making up syllables: April 2011

april's been a busy month, yessirie. started off, as previously posted, with the short trip to gyeongju and yeongdeok. in those early days of april the cherry blossoms had yet to make a strong appearance, but since then they have already come and gone. a beautiful flash in the pan. but a massive, explosive flash! because unlike, say, the united states, where you're hard-pressed to find anything resembling a cherry blossom, they're stinkin' with them in south korea. not that they smell bad (like you, female gingko trees - shame on you).

but these aren't the cherry blossoms of korea's past. no, that alpha tree--the super-strain, the superstar of blossomed trees everywhere--was almost unbelievably usurped, like so much of korea's past, by japanese invasion. if we're to believe my conspiracy minded co-teachers, there once upon a time existed a beautiful cherry blossom, the original cherry blossom, that could only be found in korea. and they were everywhere. a symbol of national pride and beauty. but when japan made their habitation of korea--as if stealing their arts and enslaving their women wasn't enough--they jealously destroyed korea's iconic tree and replaced it with their own, much less grand version. and now the only place you can still see the original cherry blossom is in the small town of jinhae, where they have a massive cherry blossom festival every year (and to which i did not go to - sorry).

anyways, these photos are from around school, in gyeongju and out in jumchon. everywhere i went i had my good friend the cherry blossom following me. i'll try and make note where appropriate.

outside school and around the neighborhood:

duryu park:

gyeongju teachers trip. glad to see there were no back-of-the-bus-peeing-in-a-bottle type incidents this time around:

my 6th grade co-teacher ms. sung-hyi baek.

mungyeong 3-gate path, outside of jumchon. used to be the main way to get to seoul from that part of the country. all these were taken with my ipod:

while this looks like a beautiful old korean town, its actually a movie set that's been used by different korean period dramas.

this is real though. one of the 3 gates. we only made it to gate #2 before plopping down in front of some makgeolli and some kind of seafood pancake.

and they were delicious! thanks to joes crab shack for that comedy gold. but seriously folks...this past sunday i went on an all-day outing to the outer gyeongsang province with my co-workers from last year - ms. yun, hwan sun, and minjin (not sure why only ms. yun gets the honorific, but it's probably because she's a mother), as well as ms. yun's son, doosan. the trip's schedule included a stop in yeongdeok for crab (search for it on wikipedia and you'll get the description that it's 'well-known for crabs,' and little else) followed by a stop in gyeongju, the capital of korea's shilla kingdom, for some site-seeing.

yeongdeok is about an hour and a half outside of daegu on korea's eastern coast. it's about twenty minutes from pohang, not that that means anything to anyone. yeongdeok knows that it's reputation for crab is basically the only thing going for it and it represents itself as such. there are crab restaurants everywhere. and there are huge crab sculptures on the facades of these restaurants, also everywhere. and not just on the restaurants but on bridges and archways and office buildings and really anything that has room for a crab on it. but hot damn do they have crabs! tanks and tanks of crabs. hwan sun, having the inside scoop, directed us away from most of the touristy, heavily crab-facaded restaurants, to a discrete establishment well off the main drag. its only distinction as a crab restaurant were the men mending their crab nets outside and the tiny image of a crab on its modest sign. we ended up getting about eight full-sized crabs between the five of us. two or three healthy crab and then five or so that were categorized as 'disabled,' meaning missing limbs. it was amazing. i ate so much crab. i even ate the gross part under the shell because it's what koreans (and jill) do, and after we were finished with our crab they took the emptied out carapaces and stuffed them with rice and mixed it with the even nastier green goop (that i did not eat) and made a creamy, flavorful bibimbap that i could have had seconds and even thirds of.

after yeongdeok, we made the thirty minute or so ride (thanks to hwan sun for driving) to gyeongju. this time of the year gyeongju is particularly known for their cherry blossoms. unfortunately we were a little too early as they had not yet fully bloomed, but there was still plenty to do and see in the old capital town. the first stop was seokguram grotto, high atop tohamsan. seokguram grotto houses an impressive stone buddha that dates back to 752. it was so great they wouldn't let anyone take any pictures out of fear of breaking the delicate movable parts of their cameras with awe and wonder. or maybe because it was really old or something. after paying our respects to the old god we headed down the mountain to bulguksa, a massive temple complex at the base of the mountain. bulguksa is home to seven of korea's national treasures, including a stone pagoda that is on the back of a 10 won piece. like many of korea's temples, it was incredibly picturesque and my technique to capture its many splendors was to spin around and take pictures constantly. half of the photos turned out as blurry blobs of color, but the other half are what lie below. there's a lot of legend and beautiful imagery in the stories that surround the structures and scenery of the temple (a glimpse: the sculptor of bulguksa's two famous pagodas - dabotap and seokgatap - was commissioned by the shilla kingdom because their own sculptors were as of yet inferior. while he was at work on the pagodas, his loving was was refused to see him until he was completed. lonely and longing for her husband, she waited for him day after day at the nearby shadow pond, hoping to see his reflection in its waters. however, when she looked, all she saw was the completed dabotap pagoda with no one in sight. grieved, she threw herself into the pond and drowned. she did not know that her husband was busy at work on the second of the two pagodas and that is why she did not see him. this is why seokgatap is known as the shadowless pagoda, because she did not see it's shadow/reflection in the pond.). we ended the evening by dining at a traditional korean restaurant, sharing dishes as koreans do, sharing drinks as koreans do, sharing lives as koreans do. i'm practically korean these days.

at the end of the trip i was informed that we will be returning as a school to gyeongju next wednesday. maybe i'll have more stories and more pictures to show from that experience (but if i know anything about school outings, it'll probably just lead to another horrific bus peeing story).