The Hawaii of Korea

Here's is the beginning of many (hopefully) small vignette's about our summer travel. Toward the beginning of our travels we went to Jeju-do, a Korean island off the end of Korea.

Meet Jin (see below). Jin is the English translator at the Lava Tubes, which are caves that were formed due to a volcano spewing lava. Jin was an extremely nice guy and jumped at the chance to chat with some English speakers. The first thing he asked was if we had seen the stalagmites, which he said look like a nipple. He then proceeded to tell us that "I sucked on my mother's nipple until I was 9 years old." After which he asked Adam, our friend traveling with us, "Did you suck on your mother's nipple?" Jin, it was great meeting you.

This is Sunrise Peak. It was a beautiful hike with a great views of Jeju and the city. We hiked it our last day there when it finally became sunny! It was rainy and cloudy our first two days.

Us a the beach. Jeju is a four season's island so it was too cold to swim. Bummer.

Jeju also has a small peak which is an inactive volcano. We hiked up part of it one day and had Ramen noodles at the top. It was a challenging but fun hike.
These goofy statues were all over Jeju. No one really knows what they're about....

We also visited a folk village where you can see traditional houses and take pictures with fake traditional people.
Traditional hut with a handsome man.
Lastly, while flying back from Jeju on a local Korean airliner there was a special raffle held by the flight attendants. We had no idea what was going on because it was all in Korean, but after a few minutes no one was winning this special raffle, so the flight attendants came over to the four of us, the only non-Koreans on the flight, and looked at the bottom of our cups. It turns out Mary Kate had a special star on her cup, making her the winner of the raffle! What did she win? A free family photo session! Can't wait to use that. Not only did they give us the photo coupon, they also took our picture and emailed it to us! Thank you Eastar Jet in Korea.
Jeju-do conquered.

My Beef with Vietnam Airlines

So before we left on our mission trip to Nepal Bonnie and I decided that we should probably get me a hiking backpack because I really didn't have one that would be suitable for our trip. We ended up finding the red Summit bag that you see below. I love it. It is a hybrid top loader and front loader. What that means is that you can lay it flat and pack it like you would a suitcase or you can stand it up and stuff it like a sack. It has a flap that closes over the top with a pocket on top and a cool "hidden" pocket underneath the flap. This is where I put important stuff people shouldn't find. It has other cool pockets and compression straps too. It is everything that I could hope for in a backpack.

When we went on our recent trip to Beijing and Vietnam we took our backpacks because they are so much easier to move around with. When we went from Beijing to Saigon we made an immediate transfer to Vietnam Airlines to fly to Nha Trang. We stayed there a couple days and then flew back to Saigon to wrap up our trip. When we got to our hotel in Saigon I noticed that tons of little white balls were spilling out of the top of my backpack. I quickly concluded that these were coming from the neck pillow I had stuffed in the top. The neck pillow had been ripped open and thousands (maybe millions) of these little white balls where everywhere. I also noticed that the lining of the "hidden "pocket on both top and bottom were ripped as well. I was baffled as to what had happened. I had some USB ipod and camera cables in the hidden pouch so I assumed that those must have ripped everything some how. I was wrong...

It wasn't until I was in the fuzzy stages of waking up the next morning that I realized something was amiss. My cell phone was not in the hidden pocket. Everything started to come together now. The outside of my bag appeared fine. No blemishes or tears whatsoever. That was because somebody (probably a Vietnam Air baggage handler) opened up the top pocket of my bag (seen below) and cut through the lining to remove my cell phone. In the process of doing that they cut through 3 layers of fabric on my bag and the pillow I had stuffed in there. They then zipped the outer pocket back up and everything appeared just as I had left it.

I tried to chat with Vietnam Air about this issue. Pointless. Of course since I had already left the airport they were completely unwilling to accept any liability for the theft, damage, and deception that had occured. Bogus but understandable. I am definitely most bummed that my bad got all cut up. The cell phone was just a plain old phone. I'll get a new one when we get back to Korea in August. But the backpack was like a part of me. I went to Bangkok, Nepal, Beijing, and now Vietnam with that thing. Oh well, maybe some duck tape can act as a battle scar. It all just adds more character right?

