Bike Tour

This summer Sara and I decided to get out on a bike tour. We took the train with our bikes from Portland to Tacoma, rode to my hometown, Port Townsend, where we stayed for a week with my cousins, then rode back to Portland, about 310 miles all told.

We had been talking about such a trip for a while, but needed to find a way to make it work out with our respective work schedules. Not taking any summer classes, I'd picked up some more hours at Clean Edge, and Sara was doing some program development for UC Riverside. Since both of our jobs allowed us to telecommute, we decided to take our laptops and take a working holiday.

Our Trek 520s fully loaded (food, camping gear, clothes, laptops), we set off for the Portland Amtrak station on September 4th for the start of our adventure. After only a little bit of confusion and getting yelled at by some Amtrak folks for riding on the platform, we were on our way. At Tacoma, we were excited to start riding, and immediately faced one of the steepest and longest hills I have ever ridden in my life. Not  the most auspicious start, but after getting to the top of it I took back everything bad I've ever said about the granny gear on a bike.

From there on we rode towards the beginning of the Scott Pierson Trail as suggested by Google Maps bike directions. Now I don't dislike hills - in fact I prefer going up them to down them, and have always thought of myself as a bit of a climber. These hills though, were so pointlessly miserable that getting out of Tacoma was the singular worst experience I've ever had on a bicycle. Up, down, up, down, up, down; you get the picture.

Once we got to the trail, the terrain became more reasonable, and we stopped for lunch at the War Memorial Park just before the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. Originally, our plan was to ride the 84 miles to Port Townsend, but the combination of not taking into account how long it'd take to get to Tacoma on the train, and how long it would take to get out of Tacoma, we were hopelessly behind schedule. We decided to just plow ahead and see where we were at when the sun started going down, roughly aiming for the Hood Canal Bridge.

Going over the Tacoma Narrows was a pleasure - there is a huge pedestrian / bike area that is behind a very substantial barrier. There were enough pedestrians and other cyclists out that I didn't get to look around as much as I wanted to, but it was a lovely day, and being anywhere in the Puget Sound puts my heart at ease. On the other side of the bridge we found the Cushman Trail with only a little difficulty (having a spacephone with GPS makes finding trailheads a lot easier, as I was to find out again and again).

The Cushman trail, like the vast majority of trails we took, is paved and took us for a decent distance up the peninsula. Google Bike Directions are pretty good, but they are not the most direct or efficient way to go. We stopped in the early afternoon a little south of Port Orchard and got some food to cook for the evening at a grocery store and decided that there was no chance we were going to make it to the Hood Canal during daylight hours. Neither of us were excited by the prospect of night riding on the small back roads, so I started calling around to campgrounds to see if there was anywhere we could bike in to. There weren't any that were convenient or on our way, so we decided to detour to one NE of Port Orchard.

A few wrong turns later, we were getting punished by some miserable hills, and stopped by a "Welcome to Port Orchard" sign, encouraging visitors to eat at their restaurants and stay in their hotels. By this point, neither Sara nor I needed much convincing, so we decided to sleep indoors that night. It was amazing how much of a second wind that decision gave us; the remainder of the hills just flew by to the door of the hotel.

Now I don't know how much of an economic powerhouse Port Orchard has ever been, but the downtown is largely abandoned, save for a number of pawn shops and bail bond stores. The Comfort Inn was nice enough, and the view was great. A hot shower and a meal of bread, cheese, and rotisserie chicken later, we were quite content.

We got an early start the next day, determined to make it the remaining miles to Port Townsend. It was another beautiful day, and the riding by the Sinclair Inlet was delightful. We made it to Silverdale with little event and had lunch at the Old Mill Park, which was uninspiring, but had bathrooms and water fountains, making it a superb one in my book.

The rest of the peninsula went by smoothly, going down a lot of roads I've never been on. The gates of the Bangor Sub Base were imposing and looked totally deserted, but you know that there had to be eyes somewhere. We joined up with State Route 104 heading towards the Hood Canal Bridge and I was back in my element, having driven that road dozens of times. The bridge itself was very windy and the view didn't fail to deliver, though with the wind and all the crap on the shoulder, I didn't take my eyes off the road much.

On the North side of the bridge I decided to stop paying as much attention to Google Maps; I knew the roads well enough, and I could now see firsthand that it was doing its best to wear us out, send us down unpaved logging roads, and to generally make us vulnerable to cross-traffic. So, onward we plowed on SR104, pounding the hills and our water. We stopped for water when we turned off onto Beaver Valley Road, and later in Chimacum at some farmer's market.

