An Idiots Guide To Driving In Korea.

For those of you who do not know, I have started driving on a regular basis here in Korea.  Thanks to Brenden leaving I found myself in position to learn how, and become competent on a motorcycle.  I know have a way to get around town when I need to, and every now and then leave the town for one of the smaller localities around.  Yet, with these new experiences I feel compelled to create a guide on how to drive in Korea for those of you who may one day consider trying it.

Rule Number One:  There are no rules.  Now this is not to say that there aren't rules to the road here in Korea, it just means that they are primarily considered suggestions. 

Rule Number Two:  Red still means stop, unless you can make through the intersection up to and including one minute past the red light. 

Rule Number Three:  Green still means go, unless the intersection is blocked, in which case it means play car Twister. 


Rule Number Four:  Sidewalks are for the following uses only: Pedestrians, Bicycles, Motorcycles, Scooters, Walking, and Parking your vehicle.


Rule Number Five:  You can stop your vehicle to offload or upload any person or item on any road provided you put on your emergency blinkers and are in the right lane.  You can have an added bonus if you block an intersection while doing this.


Rule Number Five:  Don't screw with the delivery boys.  These guys are whipping around traffic without protective gear at high speeds on their scooters.  Watch out, just because your vehicle outweighs them and has the green light, doesn't mean you have the right of way.


Rule Number Six:  If you drive a Motorcycle or Scooter you are allowed to use Crosswalks to get around a red light.


Rule Number Seven:  Parking on the street is fine.  On any street, in any direction parking is fine.  You can even park on both sides of a narrow street effectively making it a one lane alley.  It's still two way traffic.


Rule Number Eight:  There is no problem with double parking, or blocking somebody in.  Just leave your hazards on and the keys in the ignition.


Rule Number Nine:  It is acceptable to move someone's vehicle if they have left the keys in the ignition so that you can park your vehicle .  You don't even need to ask them.

Rule Number Ten:  Seat belts are optional unless the cops find you.  Seat belts are always optional in the back seat, regardless of the police seeing you.

Rule Number Eleven:  It is okay to put two people in the front passenger seat provided the seat belt fits around them.

Rule Number Twelve:  There is absolutely zero tolerance for Driving Under the Influence.  However I have yet to run across any DUI check points.

Rule Number Thirteen:  Just leave your car running.  When you run in to use the bathroom, or do some quick shopping, just leave your car running.  It may be hot or cold outside so you need to keep running your heater or air conditioning.  Bonus points for taking a nap and running the air conditioner with your windows down.

Rule Number Fourteen:  There are no stop signs or yields.  When you arrive at an intersection that does not have a light, whoever goes first goes first.  There is some consideration for flow of traffic, but if not you just go anyways.

Rule Number Fifteen:  You can cross any road at any time so long as you hold up one hand and start walking.

Rule Number Sixteen:  Remember what the speed limit is at all times.  That way when you come across the speed cameras you can figure out what 11% above the speed limit is and slow to that speed.

Rule Number Seventeen:  There is no speed limit unless you are coming up on a speed camera.

Rule Number Eighteen:  Police don't do anything.  Run a red light, speed, or cut someone off.  The police don't do a thing.  In fact they tend to do most these things. 

Rule Number Nineteen:  Always remember that it is ok to turn right at a stop light, even when people are turning left into those lanes.  You don't even have to stop.

Rule Number Twenty:  No Harm, No Foul.  As long as there was no harm, there was no foul.

Rule Number Twenty One:  If you hit a pedestrian just pay them 1,000,000 Won and all problems are solved.

Rule Number Twenty Two:  There are no rules about protective wear for motorcycles or scooters.  Don't wear a helmet, that's fine.  Want to wear a helmet but can't afford one? Just wear a construction hard hat.  Can't find a hard hat?  Just wear a bucket.

Rule Number Twenty Three:  When in a traffic jam, watch for the vendors selling snacks and drinks standing in the lanes.  Some of these vendors are selling alcohol and it makes a long stop in traffic fun.

Rule Number Twenty Four:  There are no rules against open containers in a car.  Drink all you want in the vehicle, unless you're the driver. 

Rule Number Twenty Five:  Drinking on public transportation is fine.  Karaoke on public transportation is even better.

Rule Number Twenty Six:  There are no rules, just drive.

I hope that these rules have been effective in helping calm and allieviate any fears you may be having about driving in this wonderful country. 

Feliz Chuseok?

