Some stuff happened

Let's see. I went to Korea for a little over a week. The unit there will be inspected next year, so we took a team to look at their stuff and give them an idea of what they needed to fix in that time frame. I have decided that the best way to visit Korea is for one week. Get to come in, eat at all the good restaurants, visit some folks, buy some stuff, go out to some bars/clubs, and go home. Beautiful.

Then yesterday, I attended Warrior Challenge 2010. Didn't really compete, but I ran the 5K at the beginning. Didn't feel too bad. Unfortunately, the whole day took place outside, and I wore no sunscreen. So, today I am - shall we say - a little warm.

My Superintendent (and good friend) deployed with a 10-day notice. Though it sounds harsh, it was the better of two alternatives. He could have taken a later deployment, but his new wife (they've been together for a long time) has just been diagnosed with pregnancy. This shorter-notice deployment will have him back for the baby (and the holidays, too). On Tuesday, our boss is leaving. She's headed to my old stomping grounds to direct operations with an AFSOC unit (pretty sweet for her).

Saundra got orders...to the unit in Norfolk she was stationed at when we first got here. That delays the departure we've been trying to implement for another three years. Gol durnit.

Our washer died with extreme prejudice a couple days ago, and our new one will be delivered tomorrow. It's been an interesting few weeks. With luck, we can swing a boring few weeks in here soon.

"Lieutenant Dan, what are you doing here?"

Last night, I waited in a line at the theatre. After waiting for a time, we were let in, and despite being somewhere around 50th in line, I got an excellent seat. Some time later, the lights dimmed and someone's commander came to the stage to introduce the Lt. Dan Band. Gary Sinise plays bass in a 12-person ensemble that does shows for the USO. They play an eclectic selection of Soul, Country, Rock, Jazz, whatever. It was a great show.

So my seat was, in fact, front row. I was close enough to see the sweat on their brows. To cap it off, I was able to coin Kimo Williams (a Vietnam Vet who plays guitar) and I got a set list from the stage.

Yeah. It's pretty cool.

Sherpa, Part 2

When we left our hero, he had failed on Tuesday...

The very next Monday, we set out again. Amanda was too tired to join us, but JoAnnie grabbed her spot on the roster. Again, I asked lots of people, but we hit the by now obligatory 3-person set: Dana, JoAnnie, and me. We hit the subway and ride it up to Seoul and to the Namsan Traditional Village. We wander around looking at all the traditional stuff, try out traditional outfits, cut-out-head style. We see some lucky posts and a princess's palanquin (really small...imagine "the box" in a rural prison on sticks so two people can carry you around in it). We marvel at the swing - not because it swings, but because it was used so that girls could see outside the village every now and then. JoAnnie manages to make the Traditional Korean top (or dredel) spin with its little launcher thing.

We make our way over to the National Palace. Not surprisingly, it is several times bigger than the village. But it is laid out in a similar fashion. Sprawled out over the countryside - building in courtyard which abuts another courtyard that holds another building. Each building holds one to three rooms, usually. That construction style intrigues me. Why so spread out? I mean, yeah, it's grand and impressive, but you can't go from room to room without going outside. If it's cold and rainy, do you just stay in your bedroom? I loved this pagoda (or whatever they call it here) out in the middle of the pond. It looks so peaceful, I just want to go out there and meditate for a while. Unfortunately, we are not allowed out there. I also enjoyed the juxtaposition of this shot of the ancient gate (from inside) placed next to the modern city outside. Ancient, colorful wood and new, grey cement and steel.

After our visit to the palace, we are getting hungry, so we head out the gate, turn left, and wander. This takes us into a neighborhood I can only describe as Korean Soho. All the storefronts are arty, trendy, kitschy, and expensive. We eventually decide on a place (mostly on the basis of "I'm not walking anymore.") We get a very traditional-style dinner, and JoAnnie enjoys much more of it than Dana does. After dinner, we go two doors down to a coffee/dessert shop, they get some of the most scrumptious desserts I've ever seen, and I get a 5500 Won can of Coke (yeah, that's like $4.50 - like I said: Soho). After we finish there, we find our way back to the subway and back to Songtan. We get out of the station about 25-30 minutes before curfew and there are NO cabs. Uh-oh. Dana lives right around the corner, so she meanders in that direction. JoAnnie and I strap the backpacks on properly and proceed to run about 1/2 the way, where we find a cab to take us to the gate.

