Flyaway Friday: Santorini

TGIFF again! This week blew by in a blur of "never really caught up from last weekend" fueled by copious amounts of coffee. It's Flyaway Friday again and I haven't even had time to think about where I'd fly off to today if money, time, distance, and those pesky laws of physics weren't in the way. Of course, it's not really like I have to think about it all that much to tell you that I'd much rather be on the island of Santorini, in Greece right now.

Oia, Santorini - photo by BlueEyedA73 on Flickr

My reasons for wanting to go to Santorini right now are pretty simple. White buildings, blue ocean, blue skies, colorful doors, and food! I love Greek food, and I imagine that it tastes better when you're actually in Greece. In a fantasy world (you know, like the one that Flyaway Friday exists in) I'd be overlooking the ocean, perhaps next to a nice pool, with a Greek salad on my left side, a platter of souvlaki on my right, and a glass of wine. Because that's not enough, I'd also like to have Carolyn dressed up as Aphrodite feeding me Carolyn and I olives and fanning me us with palm fronds while I read The Iliad and throw a munch on all that grub and Carolyn enjoys a stack of magazines printed in English (nearly impossible to find in Korea, don't judge us.)

Even though I'm sitting in a desk in a country with its own ancient history, Greece has an ancient history to which I can relate. It's not that I don't think Korean history is interesting, it's that I already know many of the stories of Greek history. I think that anyone who has grown up in western civilization has at least some knowledge of Greek mythology. I'd really like to see some of the places where people worshiped those gods and goddesses I've read so much about.

So there you go, Flyaway Friday. My pick is Santorini. Where on earth would you like to fly away to today?

Thoughtful Thursday: Using babies as battering rams, isn't good. Okay?

Today I thought I would write a half-post, half-open letter to a large segment of society about something that I think is important, overlooked, and probably forgotten as soon as a parent experiences the joy of their first child. I guess I must in the spirit of disclosure tell you that I have no children as of yet, and yes, I am pretentious enough to believe that I won't be one of the people to whom this post/letter is written about/to. I also realize that I just ended a sentence with not one, but two prepositions. Humor me, this issue is not one for proper grammar, but rather for blind, poorly spoken rage.

The issue is simple. If you place your baby in a stroller, you are not given a freaking open pass to walk all over the place, cut people short and leave them stumbling, or let any part of that stroller touch any part of my (or anyone else's for that matter) ankle. This is a problem of epidemic proportions, and I think that (for the sake of using as much hyperbolic speech as I can muster in a single post) the only thing dumber than using your god-sent beautiful newborn baby in golden fleece diapers as a battering ram is letting your slightly-larger-than-toddler child push a shopping cart into my ankle.

Interestingly, this problem is not only relegated to Americans. Koreans also use their babies as battering rams, and it's not cool in any language. Let's look at a few good reasons that you shouldn't use your baby as a battering ram.

1. It can't be good for the baby. Battering rams are meant to break things. Babies still have soft spots on their heads. Just because you've wrapped said baby with aluminum rods and cordura doesn't mean that it's safe to ram your child into my Achilles' tendon. Also, your child might be asleep. How would you like to be asleep in the back of a car when it suddenly crashes into a wall? Did you ever think about that? I mean, did you even see Inception? You don't mess with someone's sleep, man! Think about your child first. They have a soft spot on their head, and they might be asleep. Don't scare them to death by crashing them into my sculpted, Olympian-like legs.

2. It's not good for me. I hate having a scab on my ankle because someone's stroller hit me. If you're behind me, I can't see you, and I don't have to check my damned blind spots when I walk. You probably don't check yours when you're driving, and walking is less likely to produce injuries from collisions, right?

3. It's not good for the economy! Am I going to continue enjoying my shopping experience at the Coex Mall if you send your baby into my leg like a sweet helpless little Kamikaze? No, I'm not. Do you want me to dump less of my hard earned money back into your economy? Didn't think so. That doesn't just go for Koreans. Hey lady with the triple wide stroller filled with kids aged 4, 6, and 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, do you want me to buy dessert with my lunch, because I won't if I'm in a bad mood. How is the American economy ever going to recover if I don't buy dessert. Did you think about that? Didn't think so.

4. I might make a scene, and you're a part of it. I usually don't make scenes, but I might. I'm not the only one that ever gets rammed by a baby, and not everyone is as mild-mannered or afraid of making a scene as I am. What if I start blaring words from my mouth in a scary tone and volume at you? What if those words are bad? Do you want your developing battering ram baby to learn those words right now? Do you want to deal with the embarrassment of being part of a scene? You realize I'm not talking about the kind of scene covered on Gossip Girl, right? Anyway, this is the risk you take when you use your baby as a weapon.

5. You were unarmed once a person who loathed stroller people, too. Don't forget your roots. There are, as a matter of fact, a couple of nice stroller people who have somehow managed to maintain their consideration for others after having a child. Their child sleeps peacefully in the stroller as they are carted around their environments, and angels play harps in the child's ears as they rest peacefully. Would you rather have that or an angry man with a hurt ankle trying to convince you that he's going to file assault charges because you were too lazy to look in the direction that you were walking? No question, right?

Okay, so none of this is really so extreme, but seriously, why do people forget to watch where they're going once they've got a loaded weapon stroller? Stroller people are a big annoyance for the solo or childless traveler sometimes. Why don't we make a deal?

I propose that those of us who like to go places and experience culture who are not stroller people promise to watch our language in public, because your little cherub's ears probably work pretty well and we don't want them using the "f" word while tossing down flowers at your best friend's wedding or anything. In return, you promise us that you will do the following few things to make life easier for everyone.

1. Use common sense. If there's 1,000 people standing around the triceratops skeleton at the Natural History Museum let them move on, or pick your kid up so they can see. Don't just barrel through with your stroller.
2. Use common sense. If your stroller is 20 inches wide and there are only nineteen inches of space between me and the wall, it probably won't fit.
3. Use common sense. Don't text and push your stroller.
4. Use common sense. Don't push your stroller while making your child a bottle and handing it to them.
5. Use common sense. Don't push your stroller into other people for any reason not listed above.

If we can fulfill the aforementioned promises to each other, we can live in harmony. Did you hear that? My phone just rang because I'm probably going to win a Nobel prize for this Grand Bargain.

Anyone have any good stroller-people stories? Any outraged stroller-people want to chime in? Feel free to discuss in the comments section below...and don't forget to "Like" this blog on Facebook.

5 reasons you don't need to leave Seoul on your trip to Korea.

In a previous post, I gave you 5 reasons you should get out of Seoul when you visit Korea. What I didn't tell you in that post is that it would be quite easy to get a good taste of Korea and spend your entire visit to the country well within the Seoul metro area. Seoul is a frenetic, fast paced, ultra-modern city sprinkled with ancient cultural sights as well as all of the modern advances that contributed to Korea's rise as one of the four Asian tigers.

Seoul really lights up at night

1. Seoul is a massive city. According to the most infallible source of information ever, Wikipedia, Seoul is the third most populous city in the world. If you visit Seoul, you'll believe it, and maybe even question why it's not number two. To be fair, I've never been to Tokyo-proper, but I imagine it's pretty obvious that it's the most populous city on Earth to those who visit. If you like big, modern cities, Seoul is a great place for you. The city glows with flashes of light that can be blinding, and the traffic, parties, and bright lights stay on all night. If you'd rather have a trip filled with frenetic, blood pumping energy than a pastoral holiday in the middle of a rice paddy, you can't go wrong by picking Seoul.