Having driven this route so many times before, I knew all the hills we were coming up to, and was a little scared of the ones my Mazda 323 hatchback struggled to get up. My legs and my 520 turned out to be a better combination, and the hills went by smoothly, thanks in part to some good marching music by Madeon. As a side-note, I wonder if there has been a study on the effectiveness of music on endurance; my guess would be that there is a strong correlation.

We finally got to the outskirts of Port Townsend and turned off on the Larry Scott Memorial Trial, avoiding a dangerous choke point, and took it all the way down to the harbor, including some hard-packed dirt riding. When we first came around the bluff to see the identical blues of the Port Townsend Bay and the sky, I realized why it is my favorite color. We finished off the ride showing up at my cousin's house around dinner time.

We stayed for about a week with the Hanifords, camping in their backyard and working downtown at the Undertown Cafe. My main task was to move Clean Edge's website from a 12 year old php-based CMS to Drupal. Having about 12,000 pages, it was no small task, and I was kept very busy. The week went by, going to work in the morning, walking around and enjoying the sun at lunch, and hanging out in the evenings with Sara and my cousins the Hanifords and Spesers. I began to think of Undertown as "the office", which in a way was too bad, since it is a great cafe, if not a little heavy on the Portland coffee and culture.

The Wooden Boat Festival was in full swing while we were there, and there were hundreds of amazingly made and cared-for boats, as well as a festival atmosphere. The woodworking and craftsmanship that went into the boats was humbling; there were a few 1920 racing sloops that had the most amazing parquet decking. I have never before or since seen such fine woodworking, let alone on a boat!

At the end of the week we took leave of our gracious hosts and started heading south. Wanting to do away with the backroad nonsense of our trip up, Sara and I decided to head down 101 to Olympia, then to follow I-5 to the Colombia River Highway in Longview. The first leg was an easy one, and we camped at Dosewallips State Park. The next day we headed to Olympia.

A bit north of Olympia, 101 turned into a major freeway with cloverleafs and all, not very bike friendly. Google Maps told us to take a road that went just alongside it, West Golden Pheasant Road. As we were going down it, the houses became more and more decrepit, and at one point we passed a vacant lot that had been turned into community a garbage dump. We keep on heading down the road and we pass by a house with a shirtless man out front whose primary occupation seemed to be burning piles of clothing in his front yard. He was chasing some dogs around with a garden rake and I tried not to stare. Then, about 200 feet ahead of us was a dead end and a no trespassing sign.

We turned around, not looking forward to retracing our steps, and headed past the clothes-burning house. The man was staring at us, and then freaked out and started yelling and running towards us with his rake. It turns out that his dogs were bolting towards us at full steam and he was trying to get them back, but we were quickly overtaken. Sara, ever resourceful, pulled out her water bottle and squirted them in the face, giving us the pause we needed to escape. Not seeing any other way around it, we jumped a fence towards 101 South, as many people seem to have done before us, judging by the well-traveled path, and made the best time of the whole trip, practically flying down the freeway.

When we got to Olympia we rode to the house of some friends of my cousins, who we had met in Port Townsend where they had come up for the Wooden Boat Festival. We spent a full day there, as I had some work that had to get done, and headed out the next day towards the Toutle River RV Resort. Not being able to ride on I-5 itself, we criss-crossed it on old roads, going through towns that I've only seen exits for. It was a great ride, with great weather and beautiful countryside.

I had never been in a RV Resort before, but it didn't seem like a bad idea to camp there, as it was a good distance away from Olympia. The Toutle River RV Resort was a bizarre place - they could accommodate hundreds of RVs there, and fortunately for us, the season was over, so we had it mostly to ourselves. The place is basically a triangle, with the train lines on one side, and I-5 on the other, and it was ungodly noisy with freight trains sounding their horns every time they go by. That said, we were happy to be off our bikes, the resort had a little store where we got some wine, and Sara cooked up a delicious dinner, so no major complaints.

Our last day was to head to Longview, over the Lewis and Clark Bridge, and back to Portland on the Colombia River Highway. The ride was fine and we got to Longview and headed towards the border. All the while there was a strange building in the distance - some sort of out-of-place skyscraper in a medium-sized logging town. We got closer and closer and it became apparent that it was the bridge, an absolute mammoth of a thing, spanning the relatively narrow Colombia River with enough height to allow freighters to go underneath. The bridge is very unfriendly to bikes, having a fast speed limit, an endless number of logging trucks, an incredibly steep grade, and a narrow shoulder littered with bark. If that wasn't enough, they were also painting the bridge, so there were tarps boxing most of the superstructure in, adding paint fumes and diesel exhaust to the mix.

