Summer Vacation

Oldest astronomical observatory in Asia

Lotus Flowers

My room at the guesthouse

Hangover Soup

Bulguska Temple

Outside the Grotto

Roof tiles with messages from around the world

My instructor with my final product

Ok, I'm just going to force myself to write an entire post with the highlights of my summer vacation. After taking in the fireworks festival in Pohang, my friends and I departed. They returned to Seoul and I continued on the rest of my journey by myself. I have to say that there is something amazingly exhilarating about travelling by yourself. It also makes for some hilarious experiences.

The next leg of my journey led me to Gyeongju. The city's motto is, "An Open Air Museum." It turned out this is pretty true. There were royal tombs that dated back to 600 BC. These tombs are the final resting place of the royalty of the Silla dynasty-the first ruler of Korea many, many years ago. The tombs were rather beautiful. They looked like giant hills but they were so simple and green.

Royal Tombs in Tumuli Park Anjapi Pond

I saw the oldest observatory in Asia. The Anapji Ponds were also a stop on the journey. I read my book and watched the sunset fall over this beautiful garden that used to be the vacation get away for the royalty of the Silla dynasty. After walking through many of the beautiful gardens, I decided to call it a night and head to my accommodation.

I stayed at an amazing traditional Korean guesthouse. By traditional Korean, they mean sleeping on the floor in a small room. The doors were made of thin pieces of wood covered in oiled paper. It had been updated to the extent that there was a bathroom and electricity. The hosts of the guest house were an older couple that loved hosting travelers. They provided breakfast each morning, sat around the campfire with us at night and made traditional crafts. It was a great experience! I've come to almost enjoy sleeping on the floor! I paid 60,000 won for 3 nights (around $45-$50).

My second day I sat out to explore some of the religious sights. I left the guesthouse in search of some breakfast. Gyeongju is a fairly small town and hasn't been tainted too much with the desire to become "Western." I was wandering down the street and this little, old halmoney (Korean grandmother) took my hand and led me into her restaurant. I figured what the heck I'll give it a go. There were 3 items on the menu so I asked her in my very, very broken Korean which one was delicious and of course she pointed to the most expensive one. By expensive I mean 5,000 won ($3.00). I told her okay and she got my meal started. I started reading the Korean characters and recognized the word soup. I thought, "Okay, fair enough. Soup isn't my choice for breakfast but Koreans love it so it must be good." Then it occurred to me that the travel brochure said that Gyeongju is famous for their "Hangover Soup" street. I began to get an uneasy feeling so I broke out my guide book and sounded out the Korean for the meal that had just been presented to me. Sure enough, my breakfast of champions was you guessed it, Hangover Soup. It might not sound so bad but here's the ingredients, pork spine, coagulated blood and some vegetables. I ate the broth and vegetables which were pretty decent but then the halmoney came over and showed me how to pick the meat of the spine. I tried it but the texture of this stuff was just not right. I ate my rice and while she was outside sweeping the sidewalk, I stuffed all of the pork spine under one of the side dishes, so it looked like I had eaten more than I actually did and walked outside and presented her with the money. She was really adorable and I didn't want to hurt her feelings.

(Side note-the formatting for this blog is really irritating me so I'm going to upload all of the photos to the top of the blog and put captions on them. My patience is running thin).

I then took a bus up to Bulguska Temple which is a Buddhist temple that was built in 751 BC and was destroyed during the Japanese invasions of the 1500's. It has restored been restored to its original glory. There are many Buddhist relics and many, many giant Buddha statues. Unfortunately, you are only allowed to take pictures of the buildings. The temple sits way up in the mountains and the drive/hike up is very beautiful and scenic. It almost made me feel like I was back home in the Colorado mountains. This temple is the UNESCO list of world heritage sites.

I took a bus to the Seokguram Grotto which is a giant Buddha statue that was carved out of marble. It was very beautiful but once again no pictures were allowed. Here's the Wikipedia article about it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seokguram As you leave the temple, you can purchase traditional roof, shingles and leave a message for Korea or for other visitors. It was very cool to see all of the visitors' messages from around the world.

