Temple Time

Last week I went to Chuncheon, located about 150km N/NE of Seoul, pretty close to the NK border. And I discovered a delicious candy called "Crunky". I documented his adventures through Chuncheon to the Pyeongcheong Buddhist temple. Hijinks ensued.

Crunky arrives.

Chuncheon is a nice place, not much to the city itself besides a market and its being the birthplace of dalkgalbi, a delicious chicken dish.

We took a quick taxi through the city and arrived at Soyang Dam, built in 1973. Soyang Lake was created as a result. At the time it was the largest private dam in Asia. (If you can find a more interesting fact about a dam, or a waterway, related to the 1970's, I'll eat my hat.)

After walking down to the ferry, we arrived at the other side of the lake, a rocky beach that lead to a rockier pathway to the foot of the hill where the temple was. In Korea (and I imagine in other Buddhist countries) there's a superstition involving the stacking of rocks in order to receive good luck. Anyone who walks by and adds one is said to achieve good luck. Normally, this is seen as a joke, just something to do while taking a hike. The closer one gets to a Buddhist temple, the less of a joke it becomes.

More pictures of the way up:



At the top is Cheongpyeong Temple, a rather small temple by Korean standards, but remote--it's a four km hike after taking the ferry. There was a few open air restaurants on the trail and some food shacks as well. Korea has 45 million people squeezed into an area the size of Indiana, so the concept of "remote" is relative.

According to the legend, a princess fell in love with a commoner, but he was killed. His soul, in the form of a snake, came to her and drained her energy. She made a pilgrimage to Cheongpyeong Temple, and prayed for release. There was a huge thunderstorm, and when it passed, the snake's corpse was floating in the river. She prayed for another 100 days and her lover's soul, free of the snake, returned to her one last time. Oh my...

Here's a few of the temple. There'll be more posts soon, I promise:

The entrance

A quick one

The other day, I'm leaning over to repeat a phrase for a student, and the kid next to him starts rubbing my arm hair. So I jerk my arm away, and repeat the phrase again. And the other student (the one I'm helping) starts doing it too. As I'm talking to him.

"Very good teacha, very good!"

Thanks, kiddo.

"Very good arm!"

Strange children.

Why I Teach English

How is Korea?

Korea is full of Koreans, most of whom aren't fluent in English. So I shriek in their faces, spittle flying from my mouth.
"Do you sell colostomy bags, crone?!"
I ride the subway at one in the afternoon and it's completely packed with people. Old women punch me in the back when they want me to move. Korean women have stout shapely legs and they love skirts. Korean men probably have nice legs as well but I rarely see them. You can drink on the streets and they sell a 40 proof liquor/beer hybrid called soju for $1.30/12 oz. bottle. My school is always 42 degrees F. no matter what the temperature outside. You can eat an excellent meal with soup and side dishes for 4 dollars. The air is filthy but the city is surrounded by mountains. The subway goes everywhere, as do the buses. Their alphabet is wonderfully intuitive. The street food is amazing, and everyone drives like an asshole. Korean women love skirts.

My Favorite Part of Seoul

Hello friends. It's been a while since I've posted anything, because I've found facebook to be so endlessly fascinating. This Saturday was the St. Patrick's day celebration in Seoul, and it was pretty fun. There were a ton of sloppy obnoxious waegukin (wae=foreign, guk-land, in-people) acting like jackasses, but the city put on a pretty good show, from what I heard. There was a small parade in the Jongno area, which I have decided is my favorite part of Seoul, in the one week that I've been here. Here's a picture facing north:
I'll eventually get some other photos going to give a sense of how central this district is. To the west, east and south of this intersection is downtown Seoul, which has just as much steel, glass, and inscrutable public art as New York or Chicago, if not more. There's a great shot if you can get in the middle of the boulevard, which I think here is called Gwanghwamun-sam-ga (sam for "three" and "ga" being a special designation for large streets. Interestingly enough, a named street in Seoul is something of a rarity) In the foreground there'd be a statue of Yi Sun-shin, a Korean admiral who defeated a Japanese fleet under Hideyoshi in 1532 using the world's first ironclad boats, the geobuk-seon or "turtle boat", and behind it, Bukhansan.

I can't stress how often one sees some peak or another while taking a bus or walking down the street here. It's quite a change of pace from Chicago. You're really in the middle of everything here, and look at that view. There's an English language bookstore about fifty yards south and all kinds of street vendors selling various wares for at least a square mile around here. Really really nice place.

Big Mama

Introducing Big Mama. Four Korean "housewives" who sing in a Korean pop group. None can be classified as "eye candy", but they're really good singers, and apparently quite popular. I would love to see something like this in the States. But I don't see that going down. Watch until the end. There's a rub.

My Orientation Room

Good day to you all. My name is Daniel Plainview, and I'm an oilman. I've just arrived in Korea last night, after a sleepless 14 hour flight sitting next to the can. I will never sit next to a bathroom again on a long flight. No sleep with all the openings and closings. Arrival was uneventful. Here is a video of my orientation room. Yes I do fall. And hit a bar.



I DRINK IT UP!

Dance With Dragons Has a Cover

Sweet Christ in knickers. At least there's a cover.

Matthew 19:14

"Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

Jimmy Stewart Reading a Poem About a Dog

This will get you.

Fred and Barney

Sweethearts.

