Koreans are really nice sometimes

As I am sitting here in the PC room, the guy working here came over to me and just gave me a cup of hot chocolate.

It's times like these that I really like the people here. This might be one of the best cups of hot coco that I've ever had.

A beautiful poem about Japan

Here's a poem that one of my students wrote:

Japan is bad
Japan is crazy
because Dok-do is Korea's island!

Japan is very bad!
I don't like Japan.

Korea is very good,
But Japan is very bad!


I'll just let that one sink in for awhile...

Jinha Beach

This weekend ended up being a pretty fun weekend. It consisted of showing some of the Greenpeace folks around the city at night, checking out some local foreigner (isn't that an oxymoron?) sports action and heading to Jinha Beach for some nice scenery, some live music and an international windsurfing competition.

There's not too much to talk about with the Greenpeace folks. Basically I took them, via cab, to a couple of the foreigner bars in the old downtown area. It was good fun with some good people. The same thing basically happened on Saturday night.

On Saturday, the foreign ESL community sat up a large "triathalon". It consisted of three sports: soccer, rugby and American football. There were seven teams: Eastern Canada, Central Canada, Western Canada, England, Ireland, USA, Australia (which the writer of the score tables spelled "Austrailia"), and New Zealand. There were two divisions, with each team playing the other teams in their division three times; once in each of the three sports. The top teams in each division played off, with Western Canada taking the championship. They seemed to be the top team in every sport, save rugby. New Zealand owned everyone in rugby. The scores were in the range of 12-0 to 7-1.

I represented the entire country of Canada by not playing on a team, but by helping to serve the beer! "One for you, one for me", was my motto. As usual, this was not a good idea. I quickly had to give up on that idea, changing my motto to: "one for me, and screw you". Heh heh.

Sunday turned out to be really cool. If you're expecting a "drunken Blake tries to pretend he's Tucker Max and buggers up", look elsewhere. As fun as it might be to be him, I'm not Tucker. I'm Beer Bong Blake.

After waking up on my kitchen/bedroom/living room floor at 2pm to the sound of a t-shirt octopus and vegetable market being set at the base of my apartment building (as they seem to do to me every weekend), I decided that this was the day that I was going to go to the beach to see some windsurfing. I threw on some clothes, put a bandana that I'd bought in Daejeon over my still greesy-from-hairgel-head, grabbed my bike helmet and headed out the door. After ten minutes of wondering why my bike wouldn't start, I headed back to the second floor of my apartment building to grab my keys. Motorbikes start much easier if you have keys to start the engine with. Within a half hour, I was on my way to Busan/Pusan (same place).

Huh?

Why does that road sign say "Pusan 45 km"? Apparently Ulsan is closer to the second largest city in the Republic of Korea than I'd remembered from my last visit to Busan. Much to my relief, since I really didn't feel like getting lost in Busan, the next road sign read something to the nature of "left: a dozen huge industrial complexes... and Jinha beach". After passing at least four dozen huge industrial complexes, I found myself riding though some really beautiful looking rice fields en route to the small town of Jinha.

Jinha beach is actually part of Ulsan. A few years ago, Ulsan ate up and incorperated all of the small towns around it into "Ulsan". The town of Jinha is now the southernmost part of Ulsan. It's surrounded by the East Sea (*cough* Sea of Japan *cough*) on the, well, east side and by trees and rice paddies on the other sides. The Ulsan international windsurfing tournament, a week-long extravaganza, was being featured. I went to the tournament website and this is what it gave me:

From Asianwindsurfingtour.com:

Ulsan is a major port city on the eastern edge of Korea, 50km north east of Pusan, facing the East Sea and the coast of Honshu. Its function as a port and its outward looking nature has always made Ulsan a gateway to the country – and so it continues.

Ulsan has a population of over 1 million and it’s a busy metropolis symbolic of the industrial and economic growth of Korea. A green belt divides the metropolitan area from the fishing and farming villages and here too is Jinha Beach, site of the AWT event.

Jinha Beach is a 2km long white sand beach blessed with clean water and backed by a pine forest. Wind speeds are expected to vary between 10 and 20 knots out of the north-east. Expected air temp is 18 degrees C and a 2-3mm shortie is recommended for sailing.