Currently my favorite building in the world

2. The architecture! Seoul has a ton of really cool building designs, both massive and small. For that matter the architecture of some of the restored historical sites contrasts in a stark and dramatic way against the backdrop of slick, ultramodern buildings. If you love to take pictures of buildings, or studied architecture, or just want to feel like you've somehow warped into a future place where people should ride hoverboards and have space cars you'll love Seoul's skyline. 

Cheongyecheon River in Seoul

3. Urban oases are cool, right? Seoul has a massive urban oasis right next to it's grandest plaza. The Cheongyecheon River is literally an oasis in a jungle of concrete, glass, and steel. On a hot day, the temperature along this little ribbon of water is a little bit more palatable, and the public displays of art (and at night, public displays of affection) are actually pretty cool. Set about 3 meters (10 feet) below the noise and commotion of foot traffic, taxis, busses, and diplomatic vehicles this is a fast and easy escape from Seoul's urban intensity. If you're lucky enough to be here during the Buddha's Birthday Lantern Festival it's extra cool, as it's lit up with all manner of lanterns after dusk.

Gyeongbokgung Palace Gate - Changing of the Guard

4. The palaces, man. The palaces! Seoul has two very old palaces from the old dynastic days. Of course  these palaces have been damaged, destroyed, burnt to the ground, or otherwise by the Japanese during World War II, the North Koreans during the Korean war (probably the Americans too on the drive to retake the country), the Chinese, and I imagine the Mongolians were here once too, but I don't know that for a fact off the top of my head. Facts aren't important. The thing that's important here is that you can visit two really cool palaces in Seoul. Gyeongbokgung is the bigger of the two palaces, and if you spend a day roaming around here you'll find yourself lost in all sorts of imperial coolness. Cheongyeonggung is a bit smaller, but it's got a great garden. Interestingly, during the Japanese occupation Cheongyeonggung was used as a zoo, and it kinda still looks like one. Might I make the odd suggestion of visiting these palaces on a rainy day? You can usually stay under an eve, and you'll get great photos with far less people in them. You could easily spend half a day at either of these palaces, more if you like to take your time framing your pictures.

Insadong - Seoul's Culture Street

5. Insadong is a great place for traditional goods and experiences. So you like the urban vibe, but you want your friends and family to think that you didn't just hang out in the city the whole time you were visiting. Want to know where to buy kimchi pots, traditional placemats, handmade wooden flutes, and papercraft hanbok bookmarks? Go to Insadong. It's about 3 stops on the bus from Cheongyecheon or Gyeongbokgung, but feels like it's a world away. Actually, it feels a little bit more like a whole bunch of international visitors trying to buy traditional Korean products to take home to their families. It's also a good place to try Korea's more foreigner-friendly street foods for people with more squeamish stomachs. Try to go on a Saturday or Sunday because the street is cut off to vehicle traffic on those days. Be ready for crowds. Take a deep breath and enjoy yourself though, you never know just what kind of cool things you'll find on a visit to Insadong.

There you have it. The anti-travel guide to Korea, why leave Seoul at all? Here's five great reasons to not leave Seoul on your visit to Korea. Perhaps these are five great reasons to take a long layover at the Incheon International or Gimpo International airports, too. What cities do you think are big enough to deserve an entire trip? New York? Tokyo? Phnom Phen?

Retail therapy for the Seoul

Living in Korea has taught me a few important lessons. One lesson that I have learned to no small degree is that sometimes you just need to have a weekend away from your normal routine.

Daegu is a nice city and all, but if you ask any Korean they'll tell you that it's probably the most staunchly conservative and foreigner-unfriendly of the big cities in Korea. Both Carolyn and I have recently had it with the blatant disrespect shown to us by our students when they see us on the street, the stares of drunken senior citizens, and the constant gasps of surprise from other people who live in the neighborhood that somehow are still surprised to see a foreigner in the area even after two years of several foreigners living on the block.  These things aren't usually enough to really bother us, but they do build up over time and require some relief in order to regain your patience and a generally care-free disposition.

When you take these little frustrations into consideration and add in the fact that we've both lost quite a bit of weight in the last few months and need some new clothes, there's really only one reasonable outcome, and that's a trip away from home.

We originally planned an engagement photo shoot for Saturday in Busan, but the photographer was concerned about the predicted onset of the monsoon, so we're going to try and reschedule for sometime in August. Carolyn had been especially looking forward to having a weekend getaway as she had to take care of me during my week of incapacitation after the kidney stone hell of a couple of weeks ago. So what did we do? We didn't go to Busan, we’ve been there quite a few times already this year. We didn't stay in Daegu to shop the knock-offs of brand names that Korea’s textile capital has to offer either. Instead, we headed up to Seoul for a weekend of shopping and relaxing in a nicely international and progressive city.

Saturday morning Carolyn woke up at about 6:00 and went for a run. It seemed the monsoon had truly arrived with light rains and the humidity we've so happily not felt this summer. We took showers, cleaned the apartment a little and headed to the train station to catch our KTX to Seoul.

I love travel days and always get myself a little treat for the rails. Dongdaegu Station has a Dunkin’ Donuts we always stop at, and this time I ignored the weird vegetable flavored donuts and instead ordered an item I’ve discovered on the menu here in Korea that I hope is also available in the US, the sausage burrito. This thing is probably a poor choice for someone who recently had a kidney stone, as it’s chock full of animal proteins and certainly sodium as well. Imagine a chili-cheese dog with rice wrapped in a warm tortilla and grilled. Yummo. That's what I call train food. After our little treat we boarded our super fast train for Seoul. An hour and a half of rice paddies and tunnels later we arrived at Seoul Station.

Seoul Station is one of my favorite places in Korea because it’a almost always a hub for some adventure we’re embarking on. It's always abuzz with movement, life, and noise. A few subway stops later and we were checking into our hotel in Sinchon, a neighborhood placed near lots of good shopping and dining options.

If you are a couple traveling on a budget and you want to spend a night or a week in Seoul, I’s suggest staying at the WS Hotel in Sinchon. It costs roughly the same as a private room in any of Seoul’s hostels, the desk clerk speaks English very well, and the service is pretty extraordinary for a small hotel in Korea. We screwed up and reserved a single room, and they upgraded us to a double at no additional charge. On top of that they gave us a cool gift upon check in! The location is nice too, with lots of good eats within a block and one of Seoul’s biggest bar and club districts only one subway stop away. We grabbed lunch at a Taco Bell (none of those on Daegu) while they cleaned our room (we were early), dropped our bags off, and headed to the Coex Mall for a few hours of American style mall bliss.

Coex Mall - Seoul's largest underground shopping center.

Coex was a little bit of a disappointment. Carolyn found some cool accessories, but neither of us wanted to spend much at boutique stores when we knew the big guns of fashion shopping in Seoul were waiting for us in Myeong-dong. We had a sad lunch of "Indian" curry and got back on the subway to head for some retail-therapy in Myeong-dong.

Crowded streets in Myeong-dong

I'm not really sure what happened next. If you've ever been shopping in Myeong-dong you know why. It’s like a tidal wave of humanity making its way through an urban landscape with a million different things happening at once and all five of your senses going into overload. I know for a fact we visited the smaller of the two H&M stores and the Forever 21 before telling a street vendor to do-something-not-so-nice to himself for trying to rip us off on a handbag. My memories become clear again as we walked out of Myeong-dong to catch the subway back to Sinchon. Carolyn had a walnut candy she bought from a food cart, and I had a collection of five sausages on a stick. We made it back to Sinchon, shared a berry pingsu, and settled into our hotel room where we drifted off to sleep as some Australian guy got kicked off of Masterchef Korea.