Happy Chuseok, Merry Chuseok, Feliz Chuseok? It doesn't matter how you say it, or why you say it. All that matters is that you understand what the holiday is. What's that you say (no, not the Sprung Monkey song) you don't know what Chuseok is? Well, in that case let me educate you. Or, at least in my own way attempt to explain just what this Chuseok thingy is.

Chuseok (pronounced Chew Sock) is the second most important holiday on the Korean calendar. A simple explanation is that Chuseok is a Korean Thanksgiving without all the genocidal implications. Yet, that simplifies the matter far to much. Chuseok is a harvest festival that falls on the 15th day of the 8th month of the Lunar calendar. How that translates to the Julian calendar is it happens somewhere around the Autumnal Equinox. I know I'm not giving you guys any help in determining when this is, so here is the best I can do. It happens sometime in September or early October.

Koreans celebrate this holiday many different ways. The first is that almost every Korean heads back home for the holiday. The first thing this leads to is massive traffic jams across the country. If you are lucky enough to live on the main rail artery through the country, then you can fight with the rest of the people who refuse to drive and attempt public transit. Needless to say travel is a nightmare given that most people have two or three days off of work. Once they have arrived home Koreans tend to meet their friends for dinner and drinks. The day before they spend most of their time preparing food and making sure that everything they require is on hand. Think day before Thanksgiving or Christmas at the supermarket or mall and you'll have a good idea what shopping is like.

The day of, the family wakes early and prepares a ceremonial table of food in front of the family "shrine". I have shrine in quotation marks because it's not really a shrine, but a room divider with Chinese and Korean symbols on it. That honestly isn't a good explanation either so I will just include a picture of it and hope you guys get what I mean. That morning the whole family will gather to pay respect to their ancestors through several means. The first thing they do is they prepare a Jesasang. This is a ceremonial table full of food that acts as a type of offering to the ancestors. However, this is not an offering in the sense of Dia De Los Muertos where the food is left. The offering is for the ancestors to come and have a meal with the family. The family channels their ancestors by burning incense and a piece of paper with the names of their ancestors upon it. After doing this they preform several Buddhist style bows (head to the floor bow).

With the ceremony complete the family then sits down to a feast of a meal. Traditionally the meal includes Bulgogi (marinated meat), Mulgogi (fish), Kalbi Jim (marinated ribs), Songpyeon (rice cake), Chapchae (Korean style Chow Mein but they don't fry the noodles), and fruit.

Now I must state that this feast tends to take place in the morning. I had some friends who were doing this at 6 AM. Other were doing this at 10 AM. The family that I celebrated with did so at 7:30 AM. After enjoying the meal, the family then heads to the family graves to pay their respects, leave flowers, and trim the plants around the graves. Now it's important to note that only the men are required to do this. Some of the women are expected to stay behind and clean up. Which is really unfair considering they had to cook in the first place.

After visiting the graves the family then will go to their grandmothers house. What they do here varies by family. My friends family went there and farmed for eight hours. After this, they official duties of the day are done and the people are free to do what they want that night. This normally leads to the entire town heading out to the bars to drink with friends they have not seen in some time. Well, at least here in Seosan that is what this leads to.

I was lucky enough to spend this Holiday with my good friend Seung Hee (Alia). Her mother invited me to come eat with their family. I have to say I was quite surprised when they told me the meal would be held at 7:30 AM. When Alia told me this the first time I said "You mean PM?" She then corrected me and it was then that I found out they tend to do this really early in the morning. The other unique facet about this holiday and other traditional holidays like it is that the actual ceremony takes little to no time at all. The ceremony was done in ten minutes and the feast was done in 45 minutes. The explanation I was given for this is two fold. First Korea has been a very poor country until only recently. Many families could not afford extravagant feasts that went on for hours. In fact most families couldn't. The second reason the ceremony is so short was because since 1953 the country has lived under the threat of invasion. My friends say that you never know when the bombs may drop so they do these things quickly.

I am very grateful to Alia's family for allowing me and Joe (another foreigner) to partake in their families celebration. This is not the first time that I have been invited to her house for a family feast. I guess this means that she gets to come over for Thanksgiving. Wait, who am I joking. I will probably be cooking Thanksgiving dinner at her parents apartment.

My life is a construction zone.

This summer during break my school decided that it needed a face lift. Honestly, it did. My school has been educating students in this little Korean town since 1965. The building we currently occupy had been standing since 1965 and had undergone very few renovations. The school had kept up with the times on some things, but overall the general impression was that the school had been haphazardly upgraded. Enter a 5 week summer break and the chance to do a thorough renovation on not just my building but the whole school.

