Moving out and to a new place was kind of a hassle - I'll have to get better at consolidating my things quickly and being more mobile.

I really like staying at this Guesthouse! I meet people from around the world every day in the morning and evenings and get to pester them to go and do stuff with me in Korea hehe. My first day here I still didn't have all my clothes and things, so I went back to my homestay family house and spent the day with them after using their car to transport my big duffle back to the hostel. We ate some jjajangmyeon (짜장면 is a korean/chinese bean noodle dish) at a pretty famous Chinese restaurant, went to the cinema and watched Transformers together, and went to the electronics store and bought me a fan. Transformers was really entertaining, especially since there were Korean subtitles at the bottom and I was the only guy in the theater who didn't have to look at them.

Also, a fan is kind of a key commodity for me here in Korea. Since it's summer there are a lot of mosquitos and nobody really knows how to keep them out of the house. Especially when I'm sleeping they like to bite me and fly around my ears and keep me from sleeping. Since mosquitoes don't weigh anything, if I just have a fan blow over me at night, they can't fly near me and I'm safe ^^.


I went hiking with my roommate yesterday. These are the nice people we met on the way to the mountain that kinda acted as our guides. We swapped food with them at the top, and I was translator for the group hehe.

The awesome jjajangmyeon that we ate at the Chinese place. I eat this stuff like I eat lasagna: lots and very quickly.

My homestay family again - I'm so fortunate to have been able to stay with them here.

A view from a place on Achasan (아차산) which wasn't even the top. This was Tuesday at about 3:30pm, and there were a few older Korean ladies and men climbing the mountain also. Some people go hiking every day just for the exercise, and there are various exercise facilities along the way where you can lift weights, do pull-ups and sit-ups, and ab twists. Strangely enough, we didn't really see anyone under 40-years old on the mountain.

Some friends I met here at the guesthouse. They're from Japan, and we had a really interesting conversation in Japanese/English/Korean. The girl on the left can speak English well, but can't speak Korean, and the girl on the right can speak Korean well, but can't speak English. And you know I can't speak Japanese, so I went back and forth talking in Korean and English, translating every now and then to the other language, and they would do Japanese to explain from time to time. They gave me their emails, so I can have some friends if I decide to visit Japan ^_^