All in all, a fine day.

Where's my Sherpa?

This is the story of two Seoul trips. One of them on a Tuesday, filled with disbelief and mocking laughter; the other on a Monday with redemption and still a little mocking laughter. Both of them full of fun.

A few weeks ago, in the middle of a conversation, one of my friends remarked that she had not yet been to Namsan Tower (or Seoul Tower to the tourists). I decreed that this would not stand, and thus was born Seoul Expedition. In the ensuing days until break, I invited half my flight and some people from elsewhere to join us. Tuesday rolled around; I arrived at the prescribed time at the prescribed place. There were two entire people there to meet me. Ok...we roll on to the train station. Our plan is to check out the Namsan Traditional Village and then cruise on over to Namsan Tower to catch it at or after sunset (they light it up and it looks gorgeous). We arrive at the appropriate stop and spin around a couple times to find the traditional village...closed. Closed on Tuesdays. What? [take picture of sign]



















Ok...it's not late enough to run to the tower...[consult subway map for info]...hey, a National Palace is a few stops up and a few stops over. Cool. Let's roll. We arrive, walk out of the subway right at the gate...which is closed. Every Tuesday. Dude. You've got to be kidding! [take another picture of sign] Well, this National Palace Museum right next to us appears to be open. We can run a trip through there. Rock.We enjoy the museum and laugh uproariously at me for picking "Fail Tuesday" for our excursion. The sun begins to sink; we've seen what there is to see at the museum. We stroll out of the museum, down into the subway, and a few stops up and over. We climb to the surface and find a cab to Namsan Tower. There, we ride the cable car to the top of the hill. After climbing even more stairs, we arrive at the base of the tower, where there is a Teddy Bear Museum, a few little shops, a restaurant, an outlook, and thousands of padlocks on the chain link fence.

There is a tradition of sorts there at Namsan Tower. You bring a padlock with your names/initials/whatever inscribed thereon, then you lock it to the fence and throw away the key. The lock represents your relationship, and by throwing the key away, you've rendered it immutable. The Korean are a very romantic people. I dig that. I prepared my locks the night before, so I lock my Sweetie-n-Me lock with its flanking/connected young'un locks on the fence. [take a few pics] We head to the observation deck. From up at the top, you can see the entire city. It's beautiful. Printed on the windows around the tower are some major world cities and their distance from that point. It's somewhat sobering to note that Pyongyang, N Korea is closer than Busan, S Korea.




We enjoyed our time, beat feet for Osan, and laughed about the fun time we had in spite of our misplanning. Thank goodness I didn't get 15-20 people...there might have been a riot. Thank you, Dana and Amanda. I salute your Buddha nature, which is everything good and permanent.

I believe Seoul Expedition, Mark 2 will wait for another post.

Serendipity

According to Webster's Online Dictionary, serendipity is finding something unexpected and useful while searching for something else entirely.

Let me tell you a story of my serendipitous meal a couple weeks ago.

My buddy, Chance, and I (yes, that's his real name) went to Seoul. We caught one of the National Palaces and the National Folk Museum. Very nice places. Very cool. Spending most of the day walking around Seoul, we got a little hungry and started looking around for a place to eat. I love hanging out in Korea with Chance. Apart from being a good kid, firmly planted in his twenties with that natural exuberance, he is a pretty good Korean linguist. He has learned to slur and "aaaa" the way the locals actually speak rather than in the more crisp, enunciated way he was taught. So, when we grab a place to eat, it's usually a local joint, rather than some "Americanized" establishment. This time was no different.

We grabbed a small table and received a menu for English speakers. This menu had their foods listed down the page in Korean, and some of them had translations in a right-hand column. I really like to try out new foods, so I scrolled quickly down the menu and found "rice dish in pot." This was like a perfect entry for me: vague enough that I would be surprised by it, but specific enough that I was pretty sure I'd like it.

