometer "easy" course around that island. We grabbed a cab, which was a bit ridiculous, because the hotel was close enough to the port that we didn't even get the meter turned over for the cabbie. I felt bad enough that I tipped him to the next chun-won, which was still a pathetic 3 chun-won.

The ticket office was jammed, and we got our tickets and hopped onto the ferry, which took us to one of the two ports on Udo.

We went a lot of cool places, which I will talk about when I get home and can post pictures.. Mainly, as Udo is known as "mini-Jeju," it gave us some hint of what to come, including some brilliant basaltic volcanic stuff, more of which we saw as we headed up the Olle Trail. That picture, by the way, is Yvonne tramping up the butt of the cow (Koreans believe that Udo is an island in the form of a cow lying down, but you know, with cows, they can lie down a lot of ways).

But at a certain point we not only lost the trail (which was actually the second time we'd done so) but it began to rain in horrible shitty buckets. We cranked our way past the lighthouse and to the rather nice beach on the backside of the island. Unfortunately it was really pouring by now, and Jeju is quite windy, so the rain comes in sideways like bullets. While we were stopping so that I could take a picture of Yvonne in full raingear, a car with a young/middle-aged couple stopped to make sure that we were ok. More of that lovely Jeju attitude.

We trudged on until we came to three young girls on bicycles who had stopped by the side of the road to figure out where they were going to go next. They stopped us in the middle of the road and showed us their map, and where we should go. As it turned out, even on our lost walk we had pretty much followed the Olle trail (not unlikely given that it's a small island that you just kind of walk counter-clockwise on). We dried out in a bus stop with a halmoni, and caught a bus that sort of drove us back the way we had come, and brought us back to the port.

We returned to Songsan and our new hotel pretty unimpressed by what we had seen of the Olle trail. It had basically been on a main road except for some rather random and short excursions into horse-fields and meadows that then immediately dumped us back on the road.

Underwhelmed, we contemplated out plans. We decided we would do Olle Trail 1 the next day, and see if it was a bit better.

For dinner we had some of the fattiest pork we've had in Korea....

An unispiring day, and we were kind of beat down by all the pavement we had walked on, and all the camping equipment in our backpacks - and we hadn't seen a single site worth camping in.

Alas!

Oh well, we had seen some cool basalt formations in the sea, some cool beaches, and at least gotten a start.