What exactly is this?

On Korea’s south coast, in the bay that is formed by water between Geoje Island and the mainland (just to use one example), you have this:

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Click ‘View larger map’ under the picture for a better view in Google Maps.

Obviously it is fishing of some sort, on an industrial scale, but what kind I wonder? Trawl lines perhaps? That’s what I’m leaning towards, but they could be farms. There are boats on some of them, and boats that are steaming avoid them, so there are floats on the water I imagine. Could it actually be strings of floats that we’re seeing? I’m thinking that’s what it is. I’ve heard that there are a lot of farms to the south.

Anyway, it is interesting. The productivity of the waters around Korea is unbelievable. I can’t even begin to imagine what is plucked from coastal waters here every day. There are 20 million more people in South Korea alone than there are in Canada, and just about every Korean loves seafood and eats it very often, if not daily. All that food comes out of a coastal fishing area much smaller than the continental shelf off Newfoundland.

Update:

A further look tells me that I’m likely right about it being trawls rather than farms. A nearby bay has what are obviously farms:

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I suppose farms for different species could look different, but I suspect not that different. I’m gonna say trawls? What do you think?

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One more note on the satellite maps–they really do vary in quality from place to place. I just checked a few places in England and some parts of it were…well, scary:

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See the man’s shadow? I know they have satellites that can read your plate number now, but this is publicly available stuff.

It’s a rabbit.

Google Maps: The Road Map to…Everywhere

Well, a glance at the ole calendar tells me it’s been more than a month since my last post–so much for keeping it updated I guess.  In my defense though, I’ve had to make some adjustments this past month, what with juggling my private classes with a part-time position and all.  But I have had a couple of posts in mind for a bit, so with luck I will get around to those this week.

This post is mostly for dad, incidentally, since most other readers won’t be very interested in maps.   Anyone who has downloaded and tried Google Earth knows that it is pretty impressive, providing detailed satellite imagery of the whole world, pretty much.  But it has its limitations, too.  It doesn’t provide very useful information for traveling, despite road map functions, and navigating all of  the functions can be a pain.  Well, that’ s where Google maps steps in to fill the void.  It’s simple and easy to use. First, go to www.google.com. It will look something like this, but they change the Google banner often.

At google.com you can see a “maps” link in the top left-hand corner.  Clicking that takes you to Google Maps. The page should look something like this:

I’ve highlighted the full-screen and satellite view buttons. Google maps combines the detail and accuracy of satellite imagery with scaled road and terrain maps. The information detail and type varies with scale too, so the whole thing is seamless. There is a print button as well, so that you can print out just the area you expect to need a map for. A road map of the whole world. It is just as useful here in Korea as it is back home. In fact that is how I found it. I usually use a couple of online Korean maps to navigate here, but they are not well updated and I heard Google maps was good, so I gave it a try.

From the perspective of someone who knows what blogging is about, and how difficult it can be to integrate info online, Google has done a great job of making this platform versatile. I can provide links to specific locations in my text, so you just click once to be brought to the appropriate location on the appropriate kind of map.

But, even better, I can include Google Maps itself in my post so you don’t even have to leave my blog to use it:

View Larger Map

How about that?

It’s a rabbit.

노란개 The Yellow Dog

Got a real treat for you all today.  Literally.  And this one has been a long time coming.

I’ve  lived in Korea for a total of about six years now, not including some time spent back home.  And in those years I’ve done a lot, and learned a lot.  But there were, and are, still things that I haven’t gotten around to, like eating dog meat, for example.  Thankfully, I solved that problem yesterday.

Yes…I ate some dog.  Here is a picture of the kind of dog I ate (called ‘yellow dog’ in Korean)–a breed that is bred specifically for being eaten, and one which is also known as ‘shit dog’ due to its ability to survive through “recycling” when times get hard:

the hardy yellow dog

And in Korea, there were lots of times when times got hard in years gone by. That’s why Korean cuisine includes just about everything that is even remotely edible. The dogs, of course, didn’t escape.

In recent years, selling dog meat has become illegal due to international pressure exerted mostly by the influence of animal rights groups. I guess those groups don’t take on the beef industry as well because those guys have their own lobby groups. But I digress, and in any case most laws here are only sporadically enforced, so most dog meat restaurants simply ignore the whole thing. Anyone who wants a little more history on the issue though can find it here.

