Ed's Post of all Posts!

Okay. Hi, everyone! We have been in Korea for 1 full week now.  The picture is Kale and Charlie (Kale's godfather).  We haven't sold the child or anything...if you want to know.  We were at a open cafe near Seoul Tower. I have not been able to arrange the pictures so that the more recent goes to the bottom. So, please go down to the bottom and come along on our journey through pictures.

Off to see Charlie, the god father!

Yulie waiting at a small cafe for a subway train. Being under the age, Kale and Yulie ride for free.

This is a series of pics of Kale, watching Disney Jr channel broadcasting in Korean, instead of English. He said, rather appropriately, "I don't understand a thing they say." His Korean, however, has shown much improvement in the last week. Most importantly, he wants to learn Korean now.

Can't live without her milk bottle. On our trip to Jae's parents' place, we forgot to pack this bottle.  Yulie was often cranky to say the least. She is now happily rejoined with her comfort zone.

We are returning from Jae's parents' place to my parents' place. This is in a subway train. The series of pictures portrays all of her moods about life and travel in general :)

Yep. They are sleeping again at another restaurant.

The traditional Korean house in the pictures so far is the residence of Jae's paternal uncle. On one side of the house, I found this green bicycle with cut bamboo behind it. I thought they went well together.

Yulie and Kale wanting to get off the porch to play with house dogs.

More of traditional Korean architecture.

Traditional Korean houses. This is the view from the raised wooden porch / corridor, seen on the picture above.

Some authentic Korean food.

When Kale woke up, Yulie went out like a candle. Kale was  nice enough to lend his leg for her sister for almost an hour. We insisted on taking turns, but Kale was proud to be of service. We were proud of him, too.

Yep. Sleeping. The Jet-lag is a difficult thing to shake off.

Jae posing for the picture. Kale is off to the dream land.

Kale in the same train. He remembered, though faintly, his last train rides 2 years ago.

We are moving by train, off to Jae's parents' place in Gwangju.  This was Yulie's first train ride. The whole ride took about 4 hours.

Jae and I ate well and soon fell into food coma, while the kids are in sleep coma. As we ate, they slept through the whole meal. As in traditional Korean restaurant, the place had semi-private rooms where everyone sits on the floor. This suit us fine because our kids could sleep safely on the flat floor instead of slumping on chairs.

The tofu, pork and kimchi combination go well with rice-based alcoholic beverage.

Some of the local foods we had. The square ones are tofu in different colors. To the right is steamed pork. Behind is slightly stir-fried Kimchi. 

Here's my father, Yulie and Kale. They should not be standing on the offering stone, not especially with their shoes on. Still, my dad wasn't bothered by it. He was just too excited to have them over in Korea, at his house and reporting at the ancestral graves.

Hi, Yulie. The black stone next to her is a tombstone. We came here because we need to "report" to deceased ancesters that we are visiting Korea.

Kale at my family ancestor graves. Kale has the pose of Kim Jung Eun of North Korea. :)

Flying past Japan now. One hour and 40 minutes to go.

The meal in front of Jae is actually for Kale.

Sleeping, Kale missed his meal before arrival. The last two hours of flight a series of turbulences.  Kale had no idea.

Here, she is catching up on what in-flight movies she missed in her slumber.

We are flying over Japan. Two more hours to go. Running a bit short on patience and sleep.  Kale is fast asleep at this point, while Yulie is slowly waking up--rested, but hungry.

Here's Yulie, watching an in-flight movie. She soon fell asleep and remained sleeping for 9 hours straight. Jae and I were more than thankful.

Kale is bored senseless. We told him not to use Mom's Kindle or his Samsung Tablet because we didn't want the battery to drain before the airplane ride. Being a good boy as he is, he followed his instruction well, but the boredom was just too much. You can see Jae in the center.

Yulie is seated in her seat in the airplane. This was the first time she rode one. I wasn't sure how she would react when the plane takes off. Despite my uncertainty, however, she was great. She even said things like, "Are you ready to blast off?" I guess watching Netflix movies could be educational :)

Here we are, ready to leave. This is SF International Airport. I would like to thank Jae's colleague who let us use her stroller. This light collapsible stroller has served us quite well throughout the journey so far. 