The “main event” will be a downwind slalom event and there will also be a speed course and a freestyle windsurfing competition. There is no windsurfing equipment rental shops on Jinha Beach so competitors must bring what they need. A “wide style” board of 140 litres is recommended together with sails of 8 / 9 / 10 meter sails.

I had a great time just wandering around the beach and checking out the action. They had a stage set up with live bands from all over the world playing. When I sat down and watched, there was a South American style band playing. After their set, I had a chance to chat with one of the guys and find out a bit about them. They were a group from Equator that is touring around Asia. They've been in Korea for three months now. The guy that I was talking to didn't really speak any English, so I had a chance to practice some Spanish. He was pretty happy that I could speak some Spanish to me, so we had a nice basic conversation; "where are you from, where did you learn Spanish, what are you doing in Korea, etc.".

Some of the other acts included a Korea rock band, who kicked some ass, and an interesting Japanese group. The Japanese group consisted of a pretty girl on keyboard, a Mr. Fuji look-a-like on the flute and a girl telling a story to the music. I was really surprised to recongize some Japanese words in their story, since I was expecting it to be in Korea. It was a really awesome atmosphere.

Following that, I just wandered around the beach and the town. I made sure to get my feet wet in the ocean. It was quite cool. Those windsurfers definetely needed their wetsuits. I walked along the street which boarders the large sand beach, checking out the various restaurants. Most of them featured small aquariums in front of them, showcasing the soon to be eaten live food. Most streets in Korea seem to feature aquariums in front of restaurants, but being right on the ocean these were much more prevalent. I must've stood in front of one of the aquariums for a good 10 minutes, just watching some squid repeatedly run into the glass walls. Poor, strange looking, things... I kind of felt sorry for them.

About that time, I decided that I was a bit hungry. I ran into a few of my white devil peers, who were also looking for food. After they couldn't decide what to do, I got bored with them and entered into a random 7-Eleven type store. What did I buy? Dried squid.

I guess I didn't feel too sorry for the poor and tasty creatures that I was just watching...

After filling my belly with a multi-tentacled creature, I hopped onto my bad motor scooter and I was heading out to the highway. Before heading back home, I dropped by Benchwarmers bar and had a nice chat with Troy, the owner, about nothing in particular for an hour or so. Then I went home.

The internet photo thief strikes again!

In retaliation for having my camera stolen, I've not taking up the hobby of shamelessly robbing digital photographs from whoever that I see fit.

My latest victim is Mr. James Duggan.

At approximately 22:30, Russian Federation Zone 8 time, a website, under the alias of "MSN Spaces: Something Profound: Well... Maybe", was bloggeraped. It seems that the following 13 pictures were not taken by Astroboy, but were taken by someother person. This person is none other than the aforementioned Mr. Duggan. The aggressor in this shameless bloggerapery was the self convicted, not-quite-almost-famous, Astroboy in Korea (also known as Blake-teacher or "hey you!").

I'm sure that you'll read this soon enough James, so consider this a complement.

James, you have been bloggeraped!

James before... 

...and after. 

See those water fountains just below the centre of the picture? I made 10,000 won just by running through them with no shirt on. I'm awesome. 

Let's go Ulsan! 

It's Rhys! Does everyone from New Zealand have that shocked expression on their face when they see a camera? 

The Ulsan Hyundai Tigers in action verses Seoul (I think). 

Where did everybody go??? 

Munsu World Cup statium; side two. 

Munsu World Cup stadium; side one. 

James, who unknowingly let me use this set of pictures, getting peaceful with a girl that he calls Gun-Hui. This photo was apparently taken right before he possibly got into a hottub with up to ten naked women.  

Kimchi jigaae, a popular spicy soupy thing here. James probably ate this. 

Steve; master of his stick. 

Jeff and Al from Tombstone, at Tombstone. 

I just couldn't resist. I shamelessly stole this wonderful photo of Daejeon from Ryan Cordell's site. Even after he told me that he'd generously let me use his photos, I still took this without asking.

For the record, if I steal someone's photos and you are the owner of them, just tell me to take it/them down and I will. I really don't see what the big deal would be, since it's more of a compliment to the photographer's work than anything

This is my friend Rob when he was living in the same basement suite as me. This is the "before marriage" photo. The next one is the "after marriage" photo. There's quite a difference. 

