Notes from Asiapalooza

I'm back! I'll post a full Flickr set of my pictures soon, but first, here are some notes from my trip.

I have:

-taken 10 flights in 9 days
-set foot in 5 countries

-visited major world heritage sites like Angkor Wat and the beach where The Beach was filmed

-watched a 6-year old boy dance on a beach with a flaming baton

-gotten rather excessively intoxicated on Koh Phi Phi

-possibly been (but almost definitely was) peed on by a monkey in an overhead tree

-been invited to a party by a Thai masseuse

-listened to a soft-rock rendition of "Oh Holy Night" in a Thai cab at 4:30am

-flown to the wrong Cambodian city and had to purchase last minute flights to the one that really is next to Angkor Wat

-waited out a monsoon holed up in a tuktuk with our driver

-witnessed the abrupt end to a Khmer cultural show when Chinese tourists leapt onstage to pose for pictures 

-watched more American TV than I had in the past year in a Cambodian hotel room

-decided that Singapore looks more like the CGI mockup of a city than an actual city
-become bunk bed buddies with an elderly Pakistani man
-successfully crossed the street in Hanoi without being hit by a motorcycle
-made an unplanned overnight visit to China when my flight from Hanoi was delayed, causing me to miss my connecting flight to Seoul and forcing the airline to get me a 72-hour visa and put me up in a 5-star hotel
-cried my way into getting a free half-hour of computer use in the hotel's business center because I had no money and no way to contact anybody to tell them where I was
-traveled to places I would have never dreamed I'd see
-had, overall, a most excellent adventure.

Adventure time!

I'm going on an adventure!!!

Ok, fine, I know I'm reusing this gif from a couple weeks ago, but I don't care because it's accurate. Also I love it.

I'm leaving today for Asiapalooza. With two of my friends, we'll be hitting up 4 countries in 9 days: Thailand, Cambodia, Singapore and Vietnam.

I was up most of the night packing, so I'm ready to go.

-sunscreen? check
-spare contacts? check
-lots of tank tops? check
-binder full of every itinerary, resesrvation confirmation, and visa document? check.
-3 new books? check. check. check. (While nothing beats the smell of a real book, I really love my Nook Simple Touch for travel.)

I'm ready!

I'll try to write a blog post or two while I'm there, but no promises. Vacations are kind of like a busman's holiday for travel bloggers.

So until then... catch you on the flip side!

Korea in August

Not exactly a sunny summer paradise. 

Yay Korea! Table Buttons

One of the (in my opinion) great things about Korea is that it's a no-tipping culture. This affects your experience in ways that I didn't really think about before I came here.

My personal favorite is that when you're eating, your waiter or waitress leaves you alone. No awkward interruptions every five minutes to ask if you need anything. Instead, if you want something, you just push a button! It sets off a little tone (and sometimes a light) to alert the staff that you want something.

 

These little buttons are at the end of the table in almost every restaurant. It's so simple! No awkwardly flagging down a passing waiter or having him interrupt your meal. Push a button and your waiter/waitress comes right over! It's genius.

 

A Week of School Lunches

I decided to document every lunch I ate for a week. Korean school lunches are profoundly different from American school lunches, and I am convinced they play a vital role in why Korea doesn't have the obesity epidemic currently facing America.

Monday: Stir-fry noodles, pork ribs, seafood soup with bean sprouts and octopus tentacles, rice, and kimchi. 

 

Tuesday: stir-fried mystery meat, a roll of rice dough, spam soup with other mystery meat, rice, and kimchi.

Wednesday:  Special food day!

This was a disappointing special food day. Some days we have 'spaghetti" or "pizza." This week it was bibimbap, friend octopus bits, pineapple(!!!), seaweed soup, and kimchi. 

Thursday:  Sesame spinach(?) Donkasu (fried pork cutlet with gravy-ish stuff), tofu soup with peppers, rice and kimchi

Friday: Dalk Galbi (spicy stir-fried chicken), corn on the cob, kimchi, seaweed soup, and rice. Friday was special because we got lettuce to make little wraps with our chicken and rice.

