Fulbright Spring Conference 2014

Just a few photos from Fulbright's Spring Conference held at the beginning of this month. Hard to believe April is almost over, now that I think about it... Anyway, the conference was nice. Good to see my friends again. The programming was long and pretty tedious since a lot of it I'd heard before (last year), but if I'm honest with myself, you can never learn too much or prepare too well. Satisfaction with one's current performance is mostly a lack of desire to keep growing and improving, and that leads to complacency. So I took notes. Said notes are in my office at school, so I'll type them up later. But without further ado, here are some of the aforementioned photos!

Spring Conference peer-led workshops. I led one that was a panel discussions for first-years wondering about what doing a second-year is like.

Spring Conference is when the Fulbright researchers present the contents of their research projects, so we also had discussion small groups with them. The cool researchers held their small groups outside!

I went to my friend Adam's small group. He's been studying street dance and performance art in Korea, so our "discussion" mostly revolved around him teaching us some basic hip hop moves. Ha! All the other small groups may have been more professional, but ours was more fun.

And this was the view from our hotel on Jeju Island. Gorgeous. Perfect weather. I want to go back!

On Friday night, there was a fundraising game night that involved an "ice cream pie" contest. Contestants had to search for a missing gummy bear inside a dish of ice cream... using just their faces.

It got pretty messy pretty quick. Entertaining, though.

Our winners! Or did everyone lose?

Saturday night, we had a special dinner of Jeju's specialty, black pork. We ate a ton! I'm really going to miss Korean barbecue when I leave. (Actually, I think I'm going to go back to being vegetarian in the States...)

Saturday night was a fun event at a local club called Monkey Beach: "Fulbright Prom", organized by some Fulbrighters as a fundraiser and a party just for us. I never went to my high school's prom, actually, so it was kind of funny for me to go. L to R: me, Ashley, Amy, and Anna.

Seogwipo's Monkey Beach is so legit! It was huge, for one, and had game rooms, arcade rooms, karaoke rooms, a stage, and even a waterslide! I had a really great time.

Having a great time at Fulbright Prom! L to R: Cait, Patrick, Katelyn, Jennifer

The club's actual waterslide! It was ridiculous and amazing!

Jake and me. Hm... I've got to stop making it a habit to put my arm around the shoulders of people taller than me.

Our fearless Program Coordinator, Andrew, and Executive Assistant, Liam. Props to them for putting together a great conference!

Dropping by Jeju

Plush horses of Jeju!

Whew, a solid week of travel really knocked me out! Since Monday of last week, I've moved around via bike, bus, plane, ferry, rental car, hippie car, subway, tram, local train, regional train, bullet train, and even a sideways elevator; I've ventured across mountains, across and above seas, and to an uninhabited island, stopping at ten cities along the way. And the first thing I did when I arrived back in Changwon was go to taekgyeon practice.

So now I'm exhausted. Fortunately, I have a solid week to refresh and look back on a great week that really made my vacation seem like a vacation before flying off somewhere else. Part 1: Jeju Island! I went to meet with a professor for consultation about my Castleberry research project but also spent some time with Fulbright friends.

On Monday morning, I got a sorely needed haircut, cleaned up my apartment, and then left for the airport. As usual, it took about a minute to get my boarding pass and get through security; though I was hours early, I passed the time with a book, The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester, which was gifted to me by a good friend. It was late afternoon and getting dark when I arrived on the island, but I found my way to my friend Vika's apartment in Jeju City and we caught up, her telling me awesome stories from her recent trip to Laos.

A 돌하르방 at the entrance to JNU

On Tuesday morning, after a paradoxically calming and invigorating yoga session at Vika's favorite local studio, I took a nice brisk walk to the nearby Jeju National University. You can just see the peak of Mt. Halla from the campus; South Korea's highest mountain was covered in snow. At JNU, I met up with Professor Yang to talk about my research project on Jeju-eo. The meeting was fruitful and encouraging in some ways but slightly discouraging in others. The good news is that Professor Yang is 100% on board with my project and thinks that it is an amazing idea and opportunity. The bad news is that, realistically speaking, it's going to be more difficult than I anticipated. We must figure out a way to conduct our own fieldwork (I had wrongly assumed that there would be an existing corpus of recordings of the language), and the timing is not ideal. Despite this, I had a great talk with the professor, gained a lot of useful information about Jeju-eo, and left the meeting feeling extremely encouraged about my prospects.

