Seoul Horse Races & Lantern Festival

Yesterday we had the opportunity to experience our first real-life horse races. I had been to harness racing at the county fair before, but never anything quite like this. We took the train into Seoul to meet up with some friends from church at the races, which run every Saturday from about 11am-6pm. It felt a little bit like a scene from a movie, so many men watching the scoreboards, placing bets, and smoking. Lots and lots of smoking. You can place many different kinds of bets (anything from betting one horse will place to picking the top three horses in order). They also take bets as low as 100₩ (or about 10 cents), so we enjoyed the atmosphere a bit and only lost about 4 bucks. :)


This is one of the many guards standing along the fence at ground level. We spent most of our time on the fourth floor, but I forgot my iPod had a camera until the end. Whoops! In the background you can see the huge screen where they show the horses starting each race.


This is a shot of the finish line. If you can see the arch-like horseshoe, the cameras are in lines just to the left of it. I don't have any pictures of real horses for you all. We were too busy cheering them on to take pictures. (Don't worry, no outbursts a la "My Fair Lady" were heard...)


Now for the lantern festival. I'm not sure if it's an annual event or something special in time for the G20 Summit, but they had all kinds of lanterns in the Cheonggye Stream in Seoul. We were hungry after a day at the races, so we went to Bennigan's for a change of pace. After being quoted what we thought was 15 minutes, we double-checked with the host only to be told she had said 50 minutes. Ah, misunderstandings. At any rate, we eventually ate a delicious dinner. I had a cheesy mushroom steak with mashed potatoes. First time I have had mashed potatoes here. Quite a pleasant treat. Brandon had a southwest sampler, including quesadillas and carrots/celery with southwest ranch. (Ranch of any kind is quite the rarity here, so I thoroughly enjoyed helping him with his food.)

Now for the experience of the festival itself. As you probably know, Korea is a relatively small country (about the size of Indiana) with a lot of people (about 48 million) living in it. Combine that with a popular event and the Korean way of finding your way through a crowd and you get an interesting experience. As far as we know, Koreans' rarely use any sort of "excuse me" expression to ask people to move. When a subway stop comes, many people stand right next to the doors, waiting for them to open. Then they just push their way out. If someone wants to get by you in a small area, they simply squeeze their way through. At the festival this practice was extreme.


We waited for over an hour (much of it in the wrong line) to get down to the stream level. The two strings of lanterns in the top left shows street level, and there are limited access points to the stream. While we were in line, people were almost constant shoving their way through our line to get to the other side. The boldness is pretty impressive sometimes. Brandon and I started standing quite close to the people in front of us (something generally done here it seems) to cut off the paths of the squeezers because once one person got through, 10-20 more followed. Our efforts did little to decrease the cross-flow of people through our line. Oh, well. On to the lanterns...



They had lanterns depicting all kinds of topics, ranging from animals with their babies, to world famous monuments (Statue of Liberty, Leaning Tower of Pisa, etc.). We ran out of time and had to go catch the last train before we saw everything! I liked this shot because I like cats, and I like silhouettes. Enough said.



Even though it's kind of creepy, I loved the colors in this one!



The dragons turned out to be my favorite because of the colors and the clear shot of the colorful strings of lanterns behind them. I really enjoyed seeing all of the lanterns at night, even if we were pushing and shoving most of the time to stay out of the stream. :) Highly recommend it.

Deanna

Chuseok in Busan

In the last post, I mentioned that a holiday was coming up soon and we were going to get some time off. The holiday was Chuseok, which is sort of a Korean version of Thanksgiving. They all travel all over the country and get together with their families; they eat lots of traditional food and pay respects to their ancestors.

However, we were in a bit of a tight spot when it came to celebrating this holiday in the Korean fashion, because we don’t really have any family in this area of the world. So, we decided to get together with the closest thing to family we have in this hemisphere—our friend Chris Allison.
Wednesday morning, Deanna and I took the (slow) train down to the southeastern port city of Busan—Korea’s second largest city behind Seoul. Chris took a ferry and met us there that evening. What followed was 3 days of awesome—visiting temples, showing Chris our favorite Korean dishes, helping to ease some of his homesickness with American food (Papa John’s, anyone?), mountain climbing, spa-ing, and subway riding. Oh, and we visited a fort, too. On top of a mountain.

It was a whole lot of fun for Deanna and me both (and I assume Chris, too). It was so good to see him again—it had been nearly a year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make visits with him a semi-regular occurrence. It’s looking like we’ll have to go to Japan sometime in October to take care of something with our visas, so maybe we’ll get to meet up with him then.

So yeah, overall, lots of fun for Chuseok. In other news, Deanna and I only have 3 days left at our current school. We start at the new school on Friday. It will be really nice to work close to home and not have an hour-long commute every day. We can even ride our bikes if we want to, which will be sweet. The downside of this is that we basically have to start over with our classes. I’m just now getting to the point where I really feel a sort of rapport with my classes, and now I’ve got to start it all over. So that’s kind of frustrating, but oh well—you do what you have to do.

As far as actual teaching goes, I’m really enjoying it. It’s really nice to have a job that is constantly changing and to have to adapt and change with it. I’ve got 4 different groups of students I teach, and each one is a different class (basic English, science, social studies, and geography). So not only do I have to prepare lessons and activities to help with their grammar, but I’ve got to prepare lessons for each of those subjects. It’s really sweet—very challenging and rewarding. Especially when the plans and activities I come up with work and the students respond well to them.

