I Heart Trees

(You may remember this poem as the one my shop teacher made me memorize and recite for too many tardy arrivals to his class. But I never forgot it.)

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast

A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. -Joyce Kilmer

And Hal, my dad.  My dad makes trees.  In fact he's kind of obssessed with them.  I call him Johnny Appleseed, because he's constantly planting trees.  Sometimes he just cuts off a branch of one tree and sticks it in the ground, and voila!  A new tree!  A tree that you better not accidentally scrape with the lawn mower because then you pretty much killed the tree and he'll never forgive you.  I often wonder if he would be as mad if somebody scraped ME with a lawnmower.  Probably not.  He'd probably suggest it was somehow my fault because, stupid, I got in the way. 

Remember this old Hal-ism? "I don't mind killing animals, but I hate killing a tree...unless it's already dead and I cut it up to burn it."

Maybe this is where I get my love for trees.  I love them.  I love taking pictures of them, and seeing their silhouette against the sky.  This year I have seen so many amazing trees.  Here are my favorites:

Bali

Australia

New Zealand, South Island

New Zealand, North Island

Cambodia

Laos

Korea

Panama

Samoa

Singapore

Thailand

But my favorite? My absolute favorite tree in the whole world? This little momma, located in International Falls, MN, on the way up to my job at Island View Lodge. I got to drive by this tree almost every day this summer. I kept meaning to take a photo, but never got around to it. You can't really see it in this shot, but there is a huge crook in the neck of this tree.  I can't get enough of it.  Finally, when I went to dinner with my parents at Island View, I made my dad pull over the car so I could take this shot in the rain. Me and dad and my tree.



Sick?

Something I have noticed in my travels is that people from other cultures have different ideas about what makes you sick.  In Korea, my friends who teach English say that the school administrators and other teachers leave all of the windows open in every classroom throughout winter.  Everyone just wears their winter coats to school.  This is so they won't get sick.  Because everybody knows that you must have fresh air in order to stay healthy.

Here in Panama, a couple friends went to a fiesta and danced the salsa all night long.  Of course their T-shirts got very sweaty.  When they went to leave, the hosts of the fiesta wouldn't let them unless they changed their shirts, because everybody knows if you go outside with a sweaty shirt you will get sick.

Even the famous surfer told us that we couldn't use the air conditioner in the car immediately after surfing because if we did, our face would go numb on one side, like a stroke victim.

And so I had to marvel at what happened to me yesterday.  In Panama, it is customary to greet people (male and female) this way:  reach out your right hand as if to shake hands, but instead, pull the person close and kiss their right cheek.  Last night a woman came up to me, moved her snot-rag from her right hand to the left, grabbed my hand and kissed me and then said, "oh, I'm SO sick."

I think there may be some sort of misunderstanding.

Wrappin' it all up with a nice bow

Yesterday, the last day of a four-month trip, I managed to lose my wallet, camera and laptop.

The wallet I left at the check in counter, and was returned to me by a nice man.
The camera I left in my seat on the plane, and was returned to me by a nice lady.
The laptop I just plain lost.  I called and emailed and checked with Lost and Found about seven times.  Then I found it in the back seat of Laurissa's car.  And then I remembered putting it there.