UnSprung Forward

A lovely walk to work... Had to won the wild  right side of the road, because I'm allergic to some yellow flower that blankets the wall on the right side. Still, gave me a chance to walk past some rather pretty flowers and stop to take a picture of them with the trusty Iphone.

At the top of the hill is this impenetrable collection of signs - perhaps it says "Danger, The Catholic Snowman..." well, that's where it kind of breaks apart for me, so suggest whatever you might

Then it's a quick path up to the Sanchaek-ro, the walking/biking path that circles Namsan. LOL, this isn't even the part that has the stream.

Starting to get hit by students who need help with next year's applications, or letters of recommendation. I'm happy to report that they aren't waiting for 'the day before the due date' as much as they used to.

Other than that, had a dinner with an agent who is interested in me writing a book along the lines of the "Looking for Hong-Gildong" project that I'm working on the KTLIT site.

Should be fun, and got Yvonne and I to head over the river and get library cards at the National Library and National Digital Library. I produce this high-velocity tripe-spatter at a coffee shop before the walk begins... I figure, maybe an hour to get there und moderate sun and immoderate headphones, then... well, I'll snap some shots their, because the digital library has something quite cool about it..

Other than that, living on the financial downlow to be able to finance my upcoming trip with the Eds and then the summer trip to Australia, Malaysia, and either Vietnam or Thailand.

Semi-lazy days interspersed with brief bursts of crazy productivity (often when I wake up in the early morning and everything is quiet). Yvonne is off learning German, which she is certain will prove invaluable in communicating with the savage nationals of this unusual country. I am not one to chivvy her beliefs, as it means she has Saturday mornings at the Summer "Concentrate on German Camp."

I might have chosen a different name.^^

An awesome thing.... came across this creepy critter on the stairs by my house..

Came back a bit later and thought, 'hmmmmmm, perhaps I should see what is in the message in a bottle.' It was this...

And it leads to this guy's page....

Kind of cool...

Letters to acquaintances #1

 I posit (which I sometimes do when I am feeling philosophical; other times I get depressed and drink) a conservation field theory of work (and laziness). The physics, of course is trivial to a polymath such as yourself.

Some of the implications of this are that:

1)   Work can be neither created nor destroyed

a.     Therefore doing any work is foolish, for it cannot affect the total amount in the universe

2)   The form of work can be altered by container

a.     Thus, although it can’t really be dealt with in any worthwhile way, it can be packaged differently and shifted around (I’m not sure I need to be explicit here and say I mean shifted to others?)

3)   The density of work can be altered

a.     Consequently I prefer to spread it out the maximum amount I can

I think, perhaps, that this is best summed up by that Great American Philosopher, Johnny Cash, when he croaked, “16 tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.”

At the HiAnimal Show

Did a little bit of editing for the folks at 10 Magazine, and got paid off in tickets to various art exhibits. Looking at them this morning we discovered that one was just down the street at the War Museum, so we headed off to see it. Pretty bizarre with that combination of nature/reality and artificiality that Koreans are so good at producing.

Yvonne molested every exhibit she could

 


 

 

Til one molested her back

 


And I marveled at the artificiality

Boxeo

Caribou Agonistes

Bestiality Exhibit

Lion IZ King!

 

 

 

 

Rudolph In His Native Environment

Kind of weird, but thoroughly enjoyable.

Its' like Wikipedia KNOWS me!

So I'm trying to remind myself how to post graphics on the wiki...

and my search gets this:

 

It's like the know who I am!^^

The end of Malaysia, for now

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Long View of Batu Caves

So, after the presentation it was off to lunch with Professor Mustapha and her friend, who were absolutely hysterical. We had got a hint of that the previous evening when the parking lot had given us a bad ticket and we couldn’t exit. Mustapha and friend played Mutt and Jeff for us while we waited – the classic answer after the friend had to park the car sideways and run upstairs was, “oh, the tickets fail all the time.” Which seems to suggest a problem, and surely enough, as we began to (finally) successfully pull through, we noticed another car with a bad ticket and we think (hope, really, since the folks in the other car didn’t speak English, that we pantomimed to them what they needed to do. Or, they are still trapped in the parking lot, getting weaker as I type. By about the third night, the underground-parking-lot weasels, teeth sharp as razors and claws fetid with the gore of previous victims, will come!).