In the afternoon, Vika and I took a bus headed for the sleepy city on the south side of the island, Seogwipo. This express bus cut right through the island, climbing dizzily through the mountain roads for twenty minutes until we were surrounded by snow, then barreling down the other side for twenty minutes until we saw the beach again. It was an odd journey. In Seogwipo, we walked along the Olle Trails for some scenic views and visited the Jeongbang Falls (정방폭포), the only waterfall in Asia that falls directly into the ocean! Although it was cloudy out, it was still quite a sight, and even though it was the middle of winter, there were plenty of tourists, especially Chinese.

(An aside: a ticket to see the falls costs two bucks normally, but youth aged 24 or under can get in for one. When I saw this information at the ticketing booth, I realized that, it now being 2014, Vika and I, as well as everyone in the world born in 1990, were now 25 by the Korean system of age-reckoning. But we went for it anyway and showed our ID cards, and score! We got the half-price tickets.)

Jeongbang Falls on a cloudy January day.

Vika and me at 정방폭포

After some more hiking, chatting, and eating delicious Jeju oranges, which are now in season, we met up with some of the Fulbrighters who live and teach in Seogwipo. We hung out in Jessica's apartment and ate tons of cookies while laughing over travel stories and commiserating about graduate school and those onerous applications.

For dinner, we went to a popular barbecue restaurant that Kristen has gone to many times before with her school faculty. It's called 새섬갈비 (Saeseom Galbi/BBQ), and it's amazing. The black pork (흑돼지) is so thick, and the side dishes are good. Prices quite reasonable for the portions. I'd definitely go back, but the best part of the dinner, of course, was sharing it with friends.

At the end of the day, Vika and I took the bus back north to Jeju City; flying through winding, dark roads in the rain (no lights except those from passing cars on this terrifying route) was pretty nuts, but our bus driver seemed to know what he was doing. And on Wednesday morning, I left a cold and rainy Jeju to board my flight back to the mainland. Goodbye, Jeju! I'll be back again soon.

Pure yum. I used to be a vegetarian, but in Korea I'll enjoy a grilled pig any day.

Dinner with friends! Left to right: Jessica, Kristen, and Vika, all of whom are going to go on to achieve amazing things. And then there's me. Taken by Taxi.

Photos from Jeju

Well, it's been a rather gloomy and dismal day, and that's not just on account of the weather. It's gotten cold in Changwon lately, and there have been scattered rains. Also, awful things are happening in the United States and around the world. So it's time to go to my happy place and relive memories from Jeju Island (where I attended the Fulbright Spring Conference two weekends ago).

This was the view from my hotel room! It was in Seogwipo, on the southern coast of the island, looking south at nothing but ocean.

First stop on the one-day tour of the island: famous volcanic rock columns making interesting formations at the water's edge.

The peak of Sunrise Peak! (일출봉정상/Ilchulbong jeongsang) (taken by Adam)

It took about 20 minutes to get to the top, and the wind was blasting us the entire time. Here's another shot at the peak, facing east.

Looking west, back toward the island... it was gorgeous! 아름답네요! I love the colors of the water and the rooftops.

Down by the beach, Jeju's famous female divers were looking for shellfish. When they found their catch, they'd discard the beautiful shells. But this one I picked up in a tide pool. (Seems like I also got photobombed by Ashley.) (taken by Katelyn)

Cuttlefish/squid (오징어/ojingeo) drying on a line on the coast. Nom nom nom...

"I hope the Pacific is as blue as it has been in my dreams."

A Jeju pony! Riding one is on my Korea bucket list.

Have I mentioned yet that it was super windy and cold all day? Jeju is famous for its women (the divers), rocks, and WIND!

Super-windy. 바람이 불었어요.

But then we went somewhat inland to chill by a beautiful river and take a short hike to see a waterfall.

And here is the aforementioned waterfall, called Cheonjiyeon Waterfall (천지연폭포), or Sky-Land Waterfall. The hollowed-out bottom portion is made up of softer, porous volcanic rock, which has been worn away by the splashback of the waterfall, while the upper granite portions remain.

Since my departing flight was on Monday evening, I had time to hike up a hill in Jeju City with some Fulbright friends at sunset.

We also visited an arboretum. Ginger is standing in a sculpture of the hanja (Chinese character) that reads 木 (목), or tree. Adam is doing Gangnam Style because he is silly. We also got dinner, and I had 제주 육개장, and it was delicious.