I haven't posted many pictures in a while, so here are some of the flower pictures I took when the cherry blossoms were blooming.

This is one of my best Egret pictures.  They were really hard to take a good picture of, but there is one in the middle of the tree.  There were tons in the tops of trees, but white birds with a white sky in white flowers doesn't show up well.

This is the most common bird you see here.  They are a type of Magpie and sometimes flock in the hundreds.

Spring green maple leaves!

Cherry Blossoms

This is a type of Rubus (I don't know if it turns into an edible berry like blackberries or raspberries), but the leaves with water drops were pretty.

This is one of the famous cherry blossom trees that they have festivals about.

Traveling without a car in Korea

One of the interesting things for us living in Korea is the fact we do not own a car.  Since we live in the city it turns out okay.  Everything is close enough together here there is not much of a problem.  If you did not know, Daejeon, has over 1.5 million people, but has a land footprint that is half the diameter of Charlotte (Measured by belt line size.)  Charlotte has 0.7 million people.  So this makes living without a car very easy.  We do not even miss the things, except the powerful feeling we get when driving them.  So without the gas guzzling traffic generating machines that get our country into awkward political situations (See Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria etc) what do we do when we want to go somewhere?

Work: We usually walk the 3/4 mile journey to work.  It takes about 30 minutes.  Along the way we normally practice our Korean.  If we are late we bike.

Groceries: There is a grocery store that is a 5 minute walk away.  It has almost everything we need.  It carries a good stock of fruits and vegetables, and there are many mom and pop dealers outside too.  Shopping in Korea is halfway between a western supermarket, and a open air market.  The dealers outside sell fruit, vegetables, and grains.  We normally buy from them when we can because once they know you as a regular, they give you discounts :-).  Unfortunately, we still do not know the words for many food items, so we normally point, and ask how much it costs.  It's a little awkward, but it gets us food.  Note: the Korean fruit tastes, and the Korean milk taste much better than the American versions.  Every piece of fruit I have ever had here, has been perfectly ripe.  It's nice, but I wonder if it is because of GMO's, or if it is because their agriculture here is ran almost exclusively by small farmers who pay very close attention to their products.  On the apple trees here, they always wrap plastic bags around the apples to keep the insects off because the cost of labor is low ($5 per hour minimum wage, but given the work culture here (long hours, but slow work), it is probably equivalent to our $7.75 minimum wage).

Manufactured goods: There is a Super Walmart-like store here, called Home Plus.  It is operated by a British firm known as Tesco which has similar stores in Brittan.  We go there about once every 2 weeks to get special items.  It is a 30 minute walk away, but we sometimes bicycle (10 minutes).  There is also a Sam's Club-like store that requires no membership very close to it.  We get our bulk items (Prego Spaghetti Sauce and peanut butter) there.  Although we can get a lot of Prego for cheap, very few of our friends know what it is or how to use it, so they are often impressed when we make spaghetti.  We also use it to make pizza.

Church: This is our farthest destination.  It is a 45 minute walk, or a 20 minute bike ride.  There are other churches closer to our house, but this church is the first one we attended, and we liked it so we stayed.

Downtown: The movie theater, and a bible study that we often attend is downtown.  It is somewhat of a trek in the winter, when bicycling is not much fun at all.  What we normally do is bike to the subway station, and take the subway the remaining distance.  It is not efficient and takes about 30 minutes to make the 3 mile trip.  In the summer we normally bike and if traffic is nice, it takes 25 minutes.  We only go once a week.

Across town: Twice a year, an English speaking high school has really awesome festivals (think western food that is normally unavailable in Korea like hot dogs and tacos), so we go to them.  The bike ride is 45 minutes, and the bus ride is too, but the bus ride is often worse because the air gets stuffy.  I really enjoy biking, so we normally bike.  The taxi fare there is $6, but we like to save money.  The school also puts on a twice a year play which is also good.  Some of our church friends teach there.

The countryside:  This is the best part about a compact city.  There are parks everywhere, but if you want real trees, they are right outside town.  So we can take a 20 minute bus ride, and be in a national park (which is more like a state park), or a 10 minute walk and be on a forested mountain that is on the edge of town. 

Other cities/the airport: We take the Korean intercity bus.  It takes about 3 hours to get to Inchon (where the airport is).  We take the KTX sometimes too.  It takes 90 minutes to get to Seoul, but that is because we are going 150+ mph.  It runs on standard rails, but they have the concrete ties, so they are very stable.  Also its couplers are as tall as the car, so oscillations are greatly reduced.  I think that's how it goes so fast.

So that is how we survive without cars.  It's also nice that we pay no mechanic, no insurance, no fixing it ourselves, no gas and no traffic.  The nice thing about this city is that our rent is cheap and we have no grass to mow.  So we like our life here, but we really miss home because it is what we know and what we are used to.  I am coming home in June for two weeks, and I hope to see many of you.  Margaret is staying in Korea, but will visit in September.

Taken from a bike trip across town and over a mountain (no fossil fuels used!)

One Year!

First off, I want to thank everyone who wished us a happy anniversary!  Its still hard to believe its been a while year since we stood on the porch with everyone there.  I miss all of you and I wish we could have a similar occasion again to have everyone we love together in one place.

In Korea, to celebrate our anniversary we escaped from Daejeon and took a bus to a nearby small town for the weekend.  This town was once the capital of one of the three kingdoms in Korea around the 500s.  They have a beautiful fortress with stone walls and trails.  Though not as fancy, it reminded us of the Great Wall of China.  The town also had a lot of tombs with an underground tomb museum.  The really really nice thing about going to historical sites in Korea, is that almost all the informative signs are half in English!

