4 posts tagged “chusok”

What do these four numbers mean? Well they are all related to this past Chusok weekend. I drove down to my in-laws house this weekend. Normally the drive takes about 3-3.5 hours, however on the way down it took 4 hours. Not too bad considering the state of driving during the holidays in Korea.

We left on Monday morning  and had a late lunch (1:30) after we arrived. I spent most of the weekend reading books and watching downloaded TV on my laptop. There was no internet available and it was nice to be disconnected for a short time. My daughter played with her cousins and my son got to do what babies do best - look cute and entertain everyone.

On Monday my wifes two brothers and families came. On Tuesday, however, the rest of the family arrived. 28 people, including me, were all in one house on Tuesday. However not everyone came - we were still missing 4 people. Can you imagine how noisy the house was. The most difficult thing was getting access to the bathroom - only one bathroom for 28 people! Now you know what 28 is - what about the other numbers?

Driving home took 10.5 hours. 10.5 hours with a 5 year old and a baby in a car is not very fun. Fortunately The baby slept most of it and we brought some crayons, paper and books for my daughter. We left Wednesday morning at 8:30 and finally arrived home at 7:00, completely exhausted. Now you know what 10.5 is. What about the remaining numbers?

On the way home we pasted by one rest stop and noticed that the next one was 29km away. It took 3 hours to go 29km! Obviously everyone had to go to the bathroom and stretch their legs. Well the line up for the mens bathroom was 15 minutes long - I don't even know how long for the womens bathroom. There were even women lined up to go to the mens washroom - talk about a lack of privacy. - anyhow I understand that on this weekend.

After picking up some snack food it was time to leave. I started the car and proceed to drive the 500 metres through the exit to the highway. It took 90 minutes! Yes, 90 minutes to go 500 metres out of the rest stop. Unbelievable. By the time we got out of the rest stop we had to use the bathroom again. Now you know what 90 and 500 are. Unbelievable.

I hope your Chusok travel was not as difficult as mine.

On Wednesdays class I introduced vixy.net to you for downloading and saving YouTube videos. Coincidentally, today while checking my RSS feeds I found a similar site. The difference is that this sit gets you to install an open source program that:

is a open source program utility that allows users to extract, download and save Flash based embedded video clips from various video sharing and hosting sites, including YouTube, XTube, Dailymotion, MySpace, Stage6, Google Video and Yahoo!, and then automatically convert and export to other file formats and encoding including MPG, AVI, MP4, 3GP, 3G2, WMV, PSP, MOV, and the flash video FLV itself, depending on your choice.

Be sure to read the rest of the article at My Digital Life. If you are interested in technology, internet and other futuristic information My Digital Life is a great web site to visit or even better subscribe to the RSS feed.

In other news, I hope everyone has a great holiday this Chusok. Drive safe and don't eat too much food. I'll be driving to my in-laws house from Monday through Wednesday and using Saturday/Sunday to prepare for classes and catch up on reading homework/blogs.

Happy Holidays.

Since I moved on Monday, I have been so busy that I haven't had time to think. We've been buying all kinds of new furniture and appliances for our house, organizing where everything goes and getting things delivered or installed like internet, cable etc. In addition because we moved my children have to go to a different kindergarten and daycare which means we have to drive them in the morning. It was much easier at our old apartment as everything was within a 4 minute walk.

I'm not really complaining, because our new neighborhood is great, the apartment is bigger and newer and life really couldn't be better. Just thought I would explain why I haven't been blogging very much this week other than school related posts.

If you are coming to class tomorrow we'll be watching a movie - if you don't come to class I hope you have a great holiday.

Because of Chusok, I'm making this Friday's class attendance optional. We will probably do something light and fun for class so if you are not going away for the holiday do come to class, but if you need to get on a train or plane feel free to leave early and enjoy yourself. However be aware that next Friday's class will be very important as i will be giving you your first major assignment so be sure to attend class on that day.

I was also really impressed to see that Summer has posted a flixn video on her blog. The audio is a little difficult to hear, but why not go listen to what she has to say.