Martial Arts

Below are a couple images from Hong's Martial Art Academy. Hong used to be our landlord, but recently sold the building to a new owner, but he's still one of our students' father. I ran into him last weekend and he showed me his academy, full of extremely sharp swords, and a bunch of bamboo practice swords. I can't remember the exact name of the style of fighting now, so that's why I'm just referring to it as a martial art. It's like Taekwondo, with swords. Hong even demonstrated slicing newspaper several times with one of his swords. He said that he can cut through full phone-books.

We have worms

Thankfully the worms are not in our body, but sadly enough they are in our plants... :( Oscar and Clarisse. Oscar was our first 5,000 won plant ($4.47) and Clarisse was our second. You can thank Amanda for their awesome names. Oscar had been doing so well after we first added him to our family, that we decided to get beautiful Clarisse, with her white flowers and all. Unfortunately, they have both been dying over the past week or so. Earlier tonight we found tiny worms in Clarisse, which we think are also poisoning Oscar. So, after dinner at about 9:30, armed with a spoon and a flashlight built into my pocket knife, we set out to re-pot our two plants with some fresh soil. We couldn't find any of the good black stuff, so we just used what was in the ground across the street, which is more of a brown dirt than black soil. Hopefully it does the trick and Oscar and Clarisse survive!

Hiking on an Island

Amanda and I celebrated our 2-year anniversary last Sunday (March 13) and spent the day hiking around the perimeter of Jeo-do Island, south of Masan (about a 1 hour drive from Jinyeong). It was beautiful! The weather was perfect with temps about 60 and not a cloud in the sky. We were accompanied by Kang and Choi and their kids, as well as Choi's parents, who, at about 60 years old were hiking better than any of us! Even as they pass the age of AARP membership they are more fit than I could ever imagine.

The water around the island was nearly crystal clear. We walked paths that Kang guessed had been recently created. These paths are quite narrow, are often obstructed by rocks and boulders, and many times require a great deal of vertical climbing ability on man-made steps made simply of small logs in the dirt. It was great :)

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Old man manually rowing a small blue boat.

Refreshingly clean water in a small bay.

View of the nearby mountains.

View of the mountains, water and lumbering ships.

Kang leading our pack as we trail behind other hikers.

Amanda and I standing in the freezing salt water.

Ms. Photographer unwillingly posing on a rock.

Kang and Choi posing on the beach.

Meeting the locals

Last Sunday I spent a few hours meandering through the old city taking photos, which can be seen in this set. As I stood on the old pedestrian bridge that crosses the now-closed railroad tracks I was passed by 3 teenage kids that excitedly said things like "Hello!" "Hi" and "You are so great!" as they walked by. All of this was nothing new, however, because we are commonly greeted by locals as if we were stars. It can be flattering at times, but sometimes it would just be nice to be able to walk around an not feel like a complete foreigner. Anyway, these 3 boys kept walking and I kept taking photos of the landscape, but once they  reached the other end of the bridge, they must have mustered up enough courage and decided to come back and ask me to take a photo of them. So I said sure, but I will need to back up a little because I have a zoom lens on my camera. They didn't quite understand and looked nervous as I started walking away from them, but were reassured when I turned around and said ok, 1, 2, 3! I showed them the photo and again they said "Oh you are so great!" "You are so good!" And they also gave me an awkward half-hug. They asked where I was from, and new of Minnesota; why I was in Jinyeong; how old I am, etc. They were so eager to ask me questions. I asked where they were going and they told me church, and pointed to the steeple in the distance. At this point it seemed as though they would have stayed and continued asking me questions for for another 30 minutes until service started so I simply said, "Ok, thank you, see you!"

Backlog - Events from the recent past

Here are a few photos from recent events that haven't yet made it to the blog. Thought I would just put them together:

Feb. 3 - Lunar New Years meal: baked ham, deviled eggs, mash potatoes, sausage, cheese and crackers.

Feb. 8 - Velveeta Mac & Cheese! Sent from Mom, enjoyed by us

Feb. 11 - Our apartment surrounded by noisy things

Feb. 20 - Our loot after a day of shopping at Costco in Busan (300,000 won later)

Feb. 21 - My first attempt at baking. Success! Flour-less peanut butter kiss cookies.

THE BOOK

As some of you may be aware, I recently worked on creating a photo-book of my and my parents' trip to Denmark. It has commonly been referred to as "The book" since it has been published and printed. Amanda just found a neat little trick to embed book previews from Blurb, the company that prints books, so I would like to share with you "The Book":

Denmark by Andrew Tisue | Make Your Own Book

Monkey Butt

Yes, monkey butt. For those of you who have any experience with a motorcycle, you know what I'm talking about. For those of you who don't, monkey butt basically refers to having a really sore tush after hours of sitting on a bike. The book below was a gift I made for my dad and step-mom. It's a collection of my favorite photos that were taken during our motorcycle trip up the north-shore to Canada last fall. 975 miles in total.

Monkey Butt | Make Your Own Book

Snow Day!

After Jinyeong received a record ~20cm of snow, almost 8 inches on Valentine's Day, our school was forced to cancel classes. Amanda and I took advantage of this unexpected day-off by enjoying some coffee at Caffe Bene with Kang (well I did, and Amanda stayed home to work on finishing her top-secret project). Later we went for a walk and photographed the snow covered city. See the photos with descriptions I took here.

Where Are We?

The idea for this post came to me long ago, but I am just getting to it now. Luckily for you, however, it wasn't until recently that I learned how to embed videos in my blog, and not until very recently how to create a video in Google Earth. So now, the shear millions of followers of this totally awesome blog can watch and understand exactly where we are located. Enjoy:

Oh, PS. I apologize for the very annoying "TRIAL VERSION" watermark smeared across the video, but I did not feel like coughing up $399 for the Pro version of Google Earth, and figured I could make the most of my 7-day trial.

Where Are We? from Andrew Tisue on Vimeo.

The most recent image Google Earth has to offer was taken March 11, 2006. A wee-bit outdated. Here's a more recent image courtesy of Daum maps. However, our apartment building is so new it isn't shown here either.

"Shhh! Be Quiet, please."

This is one of the phrases that we teach our students. It’s part of the curriculum and every student at the Red level learns it. Unfortunately, the construction workers outside our apartment don’t seem to be familiar with the phrase…

Yesterday morning Amanda and I were woken up at 7:30 from the workers across the street banging and clanging huge conduit pipes around for the construction of the new building. We also listened to our neighbors above us make continuous banging noises as if they were simultaneously rearranging all their furniture and playing Dance-Dance-Revolution at the same time. As we went to bed last night we were again serenaded by the furniture-moving-DDR combination. This morning, again at 7:30 the construction workers across the street were at it, building the form-work for the new building. Then, after trying to muster a little more sleep, at 8:30 our apartment shook from the noise of a jackhammer ripping up the street just outside our apartment. Lovely. Along with the jackhammer came the utility workers with an asphalt saw and large truck-mounted generators.

So, in total we now have an orchestra of furniture-moving, DDR playing neighbors above us, a restaurant moving in below us, the construction of a new building next to us, and utility and street repairs just outside our windows. Needless to say, it was not a happy morning.

Here’s a taste of the noise:

Noisy Korea from Andrew Tisue on Vimeo.