A brief synopsis of my last few days of travel:
Saturday night I accidentally kicked a bathroom stall door with my pinky toe and lost the nail and a heck of a lot of blood.
Summer left for Bangkok on Sunday afternoon. 
I went back to our hostel and went to bed at 9pm but didn't fall asleep until 1am.  There was a loud snoring man not three feet from my face.  It was so loud and he was so close that I actually reached out my arm and touched his head to get him to stop.  Several times.  Sometimes I didn't touch his head, but instead just banged my ring against the metal bed frame near his head.  That was not as effective as the head-touching.  Another man was talking in his sleep.  Two girls came in at midnight and turned the light on and got ready for bed.  A German guy who had the bunk above me saw that I was awake and had a long conversation with me even though everybody else was trying to sleep.  A group of people talked loudly and played guitar outside the window near my bed.  All this time, I should have been irritated, but I couldn't help but smile, as I knew it was to be my last night in a hostel for a very long time.
The next day, I planned to go to the Contemporary Art Museum.  First I packed and showered and Skyped my mom and Cory for some last minute 'on my way home!' conversations.  My dad told me to stay away from 'that Vandersloot'.  I traveled for an hour by subway only to find out that, like every city in the world, Seoul also closes it's museums on Mondays.  Dejected, I returned to a shopping area I remembered, spent too much time and no money and got back to my hostel with barely enough time to make my flight.  I RAN with my 40 pound backpack on my back to the airport shuttle and made it to the airport just in time.  My plane sat for a long time before departing, which narrowed my connection in Chicago to 45 minutes.  So I asked the flight attendant before we made our descent if I could move to the front of the plane to get ahead of everybody in customs.  That's when I left the camera and it was subsequently returned to me.  I was the 15th person off the plane, but with running I made it through the passport control area first.  Then the bags didn't come out for ten minutes and it became 6:50.  No matter what I wasn't going to make my 7:15 flight.  But lots of people missed their connections and I got ahead of them in line.  ha.  They put me on a 9:45 flight, and I checked my bag, but I begged the check in man to let me on the 8:20 flight and that's where I left my wallet. 
I got on the earlier flight, without my bag, and borrowed two cell phones to ask my mom to log into my facebook account and put an SOS out there to let my ride know that I wouldn't be on the original flight.  Once in Minneapolis, I found Laurissa, we went and had drinks to kill time and then returned to the airport to grab my bag and that's when I lost my laptop, or so I thought.  It wasn't until the next morning that I found it in her backseat so I had a fun night trying to remember what I have on the hard drive besides EVERY PICTURE I TOOK FOR THE LAST FOUR MONTHS.  So glad I found it.

Today I caught up some on my favorite shows, up to and including the Lost season finale, for which I have not yet formulated my opinion.  Well at least I can finally read Sarah's blog post about it, and go back and read everybody's facebook status updates that I had previously avoided like the plague.

Listing Minnesota

I love making lists.  It's what I do.  Or did, more accurately, since there has been nothing to really list for the last four months.  I have tried listing the stuff in my head that I need to do in a day, but it's just not the same as writing the list down and crossing items off of that list.  And so, while waiting in the teacher's lounge at Shawn's school, I triumpantly and maybe a little smugly took out my little notebook -- a gift from Teri, depicting a girl and the quote 'She packed up her potential and all she had learned, grabbed a cute pair of shoes, and headed out to change a few things' -- borrowed a pencil and wrote the following:

Minneapolis: (I'll be there for a week before heading to International Falls)
Watch LOST finale
Travel insurance
Open new bank account / figure out misc erroneous charges on debit card
Target -- t-shirts and swimsuit
Meet renters, visit storage in basement
Visit Advisors
Punch Pizza
Chipotle
Activate cell phone and car insurance
Research a new backpack
Reactivate Netflix, send to mom and dad's
Mail - change address.  But to where?
Go visiting


International Falls:
Get motorcycle license
Refresh Spanish - lessons?
Travel insurance
Sell old backpack, buy new one
Research around-the-world ticket
Zumba!
Run/bike/swim - Murphy - beach
HSBC bank
Sell car?
Cash out 401k?
Road trip plans...North Carolina? or fly?


Oh yes I did put 'watch LOST finale, Chipotle and Punch Pizza' on my Minneapolis list, so if anybody wants to join for any or all of those three activities, let me know.

Today gets done twice

I fly to out of Seoul at 6:45pm, Monday June 7th.  I arrive in Minneapolis at 8:40pm, Monday June 7th.

So if I screw up June 7th, I get a second chance.  Stay tuned for messages from the future. 

Jjin jil Bang

Sauna!  The cheapest place to stay in Korea.  It's also an arcade and a spa and a bar and a cafeteria and a steam room place.  You can purchase a pass and then just sleep there.  And people do.  All over the tile floor, they lay down and go to sleep.  So that's what we did.  But first we played air hockey and basketball and sang karaoke in a really hot booth.  Then we went into this thing that looked like a furnace, and it was SO hot inside, hotter than the hottest sauna, and then we went into a cold room and sort of did a back-and-forth.  I had really planned on staying in the jjin jil bang until it was time to fly home on Monday. 

