Roadtrip North-Day 1

My apologies to my faithful readers for not informing you that I was taking a trip these last few days. But now I'm back and I hope to continue my picture a day this week. For now, enjoy a few pictures from the roadtrip.

Lunch our first day.

There are pillboxes and lookouts along much of the coast, along with plenty of barbwire, fences and spotlights. They were all reminders of the threat of N. Korean infiltration along the east coast.

Almost to Samcheok, which was close to the limestone caves we visited.

Entrance to Hwaseon-gul park. It was located in a beautiful valley.

Part of the hike up to Hwaseon-gul.

The temperature change at the entrance to the cave was quite dramatic. Here the guys are illustrating the difference.

The cave was quite large (billed as "cathedral size") and it took over an hour for us to go through it. Here's a picture that hopefully shows a little of that...and also the fact that they liked to light the cave with brightly colored rope lights. T

We had a really great dinner. Mmm...

World Cup

In 2002, Korea helped host the World Cup and got 4th place. So this year, all the t-shirts have slogans like "Fighting to the top" and "2002 Again." The World Cup has been anticipated for several months, and on Saturday Korea played its first game against Greece. You could watch on outdoor screens across Busan, so a few of us went to the closest one. It was quite the cultural experience. When they scored a goal, there were fireworks onstage. Unified chants of "Dae-han-min-guk!" followed by thunderstick clapping. Most people were decked out in red shirts or were wearing some kind of red. The nationalism was definitely flowing through people's veins.

The stage. "Fighting" is a Konglish cheer.

The crowd

The guys

The girls

We left early to avoid some of the traffic (Korea was up 2-0 already). We were almost across the bridge when they shot off fireworks to celebrate the win.

Ok, so this is easily the biggest elevator I've ever seen, compliments of the Busan Costco. The parking is on the roof, so they have elevators and escalators going up to the top. We had around 25 people in there!

One of my questions for my junior exam is "have you ever given or received a surprise party?" These guys thought that was difficult, so they surprised me right before they were taking it this morning so that they could answer the question. What a great idea!

Some mornings it's particularly nice to look out the window when I wake up.

Here's my junior conversation class from this semester. I saw them for 4 hours most weeks. They were lots of fun. I like to think they enjoyed our time together as much as I did.

Two posters that caught my eye this morning. I love the idea of a "fire seed" and also appreciate the counting quantity of "3th" that apparently exists (where have I been?!). One would imagine that it wouldn't have been that hard to run the "3th" design by one of the foreigners...