Taking a Trip to Italy

I'm off to Italy on Friday. It's my first trip to Europe, so I'm a bit excited. I'm coauthor on a paper being presented as part of a conference at Bocconi University in Milan next Monday and Tuesday. Yeongmi is coming with me and we'll be spend two days in Florence and three days in Rome after the conference is over.

The whole thing happened rather suddenly. I was intending on skipping the conference, but funding appeared at the last minute. Should be an interesting ten days. Leaving on the 9th, returning on the 19th.

Not Just Another Rainy Day in Seoul

We've had some wild weather here in Seoul in the past 24 hours (Tuesday & Wednesday).  Thursday update - Looks like it will continue today, already raining heavily this morning here in Anam, near Korea University.

I got soaked to the skin on my 10-minute walk up the hill to my apartment Tuesday afternoon, but at least I am alive.  Things were much worse in my neighborhood Wednesday morning.  I wore my rain gear and my waterproof  hiking boots on my walk down the hill this morning, but the boots didn't do much good.  The waterproofing just kept the water inside.

Shots from the morning and the afternoon

Links - Many of the links below have photos or videos of the storms and aftermath
Landslide hits South Korea mountain resort, at least 10 dead
Thunderstorms Wreak Havoc in Seoul Metropolitan Region
Nine dead, two buried, as rains batter S. Korea
How it Looks in Downtown Seoul
Heavy Rainstorms Pound South Korea
UPDATE: Storms, Landslides Kill 18
A Long Rainy Season — By the Numbers

Lots of businesses in Seoul grind to a halt in the rain
Torrential rain wreaks havoc in Seoul and beyond
Thunderstorms Wreak Havoc in Seoul Metropolitan Region
Unstable atmosphere blamed for torrents
'Water Bomb' Brings Floods and Landslides to South Korea, Kills 36

Video
Deadly landslide hits South Korean resort
Flooding - Bongcheon - Seoul - 27.07.2011 
Landslide at EBS Studios in Seoul 
Dramatic video of heavy floods, deadly landslides in South Korea 

Publish Post

2011.7.27.오전 관악구도림천의 모습 
Flood due to Rain in Seoul. 2011.July.27 
Seoul, Korea - Daechi-dong Rain "Flood" self-cam
Han River Flooding - Seoul, Korea 
AMAZING!!! South Korea - FVA Train VS Flood (original version) 27-7-2011 

Compare to floods back home that happened around the same time:
Spanish Fork flash flood

Updated July 28, 2011 7:40 a.m. Seoul time.

Comparing Yeongdo in 1980 with 2011

I served in the island of Yeongdo as an LDS missionary from May through November of 1980.  I served with Glenn Leewright, Peter Stewart & Jed Hill as companions.  Other missionaries that lived in the same house at the same time were: Chris Morin, Jim Falconer, Dan Mitchell, Charles Cook & 김학수.

I went back this week with copies of some of the photos I took then on my iPhone.  I went back to many of the same places and took photos of what they look like today, after 31 years.  Here a some of the comparisons.

The Busan Bridge

 1980

 

2011

The Yeongdo Bridge

 

 1980

 

 2011 (Under Reconstruction)

Shops Near the Yeongdo Bridge

 1980

2011

Downtown Busan from the Yeongdo Bridge

 1980

2011

Namhang Market

 1980

2011

Road in Yeongseon-dong near my House

 1980 (looking downhill)

 2011 (Looking uphill from the other end)

Outside of the House I lived in

 1980

2011

Alley next to the House

 1980

2011

Yeongseon Rotary

 1981

 2011

Upper Yeongseon Rotary

 1980

2011

Martime College

 1980

 2011

Taejongdae viewed from Dongsam-dong harbor

 1980

2011

Train from Provo to Denver, January 2011

Back in 2005, when I first came to Seoul to teach, I met Eddy Berry, a professor at Utah State University.  She told me about taking Amtrak from Salt Lake City to Denver and I decided if I ever got the chance I was going to take the trip too.

