Bike Ride and Cherry Blossom Festival

One weekend, I decided to ride my bicycle the 30 or so kilometers from Bundang out to the Cherry Blossom Festival in Seoul proper. My ride began with the twenty minute ride I took to work every weekday along the small river in town. I passed some of Bundang's largest and most distinctive buildings on the way.

The H-shaped building is particularly impressive.

The stream was, as always, a pleasure to cycle beside. I would always show up at work feeling energized and in a good mood after seeing the reflections in the water, along with the cranes and other wildlife.

A long way out of town, I got to an area where the fish were frantically active across the whole stretch of river. Maybe they were spawning?

The frantic fish were at the base of what looked like a military base. 

After a long while, I made it to the point where the little tributary I was following meets up with the Han River. I followed the path along the Han, taking in views of Seoul.

After another considerable distance, I made it to The National Assembly for the Republic of Korea. The area is technically an island since a trickle of river cuts it off from the rest of the South bank, but since every road bridges that gap, a much more noticeable division was the prevalence of cherry trees. 

Cherry blossoms are bitter sweet for Koreans because they are both beautiful and a symbol of the times in their history where they were conquered by Japan. I was thus a bit surprised to see that symbol surrounding the seat of their legislature. Perhaps it is an homage to Washington D.C. ...

The festival had a street fair feel, with lots of merchant stalls and live music, including in unexpected genres such as jazz and country. 

A slight tilting of my camera can make the scene feel peaceful...

... or make it clear how busy and crowded it really was. 

I don't know what this water-front building was, but I like the architecture.

In Korea, everything is anthropomorphized into a cute cartoon character, so I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was to see the National Assembly Building itself as male and female mascots of the festival.

I walked around for an hour or so before seeing a parade of traditional dancers march through the street. 

As I was about to leave, I noticed some garden exhibitions, some of which were quite pleasant.

The awesome street lights on the island were powered through both solar and wind!

The festival itself was fairly tame, but I did enjoy the incredible beauty of the cherry blossoms.

The ride back seemed much longer, and I actually had to stop a few times because my knees were so painful (and if you know me, then you know that me actually stopping to address some bodily complaint means that it was rather intense). When I got back to my neighborhood, I saw one of my students, Annie, and she couldn't process seeing me outside of school and speaking to her in Korean. It was rather amusing to see her shocked into incoherence, though she didn't think it was a big deal anymore when I saw her on Monday. 

Flat Stanley in Korea

My little cousin's class read a book about a character named Flat Stanley who mailed himself all over the world. The students in her class participated by mailing their own copy of Flat Stanley to someone they knew, and she sent hers to me.

I took the paper doll to a few sights, and to my supervisor's Korean wedding.

Here's the short blog I wrote from Stanley's point of view: http://flatstanleyvisitskorea.blogspot.com (read from the bottom up).

Also, around the same time I mailed a box full of nonsense back to the US, which got great use at Renn Fayre and Burning Man. Some of my favorites were giant gloves shaped like bear paws that only had space for four fingers, a rectangular pillow with a cat face on it with a circular hole right in the middle, and this thing:

Teaching at Poly

All winter long, I still biked to work. My coworkers thought I was insane when I showed up at the office sporting beardcicles.

It was a long difficult day, but rewarding. I taught ten or eleven classes each day that each lasted forty minutes. That's ten hours of teaching time per day, with preparation and grading on top of it, which was... grueling. On the other hand, I was a proper teacher, unlike in most cram schools. The kids were brilliant and fun, the curriculum was impressively well thought out, and the results were fluent or near-fluent English speakers with far better grammar, reading comprehension, and vocabulary than average American students two grade levels higher than them. I really want education to be a hybrid of East Asian and American/European schools. I want the family involvement and encouragement, the demanding yet achievable expectations, and the extremely high value placed education of Korea and other countries in East Asia. On the other hand, I want the emphasis of comprehension over workbook completion, critical independent thinking skills, and encouragement of self-expression found in the best schools in America and Europe. I also would like Korean kids to have more free time, but I don't know if that's really compatible with the level of achievement they attain.

The kindergarten was great because the kids really were having fun, and it was their only scheduled commitment of the day instead of being one of three or more academic institutions attended daily. 

I do think that our kindergarten students will have a skewed idea of 'party' though, since Poly's monthly birthday 'parties' were more like recitals: they sat still and quietly as each class performed a song, after which they would get a little cake. Socializing and running around having fun was not on the agenda. 

I actually remembered to bring my camera and record the songs one month.

I had my class sing the Beatles' Hello Goodbye.

My co-teacher, Becky, was much better at getting our other class to do the choreography in unison while singing Apples and Bananas.  

The Suspensful Bridges of Daedunsan Provincial Park, Korea

In January of 2011 I was able to meet up with Mad and Jeff in Daejeon. In the early morning we, along with some of their friends and coworkers, bused out to go hiking in Daedunsan Provincial Park. I was immediately struck by the impressively jagged ridges and rock faces. 

After a quick breakfast, we passed by the gondola ride up the mountain and took the hiking trail that lead to the same point. 

In one spot along the trail up, ice had accumulated in stalagmite-like formations.

Midway up the trail we looked up at one of the big draws to the park, an acrophobic's nightmare of a suspension bridge. 

We reached the top of the gondola, which was home to many birds who had learned to eat out of tourist's hands. Feed was for sale in the building where the gondola unloaded. 

The views from the stairs made up for them being steep and a bit icy. 

I love utterly literal signs. 

At last we reached the suspension bridge. 

The fact that one could see right through it didn't deter me, but some of our party were a bit hesitant. 

The next artificial bit of trail was a bit more inclined than the bridge. 

The steel stairs weren't nearly as treacherous as the ice-covered stone ones, however. This was the only part of the hike that actually seemed unsafe to me. 

Despite the icy stairs and see-through suspension bridges, our path was not the most terrifying way to get up the mountain.

Okay, I'm pretty sure these cages were only used for equipment.

My favorite part of the steel stairway may have been the sign at its base:

We continued hiking and reached the 878m high summit of Daedun Mountain. 

There was a decent view.

We were surprised to see little birds all around the summit. 

The hike back down was fairly uneventful. Back in Daejeon, I encountered  stairs in a pedestrian underpass even icier than any we had seen on our hike: 

On the subway to the train station, I finally got a picture of my favorite of the images on the constantly playing loop on the subway screens that also shows the current station. Dear Daejeon subway safety presentation creators: I'm pretty sure the guy throwing the Molotov cocktail knows that he isn't supposed to be doing so.

I returned to Bundang and my usual teaching life.