The First Blog of 2009

It's hard to believe that it is August 2009. It seems not that long ago that I was just arriving to Korea for the first time-- when I visited Emily for ten days in April 2008. A few short months later, I had quit my job in NYC and was moving to be with Emily here in Ilsan. All in all, it's been an amazing experience.

I still enjoy my day-to-day life in Korea. Good food, great friends and about 30 coffee shops are all within walking distance. My first school closed at the end of January, and I had a smooth transition to my new school in February. I was very lucky. My new school is brand new. I love my kindergarten class.

I have had some amazing travels. As I blogged about (over a year ago...), Em and I had a fantastic vacation last summer to Malaysia, Borneo, and Hong Kong. I got a chance to see some other parts of Korea last year as well. Emily and I had a fun weekend to Gyeongju, a very historic and scenic area about 3 1/2 hours southeast of Seoul by train. We also had a nice stay at Seongmo-do Island on the Western coast.

Last December, we managed to scoot home to NY for a short week of family gatherings and holiday celebrations. Soon after, we spent the Lunar New Year in Emily's old stomping grounds-- Osaka, Japan. We stayed with some of her old friends that are still living in Japan and she showed me around the city. We took day trips to Kyoto and Nara. Gorgeous. I will definitely be back to Japan someday.

After Japan, I adjusted to life at my new school, and we started planning early for our summer vacation 2009-- Vietnam! It was another amazing trip. We started in Hanoi, spent my birthday on a junk boat in Halong Bay, and then spent the remainder of our vacation week on Phu Quoc Island. Fantastic food, motorbikes, and beachfront bungalows.

I consider myself fairly spoiled.

So what's next? Well, I'm due to finish up at my school at the end of February 2010. After that, Emily and I are planning to do a big last hurrah of traveling before we return to the States. We're thinking Cambodia, Laos, and maybe a return trip to Vietnam. I should be home to NY by late spring. Emily won't be far behind me, as she and her friend Kim are going to spend a month working in Australia after we finish up in Southeast Asia.

If all goes as planned, Emily and I will be seeking an apartment in Queens by the end of the summer and I'll be back at Hunter College to start my Master's in Music Ed.

Annyong Haseyo (bye) for now!

Another Overdue Update

Time has truly been flying by. I can't believe that I arrived in Korea more than two months ago. I am exhausted every night after school and the weekends are always busy.

Every weekday morning, I arrive at my school a few minutes before 9:30. I have about 20 minutes to collect my wits before the bell rings at 9:50, at which time I meet "Nemo class," my homeroom of 7 students. Depending on the day of the week, I see them for 3 - 5 periods a day, in classes such as "sentence drill," "vocabulary," and "phonics". I also teach gym and science to some of the other morning kindergarten classes. I am fortunate to have a 50 minute lunchbreak to myself (Emily is jealous of this) and I frequent a little restaurant called "Burger Vill" which is about a 10 minute walk from school. (Or a 5 minute bike ride, thanks to my awesome new mountain bike.) While at school, I survive on instant coffee and pocari sweat (a japanese sports drink) and water from the water cooler. After the morning kindergarten is over, I have a few periods where I write reading questions for the school's textbooks and story books. On Tuesday and Thursday, I leave at 5:00pm. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I teach two more after-school classes, and can punch out at about 6:25pm. All in all, I like teaching and feel lucky to be where I am.

As I mentioned, just about every weekend that I 've been here has been really busy -- and fun. Several weeks ago, Emily took me to a jjimjilbang, a Korean sauna. Although hesitant at visiting a sauna of any kind (I sweat a lot, without going to a sauna), it turned out to be a really amazing and relaxing experience. When we arrived, I changed into the shorts and t-shirt that were provided, and met Emily in the unisex area of the jjimjilbang. There were a variety of sauna rooms. There was a salt room, a jade room, an air-conditioned charcoal room, and a gravel room. There was an ice room and a stiflingly hot room that basically felt like you were sitting in an oven. After a few hours of laying in various rooms, Emily and I split up and went to the gender-segregated bath portion of the jjimjilbang. Clothes are prohibited in the bath area and a shower is mandatory before getting in any of the baths. After a few minutes in one of the jacuzzi baths, I began to forget I was the only 6 1/2 foot naked American in the room. Adjacent to the bath area, there were three small sauna rooms where you could sit and sweat and then it was just a 5 foot walk to the ice pool. (A real shock to the senses, but it feels really good...) In addition to the jjimjilbang amenities already mentioned, you can sing karaoke, check your email in a computer room, dine at a korean restaurant or a little snack bar, or watch Korean soap operas on a big-screen tv. Needless to say, this was not my last visit to the jjimjilbang.

