Random picture of Loch Lomond:



I made it back to LeTourneau very smoothly. The flights were on time and Granny was there to pick me up for an early arrival in Houston.

We drove up to her house, grabbed my stuff and deposited it in my room. There were only a very few people in the dorm, but I ran around for about an hour saying hi to people.

The rest of the night consisted of the random, yet progressively building series of events that make me love evenings at LETU so much.

I sat down to play the 41 piano. Fjord heard me and walked in and we started talking. Then Spork walked in and we sat there for a good half hour in the so-called "make-out closet" until we collectively agreed to go to Whataburger.

So we drove down and ordered our burgers. We noticed, in addition to the normal Whataburger late-night crowd, there was a number of stranded bus passengers.

Their bus had tried to pull in to Whataburger, but the bus became stuck in the rut between the road and parking lot. The front and back ends had scraped too hard on the road and the wheels were unable to contact the ground hard enough to move the bus.

We finished our burgers and as we were walking out to the car, a huge purple tow truck pulled up. "Hey, this could be fun," we thought so we sat down and watched the tow truck pull it out.

The next day, IMPACT retreat immediately started. Today I have carpet to put down, generally putting all my stuff away. I hope to start on academic business in earnest this week.

OK, so I should probably update this thing before I leave.



There's a taste of some new Flickr-age.

The weather has been phenomenally good since we came to Scotland. The locals call it a bit of a heat wave, but I seriously doubt the temperature has gone over 90 degrees Fahrenheit since we arrived. Glorious sunny days that don't make you sweaty and hot.

My dad is working with the Reformed Presbyterian church here in Airdrie, and Pastor Quigley kindly gave him the first few weeks off to do household business and do a bit of sightseeing.

My folks and I have been in Scotland for five weeks now, and have settled in quite nicely. More than ever, I have immensely enjoyed just hanging around the house doing nothing at all, eating whenever and sleeping late most mornings. Wouldn't want it forever, but this summer certainly isn't.



We stayed fairly busy the first couple of weeks, moving things, setting up beds and phone lines, and then going to see castles or something when we had to get out of the house. Airdrie itself isn't much to see, but it is ideally situated in the middle of Scotland.

Stirling Castle is lovely and just 40 minutes to our north. It's been restored to a Reformation-era style and overlooks the plain of Bannockburn where William Wallace scored his greatest victory against the English.

They have a monument in a garden there to a man in the 1500s who angered his compatriot and was unfortunately thrown out a second-story window to his death.

I tried watching Braveheart, since it is the quintessential William Wallace/Scotland type movie and wow, I was really not impressed. I don't know; something just struck me wrong. Probably a lot of it has to do with Mel Gibson's hair.

But also I thought it just dragged too slowly. I dig long movies when they're good, but this was too much.

A few weeks ago we also went to Loch Ness. It's a very long, thin and deep lake.

The Scots often snub the English, and proudly relate that the loch contains more volume of water than all the rivers and lakes of England. Of course, more water doesn't mean better, as far as I know, and the Scots could no more fill the lake than they could win a war against the English... OK, so that was harsh. ;)

Urquhart Castle is this really beautiful and old medieval castle right on the shore of Loch Ness and we walked all over it. It has this really interesting history and changed hands a number of times between the English, Scottish and some clans through several significant sieges. Sausages sizzling savorily in sunlight. In the summer.

Just last week, Candace, Amy, Ben and I took our own trip into Glasgow, which is a 30-minute train ride away. Traffic and parking in the city is terrible but it is easy to take a train almost anywhere in the city we need to go.

We hung out at Starbucks (our first in Scotland), walked around, looked at shops, ate, and generally flowed "with the wind." It's a fun city to walk about and doesn't completely swallow you like a bigger place.

Come to think of it, I still don't know my grades from Korea. Now there's a scary thought.


So I am definitely ready to be back in Texas for a while. I am taking 18 hours this fall and I am looking forward to each class in its own way. I still need overrides for three of those classes. :D

As for after grad, I have some options there but nothing firm yet.

I still cringe thinking about what a kid I was just three falls ago, and that process isn't over by any means. But I am thankful to LETU and all the people there that have taught me so much.

