February showers bring March cherry blossoms

It's a rainy, rainy morn in Ulsan today. I love a nice, warm, spring rain. It may just be my imagination but I think I see a hint of green in the grass and on the trees already....and in about a month there should be a spectacular display of cherry blossoms. Yipee, I can't wait!

Last Sunday I had my first visitor, the lovely Miss Laura Fritz! My good friend from UNI, Jon Fritz's, older sis. She is traveling Asia for 4 months so stopped by for a night to check out eastern Korea. She wanted to see Gyeongju, Korea's old capital city, which is just 40 minutes from Ulsan, so me and 3 friends (2 being sk8ters boys) met her at the train station and off to Gyeongju we went. It was a beautiful day to walk through the city parks. One park was entirely tombs of kings and nobles from dynasties long ago (see pic below). The tombs are more like small mountains. The bigger the mound the more important the person. There was one tomb we got to go inside of...super cool!

We kept walking to another park that had a goregous lake. There used to be an impressive palace there where emperors entertained many guests....until the Japanese came in and destoryed it. Unforunately, that seems to be the common theme in most Korean historical sites. "This used to look like this (display model) until the Japanese invaded and burned everything down. Now all that's left is this, that was reconstructed in the 80's or earlier." It's too bad really....

We also had a delightful dinner of bibimbop (vegetables, rice,egg, and pepper paste mixed together in a bowl) and the most side dishes (aka little mysteries) I've seen since I've been in Korea. Tasty! We took the train back to Ulsan and I got to show Laura a little bit of my 'hood, my pad before dozing off to sleep for the night. Monday morning she left to go back to Gyeongju for an arranged temple stay and more exploring there. Safe travels Laura!

Summary: It's nice to have visitors. :)

There have been strange things going on at school lately that I can't really put my finger on to explain...just strange. Random people milling about, the sudden "release" of Mr. Kim, my favorite ELC staff person, rearranging.....perhaps I will blog about this in a future post.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention....I'm sure you all will get a kick out of this. I also managed to lose my keys last Friday night while out for a friend's birthday. No big deal, Kat took my helpless, homeless self in for the night. The next morning as I searched for my keys all the places were closed so I called my director to help me out, thinking he could find someone to unlock my apartment door. He calls my landlord , some lady comes (who doesn't even attempt to speak English to me), has a handful of keys and NONE of them work on my door. Why wouldn't the landlord have a master key for my apartment?! Before I knew it, and maybe with my approval but definitely without my understanding, the lady had called a locksmith who starts hacking away at my door to put in new locks. Blasted! So I had to pay for all new locks when hours later I knew I could have had my keys back. Oh language barriers. Go ahead, laugh all you want....

Anyway, Happy (almost) Valentine's Day!

xoxoxo from Korea