Street art in Hongdae

Quiet morning in Hongdae

I slept like a rock for the first time since the kidney stone two weeks ago. The hotel room was dark and quiet. We woke up slowly, got ready, checked out, and headed over to Hongdae to find something for breakfast. Hongdae is one of the liveliest night spots in Seoul and the sidewalks show it in the morning. The streets were being cleaned up from another Saturday night as we followed our noses to brunch. We were the first customers to arrive at Neal’s Yard and ordered a brunch plate of waffle, bacon, sausage, and eggs as well as a quiche. Everything was pretty good. Stuffed, we headed to find any clothes we might have missed in our first trip to Myeong-dong the night before.

The larger H&M store had a lot more for us to look at. I passed on shorts as I seem to be between sizes right now, but found some pants and a shirt I couldn't live without. Carolyn found a dress, some shorts, and a top she liked. Success!

Myeong-dong Cathedral

Myeong-dong Cathedral

We also walked around the exterior of Myeong-dong Cathedral. The cathedral has stood for over 100 years and seemed to be according to the pictures on-site one of the few buildings in the area to survive the Korean war.

We sat down to relax a bit at a Starbucks before heading into the fray at the Forever 21 one more time. I picked up a shirt I couldn't live without and Carolyn got some basics. We stopped at the new flagship UniQlo store for a pair if pants for Carolyn before heading back to Seoul Station.

We tried to make our normal stop a the Dos Tacos in Seoul Square before making wrong in the train, but damnit, the whole basement level of the building was closed. We had sandwiches at a Quizno’s and meandered over to the station.

The train ride home was pretty good minus some parents who think its a good idea to let their kids run around a train car like wild animals, but you run into that just about anywhere, I imagine. This is the sort of thing that would have really been irritating on Friday night, when we had our fill of being treated as some sort of exotic and dangerous wildlife as we walk through the streets, but at this point it was no big deal. The steam had been blown off. This sort of "monkey effect" is just part of being an expat when you live somewhere that you stick out. We've found that it's generally harmless, doesn't impact our life much, and we can deal with it. Sometimes though, it just becomes too much, and you need to find a way to let the rage out. For us, that means shopping. This weekend our retail-therapy was 100% effective.

Altogether our weekend escape to Seoul was a lot of fun. I think we got our fill if shopping, and boy will we look fancy on our way to work tomorrow! We might even be happy to be back in quiet, boring Daegu.

Flyaway Friday: Where I want to go right now.

Happy Friday, everyone. I'd like to start asking a single question every Friday. Where would you like to fly away to today? I hope you've got an answer and will share it with me in the comments. Now, I know that lots of us have travel plans ready to go, so let's ignore the destinations that we're already planning on visiting. Basically, if you've already bought a plane ticket, you're going, so use Flyaway Friday to dream about living a little larger than you already do.

Photo by Denis. G on Flickr

Well, I'm off to Seoul this weekend, but if I had it my way, I'd be catching the first flight for Prague. I can't even pinpoint the reason why, but Prague and the Czech Republic have captivated my imagination for the better part of the past year. The architecture is beautiful and very old-world style, the food is very basic and filled with things that I love, and there's something familiar about the place even though there's no reason for the familiarity. Now, what would I do in Prague?

Eat. I love sausage, and growing up in South Texas there was no shortage of Czech sausages to be found. The fried cheese sandwiches look amazing, and the beer is supposed to be the best in the world. I imagine that I would fill out my slightly-too-baggy pants in no time on a visit to Prague.

Wander. Given Prague's distinctly old-world architecture and streets, I think I could wander with my camera for hours, just catching the light. It would be lovely.

Visit a castle. I have yet to visit a real castle, unless you count the old palaces in Seoul. Whatever, I want to visit a European castle that looks like it should have all sorts of Disney characters walking around in it. Prague Castle should do the trick.

See those creepy puppets. I recently confessed to my fiancee that those old European marionette puppets creep me out. I'd love to get creeped out on their home turf.

Did I mention fried cheese sandwiches? I've been thinking about a fried cheese sandwich for months. I really, really want one, and it's just not happening for me here in Korea. I could eat a lot of them in Prague, though!

So there we go. For Flyaway Friday today I'd like to hop the fastest flight to Prague. Is fried cheese on bread really such a shallow reason to go somewhere?

Where would you like to jet off to today? Tell me where and why in the comments!

Thoughtful Thursday: On Food

Welcome to Thoughtful Thursday. I'd like to make sure that at least once a week I write something that involves a little bit of thought and contemplation on my part before sending it out to the internet. I don't really intend to make my blog a heavy-hitting journal of deep thoughts, but there's some big things to be gained from food and travel, and sometimes pictures and snark just won't do the job. Let's get right to it.

If you've read this blog for long enough, you know that I love food. I love buying it at the grocery store (most of the time), I love cooking it, I love eating it, I love watching television shows about it. Food is probably my biggest non-Carolyn-related passion. What you may not know is that for the first 29 of my 30 years, I ate like a moron. Lots of fried foods, fast foods, processed foods, and meats made up the bulk of my diet, while there was very little representing the world of vegetables and fruits.

When I turned 30 I realized I probably won't live forever, and that I should do what I can to give my body more of what it needs so that it doesn't have to process a ton of chemical and artificial crap. I continued to eat like crap until we took a vacation back to the good old U.S. of A. and gorged on all of the stuff that we've missed since moving to Korea. I gained 12 pounds in a matter of 3.5 weeks. When we came back to Korea we both changed our diets. I cut my soda habit down from about five sodas a day to perhaps four or five per week. We eat meatless most days of the week, because it's cheaper, easier, and better for both our bodies and the environment. We also started exercising. Since coming back to Korea I've lost 20 pounds, and Carolyn is down over 30. Those changes weren't enough to prevent a kidney stone that I imagine was 29 years in the making, but hopefully it won't happen again.

Now that you have a little background information on my eating habits, I want to talk about food in a way that's a bit different than "wow, this shit is delicious" or "silkworm larvae taste like dirt." I want to talk about food as a resource and how we can avoid misusing it, and how we can learn about using our resources more wisely by getting out of our comfort zone and globetrotting a bit. In one sense, I believe this is a really simple subject, eating healthier and using all parts of an animal in the way that people from other countries do is far less wasteful than buying only the breast of a chicken or beef steaks. In another sense, I feel that using only the breast of the chicken or the choice cuts of beef is disrespectful to the animal that you're eating. These are the two main things I want to talk about today.

"Ew, that's gross!" is a bad thing. Who has watched an episode of Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern? For a long time I had a problem with that show, because I thought that what he did was basically invalidate the eating habits of other cultures by trying to turn their everyday foods into shock-TV. I think I might have gotten the wrong message though. In this interview, Andrew Zimmern explains that his show exists not to introduce culture or shock the American audience by the "gross" things that he eats, but rather to send a message that there's a lot of food that we Americans won't even try, and that we rely far too much on commodities.

This NPR article has some infographics that illustrate the environmental impact of meat, as well as how we eat more meat per capita than any other nation aside from Luxembourg. I find it interesting that they point out that scientists have devised ways to get more meat out of every cow, pig, and chicken. By injecting them full of steroids and hormones? Do we really want to eat that? Will these same steroids and hormones give me 'roid rage and man boobs? Also, what happens with the tripes and cheaper cuts of meats from these animals? I don't see many Americans eating kidneys, livers, and tongues for dinner.

