Micrometablogging

This sums up my feelings about twitter.

(Hat tip Andrew Sullivan)

[Ironically, if not for the parentheticals, this blog post would be one of very few of my posts that would be short enough to fit on twitter. The title of this post would barely fit on flutter. I suppose it is some consolation for twitter users that twitter is not yet so far gone as to be beyond parody, the way youtube comments are (fun challenge: post a tongue in cheek comment on youtube that is obviously satirical, or even at all differentiable from posts made in earnest).]

Tuesday night ride

Will and I went on another bike ride tonight. We were going to Korean class, in theory, but we took a wrong turn so by the time we got there we weren't in the mood. The wrong turn was definitely worthwhile, though, because it gave us great views of the sun setting over the mountains.

We also found this temple tucked away in the outskirts of the city.

Comparing and contrasting Daejeon and Portland

Last night I met a couple people from Portland (there seems to be a lot of us here). Strangely, one person I met grew up in Castle Rock, Colorado, half an hour's drive North of Colorado Springs (actually, the two towns are threatening to merge together because they have been expanding so much). He then went to Lewis and Clark college in Portland, OR, where he was a philosophy major. He and his wife actually flew to Korea on the same day as me from the same airport (Denver International Airport), though we were on different flights. Also, this is their second year in Korea, so they've been here a year and three months. Quite the coincidence, nonetheless. Anyway, meeting people from Portland got me thinking about the city.

Portland and Daejeon are of a pretty similar size. Daejeon's population is 1.5 million, while the Portland metro area has 2 million residents (only .5 million in Portland proper), though Daejeon has nearly double the population density. Both cities also have cherry blossoms and river front parks with bike paths.

Today Will and I biked over to the campus of Chungnam University--one of about a dozen universities in the city, and probably one of the largest and most prestigious--for the cherry blossom festival there. Cherry blossoms are bitter sweet for the Korean people because on one hand they are pretty, but on the other hand they are a reminder of the Japanese occupations of the country.

The festival mostly consisted of people coming to see the streets that are lined with blossoms and a few street vendors.
I really enjoyed the campus. There are sculptures everywhere, many of which are good or entertaining.
In some ways it looked like any college campus anywhere.
Other parts are pretty distinctively Asian.
This ROTC poster combined with the cherry blossoms made me think of prospie week at Reed. (Reed ROTC: because killing Arabs is fun). Oh, prospie week. Good times.
Other fun signs included a classic Pedophiles Area sign--which isn't quite as good as the ones in Europe where a man in a hat is holding the hand of a girl who clearly is trying to pull away--and the omnipresent 'information' signs where the only word in English is 'Information'. So helpful.
After leaving the university, Will and I biked downtown to the bike path along the river. We saw a couple dozen cranes on the way.
A strange thing about Koreans is that they haven't really made up their minds about how pedestrians and bicycles should pass when going in opposite directions. It seems that traditionally everyone stayed to the left, even though cars all stay to the right as in the US. The crosswalks are all labeled so that pedestrians should all stay to their right, though. Apparently there was an effort to get people to change to staying to their right, but it didn't take and now everyone is just confused and awkward every time they pass each other. The bike path along the river is particularly confusing because it has arrows going each way at different points. In some places the arrows are actually overlaid on each other, both faded but distinct, so that the directions are about as clear as the Scarecrow's from the Wizard of Oz. We managed not to crash into anyone despite the confusion. We also thankfully managed not to do this:
After the 20k+ ride we went shopping, giving me the opportunity to document one of the oddities of stores in Korea. Stores here all promote items by strapping a free product to them with packaging tape. Sometimes the extra bit is more of the same, like single serving carton of orange juice strapped to a two litter bottle of orange juice. Sometimes, however, there is no obvious connection, like jerky and crackers coming free with cases of beer:
Also in the store, there are lockers for any possessions that you don't want to carry with you while shopping. There are also lockers to keep your small pets, which look pretty much the same but with airholes.
We saw another Korean oddity on the way back from Lotte Mart. For some reason apartment buildings here don't have freight elevators. In fact, the elevators are all tiny and have low weight capacities. Given this, and their penchant for having thirty story apartment buildings, Koreans have come up with an interesting system for moving into and out of apartments:
Oh yeah, have I mentioned that in Korea people have no problem painting all over buildings? The building number can be seen from a quarter mile away, and sometimes there are pictures too.

