Last Monday was Buddha’s birthday here in Korea (and other places that use the lunar calendar; Buddha’s birthday is traditionally on the 8th day of the 4th month in the lunar calendar). I like this photo from Korea Beat:

Looks like some temple residents haven’t quite mastered the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. :)

The picture, by the way, was taken at Jogye-sa, which is the temple in Seoul where we went to the Lotus Lantern festival a couple weeks back.

We will be back home (Wisconsin + Twin Cities + Chicago) in August. Here’s our basic travel plans:

I (Dan) will get in on July 30th or so. From the 31st to August 2nd, I’ll be in Madison attending MathFest and I will be pretty busy. After that, I’ll be available to do stuff until August 7th, when I’m flying to Vancouver for Sage Days 9 (another conference) and I’ll be gone until the 14th or 15th or so.

Meanwhile, Tae will be coming to the US on August 9 or 10. She will probably stay in Madison through the following week. We think we’ll come visit my ancestral homeland the week after that (so, sometime in the 17th–23rd). We’ll try to get up to the Twin Cities then, too.

We will both be returning to Korea on the 23rd.

We haven’t actually bought any plane tickets yet, but that’s the general outline of our plans. If you have any specific preferences/demands/etc about when or where we visit you (or you visiting us), let us know, either in the comments here or by email.

It’s Children’s Day here in Korea and we have the day off.

I took this yesterday at the Lotus Lantern Festival in Seoul. Carrying children that way is very common in Korea. The woman in the picture has a special sling for carrying the kid, but you often see people improvise something with a blanket or towel or something, or the parent just clasps their hands together and the kid sits on top of them.

A while back, I saw a kid in that sort of sling. He was also sleeping, but he was leaning backwards. I was amazed that he didn’t slip out and fall. Perhaps I should add “ability to avoid slipping out and falling while strapped to your mom’s back” to my list of superpowers that Koreans seem to have.

You see kids a lot in Korea. Each day, I bike through a large apartment complex (the Hanbit apartments, if you know the Gung-dong/Eoeun-dong area) going home from work and there are always kids running around in the side streets, even when you’d think they should all be in bed. Going around Daejeon or Seoul, there are always parents with toddlers or elementary school kids around. Middle school and high school kids are everywhere. Last autumn, when I started noticing the ubiquity of kids around here, I realized that in Minneapolis, I didn’t see children very often. You just didn’t see them.

Many Americans seem to think that children are in constant risk of instant gruesome death whenever they are not safely ensconced in a suburban house. My impression is that Korean parents are equally neurotic, but at least they think that playing outside with your friends is a good thing.

Having just written about Korean names, this story is appropriate. One of the biggest pop stars in Korea is Rain. That’s his name, Rain. He’s in the new Speed Racer movie, and recently at some Hollywood thingy event was introduced as “Taejo Togokhan”—the name of his character in the movie.

One thing that very few Koreans seem to know (and that I am afraid to tell them) is that most Americans are at best dimly aware of Korea as a distinct Asian nation. Watch Stephen Colbert quickly exhaust his list of things that are Korean (the funniest bit starts at about 3:45, if you’re impatient). And how many people think MAS*H took place in Vietnam? (I did, for quite a while.) So it’s not surprising that some publicist would look at Rain, see some Asian guy, and figure that “Taejo Togokhan” seemed like it’s probably his name.

Naturally, Koreans are a bit shocked, especially since they got the name one of the Japanese actors correct. They got it right for some Japanese guy…but they got Rain’s name wrong! And used a Japanese name for him! Shocking!

A while back I posted a video of the best Korean drummer ever. My Korean officemate showed me a couple videos that demonstrate that not all Korean musicians are ridiculous.

Both of these are versions of Pachebel’s Canon, which is possibly the most popular piece of Western classical music here in Korea.

Pachebel’s Canon on traditional Korean instruments: http://jwmx.tistory.com/531

Hip-hop and b-boy dancing is incredibly popular here. These two videos combines the hip-hop elements with the Canon and you somehow get something very Korean. Go figure.

http://yesarang.tistory.com/12

Several weeks ago, the magnolia trees started blooming here. I’d never seen blooming magnolia trees and thought it was super cool. Just as the magnolia trees started to fade, the cherry trees started to bloom. Last autumn, I was wondering why they had these small, scraggly trees all around the city, and now I know why. Blooming cherry trees lining a road are really lovely.

In addition to magnolias and cherries, I’m told that the lilac will bloom soon, and there are many bushes flowering right now. It’s the best time of year in Korea.

I’ve made a photoset that you might enjoy.