Mindy (whom I had to drag out of bed, which is why she is wearing a hat), Gi-hyuk, a guy we call Jengi ajosshi and myself went to this restaurant at my behest, as I had mentioned it last week, and these guys set about finding a good place. They found one, and so, off we went.  And because they got to the restaurant and ordered before I did,  this is the sight that greeted me when I arrived:

cooked in front of you on a propane burner that is built into the table

the happy dog meat eaters

click to enlarge

Contrary to what you might expect, dog meat is very tender. Would you like to know why? Well, I’ll tell you anyway, and really it doesn’t have anything to do with the nature of dog meat itself, but rather the way in which it is prepared for consumption. That is to say, the way it is killed. After hearing the details of how this is accomplished, although some sources claim that what I am about to write is not the case anymore, I began to understand why even Koreans say it is a cruel business.

First the dog is strung up live. Next it is beaten with a large stick (these days I’m told a piece of aluminum pipe is preferred due to its light weight but metallic hardness) to soften the muscles. The beating continues until the dog is dead–which takes quite a while they say–and long after, until all of the tough muscles are softened. Mindy says that she has had the distinct displeasure of  hearing this process take place as a child, and the memory of the sound the dogs  made when beaten still sticks with her to this day. It’s the reason she doesn’t usually eat dog meat, she says. She was prepared to make an exception for me though:

Yeah. That’s a dog’s rib. I cleaned one up and took it home with me for a souvenir. No joke. I did that because it’s unlikely I will be eating dog again, and that is because of the other reason Mindy doesn’t usually eat it: It really isn’t very good.

Firstly, it stinks. In fact dog meat is famous for it’s peculiar stink, which many Koreans love, but which really is the kind of thing that people either will leave or take. I didn’t like it much at all because, along with the smell, it had an unpleasant cloying taste–especially the fat. I couldn’t eat the skin, or rind if you like, at all. And here is why (click to enlarge):

dog skin, with some liver mixed in

It’s just as well I didn’t too. After we left the restaurant, Jengi ajosshi became very ill, went home, and did a lot of vomiting. Mindy also took exception to it and her stomach gave her problems. Gi-hyuk and I were fine though, oddly. I don’t know if this was because the meat was bad, or if it was just that dog shouldn’t be eaten unless absolutely necessary.

When most of the meat was eaten, the restaurant owner took the pan and mixed in some rice with the meat juice to make this:

It was actually pretty tasty, so the whole thing wasn’t a complete loss.

It’s a dog.

민속죽집 Minsok Juk Jip (Folk Porridge House)-Part II

I did a post on this place months ago, and promised some more pics.  Well, this time I went at night, with Mindy, and I only had my phone camera, as usual.  But still, it’s not so bad.  I’ll rob a pic or two online to supplement.

Last time I went it was with my good pal Gi-hyuk:

Sull Gi-hyuk

Gi-hyuk’s last name is ‘Sull.’  How cool is that?  And Koreans put their last name first, so his full name is Sull Gi-hyuk.  He plays a mean acoustic guitar and sings well too.  Most of what he sings is western music though, strangely enough.  He loves Music; especially loud music.

Konglish of the day

That’s great.

Let’s talk a little more about Korean porridge or ‘juk’, which here has none of the homely, breakfasty air that it does back home.  Here it is considered a hearty meal like potatoes and beef.

Mindy likes it:

The juk that I ordered was kind of expensive (about 15 dollars for a bowl) because it was made with jon-bok (abalone), and that stuff is expensive:

Abalone porridge

Maybe some of you don’t know what an abalone looks like.  Well, there are a few different kinds, but this is the one used here:

It tastes better than it looks.

In all though, I would have to say that this place is much more like someone’s house than a restaurant.  They serve only this stuff.  There is no menu, and you can’t buy anything else, like booze if you wanted it for example.

It is one of those sit-on-the-floor places, but the floor is heated, padded and soft.  The thing that looks like a fan is actually a heater as well.

I like juk a lot.  At the same time though, it’s a job to beat a good slice of pizza.

It’s a rabbit.

Epic Malaysia Picture Post (Part 2)

This second installment has some pretty strange stuff. I can only include a small fraction of the pics, and it looks like some of them were lost when I had a computer crash a year or so ago.

A creepy tree.

Weird flower.

Probably one of my favorite pictures.

Wish I had put something in for scale. These leaves were as big as me.

Real spiders under glass. As big as your hand. See the fangs?

This one would probably just get mad if you stepped on it.

Real leaf insects.

I have more pics of giant insects, but this is the last one for this post. These are stick insects. I couldn't believe they were real at first, but they are.

More weird plants.

One of the first sights I saw on Tioman Island: Fruit bats--also known as flying foxes because they have heads and fur like foxes--are each about the size of a full-grown cat.

A close-up of one.

Why is Mindy smiling in this picture?

