Fighting Over Kimchi (Part 2)

In the last post, friends and I were having a rocking good time in Cheongju because I persuaded them to visit just to wander around and see this small city. Then I went back to Daejeon with my friend, and guess what we did the next day?! That's right - we went ziplining.

We had to get up early, because that seems par for the course for every big trip that we do. I stayed over with my friend, then we got up early - 6am? - to head to Daejeon Station, where we caught the KTX to Daegu. Then, we took a bus for 40 min. from Daegu Station to an amusement park named Herb Hillz.

This park has everything. There were little wooden cabins for quieter children who want to create art, a pool with giant inflatable hamster balls for children to get in, the pirate ship ride in most amusement parks, a merry-go-round, a garden with pictures on wood for families to hide and behind to take pictures in with their faces sticking out. Some of us took pictures, but others bypassed all of that for the food. I finished my cream cheese bagel from Dunkin Donuts and ate BHC with the Reeds.

Then it was time for the ziplining tutorial. We all put on harnesses, and there were so many buckles and places to tighten and tuck everything in. The man spoke in relaxed Korean, explaining the two hooks that catch us if we fall, and that's why we're supposed to hook them to everything at every step. Then of course, there's the zipline hook itself, which has small wheels for safe and fast gliding on the cable wire for some fear-of-height thrills. We each had a helmet - blue for women and yellow for men. We also all had rubber gloves to protect our hands as we will be using them a lot. I was glad to find a pair that fit me - normal gloves never fit me.

It was hot. We were all impatient for it to begin. We practiced on the low sample course, where a friend didn't know whether she wants to do it. Then we all headed to the Gorilla course anyway, but the same friend says there is an easier course, so we should do that one instead. We headed towards that one, but she decided to stop and sit it out for the day. So my one partner left and I climbed the Chimpanzee course. These courses - there are about five or six - are rated by a star system, and ranked by how much upper body strength it would take to balance and climb, because the hardest one is the longest.

I don't remember how many stages it came in, but the most memorable ones are these. There were two wires, one to each side of you, and two wires lower than that for you to step on. Occasionally, there are circular wood platforms for you to stand upon and rest for a minute or two. Then there's the one where you step on one wire, the other one you lean on at the middle of your waist, and the way to get across is to hold on tightly to individual ropes that hang roughly 2.5 feet apart. Walking on a net, that was the easiest one for me. Jumping across two platforms, with only one rope in the middle to help me swing, that may have been the hardest. I also had to crawl through barrels uphill, with spaces between the barrels.

And then, finally, the final stage was always the zipline itself. There were two ziplines to this course, and it's not just zipping. You have to crash against a thick green mat and catch the ropes around it to stop and pull yourself up to the next platform. My partner found that the most challenging.

It's the combination of height - we were maybe 10 meters up? - and using your hands and arms to grasp at objects and climb the obstacle course that was a lot of cardiovascular work. I remember my fingers feeling the blood pumping through them, and the blood flowing throughout my whole body - making my skin almost wine red and giving me an adrenaline rush that lasted the next two days.

It doesn't stop there. So, we leave Herb Hillz to catch the bus back to Daegu and then take the KTX, right? So we're all chilling out, expecting to have an easy ride home et all, and what happens? We were either sleeping, recovering, or talking about how great it was when - Flash! Flashflashflash flash! As we all looked out the bus windows to admire the dangerously close by lightning, thunder hits - BOOM!! First, it was farther away, and then it got closer and closer, until it was only 4 mi. away. And it started pouring. The streets were almost completely flooded. Only that one friend had an umbrella, and we were a party of 6 or 7. Not only that, the bus overshot Daegu station by a good 5 minutes.

So we get off the next time the bus stops. We know which general direction the station is in, and also assume that it's just a straight line. Then we... that's right - we run for it. 7 foreigners, running as fast as adrenaline will fuel us, through the rain in a straight line, splashing puddles everywhere and being joyfully dramatic. It was totally a sight for the Koreans to see! It was roughly maybe 8 to 10 blocks, we were all soaked. It was nostalgic, like autumn cross country running back in Massachusetts again.