Fundrace 2008

Fundrace 2008 is a really cool site. You can zoom from block by block to nationally. I'm not sure how comprehensive it is, but it's useful to compare urban areas.

First Sign That The Apocalypse Is Upon Us

Achy: "I can see in three dimensions now. Just like a Jew! haha j/k!"

From the wire:

Ahmedinejad was briefly in a Talking Heads cover band during the early 90's in Tehran, but Achy (as he was known) soon clashed with the guitarist, (a lesser known mullah named George Michael Rasfajani) over whether or not David Byrne or Jerry Harrison were more suited for the title of "Rock Mahdi". Disillusioned, he entered politics.

Cross Man

From the Chicagoist:

Greg Zanis, a carpenter from way-west suburban Sugar Grove. Zanis started his "Crosses for Losses" ministry in 1996 after his father-in-law was murdered and Zanis discovered the body. He began leaving crosses at murder and accident scenes.

Although this a tad morbid, he seems like a driven individual.

A Special Treat

You may remember him as Joe the Policeman from the "What's Going Down" episode of That's My Momma! Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Randy Watson!

Dyson Spheres and Ring Worlds

From the Guardian:

"[Scientists] identified sunshine as a "tantalizing source of environmentally friendly power, bathing the Earth with more energy each hour than the planet's population consumes in a year." ... "We only need to capture one part in 10,000 of the sunlight that falls on the Earth to meet 100% of our energy needs," futurologist Ray Kurzweil, a member of the NAE group, told the AAAS. "This will become feasible with nanoengineered solar panels and nanoengineered fuel cells.'"

While all that sounds very well and good, but whatever happened to the Dyson Sphere? Basically the idea is to create a sphere that completely encompasses the star, like an egg around a yolk. No solar energy is wasted. Variants include a Dyson Swarm and a Ringworld, as seen here:


A ringworld is basically a man-made structure with walls 1000 miles tall to maintain an atmosphere, with a circumference of over 600 million miles. It was made popular in the Halo series, according to the folks at Wikipedia. Its surface area is something like four hundred times that of Earth. Obviously, these are developments that are only possible once all the nano-solar machinery is created and becomes cost-effective, but it's something to shoot for.

Jonah Goldberg is a hack

Barrack Obama is pretty good at saying very little while continuing to win state after state. He doesn't really address specific policy because he's doesn't have to. Instead of tacking to the left, as would be expected, he continues on with his cult of personality, which works just fine for him. Jonah Goldberg doesn't seem to like this. He takes Obama to task for his rhetorical flourishes, implying that (gasp!) political speech during an election cycle doesn't resemble the grit of everyday American life:

"It seems that Barack Obama can win blacks and that he can win whites; where he has trouble, electorally speaking, is winning blacks and whites," and that in "in states that actually 'look like America,' he tends to get beaten by Hillary Clinton."

This is, of course, bullcorn. Obama gets 35% of the Latino population and roughly 45% of the white males, but his support among Latinos rises when the population has a low amount of foreign-born immigrants, as noted here in the Daily Kos. In states like New Mexico, Obama got half the Latino vote. Not dominant, obviously, but not anemic.

So despite breaking even with US-born Latinos and white males, Goldberg tries to paint Obama as another ivory-tower phony pol who wins over rural whites (who does that sound like? Nixon thru Bush II?) which would be understandable if Goldberg has had a history of positioning himself as a political realist concerned with the ins and outs of political theatre and framing opposing candidates.

But he isn't. He's a "principles" guy, meaning that anytime conservative candidates or movements fall out of favor, it's because conservativism is more concerned with "principles." "We're not trying to win, we're sticking to our guns." This is a good way to spin "we're too far to the right and people are sick of us getting a hard-on from our dreams of a security state." If you're a principles and ideas guy, why write a framing article about a Democratic candidate that fails under the most cursory scrutiny? Liberals (or progressives) have had a hard time recovering from their brush back in '94 and have often come off as pretty opportunistic in their climb back up the hill, but they haven't tried to deny it as stridently and self-righteously as guys like Will and Goldberg have.

My official presidential endorsement

Dumb Texans, in review

Okay I'm trying to get the font types and colors down here, so bear with me here if these don't all match up at first. I doubt anyone is reading this anyway.

Here is a recent story from the New York times regarding the Army's burial of a completely unclassified version of a study conducted by the RAND corporation. As noted by Timothy Noah here, this is the same company whose research appeared in the Pentagon Papers, leaked by one of its employees. The article states:

The study chided President Bush — and by implication Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who served as national security adviser when the war was planned — as having failed to resolve differences among rival agencies. “Throughout the planning process, tensions between the Defense Department and the State Department were never mediated by the president or his staff,” it said.

The study goes on to slam Tommy Franks and others, but what is galling (aside from fact that the Army buried an unclassified version of a report that already had a top secret version) is that it's a repudiation of the Bush government and its ability to effectively manage departments. Bush was supposed to be the MBA president, but he completely overlooked a pretty well-known phenomenon, the notion of "bureaucratic politics". Although this falls under the purvey of public administration, I would imagine this is not that dissimilar from what one would encounter when driving the Texas Rangers into the ground. Although this horse has been flogged ad nauseum, its worth noting that this administration's penchant for secrecy is only exceeded by its tendency towards complete incompetence.