A scene from a supermarket in Harbin, China.
Category Archives: Wandering & Travelling
I’ve never really liked those headphones they use on flights. They’re uncomfortable, ill-fitting and the sound’s almost always terrible. Then there are headphones used on my recent China Southern flight.
WTF is this? The ‘phones are completely wireless (har har!) and are basically hollow tubes of plastic moulded to a stethoscope-like form. Yup, the hollow, wireless tubes are not a mistake.
Each set of stetho…I mean, headphones come with white sponge cylinders that you’ve to fit over the ear area or risk poking out your eardrums (I think). There’s some means to adjust the height of the headphones but I’m not too sure what use that is.
These headphones work by transporting and amplifying the sound from the holes in your armrest to your ears. It’s not like a modern day version of string-and-cups because that requires more technology. This is like a sound-hose. If you pull up the armrest and listen carefully, you can actually hear music coming out from it.
Ridiculous.
Or sheer genius.
For $17, you could get a sashimi meal or a good portion of cod steak. Or you can visit the COEX Aquarium in Seoul and gush at how cute the creatures you’d otherwise eat are. (more…)
The first thing you have to know about the Korean unicycle team is that they’re really more of a crowd than a team like we Singaporeans are. Unicycling became huge in Korea after the master of the taekwondo gyms there decided that it was a great sport for the members to be part of. When we started the Asia-Pacific Unicycle Championships eight years ago, the Koreans were new and it showed. When we were in Korea in August, the unicycling crowd numbered in the hundreds. And we played the best of them. (more…)
If you look hard enough, you’ll find a T Rex at every corner. Goseong Dinosaur Museum is hard to locate if you don’t read Korean. It’s hard to find out how to get to Goseong to begin with since it’s pronounced the same as Gosong which is a separate town/province and there’s yet another Goseong which is on the East Coast of South Korea. This Goseong is all the way down South, closer to Suncheon and seemingly devoid of a train stop. It’s probably a bad investment on my part to spend just a night in town since it involved a 4 hour bus ride from Seoul. There didn’t seem much else to see though, apart from the museum and the coastline but it’s definitely a worthwhile visit. (more…)
[Photos are from an old post]
A while ago, I brought my Superheadz ultra wide angle toy camera on a trip and screwed up my roll of film. These pictures are the only ones that didn’t end up blank. A friend reckons they’re actually very good in an artistic way. I guess I like the first one. I found out some weeks back that the reason for the camera malfunction is a stuck shutter. The spring was loose and didn’t close when I snapped pictures. I wish I found that out before heading to Mongolia.
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A recap vid from the last International Unicycling Convention held in Wellington last year.
Next year’s is in Brixen, Italy. If you have a unicycle, you should go even if you can’t ride.
One of the things I consciously did just before and during my trip was to learn to read Korean script. It’s a phonetic system so it’s a lot easier to read than say, you know, Chinese. And because of its historical ties with China, there are borrowed words from the Chinese language which made it easier to pick up. The number system for instance, is so similar to Chinese it took me something like 5 minutes to memorize and learn.
On my first day, I made it a point to read to myself every sign that I came by so I was quite ready to read by sight menu items by the second day. The most useful term I learnt was how to ask ‘What is this?’ Each time I found something interesting, I’d ask what it is and cache the term in my head for use the next time I want to ask for the item. And that brought me to visit this wharf. (more…)
Hwanseon Cave is the largest limestone cave in South Korea and was really not on my list to begin with. I had intended to visit Samcheok for Haesindang Park but thought I’d stay an extra day to check out the city.
In the sweltering daytime heat, this was possibly the best move I made the entire trip. I haven’t been in caves before and so was completely caught off guard by the cold. Metal suspended walkways connected visitors to the caverns and bright neon lights lit the place enough to see where you’re going in some areas but not enough to scare off wildlife that purportedly still call the cave home.
If anything, the lights, coupled with the waterfalls and streams remind me of Chinese folklore where star-crossed lover-ghosts sigh and stare wistfully into the distance.
I’m surprised my camera caught some decent photos because the platforms were all moving and vibrating with each tourist’s step. I wish I had more pictures but most of them turned out blurry with light trails where the neon lights are.
How Does One Get There? Walking at a leisurely pace through the cave will probably take you a couple of hours just to enjoy the sights. From the Samcheok bus terminal, there are quite a few bus timings. Like in the rest of my trip, I found it pretty straightforward to locate the bus stop to alight at. There are 2 caves in the area – the other being Daegeumgul which is right beside it and has a separate entrance fee.
Haesindang Park or Penis Park, as referenced by too many traveler blogs, is both a boom and bane to Samcheok-si I’m sure. Like many before me, sculptures like the above are enough of a curio for me to venture out of the way to the coastal city. It’s unfortunate though that the rest of the city’s draws are overshadowed by the park but then again, people might just give the area a miss if it weren’t for Haesindang Park.
For the record, if my Chinese doesn’t fail me, the name of the park draws reference from Poseidon and doesn’t translate to anything phallic. The folklore goes that some fisherman was lost at sea and his lovelorn wife was so depressed, when she died, the village didn’t yield fertile land until some wise guy decided to offer some uhm, seeds of goodwill.
Unicorns fart rainbows. Unicyclists, we poop them.