Kayla in Korea: May 2009

As I'm sure many of you are experiencing, as the weather gets warmer, the schedules get busier. The weekends fill up and the sunshine seems to make time fly by. It's been in the mid 80's here all week! I spent a lot of my May mornings substitute teaching kindergarten at a friend's school and then heading to my usual 2-9 job. Teaching continues to be wonderful. There have been some cases of swine flu in my town of Gwangmyeong so everyone's a bit on edge and parents are concerned but it's still business as usual. When people aren't concerned about swine flu, worries of N. Korea's latest threats are always enough to keep you on your toes. These latest developments are definitely the worst since I've been in Korea but I'm registered with the US Embassy and their latest email said there's no immediate threat as things stand. Still it's enough to make one nervous...

In happier news, I've been taking a wonderful course in Korean language at a local center for migrant workers. The other students are Chinese, Vietnamese, and Filipino. My friend Sarah and I are really enjoying the class. It's 6 hours a week and the teacher is excellent but the language is just so difficult. I know a lot of survival Korean - the word for this, the word for that, how to say basic things. But actually learning the language with all the grammar and sentence structure and pronunciation is proving to be incredibly difficult - plus it's showing me how little vocabulary I actually know. Still it's nice to be in "school" again and it's refreshing to be challenged in a new way.

I recently took a trip to Lotte World, one of the three amusement parks Seoulites have available to them. It has the unique status of the being largest indoor amusement park in the world. It also has a small outdoor section. It was fun...the decor and atmosphere were excellent, although quite the Disney rip-off (see the castle below). It had a lot of things to do and lots of gimmicks as all parks do but it's big rides were really lacking. It wasn't as good as Six Flags. The rides were quite short which is always a bummer but on the positive side the lines were short. All in all it was fun, but I'm looking forward to checking out Everland, the biggest amusement park in Korea, sometime this summer. Enjoy pics!

and here are my pictures!

So Tokyo is HUGE! It took us two hours by train to get to our hotel from the airport. Our hotel was more like a hostel except that we had a private room which they cleaned every day. It had bunk beds! It was in an area called Jim-bo-cho which is quite close to the center of Tokyo.

One of my first impressions of Tokyo - all of the buildings are uniquely designed and very beautiful. They don't just build office buildings, they build really cool-looking office buildings! Also it was so much cleaner and well-organized than any other city I've seen. I never felt like I was in a city of 30 million people. There's no smoking on the streets and the air feels clean and clear. You can tell they work hard to keep their city clean - the subway system was so much more elaborate than Seoul's and was somehow even cleaner.

looking up at buildings

look familiar?

View from an observation deck. when you go to the top of City Hall and look out at Philadelphia, or go to the top of the Empire State Building and look at NYC you can see the end of the city. It stops at some point and you can see where the water is or where the next state is. In Tokyo you can see nothing but Tokyo. The city never ends, it goes on and on and on and on. All you can see in all four directions is the city. It's HUGE.

In the business district of Shinjuku

Feel like you need a vitamin? You can get them in this vending machine, conveniently located in a subway station

Hanging out at Roponggi Hills - a really snazzy new shopping area with lots of designer shops both outdoor and indoor. Very modern and zen.

Worst part - gigantic spider sculpture in the center. Eeek!

Sunday morning in Tokyo - lovely breakfast of tea and toast at an outdoor cafe.

We went to the Meiji shrine at Harajuku.

We found a random kimono-clad woman and asked to have a picture with her!

gift shop

seeing a woman in a full kimono is really amazing

It was amazing seeing both sides of Tokyo culture. On the one hand the delicate and lovely kimonos. On the other hand is cutting edge, sometimes bizarre fashion which you can best observe on the bride over Harajuku station. Here Tokyo's stylish teenagers hang out and make incredible fashion statements. Everything from goth to glam and even dressing up like anime or manga characters. It's what they do on the weekends and it's amazing to see!

The Japanese teenagers are way more openly rebellious than the Koreans! :)

Takeshi-dori - busiest place I've ever been. This is THE place for funky teenage fashion and weird stores. If it's bizarre, you'll find it on this street.

It was too crowded to move so we took a picture!

Making a statement

Harajuku Street!

Here I am in Ginza - the "Rodeo Drive" of Tokyo. In this picture I'm outside Mikimoto - the mother of all pearl stores. Get it? :) Ginza has every designer you could imagine: Tiffany's, Fendi, Armani, Louis Vitton, Gucci... Being there made us feel poor.

My favorite part of the trip was the evening we spent walking around the huge district of Shinjuku at night. It was so alive and bustling, a neon forest that was always exciting and never felt dangerous. Restaurants, bars, stores, clubs, anything you could imagine, this place was incredible to experience and it went on forever.

At some smaller restaurants in Tokyo you place your order before you go inside by pressing a button on a machine like this one that has all the choices on it. Cool!

We opted to eat at a Sri Lankan restaurant that night. You might be wondering why there aren't more pictures of us eating Sushi and other Japanese cuisine. Sarah doesn't eat and is terrified of all fish with makes eating Japanese food pretty difficult. So we ate lots of other cuisines on our trip: Indian, Sri Lankan, Thai, Turkish, and Swiss.

The station where our hotel was located: Jim-Bo-Cho

At the entrance to the East Garden of the Imperial Palace (where Japan's royal family lives). The actual palace where they live is only open two days a year. But the grounds and gardens (which are mind-blowingly huge) are open to the public. Also behind me in this picture is Tokyo Tower!

The east garden of the Imperial Palace - it was so beautiful.

again

Looking for butterflies

A group of Japanese students who were in a photography club asked to take our picture and after they were through they took one with my camera.

After the Imperial Palace we went to Asakusa to see a Buddhist shrine and visit a market there. We ran into more kimono-clad ladies and of course had to get a picture.