Deanna and I are still trying to learn Korean. It’s definitely a challenge. We bought a textbook for learning it. The textbook teaches you how to read in the first chapter, then after that, it’s basically all in Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. It’s nice as far as practice goes, but it’s hard because even though I can read now, I’m still not at the point where I can read quickly. I’m still just sounding words out, so even a basic sentence takes a lot of effort to read. Part of that is that my vocabulary is still very small—there are a few words that I recognize for how they look and don’t have to sound them out. For example, the word for meat is 고기 (gogi). That’s actually a word I just learned fairly recently, but it’s stuck with me because it’s important for ordering food (I’d much rather have a dumpling stuffed with 고기 than 김치—kimchee).

Ok, I think I’ve rambled enough for now. Deanna and I are looking forward to getting phones/internet soon—we’d really like to Skype with you.

Brandon

Anniversary Numero Uno

Well, Deanna and I have officially completed one year of marriage. A year ago, I don’t think either of us expected to spend our first anniversary in another country (or at least not Korea), but there you go. Crazy stuff.

We weren’t really sure what to do to celebrate, what with being in a foreign land and all. It seems like usually you might go to a favorite restaurant or have a night out doing something you enjoy. Unfortunately, we haven’t been here long enough to really have a favorite restaurant or have much idea of what there is to do around here, let alone feel confident enough in our abilities to travel anywhere in town we haven’t already been.

So as a result, we decided to have a sort of chill day around here. We slept in late, made brunch (scrambled eggs with red/green peppers and mushrooms, along with some grapes and kiwi), and then decided to go play badminton with our newly-acquired badminton equipment. Unfortunately, all the courts near us were either occupied or flooded, so that didn’t work out too well. But it was nice because it was a beautiful day and we got to walk all over the place looking for a court. After that, we went looking for a coffee shop to have a mini-date. We found a Dunkin’ Donuts (which they’re crazy about over here) and had a couple donuts and coffee (our donut-buying experience was greatly facilitated by the cashier who spoke English—God bless her). After that, we came back and made dinner and then settled in for an evening of downloaded TV shows from my external hard drive (thanks, Brett). So yeah, all in all, a pretty good day, even though we still don’t really know how to do much here.

In other news, I’ve learned to read Korean. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, but it still doesn’t help much since my vocabulary consists of about 8 words. That means that even if I can tell how to say what I’m reading, I still don’t know what it means. But yeah, I’m still pretty excited about it. I’ve impressed some of my students when I’ve read their Korean names, which makes me happy.

We’re still waiting on internet at our apartment. We can get a pretty simple browser on our Kindles, so we can check email and Facebook and stuff like that, but it’s not very good for responding to things. We also can get online when we’re at the school, but usually when we’re there, we want to be planning and/or grading. Hopefully we’ll get our Alien Registration Cards (ARC’s) soon so that we can get that stuff taken care of. As of now, we’re pretty much cut off from the world—no tv, no internet, no cell phones—when we’re at home. It’s kinda nice, but I miss being connected with people, too.

Other than that, we’re still trying to learn our way around here. We took the wrong bus the other day, which ended up taking us the complete opposite direction of our school. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized it when it turned the wrong way, so we were able to get off and walk back a ways and get on the right bus.

We’re also halfway done with our time at the first school, so soon we’ll be close enough that we don’t have to take buses. Which will be nice. We also have a holiday coming up called Chuseok (추석…I think. It’s either that or 주석) where we get almost a week off school. We’re going down to the southeastern port city of Busan (부산) for a few days and meeting up with Chris Allison (가리스 알이산)—our now (basically) Japanese friend. We’re getting really excited about that.

Ok, that’s all for now.

Brandon

We're Here!!

Hello everyone!

This can't be too long because I need to go plan for classes, but I wanted to update you all a little bit. So, in a nutshell...

We've been here less than a week and we've already:

- taken public transit (train/bus) to and from school several days
- eaten strange foods (I had caviar and Brandon had some octopus we think)
- walked 5 flights of stairs consistently to our apartment (that's right, we have the "penthouse")
- taught 3 classes!
- walked in circles for 45 minutes looking for a store we'd been to before
- woken up most mornings by around 5am
- found peanut butter!
- wished we knew more Korean
- experienced a whole new meaning of "humidity"
and
- praised God for air conditioning, one of His many faithful provisions thus far

Something sweet about Korea:
They have crosswalks that go diagonally across intersections. They stop all the traffic and there you go!

Well, that's all for now. Hope you all are doing well. Looking foward to getting internet at our apartment in a couple of weeks, so we can do some Skype action.

*Deanna*

New blog!

So Deanna and I thought we would start a blog, so that you people here (and those of you abroad) could follow what we're up to as we begin (continue?) our world travels.

We're still living up in Grand Rapids, but only for another 1.5 weeks. Then it's back to G-town and B-town for August to spend some time with our families and friends (that's you).

So yeah, add us to your RSS feeds or whatever and read what we're up to. Probably not a whole lot of posts to start with, but we'll pick it up once we get over there.

Probably.