Hwacheon Ice-Fishing Festival

Well, after many consecutive weekends spent glued to the computer screen, playing Warcraft (yes, I know- I whined about Tom playing, but he got me addicted!!), Tom and I finally tore ourselves away and signed up for a trip with a travel group to a winter festival in Hwacheon, Korea. Our wake up call was at 6:00, and we were very tempted to ignore it and continue sleeping, since we had been up late the night before with some friends. After a couple of rounds with the snooze button, we dragged ourselves out of bed to catch the subway to the meeting place. The bus ride out was a fairly uneventful 3 hours- most people slept. I played FreeCell on our sweet Korean cell-phone, which Tom has somehow made to sound like a sword being pulled out of it's scabbard when it opens (it's his new favourite toy).

Hwacheon is close to the Eastern side of Korea, and it's about 30km south of the DMZ. The town has a population of 30,000- 12,000 of which are people in the army!! It was kind of like a cold Folk Fest, with a few modifications; ice replaced the gross mud, clean Koreans replaced the dirty hippies, and speakers blaring weird Korean pop songs and the odd Kenny G. tune replaced the folkie alternative music. So really, you can see the many similarities.

So, we started off our eventful day ice fishing. No one in our group was particularly successful, although I did see a few fish swimming. Eventually a Korean man came with a cooler full of fish and told everyone in the group to take a fish and put it on their hook and get their photo taken. I guess that they had little faith in our fishing skills. Not that we exactly proved them wrong, but whatever.

We spent the next few hours riding on these crazy ice bikes with skis instead of wheels in the back, and walking around the festival grounds, before we met back up with the group for our main event. On the Adventure Korea website, the activity had been advertised as bare hands fishing, and I had pictured us standing beside a tank with our sleeves rolled up, trying to grab a fish. It turned out to be nothing of the sort. When they gave us shorts, T-shirts and sandals and pointed us in the direction of the change room, I was worried. Our group of 20 foreigners left the change room together, shyly staying close to the other group members. There were many Koreans gathered around us and the tank which we were apparently supposed to be jumping into in a few minutes, who looked as though they never missed this event for the world. We were definitely the hit show at the circus. So, we all edged around this freezing cold, icy pool, and jumped in when the gong was hit.

After posing for some pictures, trying to keep as much of our body our of the water as possible, we began the bare hands fishing even. It was somewhat of a mad scramble. They told us we couldn’t get out until we had caught two fish, which we were supposed to store in our pocket. I’m not sure if they were being serious. Once I started I got really into it, and I ended up catching 6 fish!!!! With my hands!!!! Keep in mind that Tom (who grew up living by a lake) caught 2, and no one else caught more than 4! I guess I’ll never go hungry (Although I was somewhat disgusted at the thought of eating it). I threw them out to the eager spectators, but my hands were so cold that I could barely throw- I ended up hitting one woman in the face with a fish, knocking her camera out of her hands. Woops. With the remaining movement we had in our hands and feet, we all scampered out of the water and into the sauna/change room, when we huddled for the next 25 minutes to get warm.

After our body temperature had warmed to sufficiently above hypothermic, Tom and I decided to hike up the nearby mountain. The path was ridiculously icy and slippery, but we got out of the crush of people that is Korea, which was definitely worth sacrificing our safety. The view was worth the effort, anyways. We began the treacherous walk down, and emerged safely to meet up with our group for the drive home.

Thanksgiving Dinner

So, a friend of ours invited us to a Thanksgiving dinner at her church a few weeks ago. We were very excited by the prospect of free dinner, but we didn't really consider the possibility that we were probably being coerced into a huge church service. When we arrived, we found out that this was in fact the case. The service started out very harmless- there was a little orchestra and piano player playing Christmas music, a theater group, and a dance group. The dance group was pretty hilarious- it was a group of 25-30 year olds, dancing to a Christian pop song- the dance was a similar a caliber to what my grade 5 lunch hour dance group was capable of (a lot like Napeleon Dynamite's sign language dance).