There were several jobs that absolutely had to be completed. The first was every classroom needed a fresh coat of paint. When it had been painted last I'm not sure, but the fact is with children and their propensity for drawing on things this school needed some new looking walls. Enter men and women with paintbrushes and several different colors of paint. The result is a surprisingly more vibrant and honestly welcoming school. I actually don't feel like I'm walking the hallways of a mental institution any more. While I may still be patrolling said hallways, at least I don't feel like I'm surrounded by a world of drab white and screaming children. I'm only surrounded by screaming children.

Next, every window, and door needed to be replaced in the school. Why, I'm not entirely sure, but the school decided that it was time to upgrade the doors and windows. The last ones were working just fine but hey, I'm not the boss. Another thing that happened was they re-floored every classroom. This quite simply has been a godsend. The school had a mix of dirty linoleum, old creaky hardwood floors, and somewhat newer wood "tiled" floor. Enter the wonderful world of knock of Pergo style flooring. I am very happy that the new floors no longer squeak, creak, or make noise when I'm walking the aisles of my classrooms. Several of the auxiliary rooms have been given a complete face-lift and overall the repairs and renovations have been quite nice to experience.

However, these are all the things they have done to the interior of my school. What they did to the exterior is quite simply a tragedy. They took a classic old brick building and well, honestly I don't quite know how to explain what they did. The best way to explain what they did is that they resided the building, however there was no siding on the building before. They took my classic brick style school, and well made it metal. Yet, not only did they side it with sheet metal, they did it with multi-colored sheet metal. The colors they chose were yellow and light blue. It's not a true light blue, but it is a true yellow. We're talking like yellow Ferrari yellow. I get it, my school is old, but I didn't know that schools could have a mid-life crisis. If this wasn't enough, they decided to also have portions right in the middle of wood. They stained the wood to look like red pine. I honestly want to ask the designer what he was thinking.

This is what they have done to my building. The building across from my office has been turned from a standard school building, into something that could possibly have been dreamed by Dr. Seuss. Utilizing the same sheet metal colors, they decided to add Green accents to this building. Not only that, but they decided that the building needed to look a little more new age. Gone is the nice simple rectangular shape. Granted its not very imaginative, but this is an elementary school, not architecture school.

I was not asked about how the school should look, and honestly, while I think it looks bad, I'll deal with it. What I am not happy about however is the way that the work was done on my school. They are still not finished with my building. We are three weeks into the new semester and they are still working on my building. My office has no windows, just a plastic sheet. Luckily they are almost finished, but the time management by the company was poorly planned. They had five weeks where there were no major classes besides my English summer school. We were in a separate building and only had class for three weeks. What aggravates me the most is that they knew they were not going to have the building opposite my building done before school started. They brought in the Korean version of portable classrooms. They made classrooms out of cargo containers.

This is standard practice in Korea. They brought in enough container classrooms so that they didn't have to have the building done in time. What is problematic, is that they knew this, yet still chose to keep 1/3 of the work force working on the building that didn't have to hold classes until the start of the next school year in March. What this means is that until just recently, we have had to deal with men on scaffolding, drilling, cutting, and making all types of racket while we teach. This makes teaching English quite difficult because I already have to fight for my students attention. Needless to say I've had to remind them several times that class is not outside the window, but in front of them. They could have easily finished everything by the first week of school if they had just assigned that 1/3 of the workforce to my building. Yet, instead they chose to have nap time for 1 hour every day, and work on both buildings at the same time. If a company ran a contract like this back home there would have been major repercussions.

The worst part of all of this has been dealing with the noise pollution that construction creates. I have not had a class in three weeks where I have not had to pause and wait for someone to finish cutting, drilling, or yelling at another person. It makes the whole thing a challenge at times. Yes, its something that I have to deal with and there is nothing that I can do about it. Well I can complain to all of you and show you some pictures of what they have done to my school.

One Year In, One Year to Go.

Well, for those of you reading this now that on Saturday the 12th I will celebrate me 1 year anniversary for being in Korea. What most of you may not know is that I have decided to spend another year abroad here in Korea. There are many reasons for this. Some of them are very good reasons to stay, and others are not as good. However, the decision being mine, and mine alone I decided to stay.

