After a month of running around Korea...

Today marks two weeks--already?--that I've been back in Tucson.

From late May through most of June, my wife and I were HERE:

(during the trip, I posted to traveling-allophile.tumblr.com)

It's taken me almost two weeks to get over the wicked East Asia-West Coast US jet-lag...

Finally, I'm sleeping 'normally' enough so that I can wake up and beat the summer desert heat by going for early morning runs...

...and running has become something I make sure to do whenever traveling. Last summer, I took advantage of my jet-lag by going for a long run along the Canal St.-Martin in Paris when I couldn't sleep on my first day back in France. This summer, upon our arrival in Korea, somehow we were able to 'switch' to the local time zone immediately; we flew in late at night, went straight from the airport to a nearby hotel, and the next morning, I found myself running along a saltwater canal in the 'instant city' of Songdo, built on land re-claimed from the sea across the harbor from Incheon airport:

Jet-lag is inevitable, and it might work in your 'favor' or not;

whatever the case--RUN!

It's one of the best ways to get over travel fatigue while at the same time getting the true feet-on-the-ground feel of a place.

A few other scenes from running around Korea...

====================================

Running along the top edge of Seoul's remaining old city wall,

just north of the Bukchon neighborhood,

on the slopes of Bugaksan mountain:

Down along Chong-gye-cheon stream, 

beneath the skyscrapers of downtown's Jongno district:

Along poppy-lined vegetable gardens in Gangneung:

...on the sandy boardwalk along the country's east coast in Gangneung:

By the remaining fortified gate in Jeonju, in the country's Southwest:

Crossing the Jeonju river on an idyllic morning:

===============================

So, back to Songdo, on that first morning.

Large parts of the city--Korea's gamble on establishing a brand-new international business hub for NE Asia--are still vacant lots, as I saw when I opened the curtains from our tenth-floor hotel room:

The morning was foggy, but by later in the day, this was the view:

--the elegant bridge that links the Incheon airport to the new city of Songdo..

The city is 'filling in' nicely, with families moving into these apartment buildings:

No shortage of modern angles and curves:

...along with the requisite public art:

The city is scheduled to host this September's Asian Games, so as I ran through the "Central Park" area, there was a lot of construction work and tidying-up still going on... 

Songdo is being developed as a planned modern Asian city that is consciously adapting what works in cities around the world: New York's Central Park, Venetian canals, Savannah's numerous neighborhood squares, along with incredible wifi connectivity. It's supposed to be a "smart city," with live-work-play pedestrian access.

A BBC article recently reported:

The waste disposal system is also impressive - or it would be if you could see it. Because there are no rubbish trucks trawling the streets or vast bins dotted around blocks of flats. Instead, all household waste is sucked directly from individual kitchens through a vast underground network of tunnels, to waste processing centres, where it's automatically sorted, deodorised and treated to be kinder to the environment. 

Not bad, eh?

Some investors are hoping that part of Songdo's growth will come from Western expats who are growing tired of the pollution in China and will come settle here. Hmm. (I read that in this recent article from France's LeFigaro.)

Among the multitude of newly planted trees, there is also a plethora of public exercise equipment, traditional Korean shade-pavilions, and even a phone-booth-sized public library:

Get tired of straining your eyes by reading on your smart phone or tablet while on your lunch break? Ahh, the tactile pleasure of paper in your hands...

And there's the subway--gleaming, all polished granite and marble--feels vaguely post-apocalyptic, hardly a soul in sight:

But you can be in central Seoul in an hour, avoiding the traffic jams above ground.

That's what my wife did, after our first day in Korea--we took the subway from Songdo into the capital, an easy ride...

=====================

Running around Korea, then...

...in the weeks to come, I'll post more specifics about the remaining running routes:

mountain, stream, and river runs in Seoul, 

along the coast and around a lake in Gangneung,

and through a 'hanok village' and along the river in Jeonju.

Yours truly, running...and it's not a selfie...

More on this later.

"You need to hear what I have to say about breakfast wraps!" --while traveling...

"Breakfast wraps?"

    Maybe you recall this cartoon from a few years ago:

When the New Yorker published this, Twitter hadn't yet taken over as the 'breakfast-wrap-megaphone.' As an increasing number of bloggers have monetized and professionalized, I wonder if the cartoon above is as accurate as it was back in 2007? (Incidentally, for me, now, Twitter is more of a media-sharing platform rather than a social-media-keep-up-with-'friends' tool.)

I do wonder, as I realize that I've been blogging for almost eight years now, what exactly this blog is. It grew out of weekly e-mails during the year we leaved in Nicaragua...