I had read that you could take hot air balloon rides so I set out on a quest to find the air balloon. I could see it floating off in the distance so I decided to just walk towards it. Well the short story is, I walked for 3 1/2 hours and never got to ride the air balloon. Sad day. Those things sure look closer than they really are in real life.

On my 3 1/2 hour walk, I found a "Place for Traditional Korean Paper Making." I thought, "Awesome. I get to make some paper"...wrong. I got to make something out of traditional paper. It was a good experience though. The little, old lady that helped me didn't speak any English so there were lots of hand motions and the use of my horrible Korean. She laughed at me quite a bit so I don't think she was too impressed with my artistic ability. Oh well, I've always known it is non-existent.

I took the bus back down the mountain and I must have caught the last bus of the evening because there really wasn't room for me on it but they still let me get on. I had to stand in the front window next to the bus driver. I can't say that it's a moment I felt very safe but it was an adventure nonetheless.

I'll try to get the rest of the trip up very soon. I know I've been slacking lately. I promise there are many more hilarious stories to be told. Oh, and as always you can check out my pictures on my Picasa album. http://picasaweb.google.com/christinestroup Peace!

Pohang Fireworks Festival

One of my goals I had when I came to Korea was to see fireworks here. Two friends and I traveled to the Pohang Fireworks Festival to kick off our summer vacation. We flew to Pohang from Seoul. The flight was only 1 hour and it only cost us around $50.00.

We knew the trip was going to be eventful when we discovered 10 minutes prior to boarding that my friend had thrown away her boarding pass. This is not a big deal in Korea. The just issued her a new one no questions asked and we were on our way. Domestic flights in Korea are pretty relaxed. There's no liquid restriction in carry on luggage and I made it on the plane with a razor.

We arrived and asked a cab to take us to a love hotel near the fireworks festival. He didn't understand the word fireworks and none of us know the Korean word so we showed him a picture and 2 of his cab driver friends helped clarify. They started making a sound like "Pop, pop!"

We went rode into town and the roads near the festival were closed off. The cab driver drove up to a volunteer who was manning the barrier and told him, "I have foreigners in my car that need help finding a hotel can I drive through?" The volunteer let us through so we were the only people in a car on this strip of the street. I tell ya being a foreigner here has its perks sometimes.

We went to check into a hotel and the man was really excited to have us there. He started yelling at his middle school aged son to speak English to us but his son refused. It was pretty funny because the dad was really angry at the kid.

We then set out to find a cheap t-shirt. One of my friends that came with me, had just returned from Malaysia and didn't have any clean clothes. We went to the Lotte Department store and things were grossly over priced. There were a group of policeman who were dancing and eating kimbap on the street so we decided to ask them were to find a cheap t-shirt.

My friend asked them in English first but none of them responded so she resorted to the Korean she knows (cheap, t-shirt, where). She rambled about Lotte not being cheap and finally the police officer interrupted her with, "Excuse me, do you speak English?" This is by far my favorite quote of the trip. I guess he didn't like the butchering she was doing in Korean. He then advised us to go to the traditional market to find the shirt. We wandered over there and found a t-shirt for 3,000 ($2.00). They even had t-shirts from the Athens Olympic games although I doubt that they are authentic. We headed back to our hotel only to discover that my friend had left the shirt in the cab.

We tried to buy a shirt from the volunteers at the festival but they didn't understand what we wanted and it ended up being a big photo shoot. We had to take pictures with lots of volunteers and children. I really have no idea what was going on.

The search for a t-shirt left us hungry so we decided to get something to eat and were enticed by a whole pig that was being roasted on the side of the street. It was absolutely delicious but midway through the meal we saw his brother hanging on the pole covered in black trash bags ready to be thrown on the fire next. Sad day. See picture above. If you look closely, you can see one of its hooves.

We were now ready to enjoy the fireworks. They were amazing! They were all set to music and were lit off over the ocean. There were two teams that participated. One team was from France and the other was from Korea. They lit off over 48,000 fireworks! I was told by my Korean friends that the festival was much smaller this year than in previous years but it was still a great show. Here's a sample of what we saw. The video quality isn't the greatest but what can you expect from a digital camera.

I'll be blogging more about my vacation over the next week. I managed to cram a lot of stuff into one week!

