| Wednesday, April 25, 2007 |
| This is not 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules. |
 These are magic bowling shoe lockers. There are tiny little men inside that take your money and send purple shoes down the hatch. Fast, convenient, entertaining, and I don't feel like I'm taking the "there's no such thing as Foot Syphilis, is there?" risks I would at a classy joint back home like Kenmore Lanes. Highlights of the Cambowlia-that-nearly-wasn't: I bowled 136, and Birdie G and I spent a good 10 minutes basking in shoe-locker wonder. Now, to Cambodia, Cambodia, Cambodia!
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posted by Raychaa @ 12:06 AM  |
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| Friday, April 20, 2007 |
| Let's go mushrooming. |
 Day 5 of 6 in a workweek where you feel like you're doing everything just slightly wrong:
Teachers: "Oh! Goodo moooorning!...(air of panic) What are you doing here?"
ALT: "Um, I work here? I think?"
But, it's a bit exciting to have a teachers' meeting called in your honor, if only to decide what to do with you all day. Allen Lachel Teacher also moonlights as Assistant Lachel-PE-Teacher, Assistant Lachel-3rd-grade math teacher, and general playground phenom. So now to cancel the weird week, some belated Seoul pictures:
 This is the tunnel that leads to the tunnel under the DMZ that the North Koreans allegedly never built. (No pictures allowed, but Ty is sneaky.) They painted coal on the walls after the fact to pretend that it was an old abandoned mining tunnel, without accounting for the fact that there is nothing to mine for in the entire region. What's worse than a liar? A bad liar. It's a bit like a child scribbling their own name on the wall *cough cough Livia cough* and then blaming their infant sister. Who can't even crawl, let alone wield a crayon and the alphabet.
 National assembly building, and inside on our personal tour, sloshing around in wet jeans and shoes on the marble floors. Below is part of a peace monument with stones taken from battles and wars all over the world over the past few hundred years. Some of the wars were ones I'd never even heard of, but it was a beautiful statement.
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| posted by Raychaa @ 11:50 AM |
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| Tuesday, April 17, 2007 |
| One Trivia Night and One Day in Hiroshima |
 Trivia question: What breakfast food goes well with everything... salad, ice cream, chicken, and so on? Obviously, it's cornflakes. So fusion, so unnecessary, but secretly I think it's fantastic. On their first full day of the Japan Tour, Version 5.0, the 'rents came along, jet-lagged and cranky, to another great Trivia Night by Bob-n-Eric. I kept waiting for questions that never came about Britney Spears, playground tag game strategy in modern Japan, onsens, or Shakespeare. It turns out that I, like the cornflakes, am so fusion and so unnecessary. Jon K Gogh worked his way onto the team with claims that he was admitted to PhD school on the basis of his trivia knowledge alone-- such lies! But those civil war questions would've otherwise gone unanswered, and the JET Lags certainly didn't get last place.
 After a busy Easter, M/D and AB went off to Shikoku, and we all met up in Hiroshima a few days later. My dad wanted to see Miyajima, which is home to the really big red torii shrine and and an army of scary monkeys. The deer that swarm the island look worse than ever: skinny, scraggly, and going through molting season and/or lice infestation. They were mostly too sickly to do anything but lay under construction scaffolding, and only one approached us half-heartedly for the requisite chomp of a map out of tourist hands. I'd diagnose shika influenza or maybe severe apathy, but shouldn't notify the authorities until there is someone to blame.
 (From foreground): Dadster, Rick-Steves-Approved backpack, Big Bad Rice Paddle.
 Sisterly love is tender and true...
 (Hey A-belle! J-Lo called... 5 years ago. She wants her shades back.) The best line from the fortunes that we bought at a hilltop temple was Abelle's love forecast: "He will arrive, but he will be late." Late for what? Late for dinner? Late for the wedding? Late as in the Late Dentarthurdent? It's sort of a threat, you see...
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| posted by Raychaa @ 5:09 PM |
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| Saturday, April 14, 2007 |
| 2nd Annual George Chapman International Easter Egg Hunt |
Now that the Chapman kids are all getting married and the Allen girls are scattering to the wind, the hunt lives on in new forms. We had a party on Easter Sunday at the children's home in Okayama-city, with 7 of us JETs, plus my sister and parents. My mom was the plastic-egg mule, and got questioned at customs about all the paraphernalia she was trying to smuggle into the country. But, oh, was it worth it...
A-Belle's Tugboat service: No distance too far, no child too cute.
 Jon K Gogh, Birdie Glass, Bob-san, and Richard of Oz filled up eggs for the hunt. Per unspoken tradition, the boys went out to hide them on the playground, because everyone knows that girls aren't capable of such manly tasks. We stayed indoors, washed dishes, did the laundry, painted eggs... you know. The usual.
