About Time for a Happier Post

Oregon kicks ass! I am so happy to be home. I have loved living in Korea and travelling in east Asia, but Corvallis is awesome. Two dollar micros, my family, good friends, great food, clean air, sane driving, and traffic-lights with sensors are some of the things I have been enjoying most. Cota was stoked to see Mel when we arrived at the airport but she has had a kidney infection since we have been home.

Mel's mom is currently visiting here in Oregon. She had her first time on an airplane today, but she seems to be doing fine. Tomorrow, we are planning to canoe up at Summit lake with my parents.

My head hurts

We were supposed to get paid today. We didn't. The office was locked and the boss man didn't even have the decency to tell us. It is now a legal proceeding and we have to be present if he does not pay in the next two weeks. We are coming home, so we will fly back to Korea if it comes to that. Being screwed out of $8,000 is tough to take.

Happy birthday to me.

Back in Korea

I have always thought this would be a fun job, until the whole washing part started.


Mel having fun posing for tourist photos along the waterfront in Shanghai. This particular pose was very popular among Chinese tourists, so Mel decided to give it a try.

Well, we made it back to Korea and we still have not been paid by our school which is not particularly surprising. Tomorrow we are headed to the Labor Board to see if the government can make them pay us. We ate kimchee for lunch and realized that we missed it quite a lot. Might be hard to find good kimchee when we get home. I guess I will have to learn to make it.

The remainder of our China trip was great, mostly we just settled into Shanghai and ate a lot of really good food. We had some great Thai, good Indian, funky cool fusion in a place that was impossible to open the front door, and Chinese vegetarian that was made to look exactly like meat. The veggie place was so good we went back. And yes, we ate at some great hole-in-the-wall Chinese places too.

Aside from shopping, eating and riding around on old bicycles we really enjoyed the Shanghai Museum. Their collection of jade was up to 7,000 years old and they have the oldest discovered bronze at around 4,500 years old. They also had a really cool exhibit on Assyrian culture on loan from the British Museum.

Shanghaied

Any city whose name doubles as a verb must be cool. Here are some pictures from the past couple of days:


Chairman Mao buttons for sale in the Dongtai Lu market.


After dinner drinks on the patio at Sasha's.


Rooftops near the Yuyuan Bazaar.


Bridge over a canal in Suzhou, the Venice of the East.


Baskets for sale at a market.

Progress Report

Since the wedding we have had a blast! Yesterday Ronnie's translator and his family took us to dinner at a very nice restaurant. Some of the highlights were the shark-fin soup and watching Mel tear into some of the smallest crabs I have ever eaten. Today we headed about an hour and a half away to Yixing (Navigate to "Teapot Info" for a little reading) which is basically the epicenter of traditional Chinese teapots. I think we saw upwards of 200,000 teapots today. We somehow managed to come home with only a couple. Tonight for dinner we just had to go back for some more street food. We are taking the train to Shanghai in the morning


Mel and Ronnie picking their kebabs from the greatest street vendor this side of Thailand.

Found an old photo...

Brian Vogt took this shot of Dana and I running Double Drop on the Truss section of the White Salmon in March '05.

Ni-Hao from China

Today we went to a Chinese wedding. It was interesting, there were fireworks inside, a smoke machine, bubbles, snow, dry ice, confetti and a soundtrack by Queen. The highlight was getting in a minor fender bender on the way there. Later in the day, Mel and I got foot massages right down the street from the apartment. Our masseurs were two twenty year old kids that had great smiles and were super eager to try out their English. I think they had as much fun as we did and they made us promise to come back tomorrow for the full body experience. For dinner we ate street vendor style from a cart with more vegetables on skewers than I have ever seen. You choose your skewers and they put them of the BBQ. Between four of us we ate about sixty skewers of garlic, 3 kinds of mushrooms, eggplant, green beans, potatoes, huge Anaheim peppers, cauliflower, shrimp, pork and chicken and we didn't even put a dent in their selection. Total cost for the meal including two pitchers of beer was equivalent to seven dollars.