Since the annual American Economics Association Meeting were in Denver this last January, I decided that Yeongmi and I would get there by train.  The trip was a lot longer than driving, but the scenery was fantastic.

View from the Train Trip to Denver

We left Provo very early in the morning on Thursday - around 4:00 a.m., if I remember correctly.  Since it was mid-Winter we didn't see the sun come up for quite a while and we were already over the mountains and near Price before we could see anything through the windows.  We missed all of Spanish Fork Canyon and Price Canyon, but the canyons later in the day in Colorado made up for that.

The trip took 14 or 15 hours, but we went through country that was so scenic it was worth the trip.  Much of this was through places where it would be impossible to get to in a car.  Even in the parts that could be seen by car, sitting in the train and not driving made it so much easier to enjoy the scenery.

Take a look at the video below to see some of what we saw.

LINKS

Google Earth viewable .kmz file of tracks and places on the trip.

Korean Baseball Game

On Tuesday I got to attend a baseball game here in Seoul.  The Korea University ISC staff arranged for the professors to attend the evening game between the Dusan Bears (the home team) and the Lotte Giants who are from Yeongmi's hometown of Busan.  Our seats were on the 10th row or so, in the 3rd-base section with all the Giants fans.  We were in the lower section, right below the stage set up for the Giants cheerleaders.  Yes, they have baseball cheerleaders.  And yes, they need a stage.

Panorama Taken Early in the Game

Cheering at the game is a highly organized activity in Korea.  When the team is batting the fans all sing and chant various ditties that are customized for each player.  Many of these are recognizable pop songs.  For example one player's was the melody from "We're Not Gonna Take It" by Quiet Riot.  And as Tom noted, since almost every player has a name with three syllables, it is quite easy to rotate a new player's name into the song when he rotates into the batting order. 

The Giants Cheerleader

The cheerleaders were behind us, so I didn't see them very much, but I certainly heard them.  There was a male cheerleader who led the singing and chanting and bounced around very energetically on the stage, but there was also a back up band of sorts, with lots of drums and noise-making equipment.  This included a loud PA system with preprogrammed melodies for the chants.  There was also a team of four women who danced around between innings and who looked like they got lots of exercise.

Cheering was always quite positive.  The chanting was always some variant of "Player X ...  Our Team...  Home Run!"  There was never anything derogatory about the opposing team, like you might expect in the US.  Everyone seemed very good-natured, if passionate in some cases, even the more inebriated.  Everyone participated in the singing, chanting and other activities, at least in our section.  And there were clearly rules for when this was allowed.  We never sang when the other team was up to bat; that time was reserved for their cheerleading squad over in the 1st-base section .

The extra activities included distributing bright orange Lotte Department Store shopping bags during the 5th inning which we all inflated, tied off, and then wore on our heads with the handles attached to our ears so they wouldn't fall off.  Diehard fans wore these until the end of the game.  Apparently, this is a Lotte Giants thing that only their fans do.  We also sang some more extended songs toward the end of the game.  The only one I recognized was "Come Back to Pusan Harbor," which I sang along with.

A whole section of bag-heads

 A True Lotte Giants Fan

Another Diehard Fan

The game was fun to watch.  The Giants won in the 10th inning.  They were up 3-1 in the bottom of the 9th and the relief pitcher gave up a two-run homer to send the game into the 10th.  The Giants managed 2 runs at the top of the 10th and won the game when the Bears got no hits in their final at bat.  The crowd loved it, at least on our side of the field.  Things did get very quite in the bottom of the 9th in our half of the stadium, but the noise in the 10th made up for that.

Stadium after the Lights Came Up

Video Footage of the Game

Trip to Ulleungdo, July 2011

Ulleungdo is a small island 75 miles off the east coast of Korea. It is a fairly popular tourist destination in Korea, though the island only holds about 2000 tourists at any one time. The native population is about 8000. The name Ulleungdo is based on Chinese characters and it means “Island of Tree-Covered Hills”.