Last weekend, it was Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) and I had a 4-day weekend. With about a dozen of our friends, Emily and I went to a small island off the western coast of Korean called Seongmo-do. We stayed at a pension and had a whole floor to ourselves the first night. There was a swimming pool and a big grill where we cooked various pork products accompanied with various Korean condiments and rice. The woman who ran the pension was incredibly accomodating, driving us to town for groceries and arranging for rented bikes to be delivered to the pension. My friend Zach and I attempted to play the immensely popular board game "paduk" (aka "Go") and there was also a fierce game of scrabble. On Sunday, we biked to a famous Buddhist temple called "Bomunsa". After a steep ascent of 400+ stairs, we reached a stone carving of Buddha and had a breathtaking view of the ocean. In the evening, most of our cohorts relocated to tents on the beach and we had a meal of Korean seafood. It was really nice to get away for a few days and see Korea from a different perspective.

I have yet to make it to one of Korea's jazz clubs, but I did find a great little record shop called "Record Forum". The ceiling is less than 6 feet high, so you can imagine how humorous my perusing must have seemed to others in the shop. The shop had a really impressive selection of jazz records... There was lots of Miles and Coltrane... and everything from Ingrid Jensen to D.D. Jackson (including a CD with my old teacher John Geggie on bass) to Keith Jarrett. He had a ton of ECM records, but they were at least $33 a piece, a little too steep for me. I picked up an early Fred Hersch record and vowed to return when I had more time.

It's a pretty nice existence here, I have to say. I feel really lucky. Emily is wonderful. We cook dinner together and go out for Indian food too often. We go biking together at night in Lake Park. We even had pizza delivered to the park! (with the assistance of Emily's Korean friends, haha)

That said, I miss my friends and family at home. I miss New York delis. I miss my keyboard. I am looking forward to our trip home and seeing everyone, if only for a week. I'm going to try to schedule a gig with Connie at Waltz in Astoria while I'm at home. I'll try to post again soon.

The Overdue Emily Post

I know I'm way behind here and the blog has pretty much been in the hands of Ryan so far but I vow to fully assume my position as co-author. Fortunately for me, Ryan handled the Vacation Post beautifully and I really don't have anything to add. We had 3 foreign currencies and 9 flights in something like 7 days. We rode Malaysian subways, flew Asian Air, hiked on canopy bridges and trails through the rainforests of Borneo, took longboats down jungle rivers in Sarawak, cruised through the South China Sea on motorboats, scaled Victoria Peak in cable cars, double-decked on double-decker trams and busses, and sailed Hong Kong Harbor on a cruise boat.

However, even with his comprehensive account of our trip and his first week in Ilsan, he has somehow carelessly neglected to mention one very important thing, and that is this:

We now live in the same neighborhood! Same hemisphere, continent, time zone, country, city, NEIGHBORHOOD!
It's amazing. Here we are, in the same place at the same time:





Don't we look happy? We are.
(Oh, and in case you were wondering, that last shot with the clown wig and the coats is not traditional Korean dress or anything, but rather a bar made entirely of ice which you need to wear parkas to enter. Obviously.)

So anyway, now we're back, with regular work schedules and less exciting weekend plans, and finally setting into a routine of some kind. We wake up, drink coffee, go to work, come home, eat dinner, pass out due to Korean Kindergarten-induced exhaustion.
I know Ryan hasn't had a chance to really discuss his new career path in any kind of detail just yet but it looks something like this:and this:

Pretty funny, huh? I know I only had a chance to check out the old C&D digs once, but I'm fairly certain this doesn't compare.
Before you go wild, it's not actually that crazy. Those photos above are snapshots of Ryan Teacher's Swimming Pool Field Trip (there are wilder details but you should really ask him as I'm not at liberty to disclose). Last week I had a Water Gun Field Trip and if the pictures were not so threatening to my reputation I would upload them here.
In any case, his kids are crazy (though maybe not as crazy as mine) and you should have an idea of what we're up against over here.

As the summer winds down, we're just taking it easy and trying to enjoy the weather now that the heat has died off a bit. Friends are starting to make plans for their next adventure post-Korea and we're considering our options. Hopefully they'll include a brief, tailspin trip home around Christmastime.

We will keep you posted. Till then!