Essentially, I get the feeling that we're essentially subjecting ourselves to scientific experimentation by eating these genetically and chemically altered animals that have been tampered with to grow bigger "desirable" parts in lieu of eating the parts that people have eaten for hundreds of years.

I've been out and about in the world just a little bit. I haven't been to a million different places, or eaten every ethnic delicacy from any one location, but I do know that in Korea and Indonesia I've seen lots of people eating things that wouldn't be served in any suburban household at home. I've been out with my coworkers for makchang, which is essentially raw beef or pork tripe that you grill at the table. You know, it wasn't bad at all. We also had raw beef kidney, liver, and stomach lining. It wasn't my thing, but it wasn't bad. Millions of people around the world eat these parts of the animals that they slaughter, and they don't get sick or die from them. I think that one lesson most Americans could stand to learn is that a lot of people live their lives with much less than we do, without impacting their happiness. I think the only effective way to hammer that point home is to go out and meet those people where they live.

So what's brought on this change of heart about meat? Well, I just think you have to respect an animal if you're going to slaughter it to eat it. It's easy to forget that something has literally died so that you can eat it when you buy the faceless, plastic wrapped tray of meat at the market. I'm not saying that we shouldn't eat meat. I think we're definitely apex predators and that there's a certain amount of animal protein that goes into a healthy diet. I think we can eat less meat and lessen the environmental footprint we put on the planet with every meal. I also think that we can and should open ourselves up to eating the dirty-bits of animals that we tend to ignore. If you want to respect the ingredient (imagine it's your family dog, do you want it to die just so you can eat it's drumsticks?) you should be ready to cook and eat everything nose to tail.

So there we have it, folks. My first Thoughtful Thursday. As soon as I'm in a place where I can read the labels and know what I'm buying, I'll be cooking some liver and onions and steak and kidney pies. Want to join me?

What are your thoughts on food, conservation, and what it means to respect the ingredients that you eat? Leave a comment here and we'll have ourselves a discussion. If you'd rather, join me to discuss the topic on Facebook.

We've picked an itinerary for our honeymoon!

It was probably about a year ago that we decided that we should have a less expensive wedding, save our nickels and dimes (or our baek and oh-baek coins) and take a huge trip for our honeymoon. A quick look at our finances and projected incomes for the new year made it seem like we could do it, so we decided to go forward with making it a goal. A year later it's still a goal, but it's morphed so many times that it's almost kind of scary to commit to an idea because we've dreamed of going to so many places. How do you decide where to go when a trip has been planned (at least in your head) as a round-the-world trip, an all-of-Europe trip, a Western-Europe-only trip, and a tour-of-German-speaking-countries trip? Well, it really helps when you have a healthy appetite and a desire to go somewhere a little less likely. Now it's time to reveal what we're tentatively planning. After our wedding, we want to head to one of the culinary capitals of the world, and explore a place that both of us have talked and dreamed about going to for years.

Our current honeymoon itinerary

Sorry, Paris, you're just not on the itinerary for this couple. We plan to start our trip with a flight to Madrid, where we will spend a couple of days seeing the works of a few of our favorite artists, grand cathedrals, beautiful squares, and oh yes, eating lots and lots of tapas. After Madrid our itinerary has us traveling to Barcelona for a few days along the Mediterranean with more art, tapas, and cathedrals. Spain is essentially unknown to both of us, aside from what we learned in our high school Spanish classes and from watching foodie shows on the boob-tube that propelled it into our itinerary. Have I mentioned that we're only completely excited about seeing the Moorish architecture?

When we've had our fill of España, we will head east to the Mediterranean shores of France. We plan to stay in Nice, and fill our bellies with ratatouille and aioli. A visit to nearby Monaco is currently in the cards. This will give us the chance to have plenty of French pastries, baguettes, and all of the other delights that we dreamed about during our initial planning of a honeymoon in Paris. After a few days our waistlines should be screaming for us to move on, but they'll get no relief as we move into Italy.

After a visit to Rome, which I imagine will be a whirlwind tour of places like the Pantheon, St. Peter's Square, the Vatican, and other must-see sights, we plan to travel to Napoli and the Amalfi coast. I can't tell you how exciting it will be to wake up with Mt. Vesuvius in the distance, and to finally visit Pompeii. Pompeii has been a minor obsession of mine since the 5th grade, when my "gifted and talented" class did a thematic year on Rome, learned a bit of Latin, and of course a 5th grade boy would be most interested in the greatest natural disaster of the era.  I won't even talk about the food I'm imagining during this portion of the trip, because it wouldn't be very nice to torture myself like that as I live in Korea and it's widely unavailable. We'll cross the peninsula and board a ferry to take us to the parts of the honeymoon that I find to be the most foreign, exciting, and intriguing.

Our ferry will put us back onto dry land in Croatia. We're quite excited about this part of the trip, because there are few places that look so ancient but are yet so recently rebuilt on our itinerary. I'm imagining crystalline blue waters, cliffs, and a rugged landscape. I'm interested to meet people who have survived one of the worst civil wars on the planet that I can remember in my lifetime, and I'm sure we're going to have plenty of opportunities to meet them as we travel through the Balkans, from Croatia, through Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. Everything I have read or seen on television raves about this region's wines, foods, scenery, and beauty. I can't wait to see, smell, and taste it all for myself. After transit through Bosnia, Montenegro, and Albania, we will begin our tour of the ancient world of Greece.

Greek cuisine is one of my favorites in the world. It might be my favorite. I can only imagine it tastes much, much better in Greece. Our loose plan at this point includes stops in Athens, Mykonos, and Santorini. I somewhat want to book one of those package tours of ancient sites, but time will tell whether that's a good idea or not. When I imagine Greece, I basically imagine white buildings and blue seas. I imagine a place where the world seems much bigger than it really is, where the gods of old still play their terrible games with people, and where the people remain full of smiles and hospitality even though they've often been given a hard situation to live in. I hope I'm right about that part. After spending sufficient time in Greece, we will board yet another ferry and cross into Turkey.

Our time in Turkey will be spent  first by exploring the Aegean coastline. Once again I'm imagining a somewhat stark contrast between rocky shores and clear blue waters. I'm also imagining kebabs and baklava, but that's beside the point. There should be plenty of beautiful things to see on the slow trip from Ephesus to Istanbul. Once we arrive in Istanbul, the former-art-history-professor in my is going to go wild. I've always had a fascination with Byzantine art, and Istanbul was Byzantium, right? The Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and all sorts of sites are already beckoning me. I believe that old Constantinople will have plenty of tricks up its sleeve to amaze us with, as well as plenty of delicious foods that look like they will keep our bellies full, olfactory glands in overdrive, and have us smelling, tasting, and remembering the end of our honeymoon for the rest of our lives. 

So there it is, the official itinerary that we're going to try and make happen so that after we say "I do" we have about four or six weeks to ourselves, in a place that we've always dreamed of being, to get ready to start the next big phase of our life together. I think this is going to be the perfect way to get our heads cleared out and to hang the big carrot of travel over our minds as we get ready to start new careers in a new place, and hopefully not too long after that a family of our own.

Have you been to any of these places? Have any travel tips? Know any friends with big couches? If so leave a comment here or on our Facebook page!

Milk and berry ping su

...this is the "after" picture...I lacked the foresight for a "before" picture...