Under a bridge, we asked for directions. This would be the perfect set for a noir photography shoot, I thought. It turns out that it's more straight line, then to the left. After we left the bridge, the rain had significantly lightened, so we were able to walk, sopping wet, the rest of the way amidst lots of stares from Koreans. I got hot chocolate at the Daegu station. All of us only had standing room on the train, because it was packed for Buddha's birthday weekend, still. I was with two girlfriends, and we spoke of many things standing there and making the Koreans uncomfortable. One old lady stood right in the middle of our conversational space.

We were all very relieved when we finally got to Daejeon Station. While we kind of went our separate ways, I picked up clothes from my friend's apartment, then went to have dinner with 3 friends, 1 of whom didn't go with us to ziplining. She preferred to sit and read all day, her mind in glorious fiction, instead. We were ravenous. We asked for so many refills of kimchi, hot spicy sauce, lettuce leaves and water, that the waitresses must have thought we were fairly high maintenance. We devoured all of the dalkgalbi and wanted rice afterwards, but they explained that rice only comes with the galbi at the same time, not afterwards with the leftover sauce.

We paid and went home, but the title stuck because one friend said it's rare that all the foreigners at the table like kimchi, and I envisioned a couple of monkeys sitting at a table fighting over - you guessed it - kimchi. It as amazeballs.

Mother Earth, Love Me Weary

Two bigger events happened. One, it's been two weeks since the schedules for the new semesters at work came in. Two, I helped clean up a beach in 30 degree Fahrenheit weather on the same island that I taught on last year.

While my teaching hours start earlier now - 3:10 or 2:30 as opposed to 4:00 like before - they are fairly stable. I have five classes a day, and the new system of all kids in the same level using the same book means that there are less books to plan around, but we might have to teach the same lesson twice in one day or one week. The debate books are more detailed, like the training had promised, and having a library class means I get to teach stories sometimes.

There was a week and a half of no middle schoolers, because they have to study for big exams at their school. The younger ones just got into middle school, the regular middle schoolers showed up at TOPIA, and the older ones studied for and took an exam that determines which high school they go to. Management had us choose a random textbook to teach the middle schoolers who showed up, so we've been making photocopies of those pages and occupying them in a more casual manner than usual. However, testing period was officially over today, so I assume the regular curriculum with their new textbooks will begin tomorrow.

Saturday morning, I woke up at 5:30am to quickly pack, then caught a taxi to the express bus station. The bus there took me to Seoul, where I transferred from line 9 to line 4 and reached Seoul Station minutes before the Daebudo Ecotour group was going to depart. The commute took me three hours. We reached Daebudo in an hour. After eating, we went around to places on the island where birds gathered and heard lectures about the different kinds of birds that live there.

Then we went to a museum, where I learned about the different kinds of mud flats and the four different kinds of salt in existence. It was connected to an underground aquarium too, so we saw some live fish that were not models. After dinner, there was a workshop where they had us brainstorm and give a presentation on how to satisfy all the stakeholders in a piece of land, while trying to improve the environment there at the same time. I took the initiative to lead and got two tickets to an exhibit about Tutankhaman at the Gwacheon National Science Museum. =)

The next day was the actual beach clean up, and the amount of trash made me irritated at people's careless practices. Most of the junk was from people who had barbecued on the beach and fishermen. It was mostly plastic wrappers from snacks, and Styrofoam bits from floating objects attached to nets that the fishermen use. There were also a good two or three intact fishermen's body suits. There was much more, and the whole pile could be five or six feet high and five square feet wide. South Korea's beaches are no more polluted than any beaches in an industrialized country in the world, though.

Afterwards, we ate lunch, and all of us headed home. I got home by 7:30-ish pm, and was happy to settle down and just play video games for a while.