Summer Vacation in Southeast Asia

It only seems like a few days ago when I got back from France, but now I'm back from Thailand and Cambodia.

One of the main reasons I thought teaching abroad sounded like an enticing idea was VACATION TIME. You know, enlightening the young minds of the world, passing on knowledge, helping the youth of the world grow into respectable, well rounded, English speaking young adults, taking in the richness of a new culture, and then of course, VACATION TIME.

If you were unaware of my teaching situation for the nearly 6 months that I've been here it has been 8 AM to 4 PM Monday through Friday. During which, I teach 17 (45 min) classes a week to classes of 30 to 35 high school aged students. However, during the summer for two weeks my teaching hours were 9 AM to 12 PM, where I usually only had to teach for half of that time to classes of 2 to 6 high school students. It was basically heaven in comparison, if there is really any comparison at all. I mean, heaven and hell are both places you spend your eternal afterlife but the comparisons seem to stop there. And that's not to say that teaching for around 13 hours a week is hell either, it's that the summer classes were just THAT GOOD! I was in such a good mood I even carried all of our luggage when it started raining.

Small classes are wonderful. I can almost remember the students names. The students actually listen, speak, and sometimes even learn. We can play, have fun, and joke around when the classes are small, but when the class size is between 30 and 35 it's hard to do anything. Even the best laid out lesson plans can crumble in presence of 30 Korean students, 60 busy hands, 300 grubby little fingers, and from what I've heard they must be hiding more mouths somewhere because I can count no less than 1000 voices in those rooms sometimes. That is when they are speaking Korean, of course, when English is being spoken I need only to look in a mirror to see where the noise is coming from. But that was all forgotten for the summer. Two weeks with good students, good lessons, great hours, and more free time than I knew what to do with.

After those two glorious weeks were over the real summer vacation began; 2 weeks off. I chose to visit two countries in Southeast Asia on my two weeks of freedom, Thailand and Cambodia. I would have preferred to do the whole tour of Southeast Asia; Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, but the two week constraint made me focus my efforts. So I chose one of the wonders of the world "Angkor Wat" in Cambodia, and the world renowned beautiful beaches of Thailand. Check out the excitement on my face on the plane ride over there...do not disturb me while I'm sleeping.

I am here to tell you that Thailand and Cambodia are great too. If you get the chance, GO! If not, well then I have roughly 500 pictures that you can look at and live vicariously through here.

We flew out of Seoul and into Bangkok where I just barely missed Carmen Sandiego. We strategically (accidentally) planned our visit to coincide with the "Mo Chit Weekend Market" in Bangkok, the largest outdoor market in Asia (so we were told). It was huge though. As Rachel put it, "It has everything you'd ever want, ever!", and it was extremely cheap. But all I wanted was the t-shirt that said "How's your day go?" for my Italian friend Karl but those Thia's don't sell a shirt larger than a boys medium. So I'm looking good in it now, and Karl has to do without, it's bitter sweet. The night in Bangkok was even odder than I can go into here on this blog, and they don't let you take pictures, but there really are some places on this planet where rules just don't seem to apply. It's like the Thunderdome, only anything can go in and out, 2 men, 3 women, it doesn't matter. The next morning it was a 5 hour bus ride to the Cambodian border.

Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world, what more do I need to say? It's really interesting. Whenever ancient civilizations create huge buildings and tombs and then fall off the face of the earth without explanation they leave behind ruins for travelers like myself to climb all over, and tell their friends about how cultured they are for visiting ancient ruins. It makes you feel like a little kid when you're in places like that. Everything you look at is interesting, and you want to check it out, and climb on it. We also had our own personal "Tuk Tuk" driver for our 2 days there, who drove us anywhere we wanted to go, and then waited for however long to take us back. It's like getting a taxi in New York City but your his only client until you leave and he comes up to you right after you cross the George Washington Bridge, oh yea, and he only costs 25 bucks.