Good Reasons:

1. The economy. Plain and simple, things still are really bad for the United States economy. This is effecting everything from Universities to food prices, to health care. Wait that's a debate we're not going to get into on this post. Simply put the economy is still a mess and I have a decent job here.

2. The Job Market. This one is tied to the economy, but honestly it is another animal altogether. The current job market is horrible for people with a BA. In fact the job market is horrible right now for people who have their MA. School districts are still firing teachers to make the budget work. When there are cut backs like the ones California is going through, who is going to actually hire teachers. Most the teachers I know who have graduated recently have not been able to find jobs.

3. My friends. I have met some wonderful people here in Korea. We have had some wonderful times together and I honestly think that this past year has been one of the best in my life. It has been filled with hardship and happiness. I am not ready to end this chapter of my life, and I think that I still have work to do here.

4. Money. My school is giving me a raise and giving me a really nice bonus to stay on. I'm not going to argue.


Not so good reasons:

1. The motorcycle. I only bought the thing back in June. It would have been tough to purchase it for only two months and then have to sell it.

2. Ease of the Job. I mean I could actually look for a job that is exceptionally challenging, or I can continue my job here. Make no mistake this is not statement that I am lazy, but more a statement of the fact that I am able to teach here, while I probably would not be able to teach back home right away. The job is also pretty easy.

3. Food. The food here is actually really delicious. I'm even digging Kimchi now. I honestly will miss the food when I do head home to the United States. As weird as it sounds I know that I will find myself craving Kimchi Chigae or Kalbi Tang (Kimchi Soup, Beef Rib Soup). I maybe even find myself craving Bo Shin Tang (Dog Soup).

4. Students. The students are really well behaved. I have one or two students whose behavior remind me of students from back home. One or two out of 700. Any teacher would kill for that ratio.

5. Principal. My principal absolutely loves me. In fact he's trying to get me to commit to even longer then my next contract. Don't worry I told him that I'm more then likely heading home at the end of my next contract. I might extend it a little bit so that I head home to coincide with the start of a new job or school term.

6. Volleyball. Where else can a 6 foot tall white guy who can't jump actually play on a competitive Volleyball team. Not only play, but also be one of the key players. I mean seriously, I can't jump, anyone who has seen me try knows this.

7. Medical Insurance. I didn't have it back home.

8. Being away. It's nice to be away from home. It really does make me treasure things when I am back in the United States. I know that I am really looking forward to seeing my family when I go back in October.

Korean Music.

I know many of you have heard me complain from time to time about Korean music. Those of you who I visited in February had the exquisite pleasure to experience Korean music via YouTube. From time to time I have even posted Korean music videos. Well this blog is going to be solely about Korean music, and yes most of it is going to be bad.

In the United States you have your choice of music. You can listen to rap, rock, punk, country, bluegrass, oldies, etc. You can turn on the radio find a station that plays music that you like. Now granted my experience with Korean radio is limited, and in now way am I really qualified to talk about diversity on the Korean radio. However, I can tell you that there simply is no diversity. It's all Korean music. Unless you are lucky enough to live close to a major US military installation there are no English radio broadcasts. There are a few channels that will occasionally broadcast English lessons. Other then an occasional English pop song you have what seem like two choices for Korean Radio. You have adult contemporary/oldies, and you have pop.

Now, I'm sure if I was Korean I would love the radio, but the simple fact is I'm a Waygook. What this means is that Korean radio, and Korean music tend to be torturous to me. However, there is almost no difference between Korean adult contemporary, and pop. The main difference that I've found is that instead of 40 year old people singing the songs, I'm berated by every single one of my students singing the songs. I guess I finally understood how my parents felt the first time my sister brought home a New Kids on the Block tape. Everywhere I turn it's one song after another that honestly all sound the same. Maybe I'm just finally turning into the old crotchety guy my parents always warned me about. Either way I figure this blog should be a great excuse to allow you to experience some of the finer points of Korean music.

Like a fine Arbor Mist Merlot these songs do not get better with time. Which apparently the Koreans do not quite get. You will hear the same songs berating your ear drums day in and day out. I think I moved to Clear Channel heaven. If only they could get this type of play time and air space they would complete their awful and horrible plans of destroying the minds of America on bad song on repeat at time. Yet, in the name of all fairness, and because I think some of you actually want to share in the pain I live with here are some of the greatest "hits" of Korean music.

2NE1 with Big Bang: This song just happened to coincide with a new cell phone release called the Lollipop. Needless to say this music video was also the commercial. Hey at least they multi-tasked.