 Ulleungdo Mascots (Squid & Pumpkin)

I went to Ulleungdo this past weekend with a few of my fellow professors. We chose to depart from the city of Pohang, which is quite a ways south of Ulleungdo, rather than from the port of Mukho, which is much closer. This was because we did not make arrangements through a travel agency and public transportation to Pohang is much easier. We took the high speed KTX train to East Daegu station (under two hours) and then a Saemaeul train from there to Pohang (another 2 hours).

In Pohang we went straight to the ferry terminal and discovered that there was no one there selling tickets for the next day. There was, however, an office of the Azure Travel Agency (푸른여행사) open in the building. We spoke with a very nice woman in that office and asked if we could get tickets to Uleundo. The conversation went something like this:

“Is it possible to get tickets to Ulleungdo?”

“Of course. What day do you want to go there?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow? Oh my! What day will you be returning?”

“The day after that.”

“Sunday? Oh dear! How many tickets do you need?”

“Five.”

“Five? Heavens! Well, let me see what I can do.”

It turns out she had just got off the phone selling the last of her tickets for those days, but she managed to buy some from another travel agency after making a quick phone call. She was great; very helpful and concerned and she came through with the tickets in the end. She also set us up with a standard tour package that included a four-hour bus tour of the island, a two-hour sightseeing boat ride, and tickets to the tram in Dodong Village. Tom had already arranged a hotel on the island before we left.

I would highly recommend getting tickets in advance for this trip. We got really lucky. The Azure Travel Agency is a good place to do this. Their number in Pohang is (054) 282-5114. I note that we dealt with them entirely in Korean, so I don’t know how good their English is.

We arrived too late to take the ferry on Friday so we spent the night in Pohang. We had an interesting incident with the taxi driver taking us to the wrong hotel, presumably because it was further away and he got a larger fare. It wasn’t a mistake; he told us the name had changed. That evening we visited a nearby temple, Bogyeongsa, which I had visited once before about the same time of year in 1980.

 Panorama of Bogyeongsa

We took the Sunflower ferry from Pohang on Saturday morning. It left at 9:30 in the morning and arrived around 1:00 in the afternoon. It’s hard to say how many people fit on the boat because we could only see the coach cabins, but it was somewhere between 500 and 1000 people. Most of the travelers were parts of tour groups. Lots of people abandoned their seats and sat around on the floor playing cards, eating, and drinking rice wine (soju).

 Inside the Ferry

The arrival on the island was spectacular. The ferry arrives at Dodong harbor on the eastern side of the island. The harbor is an inlet with towering volcanic cliffs on either side and they are covered with lush green vegetation.

 Ferry at the pier in Dodong Harbor

We took a four-hour tour by minibus on Friday afternoon. There were 15 or 20 people on the bus including our party, several older Korean ladies, and a bunch of guys who were all part of the same work crew at a company. As Tom so aptly noted, it was a “soju-lubricated” tour; lots of drinking, which led to singing, and clapping, and bawdy jokes. The driver was a real entertainer, but also gave lots of interesting information. We stopped at 1) Turtle Rock which looks like a turtle from the right angle, 2) Taeha on the northwest point of the island, which has a path over the cliffs to a fishing spot and pavilions overlooking the sea, 3) a pier on the north shore to take photos of Songgot Peak, 4) a cave with natural air conditioning, 5) a small museum in Hyangpo where I had to wait for the old ladies to finish using the men’s restroom before I could use it, 6) the Nari basin inland which is actually inside the crater of the old volcano, where we had a snack of Korean pancakes, 7) an herb shop on the north shore, and 8) a shop selling pumpkin taffy, a local export.

 Turtle Rock

Our Tour Bus

Songgot Peak was very impressive. It’s a 1500-foot volcanic cone that rises from the seashore almost strait up.