Here are some of my favorites:

As the cherry blossoms fall, they cover the ground like snow:

Flickr now lets you upload short videos. Here’s a video I took while biking just outside the dorms where we live:

Today I was riding the bus and when we got near my stop, I got up and went near the back door. I was standing near an older woman. She saw me and smiled at me. I smiled back. I looked out the window to see how close to the stop we were, and when I turned back, she was holding out a piece of candy for me.

I hesitated, then took it, since I don’t know how to politely decline in Korean, but I do know how to say “thank you”.

It was only after putting the candy in my pocket that I realized I just took candy from a stranger. I don’t plan on telling my mom.

I ate the candy later. It was good.

Yes, we did a metric century on Saturday. We basically rode around Gyerongsan National Park, which is a clump of mountains that form the western border of Daejeon. We met at 8:00 for hae-jang-guk, which literally translates as hangover soup. Some people don’t even wait for the hangover—while we were there, two women who were apparently still drunk from the night before came in. Hae-jang-guk is good stuff, and perfect for starting off a bike ride with.

This was Tae’s first time using her new bike jersey. I got her a bike jersey for her birthday. It’s absolutely perfect for her:

I especially love the back:

All day as we biked, I would see little dogs, and I would think if they’d fit in the pockets in the back of the jersey.

We got back into our part of town in the evening, and we had gone about 92 kilometers. I was a bit surprised that Tae wanted to finish out the century…I am the sort of person who (especially when biking) appreciates symbolic achievements. I’ll charge up a hill in a high gear just to prove to myself that I can, and because it feels good to go up the hill fast, rather than meekly crawl up in first gear.

Tae has never really seemed to feel the same way, and I was expecting her to just want to go home, and I wouldn’t have disagreed—I was tired, too! But instead we circled around the area a bit and extended the ride to an even 100K. Tae is becoming a skilled and confident cyclist. Perhaps when we visit Jeju Island in June, we’ll circle the whole island in a day.

Second comment:

When she first told me that we’re volunteering at the orphanage, I recalled our plans to eventually adopt one or more kidlets, and asked her if her real motivation for going to the orphange was for “window shopping”. She assured me it’s not, but I am not so sure… :)

Here’s another Korean video on an important aspect of life here:

Someone in this band has no trouble playing “with feelin’”:

That guy must be awesome at the noraebang.

They are building three very large dormitory buildings right in front of our dorm, and naturally this requires tall cranes, the semi-permanent kind that you construct the building around. Recently they jacked one of the cranes up farther. Here’s what the taller of of the cranes from our apartment window:

Imagine my surprise when I realized I can see that very crane from the math building at KAIST:

On Friday, I walked in to the faculty lounge where two of the professors were talking in Korean. I assumed they were talking about something like, well, math or department politics until I start hearing words like “defense” and “Michigan State” and “Wisconsin”.

I interrupted them to ask what they were talking about. Well, duh, the NCAA tournament…one of the professors got his PhD at Michigan State and is a big college basketball fan. He told me that all the games are being shown online for free.

Indeed they are! Living in Korea we’ve learned about a few websites (most of them European) that rebroadcast US television, particularly sports events, but they generally don’t work very well. I’m really glad that CBS is doing the games.

We got up this morning and watched the second half of the Marquette-Stanford game, which was heartbreaking but still a good game. I tried to get up for the Badgers but it started at 6:30 a.m. and we had been up until midnight. I do plan on watching them play later this week in the Sweet 16, though.

Teresa was talking about her classes today and said, "sometimes when I'm teaching I can't tell what's real and what's not".

I’m starting to realize that winter is one of the best times for biking in Korea. During the summer, it is either the rainy season, or it is beastly hot and humid. And, as I learned yesterday, during the spring, we have Asian dust. No, it’s not some sort of new drug popular in Tokyo nightclubs, it is dust from the Gobi desert that gets carried here.

Yesterday I was out biking with our friend Kim. We left in the morning, biked around town for some errands, and when I was going home in the afternoon, I thought, “man, this is some weird haze or fog over the city”. It looked just like this.

I looked on the USFK site for yellow dust conditions and sure enough, yesterday there was a huge spike in the dust concentrations. Some places reached a concentration of over 1400—and anything over 800 is considered “do NOT go outside” levels. (On that military site— which naturally lists Army and Air Force bases, not cities—we are roughly in the middle of a triangle formed by Osan AB (in Pyeongtaek), Camp Walker/Camp Carroll (near Daegu), and Kunsan AB (in, um, Kunsan, although the official romanization is Geunsan, I think).