Here's a nice picture of my good friend, Rob, and his beautiful wife, Heather. I was quite the honour to be the best man at his wedding last summer. This was taken at Heather's graduation from her education degree. She just got a job teaching in Calgary, so they'll be leaving Edmonton later in the summer. Good luck guys! 

Here's an in-game picture from the super popular online racing game called Kart Rider that everyone here seems to play. It's basically a copy of Mario Kart. 

Opps, someone left this picture on the PC that I'm using. Welcome to the internet!

A lot of convenience stores have these little arcade games set up. They're just a Playstation 2 locked into a little cabinet. They cost something like 10 won (about 10 cents) to play.

Sojufest

Sojufest was on last weekend at the Ulsan University. Soju is the local alcoholic beverage in Korea. It's similar to vodka, but it's usually made from sweet potatoes (rice if it's the expensive stuff). It costs the equivelant of $1 a bottle (355 ml, give or take). It's really cheap and it mixes well with soft drinks. It's around 25-30% alcohol volume.

Basically, the main area of the university grounds was covered in large, open tents with picnic tables underneath. It was a lot like a small town fair, with the beer gardens (well, soju gardens), midway games (like pop the balloon with a dart and win a stuffed animal) and little make-shift shops set up; selling random food and glowsticks. Come to think of it, the entire place was a large soju garden. I basically just chowed down on pineapples on a stick, chicken-rice curry and drank some soju. It was great. I don't really need to go on about the entire night, but let's just say that I had a lot of fun and that I met some really cool and fun people. I've you know what the shopping cart shabang from "Kenny Roger's on Jackass" is, then you have an idea of how the night went. Just picture me running around, pushing cute girls in a shopping cart full of empty soju bottles and you'll figure things out.

Saturday ended up being pretty cool. Two of my girlfriends, Leah and Michele, had volenteered to teach kids English for the Greenpeace folks. It was sort of a nice gesture from Greenpeace to the community. I showed up when they were already teaching. Those guys are actually pretty cool to hang out with. Basically, I just hung out with them all day and evening. I didn't drink at all, since I'd rode my motorbike there. It took me about a half hour to 45 minutes to find them from where I live on the other side of the city. I'm really learning my way around now that I have a vehicle. I'm enjoying my bike.

Some of the Korean kids camped out at the Greenpeace camp for the night, and I had a lot of fun entertaining them before bedtime. One girl, about 10-12 years old, was extra sweet and cute. She followed a lot of us foreigners around, trying to teach us "Korean-speak". She'd say a word in English, and then say, "in Korean, it's this word". It was extra funny one time when I asked her what her scooter was called in Koren-speak. She said,

"In English, scooter. In Korean, kickbordu."

I replied to her, "kickboard?".

"No", she said. "kickbordu".

"Kickbordu?", I repeated.

She joyfully replied, "O.K.!!!", in her super excited voice, which showed itself whenever she'd thought that she had taught me something.

She was great. If I ever have a little girl, I want her to be just like that girl.

Sunday was basically a nice, lazy day. I made it to my third K-League football game, between the Ulsan Hyundai Tigers and the Cheonbok Hyundai Motors. Ulsan won, one-nil. If you're curious about the K-League, you can check out this site: www.k-leaguei.com. If you have high speed internet, you can watch some of the games online. If you look close enough, you might be able to pick me out (probably not). I usually site in about the 10th row in the green section (behind the net), just to the left of the insane cheering section with the group of white people.


The Ulsan Hyundai logo

Following the game, CJ, Anne, Michelle and myself wandered off in search of food. First, we found an obscure Japanese resturant with a cool atmosphere. He had a few chicken and beef squres, and then moved on. It was then that we came upon a true gem. We entered into a small corner resturant with little figures of cats fishing above the door (catfish, get it?). We ordered a 12,000 won ($12 US) seafood meal. What we got was an amazing hotpan on top of a burner filled with ocean goodness. There were crabs, scallops, mussels, baby octopus, shimp and probably some other good things too. They were all simmering in a garlic sauce. It was nothing short of damned good. I'll for sure be going back there. My mouth is watering right now as I'm thinking of it.

After the good food, we make our way to our apartements and that was basically it.

My highlight tonight was watching a Tom Hanks movie called Shipwrecked (I think) and then going for a ride on my bad motor scooter before coming here to update this blog.