 Songgot Peak in the Distance

Dodong at Night

The next morning we took a very crowded sightseeing boat around the island. It took a little under two hours and we saw many of the same places as Saturday, only from the sea. We got a very good view of Elephant Rock. When we got around the northeast point of the island we went into a fog bank and didn’t see much for the last 20 – 30 minutes.

 Our Sightseeing Boat

 Elephant Rock

After that we took the tram from Dodong Village up to a viewing platform near the top of Manghyang Peak. The view of the village and harbor below was quite stunning.

 Stitched Panorama of Dodong from Manghyang Peak

After lunch, but before leaving on the ferry we walked along the path that is carved into the cliffs northeast of Dodong along the seashore. The water was very clear and inviting and eventually Abe could constrain himself no longer, so he jumped in and went swimming. He reported the water to be just as pleasant as it looked with a temperature of around 70 degrees.

 Abe Goes Swimming

Afterward it was a 3-hour ride on the ferry to Pohang, an hour wait at the train station, a 2-hour ride to Daegu, another wait, two more hours to Seoul, and a half-hour taxi ride from Seoul Station to the apartment. We got back a little before midnight.

If I were to go to Ulleungdo again (and I would love to), I would rent a car and stay for a longer time. The island does not have a serious traffic problem except in Dodong when the ferry is unloading. I would definitely like to do some hiking and maybe take a ferry to the Korean island of Dokdo, which is less than 60 miles to the southeast of Ulleungdo.

LINKS
My Picasa photo album from the trip
.kmz file with Google Earth viewable locations and tracks 
Wikipedia entry on Ulleungdo
Wikitravel entry on Ulleungdo
Ulleungdo Tourism Website

UPDATE

All My Videos from Ulleungdo, Shot with my iPhone 

Crack Canyon 2011

I'm in Korea now teaching and in my spare time I'm trying to catch up on my blogging.

This last April and May I made two trips to Crack Canyon in the San Rafael Reef.  The first was on April 14th with my family: Yeongmi, Alan, Joan and Joan's friend, Sophie.  The second trip was with the ventures in our ward on May 6th and 7th.

Both times we went down from the Behind-the-Reef road.  You can drive a four wheel drive a mile or so down the canyon from the turnoff until it starts to narrow and you need to park.  From that point on it's short walk past a easily bypassed pouroff to the short subway section of the canyon.  When I went with the ventures we spent the morning rappelling off of the rocks on the righthand side of the canyon just before the first pouroff.

The subway section is located at  38°37'22.7"N 110°44'10.6"W

The subway part is very picturesque, but also quite short.   Aftter that its a half mile or so to the next pair of pouroffs.  These are pretty easy to get down and also not too bad to get back up, even for a heavy guy like myself.  Below those two pouroffs another quarter mile or less you run into a series of two or three pouroffs that can be a bit tricky.  On the first trip with the family, we turned around after the 2nd one because the 3rd pouroff looked too far down.  You can bypass this section by looking carefully for some cairns on the left-hand side of the canyon where it makes a turn at 38° 37' 26" N 110° 44' 09" W.  You need to climb up though a fairly wide crack over some boulders, but after that it’s an easy trail on ledges around the difficult spots.  The ventures came back through the canyon bottom just fine, but older out-of-shape people should take the detour both ways.

 The 2nd of 3  tricky spots that can be avoided by a detour
This downclimb is at roughly  38°37'22.4"N 110°44'10.1"W

Finally, about a quarter mile below the bypass or last rough pouroff, you enter the narrows of Crack Canyon.  This section is about a tenth of a mile long, but it’s the best part of the hike.  The walls are straight and very high and it’s well-worth the hike.  You can continue on after this, but the canyon opens up and you end up hiking across terrain that is not nearly impressive as the part you’ve already been through.  Most people turn around and head back at the end of the narrows.

The narrows start at  38°37'10.7"N 110°43'59.7"W

(photo taken by Kyle Wheelhouse)

All-in-all it’s a really fun hike that should take only a couple of hours even if you go rather slowly, as I do.  When you're done you can say, "I had fun doing Crack!"

