A weary celebrity.

My mother writes a better blog than I do. What a sad state of affairs.

Just a really quick update because it's late. For whatever reason I haven't felt very creative these past few days so I haven't done much writing.

Anyway, I did actually have some really cool experiences this weekend.

Saturday I went to a baseball game at Olympic stadium. It's funny how big we think the Olympics are and stuff, but the Olympic compound was really run down I thought. I was not impressed. The Olympic stadium was small-basically a minor league baseball stadium. The game was...different.
It was between the Lotte Giants and the Doosan Bears. The names of the teams aren't cities. Basically it was the Wal-Mart Giants vs. the Caterpillar Bears in terms of the companies that were involved. Since most of the action goes on in Seoul there really wasn't an overwhelming majority of crowd for either team. Doosan was technically the home team but there were actually more Lotte fans there because Lotte is more popular of a team. I sat on the Lotte side.

At home we might scream and yell during the games, but it's never anything organized. Here they sing songs the entire game. There's no stopping. I couldn't join in because it was all in Korean. Their main chant was just "lotte" set to the Battle Hymn of the Republic which I thought was funny because they probably have no idea what the song is.

My biggest complaint is the food. Instead of hot dogs and pretzels it's potato chips and steamed squid...that gets a big ehhhh. But the beers and tickets are cheap.($3 a beer, $10 for field box), so there's a trade off I guess.

Sunday I met one of my students to go hiking. It's kind of silly to call him my student because he's what I would call a Confucius sage. He's in his late 50's and he's got an answer to like all of life's hardest questions. Brilliant guy.

Anyway he asked me if I'd like to go hiking with him this weekend, he said I could go as long as I promised not to go to fast, that he prefers to take it slow.

Man, if this is slow for this old guy, I hate to see what fast is. I didn't even really prepare to go hiking because I figured we'd take an hour stroll up the side of the mountain like I did last time and that'd be it. No, no. We went to the more difficult backside of the closest mountain(Surak) and started climbing that way. It started out easy enough, just a quick pace, but before I realized it we were scaling granite walls with hands and feet. He was just flying up them like an expert, I was not. It was never too dangerous(there were little children taking the hike), but it was still more than a leisurely stroll. At one point there was actually a climbing rope to get up a rock face. We went all the way to the top nearly 700 M above where we started(about 2,000 ft).
From the top you could see about half of Seoul, and 7 or 8 sattalite cities in the distance, as well as the whole valley/forest scene of the mountain range. We enjoyed the scenery and a couple of oranges and got going again before I realized just how tired I was.

Then there was the climb down, which turned out to be even longer because of the path we took. In all it was probably a 6 or 7 mile hike. It was worth it though, the view at the top was impressive. The fresh air and trees were a nice break from the city, and there were moments where there was total quiet. I quite enjoyed that. We even came across a couple Buddhist temples. On the way up we saw a relatively new one which was interesting enough, but on the way down we came across one that was about 1300 years old-and still fully functioning. It was so peaceful-a little different than it used to be(the monks all drive BMW's), but still the serenity was there. The 3rd week in May is Buddha's birthday and there's huge celebrations all over town, so I think I'm going to up to the temple again for that-just check the scene out.


I've already pretty much got next weekend planned as well-seems like they come before I even realize they're here anymore. Teachings still going fine, theyre working on physical drilling right now in preparation for Children's day(a day filled with games and sports) so a lot of my classes have been canceled this week, and more will be next week. I've been using the extra time mostly to catch up on TV from home Ive missed(Im all caught up on 24 now) and to take afternoon naps. Oh how I love naps.

One more thing, if you'll go to www.koreatimes.co.kr and type "Clevenger" into the search bar you'll find an article I wrote-it's nothing big, just a little free-lance fluff piece. I don't like the editor much, he gave it a horrible title that makes it sound like I'm serious with my complaint(I'm not, it's supposed to be funny)

Ok, that's all for now, here's some pics, and even a video!

Just outside the stadium, it's a good example of how much construction is going on here. They're putting these cookie cutter apartment buildings up everywhere. They go up in like a 1/4 of the time it'd take us to put them up, but they also fall apart in like 20 years.


Their stadium, which they are proud of. It wasn't all that impressive to me. Just another reminder for me that somethings in America are done right and can't be duplicated.


Joseph and I. (Just a note-some Koreans I call by their Korean name, others by their English name. Generally I leave it up to them-some such as Joseph prefer their English name because it is their baptism name. Most I find, however, prefer their Korean name)


A video of what the game was like. This song had chorus and versus, it went on for about 5 minutes. They don't stop, the whole game.