We also had a delicious meal with grilled fish and lots of side dishes.  The quality of a restaurant in Korea depends on the amount and variety of side dishes.  There are normal ones that you pretty much always have (kimchi, sesame leaves, picked radishes), but in fancier restaurants you get quail eggs, tofu soup, crabs, and candied sweet potatoes.

To celebrate the actual day on Monday, we got a Baskin Robbins ice cream cake!  Yay for anniversaries!

Chungnam Cherry Blossom Festival

A couple weeks ago the trees finally blossomed!  The cherry trees are very famous here.  It seems that any place with a lot of cherry trees has a festival when they bloom.  I have heard people say it is one of the few good things that came from Japan.
In our town, one of the local universities has a nice abundance of cherry trees.  They have a festival every spring.  We wanted to see what Korea's idea of a festival was, so we decided to go. 

We went a little late and it was starting to get dark.  They turned on lots and lots of spotlights to shine up at the cherry blossoms.  It was very beautiful.  People were taking pictures everywhere.  All the lower blossoms ended up behind someone's ear.

There were some booths from the college making plaster casts or pottery, but mostly there were food booths.  They had corn on a stick, sugar-filled bread, cotton candy (or candy floss as my British friend calls it), roasted chestnuts, ice cream, Turkish kabobs (it was more like a Turkish taco), and roasted silk worms.  We had to try the worms for the sake of culture.  The texture wasn't that bad, but there was something about the taste that reminded me of the fruit fly experiments from genetics class.  They even sold boiled crabs that a friend of ours treated us to.

We found out that festivals do not usually have parades, but are usually several days long.  Most aren't that big, but are fun.  Also, don't get the bugs.

Fishies

Riley and I were out running the other day (yes, I have taken up running even though I still don't like it very much.  It is good for me, though, and it has some benefits as you will see shortly).  We run along a river where they have converted the banks into and long bike and running track.  Its a good place to run and travel around town without going on the sidewalks through the city.  My favorite part about the rivers is that they are the wildest places I have seen in the city.  They are always full of ducks, egrets, and herons with the occasional grebe!  This is one of the things that makes running ok, it is a good excuse to see the waterfowl in the river.
Back to the story, Riley ran ahead of me like usual, and I started watching the water looking for interesting ducks.  It was a drizzly day, so there weren't as many people out as usual.  Instead of dabbling ducks, I saw lots of splashing.  The water where the splashing was is very shallow, and I started seeing fins sticking out of the splashing.  It was a giant fish!  Actually, 4 giant fish!  I don't know what they were doing, but they were very determined about doing it.  I kept running, but every 30 meters or so (yes, I am started to convert to metric) I saw more splashing fish!  I finally had to stop and figure out what was going on, but all I know is that there were usually two fish splashing together.  They are the biggest fish I have ever seen in our urban river.  I'm glad they can live there.  They were about 1.5-2 ft long (ok, maybe not all metric). 
These little incidents help keep me running and in shape.

Election Day

Here in Korea, whenever there is an election, people get a holiday from work and classes!  This is so people will have time to vote, but for those of us who are not Daejeon citizens its a surprise holiday!  The election campaigning is nice here because its in a different language.  I think the most interesting part is that the colors for different parties range from yellow to blue and pink.  Its strange not just seeing red, white, and blue posters.  I saw people in red jackets stand on the side of the road and wave at people, and we also saw these trucks with either a video or a strange built into the side advertising one of the parties, but of course it was in Korean and sounded just like the trucks that broadcast food sales.  This election was for congressmen I believe, and all I know is the major party won. 

Riley had a paper to write, so I grabbed a camera and explored the woods on campus.  In Korea, almost all mountains (and hills) are left to the forests.  I think this is mainly due to the fact all the hill are really steep.  It would be really hard to build anything on the slopes, so there are hiking trails on all the mountains instead (with exercise equipment at the top).  The one on campus is small, but the flowers have started to bloom and I wanted pictures.  Also, for some reason all the egrets and herons in the area decided our mountain was where they wanted to raise their kids.  One part of the mountain is covered in giant white birds building nests.  While exploring and trying to get a good picture of the egrets, I went off the trail and scared up a Korean deer!  I have no idea how a deer lives on a mountain in the middle of a fenced-in college campus.  It was short and stocky, nothing like a white-tailed deer.  Two days later I met someone who hikes all the time in Korea and it took him 2 and a half years to see a deer.  It only took me 7 months!  Now I just need to see a Raccoon Dog...

Koreans are Church Crazy

Somehow, Riley and I found ourselves trying to sing "Give Thanks" in Chinese at 5am this morning.  This is not an easy thing to do. 
It all started when Riley got "volunteered" by someone to help with the special music at the 5:30am service that they have at church EVERY DAY!  They apparently takes turns doing special music and it was the foreign ministries' turn to do it.  Why people get up early every day to go to an hour long service at 5:30 in the morning is beyond me.  Riley's not sure how we ended up getting involved either, at least it was just one day.  We sang the song first in English, then Chinese, and then Korean.  The Korean wasn't too bad since I do know how to pronounce it, but I have no idea how to pronounce the Chinese ryn rion zu du, ping choing, xian xie, etc.  We tried to listen to the Chinese people, but I think most of us non-Chinese just sang very quietly.  The service was all in Korean, good practice for understanding Korean if we had been more awake.  I just managed to not fall asleep during the sermon, then we got home at 6:30 and went back to sleep.  Hopefully it will be a long time before its our turn to do the special music again.