We ended up flying out of Siem Reap airport the day after visiting Angkor Wat because the only road that leads to and from the border is the worst road on the face of the earth. On the way there 3 hours of bouncing up and down, ducking my head, hitting my head, biting my tongue, and sharing the road with farm animals was the kind of experience your happy to have done once, but don't ever want to do again.

So it was back to Thailand, but this time to the beach. And I don't just mean "to the beach" I mean actually to where they shot the movie "The Beach", a film about finding a legendary island paradise (heaven on earth type of place).

Yeah, I did that. I also played with monkey's, rode elephants, climbed dangerously unsafe rock faces in sandals, went kayaking, ate exotic foods, drank enough fruit smoothies to kill a lesser man, and got a little tan. And in case you were wondering two weeks is just enough time to get sunburned, have the sunburn fade into a dark tan, and then peel so you lose your tan by the time you return home. Wear sunscreen.

Then I finished off the trip with another movie island visit, "James Bond Island". The 1974 film "The Man with the Golden Gun" was shot on what is now know as "James Bond Island".

So Now I'm back home, or well, back in Seoul at least. The weather here has been surprisingly nice since returning, which is really sweet considering my friends told me we left Korea before the worst week of weather all year. Alright, I need to get back in the swing of things here but there will be more posts about Korea to come, I shouldn't be visiting anymore countries for a little while now :/


P.S. - Mr. Jong, probably my best Korean teacher friend here, who can barely speak English dropped this gem of a word on me in conversation today:

floccinaucinihilipilification: "the act or habit of estimating or describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".

With 29 letters, it is the longest non-technical word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

We can't have a coherent conversation about the color of billiards balls, but he knows this word. I try to teach him things like "Hello my name is Mr. Jong", but I guess he feels floccinaucinihilipilification for my teaching.

A Wedding to Remember

Hello, I'm back in Korea (for better or worse). Things are good and I'm doing fine. I hope you are doing well too. It has been a while since we've spoken. I've been out of the country for a while now, and my trip to France was the longest I was away from a computer during this experience. I'll try to catch you up on what you've missed.

It seems like a really daunting task to describe my trip to France in a blog post. As I sit here my mind is running wild with images of museums, women, castles, boat rides, round-a-bouts, art, food, wine, cheese, family, friends, women, and more food, wine and cheese. And while I'm sure everyone who went to my brothers wedding has similar memories to mine, I think mine might be a bit more intense. Not just because it was my first time in Europe, or because I love to travel, but because I was coming and going from Korea. Have you ever left for vacation from another country? Or returned from vacation to another country? I'm sure that sounds like a small thing to you, but hey, you don't live in Korea...I do. Trust me, it's a weird experience.
Before I left, my well traveled coworker, Rachel, described France to me like this, "It's the opposite of Korea, you couldn't go anywhere in the universe more different than Korea, than France." After a lengthy discussion about the composition of Uranus, its atmosphere, and gaseous environment she still would not back down from her bold statement. At that time I looked at her kindly, smiled, and agreed, but in my mind I was thinking all the kimchi was going to her head, and she needed serious help. Well, a few weeks older and a tad bit wiser, I can honestly tell you, from the bottom of my heart, "SHE WAS RIGHT".