A few minutes later, the waiter brings my food, and Chance says "Bi bim bap? I didn't order that. Did you?" Of course, I have no idea what I ordered, but I've been meaning to try bi bim bap for pretty much the entire time I've been here. (My Sweetie's a huge fan.) Regardless, I'm willing to eat it. Chance, of course, wants to make sure we're getting the right stuff, so the guy brings the menu back around, and sure enough "rice dish in pot" is bi bim bap. That's the actual translation.

Serendipity: Accidentally ordering a dish you've been meaning to order for the past 10 months...

And it's yummy.

Bad boys! Whatcha gonna do?

Last night, I volunteered for Town Patrol.

Basically, what happens every weekend (and random other days) is the Security Forces from base just wander around the Songtan area, ducking into bars all night. Their presence helps to keep things from going awry and, in the event that things do, they are around to handle the situation. Several of the NCOs in my unit went with them last night. It was actually a highly interesting evening.

First order of business for me and the guys I was with was to jump in the car and check out the Glass House. Glass House is an area of several streets where prostitutes hang out in these rooms that are essentially window boxes and if you want one, you just park, head in, and she'll take you back into another room behind that one. Prostitution being illegal, the Town Patrol does a quick drive by looking for Americans. I think the funniest thing about that part of the night was watching the girls lean out to wave us in and realizing it was a police car.

After our brush with the land of the sex trade, it was back to the local Songtan area and the bars that earn their living off the military. We wandered up and down the main drag, through alleys I had never noticed before, and in and out of bars for the rest of the night ('til roughly 2:30 A.M.). It was a lot of fun. It was mostly quiet. Stopped a few various folks doing stuff they weren't supposed to: taking a glass from a bar, taking an open bottle of something down the street, flipping an empty table belonging to one of the street-food vendors. Then came the final countdown. 3 o'clock is when curfew begins. You must either be on base, or in a residence/hotel room. Around 2:45, the exodus (inodus?) is getting into full swing. We just stood around the main drag watching everyone sweep by, making sure that everyone made it - even the guy who stood there puking for a minute.

As we stood there, just about curfew time, the NCO who had organized our involvement was chatting up (yet another) bar girl, as she made her way home after a long night of serving drunk Americans. One of the other guys in our group (who had been with a different patrol as we had) teased him for being recognized. He explained that he shot pool with her all the time. My reply: "He apparently shoots pool in every bar we've been in tonight."

One final story for you kiddies. Perhaps 10-15 minutes after curfew, we are slowly making our way back to the gate, keeping an eye out for stragglers. A call comes from the alley to our right. "SP! SP!" We all turn to see several Koreans exiting a bar, looking back toward their entryway and urgently flagging us down. We jog the 30 meters to where they're standing and find that there is an American passed out in his own vomit in their little alcove. The Security Forces get him to his feet and into consciousness. They ask for his ID, he replies mostly in Korean, obviously pretending that he does not speak English. Unfortunately for him, he's 1) obviously not Korean, 2) slipping in and out of both languages, 3) only carrying dogtags for identification. After some cajoling and badgering and several different tacks from both the security guys and the Senior NCOs in our party, he finally fesses up to his name and the fact that he's an Army PFC (Private, First Class). He still cannot produce an military ID (which is punishable by the Uniform Code of Military Justice), so the group leads him unsteadily to the gate. As we outsiders say our goodbyes and thanks, we can see them preparing to search him in the laundromat behind the gatehouse.

If there's one thing I learned (and I learned a lot), it's that cooperating with the security guys will help you much more than trying to pull the wool over their eyes.

Picture Tag!

I got tagged by some little Devyl:

She had some rules:

1. Go to your picture files
2. Go to your 6th folder.
3. Go to your 6th picture.
4. Tell us about it.
5. Tag 6 friends to do the same.

Ok...well, I only have 4 folders at the moment (and one of those is nested), so I went into the 2nd one (as in 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2). Grabbing the 6th picture, I find:

Not a particularly heart-warming or awe-inspiring. Rather boring, if you ask me. But, when you randomize, you take what you get. This is taken from Seoul Tower. Not the top - if you take the elevator up, you get to an enclosed observation deck, and the prettiest, artiest bathrooms you've ever seen. You can see a little of Seoul stretching out beyond me. What you see just behind my back is a small enclosure (there are three on the platform I'm on) in which to build a fire. The smoke from that fire billows out the top and serves as a warning signal. Or, well, it did a long time ago. Now, I think they have radars and computers and stuff that serve roughly the same functions.