I don't think it's just my breakfast-wrap-megaphone...but it's not frequent or in-depth enough to truly be a 'travel-blog' or a 'teacher's-blog'...and yet I feel compelled to come back to it, at least monthly, to post something... I've always tried to be somewhat guarded on this blog--refraining from the overly personal, thinking that our close friends who read this would know how we're really doing, anyway... Since I joined twitter and instagram--only to keep up with a limited circle of friends--I've felt less of the need to post here...But the limitations of twitter and instagram keep me coming back to the blog...

...especially as big trips approach.

The school-year ended last Friday, so I'm free for two months...

Travel and change of place 

impart new vigor to the mind.

--Seneca

This summer's 'big trip' begins tomorrow: 

after three summers away, my wife and I are returning to Korea.

Wanting to travel light, I'm not bringing a laptop this time--just an iPad...and I've come to realize that blogging to this particular blog is somewhat cumbersome from an iPad--text alone would work just fine, but wanting to format text WITH photos--not so user-friendly. (Come on, blogspot folks--you can do better!)

    So, for any of you who want to 'hear about--and see--our breakfast wraps' while we'll be traveling, here's where you can go:

     

http://traveling-allophile.tumblr.com/

I'm not giving up on allophile.com--but for the next month or so, I'll mainly be using tumblr...

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Seoul.

It's a city I keep returning to--

--and not just because I was born there.

I'm a young teen in this photo; an uncle of mine took this of me standing in front of the city's old South Gate--built in the 1390's, it survived centuries of invasions and wars until an arsonist severely damaged it back in 2008. When my wife and I were last in Seoul, an enormous reconstruction-shelter was hiding Namdaemun (officially known as "Sungnyemun"--'mun' meaning 'gate') from view as the restoration continued. In May of last year, it was finally re-opened to the public...can't wait to see it again, twenty-five years after the photo above was taken. And I'll still be wearing a camera-bag...

Sightseeing, though, isn't the main point of this trip.

It's language.

Korean.

My mother's mother-tongue...and yet it was my wife's idea, really, that we should make this trip this year--she wants to get a kick-start in learning Korean, and for me this will be impetus to keep going down the road to fluency...Starting next Monday, then: intensive language classes in the heart of Seoul.

I joke with my wife that she grew up with more Koreans than I ever did; her neighborhood and high-school in suburban Seattle were more like an outpost of Seoul than I ever experienced while growing up in Germany, southern Arizona, and finally in Georgia. True, my mother is Korean, but my father didn't speak the language, so English was our home lingua franca...

A couple of years before we moved to Nicaragua, we took intensive one-on-one language lessons in Antigua, Guatemala--that was my wife's introduction to Spanish, and for her learning-style, it was a perfect beginning. Not long after that, she was easily conversant, and then after we returned from our Central American peregrinations, she took on French. (And, although she won't 'own' this fact, in my professional opinion, she's almost caught up to me, le prof de français!) So, now--time to 'tame' (note, not 'conquer') a non-Indo-European language. Deep breaths...

Syntax and verb-endings will not rule the entire time, though--there will plenty of architectural and culinary exploring over the next few weeks; after our language classes, we'll be traveling around the country...stay tuned. (On the other blog, that is.)

==========

As we leave, this is what Tucson looks like right now;

we'll be leaving the desert just as the last of spring's waters dry up,

waiting for the monsoon to arrive in July:

(one of my favorite spots while running--

where Sabino creek exits its canyon on Tucson's NE edge--

seen a month ago, then yesterday...)

Saguaros in bloom:

Summer...

Tomorrow's forecast high-temperature: 106.

A fine day to fly away...

With and Without...Spring morphing into summer in Sabino Canyon

Tucson's early spring is morphing into an early summer this year--and the drying up of Sabino Creek is striking proof. 

So, here are some before-and-after scenes, from recent runs,

"with" water and "without"...

================================

And, from a couple of weeks ago, 

a scene from where the creek exits the canyon:

Although the creek is no longer flowing,

a few reflective spots still remain, including this one.

Incidentally--it was featured on:

http://www.iphoneographycentral.com/apps-uncovered-25-april-2014/

(and, it made the TV news...small thrill...)

=========================

And...as I get ready for an upcoming trip to Korea--any of you have opinions on the best platform for travel-photo-blogging via iPad? I'm not taking my laptop, and unfortunately, the 'blogger' mobile-blogging app is cumbersome and distorts photos...Let me know!

For this week's #FriFotos: STAIRS

For a few months now, I've been enjoying the weekly #FriFotos travel photography round-up every Friday on Twitter...

