the Golden Klog Final Results are up at The Hub Of Sparkle. It was great taking part in the discussions, and now, it's finished. Roboseyo won "Best Personal/Diary Blog" and my collaboration with Gord Sellar, The Korean and others tied for "Best Post or Series," but Eat Your Kimchi beat me out for "Happiest K-Blogger".
Now that the creator of the survey can no longer skew results with his own opinions, a few last thoughts:
I'm sad that The Grand Narrative and ROK Drop didn't take home any awards: those are two of my favorite blogs, and I'm sad they were shut out. Gord Sellar is another favorite, but it's less surprising he got shut out, because less than half of his posts are about Korea; the others are about his mounting success as a Science Fiction writer.
I think that Brian in Jeollanam-do winning "Angriest Blogger" does a disservice to the excellent coverage he's given to life, festivals, travel, and other such business in Jeollanam-do. He would have been my vote for most misunderstood K-blogger.
While it's hard to argue with Korea Beat, Brian might have also been my vote for "Most Current and Timely Blog," especially for his Coreana coverage early in the year, and his tireless work promoting the causes of Bill Kapoun, Mike White, and Nerine Viljoen.
Finally, I would have been happy if some of the multiple-award winners had only gotten one award, in order to make room for some of the other worthy blogs: Ask A Korean!, Korea Beat, Brian in Jeollanam-do, FatMan Seoul, Roboseyo, and Mike Hurt/The Metropolitician, and Eat Your Kimchi all got two awards (or more) and while I'm not saying any of them didn't deserve the awards they won, I'll also say I would have been happy to see even more blogs win a Golden Klog Award.
OK. Enough Meta-Blogging. Back to normal life again...
Good news out of North Korea: newly released photos show that Kim Jong-il is alive and well.
And up to some healthy pasttimes, just to show off his excellent condition. In China, I took this picture: Plugs like this were in all kinds of guest houses around South China: they're weird-looking, but they'll take any, but ANY plug, whatever shape, whatever country. Howzat?
A horrible, "He's white. He'll do" model selling some kind of product. He was everywhere: billboards, sides of buses, and everthing, tantalizing us with his eyebrow like that. Every year, at Christmas or New Years, my mom had a tradition of going from one family member to the other, asking us what made us thankful that year. Now, Christmas Eve was a travel day, but on Christmas, we sat in Shire Hobbiton coffee shop, and I asked Matt and Heyjin what they were thankful about, then they turned the camera on me.
Here's a shortened version of the video I sent to my family, of some of the things I was thankful for in 2008: 2008 ROCKED!
We took a boat trip to a town called Yangshuo, which was full of people, including a really annoying guy trying to sell his photos. He stood right beside us and barked into the ship microphone for ten minutes, and then came back for ANOTHER round. Matt cut the annoyance by daring me to punch him...somewhere.
Mwahahaha!
Yangshuo was a pretty nice little riverfront village, and all it took was a bike rental to go out and see stuff like this:
Or climb a mountain and see this: Guarded by this sign:
Or take a cave tour and see this: and this:and this:
and this: (wacky) I don't know how, but people were endlessly clever in finding new places or ways to sell things.
This was nice if you wanted to, you know, buy stuff, all day long, but if you DIDN'T want people to follow you around, saying, "Hello? Hello? Postcard. Buy Postcard. Hello? Hello?" it was a bit annoying after a while.
Anyway, that was a jewelry shop in a cave under the ground. Blew my mind.
They must have had trouble getting foot traffic before the cave tour opened. These vacationers (and many others) had silly plastic red flower-wreaths around their heads, which just goes to show, people on vacation will buy anything. There were lots of shops like this in Yangshuo, too. This one made me smile when I saw this: Buddha and Chairman Mao, right next to each other.
We played around with putting motion into a long-exposure photo in a restaurant one evening. This one's my favorite. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted an Osama Bin Laden or an Adolph Hitler t-shirt, this was the artist for you. He wasn't even the only one.
Yangshuo's main stretch was full of shopping, a bit noisy, but kind of pretty if you like shiny things.I do. Hong Kong was fun at night, too.
You could buy things like hand-made Santa Buddhas (that threw me off) Yangshuo was probably the peak of the silliness in our trip: the initial "Hey! We're travelling!" excitement hadn't quite warn out (would soon), and the second wind wouldn't wind up until Beijing, but we got these two videos taken one goofy night.
And what china trip would be complete without two Canadians singing the "Hockey Night In Canada" theme with the word "Beer"? None, I say. None.
heh heh.
The two biggest downers of the Yangshuo were... 1. The second day we rented bikes, we were TIRED: we'd biked about 18km. the first day, and then did another 14 or so the next day, including a break to climb a mountain. We needed to stop riding, so we pulled over at a little corner in the road and, after getting a bit tired of being razzed for a bamboo boat ride, a postcard purchase, a scarf or a dumb, wooden toy everywhere we went, an old lady materialized out of nowhere, and robo-hawker hassled us to buy something, ruining yet another lovely lookout point. That took us from tired to completely beat -- hawkers are worse than crowds, because crowds are in your space, but hawkers are in your face.
