Good-bye Korea!

I'll leave you with one of my favourite things about driving in Korea...
...getting stuck behind a truckload of cute men! (All Korean men must do 2 years of military service in their 20s). ;)

Good-bye Korea, I love you, I will see you again soon.
Hello Canada, I love you, I will see you soon! *muah!*

I'll be home for Christmas...

And not just in my dreams! I'm comin home Dec 18....yay!

My next favourite monks

Whilst whiling away a couple of hours in the magnificent gardens surrounding the Potala Palace (residence of the Dalai Lama), we met these wonderful monks:

Don't you just love those runners? (the other one has sandals and socks on...cute!)

They spoke barely a lick of English, and had one old raggedy English phrase book which was, well, not the greatest to say the least. But, through the use of mimes and that book, we sat and had a wonderful time with them for hours. The funniest was teaching them the word, "monk." It just wasn't sinking in...so finally I pointed at each of our group in turn: "Monk, monk, teacher! Teacher, teacher, monk!" They got it after a couple rounds of that. hahaha!

To sit with people so eager to learn, and trying so hard to understand was something else. Maybe in the future I'll re-locate to Tibet University...

My favourite monk

This poor little rascal was bored out of his tree at the Jokhang Temple in central Lhasa, and while other monks and commoners were seated in great halls listening for hours upon hours to scripture readings, he amused himself by bothering tourists. It was pretty comical...he'd run over to a group of tourists taking photos and stick his head in the pictures, and pretend not to notice he was getting in the way. Sometimes he blocked people's paths and wouldn't let them pass, sidestepping and demanding a toll.

We first saw him running over the roof here, and followed him.
Spying on people below...
And so we played with him for a bit:

Young boys are often put into monkhood (is that a word?) by their parents at a very young age. In fact, the population of Tibet has been steadily decreasing and one factor is the tradition for every family to have at least one son as a monk.

Shish Kebabs

Last night saw me and 4 of my friends going out to a nearby "hof" (bar/restaurant). We had shish kebabs! Yum-my! Well, not all of them were that yummy...I ate one crunchy thing that I rather disliked and was then told it was a "sandbag" from a chicken's stomach. Oh please pass me another! hahaha. I love the Korean tradition of barbecuing your food in front of you at the table. I will miss Korean food!!

S with pre-bbq'd food:
Food cooking:

My side of the table:

Yum and Not So Yum

So, on our trip to Seorak, we visited the East Sea, as I mentioned, and we saw rows and rows of squid drying the the wind. Dried squid is a big treat here...people eat it all the time, usually while they have a beer with friends. No thank you!

On the other hand, Korea has amazing street food everywhere, and always at the bottoms of popular mountains. My favourite is roasted corn on the cob. You can also get chicken, toffee with nuts, rice cake (which is like cake, not like popcorn like at home), boiled fish paste (disgusting), and fried bugs (also disgusting).

Seorak

Couple of weekends ago saw me back at Seorak Nat'l Park with some friends, and was it ever gorgeous!!! Clean, crisp air, fall colours, bright sunshine. Almost thought I was back home there for a bit...not to mention we accidentally happened across the East Sea...also clean and beautiful! (unlike the grey mess that is the West Sea). Here's how we felt...us Maritimers were right at home!

Well...ok, maybe...

After a lovely break of no blogging...maybe I will keep it up. I guess not everyone can have facebook. ;) I just find blogging really time consuming, but maybe it doesn't have to be. Maybe I will just post a few things, here and there. And maybe just one picture at a time, since I find that to be the most annoying part of blogger. It takes so darn long to upload photos! And only 5 at a time. Sheesh, get with the times folks.

So, here's your one picture. This is my home. I live in a complex of 4 buildings called Hiveras. A, B, C, D. I live in B. I'm leaving in 4 weeks to go back to Canada for a bit, and I'm actually gonna miss this place. Mostly b/c of all the great people who live here.

Ok, one more

I'm already feeling guilty. And I figure I should go out with a bang, so here ya go. This is my home in Incheon, South Korea, at night (obviously), from the top of Gyeyang Mountain (the mountain that has kept me sane in this busy city). Seriously, get facebook. It's so much easier. :)

The End.

I'm sorry friends. This blog is too much trouble. I'm not gonna keep it up. If you have facebook, you can add me as a friend and see my pictures there. If not...sorry. I just can't be bothered anymore. It was fun while it lasted though. ;) Love you lots.