But we musn't end the post all mushy like, so I will now tell you the *real* subtitle of Lady In The Water, which I just watched.

"Adrien Brody with Dreadlocks: The Grass Dog Gets Owned By The Three Monkeys of Justice!"

If any of that seems unlikely, well then you just watch the movie!

A ham sandwich.

A Taco Bell Grilled Stuft Burrito.

Three meat casserole.

Cranberry juice.

Frito pie.

Good black coffee.

These things make me happy. :)

I'm still adjusting to US time. The flight back went smoothly. I didn't sleep much but the time went by quickly.

We're packing and such for the move. We'll be sharing a flat in Airdrie, a town of 40,000 not too far from Glasgow. My dad will be working with the Reformed Presbyterian church there.

And now I'm getting really tired which isn't good for making interesting posts, so I'll end with a photo.



It's Pohang, with a bunch of my Handong homies.

And today's random picture, comes from Festival time, Handong, just before midterms...



One more final before I'm done for the semester. It's American History and definitely what I'd consider to be my easiest final.

A week from today I fly out of Incheon. Korea's been good but I'd be lying to say I wasn't excited about the US/UK.

The weather has been warming up, but like other places I've lived, the weather rarely stays the same all day. It can be really hot in the morning and when a rain front moves in, you need a jacket for the evening.

The dorms don't have air conditioning, but on the plus side, the construction crew outside our building hasn't worked in the last few days, so we keep the windows open.

I made a Wal-Mart trip on Tuesday afternoon. I make microwave spaghetti... mmm.

Prof. Duvernay, of Korean history fame, took a poll of the students asking who had the coolest presentation. Guess who won? The prize was this Korean language history book. So, I can't read it, but the professor said before giving it to me, "It has lots of pictures."

I handed in two finals this morning and immediately went back to bed. I knew I hadn't gotten enough sleep the night before, but now, after a 4 hour nap, I can't convince myself that it's still Thursday.

Can't think of much more randomness...

I can't stand the annoying arrangements on a lot of old big-band style songs, but I have really digged two songs recently... Dean Martin "Blue Moon" and Julie London "Cry Me A River." And yeah, they're both really sad...

Last Saturday night, there was a big fireworks display on the beach in Pohang. I wasn't initially planning on going, not knowing exactly where it was and having no one to go with, but John got me. We hopped on some random bikes and went pedaling for the beach. We soon realized we wouldn't make it, since we started too late, but we stopped on a mountain dug out for road construction and had a nice, private, cool long-distance view of the show.



Last night was Korea's first game in the World Cup (soccer, for the completely uninitiated, like me). To this day, I can't recall watching an entire soccer match through. The closest I came was one of the collegiate games at LETU, but even then, it was a newspaper assignment.

This first game was the biggest sports celebration I've ever seen. Americans just don't have the same passion for any sport, even football or baseball, that many other nationals have for soccer. These people would scream and shout and almost dance, when their team simply had the ball. When they made a score, it is unusual *not* to get a slap or hug from a screaming fan.

Handong provided their own pre-show and halftime show.





Admittedly, I have no strong emotional ties with soccer, or the performance of teams from Togo or South Korea. I do favor a degree of sportsmanship, in any game, along the lines of not laughing out loud when an opposing player slips, injures himself and rolls on the ground in agony.

For the Koreans I was with, it was more a matter of, well, nationalism I would call it. Korea is the best. Korea can't be stopped. Korea couldn't care if their team played a bunch of cripples because it's all about winning. We base our national pride on whether we can outplay a tiny African nation. Go Korea.

I'm a foreigner so how could I "get it."

Stryder wanted haircut pictures. Very well then.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present before and after...

Bookshelf madness

It's Monday.

Still handwriting the US Constitution. I'm on the 17th Amendment. Almost done.

No classes tomorrow. Memorial Day!

Rice cake presentation on Friday. You ever done a rice cake presentation? Hmm? Yeah, I thought so.

Shaved my head last night. I'm not quite bald, but not far from it. Prof. Schoenhoff led the psych class in a round of applause for my "bravery."

