It's Friday afternoon here in Korea, and though there's a delicious cool breeze blowing, the weather is still warm and a tad muggy. Big puffy cumulus clouds are piling up on the horizon and the last of the year's cicadas are buzzing. I'll venture out shortly for a bike ride, but until then I'm not budging. I have stuff to get done anyways: the new semester at Sejong University begins on Monday. (This might be the first time I've ever mentioned the name of my university on this here blog; I suppose it's high time.) To that end, I've been running around like a maniac trying to get the semester, and my curricula, all planned out. I did my planning on a day-by-day basis last semester, and though it worked pretty well, I wanted to prepare a little more in advance this time around. I think I relied too heavily on the course textbooks and wound up boring my students to death, so these planning sessions have attempted to ameliorate that problem.
I've also been getting my final kicks in before school starts up again. Yesterday my coworker, Mr. J, and our mutual friend Mr. B met up and went to a baseball game in Jamsil. Always a fun time, that. It was the LG Twins versus the Nexen Heroes. The Twins are a consistently good team, but the top spot has for many years eluded them. But danged if the Heroes, ranked fourth in the league at the moment (I think), didn't pull one out of the hat. They beat the Twins by single run in the ninth inning. Or something. How I recalled this fact after all the beer I had is a mystery.
This weekend Miss H and I are bumming around with Dr. BL, an old high school friend of mine and an army doctor recently posted nearby. We're going to give her the full Seoul tour, with the eats to go along with it. Now if we could just decide where to go and what to eat...
Mister J and Miss JB, our favorite couple from Sejong University, have got a camping holiday in mind sometime in September. It'll be over in Gangwon Province, east of Seoul, the wildest, most mountainous, most watery and beautiful province in Korea, particularly in autumn. We haven't set a date yet but we know it'll be somewhere around Gapyeong and in tents (with, of course, a convenience store nearby so we can get beer and makgeolli).
The other exciting thing about camping in Gangwon do is that it's a fine excuse to take the ITX, the Inter-City Express, the fastest train in K-Land apart from the KTX:
The fun doesn't stop once school begins and the weather cools down, though. One of the reasons that Mr. J and Mr. B and I met up in Jamsil at that baseball game was to discuss a serious proposition: home brewing. We ironed out some details, like the materials we'll need, the timeline to commence, the type of beer to be brewed and the location of the actual process. Having done that, all we need to do is head to Itaewon, find the home-brewing shop (which Mr. J has already scouted) and buy the supplies. Come mid-autumn we should be sampling an extract beer of our own making. (I will most certainly post further updates about this.) Wish us luck.
Miss H and I have been doing a little wedding planning. We think we've found a venue; we just need to call and get some solid details (and a price estimate). It's never too early to start budgeting for this thing. We're not planning on anything grandiose, but we still want to make a fair show of it. I'll have more concrete details for you when they come about. The date hasn't been fixed yet, but it'll definitely be sometime in August 2015, a few solid months after Miss H and I return permanently to America.
The biggest news about Miss H and I, though, is that (along with our friend Miss J from Bucheon) we're going to China in mid-September. No joke! For the Chuseok holiday, September 18-20 (and the Saturday following) we'll be in Beijing. We've already gone through the rigamarole of getting our visas. We saw a travel agent in Bucheon recommended by a friend, and stumped up 215,000 won apiece: 190,000 for the visas themselves and 25,000 for the travel agent's processing fee. Four days later we had our passports back with intricate, delicately-printed Chinese visas inside! We're quite excited. I remember way back when I wrote on this blog that I'd never been to China or Japan, and soon that'll be completely untrue. Can't wait to make it so, and knock another country off my to-do list. I have far more that I want to do in China outside of the capital (riding their bullet trains, for example, to places like Xi'an and Chengdu) but for the nonce the city of Beijing, and the adjacent Great Wall, will do. Don't worry, I'll treat you readers right. I'll do just like I did with Japan and put up plenty of photos and accounts. Stay tuned.
Man, suddenly this old place seems a lot more like a travel blog, doesn't it?
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