And I've decided I'm not eating dogs anymore. Nope. Not cool anymore. I did it once, but, uh, no. New Year's Eve was in Yangshuo, and we had a silly time that night in a bar run by a Canadian guy who was pretty cool.
Yangshuo was nice. We met a few funny and/or cool people there, had trouble staying warm (my guest house room's heater died -- but the super-warm sleeping bag saved the day).
Better yet, this coffee that we discovered on a menu in Shenzen, called "Blue Mountain," which I had heard of on one of those "foods to eat before you die" lists -- it turns out this coffee was in vogue a few years ago, it's a bit pricey, but it's a deep, lovely coffee that has a really complex, yet beautifully balanced flavor, right from beginning to end.
This was in Shenzen...But the star of the Yangshuo trip was not the brick oven-baked pizza (unfortunately), but the apple tarts at a place called "Drifters' Bar" -- you should go there if you visit Yangshuo. You had to wait 25 or 30 minutes for it to be ready, but once it came out, it was sweet and rich, with just enough crumble and just enough thickness, the apples were roasted and lovely with cinnamon, and I spent a good long time writing in my travel diary, waiting for it to come out. Happy, easy days on the China trip, dear readers.
There is no way to write you directly at Blogger, so I'm going to complain about it here. I have mentioned it on the help columns, and it seems to be an ongoing problem for numerous blogs, but it has not been repaired in two months.
At the bottom of blogger pages which are linked in my sidebar, dozens of links to my site have been appearing, from pages which do not directly link to those sites.
At the bottom of my page, links to dozens of other blogger blogs have been appearing, which have ME on their sidebar, but which do not directly link to my page.
This has not been repaired in two stinking months! The only choices I have are to 1. systematically, painstakingly go through each one of two months worth of posts and delete all the junk links, which is a huge time suck, 2. clear my sidebar link and hope that fixes it, but it also means my blog becomes much less useful for people interested in reading blogs. 3. leave it, and have cluttered and useless "links" bars or 4. switch to a different blog server which fixes glitches when they appear.
Now sure, with bogger and these free blog hosts, I'm getting just what I pay for, but if I'm going to keep blogging anyway, and if blogger doesn't seem to be fixing this, and if there's not even any way to contact them, the balance is starting to shift toward switching hosts.
If this is happening to your blog, post about it. If there is no way to directly contact Blogger about this glitch, maybe enough people posting about it will remind them, or alert them.
3. If you're an internet nerd, and you know what rick-rolling is, this mash-up will confuse you: was it a rick-roll, or a cool mash-up? If you're not an internet nerd, and you don't know what rick-rolling is, then you'll be happy to know I was lucky enough to catch the funniest one-liner of our entire China trip on video. Click here to see the video. (And if you want to get meta...)
4. Guangxi Province, China.
Guilin Highlights:
Mountains like this. Everywhere. Two famous lakes in Guilain; this one had these awesome pagodas. They were even prettier at night, but those pictures didn't quite turn out.Sunset, same park as that first photo. This waterfall was in that same park, too where I took the first landscape picture. That was a seriously good walkabout day. Shire Hobbiton Coffee: Matt is a huge Lord of the Rings fan, so finding the best coffee in Guilain, in a place named after Frodo Baggins' home, was just too perfect. Interior was nice, too: full of LOTR themed painting...the nice, "Mist over the Fields of Pellinor" kind, not the geeky "Orc With Armor vs. Elven Warrior Prince" kind.
Walking around downtown Guilain, we saw this cool statue of a totally badass painter: that's totally a paintbrush. We took this picture...And then later, when we came back through Guilain to catch our train to Kunming, we saw another group of tourists posing the exact same shot. I guess it's the Guilain equivalent to doing the cheesy hands-out Titanic pose on the prow of a boat.
And we ate the hottest Szechuan Hot Pot you'll ever find. The broth was about two parts broth and one part peppercorns and hot peppers. Ridiculous. Hotter than squid fried rice, hotter than jjuggumi, hotter than bbul dalk (fire chicken) in Korea. Silly.
Matt got a jet of boiling hot, hot oil right down his throat, and I ate a spoonful of peppercorns and spice oil, just for kicks. It was Christmas day.
This cute kid was at that same restaurant when we went there again, on our last day in Guilain.
One day, we took a bus down to a place called Longji. (Some nice, professional photos here and here.) The terraced rice fields there went right to the top of the mountain, and that day was mysterious and misty: one minute, fog would be hiding everything in view, and all we could see was a nice trail; then a wind would kick up, the fog would clear out, and we'd have scenes like these.
This picture was also taken up there.