Then the service morphed into an hour long speech about the importance of accepting Jesus into our lives, from an intense, self-righteous pastor. He told us how bloodshed is the only way to true salvation, and that Jews, Muslims, and Hindis are all banished from heaven because their leaders did not sacrifice themselves to save their followers. The pastor then asked the audience some supposedly rhetorical questions "What have Mohammed and Buddah done for their followers? No blood was shed. No sacrifice was made. Therefore, there is no room for them in heaven!” to which a protesting member of the congregation answered, “They give their people hope and love!”. This reply was quickly dismissed by the pastor, who cried, “Yes, but there was no blood!” He then asked everyone to open their hearts to Jesus, and asked everyone who believed in Jesus as their personal saviour to stand and acknowledge one another, while the heathens remained sitting. I was a bit worried, listening to the chairs creaking that everyone was standing, but actually the whole room remained sitting. At least there was nice pianist playing in the background.

After this exhausting sermon, we were finally released and allowed to go eat dinner. I had about 5 pieces of apple and pumpkin pie to compensate for the past hour. I also won a free dinner for two at this Mexican restaurant, and a free chap stick, which raised my spirits! After dinner, we quickly escaped to a pub across the street. It was snowing- our first snow of the season- and everyone was outside, throwing snowballs, slipping on the sidewalks, or hiding under a protective awning. After unwinding with a couple of drinks and discussing the evening for a couple of hours, we walked our friend Becky back to her place.

By the time we left, it was about 11:30, giving us ample time to get home before the subway stopped at 12:30. Unfortunately, they shut the subways down at 12:00 on the weekends, which we found out when we were kicked off the train at its last stop, still relatively far away from our apartment. So, along with several hundred other passengers, we climbed the stairs out to the street, to try and compete with everyone else to catch one of the few available cabs. After about 45 minutes of standing in the snow, watching many full cabs drive by us, a sympathetic man came over to offer us a ride with his brother in law, to an area close to our place. He told us he was going to a hotel, so we could easily catch a cab from there. So, we waited with this man for another 45 minutes. It turned out that he was the Korean diplomat to Central and South America, in Seoul for a conference on the reunification of Korea. Interesting to talk to, but I couldn’t really hear him over the chattering of my teeth. His brother finally arrived at about 1:20 (only 80 minutes after we got out of the subway terminal), and he drove us to the hotel. We arrived at the hotel at 2:00, only to find out that the last guy had been waiting for a cab for over an hour, so we decided to walk to 40 minutes home. We arrived home soaking and cold, and put our shoes and pants in the dryer.

The next morning, when I got our stuff out of the dryer, I found the remains of my melted plastic container of chap stick, and my coupon, in tatters. So, it’s true: The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. No matter. I saved $5 on the cab ride home.

Movin' to Korea...gonna eat a lot of Kimchi

Summer 2005

After graduating from the University of Manitoba in May 2005, I had an exciting summer, including a research position which brought me to Colorado for several weeks, my brother Kyle's marriage and the subsequent cruise ship honeymoon that my entire family attended with my bother’s new wife’s family, followed by a bike trip from Vancouver to San Francisco, with Tom. In October, after returning home from the cycling adventure, I left Canada on a much longer adventure- destination: Seoul, South Korea!

Fall 2005

Tom and I arrived in Korea in October 2005. After lugging about 500 pounds of luggage (yeah, I have no discretion I guess when it comes to packing for a year away) from Osaka, Japan to Seoul, Korea in one day (no joke) I found my new apartment and started a new chapter of my life as an English teacher in Seoul.

Too much luggage??

There are approximately 250,000 foreigners living in Korea teaching English. It’s pretty insane how much time and money parents and children funnel into the whole academy system, from an extremely early age, primarily to give them a competitive edge when applying for university- 12 years later!! I mean, children who are enrolled in extracurricular academic programs will undoubtedly benefit form the extra help, but the quantity of time that these kids are required to spend is truly mind boggling- I have a feeling that a 6-year-old Korean’s schedule is sadly a lot more rigorous than the average Canadian university student! Anyways, one of the kids’ many academies is English, and for the lucky ones, they get to spend their parent-mandated daily hour of English class with me!

From November 2005-6 I worked at an English academy called Michigan Campus, where I taught kids ages 6-18 various levels of English. Other than the 75 minute commute each way, I loved this job- the kids were wonderful, and generally extremely well-behaved, and I had a lot of freedom, in terms of class content, reading material, and student evaluation. I heard a lot of horror stories about my boss from other employees, including how he spit in one man’s face, but I later found out that his reaction way in response to the employee pinning my boss against the wall with a desk- yeah, there are a lot of weirdos here... Other than a sketchy boss, which is apparently all too common, my three Korean co-workers, the secretary, and my students made for a great year at the school.

Highlights from Korea this year were....