Celebrating America's Birthday in Korea

So most of you that know me from back home know that I love my country. I felt a bit sad to be outside of America for the 4th of July. Never fear, I came up with a battle plan to combine the two cultures. One of my fellow co-workers is married to a US Air Force guy. She lives very close to the US Army base and has access to almost all of the conveniences of America. We invited all of our Korean co-workers. They kept asking us why we were so excited to celebrate our countries birthday. I found this to be a bit odd since they are a fairly new democracy but we promised them a good time.

I started the festivities on Friday by having my classes sing "Happy Birthday" to America. Here's a video of my favorite class.

We gathered at my friends house and her husband went to Taco Bell to get us some food. There's nothing like eating American junk food on America's birthday. Also you add the fact that Mexican food is non-existent in this country and it made for a pretty nice treat. Our Korean co-workers showed up shortly have that and made the Korean "junk food" called ddeokbokki which is a spicy, rice cake, ramen noodle, fish cake filled, soup-like mixture. I think we really mixed up the cultures!

We also taught the Koreans American drinking games. It was really fun to teach them about America!

When it was time for the fireworks we headed to the roof...I mean helipad to watch them. Yes, my friend's house is so posh it has a place for helipads to land. There were signs everywhere that were written in Korean that I'm sure told us to, "Keep Out." We disobeyed them and went up there anyway. I managed to fall up the stairs since I'm special like that but they view from the top was amazing. You could see the entire city! We watched the fireworks and sang patriotic songs with the fellow military people who also broke the rules.

On a side note, when I returned to school on Monday my kids asked what I had done that weekend. They all knew I was excited about America's birthday and I told them I had celebrated it. I asked them what they will do to celebrate Korea's Independence day on August 15th and they told me they would just stay at home and relax. One girl told me, "Teacher, I think that people in the west like to party a lot on holidays and people in the east just like to relax." My response was, "I think you're probably right. Fair enough."

Comparison--Korea v. Western Countries

Here is a list of things I have seen in Korea that wouldn't or rarely happen back home. I mean there are exceptions to every situation but this is what I've come up with.



1. A 8 year old kid brought a toy gun to school and was running down the hallway pointing it at his class mates. At first, I really freaked out but I had to take a step back and remind myself I'm not in America.


2. Children walking by themselves. By children, I mean first and second graders walking home from school without an adult. There are days I can barely manage to not get hit by a car. I can't imagine being that young and navigating the city by yourself.


3. Children out until all hours of the night. See picture above of a young child who was out for a walk with his parents around 11:30 pm. Here's another example. It was around 10:30 on a school night and we were playing poker at the park near our house and two girls came up to us and started talking to us in Korean. We managed to hear the term "Waygook" which means foreigner and "Migook" which means America, so we told them where we were all from. Around 12:30, they appeared again and tried to talk to us some more. We finally saw one of them go home with her dad around 1:00 am.

3. Having a probation office located within a 1/2 mile of 5 elementary and middle schools. The Seoul Probation office is literally a 5-10 minute walk from my school.


4. Always knowing who the foreigners are. In America, you can hardly ever tell if someone if a foreigner until they speak. Here you can tell instantly since Korea is one of the homogeneous countries in the world. This leads to a lot of stares. The other extreme is people talking to you to practice their English. The other night I was out with my Korean friends and a group of other Koreans started yelling, "Hello!" "Where are you from?"...All the typical questions. I responded and my Korean friend told me that it's not fair that I'm treated like a celebrity in Korea and when she studied in America no one cared that she was a foreigner. My response was that's kind of the beauty of America. You can't tell the difference between natives and foreigners. Anyway, I digress.



5. Crazy superstitions and rules... a) don't fall asleep with a fan on. It will suck all of the air out the room and you will die. All of the fans in this country have timers on them to prevent an unfortunate "fan death." b) Using vinegar to take the sting out of a sunburn will cause worse burning. One of my fellow co-workers got sunburned on the beach last weekend. He was asking for advice on how to cure it from the rest of us pasty, fair headed foreigners. A few of us suggested vinegar and one of our Korean co-workers freaked and told us it would make his burn even worse.