The karaoke booth was fun.  In Korea, karaoke is called Norae-Bang, and it can be dangerous because prostitutes sometimes offer their services at such places.  When we found the booth at the jjin jil bang, we were excited.  There were even like a million songs in English.  Of course we went for the old standards -- Total Eclipse of the Heart, Crazy by Gnarls Barkley, Islands in the Stream, and Shawn and I belted out 18 and Life by Skid Row.  It was fun, but because it was located in a sauna, the booth was at least 95 degrees inside.  So we didn't pay for another 20 minutes.  The funny thing was that Koreans produced videos to the songs, so on the screen you didn't see Bonnie Tyler singing Total Eclipse, you saw a Korean woman, following a mystery man, through a forest.  She is crying, and his face is never visible.  There is a rose...you get the picture.  Same for all of the songs we chose.  The best part seemed to be the cheesy video that went along with the song.  The point of the song...well it just seemed to have been missed completely.

And then the boys went to the boys sleeping area and the girls went to the girls sleeping area.  Summer and I finally found a sleeping room with lights out.  We stumbled in, and Summer stepped on a girl who was sleeping in the walking area.  We found two mats.  Two half-inch flat uncomfortable mats, with brick pillows and they weren't next to eachother.  Somebody was snoring loudly.  There were at least 30 people sleeping in this room.  I woke up at one point and both women on either sides of me were on my two foot wide mat with me.  So I moved to another unoccupied mat.  Then I woke up and Summer had gone downstairs so I followed and I found her sleeping on a massage chair.  I layed on a sawed-flat tree bench next to it.  In all I got about 7 hours of sleep.  We decided we'd have to get a hostel for the next night. 

Then it was time to shower.  Which is done in a very large room and no clothes are allowed.  We knew this because we tried to wear our clothes into the shower area (obviously) and got rejected.  So we looked at eachother and shrugged our shoulders.  We shouldn't have bragged just yesterday that we had gotten away with 7 weeks together and never had seen eachother naked.  So, we undressed and grabbed the provided towels, no bigger than a dishtowel.  I held it up in front of me, and we walked the city block through the lockers to the showers.  Naked women everywhere.  Naked Asian women.  Naked Asian thin beautiful women.  ARGH.  We got to the shower area and found hot and cold tubs, and shrugged our shoulders again.  We couldn't beat 'em, so we joined 'em.  We sat in the hot water, then the cold water, all the while trying very very hard to look only at eachother's face.  After all that we had to shower, which is done seated on a plastic stool and in front of mirrors.  I have never sat on anything naked in my whole life, except the toilet.  And there I was, sitting on the hot tob bench and a plastic shower stool.

Facing fears!

Mudeung Mountain

So we hiked a mountain!  Folks in Gwangju are coo coo for hiking, especially the older ones.  They are completely geared up in the cutest outfits.  They have walking sticks too and honestly they were pretty fit.  I was like huffing and puffing my way up the mountain and these old folks were just passing us no problem.  It was kind of adorable. 

Here we are, hiking:

p.s. when we left our apartment, we had to walk through adorable groups of college kids (we were staying on campus with our friend Su, who teaches there) and we felt pretty embarrassed...I personally had on cargo-y shorts with tennis shoes and a tank top and back pack.  Summer had her Keens on.  Nuff said.

We didn't make it all the way to the top because of time constraints, but we did get some spectacular views.

It's pretty steep also.  In all, we hiked about 3 hours up the mountain and then about 1.5 hours down.

Korean Drinking

It's a little tough to find cocktails anywhere.  Mainly you'll find beer and Soju, which is a rice drink, not beer and not wine.  It's pretty good, but the whole table usually orders one bottle and drinks it from tiny tiny shot glasses.  The etiquette for Korean drinking is pretty funny.  You can never pour yourself alcohol.  Somebody has to pour yours for you, and you need to keep your eyes on peoples' glasses so that when they are empty you promptly fill them.  Of course this means you have to hope that somebody is watching your glass too.

When somebody is pouring your drink, you hold your tiny shot glass with one hand, and place your other hand either on the underside of the glass, or on your other wrist.  It's polite or something to receive with both hands.

If your glass is empty and nobody notices (and you're Korean), you say (in Korean) to the person next to you: "Are you busy?"  And that's a clue that you need more alcohol.

If you're American, I found that usually if you tap tap tap your glass on the table for a while, somebody will get the hint eventually.

Korean Elementary School

Our friend Shawn teaches English in the school system here, and we got to visit his classes today!  It was pretty fun, although I was disappointed to find out that I wasn't able to teach any kids to speak fluent English in just one day.  In fact, we were really only there to answer questions for about ten minutes at the end of each class period.  It was fun.  The questions depended on the level of English of the student and varied from:

"Do you wear your shoes inside the house?"

and

"Do you like kimchi?"

to:

"How did you find the flight to Korea?"

and

"What do you do to cope with jet lag?"