It says to tag 6 people...but my friends list is not so long as all that...so I'm going with 4:

Wabbit,
Kebo,
Drac, &
Soo.

Have fun!

How to see Seoul on 50K Won a day.

Sunday, there was a picture-style scavenger hunt in Seoul. It was a fantastically fun time. The rules of the game said each team of five had to have 4 teammates in each picture and we were restricted to public transportation. Needless to say, I have some cool pics from all around Seoul.
Here we are at the temple near the Coex Mall. I'm pointing at the Buddha statue that we were looking for.











We walked quite a bit, though not always in such a silly manner.


We walked over to Olympic Stadium from that temple.


Then we caught a cab ride (yes 5 of us in a cab...a little less than comfortable) to the National Palace, where we helped guard.


Next, it was a trip to Seoul Tower. That was one of the cooler parts of the trip. First, the fences covered with locks (our objective), and the view was spectacular. I really dug the wiry flying man and the "layers" display (my pic doesn't do it justice).



Lastly, we went to the Fish Market. As you can see from "Row 1," it was huge! There were many things to be had, but I took pictures only of the live squid and live shark. (Yum!)



Finally, we headed to the Hard Rock in Itaewon to meet up with the other teams. On points, we lost. (Apparently one team just handed a cabbie 100K Won and said take us to these spots.) However, I feel that we won on experience. If we have another like this, I'll throw it on purpose. No other team has a shot like this, though it was just across the river from the Olympic Stadium.


After that day, I have many places on my list to visit with time to kill. Wow. I love being in a foreign country.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

I made a couple changes to the sidebar. (Over there --->)

I removed the links to "My other touches on the web" that I never go to anymore, and I added a couple links where you can buy me stuff if you like. All I could think of off the top of my head first thing in the morning here was Amazon and ThinkGeek, but if there are other places you think I could come up with a decent list, let me know. I'll be glad to troll around and find neat stuff.

What's goin' on with me lately? Not too much, really. I've switched from a 4 on, 3 off, 8 hours a day schedule to a 3 on, 3 off, 12 hours a day schedule. Sounds like a total downer, but I like it. It's the same schedule I started my career on. 12s take a minute to get used to, but once you do, it's really not much different than 8s.

My XBox360 is dead. This is a tragedy of epic proportions. However, I only got it this past Christmas, so it's under warranty, and I'm e-mailing back and forth w/ tech support so I can see about getting it fixed or replaced.

Along with Twitter, I've started on Blip.fm. Pretty neat. I listed a few of my favorite musical artists and they gave me a few "favorite DJs." The concept is, each user (or DJ) finds songs on the server (or uploads them) and "blips" them. All people who have that DJ as a favorite hears it (assuming they're listening). You can also select any song to be part of your playlist. It's a pretty cool way to catch songs you haven't heard before but are likely to be something you enjoy.

What started as an odd phenomenon for me here has now turned into some sort of weird quest. I have still not had Korean food in Songtan (the area just outside the gate). I have had some on-base, and several areas outside Songtan, but none there yet. I have, however had Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Indian, German (?!), Sort-of-New-Englandish, and Ice-Cream. I've still got Italian and Vietnamese to go, and likely a few others. But then, I'm just odd.

Intro to Korea

I thought I should probably post a little of Korea. I still haven't seen much of it, but out the gate is an almost overwhelming display in pursuit of the (not so) almighty Won. There are 300 bars in a 3-block radius from the gate. This is not an exaggeration. The storefronts (including restaurants and bars) stack right on top of each other. Many signs include the legend "2F" or "3F" indicating the floor you should stop at for their wares.

I included these two pictures simply because they appeal to the hippie idealist in me. The mural of the two flags painted on a wall out in town touches me. What touches me even more is that there is almost no graffiti painted on it, though there is some nearby. And the Peace Shop? How can you top it? "How much to get some for the planet?" They actually sell art in there. Most of it looks good, if not particularly inspiring. I have a few pics from Lotte World (an indoor/outdoor amusement park attached to a mall with an icerink), but those will wait for another day.

Much love!