Differences, hmmmm where do I start? I guess I should start right from when I got there. I was on the subway, or Metro, leaving the Paris airport literally 10 minutes after arriving there (always avoid checking bags whenever possible), and at the first stop a nice young couple came on and sat directly across from me. That in itself has happened many times to me in Korea, but now lets take a closer look at the glaring differences in a seemingly all too common occurrence:
1. Neither the man nor the woman was Korean...(that's not like Korea at all)
2. The man and the woman were of different ethnic backgrounds...EXTREMELY rare to find that in Korea, but obese white men and small Korean women is the one minor exception to that rule.
3. The girl was showing cleavage. That was startling for me on two accounts; one, women in Korea do not show much skin around the chest or shoulders. And two, Korean women generally do not have cleavage to show.
4. They were all over each other, kissing, touching, fondling, groping, it was like I should have payed money for my seat. While in Korea, public displays of affection are strictly frowned upon. A good way to understand this is that in France when you say hello to someone you give them kisses on both cheeks, but in Korea you bow, no contact at all. It's an overly physical culture compared to a non-physical culture.
5. Lastly, and maybe the most interesting to me was...they didn't even look at me, not once. I was just a fly on the wall, even though we were face to face separated by only a few feet, my presence went unnoticed. In Korea, eyes almost always wander in the Wagooks (foreigners) direction, if not stares.

As if that wasn't enough of a rude awakening, it was barely 10 minutes after that when I nearly got caught up in a fight between about 15 black males of questionable character. I don't know if I've ever seen 15 black people together in Korea, and they definitely don't yell at each other in French and then try to beat the hell out of each other. I ended up hopping over nearly an entire subway car full of seats to escape the melee. I'm sorry I don't have a picture of it, but I'm happier being alive to share the story with you.
As a kicker to my first subway ride in Paris, the next people to sit next to me were two cute girls...who decided to make out next to me. I'm all for gay rights, but Korea is not, and I was taken by surprise seeing something that I hadn't seen in a long time. Crazy how that can happen, to see same sex kissing in New York is common place, but a few months in Korea and I was amazed.

I've written plenty and we're only about 25 minutes into my trip to France. If I stay on this pace I'll never finish, so I won't, but trust me, I could. Instead, I will try and skim through the rest.

Paris was a beautiful place. It's exactly how I pictured it, only bigger, and with even more of the things I expected than I thought; more statues, more old buildings, more museums, more parks, more tourists, and most of all more wine and cheese. I was totally amazed at how their culture seems entirely focused around art, creativity, relaxation, and enjoying life. Everywhere you look they are celebrating some one or something creative, and nearby people are relaxing and talking about it. It seemed awesome. It was like a HUGE college campus, and we all know I love them. While Korea feels almost entirely focused upon work, and America is caught somewhere in the middle, France has this one right. Enjoy life, be creative, relax, eat good food, drink good wine, and stop worrying.

After about 4 days in Paris I flew down to Bordeaux for the wedding. It's safe to say, things were not the same. The house we stayed at was built in the 15th century, the church was built in the 12th, and the entire town had only 80 people. So even while the small towns were hard to find, and caused for a lot of arguments in our car, they were secluded, peaceful, and beautiful. There were tons of grape fields, sunflower fields, rolling hills, huge castles, and again wine and cheese.

Some of the meals we ate were of epic proportions. About 40 people who threw caution to the wind in the name of Kevin and Susie's wedding prepared meals fit for kings and queens. Blocks of cheese the size of a small elephants, enough wine to get the mother and father of that elephant to fail sobriety tests; steak, chicken, sausage, duck, soup, strawberries, whipped cream, and of course chocolate. Not just a little chocolate, but like all of the other foods, loads of it, enough chocolate to have a full fledged chocolate fight, enough chocolate for there to be collateral damage in that chocolate fight. As the large French Man put it "Zay boght zee whole SUPERMARKET".

All of that fun, night after night in a castle that was haunted with the ghosts of 30 generations of French family members, and 100 generations of French rats. It was equal parts exciting, and scary, but that just made it more of an experience. This was still just leading up to the wedding.

The wedding was beautiful, all be it in French, but beautiful none-the-less. If there was one language to listen to but not understand, it's French. It was in a church built in the 12th century, that could probably only fit about 50 people. Nice and cozy for us, but perfect for Kev and Susie. After just a couple (trillion) photos, then the real party began. Back to the house for more food, drink, and festivities.

