The sounds of August’s first two days at Yeon and Nature

These are some sounds from August’s first few days. I love podcasts and audio pieces, so I’ll try to do a lot of audio only pieces like this. I’ll try to post them here to the blog, but probably won’t post all of them. If you want to listen to them all, you can find them on our SoundCloud account.




August meets Omma

August, Carly and I came home from the birthing center around noon on Wednesday.

After the surprise of seeing the apartment decorated with the art of family and friends, Carly and August settled in and I spent some time organizing things before heading out (my first goodbye to August) and catching the bus to the airport to pick up Carly’s mom, Cherie.

Cherie and I returned around 7:30. Here she is meeting her third grandchild and second grandson for the first time.


A New iPhone and Museums at Kyunghee University

Yesterday we travelled down to Hyewha to go to a cell phone store that speaks English. Ryan got a new iPhone 5S and Carly now has the iPhone 4.

After that, we walked into Kyunghee University and managed to find both their history museum and natural history museum. The first three museum photos show a couple of festive statues outside the library/history museum, Carly sitting in a cool chair and then a jar coffin in the history museum. Basically, it is two jars, or cups, that fit together to make a coffin. We’d never seen one before despite being to several history museums here in Korea.

Then we headed to the natural history museum and that’s where things got really interesting. It doesn’t look like it has changed much since the 70s and is filled with questionable taxidermy (look for the photo of the cats with the bulging eyes), specimens in bottles, pinned insects, and colorful murals that demonstrate a very 70s (I think) view of science, the universe, and especially the future. In particular look for the a very random diorama of the ‘Moslem Garden of Eden’, a cheesy robot covered in dead humans, and the vision of a future ‘oughtopia’.

You can check out the photos at http://flickr.com/gp/rcniman/8ED5U3/

Namdaemun!

Namdaemun is one of the gates of old Seoul. It is National Treasure #1. It was damaged by an arsonist in 2008 and for the past five years restoration work (using all traditional methods of stone and wood work) has been ongoing. It just reopened a few months ago so this was our first trip to see the restored gate.