Jeju Island: People Go There For Honeymoons

The yellow splotch in the picture is on Jeju Island. It's an island made out of a volcano. People go there for honeymoons.

Waegwan is the red splotch in the picture. That's where we live, 40 minutes from Daegu, the fourth largest city in South Korea. We walked to Waegwan's train station - actually, we ran to the train station, and the train was arriving as we were buying our tickets, and THAT WAS REALLY CLOSE. But we made it! And rode to Seoul for like 4 hours. Then caught a plane. And then we were on Jeju! We got to be on the 16th floor of our hotel! Which was 2 floors below the breakfast buffet! Perfect spot.

Near the hotel, there was a Dunkin Donuts and a Baskin Robbins (neither uncommon here.) We also found a Krispy Kreme!

After dinner and ice cream and then donuts, we went back to the hotel and watched a boring show where they weren't speaking English while playing a mysterious board game. We couldn't figure out how the game was played. I found it on the internet, though, and we bought our own Go game set at E-Mart the next morning.

I got terrible sleep that night. I spent like 10 minutes trying to turn on the air conditioner when it was time to get ready for bed, because it was stifling in our room and the windows only opened like two inches. But guest access to their air conditioners was turned off because it's winter. So I got way too hot and woke up 97834543 times. Also, Joe and I were sharing one of the two small beds, but that wasn't working, so we slept in different beds that night. In the morning I had a miniature temper tantrum and tried to convince Joe that we needed to find a different hotel. He didn't agree. So I adapted. The next night, we pushed the beds together to make a big one and moved them over to the only source of cool air in the room. AND THEN IT WAS LOUD FROM TRAFFIC. But I had earplugs!

There was a funny sign in the room warning people about putting fish or noodles into the electric teapot.

Also here's a picture of the McDonald's where we had lunch every day. We've only had McDonald's a few times in Korea.

I don't have any pictures of how cold and rainy and windy it was when we caught a taxi to take us halfway around the island to see a LAVA TUBE. The LAVA TUBE was a cave where lava had once flowed. There was old, dry lava everywhere we looked! It was incredible.

Then, there was the leaky bus stop where we waited for 45 minutes for a bus that never came. It was getting darker and windier and even colder. Finally...a taxi appeared! Just when we were trying to find a way to find one! I ran through the rain waving my arms at the taxi. It worked! Soon we were warm and comfy and on our way toward dinner. I'd checked my phone-internet for notable restaurants in the area of our hotel, and found one. "Bagdad Cafe GO!" I said to the taxi driver, in Korean, and IT WORKED! Kind of. He had to call for directions. But we got there! And we were so hungry that we pretty much ordered one of everything! It was Indian food. It was delicious. I'm sad that I was too busy eating and trying to be warm to take any pictures. (It was really cold in there.)

After dinner, we went back to the hotel. We played part of a game of Go. I lost, and moped until we went to bed. The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel and saw that it was finally starting to be sunny outside.

We planned to hike up the volcano in the middle of the island and got a taxi to take us to the mountain trails after lunch. But! The trails were closed! It was about 1:00 in the afternoon, and they didn't want anyone else to go up the mountain, because it can take a very long time to get to the top and climb back down and they didn't want anyone stuck up there in the dark. So that was kinda sad. I'm sure it would have been amazing. And also an exhausting 8+ hours. Instead we got to see the first waterfall we've ever seen together!

 

Nearby was a bunch of rocks we went exploring on. I wanted to see what was around the curve of the cliff.

 I pretended I was the Little Mermaid.

I did it wrong.

We bought some snacks at the nearby gift shops: Tiny fresh seasonal Jeju mandarin oranges, and some orange-flavored chocolates. Also I sampled a mass-produced Jeju chocolate with a cactus-flavored filling. It was okay. After that, we took another taxi to the Jeju Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum.

I was particularly impressed with the museum's cardboard James Bond car.

The guy on the left is made of wax.

After the museum was dinner in the attached "Kraze Burger" (I think it's a Korean chain.) It smelled like frying in there. Then we took a bus to the area of the hotel, and got Krispy Kreme! While we were there, I needed to use the restroom. The restaurant had a spiral staircase. The restroom was up the staircase...and outside of a door opening onto the restaurant's roof. Cold again, but I was too amazed that I was in a bathroom in a shed on a roof to be upset. We went back to the hotel and watched the Abraham Lincoln Killing Vampires movie. It was a very nice last evening on the island.

The next morning, decent hotel breakfast again, packed our bags, left them with the front desk in the lobby. Then we took a bus...

...to see a rock in the water, and ate some weird kiwi fruit sold there, and saw a couple of people fishing on a precarious perch, and marveled some more over how the rocks we stood upon had obviously once been lava.

Joe's foot fell in a puddle and his shoe and sock got soaked. It was time to leave, anyway. We ate at McDonald's one more time and picked up our stuff from the hotel and went to the airport. I took one last picture of the volcano-mountain.