6. Kids going to school or private lessons until 11 pm. I know that the US's education system leaves a lot to be desired but having kids stay in school that late can't be good for them either. If you ask my students what they did on the weekend, they all say something to the effect of, "I went to science academy, math academy, piano academy, Chinese lessons, and another English school. When do these kids get to have fun? They asked me how many academies I went to when I was a kid and I blew their minds by telling them zero!


7) South Koreans don't seem to be the least bit phased by North Korea. Granted, I grew up in America and have been told that North Korea is evil and blah, blah, blah. The first few times my not-so-friendly northern neighbor threatened to set of missiles most of the westerners in the office started freaking out. The Korean co-teachers assured us that there is nothing to worry about and that good old Kim Jong is just trying to test America and specifically our new President Obama but he's not really going to do anything. The threat is always in the back of my mind but I've kind of started to accept their mentality. After all, if something happens, they don't have a place to run. I can at least go back to America. I've talked to my Korean friends and quite a few of them have told me that they don't really think about North Korea and don't really care. Fair enough, I suppose.


This is my list I've compiled so far. I'm sure there will be more to come after I've been here a while longer.

Seodaemun Prison & Inwangsan Shrine

The Execution Stool

This tree is outside the execution chambers. It was the final thing many prisoners saw before they were executed. It's the oldest tree on the site.


The prisoners were responsible for making bricks while they were incarcerated. These are bricks that are in the courtyard today.



View of the prison from the top of the mountain/shrine.

Zen Rock


Today was unlike any other I have had in Korea. My friend and I headed out to Seodaemun Prison. This prison was built by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea. It was built in the late 1910's to house Koreans who were trying to start an independence movement. The prison was used to house Korean criminals all the way up until 1987.

The prison has numerous buildings that housed different types of prisoners. They showed prisoners being tortured in various ways including by electrocution. As we were going through the exhibit about how the independence fighters were tortured, one of the Korean workers came up to us and explained how the torture devices worked. There was a wooden box that had spikes in it that they would put people in and have the guards kick the box over and over, so the person would be punctured by the spikes many times.

The cells looked pretty large but as I read more I discovered that they would house up to 40 prisoners at a time and the prisoners had to take turns sleeping at night since there wasn't enough room for everyone.

There was also a reenactment of the Japanese court that independence fighters faced. The Koreans were not represented by attorneys and the only Korean that was in the room was the one that as on trial.

When it came to executing the prisoners, the prisoner would sit on a box with a noose around their neck and the box would fall through the floor killing the person. The Japanese would then take the bodies out of a secret tunnel to be buried.

It was a pretty intense experience. I have to keep reminding myself that all of these memories are still fresh in people's mind since the Japanese occupation only ended in 1945.

After this we headed to the Inwangsan Shamanism/Buddhist shrine which is at the top of the mountain next to the prison. It was quite a vertical climb. The tour book called it a walk so we were in flip flops which were not the right shoes for this hike. We made it up to the temple and drank some water and chilled out. A Korean woman came up and gave us tissues to to wipe our sweat away and offered us cigarettes. She was super cute. We headed further up the mountain and encountered many shrines and people praying along the way. There was a natural spring that we stopped at and we ran into the Korean woman again. She gave us some incense and showed us how we should whirl it around our head before sticking it in the shrine.

We passed the Seounbawi Rock or "Zen Rock" which is supposed to have the power to give sons to pregnant women. Most of the people that were praying here were women.

We made it to near the top and sat and looked out over the city. It was a beautiful view and was very peaceful and quiet. I was able to pick out some different neighborhoods (Gus) within in the city.

We climbed down and had some dinner and headed home for the night.

Soccer, Noraebong and more Randomness

On Wednesday night, I met up with one of my Korean friends for dinner and to celebrate the end of her semester and beginning of summer break. We ended up at our neighborhood chicken hof which is normally rather busy. We wanted to sit outside since it was a beautiful night. However when we arrived, there was only one table left inside. We sat down and there was a huge projector playing the Iran v. South Korea soccer game that was taking place in Seoul. The score was 1-0 in favor of Iran towards the end of the game. (Sorry my knowledge of soccer is rather limited).

South Korea ended up scoring a goal in the final minutes to tie the game. The restaurant exploded. It was a pretty amazing site to see everyone in a place cheering for the same team since this doesn't seem to happen back home too much.

