A Displaced Manifesto

so, as you can see, i actually got home off work today with a few hours of daylight left. not that i did anything outside with those hours, i had to go to homeplus to get supplies for a lesson tomorrow (we're making fruit kabobs...ooooh. aaaaah). and to celebrate getting home early, i'm going to sit in front of the computer and upload some pictures! i'm telling you now, it's nothing great so far, so hang on for a slow and arduous journey.

So I went "hiking" on Sunday. Why just "hiking" and not HIKING, you ask. Because I was shown the beginning of this hiking trail on Saturday by a co-teacher, and I thought it went all the way up the Sikjang mountain (2000 ft.), alas, it was a 15 minute walk up and down a hill that led to the mountain. . . kind of.

The beginning of the "hiking trail".

The view of Mt. Bomun (the other mountain, behind my apartment)

A big rock. Yes, that is the interstate behind the big rock. The actual mountain is on the other side of the interstate. . . I was on the kindergarten part.

Towards the end of the "hike", yep, those 15 minutes were almost up. (these are different mountains, not sure of what they're called)

Overlooking a beautiful scene. . . baseball practice

the trail behind me. woah! watch out for the professional hikers hiking on this hiking trail.

en fin.

Post-"hike". Sitting in a little park at the end. Some Korean man was driving (his motorcycle) on the sidewalk and stopped to holler at me (literally, he was shouting. the sidewalk was kind of far away) in Korean. God only knows what he was saying. I am sure it was either offensive, grotesque, and probably both. It seems he was somehow trying to compliment me. . .

Some Easter Sunday produce. Stopped at the market by our school. Produce here is bizarrely expensive, especially since they grow most of it in greenhouses and don't import it. And it is literally sold on every street corner. It was $6 for these tomatoes and a korean pear. Maybe because these little tomatoes only come in "family-of-eight" size.

Korean Pear = giant piece of fruit. It is supposedly a mix between an apple and a pear. I guess an apple because it doesn't have much of a taste. But it does have the exact same consistency as a bartlett pear. watery, almost spongey. They're everywhere though, and they're all wrapped in this foam flower thing.

Some rice I had for dinner one night, with bell pepper added. Who can eat just rice for a meal?

The reason they won. . . go duke!

This is my favorite soap now! It is made from mud from the Boryeong Mud Festival. It is so soft and smells delicious. Granted, the way things smell around here sometimes, a fake flower might start to smell divine.

Our mailboxes - they are about four inches deep. You literally can't fit an envelope inside it, so they all hang out like this. Not too much mail security, huh? I hope nobody has a magazine subscription.

This is the recycling area downstairs. We recycle plastic, paper, and glass. The little buckets are for food waste. Yes, there are buckets of unused food sitting by the doorway to our building. All businesses and restaurants are required by law to recycle and can get fined if they have food mixed with trash, or any recyclables mixed with the general trash. The bags are color coded and you have to get them from HomePlus. Needless to say, with all the restaurants around, these buckets are everywhere on the sidewalks in the morning.