The lunch was good, and afterwards they took us down to our new hotel, which was in every way superior to the other one, including a rooftop bar that sold three pints of Carlsberg for $55Sing.  After we got to the hotel we first went (Yvonne’s addictions always coming first) to the Junk Bookstore, which was actually pretty cool. I picked up a slender volume of PG Wodehouse stories, and Yvonne got, well, whatever kind of thing it is Yvonne gets. Returning, we took advantage of the rooftop bar, and then ordered dinner from room service.

The next day was the big tourist day.  Which really wasn’t much. We went to Batu Caves, which was conveniently on the subway, and here we met the only real touts we would meet on the trip, selling little knick-knacky stuff. Batu Caves was cool, but dirty and smelly. The smell has to do with bat guano, I think, but the Caves were also cleaning up from some kind of previous festival. Monkeys, roosters, and pigeons were pretty much everywhere, and we watched with amusement as a very young boy was swarmed by pigeons. We were less amused, later, when some monkeys got fairly aggressive. On the way down from the  two chambers of the above-ground caves we stopped to take a tour of the Dark Caves. This was completely worth it, and I was amazed at how many people walked right by it without considering it. 45 minutes of nature lecture and awesome sights and sounds (or lack thereof, sometimes).  Then it was back into town and a trip to the Petronas Towers, which we checked out, but we did not end up going onto the tower bridge, because only single tickets were available for the next few slots, and we had a dinner date with a professor Manaf an her husband. Yvonne did manage to borrow an umbrella from the hotel and lose it within 20 minutes, setting a new person best for her.

In-Cave Waterfall

Dinner was grand, with a lot of chit-chat about cultural differences and misunderstandings, and it ran a bit long, and then back, as we say in rap, to the hotel.

The next day began, of course, with me making the nearly fatal mistake of listening to Yvonne.^^ This was partly because I had made a bone-headed mistake of my own. AirAsia, concerned for our travel, had sent us an email noting that it was Chinese New Year’s weekend and that travel times, and particularly time spent in airports, might be extended. I wondered why they had sent that out to me  nearly 4 days in advance of the weekend, but I dutifully set out to check in online, where I promptly entered my passport number incorrectly. Ooops!  This meant we should probably get to the airport even earlier than we had planned. Fortunately, Yvonne told me that we were leaving from KUL’s main terminal and that would make everything much easier, as we could take the express train. Except, of course, that we  weren’t leaving from the main terminal, which I only figured out after we were already on the train. Fortunately there is also a bus-shuttle between the main and low-cost terminals, and even with leaving to the wrong airport, we got to LCCT in just about the same time it would have taken to go directly.

Once we got there, the passport SNAFU was fixed up in a jiff, and it turned out the airport was relatively deserted, as we were traveling on the actual New Year’s Eve. Air Asia had sent the warning out early because travel the days before were hectic, but both Kuala Lumpur and Singapore had pretty much cleared out (lots and lots of Indians and Chinese go home, and most Malays head to their hometowns – a lot like what happens in Seoul at the same time.

The flight to Singapore is less than an hour, and we walked out of the airport, into a cab, and over to our hotel at  Joo Chiat, which thankfully was what had been advertised on the web. We walked around the neighborhood and had some awesome food at a roadside stand, then beers at a nearby pub. The neighborhood was pretty shut down, but what was open hinted that it would be a pretty partying neighborhood in regular circumstances.

Malaysia and Kuala Lumpur = Awesome. But it is goodbye

We shall get to all that title nonsense later, but for now a bit of, as PG Wodehouse might say, F-ing in the B (Not what some of you weirdos might think).

What did happen in Malaysia?