Another one of our friends met up with us but we had finished eating and he was hungry. We decided to try out the "New Zealand House" which is just around the corner from my apartment. They served some delicious ribs that hadn't been "Koreanized" (translation: has something funky added to it) and soju (the Korean traditional liquor) in a CO2 powered bottle. They also had some international beers which doesn't happen too often in my neighborhood. I'll definitely go back.

On Thursday, I met another group of Korean friends in the Kunkuk University area. The areas around universities here are always really trendy and there's lots to do. We went to Ho Bar II and played darts. I have no idea why it's called Ho Bar but it's an interesting name nonetheless.

The night ended at a noraebong or "singing room." Each group gets your own room to sing to your hearts content. The room comes with all of the essential equipment like a TV, microphones, tambourines, and maracas. They had quite a few English songs. We had a blast!

One of the guys I was with speaks about as much English as I do Korean. I always seem to have a great time when I am with him though. We communicate through hand motions and our extensive 20 word vocabularies in both languages. I told his "Canchunayo" which means "it's okay" and I blew his mind. He told me my Korean has improved by 100% (this was translated through our mutual friend who speaks both languages) since I last met him. This isn't too much of an accomplishment since I could like two words last time a hung out with him.

All and all, it was a pretty awesome couple of days. I love Korea!

Another Random Saturday in Seoul

I had an awesome Saturday and one that shows how completely random Korea can be. My friend Madigan (who has only been in Korea for three weeks) and I set out to visit Changdeok Palace and Biwon Gardens. At this palace you are required to take a guided tour, so we purchased our tickets for the next English speaking tour, bought some coffee and waited for our tour to begin.

In the meantime a guy from the Netherlands came up to us and asked if we knew where the tour began. He ended up waiting with us and we started chatting it up. We took the tour together. More on this later.

The palace was interesting because it contained a secret garden and this was the first tour I took that was guided so I got a better understanding of why the palace is designed in certain ways. The gardens were absolutely gorgeous. They had lots of trees and ponds. It was amazing to see so much green in the city.

We finished up the tour and decided to head to Insadong to get some food and check out the stuff people had for sale. The Dutch guy came along with us. As we were trying to figure out how to get there, an American guy stopped us and asked us how to get to Insadong. We told him to join our group. We tried to go to a vegetarian restaurant but went in the wrong door and ended up at an awesome tea house. It was literally a hole in the wall place you had to duck in order to walk through it. We tried some amazing tea and ate the traditional Korean rice cakes.

We then sat out to find the doll for the Dutch guy's grandma. While we were walking to the market, I mentioned that I needed to get back to the baseball stadium to buy some gear for my Grandpa and told the guy how amazing Korean baseball is. He asked if there was a game and turns out there was one that was about to start in 30 minutes. (As with most Europeans, he loves soccer and was disappointed there wasn't a soccer match and he decided he wanted to see some sort of club sport in Korea.) We all jumped in a cab and headed to the baseball game.

We decided to cheer for the travelling team and the game turned out to be amazing. All the newbies loved the game and we had Koreans stopping and asking if they could take their picture with us. It's still so funny that they think we're something special.

Our team lost in the 9th inning after leading 2-0 throughout the game. We stayed behind for a while talking and had trouble leaving the stadium. It was a strange feeling knowing that we might be locked in the big stadium for the night. We finally found an open exit and decided to head to Gangnam to get some dinner.

The night before I had been to a Czechoslovakian bar (shout out to Uncle Larry!) and I decided I should take them back there. They brew their own beer and site and it is far superior to the light beer that is standard here. We order the meter of beer which is 10 beers that the Dutch guy told us really is a meter. (I still have know idea about the metric system!)

The Dutch guy and I moved on to another bar and discussed U.S. politics and how he feels the US is viewed right now in Europe and throughout the world. I was very happy to hear that he had a bad image of Americans and told us that the 3 of us changed his mind.

It was pretty awesome to meet such intellectually stimulating people in such a random way. We had some pretty deep conversations that you usually don't have until you've known someone for a while. I'm glad we stumbled across these people and it showed me that I should put myself out there more in more non-bar and club related places and I can meet some more awesome people!