Good-bye Girl...

...off to see the world. I'll miss you.

Town

Most of our scenery was pretty brown along the drive. The mountains are very rocky and brown with not a lot of vegetation, the valleys are also brown and rocky, and the river was actually made of chocolate, as you can see. But then, all of a sudden, we'd see these cool little towns with green and yellow fields layered one above the other. I assume they were irrigated from the river.

Animals & Carts

The small towns we visited were really rustic and basic, having few (if any) cars, but lots of motorcycles and carts and animals...cows, horses, pigs, and packs of mangy dogs that roam around and howl all night long.

Post office:
Crosswalk:
View of the one-street town from our "restaurant:"
Some kind of pig eating breakfast on the sidewalk:
Bored, but pretty pony & cart beside a little market:
Traversing the open plain:
And in the cities we have human-powered carts. The rickshaws have their own lanes, and they are a fabulous way to get around:
And they're harder to drive than you think!

Cute

Was talking to two Korean friends tonight and we discussed the expressions, "Crystal clear," and "Clear as mud," to indicate comprehension. So after awhile, one of them decided to try out his new knowledge, and the end of one of my sentences exclaimed, "Crystal mud!"

Pilgrims & Prayer Flags

Pilgrims from the Tibetan countryside come from all over to visit monasteries in Lhasa (the capital) and other cities. In the picture above, you can see three young boy monks bowing in front of the Jokhang, one of Lhasa's oldest and most prominent monasteries. Below, you can see a young person doing the bows on the street. Many pilgrims do this sort of bowing all the way around the temple. It takes hours and hours, and I can't imagine how hard it would be on the body. Most of them have pieces of wood strapped onto their hands so as not to rub them raw. Other pilgrims usually put small bills into their hands as they pass:
Around all monasteries, you can find prayer wheels which pilgrims and monks (and anyone else who wants to) spin as they walk by. The wheels have a little rolled up prayer inside them, so when you spin the wheel, it is thought the prayer gets released up to the gods. The woman below is not spinning the wheels, but she has her own tiny prayer wheel that she is spinning around and around as she walks the circuit:
This cute little woman saw us taking pictures and jumped right in, wanting her picture taken. The old women loved to see us and were always so friendly:
Most pilgrims, as I mentioned, spin their own wheels. Here's a man with a gigantic one! He has a pouch attached to his clothing to help him carry it:
One day while we were visiting the Jokhang, there was a mass convention going on. Pilgrims from all over came and sat all day on the floor listening to a monk read from what I assume are Buddhist scriptures, or teachings. It seemed so boring to me, but they were content. They were all following along in their own books, and every now and again the monks from the monastery would walk amongst the seated people giving them yak butter tea. There were lots of visiting monks sitting and listening too, which I will show pictures of later. This is a picture looking down on a section of the main room for the pilgrims (they weren't even in the same room as the reading monk; just listening through a speaker)...the other main room was filled with monks. There were also people sitting everywhere on the sidelines, above, below, all around:
Finally, on mountains and on highways, you can see tons and tons of prayer flags flying in the wind. They are fastened there to appease the gods, and when the wind stirs them, it is thought the prayers go up to heaven (does look a bit messy at times I admit):

Country Folk

Ok, so on the day we were supposed to visit Mt. Everest, our guide took us to see his brother and sister-in-law instead. We walked across an open plain, with no houses in sight. No houses in sight, because this is what they look like up close (you can see his brother to the right):

And from far away you can't see them, since they're made out of the same dirt the covers the fields. The above house is their summer house, where they tend sheep and yaks all summer and make the winter's supply of butter and cheese. Here's our guide and my friend walking across the plain toward the house:

Once we got there, we were welcomed inside by his sister-in-law:
What you see is basically their whole house: one room containing two little beds, a wood stove, a pile of old blankets, and a pile of sheep manure beside the stove for burning. The ceiling was low, and attached to this house was a corral for the sheep at nighttime. These people live off the land, and do not make money. Occasionally they will sell some crops to buy a few things, but other than that, they do everything for themselves. Their lives are so hard, but they are so happy, generous, and kind.

