Command has been promoting the K-16 summer fest for over a month now. Come to summer fest! It’s a Friday off! All the cool people from not just this base, but Yongsan and the surrounding Seongnam community will be there! Naturally, the day arrives and there is rain. This isn’t just any rain, though: it’s [...]
Last year for the fourth of July I sat in the apartment most of the weekend, emerging briefly to see the on-base fireworks display. This year I plan to top that: I’ve got a four-day weekend, an off-base pass, and a well-stocked debit card: I am travelling. Right now I’ll sleep a few hours, then [...]
I’ve been reading books about North Korea since I got here to the South. I think that by this point I’ve got a fair sense of what the nation is, and what it might do. Given that, I think that the US, S. Korea, and as many of the UN as we can convince should [...]
Last Friday I took a tour of the Blue House: Korea’s executive mansion and offices. It was a nice enough tour, though we were only allowed to take pictures from three designated locations. For the most part, the landscapes were beautiful and the architecture stately. There were two exceptions: two carefully manicured lawns which had [...]
Out and about in Songtan the other day visiting a friend from college who through pure coincidence is also currently stationed in Korea, we saw a truck open on an anonymous corner near his apartment containing lots of stage gear: lights, reflectors, etc. It generated a moment’s curiosity, as there is no nearby theatre, but [...]
The roads in Korea aren’t laid out in anything I’d recognize as a rational plan. They loop and weave crazily between each other, as if there had been a huge surplus of highway construction funds divided evenly between a number of firms contractually bound not to connect to each others’ roads except at a stoplight [...]
Seoul is beautiful to fly over at night. This is an entirely unsurprising observation. What’s a little less obvious until you’ve actually seen for yourself is that whoever’s in charge is clearly a huge fan of SimCity. It’s a big, successful city, so there’s no question that they’re good at it. Still, it also shows [...]
I never thought before going to flight school that weather would be such a big part of piloting. Even in flight school, I figured that since they train us in instrument flying techniques, bad weather wouldn’t be a huge deal. Now I’m learning that I was naive. The fact of the matter is that pretty [...]
My weekend project: unboxing approximately 500 pounds of books and alphabetizing them onto their shelves. It’s finally done–allowing me to end my Amazon-fast and order new books again without guilt. My prediction: by the time I leave here, I’ll have at least one more bookshelf, and it will be at least half full.