 Chihiro-chan and her puffball bunny. Dani brought all the crafts ideas, because she is the art queen. Birdie and Bethany monitored the egg dying/painting tables, and AB and Bob did the paper table, where Bob's *Famous* Origami Baskets were born.
 And, Kendo Man scared away the children.
The hunt itself was over much too quickly, but it was good fun. Instead of real money eggs, we thought about using coins from Korea or China as a non-yen replacement, but I pictured some 2-year-old choking on 10 yuan worth of Mao, and opted against it.
 Christmas (as celebrated in a consumer-driven, primarily non-Christian country) is easy to explain: a big chubby man brings presents and everyone eats a lot, all in honor of a miracle holy child being born. The reason for Easter is more confusing: a big chubby bunny lays colorful eggs and hides them, in honor of the aforementioned holy child who has risen from the dead. I'm not sure which part is more implausible, but at least the kids liked the Cadbury Creme Eggs. |
| posted by Raychaa @ 5:52 PM |
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| Monday, April 09, 2007 |
| SWF in small J-town seeks big man wearing a tapestry. |
Before this sumo tournament in Osaka, I didn't know much about sumo, but I thought I would catch on. I didn't, or at least I have yet to grasp the brilliance and nuance of the art form. It looks about how it does on TV, but inside it was really hot and there were crazy numbers of foreign tourists.
Summary: I recognized the Bulgarian dude that I suspect has made Bulgaria yogurt famous, or the other way around. The superstar top-tier guy won the finale. Now after 3 years of tuning out everyone who has chattered on about the greatness of sumo, maybe I'll be able to toss in a word of wisdom. ("Oh, him? Yeah, he was really... um... agile. And Bulgaria makes GREAT yogurt.")
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| posted by Raychaa @ 5:51 PM |
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| Thursday, April 05, 2007 |
| It's Koreal: Harmonious city, Happy Suwon! |
 Happy Suwon! Last city, last days, Suwon was pretty cool: shopping malls, lots of restaurants, a world heritage fortress, a folk village, and a big wall. I left from Suwon for the airport, and flew straight back to Okayama, and didn't lose my Guppy in the car park! Happy day, indeed.
 Mmm, looks like oden (direct translation: slimy slimy floating things in oily water) from the combini! But I bet 7-11 hasn't yet tried silkworm pods.
 In the traditional folk village, historians were careful to include T-rex in the silk weaving display. Tyrannosaurs used to roam free throughout the peninsula until they were (predictably enough) destroyed by the Japanese. |
| posted by Raychaa @ 10:57 PM |
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| Tuesday, April 03, 2007 |
| It's Koreal: Dust from China and Food from Seoul |
 This is the National Assembly building in Seoul on a waterlogged afternoon. The non-rainy days were hazy and overcast, which was blamed on the infamous/ubiquitous Dust From China. I wandered over with Ty (former eikaiwa teacher, now a student of Japanese) and Manuel (Swiss/German allegedly non-goatherding Oxford boy) for a visit, but we were told it was too late. Disappointed and drenched, Ty began chatting with a man at the information desk who happened to know Japanese and wanted to practice on us. So, even though the building was now closed, we were given an awesome personally guided tour, and the three of us were free to gossip about our goat-herding friend at will. The guide was explaining about the creepy lion statue, and was insisted there was something stored underneath. Ty thought he was saying there were bodies, and I couldn't understand the word he kept repeating: uwain, uwain. It turns out there is wine stored underneath the statue. Whose? He didn't know. Why? Hmmmm.
 Ty tempts the Korean sushi, Manuel inhales the bibimbap, and I'm eating food seasoned with something crazier than black pepper! I don't like Korean food because of spice and sneaky meat, but I succeeded in eating veggie bibimbap, random tofu soups with and without meat broth (vegetarian my foot!!), and some random fish concoctions. I tried to be very cultural, much to the dismay of a stomach that hates me and perhaps is still on fire. The rest of the time I was living on crackers and juice, so it wasn't that different than being at home. Or in kindergarten.
After 3 days in Seoul, I wanted to go to a national park on the eastern coast, but the rain cancelled those plans and instead I headed alone to the small city of Icheon. It was quite dull, but has lovely hot springs and a lot of ceramics. I like hot springs. One old lady didn't like me, though, and threw water accidentally-on-purpose in my direction. Joke's on you, grandma, I'm already in the tub!
 In Icheon, I didn't see a single foreigner up until I boarded the same bus to a museum as a young Russian guy. His English ended at "Hello," and my Russian left me after "Spaceeba," so it was an awkward Party of Two on the bus ride and at the otherwise empty museum. The ceramics are famous for this blue sheen glaze, but the magic formula had to be rediscovered after the war because everything/everyone involved in the ancient process was... destroyed by the Japanese. Predictably enough.