Since this week's theme is 'stairs,' I thought I'd gather a few far-flung scenes for a blog post--from France to Korea, Canada to Guatemala, and a few Desert Southwest locales as well.

From last summer,

in the Rennaissance tower of the 

Château de Montaigne in the SW of France:

Literally, in the worn steps 

of the 16th-century

essayist and humanist,

Michel de Montaigne.

From my current desert hometown,

a detail of Tucson's

St. Philip's Plaza

Back to France,

to the Loire valley--

one of the spiral stone staircases

at the Château de Chambord:

Further south,

on the legendary Pont Valentré bridge in Cahors,

the time-eroded stairs from the 14th-century: 

Traveling far to the east,

to the stairs leading up to 

Seoul's Joseon-dynasty 

Altar to Heaven:

From one of the world's largest cities

to a 'lost' city in the Guatemalan jungle--

the steep access stairs built to protect

the original stone stairs 

on this Maya temple in Tikal:

Up to Montréal--

some of the city's iconic 

curving exterior stairs:

...and elsewhere in the city,

 to the stairs reserved for 

pilgrims climbing on their knees

up to the Oratoire St.-Joseph:

Speaking of St. Joseph,

and heading south now,

some believe in a legend that says 

that St. Joseph is responsible for these stairs:

The 'miraculous stairs' of the Loreto Chapel in Santa Fe, NM

Closer to home again:

--one of my favorite architectural spots

in Bisbee, AZ,

just off 'Brewery Gulch'

And back to the Tucson area for the most recent scene,from just down the road--the utilitarian military stairs that descend to the underground control bunker of the only Titan Missile silo now open to the public:

A sobering relic of the Cold War--

nothing like thoughts of 

an nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missile

to end with...

From Little Tokyo back to Tucson: iphoneography with apps

From last weekend's quick road-trip to Los Angeles, a few scenes showing how to 'correct' or 'dramatize' an iPhone snapshot, whether a streetscape or a landscape.
(These photos taken with an iPhone5s)

On First Street, just east of downtown L.A.,

the iconic "Chop Suey Far East building,"

built in the 1890's,

and which served for much of the 20th century

as a hub for Little Tokyo's community 

of Chinese and Japanese immigrants:

The distinctive arch and vintage neon sign, along with the street-front fire-escape-stairs make for a classic 20th-century American streetscape, and the Los Angeles City Hall (1920's) on the left adds to the sense-of-place...But the distortion caused by the angle from which I took this quick photo is distracting, and the sky looks washed out, since I wanted the exposure to show the building façades instead of the clouds.

So, first,

use the Perspective Correct App 

to 're-set' the buildings as being perpendicular to the street:

Then, using "Tune Image" and a bit of the "HDR scape" tools 

on snapseed,

the drama of lifting clouds

and the texture of the bricks

reappear:

My wife liked the cinematic feel of this color version, but I thought this would work as a black-and-white scene, with just the "chop suey" sign highlighted in color...

...and so for this, the ColorSplash app comes in handy:

But the sky was a bit grainy for my taste,

so using the BigLens app,

the sky can be selectively blurred:

And, finally, using Mextures, some faux-vintage texture and color add to the mood:

==============================

On the drive back to Tucson from L.A. we passed through a normally boring stretch of desert that's come to life with wildflowers. I've lived in Arizona for nearly seven years, and I've never seen such an expanse of globemallow in bloom--for several miles along I-10 to the west of Phoenix, this was the scene:

Bright afternoon sun 'bleaches' the scene, 

so using snapseed again, 

to crop and bring out the vibrancy of the blooms

by correcting the exposure, 

I end up with this:

==============================

Back home, the foothills of the Santa Catalina Mountains

are dotted with brittlebush in bloom right now,

splashes of yellow on the saguaro-studded hills:

Taking this shot from close to ground level, however,

resulted in a slight distortion--

the saguaros are pointing 'outward' 

away from the center of the photo.

So, using the above-mentioned

Perspective Correct, I end up with this:

This scene also lends itself to 'color-splashing,'

so first I used snapseed 

to oversaturate the color (above),

then I used the 'color-splash' tool within the Laminar app  

to keep the wildflowers yellow 

while de-saturating everything else in the scene (below).

Finally, for the textures in the final image,

I used Mextures again,

before some final exposure-tweaking and vignetting in snapseed:

Spring in the Sonoran Desert...

So, from architecture to wildflowers, Perspective Correct 

can be such a useful tool...

...and snapseed still remains my favorite 'go-to' tool.