Here's a group picture from my weekend BBQ. I'm the guy with the dark hair in the front row. Roger's the guy on the far right in the second row, giving a peace sing and wearing a white cap. Roger's girlfriend, Su-Young, is second from the left in the second row and her youngest son is beside her. 

Just who are these people anyway?

I get quite a few visitors to my site that are almost complete mysteries to me. They are complete strangers to me. I only know a couple little things about them; which time zone they are in and the webpage that they were visiting before they came here. I've had around 3500 individual website visits since the beginning of February and I'm forecasted to have around 1500 hits for this month. Not that many compared to a lot of other sites, but it's still interesting to me since I'm pretty sure that I know less than half of the people that come here.

One chart that I have access to is kind of interesting. It shows the percentage of people that visit my site from each time zone. Apparently, my parents aren't the only ones who read about the mess that I'm making of my life. 30% of the people that have been visiting here are in the Korea/Japan/Eastern Russia timezone. That probably covers some of Australia too. Coming in second is the central time zone, at about 25%. Since that's where my parents, one of my sisters, and a lot of my high school friends live, that makes sense. At the next level, 20% of the people here are in the Eastern timezone. I have one sister there, a lot of relatives and quite a few friends, so that makes sense to me too. I know a fair number of people on the west coast of North America, and that accounts for 10% of my visitors. What I wonder about is the mountain time zone and the few European timezones that seem to contain some of my online guests. I went to university in Edmonton, so I'd think that at least a few of my friends there would come and read what I'm doing. It looks like few is the key word there. As for the European timezones (or is that African?), I barely know anyone there. Maybe they are just random visitors. I have no idea. I'm wondering why I have 1% coming from the Middle East as well...

So, if I don't know you and you enjoy reading into my life...

...leave me a comment! Preferably a nice one.

As I said earlier, I can look at the site that each person had been looking at before they came here. I wrote a couple of months ago that I was getting people coming here that were searching for things like "Tammy Plante nude and/or naked" into a search engine. This has not changed. Six of the last 100 random visitors here came here after searching for Tammy Plante in Google. To save you six people the trouble, here's the picture again.

I hope that you enjoy it. Oh, and stop looking at my sister! Perverts...

Another common thing that people search for when they find my site is sports in Korea. I guess that since I have links to a few local foreign sports websites, my site comes up. I get a few people searching for Astroboy, and they've found me. I guess that's cool, although it's probably a let down for whoever's searching for our friend Atom (Astroboy). I get a lot of people looking for information on Korea and on teaching English in Korea. Hopefully they found whatever they were looking for. I seems that I get a few visits from people who were at the allumni page for my high school. Maybe those people knew me and were curious as to what I'm doing and if I'm still alive. A couple of my favorite things that people typed into Google when they found me though, have been "Pepsi for breakfast" and "airhostess naked". Interestingly, the person who wanted to see an airhostess naked was searching from the Belgium verison of Google. Kelsey, my sister who's the brunette in the centre in the above picture lived in Belgium for a year. Maybe some of her friends were looking to join the mile high club? Finally, someone from the Japanese Google site was searching for the "wasabi experience". I hope that they liked the pictures of the sushi that I'd made.

Daejeon

Well, I made it to Daejeon and back safely. I had a great visit with my friend Roger and had a nice time meeting people from Woosong College and seeing some neat sites.

After sleeping in a little later than I'd wanted to, I was on the 11:20 bus from Ulsan to Daejeon. I sat down and fell asleep. Three hours, give or take later, I was in Daejeon. It was like I magically sat down in one city and woke up in another, with no recollection of the events in between. I guess that's not much different from leaving my parents basement one day, only to wake up in Korea a couple of days later; just on a smaller scale.

After looking around and realizing that I wasn't in Kansas, or Ulsan in my case, anymore, I turned around and noticed three little munchkins trying to lead me down a yellow brick road to meet the wonderful wizard of Pyongyang. After finding my brain, courage and heart, I was able to resist them and find a pay phone in which to call Roger with. Within five minutes, I was met by Roger and his girlfriend, Su-Young. We drove off in Su-Young's car to her place, where we were greeted by her youngest son, Ee-san(?). He was about 14 years old. They were both super nice people and were able to understand my English fairly well. Unfortunately, I couldn't really understand their Korean. No surprise!