 Raaaaaaaaaaaah! I am going to eat you! (Korean or otherwise, this is what kilns always say to me.)
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| posted by Raychaa @ 11:22 PM |
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| It's Koreal: Welcome to Seoul! |
Seoul was clean, safe, lively, busy, efficient, and full of real people everywhere doing real people things. Real people things include: talking on trains, laughing and crying in public, old people crashing through crowds and hitting foreigners with canes (just because they can), couples holding hands, people wearing all sorts of different fashions, girls wearing cute shoes that still allow them to walk, and generally not acting like robots. It was like everything that pisses me off about Japan was removed, and what was left was translated into Korean. Funny, that.
 My sightseeing buddies (and bear) for the afternoon. Being a single girl strolling around, I was approached primarily by random men and junior high schoolers. These girls were obsessed with Project Runway and America's Top Model, and they were all so friendly. Two thumbs up for nearly every person I met while in Korea! None of the men that approached me seemed sketchy, and some walked me 3 or 4 blocks when I was lost, just because they were kind.
 This palace was very famous for a reason I don't recall, since everything started melding into one memory blob. Many of them look like smaller versions of places in China. Also, it gets confusing when every building of significance can be described as such: "... and then it was destroyed by the Japanese." Rah rah Nippon... |
| posted by Raychaa @ 12:16 AM |
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| Monday, April 02, 2007 |
| It's Koreal: DMZ. |
 In a nutshell, Korea-too-quickly was awesome. My first goal was to see the DMZ, which is very famous and very heavily guarded and very creepy. "M*A*S*H" was set during the Korean war, which makes up most of my previous knowledge of that time period, and all I remember from the show is that one of the guys was a cross-dresser. Not so useful. En route to the DMZ, our bus tour guide was wise-cracking and making remarks about Kim Jong-Il, even as soldiers with large guns were checking our passports. It takes about an hour from Seoul, and the video we were shown was set up mostly as a Good versus Evil account of the war, complete with Good music (triumphant or sad to represent the South) and Bad Evil music (minor key, lots of drums to represent the North), and accusations of the Chinese entering the war "illegally" when the battlefront arrived at their borders.
 James and the Giant Peace? (No, that was painful. Sorry. But I bet Dad thinks it's funny.) Picture-taking was highly restricted, especially inside the 3rd infiltration tunnel. We all wore helmets in the tunnel, and had to walk, crouching down, for half a kilometre, after descending to 80 metres below ground. They said that, had the tunnels been completed, the North could have moved 30,000 armed troops through in an hour. I banged my head against the ceiling 5 times, and I imagine that running, fully armed, would have been a bit more difficult.
Before entering the tunnel, we watched another movie, but this was focused on reunification/peace/chipmunks and much less about finger-pointing at the North. It opened with a little girl prancing through fields, and then there were bombs and the ground splits open and everything is wrapped with computer-image barbwire and she cries. Insert Darth Vader's theme song, some more bad computer images, a short history of the tunnels and how they were discovered, and why the Korean people want (and need!) peace. Cut to a long section about the wonderful nature preserve that has been created by the DMZ (no people, no pollution), filled with chipmunks and rare birds. It finished with the same girl crying in a field, but this time she sees butterflies flapping in the breeze above the barbwire jungle, and computer-image trees explode from the ground. Another chipmunk montage, happy music, and the ground mends itself. This is the "sunshine policy" dream for the future.
 There is a beautiful train station at Dorasan, which one day will take trains to Pyeongyang, but for now is just a photo-op for tourists and bored soldiers. I wanted to visit Panmunjeom, which is the peace village in North Korea where negotiations occur, but the brochure said you can't do the tour if you're wearing jeans. However, everyone on our tour that continued was in jeans, so maybe it didn't matter. Too bad! Our last stop was a viewpoint of North Korea, but it was too misty to see much. The South Korean peace village in the DMZ erected a huge flagpost, and the North Korean village retaliated with an even bigger flagpost. But, we were told that they used cheap, heavy material, so the flag won't flap unless it's really windy. The South uses only the most expensive fabric, so it flaps in any breeze and has to be replaced every 2 months at a cost of $2,000. Sunshine policy, perhaps, but ego knows no borders. |
| posted by Raychaa @ 9:51 AM |
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| So wrong it's right. And then wrong. And then wrong again... welcome to the inaka. |
| About Me |
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Name: Raychaa
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About Me: “No man, not even a doctor, ever gives any other definition of what a nurse should be than this - 'devoted and obedient'. This definition would do just as well for a porter. It might even do for a horse. It would not do for a policeman.” (Florence Nightingale)
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