On the descent, suddenly a piece of tarp broke free and whipped into the road, hitting Sara, and I thought for sure that she'd fall, but she stayed up like a champ, swerving around some paint buckets that were left in the shoulder. Besides the bridge, the rest of the ride went by very smoothly, and we rounded out the day at just over 90 miles traveled, and could have gone for quite a few more.

The tour was a great experience - it was the longest tour I've done, and my equipment did me proud. Neither of us got a single flat the whole trip! I had even chosen to break in a new Brooks saddle on the ride, (and I don't know why everyone warns against it) and I did just fine. All in all, I can't wait to go on another tour!

For more and larger photos, see here.

I thought what I'd do was, I'd pretend I was one of those Buddhist monks.

I recently got back from a ten day Vipassana silent meditation course at the Northwest Vipassana Center. It was quite the experience. I'm not entirely sure why I went in the first place; it seemed like something different, a challenge, and Sara has been twice and had good things to say about the meditation and the experience, so I decided to give it a shot. The Center is out in the countryside, staffed entirely by volunteers, and is free to take. If you make it all ten days they'll let you make a monetary donation. After getting back and talking to others who have sat for ten days, I've realized how much this experience varies from person-to-person, so instead of going into deep details, I'm keeping this post brief, focusing on my own experience.

If you had asked me if I had ever meditated before day one of the course, I would have said, "Oh, a little bit, this and that." After day one, with eleven hours of meditating behind me, my answer changed to, "No, never." The days are broken up into chunks of one and two-hour meditation sessions, or "sits". After a few days you are encouraged to remain motionless during the one hour session, but you are allowed to get up and go for a walk during the two-hour sessions. Sitting on the floor for an hour without moving is a lot harder than it sounds.

Day one: pain. How on earth can you sit on the floor like this? So many folks were just sitting there like statues, but us rookies were constantly shifting, grabbing more pillows, and being generally miserable. For eleven hours. The instructions had us starting out slowly with Anapana meditation, just watching the breath; no mantras, no forced breaths, no nothing. Just watching the breath. There was no instruction on how to sit comfortably, and we couldn't talk to each other, so I just tried to copy what I saw around me, which was people building pillow nests for themselves, some in the half-lotus position, some on meditation benches.

Day two: pain. I think I could concentrate on my breath if it wasn't for all this pain in my ankles, knees, and hips. More pillows must be the answer, but everyone else had that thought too and there are no more to be borrowed.

Day three: [see day one and two]. During the very last meditation of the day I realized that if I concentrated hard enough on my breathing, the pain faded to the background.

Day four: major progress. My realization from yesterday allowed me to sit for the first time without major discomfort. With a meditation bench, I first sat a one-hour sit without moving, then after a ten minute break, a two-hour sit without moving. After that I moved to the half-lotus position and sat for an hour without moving. Now that we had 33 hours of Anapana practice behind ourselves, observing our breath, it was time to start observing the rest of the body, time to start Vipassana.

Day five: the wheel turns. At the first sit of the day, the phrase, "Goose Laxative" pops into my head, and all the progress that I've made in the past 44 hours of concentrating are shattered and broken. At the time I have no clue what Goose Laxative is, but I am unable to focus until evening when I finally manage to get my composure back. I didn't figure out until I got back to the interwebs that Goose Laxative is written on a bottle in a scene of Futurama, a fantastic show that, other than this one day, gets credit for helping me stay sane during this ten days.

Day six: the boredom started to set in. With the majority of the technique having been introduced by this point, the repetition of doing it so much was wearing me down. Most people, for whatever reason, leave on either day two or day six, and I had the day six blues. During an evening meditation, one of the ones where you are supposed to sit absolutely still, I was analyzing the sensations on my body, trying to cultivate equanimity. A cool breeze on my face; it will eventually go away. A sharp pain in my knees; it will eventually go away. A small furry animal burrowing up my right pant leg; oh gods get it out! I manage to get up without making any noise, and shake a small mouse out of my pants, which scurries over to a woman's pillow pile. I gesture to the assistant teachers who tell the course manager to go after the thing. I sit back down, tuck my pants into my socks, and manage to sit for the rest of the hour, listening to the sound of the manager tiptoeing around, trying to get the mouse. It never did wind up bothering anyone else, and when I brought it up at the end of the course, none of the other students had noticed the commotion. My blues of the day are broken, and I get right back to work.