It was because she was riding in the sidecar of this thing, which was our taxi from the boat.

The beach was nice.

Our room was pretty basic, but clean at least.

Getting ready to go for a swim on the coral reef.

There were big monitor lizards in this lagoon, but it looks like my pictures of them are gone.

Epic Malaysia Picture Post (Part 1)

I’ve sent and shown some of these before, but I have been meaning to post some of them ever since I made this site. It takes me awhile to get around to things.  Our trip to Kuala Lumpur was a special one for us, although in retrospect we didn’t get enough pictures of us together.  You live and you learn.  This trip happened a couple of years ago, by the way.  Some of these are really something.  Malaysia is the home of the big, beautiful, ugly and weird.  I don’t even know where to start:

We saw this giant dragon before even leaving Seoul

On the flight: clouds from the air.

At our Hotel's restaurant in Kuala Lumpur: the band was excellent

Mindy is a tree-hugger

The city was very colorful at night.

Mindy's middle school friend lives in Kuala Lumpur, so of course we went to meet them.

We went to see a huge cave...it had lots of stairs.

The monkeys were a little too brave for my liking

These caves were absolutely huge.

In one place there was a temple in the cave.

We stopped to get a drink and a guy with a machete cut a cocunut like this for us. The juice was sweet.

We visited another cave where they had all these really weird scuptures. They were all a little larger than life-sized.

Again, the small dudes are all life-sized. Just weird.

The famous Petronas towers or whatever. I didn't really see what the big deal was.

It was hard to get used to the size of the trees.

We also went to this butterfly botanical garden thing...the netting was to keep all the butterflies in. There were alot of em.

Some of the plants were pretty strange looking.

Mindy liked this place.

The fish they had there were impressive too. Big goldfish. I think they are called Koi.

Butterfly cocoons

Mom would have loved these plants--I should have got a slip.

Here's one of Tioman Island. More on that place in Part 2

An overcast morning

I just got back from a stroll in the downtown and waterfront area.  It’s a pretty slow morning down that way, compared with how it usually is.  I guess that’s just how Monday morning is.

a lady that owns a small store always cooks outside in this alley

a traditional Korean convenience store

water is stored in big round tanks on the roofs of buildings

a mobile shoe repair shop

On the waterfront: fish is delivered live in tank trucks to restaurants where it is kept in large aquariums until eaten. This truck is relatively small.

the sort of tanks you generally see outside restaurants

the north end of jukdo fish market (it's about 1km long)

a more typical live fish truck: these deliver fish to destinations all over Korea

there are no conventional pickup trucks here, only these ugly things, which are called "bongos "

Looks like the sun is coming out now.

It’s a rabbit.

Happy New Year!!

Say hay boke-mahn-e pah du say oh!!

That’s Happy New Year in Korean.

Well, here we are in 2010.  Time flies.  A nice first day of the year it was too.  Nice and sunny:

That’s the view outside my place.

I kind of miss snow a little sometimes–Korea rarely gets any this far south–but when it does happen here it is a disaster because there are no services in place to cope, and everybody uses summer tires.  I remember we got 10 cm here one night a few years ago, and the next morning when I opened the window you could hear the cars crashing together all over the city.  Some crashes were faint and others were loud and close.

We had a barbecue last night at The Olive (our private club) before going to Mindy’s to ring in the new year.  I think it was Gihyuk’s plan, but in retrospect it wasn’t a good idea to do it inside.  A couple of the guys went by today and said there is grease from the meat everywhere.  The floor is slippery.  We’re going to have to clean the whole place from top to bottom.

Strange grill.  It is a propane tank with a burner on it.  The stainless steel plate was brought separately.  It worked well; actually almost too well.  But better ventilation was definitely needed.

My New Year’s resolution is to eat more healthy dried squid:

And clean out our fridge:

Not much room for anything in there right now.

Mindy just got home and she’s making ou-dong (a kind of noodle soup):

It’s pretty good stuff.

Happy New Year everyone!

It’s a rabbit.

해맞이 그린빌 Haemaji Greenville

This is just a short cultural contrast post on Koreans and their ongoing love affair with apartment buildings.  I am hoping to be able to put together a New Year’s post.  We’ll see how that goes.

In Korea, perhaps even more so than you find in other places,  life is all about keeping up with and surpassing your neighbor and people are much more overtly competitive than you would expect.  A parent who doesn’t put their kid through hell with extra lessons after they get home from public school is low class.  So, there is a lot of snobbery and superficial nonsense when it comes to putting kids in good private schools,  and living in affluent areas of town.

