Wow! This Took Forever to Upload!

So, here I am again. Finally. It's time for another blog. Wow, and so quickly on the heels of Mel's recent blog? Yeppers. I'm cool like that.

Recently (ie July 17th), we went on a trip to the DMZ. This trip was put on by GEPIK for all the public school English teachers in our area who wanted to go. GEPIK is the guys that oversee the teachers in our area, Gyeonggi province. There's also EPIK (they are in charge of all the other provinces in Korea) and SMOE (in charge of all of Seoul). There's probably others too, who knows? Well, Mel likely does, but she's not blogging right now :D (** Mel edit: I fixed.)

So, the DMZ. July 17th was a holiday and, for most schools, the last day before Summer break. Not much was going on at many schools. Typically it was just closing ceremonies and the like. So, we got the day off and got to go on a trip to the DMZ. We took the subway three stops down the tracks and hopped onto the provided bus to head off towards the DMZ.

We were provided some snacks. My cellphone grabbed this picture of a wonderful "KicKer" bar. One guess what it tasted like...

Mel's camera has been out of commission for some time. The latch on the battery compartment of my camera is broke. So, we used one of Mel's hair ties to hold it closed. We figured we should snap a couple of pictures, right?

The day was rainy and miserable. Mass cloud cover and continually spitting rain. Our first stop was this monument. They made the whole group stand in front of it so they could take a picture. They tried to get everyone to put their umbrellas down so the picture would be better and we'd be a bit wetter.

Actually at another stop they put all us foreigners on some stairs leading up to some building or another. Then they proceeded to talk about taking a picture. They didn't actually take the picture until every umbrella was down. Later they gave us a nice copy of said picture in a little portfolio. Needless to say, there's a lot of grumpy looking, wet foreigners.

Apparently this is on the bus between stops.

Oh, yeah! So for those who don't know, the DMZ is a demilitarized zone between the North and the South. They each put up like 2km and they fenced the whole thing off. There was a lookout, but you couldn't take pictures there. Couldn't see much anyways.

This was one of the more exciting stops. There was two things to do, a movie, and a huge tunnel...

Apparently, over the years, North Korea has attempted to dig tunnels into South Korea. Four have been found. Our stop was at tunnel #3. I guess some South Koreans were drilling for water, or something, and broke through to the tunnel. Once they knew the gig was up, the North Koreans painted the walls black and said they were just mining coal. Seriously. The walls are still black. With high gloss, cheap, black paint.

The tunnel was a long was down. The grade was steep. We wore mining helmets, thankfully so. We all bonked our heads a bunch. No pictures in the mines unless you are a Korean Elementary student with a cellphone. I think that was the rule anyway.

The movie place. We didn't watch the movie. They tried to jam like 100 people in a room with 50 seats and no air conditioning. It was a no go.

Some of our friends standing around. Not everyone remembered an umbrella.

I saw a sign off in the bushes. I think it may have been an advertisement. Better get a closer look...

Mine! I guess the DMZ is one of the most highly concentrated mine fields in the world. We did here lots of booms throughout the day. Didn't sound like thunder, so I'm guessing splody bunnies.

I don't think anything was particularly interesting here, there was just a nice overhang to avoid rain.

Next stop Dorasan Station! This is a train station meant to connect North and South Korea.

It's a pretty nice train station.

No trains are running. Nor are they ever likely to.

Dreary day!

So, after all that the bus took us back to Seoul. The next stop was to be a palace. The palace is completely un-roofed (well at least the part we'd tour is) and you'd be outdoors the whole time. They allowed us the option to leave the tour at that point, which we did.

A couple of our friends were going camera shopping in nearby Namdaemun. (Which I probably spelled wrong). (**I fix**) We had a trip planned the next day so we figured we should go along.

We bought a camera! Here's the first test shot of one of our friends!

The only drawback to going camera shopping with camera geeks is that they tend to be at it for some time. We bought our camera and were ready and done within a half-hour, but there were more camera stores to shop at. This is outside the lighting store.

Still waiting... Why didn't we just leave them? Well that would be impolite, said camera geeks just helped us buy a nice new camera and made sure we didn't get screwed due to our camera ignorance. Plus, we were all going to dinner together in a city a couple stops away.

I forgot to mention that at this point in the day it was absolutely pouring. We were all pretty wet, despite having umbrellas. Getting off the subway in Itaewon saw us eagerly looking forward to our meal. As we approached the step to ascend to the street, we noticed a deluge of water coming down them. It was akin to a monsoon outside. Just crazy!

But, we were hungry. The place was only a couple blocks away. We got soaked...

It was worth it! Those are chili cheese fries. They're a lot bigger than they look, but I didn't throw the other shot on here.

This is Mel's burger. I believe it's the Smokey burger (named for the restaurant: The Smokey Saloon). It's a delightful BBQ Burger.

I ate this monster. This is called Kiss Me Later. Six onion rings, garlic chips, a tangy sauce, and a ton of delicious. Makes my mouth water just seeing the picture.