More hiking

Jeff and I went hiking yesterday. We went South starting at the same place that John, Bo and I had started going North. The trail of the first leg was steep and difficult, even for Korea, where there are no switchbacks. It turns out that we went up a section of trail that was closed. Had it been as well marked at the bottom as it was at the top of the mountain we would have hiked elsewhere, but as it was we had a nice peaceful hike without seeing anyone for the first hour.
Near the top there was a view of Banseok, the neighborhood where I work. Well, it would be view if not for the smog.On the top of our second peak a nice woman gave us what I have come to call citrus grapes; they look like mini oranges but you eat the skins and spit out the seeds, just like large grapes. She also took our picture.
On the next peak people had made a huge pile of precariously balanced rocks.
A little ways later there was a wonderful viewpoint of the entire loop that we had just hiked.
All along the trail were bushes with lots of little purple flowers.
And at the bottom of the trail was a bench shaped like an apple core.

Street Spirit

This is a fairly typical street at night in any of the districts that have night lives, of which there are about three in Daejeon. These areas are so brightly lit that you can walk out of a club at three a.m. and think that the sun is setting (or rising).

The apartment

I realize that I never actually documented my apartment and surroundings like I promised I would months ago. Well, here's the apartment. The bedroom/living room is itself larger than some of the apartments of my fellow teachers. There is a washing machine behind the blue sheet.

The kitchen isn't bad, but notice that there is only a stovetop, no oven. Oh well. I don't know where this sign came from, but it's far too amusing to remove. Actually, I haven't taken down any of the apartment's decorations, and the only decoration I've added is the lotus lantern.
Most showers here are like mine: simply attached to the sink. The bathroom has a drain in the floor.

Of birthdays blood and invertbrates

I have had some very Korean experiences this last week, and they didn't seem all that unusual to me, so I must be getting pretty used to this place.

My school celebrates the birthdays of the kindergarteners once every two months, and I have now been to two such birthday parties. We take all six classes of kids across the street to an indoor playground and let them run around in the McDonalds-esque play place. The birthday children dress as princesses or princes. The weird part is that the 'princesses' often look more like brides, complete with veils. We take pictures with them by class, but other than that they are free to run around like lunatics. I usually spend the whole time lifting children into the air, which they of course love. The most Korean aspect of this experience is that it all took place on the fourth floor of the building. In Korea things like driving ranges and playgrounds are up on top of buildings instead of being at ground level.

After the birthday party I had one class to teach. In that class two of the children--including one of the birth girls--almost simultaneously got pretty serious nose bleeds. My school at least isn't as concerned about blood as an American school would be. Blood is immediately and thoroughly sanitized where I am from. Not so much here. There has been a lot of blood in my classes this week. Earlier I was on one knee trying to comfort a girl who was crying for no discernible reason and one of her classmates was tearing around the room at full speed and tripped over my leg. He went face-first into the ground and bit his tongue. Hmmm.... let's not dwell too much on the level of blood and tears in my classes...

Last night John Will and I went to a Korean restaurant and ordered dumplings. What showed up at our table was a boiling stew of many kinds of mushrooms and many more kinds of whole seafood, including a nine inch long octopus, a conch-looking shell with a slug-like creature inside, and shrimp complete with legs and head. (I forget that I should bring my camera to ordinary things like eating dinner or I'd have some great pics for you.) It turns out there were noodles and dumplings underneath all of that, and the dumplings were absolutely delicious. Actually it was all good, even the weird conch-looking thing. I have found that I actually rather like octopus, which is in many Korean dishes. I feel like the fact that I no longer even find it notable to be eating tentacles is exactly the sort of thing that would be noteworthy to you. Oh, did I tell you that a couple weeks ago I at a ray? It was far to small to be a sting ray, much less a manta ray, but it was clearly of the ray family. It was pretty tasty but I wouldn't recommend it because it has so many tiny pieces of cartilage that it is incredibly difficult to eat the actual meat. A lot of restaurants have tanks of fish, crab octopus, squid, and rays outside their doors, the way Western restaurants have lobster tanks up front. In fact, even the chain grocery stores have tanks like that and will boil the seafood for you on the spot.