School Day!

Here I am again, past midnight and I' m sitting down just starting to write. Went to school today. Slept in late this morning and headed off to a Christian Foreign language school. It's a private school with three grades, our 10 - 12. It started off with introductions and then a mini concert by a couple of student bands, The first was a rock & roll Jesus band, just OK, followed by a traditional folk Korean band, which was really good. Spacy gong player, but a very charismatic lead cymbal player. Backed up by energetic drummers. Got toured around by a junior who spoke very well, Timothy. Pretty much their success in life is to get into one of the SKY universities- Seoul, Korea or Yonsei. They really bust themselves for it. They arrive at school at 7 and stay until 11. So 3/4 ths of the students, those not living on campus are gone for 18 hours. Not a lot of sleep or social time. They seemed happy and immature to me, which makes sense as they are all in it together and have had very little real world experience. Everything rides on them doing well on the single exam that is given jus once a year. Very Confucian, historically.

Had some free time inthe afternoon, so walked a subwayed to Yonsan park where there is a big tower that overlooks the city. There are these mountains that pop up in the middle of Seoul. Streets and houses are built up to the base and then they leave the mountain as a park. They are really big rock bumps more than real mountains, but the shape is definitely a mountain, just the size is smaller. Not that small, the road to the top zig zags but is 2.2 K. I didn't make it. Got lost trying to find the right road, got herded and berated into the right direction by an elderly Korean woman who seemed to know where I wanted to go. I was wandering around in the publishing district heading uphill and constantly hitting dead ends. I guess it wasn't too hard to figure out what I was up to. Anyway, I follwed a stairway trail called the "Castle exploring" trail. I'll try for a photo here, but it will probably come out above.

It led up a huge number of stairs along the wall of what a I assume to be an ancient castle. Ended up at some mineral springs and another fitness park. I did see some magpies, a new type of dove and a butterfly I had never seen before. Nearly got lost trying to find my way back to a subway stop, but enough careful map work did it. Got back to the hotel in time to shower and change but no dinner.

Off to a concert with traditional Korean instruments and then a modern band that used some traditional instruments. Pretty cool, mist machine, light show, attractive women and a very charismatic front man that played the traditional stuff in a rockin' fashion. Crowd loved it, me too!

DMZ tomorrow, the whole group is psyched!

Had