The wind and sun feel delicious on my head.

Mukolo got a new camcorder, and he also pulled out an old webcam.

We were bored.

One day shortly before spring break, I was randomly playing guitar on the front steps of the dorm and people stopped around to say hi and plan what they were doing for the break. It's the I-House boys...



I have plenty of homework (for one of my law classes, we are to handwrite the Constitution), but last night I went out and finally saw MI3. Now, I don't know why the critics hated it, but I was pretty impressed with the film. Definitely kept me on my toes and certainly enjoyed it more than MI1.

Before you go out for the night and see movies or whatever, you have to sign out of the dorm. They have room checks at 11 PM to make sure you aren't off being mischievous, I guess. So before I went to the theater, I signed out.

Name: (I scribble in my name here)

Room: (room number goes here)

Place: Cinema

Reason:

And here I pause. I could write the obvious, that I am going to the cinema, to, you know, watch a movie, but that seems too straightforward. So I thought of the most random thing I could...

flying with unicorns

Satisfied, I drop the pen and go to my movie.

I came back later that night, and lo and behold, on the sign-in sheet to mark my return, entered conspicuously into the top of the dorm computer system, is my name, telling me in 13 pt. Arial that I went to the cinema to fly with unicorns. Can't believe the RA girl actually typed it into the computer. Maybe she thought it was the name of the movie?

This morning I went with some other students to a local church. We read Bible stories and taught some basic English to about 200 kids. I read stories with kindergartners and then had a discussion time with fifth and sixth graders. I do my best, but I'm just not a little kiddies person.

There, finally fixed the layout. I also uploaded pictures of Seoul from spring break. There's no captions with them, but as always, the Flash slideshow is a dandy thing. I still need to write about Seoul but I'm too tired to do it tonight.

Buenas noches.

Well, OK.

I just had the Blog Apocalypse of 2006, which means my mouse accidentally selected too much of my HTML template and thusly I ended up saving something wrong. I have an old version of the template that I can work with to get it back but for now I am making just the home page pink to motivate me to get it fixed soon.

Tomorrow is a very busy day and I have emails to answer and pictures of the weekend to upload, 3 hours of English tutoring to do and I never did finish the term paper. So, bask in the pinkness.

I very nearly used the word "facilitater" in my term paper (which, combined with its shortened form 'tater', I thought the funniest thing all day), so it is obviously time to throw in the towel, hit the sack and all those other crazy idioms.

I thought this quote fitting:

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."
Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

I was tired of writing on my term paper, so I decided to update. Here's a random picture of a kid walking back from school in downtown. Photo credit goes to my roomie Mukolo.



The post-midterms laziness has set in, a middle-of-the-semester effect I call the slacker solstice. The work should get more difficult as the semester draws to a close, which is coming coming coming.

I don't think of my time in terms of months; now, I count the weekends until I leave, which really represent my final opportunities to get out and about before I have to go.

For Korean History, my team project people and I finally got our act together and visited a bakery. Yes, our project is the history of Korean rice cakes.

We will try to make a few, or at the very least, take pictures and claim we had a hand in it.

The man was very obliging to answer all our questions, none of which I understood since it was all Korean. This is one of those projects where I really have to trust my teammates.

We visited at 6 in the morning since that is when he makes the new rice cakes every morning. It was cool to visit the street vendor part of town, when the shop owners are setting up and before all the buyers come.

It's my goal to finish this term paper today. I'm writing on legal issues in the computer gaming industry. It's actually a fun paper to write since it's a topic I enjoy (not just the gaming part, but the legal aspect too).

Life in the I-House grinds on. This is a dorm not renowned for its openness. So many international students from so many backgrounds make any kind of cohesiveness rather difficult, so people keep to themselves.

It's a far cry from 41, but at least it's a better place to study than the library. The guy next door to me is a diligent CounterStrike recruiter, copying his hallowed version 1.5 to anyone who says yes. We're also slowly making our way through the Band of Brothers series, which I'd never completely seen.

So apparently, tomorrow, I'm having lunch with the university president. My roomie Mukolo, a friend of President Kim's, Jordan and myself are going; not sure of the details beyond that.