Of course, "Are you rich?", "Are you married?", "How much money do you make?" were asked.  It was very adorable.  When I told the class that I had 5 brothers and sisters, there was a collective GASP! followed by hands over mouths.  I also told them Americans eat hamburgers and french fries all the time.  ha!  Spreading the stereotype.  You have to say what they know, I think.  And that's why when asked who my favorite American Music Artist was, I replied, "Lady Gaga". 

Cute little signs leading up the stairs at the school:

Lunchtime:

The students go to school on Saturday, and also most have nightschool at an Academy.  They are in school until midnight or even later, and work on homework after that.  It's a pretty brutal schedule, and my English-teaching friends here don't really know how effective it is.  Kids just don't have the attention span for it.  They test well in subjects like Math and Science, and do very well at memorization.  I think it's ridiculous.  Poor kids!

But so cute and polite.  They all take off their little shoes and change into tiny slipper-style shoes for class.

I Can't Believe Koreans Eat SO Much

Koreans for the most part, from what I have seen, are thin. Skinny even. So it came as a huge surprise to me that their favorite activity seems to be eating. Most women do not exercise.  I met a girl who 'didn't like walking'.  Here, you can easily spend an entire day having meal after meal, and snacking between and realize at bedtime you did nothing else.

Shawn brought us for Ssum yup sal for our first meal in Korea and I decided then and there that I love this culture. Meals are served family style, with a main and then several myriad side dishes. These are usually some sort of kimchi, or fermented vegetable. (Fermented one month, but sometimes up to 6 months.) Ssum yup sal is pork, which you fry yourself, with garlic (oh! the garlic!), onion, and mushrooms. You take them and wrap them in lettuce leaf with sesame leaf and any number of sauces and side dishes. You also receive a hefty bowl of soup, and two to three types of salad. Here is a photo of Ssum yup sal, during the fry part. The pork is very fatty, like bacon, but THICK.

Another traditional part of the meal is like a pancake, but has vegetables in it. It's DELISH:

Then, when you are so stuffed from salad and pork wraps and soup and pancake you can't even breathe, your after-dinner snack comes. You choose between a HUGE bowl of burnt rice in hot water, ice cold noodles, or sticky rice. I chose the cold noodles. The red bottle is vinegar, which you add to the noodles, along with hot mustard.  I kept my hand in the photo to illustrate the size of the bowl:

(I got complimented on my excellent and proper use of chopsticks, so thanks mom and Kim for teaching me when I was a kid how to do it right.)

Then, you leave that restaurant and go for a walk, to the next restaurant, where you start out with snacks of tomato and corn. Summer is smiling because she is allergic to corn, and a plate of corn to her is like looking at vomit, it grosses her out so much.

Then, soup is ordered. Seafood soup. Tofu, fish eggs, oyster and fish intestine soup.

Here is me, eating fish intestine. I really ate it. It was kind of like eating squid, just a little chewy. And looked like a brain.

Look at these tiny tiny people.  I plan to move here an eat my way into a size zero.

This last one is from a totally separate meal, but just look at all the food!:

Kady got Seoul

Today Summer and I are visiting Shawn's classes all day and then we leave for Seoul at about 4pm.  I love Korean kids, so I'm pretty excited to go and teach them English.  I will probably teach them dad's favorites:

"Little bird with yellow bill
Sat upon my window sill
I lured him in with crusts of bread
And then I crushed his little head"

"Blackbird flying in the sky
Dropped some whitewash in my eye
I did not laugh I did not cry
I just thanked God that cows don't fly"

Stuff like that.

Summer-isms, Vol. 10

"You look just OK."

"We might even be wearing makeup in Korea."

Gwangju, South Korea

Yah.  I'm vacationing from my vacation.  On Monday, I slept until 4pm.  Then I got up and watched half of season six of Lost.  Today I woke up around 10am and watched the rest, except for the finale.  So I am saving that to watch with my new friends here.  We'll have a lil' party and watchy watch it.

I'm here until Friday and then I head for Seoul.  This place is fun and the food is amazing, but I'm being very lazy.  On Thursday I plan to hike a mountain to atone for the laziness.  But until then...I'm getting fatter.

Probably not going to post a ton in the next few days, internet is spotty.