Days seven through nine: routine. I've adjusted to the routine by now and go about my daily meditations without any problems.

Day ten: discussions. They end the noble silence on day ten to ease people back into real life, which is a great idea. You have so much that you've been processing internally, that heading back into business as usual would be overwhelming without this little cushion.


Other than that, eating twice a day was no problem, and the food was delicious vegetarian food prepared by the volunteers at the center. In my free time I listened to a mental recording of Blood Sugar Sex Magik, walked around the walking paths looking at bugs, and slept. Since getting back a few weeks ago, I haven't meditated once.

I've been asked by a ton of people if I would recommend going to a ten day course, and I think that the experience is very self-selecting. If it sounds at all interesting, you are probably right for the it. You have nothing to lose, except ten days of your time. Some people wind up having deep revelations about their lives, but it all depends how comfortable you are being in your own head.

Euro Road Trip Winter 2010/2011

Year in Review

This past year has gone by at a snail's pace, having Sara away, but it has also been very full with school, work, and organizing for polo.

School is going well - I am in to my second term (out of a total 12 for the Bachelors of Mechanical Engineering) and I can't express enough the advantages of going back to school as an adult. Everything, from study habits, to critical thinking, to seeing the overall worth of the education I'm getting, is so much fuller as an adult. Looking back on when I got my first degree, I was just some dumb kid trying to do as little as possible to get the best grade possible; it is true that you get out of your education what you put in.

The biggest challenge that I've had in school is accepting that some instructors have a teaching style that doesn't mesh with mine, or more to the point, are just terrible at what they do. Fortunately, by now, I've gotten over myself, and decided that it is up to me to learn the material; if I have a good instructor, it is an unexpected bonus.

As far as classes go, I'm in the calculus series, which is fairly straightforward. Chemistry is absolutely fascinating; it is one of those classes that I never took in high school or college, but as a "science fan", I'm familiar with many of the concepts. Familiar doesn't cut it though, and actually going through the atom one piece at a time is creating a much fuller understanding of how the world works. For the ME degree, I don't have to take more than two terms of chemistry, but I have a feeling that I will take the third in the series out of interest. If it continues to give me an understanding of what is going on in the background for things like electricity, the properties of metals, etc., my time will be well spent.

The other classes I've been taking are in the engineering department. I don't have much to say about them, as they are very lower-level (Wood is a material. It can be used for building structures.). The best part has been doing drafting by hand, which we spent about two weeks on. I've always wanted to be able to draw better without a computer, and short of a drawing class, drafting is a good first step.

I've been working part time with Clean Edge, a clean-tech market research firm, which is turning out to be perfect for this transition phase of mine. Clean Edge is very flexible as far as when I do my work, being a telecommuting-friendly company, so I get a lot of my work done at school between classes, at night, or on the weekends. I consider myself very lucky to be able to continue my career (marketing / communications in the clean-tech sector) while working towards a new career (mechanical engineering in the clean-tech sector).

Polo is the only part of my life that I haven't been able to make enough time for. Fortunately I've still been able to be involved, even if it is on the administrative side, rather than on the playing side. Most of my efforts have been in organizing and normalizing Portland Bike Polo's relationship with the parks department. This has been going quite well, and I hope to continue to grow that relationship. We are also looking into non-profit status, recently won a bid to host a major tournament, formed an alliance with other hockey-type sports, and have received city approval for the ongoing improvement and maintenance of our main polo court.

Finally, Sara got back last week (for good!), and I couldn't be happier.

Sasha

Bike polo cameo in Portlandia intro.

Herald of Hermes

Four Months In

It has been about four months since I got back stateside, and I'm well and fully acclimatized. No longer do I accidentally speak Korean to shopkeepers, I don't tense up for the inevitable shoulder check in crowds, and I remember what good coffee tastes like. I still can't deal with the wall of selection in the bread / cereal / shampoo aisle at the American Supermarket, but I really don't see how anyone can, given that particular plethora.

The biggest change, of course, is the long-distance relationship. It is quite manageable, as it turns out, thanks equally to Skype and email. Sara is back in town for a holiday (hooray!), and it is strange not having seen someone in person for that long (four months), and yet not having any new stories to tell, since we are in constant communication via the interwebs.

