Korea

So I had wanted to email yall earlier, about something that had happened while I was still in Nanjing, China. Unfortunately, that email will have to wait until I can find the video of what happened online.

As my subject title may imply, I'm in Korea. There was a break throughout China for a little over a week. I wanted to do some traveling, but this is the busiest time of travel for China. For one week, almost half of the country is on break, and anywhere that you might want to go is going to be crazy busy, oceans of Chinese people at every tourist spot.

So I decided to leave the country. I've been in China since June, so I kind of need the break anyways. China was starting to get to me too, so its probably best that I left.

So, I left Nanjing on October first with just three shirts, two pairs of pants, three pairs of socks and three pairs of boxers, along with a few other things, some books and my ipod. My flight left from Shanghai only, 2.5 hours away from where I'm living in Nanjing. Unfortunately, I had an overnight layover in Beijing, so I had to stay the night. I found a comfy spot to sleep and got to Korea the next day.

Korea's a pretty small, but there is a ton of stuff to do. Since I've only got nine or ten days, I'm having to split my time carefully. I'm doing three places: Seoul, the capital and the center of Korean culture. Gyeongju, a city called the "museum without walls" because its scattered with so many relics from its time as the first Korean capital in the 6th Century. And finally, Sokcho and Seodraksan National Park, a cool collection of granite mountains shooting out of the ground not far from the East coast of Korea.

Flying into Seoul I spent a day there, seeing some palace or something. Like some many things in this country, the palace looks like they were trying to copy China (60% of Korea's vocabulary comes from Chinese, 20% from English and 20% from Korean). While exploring that palace, I ran into some cool American teachers, so I tagged along with them for the rest of the day.

The American teachers and I went to eat at a little back-alley Korean place, and then, they took me to this park in Seoul where jam bands meet semi-legally most nights. That night, it was one of the most famous bands on the circuit, a reggae-tapdancing band. I know it sounds crazy but, it was one of the cooler things I saw that day. I thought the band's bongo drummer looked higher than a cloud flying a kite for most of the songs, but then I saw him tap dance the rhythm section on a Bob Marley song, and it was a lot of fun.

In Gyeongju, the 'museum without walls,' I biked around the countryside, passing by tombs that were a millennium and a half old, climbing up to see giant stone buddhas and a giant temple. While there, I stayed with a Chinese exchange student from Nanjing, who I meet on couchsurfing.org, a site that lets you meet up with people while traveling and stay with them for free. I'm practicing my Chinese more here than in China.

I'll tell yall about my rainy hiking with some Korean cab drivers and the rest of my trip later.

But there is something I should mention. Some of yall may know of one of my other loves, a love that my fiance puts up with with only a slightly disguised disgust: hot-now Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I generally don't eat them in the US, because I'd get crazy fat, and when I'm in Asia I don't generally have the opportunity. But Korea has about 50 KK's and I've made it my mission to scarf down a dozen hot one's before I leave the peninsula. Dunkin' Doughnuts are all over here, but I haven't yet seen a KK. The closest I came was I saw a lady with a KK jacket on, but I didn't have time to find the store as I had to catch a bus. I'll update yall on my search.