The moral of the story? If you pack anything of any value in you checked luggage make sure that it is there before you leave the airport. Or better yet. Don't pack anything of value in your checked luggage.

Home Sweet Home

Hey All! We are back in Missouri!!! We got back from Asia on Thursday night, went to Dallas for a wedding this weekend, and yesterday we returned to KC. We're very excited to be home for a little while. We will be home until July 31st.

Tom and I will be sharing a cell phone while here. Our number is: 573-424-7310 (this is my old cell number).

We will be working on posting pictures/thoughts of our trip ASAP.

Talk about traveling

So let me tell you about the last 48 hours and just how exhausted I feel right now. All time will be local (and will include time zone changes which hurt my head at this point in time) and Central Standard Time in parenthesis.

Wed 11:50 PM - Thu 7:00 AM (Wed 11:50 AM - 5 PM) fly from Saigon to Seoul. We each probably get a couple hours sleep on the plane and then maybe another one on the bus back to our apartment. It was so good to get back to Korea.

Thu 9:30 AM - Thu 2:30 PM (Wed 7:30 PM - Thu 12:30 AM) pack up to leave for America.

Thu 6:20 PM - Thu 9:00 PM (Thu 4:20 AM - Thu 8:00 PM) travel to Atlanta. This was interesting. We go to the airport in Seoul and find out that our plane was going to be forced to make an unscheduled layover in Seattle to take on a new crew before heading to ATL. This would back up our arrival in Atlanta by 2 hours thus causing us to miss our connection to KC, and not make it to KC Thursday night. A bright side to this is that Delta put us up in a nice hotel in Atlanta and gave us $42 in meal vouchers. We got to the hotel about 11PM and had to fly out at 7:30 AM. Needless to say we only slept like 4 or 5 hours.

Fri 8:08 AM - Fri 9:05 AM ( Fri 7:08 AM - Fri 9:05 AM) travel from ATL to KC. My dad was a rock star and met us at the airport while on a conference call (amazing multitasking) with a cookie cake in hand. He was kind enough to bring us some important mail and take our two big suitcases back to the house. We still had one step left.

Fri 11:15 AM - Fri 1:45 PM travel to Dallas. We are now here in Dallas for a wedding of one of the guys we teach with. We are exhausted. I think I have slept like 8 hours (generously) in the past 72. Hopefully this will make the jet lag disappear quicker. We are almost back to a steady place where we will be able to begin expanding on our Asian travels. Soon hopefully.

God Bless: America, Wendy's, breakfast sausage, quality Mexican food, frozen custard, $20 cab rides (freaking ridiculous), the English language, and to a much lesser extent Texas!

Saigon

Today we arrived in Saigon. We'll be spending a 1.5 more days here before we head back to Korea (for about 11 hours) and then onto America.

The past 4 days we have stayed at resort in Vietnam near Nha Trang and it was so beautiful. It may be the prettiest beach I've ever seen. One of my former teachers, Mr. Burns, actually recommended this beach and he came through! The sand was so white/fine and the water was clear blue. The beach we stayed at was fairly isolated so it was a great time of laying by the beach and pool. We did get sunburnt...bummer.

One of the highlights was looking at the stars every night. I know this sounds cheesey, but the first night at the resort we went for a walk after dinner and hung out on some beach chairs and in doing so we looked up and I think both of us were blown away by the stars. We haven't seen the stars in months (Korea is too bright because of city lights for stars). It was so great to finally see them again.

Today we took a 37min. plane flight to get to Saigon. We've explored the city a little bit this evening and so far it's been great. It's this really cool mix of being a big city that is becoming modern but then there are other parts that still seem to be a bit behind.

Tomorrow we're going to do some Vietnam War stuff, which should be interesting. When I was in high school I took a class (with Mr. Burns) that was all about Vietnam, specifically the Vietnam War. When I was in high school I never thought I'd be here. We feel really blessed to have this experience.

3 more days and we'll be back in America.

China

We just spent the past 5ish days in Beijing. We wanted to update our blog while we were there but China had blogger blocked, so we were completely disconnected from our TeamMeyer blog. We are now in Vietnam and we have decent computer access so we can reconnect to the world.

