I'm not in Korea anymore, so unless I go back to Korea, consider this website...

DEFUNCT

Is keeping busy

So the past few weeks I haven't posted any pictures on here, as usual, but I've actually been relatively busy since it's my last few weeks (now my last weekend), so here's some of what I've been doing to kill time.


I went to a soccer game.


Very few people like soccer here, apparently, which makes it pretty embarassing that they have half-a-dozen "World Cup Stadiums" scattered across the country, of which the most imposing is in Seoul of course.... They anticipated that it wouldn't really be used though, because there's a mall, a spa, a theatre and just about everything attached to the complex, including a "World Cup Wedding" space.


I also took the two-hour subway ride to the Incheon coast to see what it looks like. There was a tiny little Chinatown area, above, a lot of memorials for the Korean War landing and a pretty little park with numerous monuments to the long and happy relationship between Korea and the U.S. of A.


Including a General MacArthur statue!


Along the coast, there's also a boardwalk area that seemed a little grittier than it needed to be. It's always surprising/saddening how down-scale the outskirts of Seoul can be in places, but I figured the promenade along the coast would be a little nicer.

Who am I kidding. It was a little nicer than the view from my apartment. Shutup Tim.


I've also been doing a lot of the stuff I like to do over and over again, like rollerblade into the city. I hadn't done it in so long due to the global warming that comes each summer to the northern hemisphere of our planet. One of the effects of climate change this year seemed to be that it made my back seize up and hurt whenever I did something remotely physical for two months, which I blame on China and George W. Bush, not heredity.


Such pretty flowers. I wish I were a four-year-old girl so I could get a permit to pick one.


I also like to do things I can't afford to do once in a while, like hang out with my friend at the Hyatt bar up one of Seoul's mountains. I got one drink and I'm not telling how much it was.

See the river!


I take pictures of the river very many.

I need to do something more productive with my life, huh.

Maybe I'll build a rocketship ro something.

Korean Thanksgiving Time For Cute Traditional Clothings

In Korean, they call it HanBok, which I think means "Korean Clothes."

Anyways. The kids wear these for the traditional holidays at this school, and I guess all the outfits are bought by grandparents, naturally. One of the kids had a tag inside hers that said "ikoreandress.com," so I wonder how talented her grandparents are on the internet.

Big Benedicto. With careful gene-splicing, all children will be this cute someday, although hopefully they'll make the boy model sit down in his chair and be quiet more often.

When I yell at him, he sits down quietly and mumbles under his breathe, "Tim Teacher, scary teacher."

This is my new favorite Sally in pre-school. If you don't think she's cute, you're a communist fascist terrorist.

Nearly every day, she wears a type of shawl to keep warm, so she looks like a grandmother. In fact, everything about her (shy, well-behaved, always clean, quiet-but-playful and she corrects her behavior when she thinks she's being too silly or does something "not pretty") suggests she's been raised by grandparents, which I think is the case.

What's the best part of being a Canadian during the Olympics?

I can cheer for whichever country or athlete I choose, because Canada doesn't have an Olympic team.

I haven't posted this many pictures in a long time, so this might be fun. (Mom edition)

Yup, my mom's here and for the first week or so, the stream near my house where I roller-blade looked like this...


When it was supposed to look like this...


That's some real flooding, too. Other parts of the stream where the walls aren't so high got their streets flooded, and seven people died across the country, according to the news.

Mom didn't die though. She just wandered around my neighborhood and probably spied on all the stuff in my room while I was at work.


Here we are in Busan, where instead of being rainy and stickyhumid, it was blazingfrickinhot and stickyhumid. We spent short bursts of time outside and then long bursts inside, so ask us how many Dunkin' Doughnuts there are in Busan.

Here's mom swimming in the Pacific Ocean.*** She's either the man in the white shirt or the woman in the black full-piece.

The bridge in the back is hilarious. The beach is the inside of a bay, so they built a two-tiered bridge across the outside of the bay.

*** It's hard to suggest you're swimming in the Pacific when Japan's somewhere in the middle, but you don't need to know that.... On your capitalist American maps, that water would be called the Sea of Japan, but here in capitalist Korea, they call it the East Sea, because the Japanese don't exist.


Here we are at a temple up in the mountains of Busan. It wasn't as touristy as we expected and everybody was praying inside the individual buildings.

Mom kept asking the monks to take pictures of us, but no matter how loud she yelled and how hard she pinched them, they kept it up with the praying. ****

**** Mom didn't actually yell at or pinch any monks.


The monk with the laptop. We laughed, but not too loudly.


Today in Seoul, we ate an enormous enormous lunch with some of my kids from last year... They're "on vacation" this week, but still have Chinese, Art, Music and Speed Skating***** lessons. How about that.

***** They call it LONG SKATING here. hehe


This is the Olympic Park in Seoul. It's a beautiful park in the middle or a luxurious part of the city and I hadn't even heard about it until a few weeks ago. Oops.

It also has a museum of the 1988 Olympics, so guess what that means!!!!


Oh Canada, Our Home and Native Land....
True Patriot Love, In All Our Hearts Command....
We see the rise, We see the rise....
Our Hearts Command for Thee....
Oh Canada, Our Home and Native Land....


The museum staff said my spontaneous singing of the national anthem upon seeing Ben Johnson was the most passionate and inspiring they'd seen in weeks.


One of the biggest highlights of the museum was the collection of mascots from all the games. Mom and I couldn't stop laughing at some of them, and the best was of course Canada. The Montreal black-and-red beaver was easily the silliest of all.

I can't imagine the joy I'd feel if my father the sports reporter returned from the 1976 games with a mascot that looked like charcoal with a ribbon. Bravo, Montreal.

(And the below mascot is from Moscow 1980. Some kind of Boris the Bear or something.)


Looking into the empty subway tunnel, I thought about ditching mom and regaining my independence, but then I heard the train coming and I got scared and hid behind mom's leg.

Mom meets munchkins

Some of them even thought she was my sister...

Mom is here

She got here an hour early and brought cookies.

And it's raining a lot. Hehe.