Vacation recap

I had an incredible vacation with Emily and her friends to Malaysia, Borneo and Hong Kong.  Our first stop was Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.  It's a fascinating city.  On our first night, we wandered through a street market behind our hotel at which every vendor was selling the infamous durian fruit... a local delicacy, I found the mushy consistency and rotting-onion aroma fairly vile.  We all tried it though, and Emily was the only one among us who found it somewhat palatable.  The next day (my birthday), we visited the National Mosque of Malaysia, a serene place open to tourists when prayers are not being observed.  Emily and Kim had to wear floor-length hooded robes to be allowed into the mosque.  We also visited a small Taoist temple and a Hindu temple in KL's Chinatown.  We met up with the rest of the gang and took the elevator to the top of the Kuala Lumpur tower, from which we had a good view of the city and its best-known landmark, the Petronas twin towers.  The Petronas towers are a remarkable sight, inspired by Islamic architecture and housing the Petronas Oil Company as well as the Asian hub of the Al-Jazeera news network.  At the end of the day, Emily took me out to an amazing vegetarian Indian restaurant called Sangeetha at which we had a true feast.  

The next day we flew in a rather small plane to Mulu Park in Borneo, home of lush rainforests and vast caves.  On the first day, we had a tour of the Deer and Lang Caves, the home of millions of bats that fly out of the caves each evening.  We witnessed the bat exodus and it was fairly magical.  The bats come out gradually, and they stay together in a snake-like line so they can avoid being snatched up by hawks.  The second day in Mulu we visited the Wind and Clearwater Caves and went swimming in the pool at the mouth of the Clearwater Cave.  We then went on a canopy walk high above the rainforest floor and saw a small green pit viper perched on a branch.  

Our next stop was Kota Kinabalu, a city on the northern coast of Borneo.  It was our one stay at a five-star hotel.  We enjoyed the hotel pool and incredible sunset and had some more Indian food.  After a comfy night at the hotel, we took a boat to two nearby islands for a day of snorkeling and swimming and beach laziness.  There were some pretty fearsome-looking (but actually docile) monitor lizards that shared the beach with us.   

On Friday, we arrived at our final travel destination: Hong Kong.  On the night that we arrived, we took a tram up to the top of Victoria Peak which allows a breathtaking bird's eye view of the city.  On Saturday, we met my friend Liz (who I know from my NYC chorus) and she took the lot of us out for a traditional Chinese banquet-style lunch... thousand-year-old eggs, goose, abalone soup, and lots of tea.  Quite delicious, and we were all glad to have a local's perspective on the city.  After lunch, we took Liz's advice and sought out "Goldfish Street," a row of aquarium and fish stores that offer every imaginable aquatic creature you could ever want in your home (and maybe some you don't).  We then boarded a sunset cruise in Victoria Harbour and had another panoramic view of the city and its skyscrapers.  

All in all, a really memorable trip.  I definitely want to get back to Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong sometime.  

You can check out Emily's pics of our trip here: http://picasaweb.google.com/EmilyDLong/SummerVacation 2008

the first post

I've been living in Korea for four days already. Work hasn't started for me yet, so my days have been pretty low-key thus far. On Wednesday, I visited Emily's favorite Indian restaurant for lunch (they have an ₩8000 lunch special -- quite a deal, considering what you get) and visited a local bank to exchange the American cash I had. It was raining that day, so I also got a nice wood-handled umbrella for about $5, that would have cost at least $15 on Madison Avenue, haha. Wednesday night, I met Emily's friend Kim and we all went to a Korean place for Galbi (meat cooked at your table) and Kimchichigae (spicy kim chi & pork soup)... quite a tasty meal.

Thursday, I ventured to Hongdae for a day trip. I found a little CD store that has a decent jazz section, and picked up a Korean jazz pianist's CD that was recorded in NY with an American rhythm section. Looks promising. On Thursday afternoon, I returned to Ilsan and was able to get a prepaid cell phone. Although it's a used phone and a few years old, it has all sorts of quirky bells and whistles. Don McLean's song "Vincent" is the primary ring. It also came with 300 contacts left programmed in the address book from the phone's previous owner-- instant friends!

On Friday, I met Emily at her school after class let out, where I met her boss and co-workers. It was pretty neat to see "Emily-teacher" in her element at the end of the school day-- vacuuming, laminating, hanging up student work on the door (I helped with this, haha). Friday night, Emily took me to an Izakaya, a Japanese bar that also serves snacks. We had a yummy tofu salad with sesame dressing and a large steaming bowl of udon noodles. Emily sipped a can of chuhai, a fruity alcoholic drink from Japan while I had some tea and a coke. I really dug the tatami mats and dark wood and the overall atmosphere of the place.

Today, Emily and I took the bus to Gangnam for some shopping. Our first stop was Kyobo bookstore-- a Borders-style store with a large English-language section. I picked up a copy of Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy to take with me on my vacation and joined the store's book club which gave me a 10% discount. Then we cabbed over to COEX mall, a sprawling Western-style shopping mall which was the biggest dose of sensory overload I've had since arriving.

Overall, everything has been going well-- It's been really really wonderful to be with Emily and it's been nice to have a little break from working. I'm anxious to see what school will be like on Monday... Hopefully my giant man status will not scare the kids :)