An unfriendly suggestion

First night we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast one train station from KUL. A nice enough place, but in the middle of nowhere. We had a glass of juice and turned in. The next day was a lovely breakfast and a conversation with a Canadian couple who were doing pretty much the same thing we were – hitting KL late at night, then hopping up to Langkawi the next day. Then it was off to a bus and to LCCT, one of the most chaotic airports I’ve ever been in, with masses of people milling about. No major problems though, and shortly we were on a plane to Langkawi. Once aboard Yvonne began a campaign of attrition against my stance we wouldn’t need a car. She alternated whining with shorter bits of whining, and then a bit of whining to mix things up. As I had no driver’s license with me, I was kind of against the plan (for reasons anyone familiar with Yvonne’s driving history might guess), but by dint of superior… well …. whining, she prevailed. So we got a small car and began our adventure of teaching Yvonne the difference between the right side of the road and the left, since Malaysia drives on the opposite side of the road from what we are used to. One other strange thing, the rent a car is turned over to you with the gas-tank meter already in the red, and the warning that you must “first get petrol.”  This was an adventure on at least two levels, the first being Yvonne’s right-left dyslexia, and the second being we had no idea where the hell we were, or where the gas station might be.  A couple of stops to confer with friendly locals, and had 30,000 ringgit of gas in the tank, which turned out to be enough for the entire island stay.

Excelsior!

Then it was off to Oriental Park. Like many 3^rd World-ish places, Langkawi is flocking with motorbikes and scooters, many driven by tourists who don’t know where they are going and are unused to driving on the left. The roads are also a bit narrow, so this was a “fun” thing to do that I don’t hope to soon repeat.  We got minorly lost a few times, but the island is small enough that we made it safely to our hotel, which was quite nice.

We had time to burn that afternoon, so we went up the Langkawi air-tram. Going up was kind of scary as it was a bit windy, and Yvonne was reduced to making little grunty noises of fear, while I pretended to not be on the verge of huddling in a fetal ball and whimpering my way to the top.  But we made it, and the views were certainly worth it. The tram stops at the first peak, where you can get off for one set of views, then makes about a 30 degree swing to the left, over one last appalling precipice, and then you reach the top, top.^^

Going down the tram was much easier as you were basically looking off to the far horizon, and not down and into the pancake-like death that awaited in the ravines below the cable.

A breakfast of some kind

Then back to the village, a bit of dinner, and 4 channels of really bad TV.

The next day we headed into Pentai Cenang to meet with a friend who was in Langkawi, coincidentally, “seeing a man about a thing,” a description that was intentionally vague enough that we didn’t really ask any questions. We searched for a bookstore, but one was closed for vacation, and the other was inexplicably closed. So, it was off to the stunning (by which I mean the heat stunned us insensible) beach, which gave awesome views of blue water, boats, islands, and bikini clad babes, whom Yvonne ogled with shocking lack of concern for getting caught at it.^^

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After a couple of hours of that, we headed back to Oriental Village and the hotel.

The next day we headed up the 7 Wells Waterfall. We left relatively early to avoid the heat. Oddly, no one else seemed to have thought of this strategy, and we were basically alone on the trail. We got to the top (a bit over 500 stairs at the last bit), and wandered around taking pictures. On the way up we’d spotted a couple of the bigger, brown monkeys on the island, who were swinging through the trees. Then down to the bottom of the falls (conveniently about halfway down the stairs), which presented a much nicer photo op.  On the way down we ran into a guy with three older women, who were laboring at about step 100. He asked us about the path, and we recommended they just go to the bottom of the falls, since the view from the top was a lesser version of the view from the top of the tram and neither, really was worth the myocardial infarctions his team of angels would suffer, nor the bad back he would get dragging their corpses down the stairs.

Next stop was off to feed the Macaque monkeys, which I let Yvonne do, as all the typing my job requires means that I need all 10 fingers. The non-macaque monkeys are browner, larger, and much more shy, but the Macaque are small, relatively friendly, and extremely, extremely interested in what you might have in your bag because, after all, it could be delicious. The "friendly" thing would turn out to be in distinct contrast to some monkeys we would meet later.