This place always has a line. It's that good. The burgers would be pretty good even in America. Here? They're simply amazing. This is the line following a crazy rainstorm. It had just started to calm into a steady pour. We got lucky and there was no line when we showed up. Mostly due to the fact that you couldn't even see the place through the sheets of rain. On a sunny day this line might be an hour long or more.

Umbrellas are fun.

So, we got back from the trip at like 8 or 9. I really can't remember, we were whooped. The goal was to sleep for 4 or 5 hours and then get up and use the night time to do whatever before we had to catch a bus to Seoul at like 6am. We finally woke up around 3am. We hung out with our good friend Justin and then set off for the bus to Seoul. From there we would catch another bus for a good 3 or 4 hours to the other side of the country. Our destination was the Boryeong Mud Festival.

Justin spent most his travel time like this.


I don't know that these statues are that interesting, but we took like 4 pictures of them between the two cameras. We were deliriously tired though...

Eventually we stopped for lunch a a Korean rest stop. They had a big sign that said Western food on the cafeteria place. There was none to be found. I was displeased.

Mel got "Japanese Tempura Noodles".

And made a friend!

A friend with eyeballs!

Here's some nice rice paddies along the way. Aren't they green?

Finally we got somewhere. We rolled on up to the mudflats.

That's not like ocean or anything, that's still just mud for some ways out.

Ooo!

Eventually they got us off the bus and we all played in the mud. This was awesome! There are not pictures of us playing in the mud due to the whole not wanting to ruin the new camera thing.

There are pictures of foreigners playing in the mud. Do some googling if you really want. There were a bunch of korean photogs there. They snapped our picture a lot because we did interesting things. I made Justin a nice mud hump. We also made a mud castle. If I find a way to acquire said pictures, I'll re-post them here.

Mel is happy post mud.

Suck it in for the win!




Scenery shot as we were on the way to town.

Another.

On our way to the "motel" we saw some elephants. I think you could ride them for a pittance.

We arrived and were shown to our little room. There was one bed and a whole lot of floor for the 3 of us. No more blankets or pillows ever showed up. Our friend who went the previous weekend stated that his room had seven people and no bed. We felt lucky.

Here's the beach in town. This is obviously not a mud beach. This was the site of the actual mud festival. They haul in mud from the mud beach (where we were before) and then people get to do silly things like wrestle in it or paint each other with it.

There's a lot of sea food in town, being on the ocean and all. Here's a relatively small shark you could eat.
We eventually settled on galbi. And by settled I mean Mel squealed with excitement and ran for the establishment while I gingerly followed behind.

The meat was good and it came with like 5 sides of kimchi! Wow!

As night fell it began to rain. Got kinda cruddy. We found a nice looking bar and went on in.


Later we played some carnival games on the street. Justin won a fan and I won a light-up yo-yo! Weee!

We went to another bar and then decided to begin making our way back to the room. We did decided to stop at the beach though...



It was great! The wind was blowing like crazy and huge waves were rolling up. There were actually cops patrolling to make sure no one got to close to the water.

The next day we had to check out at 11am and the bus didn't leave until 4pm. So, we went to the beach.

After seeing the fun others were having with them we decided to rent tubes for 10,000w a piece. It was worth it.
Commander Riker beamed in to join us.

Here's the beach. It was like 25,000w to rent one of those umbrellas. Chairs were even more.

Mel went swimming too.

I guess these guys are the lifeguard patrol? You can just see one of the buoys near the top right of the pic. These guys weren't there to make sure you didn't pass those. They would find the farthest person out in the water (which was still nowhere near the buoys) do a close drive-by and motion for them to go in farther. It was a bit strange.
Mel and Justin built a sand castle. I realized I was sun burnt due to stupidly not putting any sun block on my legs.

Decorations by Mel. Appointments by request.

Spending time building a castle helped Justin not realize that he was also well done.

You could eat these giant clams! They were probably a good foot long.

Here's the bus.
Mel wishes not to be photographed.

Our bus.

I've had summer camp with the kids these past two weeks. Here's the 5th graders cooking fajitas.


Only two shots due to battery death.

Oh yeah, I believe I mentioned we bought the cats a cat tree?

I know I've also mentioned our love of geeking out and playing Dungeons and Dragons.



This is what it looks like.

Sometimes we lock the cats out :D




Justin's birthday. He's not really 21, those are just the candles that were found.

Last Saturday I decided it would be fun to have a good, cheap time out. Batting cages then the arcade with beer along the way. Then we could hit a bar and maybe a noraebang to cap the evening.




That is exactly what we did.

The bar (Garten Beer) has refrigerated cup holders. Some of them have lights. Mine did as (pictured above).




Fun times at Garten!

Something was wrong with our air conditioner. Mel found this after returning from Garten.



Various yummies.

So, this has been a forever blog. I've been at this for like 3 hour now with all the upload time and then all the typing. Hope you enjoyed it. Now I'll give up the computer so Mel can come behind and hopefully edit in some additional details and a few corrections. :)

Aaron