oily!

written last night: 12/19/07:
Ok. My internet is down for some reason. I have no idea why but I’m annoyed because I did a good deed today and that means good karma should be coming my way but internet not working = bad karma. Haha. I sound like a brat.

convo of the day: (walking down to oil-covered beach)
me: i'm so excited!! teeeehehehehe
kim: umm you know this is just manual labor?
me: i KNOW!!! manual labor is so exotic to my life!!!

Today was fuuuuuuun. We all (korea haha) had the day off to go and vote. And since I can’t vote I decided to do something else civically minded: help clean up the taean oil spill. (ok, to be honest it was maia’s idea, but I thought it would be good).

So we take off at 7:30 to daejeon where we transferred to another bus going to taean. But FIRRRRRST we wandered a bit in daejeon and FOUND A MCDONALDS OPEN FOR BRAEKFAST!!!! THIS MEANS …. SAUSAGE MCMUFFIN!!!

Yesssss!!! I had been craving one since my 1st class yesterday. I don’t know why but yesterday morning I was jus all like, OMG I WANT A MCMUFFIN. And so maybe that was my good karma. We ate at mcdonalds and wanderd around the homeeplus trying on sweet animal hats.

We slept all the way to taean where kimmy bought us lunch. It’s really pretty and open and you can see the sky!!! Kimmy’s sweet hostparents drove us to our site. Along the way there were white tents giving away cleaning up gear so we scored some boots, protective onesies, and gloves.

We got to an acceptable site and geared up.

Then we dove in by starting to scrub down rocks coated in oil when the tide went out. We did this for about an hour and a half. The weather was AMAAAAAZING. There was a crazy guy with a megaphone thing and we ignored him for a while cuz I only heard random bits and thought he was spreading the word of God and being all evangelical.


But finally we realized he was just using God to get us excited/motivated but mostly asking us to help with the long line of bucket passing that was behind us along the coastline. People coming from that direction were COVERED in oil and we decided there was like an oil pool/field/pond over yonder and maia decided we had to see it. Well …. Bad decision. As soon as we head in that direction the assembly line calls us and we get sucked in to passing buckets full of .. surprise surprise … OIL.

It was gross and amazing how much oil there was!!! The buckets were full of brown/black GOOP. At first it reminded me of fudge and then it reminded kim of chocolate pudding. But it smelled pretty much like oil.

Next exciting thing: WE SAW 신정환!!! Apparently he was doing some PR thing for some TV show. And he walked along our assembly line and apparently went down to the end where he scooped two buckets before he left. I wanted to stop him and say we were fans from America so he would talk to us but KIM wouldn’t let me. And I couldn’t take a picture because I was mid-bucket passing and we thought the angry Koreans yelling at him that half the work was already done would not be too pleased if I stopped passing buckets to take a picture. Haha.

So, yea we kept passing buckets until 5 when kim’s hostdad came to get us. It was a good day’s work. We left Taean at 6:10 and I got home around 10. I’m exhaauuuuuuusted right now but really happy we went and tried to help. =) it was beautiful out there and I can’t wait to visit again.

3 of us after finishing:


me! goal accomplished! (my goal for the day was to get super dirty, that way it would look like i really did a lot of work)


p.s. 이명박 seems to be the new president.

Completely unrelated to the president thing, but I am happy.