It's summertime here in South Korea and the heat and humidity are starting to make the afternoons seem really, really long. What's a guy to do to keep cool? Well, as an alternative to freezing your underwear, laying under the air conditioner all day, or taking a cold shower you might seek out a cold and tasty treat. A specifically Korean treat is called pat ping su, or as we foreigners call it, ping su. 

Ping su is the bastard child of ice cream and shave ice, to put it bluntly. In most cases you have a bed of ice flakes, a layer of fruit, berries, nuts, or and corn flakes, topped with a nice scoop of ice cream and some red bean paste. I've never been a huge fan of ping su, the corn flakes and red bean paste were just a bit too much for me to handle, and I really wasn't a fan of the mix of ice flakes and milk.

It was pretty hot this weekend, though, and Carolyn really wanted to have a nice cold ping su. After a lunch of tang soo yook (think sweet and sour pork at your local mall's Chinese restaurant) we stopped at a cafe we've passed a thousand times but never entered, because we saw people on the patio with big bowls of ping su. The cafe itself was beautiful, with polished concrete floors, beautiful dark wooden furniture, and a surprisingly Western (as in American West) feel to it. The prices were a bit higher than most cafes we go to, but what the hell, right?

Carolyn ordered the milk and berry ping su for us. I was not excited. When they delivered the giant bowl of ice cream and ice flakes though, I was really happy with what I saw. The ice flakes were made of milk! This gave the entire dish a makeover. The red bean paste was confined to the inside of delicious rice cakes and played very well with the berries and nuts, and the vanilla ice cream on top permeated the milk flakes with a strong vanilla bean flavor. I am now a convert.

The milk flakes reminded me so strongly of the coffee can ice cream we made in elementary school. I love that old kick-the-can ice cream, and this was a pretty close replication. The berries were fresh, and the nuts were toasted and had a satisfying crunch. Maybe I misjudged the Korean idea of what you should eat on a hot day! I now think that a milk ping su might be the cure for the summer afternoon heat, and I know where to go to get one.

What kind of things are served specifically to combat the summer heat where you live?

Where the Hell is Matt? 2012

Woo hoo! I saw it on the first day it was up. Now, all of you my readers, can watch it too. I'm still recovering from the kidney thing, and I think I just made myself sick by reading about the recovery from shock wave lithotropsy online, so I don't have a whole lot to write about today. Expect a post about food soon, though. I'm going to go back to reclining in my office chair and grinding my teeth, because that seems to make me feel a bit better.

TV has thrown a wrench into the honeymoon Euro-trip plan

When we first started plotting, figuring, dreaming, and whatnot about how long our honeymoon in Europe could be, how much money we could save during our last year in Korea, and where we wanted to go, we thought "hey, we could make this a three month thing, live cheap, and visit lots of places." We could probably still do that but I think both of us have come to the point where after spending 2 years overseas we might want to get home, find jobs, and get settled a little bit sooner than that.

Our first draft of this plan was to get married in New York, fly to Paris, and start the honeymoon there. The first draft didn't get very far though, mainly just a list of cities and places we wanted to visit. Paris, London, Amsterdam, Berlin, München, Rome, Prague, and so on and so forth. We watched lots of TV shows about traveling in France and Germany and the Czech Republic, and got pretty excited about the whole prospect.

Of course, right now we have the great opportunity to live in Asia and have cheap flights to lots of places in Asia that we want to visit, so it's pretty important to mention that we don't want to save so aggressively that we have regrets about not visiting places here. Our trip to Japan got booked first, and we understand it's going to be somewhat expensive, but I think we'd really kick ourselves if we lived next door to one of the most iconic countries in Asia for two years and never made a proper visit. Our trip to Thailand for summer vacation will probably end up costing less than the shorter trip to Japan in the end, but after a winter in Korea we both want to be somewhere nice and hot with a beach, and Thailand is yet another of the most iconic countries in Asia. We're also kicking around ideas for our winter vacation, because there's a few other "must-see" places on our list and we have a bit more time to work with this winter.

Anyhow, the point of the previous tangent of a paragraph is that we are planning on a somewhat shorter honeymoon, perhaps 6 weeks or so. Where do we start our travel planning then? Well, for one, we like guidebooks. Although it's cool among travel circles to berate guidebooks and the people that use them, I think scoffing at the idea of carrying some information about places you might want to see or visit, things you might want to eat, and a few useful phrases is short-sighted. In fact, I've gotten to the point where I think that disliking things just because other people like them is kinda crazy.

Anyhow, our Lonely Planet or Rough Guide Europe guides, one of them, had an interesting looking itinerary that started in Rome and ended in Scotland. We both thought "hey, that sounds awesome." It even started to look like we might start the process of figuring out how to make it work. We usually do travel and wedding planning at a cafe near our little apartment, but this weekend we didn't make it due to disruption from my kidney.

Last night, as we laid down to go to sleep I put on an epsiode of No Reservations in which Anthony Bourdain (another person some people hate, some people love) traveled through Istanbul. All of the sudden Turkey just turned into a wrench that has lodged itself right in the middle of my mind's "where do I want to go" engine. I think it got stuck in Carolyn's too. I mean, it looked so foreign, yet clean and familiar, and the food looked amazing. How could we not want to go there, right?

That's just how it is I guess, there's always going to be more places that we want to go...but maybe, just maybe we can plan Turkey into our honeymoon.

Hospitalized Abroad!

This weekend was one of the most memorable and painful weekends on record for my life. As you probably know, I've been living in South Korea with my fiance since February 2011, and we work in the public school system here. One of the things we were excited about was being on a national health insurance plan, and we've used it sparingly over the course of our year and a half here. This weekend we got to test it out on a bigger event.

Friday afternoon I had a quick turnaround between classes, and I started to feel a bit of pain in my back. I always attribute back pain to the chair in my office, or my concrete slab of a bed, but this was sharper and more localized. I went to my class and winced here and there as I made my way through the 45 minutes. It subsided, school ended, I grabbed a snack and went home. At home there wasn't really any more problems, just a dull ache. We watched a few episodes of Modern Family and No Reservations before we crashed.

At about 6:00 on Saturday morning, I woke up and made my way to the bathroom. I wasn't sure whether I was going to vomit or "other" and I kept changing positions while I was trying to figure out what was happening. I got very hot, started sweating, and eventually started vomiting without end. Carolyn woke up (I was apparently screaming) and went to get some juice, but the pain just got worse, so we grabbed my health insurance card and headed to the hospital.

Our first stop was Bogang Hospital, about a mile away. We caught a cab and took the quick ride over, as I continued wretching into the bucket Carolyn grabbed for me. We stumbled into the emergency room, and there were no English speaking staff members. I called my coteacher, and Carolyn called her Korean friend and they translated for us. Bogang Hospital had no facilities with which to run blood tests or anything, and they wanted to send us to a different hospital. They called a cab for us, gave him directions, and we piled in. We rode about 20 minutes or so to Daegu Catholic University Hospital, my head in the bucket, and the pain just got worse.

I stumbled into the E.R. saying "help me" and an English speaking doctor said he'd help. Carolyn got me admitted with the front desk, and I sat down on a gurney. The doctor came back a few minutes (that seemed like hours) later and took my vitals, I think, then came back another few minutes (again...they seemed like hours) later and started an examination. He asked where the pain was, before punching me in the back. My response was a loud scream, then he had me lay back on the gurney and felt my abdomen, once again inducing screams. A few minutes later they were inserting an IV, pain medication started flowing in, and I stopped panicking.