A Nifty Way to View Rock Art

I just discovered Photosynth, a photography software package and online gallery from Microsoft. It turns out to be a really good way to display rock art. It stitches all the photos together for you, and allows you to zoom in on details. The whole panel or gallery of rock art can potentially be linked together and it gives you a good context for seeing how the whole is laid out, while still allowing you to look at the details if you wish.

I put up several "synths", but a good example is the one from the Grand Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon.



This link will let you see all the synths I have put up so far.

Camping and Hiking at Muddy Creek, April 2010

Last April during Spring Break I took a group of friends and family down to Muddy Creek in the San Rafael Swell. We drove down on Thursday, April 8th after my classes were over at BYU. The group was myself, Evan, Lynn, Jarom, Alan, Joan, Sophie White, her brother Zack, and my colleague, Mark Showalter. We took my truck and Yeongmi's CRV. We met Sophie's dad, Johnny, in Salina on the way down.

The route took us south through Scipio, Salina, and we exited I-70 in the middle of the swell at exit 131. From there it was graded roads south to the Hidden Splendor Mine Airfield. We were getting close to dusk by the time we turned off the interstate and we missed the turn to head to the airfield. We didn't realize we were off course until we arrived at Temple Mountain. So we turned around and headed back the right way.

Route from Orem to the Hidden Splendor Mine Airfield

By the time we headed down the right road toward the airfield it was dark. We passed to men walking the other way in the dark and didn't realize for a few moments that we hadn't seen a car coming in. A few more miles later we found a group of hikers at the trailhead for Quandry Canyon and found out that they were waiting for their husbands/fathers to return with their trucks. They had been waiting for some time and were getting worried. So we drove down to our campsite and unloaded one of the vehicles quickly and Alan and I headed back to see if we could find the two men and help them locate their trucks. We stopped and picked up two of the hikers and then headed back up the road where we found the two men now hiking back to the trailhead. It turns out in the morning they had pulled their trucks off the road a couple hundred yards down a short dirt road and hiked cross country to the Quandry Canyon trail. When they arrived near sundown at the trailhead, they set off up the road to the trucks (about a mile) and had missed the turnoff in the dark.

The next day we were set to hike the Chute of Muddy Creek, but the weather was cold and we were worried that some of the younger ones in the party might find it too difficult. So instead we drove back around to Temple Mountain and down past Goblin Valley and hiked the Bell Canyon/Little Wild Horse loop. The trail was busy with all the families from northern Utah there on spring break, just like us, but it was a very satisfying hike nonetheless.

Upper Narrows in Little Wild Horse Canyon

Evan doing his best Bear Grylls, Man vs Wild, imitation

Rick Evans and his son, Wills, showed up at the campsite that afternoon. They had driven down that morning and spent the day at Little Wild Horse as well.

The next day we watched a small aircraft land and takeoff at the airfield next to our campsite.. Then we hiked downstream from our campsite through the Muddy Creek Gorge. This required crossing the river several times, but the water was not nearly as cold as we had feared the day before. it turned out to be a very beautiful and pleasant hike. It was warm and sunny, but early enough in the season that there were no mosquitoes or flies. We stopped at an old mining bunkhouse and tailings from the the old Hidden Splendor Mine. Apparently, the mine is still active, because we also saw another entrance downstream with a note to that effect posted on the outside. The Gorge is not a slot canyon, but it does narrow nicely with some wonderful towering sandstone cliffs. It was a great hike.

Old Car in the river bottom between the airfield and the Hidden Splendor Mine

Muddy Creek Gorge just downstream from the Hidden Splendor Mine

Looking upstream into the gooseneck in Muddy Creek Gorge

Afterward, it was hike back to the campsite and drive home. We decided to go back the way we had come and two of the vehicles were running on fumes by the time we pulled into Salina. Luckily the last 20 miles or so were all downhill and we coasted most of the way.