There's some kind of I-House talent show next week and people have been pressuring me non-stop to sign up. I don't want to, but apparently this Russian guy will do some rapping that goes well with a guitar, so I agreed to accompany him. I'll let you know how acoustic Russian rapping goes, should be fun.

This weekend I'm going with a few guys to Seoul, to see the sights. It was a cheaper option for things to do during the school's mid-semester break. We'll leave for that sometime tomorrow afternoon.

I'm checking around on grad school application deadlines. It also occurred to me that I have to take the GRE sometime in the not-so-distant future. It's like the SAT, resurrected from its unholy pit and brimming with malice after four years with the undead. Yikezorz.

You know, if you try to pronounce GRE like a word, it sounds like someone getting stabbed.

So, the plan at this point is to graduate this December. I think I figured a way for that to work. It will save me quite a bit of money to do that, and allow me a semester to prep for the Big Leagues, as it were.

Well, I've dawdled long enough. Gotta write this paper, and then later, there's some kind of special chapel service, and students are supposed to hold national flags, and Mukolo asked me to represent the United States. Ummkay.

More updateage! I put up three more Flickr sets; I've linked to each one directly as I talk about it in the post.

But before you see the Flickr photos, check out my breakfast.



Yes, that is milk in my bowl, and no, I haven't added the cereal yet. Hooray for powdered milk.

A few weeks ago, there was Korean culture night, which was essentially a 2-hour artistic and taekwondo presentation, followed by food. It was cool. I got to play the Korean guitar thing, which I wish I could try again. It was like a cool mixture of harp and guitar, except sideways, with the dynamics of a harmonica.

In the flickr set, there's a picture of the professional performers playing them. There was also singing, a martial arts demonstration and dance.

I've put up two sweet videos recorded by Jordan, my American pal from Cedarville University.

Taekwondo, punching boards (Quicktime format, 7.2 megabytes)

Dancing girl (Quicktime format, 4.3 megabytes)

The dancing girl was probably in junior high; in my opinion, she easily had the best dance of the evening. So nimble. I apologize that this clip was recorded at 90 degrees. Pictures!

So, school school school, and then this last Thursday I slipped out of Law & Contempoary Issues a bit early to attend a dinner for international students. Apparently, some recent graduates and friends of the university had set up a scholarship for international students, so we had a big dinner to publicize it.

We rode a very crowded university bus to a wedding hall and buffet type place. They made the presentations and brief speeches. I thought President Kim did a very slick job of doing what university presidents do: thanking donors for money while simultaneously asking for more.

Then, we ate. And then, the sponsors decided to hang around since everyone was having such a good time, so they brought out the karaoke machine. A few people played and showed considerable talent, including the proprietor of the establishment himself.

John and I were thumbing through the book of available songs. I put my finger on "I'm A Believer" by the Monkees and we both just started laughing. So several of us agreed to do it. I walked up to the mike, demanded that the others stop being chicken and come up with me.

They did, and wow, we had the place hopping. Jordan backed down on singing along with me, but apparently he and the others had a nice snapping/dancing routine going. One guy even did an impromptu break dance at the song's climax. Good times.

I met Dr. Henk and we had a good talk. When I mentioned I was from 41, he specifically remembered Abu off the top of his head, so Abu, if you read this, you apparently made an impression on Dr. Henk.

So, the dinner was cool, and people kept on taking pictures.

And then...

The next day, Jordan and I decided to go to Kyungju. People are always telling me, "Oh, you have to Kyungju." So on Friday May 5, we did. We decided to just go despite not knowing how to get there, and also without a Korean native to accompany us.

We took a bus out of Pohang, which is a city of about 750,000, and went to Kyungju. From Korean history class (hrm), I happen to know that it was Korea's capitol city for a stretch of roughly a thousand years. It's certainly a good place, protected by mountains but flat and good for construction.

We rented bicycles and just started riding around. We found a cool park, explored the city a little, and generally didn't worry so much about not knowing where we were going. I definitely want to go back and actually see some of the things Kyungju is famous for, but as an introduction, it was a great day off-campus. Pictures!

So there you have it folks.