They wheeled me around the hospital on the gurney, but I was feeling better at this point. X-rays and a CT scan revealed that I had a kidney stone on my right side, and that it would require a shockwave treatment for me to be able to move it along. Okay, now we're getting somewhere, I thought. They gave us a referral card and address for a urology clinic on the complete opposite side of the city, we hailed a cab, and headed on. The fee was about 150,000 won for all of the service.

We were both struck by how nice Suseong-gu is compared to where we live. The doctor's office was pretty posh, with comfortable chairs in the waiting room, and clean, clean floors. The doctor here spoke impeccable English, and told me that the run of x-rays and treatment would cost about 300,000 won and take about 2 hours. It went by quick, and before I knew it I had gone through a whole lot of x-rays and been splayed naked over a shockwave machine that broke the stone up. I felt better right away.

Carolyn's Korean friend came along to make sure we were okay (and not over billed or otherwise taken advantage of as foreigners). Her boyfriend was nice enough to give us a ride home, not before I had to run to a bathroom to vomit again and start sweating and turn pale. The pharmacy at the ground floor of the building gave me 8 days of painkillers and antibiotics, and a 30 day run of anti-stone drugs. This cost about 30,000 won. We got home a bit later, I laid down, and managed to eat some to get my first run of drugs down.

The doctor warned that I would probably experience more pain as the stone fragments continued to pass, and sure enough at about 1:00am, I was up again, having the same vomiting reaction until more moved along. I felt better by about 4:00am and went to bed. I woke up Sunday morning feeling quite a bit better, but with no appetite. Carolyn went shopping, made lunch, I took my pills, and started to feel better. I made it through the rest of the day with little pain, until we laid down to go to sleep for the night.

A dull ache awakened me at about 3:00 on Monday morning, and kept me awake, mostly out of fear that the big pains would return, I think until 6:00 or so. I called in sick to work and spent the day at home resting, eating when I was hungry, and taking my pills right on time.

This leads me to a few points about living overseas that I think people could take a note from:

1. Have a local friend who speaks the language. It makes it way easier to get your point across if you can't communicate very well and you need treatment.
2. Have a foreign friend who can handle your affairs. I could not have filled out the paperwork at the hospitals myself, and having Carolyn with me provided an unreal amount of comfort and assurance that there was someone that at least knew there was something wrong with me.
3. Have insurance. Almost 500,000 won isn't a huge amount of money, but it's not insignificant either. Have travel insurance or some other coverage wherever you go, otherwise a hospital stay could ruin your travels for a while.
4. Know where a few hospitals are just in case you ever need to find one.
5. Know the easiest place to catch a cab, because stumbling down the street clutching your kidneys, you don't want to struggle to find a ride.
6. Make sure you have a phrasebook with a medical section. Our $12 Lonely Planet Korean phrasebook had nearly everything we needed for our hospital conversations, and was worth every penny.

So there's my experience of needing acute medical treatment while living abroad. It's nothing out of the ordinary or even dramatic, simply an experience. Make sure that you have the coverage and tools (phrasebook) you need on your travels to make potential hospitalization a little more do-able.

Five countries I want to travel to. Right now.

The planning portion of our summer adventure to Thailand is pretty much over, as is the planning for our Chuseok trip to Japan. What's a boy to do? I really think that every hour you spend planning a trip counts as part of the trip, even the hours you spend just dreaming about where you want to go next. We have but one vacation period left during our time here in Korea, and the wheels in my head (and in my fiancee's head, as she gets just as much input as I do into these decisions) are already turning. Here's a list of five countries that I want to go to right now.

1. Vietnam is number one on my list. Is it because of my morbid curiosity about seeing an embalmed communist leader? Is it because I want to crawl through the tunnels that the Viet Cong used during the Vietnam conflict? Well, no, not really. I mean, I do want to see Ho Chi Minh's grave (and embalmed body). I do have some curiousity about the Vietnamese perspective on the war, and I'm ashamed to admit that I want to film myself attempting to surf in Vietnam so I can create a YouTube video called "Charlie don't surf." None of the reasons as outlined above are the thing that I think of when I hear Vietnam. What I think of is a sandwich. I want to eat banh mi sandwiches. Lots of them. What's a banh mi, you ask?

Photo by  jeffreyw on Flickr

Wikipedia says:
"Bánh mì or bánh mỳ (/ˈbʌn ˌmiː/; Vietnamese pronunciation: [ɓǎɲ mî]) is a Vietnamese term for all kinds of bread. Bread, or more specifically the baguette, was introduced by the French during its colonial period. The bread most commonly found in Vietnam is single serve and resembles a torpedo, therefore the term bánh mì is synonymous with this type of bread. The bánh mì is usually more airy than its western counterpart, so as a result, has a thinner crust."

Sounds like a tasty reason to visit to me!

Photo by jjcb on flickr

2. Singapore, from what I gather, is the cleanest big city in the world. I want to see that. The streets aren't clogged with cars, there's no graffiti, and there is Peranakan food. What is Peranakan food, you ask? Well, to my understanding it's the mixture of food that results from the cultural mixture of Malay, Chinese, and Indian people in places like Singapore. Also, there's a Chinatown and a Little India, so you can get whatever food your heart and stomach desire. Aside from that, Singapore simply has a sexy, sexy skyline. I'm a sucker for tall buildings, and I think Singapore would certainly give me my fill of them.

Photo by Arian Zwegers on flickr

3. Cambodia is a country I don't know much about, but it's got Angkor Wat, and I want some of that action. Angkor Wat is a Buddhist, Hindu, and Muslim temple situated in the Cambodian jungle, and looks like it's big enough to explore for days. Combine such an awesome sight to see with the way dollars tend to go really, really far in southeast Asia, and you have my entire reasoning for wanting to visit Cambodia.

4. Malaysia makes the list because although I've had my passport stamped there, I haven't had a chance to go to Penang yet. Penang is apparently the "pearl of the orient" and filled with delicious street food. Given the opportunity right now, I'd let someone jab me in the arm to refresh my Hepatitis A vaccine and hop the next flight to Penang. Air Asia flies straight to Penang, and as it's one of my favorite airlines this trip might be possible. Alas, they don't offer that flight from Seoul.

Photo by Arian Zwegers on flickr

5. India looks like it would be one heck of an intense travel experience. Intense in the sense that the poverty, hawking, staring, being followed, filth and grime would be unpleasant but also color your memories in a way that is more vivid than travel to a more developed place. I imagine the mysticism that I was bewildered by in Bali would be present to a huge degree, along with a good amount of new sights, smells, and sounds. All of my friends that have been to India loved the experience, and they have all remarked on how intense it was. Also, Indian food is one my favorite cuisines, and I think that's a good enough reason to go on its own merit.

So, these are the five countries I would go to right now. Leave a comment here or on the Ever Evolving Primate facebook page, and tell me which five countries you would drop everything and fly to this very moment.

7 reasons it's more fun to travel with another person

1. You don't have to call anyone to share what you've seen. I think anyone who has taken a solo trip somewhere understands this. My last solo trip was diving in Hawaii, and I seem to remember reaching for my phone to call home and tell mom how awesome the dives were that day to find that my phone had broken in half when my bag fell out of the overhead on the dive boat. In those days I was quite the loudmouthed expert on why it's better to travel alone, I even had reasons! I think the reasons were something like "when you don't have someone with you, you get more caught up in the moment and appreciate where you are more." Well, that was a load of horse-shit. I didn't have a cell phone the first time I traveled alone, and borrowed my dad's. That was back in the days of domestic roaming, and, well, he never told me what the bill was that month but I'm sure it wasn't cheap! I think that what I didn't realize, at the wise old age of 22, was that cell phones were about to change everything.
Now we're always connected and never have to even wait until we get home to share what we've seen and stuff. The reason this technology took off probably has something to do with the fact that people just like to share things they think are cool, and share them right away. This is one of the biggest reasons it's better to have someone with you. You can "share" something cool without even reaching into your pocket!