So this is a typical week of lunches for Korean students. I'm no expert, but if I had to go out on a limb and say why Korea has a vastly lower obesity rate than America, I'd say this has something to do with it.

Looking and Seeing

A while ago, I submitted an essay for a contest hosted by EPIK about challenges we've faced in our school.

I'm excited to say that mine was one of the ones they selected!

It's about making sure you really see your students as individuals, instead of just a mass of faces.

Sorry about the PDF. It's on the EPIK website like this, too.

If you click the little < on the top left corner of the frame below, you can minimize the annoying sidebar.

K-Fail: The bicycle incident--Part 2

Read Part 1 here

Last we left our increasingly unfortunate tale, N and I were holed up in a remote trail-side cafe trying to stave off dehydration as we planned our next move.

We'd just about had our fill of the "scenic trail," so we decided to hit the road to the beach. It seemed pretty straightforward.

After doing our best to refresh ourselves, we headed back out into the brutal heat to look for the road. We had to navigate the bumpy, unpaved, uphill cafe driveway before emerging onto pavement.

Once we made it to the main road, all seemed well. The road was nice and straight and sloped gently downhill. But during our periodic Google Map checks, we noticed that we didn't seem to be moving as quickly as we thought we would. We realized that, once again, we had been duped. The beach was a solid 15km away, and we were getting increasingly sunburned.

Screw it, we decided, Let's get a cab.

We pulled over in front of an E-Mart and accosted the cab drivers waiting at the taxi stand. They recoiled as we approached, filthy, smelly, and walking our bikes beside us. All might have been lost had it not been for a friendly passer-by. A Korean man dressed in fancy bike gear noticed our plight and stopped to help. After several minutes of intense negotiation, he managed to persuade two cabbies to take us and our bikes to the beach for a flat rate.

We were more than ready to lay out and have a relaxing afternoon on the beach. Unfortunately, the beach had other plans.

Upon arrival, we locked up our bikes and sprinted into the water, eager to wash away the sweat and grime.  We were immediately knocked off our feet by some of the most powerful waves I've ever experienced at a beach. They flipped us over and over, dragging us through the sand along the bottom. When we finally extricated ourselves, we were covered in sand. It crusted our hair and lined our swimsuits. We ran for the showers... only to find them out of order.

We had no choice but to go back into the water for what we called the "dunk and scrub." We would wait for a big wave to crash, run out, dunk and try to scrub the sand out, then run back out before the wave retreated and dragged us with it. It was only mildly successful.

Too uncomfortable to enjoy laying out on the sand, we finally decided to admit defeat. We got back on our bikes and rode to a nearby convention center, hoping to pick up another cab or two. All the cabbies waved us off. One told us to catch a bus and pointed us towards a small, isolated bus shelter.

The view from near our bus shelter

We had no way of figuring out if or when a bus was coming. The schedule posted on the shelter wall was unintelligible, even with N's superior Korean skills. So we waited. And waited. By now, it was about 4 in the afternoon: 90 degrees, not a cloud in the sky. The sun beat down on our little shelter as we huddled in the shade, nursing our increasingly fierce sunburns and raw, sand-worn skin.

Then, our angel arrived. He took the form of a little old Korean man driving a black cab. He pulled over and asked where we were going. We said the name of our town. He told us to get in. "With bikes?" we said. "Yes. With bikes."

We were saved.  He dismembered our bikes and shoved them into his cab. He had to tie the trunk down with string because it wouldn't close. We piled in and headed home.

As we approached the hostel, N and I decided that despite all our troubles, we didn't want to admit defeat. We didn't want the hostel manager to know how sorely we'd been beaten.

So obviously, we couldn't pull up in front of the hostel in a cab. We had our cabbie/angel pull over about a block away. We got out, reassembled our bikes, and rode into the hostel courtyard in a blaze of pride and glory.

Then we both took 2-hour naps.