It is in the definition of affluence, however, that things start to get strange.  Here we have a typical modern apartment complex, Haemaji Greenville:

I just snapped this when I went to teach a lesson there.  At this one complex, there are about 20 buildings like the one pictured here, each 25 stories high, containing about 150 apartments each.  The apartments–though new and nice–are not very big, averaging perhaps 25 x 25 feet.  But this is considered high living.  You could own a house of your own that was 3 times that size with an accompanying piece of land, but you would still be likely to be viewed as not-very-well-off.

Koreans don’t want to live in houses.  They want to live in apartments.  Ask any kid and they will give it to you straight.  Apartments are the way to go.  Given a choice, they want to live in apartments when they grow up, not houses.  Strange huh?

It seems that Korea’s shortage of land led to the apartment trend in cities a few decades back, and most of the old neighborhoods containing traditional housing had to give way to complexes such as this.  Everyone wants to live in the city, because living in the country means you are a farmer, and no one wants to be a farmer.  Farmers are poor, and maybe dirty.  Living in the city also means living in apartments because, even if you wanted it,  land for a house is unobtainable.  So apartments were built and designed to cater to the classes, with apartment size and location being everything.

What seems odd to me is that many of the families that live in rather small apartments in complexes such as these are financially capable of buying a good-sized plot of land on the outskirts of town (which would likely increase in value fairly quickly anyway) and putting a nice, comfortable, comparatively big house on it.  But they don’t, usually.  It’s not common.  I wonder why.

It’s not about money.  Often people who live in these places drive ridiculously expensive vehicles, and foreign teachers who go to these  cramped apartment complexes to teach kids typically get paid 50 dollars an hour.  Go figure.

For dad (if you want to know where this place is exactly):

It’s only 2.54 miles from my place, but it seems pretty far away.  Maybe that’s because of all the traffic lights you have to pass through (click to enlarge).

It’s a rabbit.

천북펜션 A trip to a pension in Cheonbuk

Looking at the title of this post, some of you (especially Canadians) are possibly confused.  How do you take a trip to a pension?  Isn’t that something you pay into and get back later in life?

In Korea, the word pension is used in the French and general European sense of the word, meaning a small hotel or boarding house.  These are nicer than motels and, I would argue, 95% of hotels that you find here.  Here’s a picture of the one some friends and I stayed at for a holiday a few months back:

Really it is just a fully equipped, well-maintained western style house.  I took what I thought were a lot of great pictures of the interior as well, but at the time I had a new camera and didn’t know how to use it well, so most of them were blurred.  Yeah, I’m awesome.

The guy in the gray shirt sitting on the swing is Travis, and he owned that red scooter.  We rode our bikes from Pohang to Gyeongju, where this place is located.  The big guy on the far left rode with me on my 125cc Hyosung.  That was fine for me, but the 30 minute ride was hard on him because the seat is pretty hard in the back.

Here she is:

I love this thing.  It takes me everywhere.  In Pohang, parking is difficult or impossible to find during the day, so it is the best way to get around by far.  Dangerous in heavy traffic though, as I have experienced directly.  Last summer a van came out of an alley too fast and t-boned me from the side.  I saw him coming at the last second and got my leg up, otherwise it would have been crushed.  I was thrown about 20 feet out into traffic and bounced off the side of a car.  Luckily all of the traffic was stopped for a red light, so I wasn’t hurt badly, just shaken from the close call.  I did twist my back a little when I straight-armed the hood though.

I was less lucky in September of this year, when I strayed too close to a rail separating the sidewalk from the main street in a tunnel ( I was forced into it by an indifferent passing truck).  At about 60km/h my front brake handle clipped one of the uprights of the rail and, of course, it smashed my fingers.  The top of my middle finger was crushed, and the bone broken, requiring surgery and a couple of days in hospital.  The other fingers had only cosmetic damage, so it could have been much worse.  The amazing thing is that I managed to maintain control of the bike, and didn’t fall off.  The nail on my middle finger still hasn’t grown back fully.

So the bike is dangerous, admittedly.  But I haven’t been able to bring myself to sell it.  And now I’m off topic.  So, back to the pension.

I did get a couple of passable pics of the interior:

We really did have a great time at this place.  Later in the day we had a big barbecue outside.  It started to rain, but that was no problem.  The owner brought out a huge portable canopy that covered the whole thing. The sound of the rain on the canvas made for a good atmosphere.

Good times.  We plan to do something like this again after Christmas.  Hopefully sometime in January.  It probably won’t be the same though since we will have to stay inside to escape the cold.  Fall and Spring here are the best seasons; not to cold and not to hot.

It’s a rabbit.