Nasi goreng tastes better if you have someone to talk with!

2. You have someone to eat meals with. There was a time when I thought this wasn't a big deal too. I didn't have any good or even halfway thought-out reasons. Of course, before the age of 27 or so I didn't really enjoy the act of eating as much as I enjoy it now (and oddly enough I'm about 40lbs lighter now, go figure.) If I went somewhere to eat that wasn't drive thru or pick-up (because that's easy to take back to your hotel room and get on the internet, where you're never alone. I'd sit at a table for one, smugly think that the host or hostess had judged me when I said I wanted a table for one, and try not to stare too hard as I tried to listen to other people's conversations. Meals can be a really lonely time when you're on your own, especially if you're not good at engaging people you've never met before in conversation. A friend of mine just backpacked all over southeast Asia, India, China, Mongolia, and Russia on her way back to the U.K. I'm certain she had zero problems finding someone to talk to at meals if she wanted conversation, but she's got that inherent skill of talking to people that I was born without!

3. You have someone to say good night to. My younger, more knowledgeable (I knew everything then) self would have derided me for this as a reason to be weak and travel with another person. It's easier to go to sleep when you have someone to say goodnight to, whether they're right next to you, or in a bunk bed right above you. If for some reason you were to go missing in the night, sleepwalk to the edge of town, be mauled by lions in the middle of the night, someone would know about it. Those seven to nine hours of sleep you need after a day of sightseeing, scuba diving, sunbathing, or photo taking can conceptually be pretty scary. It's nice to know that there's someone you can check out with before you close your eyes who expects you to check back in when the sun comes up, am I right?

4. You don't feel like you're very far from home, even if you're on the other side of the world. This is particularly true if your travel partner is your significant other. When we left for South Korea, I was a complete ball of nerves. Sometimes I still feel like I couldn't be any farther away from my comfort zone than I am here, but it's okay because home is just a concept that to me means, where Carolyn is. I'm looking forward to moving "home" to Thailand for a couple weeks in the near future. I'm also looking forward to moving "home" to New York for a longer term stay. I think sometimes your significant other can keep a reserve of your sanity to hose you down with and keep you from totally losing it. If they don't have enough of your sanity in reserve to do that they can at the very least call home for you and get help (say, if your bank freezes your account while you're in another country).

See? Everyone is in groups!

5. Romantic things like sunsets aren't awkward if you're not single. Oh if I could only go back in time and tell the 21-26 year old primate that sunsets on the beach were in fact romantic and that he is only lying to himself. In a sea of couples, a single person is going to feel out of place. That's all there is to it. It's probably a good thing I didn't take the trip to Tahiti I was planning in the summer of 2005, it would have been a relentlessly romantic experience where I stumbled around alone and couples made conversation with me out of pity. The fact of the matter is that some places were meant for pairs. Now there's no reason that a few dudes can't hang out together on the beach for a great sunset. Yeah, it's a couples thing in a sense, but a bunch of guys and a bunch of beers somehow are an exception to the rule. So are multiple generations of a single family when seated together. Or just two friends who have something to talk about while they enjoy the scenery. Romantic things are awkward for none of those groups, but singles are definitely the misfits in these situations.

Can I try your zombie? You can try my Singapore Sling!

6. You get to try twice as many foods and drinks. This is completely and totally simple and straightforward. You're in a new country. You want to try as much of the local cuisine as possible. If you go out to dinner 14 times, you can order 14 different dishes without being a total glutton, right? Maybe a few sides or something in addition, but you can't take down a whole lot more than that. If you have a wife, fiancee, girlfriend, friend, or any other type of travel buddy (except for maybe a dog or a parrot), you can double the number of foods you get to eat. All you have to do is make sure to not order the same thing at dinner, and trade bites. Simple. Delicious.

7. Chances are they have a few different interests, so you get to see something you wouldn't have bothered with otherwise. My fiancee likes art, a lot. I've always been one to look at art, say "that's nice" and move along. When we spent a week in New York a couple of years ago, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it was fantastic. If I went to New York alone I would have probably only wandered the streets of Chinatown buying bootleg DVDs and knockoff purses for a week (not really). I certainly wouldn't have wandered into the Met or MoMA and spent the amount of time that I did looking at all of the paintings I remembered from art history class. I got really lucky in that sense! In a few weeks when we head to Thailand, we're going to take a cooking class. That's much more my interest than hers, but I'm sure she's going to have a great time learning to cook Thai foods as well. Sometimes your partner's interests are different, but usually they're complimentary.

Traveling with another person isn't always sexy, romantic, bro-mantic, or any other adjective you might use when you think of long walks on the beach or a day trying to figure out how a damn sea kayak works (I'm anticipating a little bit there with the kayak), but it's definitely a different experience than traveling alone, and your hand reaches for your phone a lot less than it would if you were looking at something awesome and had no one to tell about it. Basically, I think traveling with a partner (any partner) is going to deepen and round out your travel experience by putting a completely new frame of reference into the experience. Plus there's someone to call your family if you get eaten by rabid mongeese in the night.

What do you call it when nostalgia and excitement mix?

I don't know why, but certain physical stimuli bring on rushes of excitement and nostalgia at the same time that make me at once remember something from the past fondly while simultaneously getting excited about something on the horizon. Right now, with school getting ready to wrap up (we only have two weeks until final exams, and a couple of lame duck weeks after that), summer camp lesson plans starting to come due, and changes in the weather happening that create brief moments of recall of the same physical feeling from a previous time, my brain is bombarding me with nostalgia and excitement at the exact same time.

Today I was listening to one of my students blast through a speaking test (good job, kiddo) and a cool breeze blew down the hallway. The minute that breeze hit me and moved on my brain instantly recalled every feeling, sight, sound, and even smell that I remember as we came off of the first leg of our Air Asia flight to Bali. We had just landed in Kuala Lumpur, we were tired, I had proposed marriage just a few hours earlier (thank goodness she said yes, or else I'd be remembering a really awkward experience right now) and we were hungry, anxious, and surrounded by people who wanted to provide us with transportation to downtown Kuala Lumpur. We didn't need to leave the airport, but we were hungry, wanted to call our families, and in a pretty foreign place. Everyone spoke English, and it was really hard to concentrate on conversations because we understood too much of what was happening around us.

That was a really exciting morning. We tried to get cash overseas with our Korea Exchange Bank cards and had trouble (it turns out we have savings accounts, not checking accounts), had to exchange some won into Malay ringgit, and had a small breakfast at the Starbuck's just outside the airport. It was lovely. We purchased a deck of cards and a magazine and sat through our layover in the crisp cool terminal until finally boarding our flight to Bali.  This isn't the part of a vacation or traveling experience that you normally think about, right? Who cares about layovers in airports? It was a really pleasant layover, but I don't think about it all that often. For whatever reason that cool breeze on a warm day brought it right back. It also made me really hungry for a char siu bao, because we had one in the airport and it was delish.