That is where the story ends for most of us. Some people getting tossed in the pool, then passing out, and then back to our normal lives in the states, Hong Kong, or Korea. Even though my story goes a little further which includes missing my flight, meeting ladies on my new flight, and teaching a class on no sleep for 36 hours, I will always love Kevin for having his wedding in France.

It takes a special person to realize when a once in a lifetime opportunity is starring them right in the face, and while most people look down and avoid it's gaze, Kevin grabs it, and gives it a big fat kiss.

Who has no relation to France what so ever, but still has their wedding there? I'll tell you who does, Kevin does. He allowed for a bunch of people from different parts of the world to gather in France and have an experience they will never forget. My Grandmother, for example, Gramma Kroll at 83 years young enjoyed her first time out of the country, and after her break dancing lesson to "I like to Move It, Move It" there wasn't a person around who could contain there gratefulness for being able to be there.

Thanks Kevin. From everyone. We all had a great time. This is just the beginning for you and Susie but I hope you can always look back and think about how wonderfully it all began because we always will.

More pics can be seen at these links:
The Wedding Photographer's pictures
My pictures
Megan's pictures
Jen and Terrance's pictures #1 and Jen and Terrance's pictures #2
Kim's pictures
Chris's pictures

I've Made It...

Wow, what a trip. I left Newark airport at 8:25 AM on March 20th and took a 6 hour flight to meet my brother in Seattle. However, that didn't happen. It seems the flights to Korea don't get the best gate accessibility. I was told I might miss my flight if I tried to go have lunch (with a 2 hour layover), but I had left my cell phone in New Jersey. So here I am, waiting for my plane, not able to meet my brother, and not able to contact him either. Then I hear my name paged over an announcement, but the incompetent workers at Seattle airport didn't know how to contact the people who were paging me. I told them how it is supposed to work, they told me they knew, I replied, I don't think you do. So I had to unpack my computer, get Kevin's cell phone number and spend 2 dollars at a public pay phone (who knew they were still around?) for 4 minutes just to say I'm sorry to my brother. Hey Kev, I'm really sorry, that sucked, I wish I could have seen you. But moving on. While waiting for the plane I met another girl who was going to South Korea to teach for a year, Anand. We had a nice wait for the plane and met two guys who looked 15 years old, but were really 18 & 19 who were flying to Thailand for a Moy Thai fighting camp. I know it's a random thing, but these kids looked like the kids who are comedic side kicks in teenage melodrama's (ie: small, kinda nerdy, try to be cute) basically the opposite of what I think of when I think Ultimate Fighter. It was very weird, but I do wish them the best. It started already, I love meeting new people with interesting stories. Then the plane. It was a HUGE plane, but it was awesome. There were like 1000 movies on demand for free, free alcohol, free games, and apparently babies couldn't even cry on this plane, it was that good. Plus I got two meals, that I got to eat with medal silverware!!! A spoon, fork and KNIFE!!! They gave out two KNIVES to each person on one trip. My dental floss was confiscated on my trip from Newark to Seattle, but apparently it's the Thunderdome when you fly internationally. But after 12 long hours, and only one bathroom break (which was one more then I was hoping for) I arrived in South Korea. Two teachers were there with a sign that read "PAUL KROLL", of course I asked them if there car had Bud Light. They didn't get the joke, but I went with them anyway. On the ride to my apartment they made me really nervous, laughing when describing the size of my apartment as being very small. Also telling me I might not have a stove, and it's a 5th floor walkup. All news to me, and when you hear it in really broken English, it makes it sound even worse (Ex: "Room, BERY BERY SMALL, hahaha). So after getting caught in traffic for a professional soccer game on the way to my apt, carrying bags that weighed 55, 30, 26 and 24 pounds up 5 flights of stairs, almost 20 hours of being cramped in a plane, all while knowing I have to get up for school at 8AM the next day...The last thing I wanted to see was a terrible apartment. Well, I opened the door and I couldn't believe what I saw...