So, in the above picture, notice the round thingy she is pulling on. It's filled with home-made yak yogurt. She's rocking it back and forth to make butter. Once it started hardening, she poured it out into this basin and scooped the fresh butter off the top:
Eventually our guide's older brother showed up from tending sheep:
While we were there, we treated so kindly by these beautiful people. She gave us fresh yogurt, cheese, yak butter tea, and made us dumplings, which are a lot of work and they only eat on special occasions. I loved all the food, except the yak butter tea. So I made my friend drink that since she couldn't really stomach the goopy yogurt. heh heh.
Then these two adorable kids showed up:
They were so respectful and sweet! We had a ball playing with them all afternoon:

I'd like to say a word about the Tibetan wives. So it's still a widely-practiced custom in Tibet (especially in the countryside) that all brothers in a family share the same wife.

Yep, you heard me.

The marriage is usually arranged by the parents of the brothers and the girl. The girl is told she is going to some special occasion, so she dresses up, and is led to the house of the brothers. Only when she steps through the door and monks start throwing barley at her does she realize she is being married off, and then she usually starts to cry. Then she lives with the family so the brothers can keep tending to the family farm. The children call all the brothers, "Dad."

So, after bombarding my guide with a million questions, many of them the same question, re-worded to ensure I was really understanding this, I said,

"So...you have 2 brothers right? And they both have the same wife?"
"Yes."
"So, isn't she your wife too???"
"No. I decided I didn't like that idea. I want my own wife."

I laughed and laughed. He's great.

In the cities this custom is not really practiced anymore. There's an interesting dichotomy in Tibet: the city dwellers are very westernized (or Chinese-ized as the case may be), while the country folk are still very National Geographic.

Barley

One of Tibet's main crops. Amidst the brown of the mountains, rivers, and rocky valleys, we'd suddenly come across these startlingly lush, green fields:
A distant town and its fields:
A view from atop a monastery, looking down on the town and its surrounding crops:

Please....

excuse the interruption! But I really must pause my Tibetan posting for a moment here to...complain. (At least I'm being honest).

But, hello, this humidity is nothing short of completely ridiculous! Imagine this, dear fellow Canadians. You wake up...soggy. You have a shower and discover you are unable to dry off. You sit in front of your computer feeling not-so-bad (the fan being about 2 millimetres away from your face), until the hard work of...standing up...has the beads of sweat rolling down your belly yet again. Imagine hiking (at night of course...heaven help those who attempt such folly in the daytime), and little rivers of sweat begin coursing down your body, gathering strength and water-falling off your chin and fingertips for the duration. The temperature here in S. Korea is not that bad really, but the humidity! The sticky, oppressive, stifling humidity!!!!

I even got a drive-by picture of it for you. Here is my beloved Gyeyang Mountain:

Well, its ghost anyway. Can you see it? It's not the 2 little hills at the bottom. Oh no! It's the one that's towering above those two...hiding in a steam bath.

I've it from good sources that it will start to be more bearable starting next week. A-saaa! ("Awesome" in Korean) ;) Can't wait for autumn.

Good-bye Girlie!

Have fun back in NB, and good luck with all your studies in Ireland! I hope I can come visit you someday!!! XOXO

Sand Dunes!

After bumpity-bumping along a dirt road for some time, we came across these huge sand dunes in a valley. If you look closely, you can see my friend sitting atop one there in the middle:
Oh, it was glorious! It was so silent! The sky was so blue, and the space so empty-feeling. It was hot, but not too hot. We ran around in the sand like little kids, and when we stopped running, all we could hear was our own breath. Really cool. Guess I didn't realize how noisy Korea is until I left it.
Our guides, having done this shtick before, opted to chill for a bit. Incidentally, the Tibetan squat looks a lot like the Korean squat: ;)

Yamdrok Lake

On the first day of our jeep tour, we took a very zig-zaggy, very long road up to see this lovely lake:
Here's me and our guide:
Unfortunately those are the only 2 pictures I took of the lake. I didn't realize we were taking that long drive up the mountain only to see the lake, and that we would then spend another 40 minutes driving back down the same path! I was so overwhelmed by all the tourists up there that we were quite quick to leave, pretty much as soon as we arrived. I can't stand tourist crowds.

Here's a picture of part of the road up the mountains:
It was fun nonetheless, and we got those pictures of the yaks that I posted earlier. I should have taken a picture of my friend hauling herself up the cliff side to get a closer picture; it was pretty funny. I just used the zoom for my pictures. :)