Sedentary life (of a sort) returned this week with the start of school. This semester, I'm studying Sanskrit, taught in a closet-sized room that fits exactly one large desk and 14 student desks in two rows. Fortunately for me, the teacher worked as an Electrical Engineer at Westinghouse for 20 years and, in addition to the ancient script, speaks Engineerese. You know, when a person sprinkles "gradient" and "parse" into conversational speech--my sort of people. Though, I do feel badly for the others in the class who major in Classics and Religion.

If you want to know why I'm taking Sanskrit, I can only provide the following picture of a Sanskrit quotation from my textbook:

If you don't love alphabets and scripts, I can't really explain any further.

Outside of Sanskrit class, I should report that I'm mostly sore muscles after falling into a new exercise routine. Other than the yoga class Leah and I are taking, exercise this week involves "anatomical adaptation" or basically going through the motions of exercise, with a fraction of the weight or effort. As weeks pass, the weights and exercise become heavier and more difficult, respectively. This is based on a synthesized recommendation from several of the library's finest books--clearly, authored by obsequious high school gym coaches. (Seriously, do all of these books have to include lame motivational speeches?) So far, my "workout" includes: picking up a couple of heavy weights to determine, for each exercises, my "one-rep max", which is used to calculate the weights for my new "sets and reps"; practicing saying, "sets and reps" without giggling; biking easily for 15 minutes, just long enough to make my butt hurt; slowly surveying the running route I plan to use; and splashing in the pool for 20 minutes. In other words, I've been relatively lazy this week and the meager effort I did put forth made me hurt.

Routine will pause this long weekend, while we drive east, visit friends, Zach and Corey, and continue to Danvers, Mass. to celebrate my Uncle Alan and his fiancee Ellen's nuptials.

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Boise, Idaho is where we've spent the last week in recovery. The tail end of the trip in the U.S. was, sadly, over-planned, over-optimized and over-strategized, which left us in a haggard state. Minutes after arriving at SFO, we sped in a rental car toward Portland. Of course, in the bay area "speeding" means going about 10 mph because there's so much traffic, but still, the jump from the flight to the car was hurried. In May, before leaving for Seoul, we had planned to camp at Mt. Shasta; however, we were too exhausted to make it that far and ended up camping at Stony Gorge Reservoir, which is a fine place to be unconscious from jet-lag, even with loud, obnoxious Humvee-driving neighbors. In the morning, we drove too quickly past some beautiful countryside, and waved out the car window at Mt. Shasta, before arriving in Portland to visit family. We had a great, but not long enough, time visiting and got to go on a peaceful Wilamette cruise before continuing to Boise.

While we've tried to recover since Monday, not all of the last week has been idle: several thousand pictures (seriously!) have been whittled down to several hundred, which were organized, captioned and now populate one of several online albums. Since we were unable to post pictures in China, some pictures have been added to old posts. We also finally managed to transcribe and post a few of the last blog entries from the trip and I got the GPS data downloaded and mapped. If you're a geek, like me, here are boring (or, maybe interesting) details about our trip:

• Within Asia, using buses, trains and ferries we moved from one accommodation to the next for a total of more than 7,400km (~4,600 miles), which works out to an average of more than 100km (~62 miles) per day. (Of course, the distance would be longer if I included the walking, hiking, motorcycle rickshaws, a traghetto, an inertial ropeway, subways and taxis, but that seems like overkill.)
• Details about where we stayed on each night of the trip are organized in a table. On average accommodations cost $32.42 per day, while the average cost of staying in either a tent, hotel/hostel or transport (with a bed) was $2.92, $26.58 and $204.04 per day, respectively--each roughly ten times more expensive than the next, which, ironically, is inversely proportional to how well we usually slept in each of the types.

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Korea's most famous national dish is kimchi, pickled vegetables, such as cabbage, seasoned with chili peppers and garlic, and then fermented in vinegar. There are dozens of different variations with popularity ranging from city to city and person to person. For many, it's spicy and aromatic enough to be spoken of with a dubious adjectives, such as, acquired. I acquired the taste quickly, but Leah did not, although she does not like dishes with a strong vinegar flavor.

Traditionally, kimchi is prepared, placed in large earthen-ware jar and buried in the ground for a few months. With high density living, however, among other things, burying kimchi has become impractical, so an expressly designed electrical appliance does the job. It looks a bit like a drop in freezer, but the temperature (and possibly humidity?) are controlled with a electronic panel on the front to simulate conditions underground. And, just in case you were wondering, like myself: I was told, no, you shouldn't prepare the kimchi, place it inside and just bury the entire appliance underground.

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David and I spent a blissful week camping between Sokcho, a town on the East Sea (otherwise known as the Sea of Japan), and Seolaksan National Park, which is about 12 kms from Sokcho, up in the mountains. Sokcho, which lies directly on the sea, is so well situated that the tourist bureau promotes it as The Tourist City Created by God. I think the camp ground should petition to have the same tag used for it's location: there aren't tons of camping sites in Korea, since it's so densely populated, but this one is perfectly placed between the coast and the park and there's a bus that runs between the two every 15 minutes. You'd think that would be perfect enough, but camping is such a popular activity, especially for families, that the campground shows movies every night on an outdoor screen. David was so taken with the idea of watching movies on a big screen while camping that he had to check out the movies they showed while we were there: The Day After Tomorrow, Chronicles of Narnia, and Welcome to Dongmakgol, an offbeat Korean movie about a mountain village's experience with the Korean war.

Thankfully, the Koreans don't do much dubbing, so the two American movies were in English with Korean subtitles, but we still didn't actually watch them, mostly because we were exhausted from our various activities during the day. Two mornings we spent hiking to temples and then a waterfall, after which lazing about camp was required before going into town for dinner. Our last day we spent all day on the mountain hiking up to one of the local peaks on a 13 km trail. The trail was a great technical hiking/light bouldering one; lots of fun going up, but rather jarring on the way down. We had a good time, but David described the day as "blisterful," which is apt. We were well rested for the long hike, though, having spent the previous day doing our best imitations of beach bums and paddling in the sea.

If only we had found such a great place to relax sooner than the week before we have to leave.

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We're back in Korea and now heading out to Soraksan National Park to reunite with our camping stuff after six weeks, so we won't be posting for awhile. But in the meantime, David's added some pictures to the posts from China and if you have free time, you're welcome to check out even more pictures on our flickr page:

www.flickr.com/photos/sopedestrian

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