Yvonne wanted to go to “Book Village” (her addiction, again), which was on the map, but a closer scrutiny of reality (by me, of course) showed that it had been out of business for at least two years. Yvonne is Republican in the sense that she does not believe reality should impinge on what she wants, so it took about 45 minutes of…er… discussion(?) before I could persuade her that it would be a waste of time to head off across the island to see something that no longer existed.

Babylon on the beach

After that, back to Centai Penang and the Starbucks where, predictably, Mike was hanging out. I then headed to the beach-bar (Babylon, baby!), while Mike continued to drink coffee and Yvonne went out on another fruitless search for an open bookstore.

Eventually we all re-convened at Bablyon, drinking and chatting. About halfway into it, we saw a bizarre apparition. Three people came from the road. Two were women, in shirts with sleeves that ran to their wrists, pants that ran fully to ankles, scarves, hats, and two enormous parasols. These two were followed by a similarly dressed man, absent the umbrella, who never once turned away from his video camera, as he filmed the women’s procession towards the beach. Yvonne, Mike, and I, all looked at each other an in unison mouthed, “Koreans!”

As they passed, I asked them in Korean if they were Koreans, and the man just nodded, then grimly returned to his filming. They marched out onto the beach, promenaded this way and that, and then grimly filed back to the main road, never to be seen by us again.

Once back at the Oriental Village we went to the “Tiger Adventure” which turned out to be an orphaned tiger cub in a small enclosure. You could order a drink (and fries) and watch the tiger lay around or pace in looped figure 8s. It looked like a rather drab experience. We had the local equivalent of slushies and moved on after the tiger came over and posed for us.

The next day we hung out at beaches, fed more monkeys, stopped for a roadside drink, then headed to the airport. A quick flight to KCCT, a bus to KL Sentral, a slight wait there, and then the Malaysian Prof who had invited me to speak picked us up and took us to our hotel.

Purty Langkawi

The hotel was epic, among the worst we’ve ever stayed at, and a testament to what a skilled cameraman can do on the interwebs. The room was puny and smelt heavily of mildew, the television was broken, and there was no window. On the other hand, there were bugs, so maybe that evens things out. The shower never exceeded tepid, the doors and walls were thin wood through which the extremely noisy, and in one case repeatedly ill, neighbors could be heard. The hotel was also in the middle of nowhere. This was problematic because there was also no complementary anything, and we ended up ranging the soggy neighborhood until we found a restaurant that would sell us a bottle of water. The next morning, après-tepid shower, I was standing in the main room and felt something splash on the back of my neck.  Looking up, I could see a hole in the ceiling, which I could see entirely through. Fortunately, the one thing the hotel did have that worked perfectly was internet, so the first thing I did after we got settled was make sure to reserve a different hotel for the next two nights.

All that joy was amplified the next morning when Yvonne rose from her slumber, more like Mars the God of War than Aurora the Goddess of Dawn, and announced that she had lost her passport.

Not just her passport, of course, but every form of identification she had.

All in one purse.

All in a foreign land.

This was, as we Koreans say, a wicket with a bit of tar on it (we normally say this while at templestays). Massive search revealed nothing, so we developed a plan, which Yvonne forgot every 15 minutes.

Our driver arrived and HURRAH! the lost passport had been lost in the car the night before. So we were, for the moment, good.

The presentation went very well.  It started about 15 minutes late, so I had to hurry a little bit at the end, but that’s good, because it means I have room to cut and sharpen before I do the version of it in Seoul. Yvonne said the history part was a bit dry and dull, so that will need to be spruced up. The room in which I did the presentation was cold, like icy cold, and I was glad to be the person up on stage, because it meant I could pace around to stay warm. I was well received, although a Buddhist professor did have some questions about my analysis of how Buddhism affected Korean han. This will be a good thing overall, as that is one of the weak points of my argument, and this taking it on the road thing is intended to discover the weak points…

And with that, presentation moderately successful, I leave the rest to the next post.