• Gorgeous fall colours in Seoul
• Ice-fishing festival in a northern Korean town
• Fire festival on Jeju Island, south of mainland Korea
• Singing at nori bang (private karaoke)
• Hiking in Seoraksan National Park
• River hiking
• Trip to Geumgung (Diamond) Mountains in North Korea!
• Trip to the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea)
• Night skiing at Yongpyong Ski Resort

Tom and I doing some hiking in Bukhansan

Skiing at YongPyong in January 2007

Sketchiness

Ahoy from San Francisco!! I'm pretty pumped about being here-it feels like it's a major landmark that we've been striving towards for a while now, so it's satisfying to have finally reached it.

We hada good ride this morning to get here- not too long, but the area is very cyclist friendly. Well, friendly in that there are plenty of paved bike paths and bike lanes, but completely unfriendly in that the hills were steep and long. Yuck. But we made it to the Golden Gate Bridge- it was a bit unceremonious, since the bridge was completely covered with fog, so we could only see about the first 200 meters,which weren't all that exciting. After Tom expertly nagivated us through the city- ensuring that we covered as much elevation changes as possible- we made it to our hostel.

It's a bit sketchy. Well, maybe not a bit- maybe more like alot. But that's ok. We're getting used to the sketchiness of California already. Most people that we have met have been complete psychos, so I guess the entirety of the Northern Californian coast has been an effective desensitizing experience with regard to sketchiness.

For example...

1: The guy we met last night- so, he walks over to where Tom, Jason, and I were eating dinner, and offers us some wine- he had a huge story about how he got the wine from some guy who he gave a bike lock to. The bottle was already opened, but he seemed nice enough, so I guess that we weren't really worried about the possibility that he did anything to it at the beginning. However, as he started to talk we became much more wary. He told us how he was a declared homeless person, who thought that he was the first person to experience an enlightment which allowed him to be the last avant garde artist, and the first person to be able to relate this enlightenment to tennis. He ranted for awhile about how he was going to make tennis a mind-body-soul experience, and so on- I think we had all successfully blocked out his spiel by that point, so his later comments are now lost to the world.

2: The guy we met this morning- we come upon him when we stepped out of our tent. He was sleeping in front of one of our food boxes in a sleeping bag. He looked kind of like a disshevelled version of Sean Connery, but didn't say much other than asking us for the time, and telling us about the raccoons who were fighting all night (there was a crapload of raccoons at this site- we). So, he left all of his stuff shortly after waking up-he walked off with a little briefcase, and i was a little worried thatthere was a bomb or something in the pile of stuff that he had left (I think that I am really paranoid because I have been listening to a lot of books on tape by american left- and right-wing political activists, so I have been hearing about the Bush administration and the war inIraq for 6-8 hours every day. A person can only listen to so much Michael Moore before going insane...). Fortunately, there was no bomb. The guy came back about 45 minutes later (he had no vehicle, and there was no town around for miles), then packed up his stuff and left.

3: All of the Americans who think that we're from either New Zealand orAustralia based on our accent.

4: Ninja biker- this guy we met was covering crazy long distances daily- he did our last 3 days in one day! He bikes about 250-320km/day! Ridiculous. Mind boggling, even!!!

5: The general population of the town of Garberville- this one guy randomly approached Tom, and explained the entire genealogical background of his two mutts. (one was half rottweiller, half wolf). Another woman greeted us as if we were old friends, which totally caught me off guard. When we looked a little uncertain of who she was, she asked us if we were in fact the couple who was there earlier in the spring. ( There are seriously hundreds of people who do this ride every month) She figured that since we were on a bike, we must be the same people. Another lady was trying to start a fire in the parking lot to cook food. Another drunk guy randomly started giving us directions to who knows where. Hmmm, well i guess that that gives you the general picture.

Fiddler's Green

I made it to California!!!! We've biked about 1,500 km, and it's been about 2 1/2 weeks, so I'm really excited about our progress. We'll be stopping in San Francisco for a few days early next week, and then heading on down the coast to LA, which I'm sure will be a very busy road.

We just did our highest hill today so far, and for the whole trip- 2000 feet. It wasn't as hard as I had expected, but it had a killer downhill- definitely worth it!!

We've been biking through Avenue of the Giants for the past few days- a winding road leading through the Redwood forests. The trees are so massive, you can't help but feel insignificant standing at their base.

