• Wandering & Travelling

    Wandering the world. Sometimes with a unicycle. Sometimes on a unicycle.

    The Asia-Pacific Unicycle Championships 2011 in Seoul, South Korea

    by  • October 17, 2011 • Wandering & Travelling • 0 Comments

    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…)

    Dinosaurs in South Korea

    by  • October 11, 2011 • Wandering & Travelling • 0 Comments

    Around Goseong Dinosaur Museum

    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…)

    Three Photos

    by  • October 10, 2011 • Wandering & Travelling • 0 Comments

    [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.

    Manila

    Manila‘

    A Prickly Affair in Samcheok, South Korea

    by  • September 22, 2011 • Wandering & Travelling • 0 Comments

    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…)