On the road!

Surreal nightmare at the moment, but comical. It’s 3:10 AM on July 4th and I am lying in bed at a Korean ski resort next to a guy named Ed who teaches outside St. Louis. Nice guy, but he has sleep apnea and snores like a chainsaw. I’ve now been sick for three days and am struggling through palace and museum visits trying not to lose it in he bus or in my pants… I’ve read about these types of things but have never experienced one myself. I just can’t seem to shake this bug. Decided that today was the day that I would go for the bip bap bop, a traditional Korean meal that usually contains meat. In fact, we had two big meals today, both which I ate about a cup or two of rice and vegetables. One was this spectacular buffet of stuff, but sadly, I could not take advantage. We are traveling south and then east, and will end up close to the east coast today. On the way we stopped at a restored palace and shot arrows. That was fun, [pretty kid like but it was absolutely a tourist fun thing at the restored palace thing… Then we continued south to a museum on the site of the fist known place in the world to produce metal type, beating Gutenberg by about 70 years. Both are UNESCO world historical sites, which seems to be big here, but I get thee feeling that Unesco is kind of a brand name” for authentic and important tourist site", kind of like piece of the park service in every congressional district…Still, I enjoyed the museum. It had the steps of making metal type all depicted in life size animated diorama form. The talking monks Adam’s apples moved, which I thought was a sign of high quality animatronics. The museum had lots of wood block prints as well, very intricate, all Buddhist texts, most training stuff for teaching new monks. The oldest metal printed book from this place is in France somewhere. The archery and the print museum were the main memories of the day although I did enjoy looking out the bus window between uncomfortable bouts of nausea.