It was cold, it rained for the first couple of days and I apparently picked the wrong hotel, but in spite of all that, I think this was the most romantic vacation we've had. We got to see old lava and a waterfall and a cardboard car and the ocean and rocks! For once, I didn't have every second of every day planned, so we got to just relax and eat donuts a lot. It was so great.

2013: No More Maybe

2012:

We started a Roth IRA and maxed out two years' worth of contributions. Paid off the car we signed for three years ago. We saw a rainforest in Singapore, saw the Great Wall of China, spent 72 hours with diarrhea and vomiting in Beijing. We visited an island made out of a volcano on a rainy November weekend, ate Dunkin Donuts, hung out in our hotel room playing an ancient Asian board game and watching Korean TV. We had two birthday parties. I started learning about my DSLR camera and have 5,863 photographs of this year - more than I've taken in the past five years combined. Researched becoming a professional photographer. (Noticed that they often work on weekends. Decided I'm not cut out for professional photography.)

I learned about preparing a balanced diet, approximate calorie counts of what we eat, approximate calorie counts of what we need. It was the most valuable thing I learned last year. I completed an intense 6-days-a-week-for-90-days fitness program. I don't think I've ever been more proud of myself. I also decided I wanted to learn how to run. Did a couch-to-5k program. Ran my first 5k. Joe ran, too, and was at the finish line waiting for me.

I wasted time. A lot of time. That little Korean workbook I got for Christmas last year and could have finished in three months still has two lessons left. [After the first two paragraphs of what was great about this year, this one was supposed to be about the bad parts of the year, but other than my laziness, I can't think of a single thing. Unless you count when I accidentally washing-machined the cellphone two weeks ago and it doesn't work anymore?] Although...of course...there is still something missing.

In August 2010, I was thinking, "It will be this month or next month." It wasn't. "Maybe the one after that." Nope.

When 2011 was the new year, I was thinking, "Just think! Nine or ten months from now, maybe..." But no.

Five minutes into January 1st, 2012, I was thinking, "Maybe this year." ...then again, maybe not.

It's different now. This year's "maybe" is tired and pathetic. I mean, something has to happen soon, but there's not much hope left for the natural, beautiful, wake-up-one-morning-and-find-out-I'm-pregnant I always expected. My expectations have changed: sterile rooms, paper gowns, pain, stress, potential victory still a kind of defeat.

My life is full, and so good. I never stop being thankful. But there are also times I can't stop being bitter. Knowing that this is part of a bigger plan, that everything happens (or doesn't happen) for a reason helps. Doesn't fix all this, but it helps.

Oh well. Joe and I are together. At least we still get to sleep in on the weekends, and easily travel, and play video games constantly. We have peace and happiness and love together. We have a lot to look forward to together, even just little everyday things. 2013 might hold very little "maybe"...but we'll see how it goes.

Not Winning Christmas

In keeping with the Christmas pile tradition:

Joe's pile

My pile

Our pile

This year, my mom made everyone stuff. Special awesome stuff. Like the table runner here, and the two pillowcases with Charlie Brown Christmas fabric. Heirloom stuff.

The pink giraffe, sewn by my sister, is a replica of an ornament made for us by one of my grandmas. I think my little sister and I fought over ownership of it at one point, and she won. This year, she made Joe and me these little guys. LOOK WHO WON NOW!

Speaking of winning, my parents compete each year to see who can give the other the best Christmas presents, who will "win Christmas." I guess Joe and I kinda do that too. It's okay for my parents, because their birthdays are in the middle of the year and within a month of each other, but Joe and me...his birthday was three months ago. He got cool stuff. There was nothing cool left to get for him for Christmas, especially since he never wants anything.

That is why my most exciting gifts were a Razer gaming mouse and mousepad and a Razer keybaord, while his most exciting gift was a case of a discontinued flavor of Canada Dry ginger ale.

I don't think there are many gifts we could give each other that would change our lives much. I came to the conclusion that whatever I got Joe, it would be about making his life better while he played video games.

It reminds me of the olden days, Christmas in my family, when we all played together and Christmas gifts were video cards, RAM, and EverQuest expansions.

Now We Can Have Christmas.

I cleaned the house yesterday. Now we can have Christmas.

My living room and kitchen were 'kay. They get tidied up almost every day (except on the weekends when I'm too busy sitting in front of my PC for 12 hours, eating out of Tupperware and cans.) However, every other room in our house looks like the inside of a closet. I throw stuff in and shut the doors and say "Look how nice and perfect it is in the living room, Joe!" and just try not to think about it.

But the more unperfect it gets, the more it bothers me. I start to feel...sort of stretched...like butter scraped over too much bread. (LOL that was from Lord of the Rings. I made myself laugh.)

In April. note the Christmas tree.