Girls Generation: Besides the rampant Mannequin vibe (yeah the movie from the 80's where Kim Cattrall was a mannequin that came to life and fell in love with the window designer) there are actually 9 members to this girl group. No those weren't all back up dancers in this video, there are actually 9 of them.




Super Junior: Great name huh. This song is the current bane of my existence because every time a student says "sorry" to me the can't help but break into the chorus of this wonderful song. After the hundredth time it gets really annoying. The other thing is this is the largest Boy Band in the world. There are 13 members. I mean come on, 9 members was pushing it, but 13.



TVXQ: This song is huge currently. It is impossible not to hear it anytime you go to a bar, club, or just get into a car with a Korean.



After School: Are the girl groups all starting to look and sound the same yet? Good that's partially the point.



Kara: I figure I should go out with Drew's favorite musical group in Korea. I don't know why he likes this band so much, but he has actually been known to not only sing the songs, but be happy when he goes to their concerts. This band is huge right now in Korea. They also butcher the English language when they choose to use it. Recently their hits have included the lyrics " If you wanna pretty, every wanna pretty" and "Rock U Body Say." Need I say more. In fact for further torture I will include two videos from them, one with English subtitles.

MudFest

For two weeks every July the city of Boryeong becomes foreigner central for all of Korea. Yet, what is it that brings all of these foreigners to this small beach community in the middle of nowhere Korea. It isn't for the vibrant nightlife or the stunning beauty of the beaches. There are places throughout Korea with far better nightlife and far better beaches. Yet, something draws almost 2 million people to this city for during two weeks. Honestly, its the chance to get filthy, and I mean covered head to toe in complete filth.

The Boryeong Mud Festival, or MudFest for short is a large party where the standing orders are to be completely covered in mud. In fact it is nearly impossible to come to this festival without taking at least one trip to the ocean to wash the mud off your body. The mud located in the Boryeong and Daecheon areas of Korea is renowned for its mineral properties. Many health spa's in Korea feature mud from this area in their spa treatments. It was an ingenious idea to hold a festival that would draw millions of people to this small Korean town.

MudFest is a reason for foreigners to gather together in Boryeong and just generally have a good time. There are several different types of things that you can do there. You can spend all day lounging on Daecheon beach, you can cover yourself in mud repeatedly, visit the mud prison, mud slip and slide, mud wrestling, mud rave, mud, mud, mud, mud, mud. There are also spa treatments and a carnival style atmosphere nearby. It is quite easy to head down here and spend several hours getting filthy dirty and just generally reveling in one of the few times that there are more foreigners around then Koreans. It actually seemed like English was the language of the day.

Our day started with David and I meeting Drew at the Boryeong bus terminal at 11 in the morning. Luckily for us Drew lives in Boryeong and we had a free place to crash. We headed off to Drew's apartment to drop off our stuff and then made our way down to the beach to get really muddy. When we first got there we cased to surroundings and figured out that the best thing to do to start the day off was to take a swim in the mud pool. Well it's more like a wading pool but it's still filled with mud. After taking a quick dip in mud we wandered around and let the mud dry on our bodies. After this we ran down to the sea to clean up. We followed this up by liberally re-applying mud to our bodies and styling our hair with mud. After a rinse and repeat we partook in the mud prison.

After the prison we decided to walk down to the carnival area to partake in some carnival games. We started with a dart balloon game which is probably the easiest carny game I've ever taken part in. Just don't miss a balloon with a sharp dart. After we had finished we won a hello kitty stuffed animal that I promptly gave away to a Korean woman who had been watching us throw darts. I didn't get her number but it was worth a shot I figured. To this David took offense because he had planned on giving that to someone and didn't tell me about it till after I had already given it away. I told him not to worry because we'd just come back to something like this and win another one (which we did later). After some batting cages we walked back up to the beach to clean off and head back into town for Dinner. Along the way we decided to stop and ride the Pirate Ship. Well, the Viking here in Korea is far more terrifying then the ones back in the states. The locking mechanisms on the ships here actually move at the upper limit of the ride. Needless this is quite terrifying and resulted in me holding the bar down every time we went up because our butts were coming off the seats. Not kosher if you ask me.

