The rest of April. The beginning of May.

What's happened in the past four weeks? Well. We got kicked out of the apartment (no fault of our own-the landlord gad a grudge against the previous occupants and decided 'foreigners, no!,' we spent two weeks looking at potential new apartments with our school director, we despaired at the prospect of living a ten minute drive out of town in a dingy high-rise, we finally found a wonderful new house on top of a Korean restaurant with a balcony (and a 4 minute walk to town), we ordered new wallpaper for it, we moved in, we basked in the sun on our new porch, be bought a grill and had a party with our new friends in Yeoju, Kate's parents visited from China for a weekend and Kate and Nathan went to an island in the West Sea for a weekend, which was lovely. Also, Nathan is still kicking Kate's ass in bowling, though the league is on a break at the moment.

The house:

What happens next?


This Friday we're going to a 'party' with all of our Korean teacher coworkers (we have no idea what to expect; we will report), on Sunday Tana is visiting for an afternoon, next weekend is Buddha's birthday (3 day weekend) and we're going to visit the old capital of the Shilla dynasty (Gyeongju), the weekend after that we're flying to Shanghai for a couple of days to visit Kate's grandmother and uncle, who will be in town to see Kate's folks, and the weekend after that we're hosting a pot luck for our school.

Oh, and we're going to buy bikes today! This will change everything, completely. We've also bought a handful of tomatoes, squash (we think) and pepper plants to complement our already growing herbs-in-pots garden on the porch. We've got a couple bags of soil in the car, now we just need to find pots big enough to plant everything.

In the midst of all this, we've both been knee-deep in getting ready to apply to graduate schools. It's made us kind of preoccupied and pretty worn out, but it's fun and exciting to be planning your life from somewhere as completely irrelevant to the rest of your life as Korea. I recommend it.

Here's a patchwork of photos from late May/early June:

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I'm just a hair away from finishing editing the Ganghwado (island trip) photos. They'll be up soon.

Until then, :

For Tulip House

Photos: Icheon Baeksa Sansuyu Flower Festival and Aggregate Valley

Hi folks. It's been a couple of weeks since I've dumped photos onto the blog, so here we go. On the first weekend of April Kate and I went to a small festival in Icheon, about half an hour away from Yeoju. And last Thursday we went for a walk in the fields/industrial landscape behind our house.

Here's the evidence:

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Click here to view these pictures larger

This all from our Shutterfly site, of course.

Non-related post-script. We went to the Icheon festival after spending Saturday/Saturday night in Seoul. We met up with Amanda's old friend Tana and we had a lovely time walking around her neighborhood. That night we went to a dinner/night out organized by our teaching recruitert. There were about 50 other teachers there, all from our province (Gyeonggi-do) or Seoul. We made a few new friends who are pretty excited to travel around Korea with us :-)

Class Project

Adventures in Korean Terraforming/ A walk

Last Wednesday Nathan and I were informed that -- surprise!-- we had half of Thursday off. This explained a nagging mystery: all day Wednesday students had been saying to us "Teacher, tomorrow, no school?", to which we could only answer "Huh?" Luckily, at the end of the day we cornered our director. After asking about the questions, she claps her hand to her head "Oh! Yes. No School. I guess... umm.. I forget to tell you?"

Like so many things, she had forgotten to tell us. Welcome to Korea.


But sometimes surprises are good, and in this case, we had an excellent, unexpected, afternoon reprieve. Since it was a gorgeous day, we used the reprieve to ramble for about 6 miles around Ohok. During the ramble we encountered a bizarre/amazing industrial landscape. We also found further evidence of Korean terra-forming projects, massive experiments in soil erosion, and what can only be called a small-scale industrial Paths of the Dead (more photos on that soon-- and, yes, Dean and Ceci, that reference was for you).

Following random roads, we eventually arrived at Aggregate Valley, an industrial-agricultural Idyll bounded by an enormous Han River flood-control channel and a "strait-as-shit" rural highway (Nathan's words). The valley itself is several feet below the flood plane, which leads you to wonder about the utility of the flood-control earthworks beside it, and organized into precise patchworks by strait concrete roads and irrigation ditches. Mixed in with all of it, were some lovely hay fields, a few lonely patches of rushes, and several swatches of actual greenery. Amazing: The perfect place to sit and watch the distant earth-movers, drink a bottle of Cass, read some Cosmicomics, and watch the herons fly overhead. It was a beautiful afternoon.

We have plans to return soon with bikes, more beer, more books, and friends.

Especially once the weather is warmer.

P.S. if anyone knows were to find a cheap bike that is big enough for a 6' tall man, please let us know. Korea is full of adorable cheap bikes for me, but sadly lacking in (any) bikes Nathan can ride...

P.P.S. We got a call today from our Director saying we may have to move imminently. Not cool. We just completed the epic battle against the awful bathroom smell!

Terraforming! Click for Huge!

Chiaksan!

We just had a hiking/adventure/unexpected snowfall on mountains weekend at Chiaksan National Park. I wrote a description of the trip over on the Shutterfly page. This may be followed up with a longer piece on Korean hiking culture and some of the more tangental and memorable moments of the trip. For now, you get the the basics. And photos:

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"All dead"; Kate teaches elementary students

A typical day in Kate's advanced elementary class:

Who else would use an ESL lesson plan with the terms "failed miserably," "symbol," "cultures and religions," "secretary general," and "conference"?

This class is filled with the brightest of our cohort (best is debatable). I had them for two weeks until Kate maliciously stole them from me. I looked forward to this class so much at the end of the day! Now my last class has been replaced with the "My name is Tyren, you die" crowd.

Kate lost her voice (again) today. She's showing the kinders YouTube videos of Feist singing on Sesame Street.