Constantly in the back of my mind as I went about my daily business was the massive cascading pile of a year's worth of cardboard boxes on one of our enclosed porches that I've been avoiding. You can't have Christmas with the haunting presence of a pile of empty boxes hiding, waiting. So, finally, Joe and I flattened them all and took them downstairs.

Someone didn't want to have Christmas with those couches.

I put like three of those giant trashbags there. And the cardboard pile, it doesn't look so big now that it's flat. That white spiral is the base of the fan I put out to keep the cardboard from flying away, at least until someone takes the fan not knowing that it got fried months ago when I plugged it straight into a 220 outlet.

That's the porch last year, when we first moved in. Before the boxes and the frying.

It's amazing how you can re-home anything instantly here. Just put it downstairs, and someone will take it within a few hours. Bag full of rancid recyclable milk bottles? Gone. Dead microwave with sign on it saying "broken" in English and Korean? Gone. $20 bill? Gone. That pile of cardboard (and the fan, of course) was already gone this morning, and the trash guys don't even work today.

So. I got the unperfect room organized. Thank goodness for that giant cabinet I found outside. (See? put anything downstairs, and someone will come along and get their very kind friends to help them stuff it into the elevator and drag it into their apartment.)

Also, I cleaned out our four "stuff drawers," and the fridge, and the freezer, and a few weeks ago I cleaned up the other porch. All that's left now is NOTHING. Christmas morning, whenever that is - I think this year it will probably be on the afternoon of the 26th, but some years it's at night on the 27th or 28th after we drive back home from visiting our families - will be peaceful and beautiful and lovely and I won't have to feel like butter at all.

In other news, on the 15th, I had a party. There were red ribbons hanging from the windows of my apartment so people could find it more easily. So many people came over with delicious food and spent time together. It was nice to be with almost all the ladies I like here in Korea (though there were a few missing - sad.)

Advent calendars. I love them. These were the only ones they had at the PX. I bought them, we ate some of the days, then we forgot about them. Joe had maybe nine advent chocolates to eat yesterday, the lucky duck.

We made a business trip to Seoul. On the way, we stopped at Osan Air Base's Chili's restaurant. This is the only place we've been in Korea where we get American food with American service. I mean, just LOOK at this, guys!

Yes, those are both mine! One of them has been dranken (hehe, "dranken") out of until it's almost gone. AND THEN OUR WAITRESS BROUGHT ME ANOTHER ONE EVEN THOUGH MY FIRST ONE WASN'T EMPTY YET.

If you're like, "Yeah................cool........?", then you OBVIOUSLY haven't eaten at a restaurant in Korea. Think of the second-worst service you've ever gotten at a restaurant, and you're pretty much thinking of what it's like here all the time. Maybe it's because servers don't get tipped in Korea. You get a drink after you arrive, like normal, and you'd better make it last until your food comes so you can ask the server for another one, and then you'd better make that one last through your meal because you can pretty much expect to never get another drop unless you go wandering around with your cup until you find out where the Coke comes from.

Then, there's this.

Some nights, moving the furniture in the living room and dragging our mattress out of the bedroom, watching Christmas movies (It's A Wonderful Life and Die Hard,) the Christmas tree the last light to go off before we sleep. Retreating so deep into home that time stops. Love. Love.

It's Christmas Eve now. We'll play video games and go to the grocery store and check the mail. Dinner will be crockpot BBQ ribs with cornbread and sweet tea, and Christmas morning will be in a couple of days. It'll be perfect.

Annual Shoe Candy

I spent a couple hours of my super-busy Army Wife day yesterday with a thread and needle and a bag of cranberries to make a garland for our Christmas tree. I also made "orangeaments," dried slices of orange with twine threaded through holes at the top, to be hung on the tree. (Last year, I had dried slices of apple as ornaments too, but this year that didn't work out very well so it'll just be the oranges.)

The funny thing about having all these natural ornaments for our Christmas tree is that our tree is made out of plastic and lead.

Anyway. When I was growing up, every year St. Nick - not to be confused with Santa - well, he kind of is, just on a different day - would visit after we went to sleep on the night of December 5th. He'd leave candy in our shoes for us to discover in the morning. I'm pretty sure the reason he visited us and skipped most of the other people in the U.S. (and Korea) is that my mom's family is German, and St. Nick is also German, so he likes us. He still visits me, and now Joe, too.

I got the best of three seasons: Christmas candy, Cadbury creme eggs, and a caramel and marshmallow and chocolate pumpkin. St. Nick knows exactly what my favorites are. I love how the cranberry garland was used to decorate, too.

Joe got a lot less than me, probably because St. Nick thought he'd be happier that way. Just one box of Moose Munch and one Hillshire Farms lunchmeat tupperware full of handmade sugar-free peanut butter cups that tasted like they probably should have been thrown away but St. Nick probably ran out of chocolate after making a second failed batch of them and decided to just go with it. Still, half of the peanut butter things are gone.

Maybe I'll have some candy left by Monday. Probably not. That box of Milk Duds is already empty.