I'm moving forward with my plan to change careers from marketing/communications to mechanical engineering, and have enrolled at a community college to do lower-level prerequisites. As it turns out, to be a mechanical engineer, you must have an undergraduate degree in the field. This is too bad, since it'll take me four years to get. Some of my previous credits will transfer, but since I got a BS in Business, and not an actual science, I'm missing all the physics, chemistry, etc. that I need.

When I first got back, I thought that I'd support myself doing the freelance marketing/design stuff that I've always done, but since I'm trying to change careers, it has been hard to put my heart into it. This shouldn't come as a surprise, of course, since the whole reason I'm changing careers is that my heart isn't in marketing any more. Generally speaking, you can't get hired on at an engineering company until you start your third year of engineering school, but my current goal is to get involved with an engineering company now, in my first year. I still hope to be involved with alternative transportation / energy / fuel in the future, but at this point, I'll take what I can get. If anyone has any thoughts on how to get involved, let me know!

So, between Skype and school, where has that left me? I built a workshop in my house, putting down an interlocking foam floor to protect the silly bamboo flooring, and have been basing projects out of there. I'm fooling around with electronic engineering, thanks to the Arduino (open source hardware), working on my bicycles, and doing small home-improvement projects. My biggest hobby is bike polo, and I've gotten involved with the administrative side of things, helping to organize tournaments, manage press relations, etc.

Playing polo is still my biggest leisure-time activity, and by far what I have the most fun doing. The sport is getting really popular, so we are looking to expand / move to a different area where we can have more than one game going on at a time, and also have some lights so we can play into the night. I've taken lead on this process, but it is a long one, and there are a lot of passionate voices in the community about how to do it right.

Well, that's about it for now. It is the first beautiful day of the summer and I'm headed outside!
Sasha

Cascadia Triple Crown Presents the Oregon Bike Polo Championships

Press Release

Cascadia Triple Crown Presents the Oregon Bike Polo Championships
Tournament to be held April 17th and 18th at Rose City Park, Portland, Oregon.

Portland, OR – April 17th, 2010 Portland Bike Polo will host the Oregon Championships, the first of three tournaments making up the Cascadia Triple Crown. Hardcourt bike polo is a fast-paced, full contact, team sport played on bicycles. This exciting sport was born in Seattle, grew up in Portland, and now has a large world-wide following.

Over 100 competitors from around the world are expected to compete. Two other tournaments, in Seattle, WA and Vancouver, BC, will complete the triple crown later in the season.  The event, Cascadia Triple Crown Presents the Oregon Bike Polo Championships, will be held on April 17th and 18th at Rose City Park (NE 62nd St. and NE Thompson St.). Spectators are more than welcome and this is event is free to watch.

Want to get involved with Portland Bike Polo? Portland Bike Polo is always glad to have new members – come out and play! We play every Sunday afternoon at Alberta Park in NE Portland. We do ask all players to be 18 years or older, due to the inherent danger of the sport.

About Hardcourt Bike Polo:

• It is a fast-paced team game played on bicycles.
• To play you need a durable bicycle, a mallet and a ball. The sport is very DIY focused, so mallets are hand-built out of old ski poles and PVC tubing. The ball is a street hockey ball.  
• It has many similarities to grass bike polo, horse polo, and hockey.
• There are three people to a team, and games are played to five points.
• There are no time outs, no penalties, and there is no referee.
• It is played on pavement and is a full contact sport.
• Due to its fast-paced nature and spectacular crashes, it is a popular spectator sport.

Press Contact:
Sasha Friedman
Secretary of Polo
sasha[at]portlandbikepolo[dot]com

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Back in the USA!

It is good to be back.

Sara and I got back to the US on January 8th and then traveled around visiting my mother in California and Sara's brother and his wife and new daughter in Colorado. We finally made it back to Portland on January 22nd, and a few short days later, Sara was off again to Korea for another year.

A few highlights from the trip and travels:

• On the Seoul to Vancouver, Canada plane, Sara had checked her bag at the gate. (This is great way to get around baggage fees. Also, a bike box costs $50 to ship, but an extra suitcase costs $150. So, pack your clothes in a bike box.) When we got to Canada, we were waiting on the tarmac in the cold, dark, and rain, for Sara's suitcase. They finished unloading them all, and it wasn't there. We described it to a worker and he said that he had given it to an Asian man. We were about 500 feet out on the tarmac and there was about another 500 feet of walkway to go to get inside. Since we had been waiting so long, people were already getting inside the terminal. We bolt across the tarmac, down the walkway, and I start yelling at this guy who has Sara's suitcase. He was very apologetic, explaining that he thought it was his friend's suitcase. Since he was walking alone, I didn't think that was a very good excuse and yelled at him for a while and watched him closely in the baggage claim. Regardless, after an international plane ride, there is nothing more invigorating than chasing someone down and yelling at them.
• We had a great visit with my mom in California. She lives right near where there are a lot of earthquakes, so we helped with the ever-constant battle of straightening paintings. The earthquakes are the downside, but the upside is how beautiful it is there, between the redwoods and the Pacific. She has an amazing garden and even in the middle of winter, it was incredibly lush (especially compared to Seoul).
• It was my first time to Colorado, and I was impressed with the wide-open spaces and the mountains. We were in central Colorado and there was snow on the ground, but it hadn't snowed for weeks, so you could see all of the animal tracks - thousands of them. Sara and I babysat her for her niece, which was really one of the first times that I've spent a good portion of time with a baby (8 mo.) Not a problem!

Being back has not been as hard as I was expecting, although I do have trouble interacting with shop-keepers and supermarkets are totally overwhelming. The hardest part, by far, is getting used to not living with Sara. Thank goodness for the internet - email and video chat make a long distance relationship a lot easier than, say, the telegraph.

Really it felt more like I was in an alternate dimension in Korea and popped back into the regular dimension here in the USA. A few stores have closed down, a few restaurants (and like a hundred food carts) have opened up, a year's worth of drama happened, but everything is more or less the same!

I'm back in my house, which Aurora took great care of. My days are spent with playing polo, figuring out transfer credits (U of O + PCC -> PSU, UW, or OSU) and starting to get my networks back in order. There are a lot of full-time jobs out there, but since I'd like to go to school part time and work part time, I'll be going back to contract work again.

Sasha

A year in Korea... so what?

Tomorrow I leave Korea, 373 days later. So what of all this?

I came here for a variety of reasons: I was tired of safe, insular Portland; burned out from my last job; wanting a change of pace and to see a bit of the world; wanting to support Sara. I didn't have too many hopes for Korea - I really had no idea what "moving to Korea" meant. I did, however, hope to learn about Korea, make some life-long friends, find a second home, and all that.

Overall, living in Korea is easy. Food is cheap, there is very little crime, and a little Korean can get you pretty far. If English is your native language, and you know how to negotiate, you can get a pretty good salary, a decent apartment and maybe good hours too. That said, unless your favorite activities are drinking and shopping, it is almost impossible to thrive here.

Now it is easy to get all negative on Korea - shooting fish in a barrel is a good analogy. The Koreans are pretty gung-ho on Confucianism, and a lot of times it feels like a bad 1950's sitcom. The workplace is as hierarchical as the army, women are treated horribly, and people treat strangers like dirt. I don't want to dwell on these things though... you can find them discussed ad nauseam elsewhere on the internet.

When I first got here, I was so excited to make some Korean friends - get into the Korean counter-culture and ride bikes and play polo. It took me a long time to figure out that the most successful ex-pats here are the ones that have almost exclusively ex-pats networks, and that there is not much of a Korean counter-culture scene. I'm leaving Korea with only one Korean friend, which might actually be a success, but I have to say I find it surprising.

As I have discussed in other posts, one of the things that I've had the most problems with here are how strangers are treated. It has been explained to me that if you know someone, you must be very polite to them, but it doesn't matter if you don't know that person. Wanting to fit in, when I first got here, I copied the locals and it drove me crazy -  I hated myself, even if I was fitting in well. I decided that I was just not going to give up this core-value of what I think is polite behavior - being polite to strangers. I've gotten so many crazy looks when I've held the door open for people, let old people sit down on the subway, or simply said thank you to waitresses. Once I realized that I didn't have to give up on who I was, things got a bit easier, at least from my point of view.

Working here was definitely a challenge. Fortunately, foreigners get a lot of leeway in the workplace, and aren't expected to work like their Korean counterparts. Again, I'm going to resist the temptation of talking about how messed up Korean companies are, and just say that I am so happy I don't have to work in Korea anymore. Also, it has made me resolve to buy American-made products whenever possible.

So, besides the fact that I'm not wild about Korea, what have I learned? Well, like they say, only when you don't have something do you realize how much you miss it. I miss living in a community. I miss small groups of like-minded people. I miss trees and clean air. I miss having choices about food. I miss America. Sure we've got problems, and plenty of them, but they are our problems.

Now, perhaps the most interesting part of all of this will come very soon... the reverse culture shock! What will I, in America, prefer back in Korea?

Sasha