Since the original plan was to have a barbeque with Roger's university peers (he's an English professor there), we headed on our merry way to the BBQ location. Well, after making a quick stop to Roger's apartment to grab a healthy amount of beef burgers and chicken breasts for the feast.

Oh ya, we made sure that we had some beer as well...

We had the party on the padio (aka. the Korean style "yard") of the apartment where a lot of the foreign university teachers live. It was an awesome time. Well, it was really just your average super fun time with a bunch of great people mixed with good fun and good beer. I arrived early to help Roger set everything up; lights, grill, music, seats, etc. The burgers and breasts (every mans favorite meal, right?) were awesome. All in all, there were around 40 people that showed up. The age range was from two years old to way older than two years old. Following the BBQ (at I don't know what time), a group of us headed off to Roger's friend Richard's place. He has a good sized balcony, so it worked out good for the ten or so of us that went there. A few more beer were consumed, and Roger showed off his amateur wrestling skills. He was quite impressive; taking down a much larger... and much more beer-fueled man. Eventually, our night was over and I crashed on Roger's air mattress. It was comfortable.

I woke up by the crack of noon on Sunday. French toast with maple syrup and fried ham was on the menu. It was a great treat. It was followed up by a trip to Su-Young's place. We were thinking of going to the Daejeon vs. Suwon soccer game, but since it was Buddha's 2549th birthday we opted for a visit to a temple area.

After a quick trip to the bus terminal to secure a ticket to Ulsan for 7:40pm, we were off to the mountainous temple area (which is really all of Korea if you're outside of a city, and sometimes even when you're in a city). I'm pretty sure that we went to Gyejoksan mountain, but I'm not really sure. I'll probably just edit this post when I find out just where I was.

The area was really beautiful. It was exactly what I'd expected to see in Asia; cool little shops on the side of a mountain road, monk-like people mixing with local tourists at the foot of a mountain, trials heading up everywhere and cool temples. It was cool as hell. Everywhere was adorned in Asian lanturns (which would be lit up at night. I missed that). There was even a stellar looking "mountain monk" with dangly things hanging off him. It's hard to describe without a picture, but he looked like he was from a kung-fu movie.

Basically, we walked up a trail for a while, which was crowded with people, and enjoyed the prime scenery. The trail followed a mountain creek, where we saw steep and beautiful rocky cliffs, majestic pine trees which hugged the mountain side, graveyards marked with pagotas, the odd traditional resturant overlooking the creek and numerous Buddhist temples which were crowded with regular people and monks. Also beside the temples were the nicely sized SUVs which were certainly owned by the very well taken care of head monks.

Dukkha (all life is suffering) and Samudaya (desire causes suffering) my ass...

Before leaving the area, we decided to eat at one of those tranquil resturants on the creek. It was of the sit down on the floor in front of the coffee table variety. We were served some kind of mushroom pancake and omelettes to start, along with a couple of bottles of Cass beer. Then our main dished started arriving. There were probably 20 or more (small) dishes in all, ranging between things like rice various styles of kimchi, fish, mushrooms, veggies and other random Korean things. Good and spicy!

After the meal, he had about 40 minutes to make it back into the city to catch my bus. We didn't quite make it. I had to pay and additional 9000 won on top of the original 18,900 ticket price. Now I had a little more time to visit as my bus wouldn't be leaving until 9:00 pm.

I said goodbye to Roger, as he had some English teaching business to take care of, and headed to Su-Young's house. He oldest son, who's 22 years old (I can't remember his name right now) was there for me to meet. He was a pretty nice guy who showed me some funny card tricks. He didn't really know any English, so his younger brother had to do the translating when we couldn't communicate with our creative gestures. After loosing track of the time, Su-Young reminded us that we should get going to the bus terminal. It was only a 5 minute walk, so there shouldn't have been any trouble. We didn't take into account that the boys knew the owner of the corner store on the way there. After talking for 5 minutes or so, and eating some free ice cream, we were running to the bus station. We caught the bus just as it was leaving. My new friend had to flag the bus down so that I could get on. After some hugs goodbye (Korean men really like to hug people that they've just met goodbye I guess), I got on the bus.

After clicking my heels together three times, I was back at Tombstone bar in Ulsan.

Here's my friend, Roger Boisvert, in a picture that he sent to me (actually, my father) via e-mail a while ago. He likes to draw and paint. 