The 'slap-on' filters available in so many apps and in so much of social media can be convenient, but if you want to get beyond the 'pre-fab' feeling you get when you use them for your photos, spend some time getting to know what you can do with an app like snapseed or Laminar. True, many apps are 'one-hit-wonders,' but even within those limited effects, there's so much potential customization available at your fingertips.

Cilantro-daikon kimchi. Yep, you read that right. Well, it's more of a 'curtido'...

Cilantro. (Or, "coriander.)  You love it or you hate it. My introduction to it, when I was a teenager, did not inspire affection. Tastes like soap! How far I have come--I love those leaves now...

My mother is Korean, so I grew up eating all sorts of leafy greens..but 'cilantro?' I'd never heard of it. Neither had she...And most Koreans, when first introduced to the parsley-look-alike, don't like it--its distinctive aromatic signature just isn't found in the traditional Korean flavor palette...

...which is strange, given that China, which is just next door, has a long history of using cilantro.

So, recently, my wife and I were discussing this curious geo-culinary situation--and I thought that cilantro would marry well with traditional Korean flavors--perhaps even as a type of kimchi. "Ooh, maybe I'm inventing something!" Well, it didn't take too many searches on the Internet to realize that I wouldn't be able to claim authorship of a new dish--on KoreafornianCooking.com, I found this. 

It turns out that cilantro does have, ahem, roots, on the Korean peninsula--in the North and also in the vegetarian Buddhist temple cuisine tradition. But for almost all modern-day South Koreans, 'cilantro-kimchi' just isn't in their vocabulary...

But it SHOULD BE...and if you want to try it out, below is my take on it. 

And while I'm not 'inventing' anything here, I am modifying the recipe from the KoreafornianCooking.com website.

My first attempt ended up too salty for my taste--

and then, when I decided to try again, I thought that shredded carrots would add a nice contrasting color...

...with the end result:

So, here goes with the recipe.

Daikon-cilantro-carrot kimchi
(mooh goh-sooh dahn-geun kim-chi)

2 cups of roughly chopped cilantro
("goh-sooh" is
the Korean word for this herb)

1 1/2 cups of shredded daikon

(called "mu" in Korean,

and incidentally,

the equivalent for 'cankles.'

Make sure the radish is firm;

the texture should be similar to jicama.)

1/2 cup of chopped green onion

4 tablespoons of minced or crushed garlic

sea-salt--start with 1 teaspoon,

then add to taste as you mix

2 teaspoons finely minced ginger

2 teaspoons Korean red pepper powder

(sun-dried New Mexico red chile works too)

1/2 cup of shredded carrot
(vocab lesson: "dahn-geun")

I forgot to include the sea-salt and carrots in the photos.

Sorry.

In a large metal bowl,

mix the shredded carrot, green onion,

roughly chopped cilantro, and shredded daikon together.

In a separate, small bowl, 

mix the chile powder, ginger, salt, and garlic into a paste.

Then, using your hands--

wearing disposable food-prep gloves!--

slowly work the pepper garlic paste 

into the vegetables in the large bowl,

rubbing the seasoning in...

As you finish, taste and see if the vegetables are salty enough.

Yes, kimchi should be salty,

but not overpoweringly so...

You'll notice that the vegetables will shrink and that a reddish liquid will be gathering in the bottom. Don't throw this liquid away--let the shredded vegetables 'marinate' in this liquid at least overnight, storing the mixture in a covered container or a large glass jar.

You can eat it right away--

it's a nice salad-with-a-kick, but the flavors marry better after a few days...

It's a great side with kimchi-quesadillas...

...and, it also works as a filling for a 

California-roll style kimbap: 

(For this, a mixture of brown and white rice,
rolled up in the seaweed with
the daikon-cilantro kimchi,
seasoned spinach, thinly sliced omelet, 
pan-fried tofu, 
and sprinkled with furikake seasoning.)

And again, a close-up of the end-result:

...which, after tasting it, I thought--

hmm, the texture reminds me a bit of El Salvadoran curtido, 

the traditional accompaniment to pupusas...

Add a splash of vinegar (seasoned rice vinegar or white balsamic) 

if you want a 'fusion-curtido.'

Wait: maybe I have invented something--just as Roy Choi invented the galbi-taco and the kimchi-quesadilla...

...I just did an internet search--nothing comes up for "Korean curtido" or "curtido coreano" and I don't think there are any El-Seoul-vadoran food-trucks out there. Not yet at least, so...

...OK. I've claimed it. 

"curtido coreano"

You saw it here first.

Bon appétit!