Watching TV a few nights ago we stumbled upon what seemed to be a Korean version of Real Housewives and the housewives were traveling in Hawaii. Something about the color of the water on the screen or the sound of the ukuleles or something visual reminded me of a very specific feeling I would get when I lived in Hawaii. I worked at Jack's Diving Locker and on our boat trips someone would always have to jump in to tie  the boat to the mooring buoy. As a new guy, it was almost always me. Something I saw on TV reminded me of how it would feel as the cool blue water would rush past on my way down to the buoy, and the little rush of adrenaline I'd get no matter what when I would think of the tiger sharks that could be anywhere around me. For some reason they didn't concern me when I had my scuba gear, but when I would jump in to tie the boat up I'd always be a bobble head looking around.

I find it interesting that certain stimuli bring on such a response. In Korea we can only put out food waste a few nights a week. We keep it in our freezer until then, to avoid flies. Our freezer has...well...a smell. When I open it, I think of durian, and the fruit stand we stopped at on our way up Gunung Batur in Bali. We bought a couple of mangoes and gave them to our divemaster the next day. Those big, ugly, pungent durian though, they left an impression, and now the smell of rotting garbage gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, interesting, right? I wish I could say that celery in tuna salad makes me think of lunch sitting on the beach at Menjangan Island, but it's sadly not the case.

Passing thunderstorms remind me of summer in Florida, when you could literally see a entire thunderstorm make it's way by rumbling along like a combustion engine as it worked its way towards the ocean, or sometimes of the cool breeze that would blow by right before a big thunderstorm in Texas in the springtime. I can't say for certain on this yet, but I'm pretty sure that iced lattes are always going to remind me of the mornings that Carolyn and I have spent planning our travels at the coffee shop. We're switching to wedding planning now, so it might have a really good warm-fuzzy feeling to attach to it.

Anyhow, we've all got these kinds of rapid-recall inducing stimuli, I'm sure. I just don't know what to call it. What do you suggest? Perhaps you could leave the real word for whatever this is in the comment box, or whatever you like to call it as a suggestion. In the meantime, I'm going to have fun trying to think about what stimulus will bring forth the to-be-made memories of my upcoming trip to Thailand.

5 Reasons to get out of Seoul when you visit Korea

Seoul is an amazing city, that's for sure. Since moving to Korea I've been to Seoul more than a few times, and every time I go I'm amazed by how cosmopolitan and massive the city is. Seoul-proper is surrounded by Gyeonggi province, but it's not very provincial. Seoul's metropolitan area covers most of Gyeonggi province and includes smaller cities like Cheonan and Suwon. With it's great collection of cultural and historical assets, it's no wonder many visitors to Korea never even leave the capital. If I visited this country on a quick stopover, or even a seven day vacation, I might be hard pressed to get out of the biggest city on the peninsula, but there's a lot of reasons to get to Seoul Station, hop a train, and get out of Seoul.

Busan has a great mix of nature and architecture

Busan has plenty of places to bask in the neon

If it's seafood you're after, Jagalchi Market is the place to be.

1. Busan is probably my favorite city in Korea. It's the second largest city on the peninsula, but feels distinctly different than any other place in the country. As a port city, Busan has a lot of great things to offer. Do you like beaches? Busan has Korea's most humanity covered stretch of sand at Haeundae Beach. Do you like mountains and temples? Busan has a fair selection of those too. Do you like seafood? Yes? Then you would probably enjoy a walk through Busan's Jagalchi Fish Market, where the fishing boats are constantly pulling in and out, and the days catch is so fresh that it's still swimming at the vendors' stalls. Yes. Swimming. Literally. If you're into nightlife, Busan has plenty of that to offer as well, with stretches of neon lined streets that light up the night just as brightly as any comparable street in Seoul.

Korea has a variety of easy, affordable rail options

2. Korea's mass transit system is amazing. If you want to zip around this country on high speed rail, it's easy. If you'd prefer to save a few dollars and move at a slower pace, you can do that too. The Korail system is not only easy to use, but pretty inexpensive as well. Trains come in 3 flavors, KTX, the 300kph high speed train that will get you from Seoul to Busan in around 4 hours; Saemaul a lower speed train that makes slightly fewer stops and is priced at a mid-range (meaning less crowded cars); and the incredibly inexpensive but slower and slightly more crowded Mugungwha. While the KTX is the sexiest beast on the rails here, the other trains are perfectly good ways to get around too, and make for a great way to see the countryside. Express intercity buses cover the routes that the trains don't, and within the cities the subway systems are cheap and easy to use, the bus systems are relatively easy to use (although it helps if you can read Hangeul or are comfortable asking for help), and taxis are cheap. There's no excuse to not get around and see the country from a transit point of view.

Ancient burial mounds are the final resting places of former kings

Gyeongju just looks ancient.

3. Gyeongju is Korea's cultural navel, where you will be most in touch with what Korea was like before Western contact. While it's still a relatively small city, it's easy to reach by any of the train options, and its sites are more than worth the fare to get here. Where else can you see the ancient graves of dynastic monarchs and visit a raunchy sex museum on the same day? The array of cultural sites available in Gyeongju is matched equally by its lovely backdrop of verdant green mountains. In the warm months you can rent bicycles and tour around the city and its fields, and in the springtime Gyeongju turns a beautiful pink color as the cherry blossom trees bloom everywhere.

Jeongdongjin waterfront

Limestone cliffs drop into beautiful blue-green water

Seaweed drying in the sun

4. Jeongdongjin and Gangneung are two small beach towns nearly as far to the northeast as you can go in South Korea. While many people's perception of Korea is of a cold, frozen, industrial wasteland, these two towns might fool you into thinking that you're in Hawaii, well, if it wasn't for the lack of palm trees. A 3 hour bus ride from Seoul into Gangwan-do province will land you in Jeongdongjin and Gangneung. Here the air is clean, and you will see old ladies picking seaweed in the surf and drying it on the beach for their soup. There's not much to do here other than sit in the sun and enjoy the scenery, and what scenery! Imagine if you will tall, green mountains, limestone cliffs that drop dramatically into the sea, white sand beaches, and beautiful blue-green water, and you've got a good description of the area. If you like seafood this is a great place to be as well, with plenty of hue (raw fish, Korean style) and seafood stews to keep your belly full. A trip to this part of Korea not only feels like a trip away from the city, but also like a trip back in time.

Gwanam Temple at Palgongsan

Lanterns lining the walkways at Dongwhasa Temple

Dongwhasa Temple

Dongwhasa's massive Buddha statue

5. Palgongsan Natural Area just outside of Daegu is an easy to reach mountain retreat, complete with colorful Buddhist temples and alpine trails for hiking. It's easy to reach, as you can take any of the trains into Dongdaegu Station, and take a Daegu City Tour bus from the station directly to the mountain. The Gatbawi hiking trail is a challenging hike to the top of Palgongsan that ends with a stone Buddha wearing a traditional Korean hat. On the way you'll find Gwanam temple, where you can stop for lunch, or just take pictures. Smelling the incense as you get closer to the temples and finally hearing the chants and bells of the temples as you break through the forest is an enchanting experience.

Another stop on the tour is Dongwhasa Temple, one of the biggest temples in the area where you will see a massive stone Buddha sculpture, plenty of monks on their daily meditative walks, and gorgeous structures that have been built and rebuilt over the years. If you really like the idea, you can even participate in a temple stay, living as a monk for a couple of days and enjoying the environment.

So, you're traveling and have a layover in Seoul, why not make that layover a few days and visit a country that's often nothing more than a place to stretch your legs in between flights? Korea isn't the dismal, frozen, industrial wasteland you imagine, but a country distinctly different from all of its neighbors, but similarly beautiful.