It was just lovely, kind of tantalizing, the way you never knew when the mist would clear and stop your heart with beauty.
This was one of the best meals of our whole trip. We hiked up to a village in the mountain -- a five minute walk from the peak -- and the tour guide led us to this little restaurant... The lady in the pink apron was burning bamboo chutes in a fire, and above the fire...They had rice and chicken stuffed inside the baboo chute, roasting over flames. She'd take the chutes and dip them in water regularly, to prevent the chutes from burning up.
When we ordered food, they came out like this... and it was, pretty much, the best chicken I've had in my life. And that's saying something. Stewed in its own juices, with bits of berries and ginger packed inside to deepen the flavor, melt-in-your-mouth tender, all bathed in that bright, lightness that comes in bamboo cooking.
Warning: one sh-poop word in this one. (My sister follows this blog with my nephew and nieces, so I gotta give the heads up. Hi, Beckles. Love ya! Hi Matthias, Bethany and Carrie-ann!)
So that was Guilain and Longji. Yangshuo, Dali, Beijing and Vietnam coming soon.
Now, I know that when bloggers post about their trips, a lot of readers just scroll through the pictures, so I'll try to keep the text minimal.
Hong Kong was overwhelming. So much, so high: we only spend four days there, and that was enough, because after living in Seoul, city travel just isn't what a bunch of burnt out teachers are looking for.
So we spend four days before moving on, three in Hong Kong and one quick day-trip to Macau.
The buildings were high. So high: it was like taking two Kangnams and stacking them on top of each other. City busses were two stories, not for local color like in some cities, but just because there was no space, and they had to fit the people somewhere. These apartment buildings were run-of-the-mill for Hong Kong. In Seoul, they'd be top two percent in height. They had buildings like these all the way up a mountainside.
Christmas decorations. We also took a bus up to the highest point on the island (Hong Kong's an island) and got some really nice photos.
The harbour was just unreal. Busiest in the world (for number of containers) - according to this page.
The trip to Macau involved some great Portugese food, a beer called Sagres, a fortress, and a casino.
We also climbed a hill to see a fortress, and in a playground, a few high-school students were blowing bubbles off the equipment. It was lovely.
Two highlights of the Hong Kong leg of the trip were the light show across the harbor, and the Sunday morning, special pink dolphin tour. You can learn more about the unique, pink dolphins here, and especially how to help protect their dwindling numbers. They're amazing animals, and meeting them was a wonderful experience, and even the tour guide said they really put on a show for us: we go really close, and saw two unique pods of them, along with two others later in the tour: a really rare turnout. You can watch some video here.
After that, we'd had enough of the city, and needed to get out of town.
HK was overwhelming, and expensive, too, though we had some of the best food of our entire trip during our time there.
Macanese food on the first night, wonderful duck at the night market, and good old British pub food at The Pickled Pelican, as well as the discovery of Tetley's beer, a really nice, drinkable beer that is exactly the same colour as Tetley's tea.
In Macau, we saw the remains of a cathedral, climbed the fortress hill, lost money at a casino, and sang silly versions of Christmas songs (we were there on December the 23rd). A lot of silliness took place during the trip... here's video of some of it... I'm just going to throw it on here without context, and explain parts of it as I go.
Warning: there is some potty mouth in the video. If hearing Roboseyo cuss, or seeing a video with cussing posted by Roboseyo will diminish your opinion of me...don't watch it.
I'm nominated in a few categories, and without my readers' support, I'll never manage to squeeze out my ballot-box-stuffing, dirty, low-down rivals.
However: This silly survey is unimportant. So, so, so, so unimportant, trivial, trite, and asinine, next to this:
SeoulPodcast has done an amazing podcast concerning unexplained deaths in the expat community. Three ladies, survivors of expats who died under mysterious circumstances in Korea, discuss the loss of their loved ones, and the difficulties they went through trying to get the full stories of their losses, and the unwillingness of numerous parties to help them get help, answers, justice and, most of all, closure.
As expats living in Korea, we should be mindful of the fact tragedy can strike any of us, at any time, and we have the responsibility both to be prepared for the day our nightmares come true, and also to support these people and their searches for truth.
You can visit the homepage Stephannie White, the mother of Mike White, one of the expats who died needlessly, maintains, here, at http://www.mightiemike.com/ and she has a facebook page called a mother is looking for answers about here son. Think about supporting her, by comments, by money transfer (for lawyers fees), by writing an article about it for your local newspaper, magazine, whatever, and by contacting your embassy, your local political representative, or the Korean politician who represents the area where you live.
Some move on from Korea and live there; others just visit. Many blog about it, and The Joshing Gnome even spoofed that tendency.
But blog pals Schwim and Foreign/er Joy both went to Japan for Winter holidays recently, and Schwim took some really lovely pictures, while Joy kept a nice, detailed day-by-day account, and loaded it up with explanations, but also put up tons of pictures, for those of us with short attention spans. Go read them.