Last night we stayed in this freaky campsite for hikers and bikers- it was about 3 km from the regular campsite. The area was nice and secluded- very quiet- but it seriously looked like it was the set of some freaky horror movie. Really freaky. I held my pee in all night because I really didn't want to go out there alone in the middle of the night. But luckily we awoke the next morning unscathed, and lived to tell. But really - if there are any amateur film producers out there, this would really be the perfect set! It even has a creepy bathroom with a skylight that you could fling a dead body over to scare the unknowing bathroom occupant.Brilliant plot line. (I'll post a photo of it once I get back to Canada and have access to all my photos- until then, you'll just have to trust me....)

Ok, well the library is closing- 5pm and this town apparently shuts down. Later gators...

Windy rides

I'm writing from the library computer of Port Orford- a little town about 100km from the Oregon-California border. It's crazy how fast Oregon went by. I guess I had a huge misconception about the sizes of the states- California's about 3x bigger than I though. It's going to take up 2/3 of our trip. I'm sure it's really beautiful though.

Well since my last email, I think that we've covered the hardest leg of the trip so far. We had some big climbs a couple of days back, but what was hard was that we're right on the ocean- the road is so exposed, and the wind whips by so fast that it really felt like i was going to be blown away. I was so scared, I wanted to just sit there and cry. Actually, that's what i did, but Tom suggested that it wasn't a particularly good way of dealing with the problem, so we walked our bike through a really sketchy area that was super windy with a super big drop on the other side, and then it was at least somewhat safely navigable after that. It's just the huge RV's, being driven by really old people that are the worst- it fells like we're being driven off the road sometimes. But usually it feels very safe, and the road is fairly quiet and not so windy.

Where's the road??

There haven't really been any notable bike problems in the last few days, which has been great. The camping along the way has been fantastic-the sites here are gorgeous and really cheap- $4/person. Unfortunately the hiker biker sites give you little to no privacy, but the social aspect is great.

Oh yeah- I forgot to mention our escapade yesterday. We were both so tired after a long tough day, and we saw a sign that said we were 2 miles from the campsite. After about 4 miles we figured that we had gone the wrong way, so i looked at our guidebook, and we realized that we had missed a turnoff. So, we biked back 3 miles, and biked up a super super steep hill- I couldn't make it- I had to walk it, it was so ridiculous. Then we get to the top and had a super steep downhill. After a few miles in the fog and rain, we came to a junction that wasn't in our directions to the camppsite. So again we realized that we had gone the wrong way again, and really we were on the right path to begin with!!!! Ahh!! So, i swore a lot, and then we biked back and found the place an hour later. It was so frustrating. Oh well, now it's over, and i'll read the map more closely!!!

Welcome to Oregon

Tom and I are now in central Oregon!! We've been really pushing it for a few days now, and I am really starting to feel a lot stronger and more comfortable with hills, which are becoming more and more frequent.

Our two biggest have been today- 700 and 900 feet. I guess it doesn't sound all that huge, but it's tough lugging all of the gear up. We rejoiced at the top of each hill though with snacks of sweedish berries and doritos to keep us motivated. We are actually going for the record of unhealthiest bike team doing this trek right now (we're somewhat in sync with several other couples and solo bikers). But you have to understand- to achieve this record is quite difficult, so we have to avidly consume large amounts of the above foods, as well as chocolate and other goodies on a regular basis. It's crazy how constantly hungry I am, though. Unfortunately our cooking ability is more of a disability, so our dinners are more similar to a vomity mush than an edible meal (see below). Oh well.

Recipe: 1 part nasties. 2 parts pasta.

We've actually just had some more troubles with Tom's bike- it's getting really frustrating!! Another spoke broke, that definitely wasn't damaged before, so right now the whole back wheel is getting completely new spokes put in. It sucks though, because we finally got into a good groove of biking and setting up/taking down camp, and then another problem arises. We were only about 10 miles outside of a city when it happened (that we were told had a bike shop) but it didn't. But this amaing couple that we met in that city offered to give us a ride into Newport, a larger town that did have a bike shop, so we got a ride with them, which was so great!! It was only about 35km, so It didn't feel too disappointing to have to get a ride. Plus we had no other option at that point because Tom couldn't ride on it anymore. So it'll be fixed soon, and we're heading on to what looks like a gorgeous state park to camp for the night 10 miles south of here.
The area is completely gorgeous- the ride floows right along the coastand the beaches are all beautiful!!

Ok, well my time is running out so I've got to go. I miss you all lots, and hope that you're having as much fun wherever you are as we're having out here!