Here's a picture that Roger painted. It kind of looks like where we went. Maybe it is? Then again, maybe it isn't. It's a nice painting anyway. 

A foggy view of Daejeon from a mountain. This is the city that I went to last weekend. This is not a picture that I took. I shamelessly ripped it off a site called "Random Ramblings of Ryan". I have no idea who that guy is and I didn't bother to ask his permission to use his pics. I just took them. You can look at his site here: random guy named Ryan's site.

There's also some really nice pictures of Buddha's birthday celebrations at this site: www.maxwatson.com

A pagota thingy at Gyejoksan mountain/temple area. I think that's where I was, I'm not quite sure. I stole this from Ryan's site too. 

Save the whales! Damn the government!

My most recent adventure had me drinking Brandy in a tent in the industrial sector of Ulsan with a group of hippies from Greenpeace at 3am.

What could be better than that?

It all started out when I finished work and wandered over to Samantha's apartment, near my place. Expecting a trip to the supermarket, she informed me that our friend Leah was coming over in a bit. We were going to hang out with some Greenpeace people that we'd met at Tombstone a couple of days earlier.

Being the nice people that we are, we made sure to bring a few beer along. It's common knowledge that when a bunch of hippies are in a dry country (ie. a place with no weed), they like to drink beer.

Before we were able to share the beer, we actually had to figure out how to get to where these guys had set up camp. I had the address and phone numbers, but I left them at home (I wasn't expecting to need them anyway). Samantha, who wanted to go in the first place, informed us right before we grabbed a taxi that she had forgot the contact details at her place. Being the smart guy that I am, I hopped into the taxi anyway. Being the smart friends that I have, Samantha and Leah followed suit without question. To her credit, Samantha did remember the area of the city where we were supposed to be (Jangsaenpo). Unfortunately, we weren't very confident in our ability to figure out just were we were supposed to be, so I made some funny gestures to the driver to pull a u-turn. He turned left down a busy street, so I just assumed that he was looking for a place to turn around. He kept on driving and started giving me "where the hell am I driving to?" looks. Not knowing what else to do, I told him "Taehakyo(university)". He gave me a "WTF???" look, since when we hopped in the cab we were at the university. When we got there, I just kept motioning for him to go straight. Eventually, we got him to drive to Samantha's place. She got out to get her stuff, and Leah and I had to tell the cabbie not to drive away (as he was beginning to do). Thankfully, Leah had a cell phone. She called the save the whale guys and they told the cabbie where to go. After a 11,100 won cab ride ($11.10 US; expensive for Korea!), we arrived at the Ulsan whale museum. It was 11 pm.

As soon as we walked in the tent, we were greeted with handshakes and beer. Apparently, while the beer was appreciated, they didn't need it at all. They had a cooler full of the Lord's finest drink. Mixed with a bottle of Brandy, it was a good night.

There were a couple of tents. One of them is in the picture below, and the other was actually a few smaller tents covered by a huge tarp. The 'other tent' served as the living area; bedrooms, kitchen and living area. A few people seemed to have personal tents to sleep in as well.

We stayed up talking with the Green peacers until about 4:30 am. Well, we didn't exactly stay up. Samantha crashed at around 2am. I got tired and tried to find a spot to sleep at around 3:30 (I found a love seat). Leah just stayed up. I got about an hour sleep. At around 4:30 I decided that I wanted to take a cab home. I told Leah this, so she woke Samantha up. Finding a cap in the industrial sector of Ulsan (or any city) at 4am is never an easy thing. Luckly, our previous driver gave us his card. Within a few minutes, we were on our way home... travelling through Ulsan at 130 km/hr. Cabbies are crazy here. At least the return trip was only about 6000 won.

I won't write too much about how Greenpeace is trying to save the whales in Korea since there website explains it much better than I feel like doing at 2am. All I'll say is that it looks like the Korean and Japanese governments are being real pricks when it comes to whaling. You can read about it here: Greenpeace in Ulsan.

This is a very dead juvenile minke whale that was "accidently" caught and then butchered in Ulsan. At a number of 84 whales, South Korea has the second highest number of "accidental" whale catches in 2003. Their fishing nets brought in 84 whales. The USA, with the third highest number of accidental catches, had six.