After a quick stop at the Sauna that way we didn't have to wait for all of us to take showers we headed off to dinner at Pizza Hut. We were famished, and honestly needed some major sustenance because we were heading out later that night for Ji Sun's birthday. Ji Sun is Drew's friend from Boryeong. The plan for her birthday was to meet down near the festival and figure out what we wanted to do. Most the people who were there had already spent several hours if not days at the festival so the plan we made was to head back into town to Norae Bang for several hours. It was a great night of Norae Banging that led to numerous horrible renditions of great songs.

Ann's Visit: Suwon and Busan

Busan, is Korea's Second City. Located at the South Eastern tip of the peninsula it is a fishing village of 3 million people. Yet, before we made it to Busan, Ann and I stopped in a town called Suwon. Suwon is the provincial capital of Gyeonggi-Do. Why, per se, would someone want to stop and visit Suwon? Well, it is in this city that there are three cultural sights to go see. The first and most important sight is what is called the Korean Folk Village. One of the hills in the city the Koreans have established a village that is run the way the Koreans ran it in olden times. It's very much like Colonial Williamsburg only absolutely nothing like it. This is a place that Korean's and foreigners go to see what it was like to live in Korea during older times. You can witness and partake in many Korean cultural things here. Needless to say it's an important sight to go see for anyone who is trying to obtain an idea about old Korean culture.

When we arrived in Suwon on Sunday we headed out of the train station to tourist information. It is here that you purchase tickets to the Folk Village. When we arrived it was raining rather steadily so Ann and I asked if the Village was still open in the rain. To this the nice ladies at the counter responded yes. Excellent we thought, we'll just run over there in the rain and have the whole place to ourselves. Well, so we thought. As we were riding in the Taxi to the Village the Heavens opened up. Roads were flooding and hillsides were eroding all across town. When we arrived at the village there were two rivers of muddy water running out of the entrance and exit. In this downpour Ann and I figured, to hell with it, let's go get wet and explore the village. As we walked towards the entrance we saw several men standing at the entrance in Storm gear telling us that the park was closed due to the rain. With this information we hopped on the free shuttle bus back to Tourist Information.

With our refund in hand we headed out to explore some of the other sights the city had to offer. Notably, we went and visited Hanggeung Palace, Hwaseong Fortress Wall, and the Paldamun Gate. These were nice to see and run around, primarily because once again we were almost the only tourists out and about. Everywhere we went we more or less had the place to ourselves. Hanggeung Palace, is not a palace in the sense of Versailles or the Hermitage. It was primarily used as a residence for lesser members of the Royal Family and as a rest stop for the King and Queen when they were travelling through the area. The reason that this city was chosen was because of the fortress that surround it. The wall was quite impressive as was the Paldamun Gate. With our time in Suwon at an end Ann and I hopped a train down to Busan.

After checking into our Motel in Busan, Ann and I headed up to Pusan National University for Dinner. The plan was to have a street food meal. Street Food in Korea is a way of life. Any area that boasts a night life will always have numerous stalls selling weird and delicious food late into the night. The area that we chose was PNU. After wandering the streets for an hour and trying a few things from the stalls we happened upon the gold mine. A restaurant the served street food. We purchased lot of Mandu (Korean Pot stickers) and I ordered some Blood Sausage with Liver and Tripe. Yes Mom I actually willingly ate liver and it was delicious. After chowing down on some good food we headed back to our Hotel for the night.

The next day we did the typical tour of Busan that I've now down three times. First we headed off to Bemosa Temple. While we were there we saw a bunch of guys in Navy Whites. As we walked by we heard that they were speaking Spanish. Interesting I thought but no big deal. After Bemosa we headed down to Jagalchi Fish Market, and then up to Busan Tower. Once again at Busan Tower we ran into the same group of Sailors. While taking a picture for a few of them we found out they were Colombian. When we found this information out, we asked them what the Colombian Navy was doing in Korea. The guys we ran into we part of a Colombian Goodwill tour. They apparently were sailing all across the Pacific and were allowing people from other countries to view their ship. It was really interesting and you could tell that these guys were loving their jobs. Before Korea they had been in San Diego, and they were headed to Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, and couple of other places. Not bad duty if I a say so myself.

When we finished up at the tower we headed over to the UN Cemetery to pay our respects. We finished up with the Cemetery and then headed back to our hotel to take a well deserved nap. It was really hot down in Busan. It was about 90 Degrees and about 80% humidity, when it wasn't busy raining on us. That night we had Korean BBQ as way to say goodbye to Korea for Ann. We wandered back our motel and got some sleep. The next day we headed off to the airport, and then I headed back to Seosan to go back to work.