Beijing was incredible. We really had a great time. Some of the highlights: hiking the Great Wall, touring the Forbidden City and Summer Palace, eating Peking Duck and other great Chinese food, seeing Tianamen Square, and bargaining at the Silk Street Market where we got a Columbia winter coat and a North Face gortex jacket together for under 50US. And we got to do all this with our friends Adam and MK! It was a fun adventure.

Last night we spent the entire night traveling. We left Beijing at 5pm and flew to Vietnam. We got into Vietnam around 2:30am local time. We had another flight to Nha Trang (a city in Vietnam) to catch at 6am and the domestic part of the airport was not open so we camped out on benches outside the airport (I slept, Tom guarded our stuff). Finally we made it to our hotel this morning around 8am in Nha Trang, Vietnam.

Our hotel here is $6 per person per day. I got a hot stone massage for 90minutes for $18 US. Tom got a Vietnamese massage for $13US. We bought some big bottles of water here for around 15 cents. Everything is so cheap! We're actually only staying at this hotel for one night because tomorrow we're headed to a resort outside of Nha Trang. Sorry for the lack of pictures--those will come in about a week when we get back.

Much Love from Asia!

Summer Has Begun

We have started out our summer with a bang. On our last day of school (last Friday--wow, it's already been a week!) our friends Adam and Mary Kate came to Korea. Since their arrival we have kept them busy. Their first day in Korea Tom and I had to finish up work at school, but then after lunch we took them to the Hwaseong Fortress here in Suwon and we grabbed some dinner. The next day we traveled to Seoul and we went to the Namsan tower (a really high tower in Seoul that overlooks the city) and we went to Insadong, an artsy area with cool pottery. While at the Namsan tower the four of us sealed our love for eternity by buying locks, putting our names on them, and then locking them into the fence. It's suppose to be a symbol of our binding love...or something. The next day we went to a market in Seoul, ate some good food, and took a tour of the Palace in Seoul. We have lots of pictures of all these things but we are getting ready to walk at the door to catch a flight, so here is a taste of what we've been up to.

Locking our love on a fence (notice our love for Missouri on our locks).



Adam and MK at Namsan Tower...they're far from home!
Adam eating bundegie (silkworm) in Insadong. Common scene in Korea--Korean sleeping on public transit and Korean kid starring at the foreigners.

Adam reaching his goal of eating at a McDonald's in every country. We also went with the Osborne's to Jeju-Do, an island off of Korea, but we'll blog about that another time. It's been fun so far! Now we're off to Beijing!!!

Visitors

We just finished our last day of school!!!!! Bonnie has now successfully completed her first year as a teacher. I'm really proud of the way that she has handled herself and the many ways that she has grown as a person and educator. We are really feeling like this place and school are home. It was sad to say bye to our students today. It was especially sad because one of the negative traits of an international school is student turnover. We probably have 10 or more students (of 140 in HS) that are leaving for various reason. A couple of them are real rock star students that we are really sad to see go. Turnover seems to be a common theme across the board in the international school community. Though it was sad to see kids go it did make us realize how much our hearts have grown to love this place and our students. We have some fantastic students that we've gotten to see grow and mature a lot this year. Random, if you ever get the chance find a 7th, 8th or 9th grader and take a picture of them once a month for a year. It is remarkable how much some of these kids have grown. I missed that age group when at RB (10th-12th grade).

Anyway, the end of this school year marks the beginning of something else exciting. Our friends Adam and Mary Kate are coming to visit us. We are getting ready to go pick them up from the airport in like 10 minutes. We have a lot of great adventures and activities planned for our time with them. We are really excited to get a fresh perspective on Korea from their eyes. We've just become so conditioned to some of the kooky things people do here. We will spend a few days with them here in Suwon and up in Seoul. Then we will head to Jeju Island (Korea's resort island). After that we will go to Beijing with them for 5 days. Then we will part ways; the Osbornes to Shanghai and us to Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh City and Nha Trang). Then we'll finally head back to America on the 25th of June. One thing ends and another begins. Exciting stuff.

Thunder

When we woke up this morning it was raining outside which is nothing terribly unusual. That is until we realised that is was thundering and lightening also. We then realised that we couldn't remember that last time we saw lightening or heard thunder. Maybe it just doesn't happen that much here in Korea. It also could be because the summer is the rainy season and there is more of it then. Either way, it was most enjoyable. 3 more days of school!