davidsmeaton.com

craig has been in korea for nearly two weeks. so far we’ve had a bit of fun and hung out together. mostly, it was good to catch up with him, since i haven’t seen him in three years. on saturday night, craig and i headed out to coex to photograph the huge buddha statue at bong eun temple. we headed out around dusk and climbed the hill behind the statue. we got a few shots and went back down. i’ve already been to this spot twice, so last night’s shoot was mainly for craig’s benefit.

the rubber chicken will be in korea for another week before bouncing out to hong kong on his way back to oz. actually, the korean weather has got the best of craig, and he’s been sick for two days. hopefully he’ll start feeling better so we can enjoy the last week of his stay.

the highlights so far have been corn, chatting and joking randomly, running away from people who start random converstations with us on the subway “hello, are you from siberia?”, corn, listening to hockey games online, braving the cold to shoot at night, corn, and various other musings.

it’s been awesome to catch up …

ibuddha.org has received a face lift, and a few extra photos. the site now has a 100 photograph, horizontal scrolling gallery. yay!!

i really like the new look … however, be warned, it takes a while to load.

oh, speaking of web stuff, i bought a few domains. i noticed that davidsmeaton.org and davidsmeaton.net were still available. so i bought them … might as well own the lot.

i had a great weekend on jeju island … it was a weekend of fun, heat, adventures and wrong turns.

i arrived on the island friday afternoon and headed to my hotel. then i met up with rorey (a seoul photo club member) and we rented a scooter for me to ride around jeju island. we headed east with the intention of seeing a cave and a hedge maze. we got lost, twice, but managed to get to the maze and take photos … we headed back to the city after dark and passed a very cool buddhist pagoda. it looked like someting from laos or myanmar. so we planned to head there the next day … friday night we ate black pig (it used to be called shit pig, because they would live on a diet of shit … usually people’s shit).

saturday i got an early start, but i couldn’t get in contact with rorey. so i headed off anyway to go to a few other places. i got to the beach down the coast and took a few photos. then rorey called. he’d slept in … lol … so we agreed to meet on the southern part of the island. i promised a friend that i’d head to a botanical garden owned by his company’s president. so i went there and was surprised by how nice the place was. they were very friendly and i had a good time. after finishing, i had some strawberry juice and watermelon, which was free.

i kept going south and met up with rorey at san bang san, which was a massive hill with a buddhist temple and grotto on the side of it. i had lunch and we hiked up to the grotto. it was very cool and definitely my favourite part of jeju island.

heading back east, on the south end of the island, we visited a famous waterfall and looked around the rich resort areas. i didn’t like that area very much. watching rich people drive like lunatics and live in arrogant oppulance really bugs the hell out of me. however, the waterfall was really cool and i got some good shots of it.

the time was getting late, so we headed north west on a detour up to a beach which might have been good for sunset. i was quite sunburned by this time so i bought a longer tshirt. the beach wasn’t very good … actually, it was nice, but i was a bit tired from being sunburned, so i didn’t enjoy it. we kept going north and followed the coast to check out some wind turbines also owned by my company. we got lost on the small farm roads, but figured it out eventually.

we headed back to the main northern beach after that. the beach was very nice and very crowded. it was one of the most popular beaches on the island. we looked around and decided to wait and see how sunset would look. we ate more black pig for dinner and, since the sunset wasn’t very good, we rode to jeju and called it a night.

oh … saturday night i went back to the cool pagoda i’d seen friday night. on friday evening the pagoda was all lit up with lanterns, so i was quite excited to go there and get some nice shots. however saturday night it was shut. cursing under my breath, i rode back to the hotel.

on sunday morning we took a second go at the cave we missed on friday. however, about half way there it started raining. we persisted for a bit, but then stopped at a supermarket for some cover to see if the weather would break. about 30 minutes later we gave up, figuring the weather was following us east, so we rode back to the city for some coffee. we talked for a while in town. i returned the bike and went to the airport.

at the airport, i got some food. the ladies at the restaurant were quite unpleasant, so i got my revenge by stealing the nice chopsticks.

all up, the trip to jeju was a lot of fun. i came back sunburned to all hell on both arms. we got lost a bunch of times and never made it to the cave on the eastern side of the island. we gave up on both sunrise and sunset photos … but i had a really good time, saw some good times, had a lot of laughs, got some good photos.

now i can say i’ve been to jeju island …

big weekends are coming thick and fast. i’ve been quite busy lately, but the upside is that i’m doing lots of photography. i’ve already shot over 400 shots this month (and today is only the 10th).

yesterday ryan came into town. he wanted to see the magnum exhibition so we headed there first. the exhibition had a few good photos, but generally i didn’t think the quality was very high. it was definitely good inspiration though, so we headed out to brave the fierce summer weather.

we headed to cheungmuro, i printed my film and we drank coffee at a cool little second hand store. we ate kimchi mandoo for lunch, met up with the leica club members (we spent some time drooling over a $30,000 collector’s camera). then we headed off to dongjak station to get some photos of the sunset.

we arrived early, but had some beer and set up while we waited for the sun to get lower. originally we were off to the left side, but moved closer to the middle of the bridge later, to get a better position. i got a bunch of great photos, partly in thanks to my new cokin flw filter … it’s designed as a fluorescent correction filter, but the upshot is that it produces amazing colours during sunsets. it’s a very nice little investment.

the photography went well, and we were forced to give up thanks to a sudden downpour of rain. we drank some beer at the local pub and headed home to argue about focal lengths. LOL

this morning we got up at the ridiculous hour of 6am to head to chenonan. we wanted to take advantage of the weather and photograph the buddha. however, the sun was behind it and the photos didn’t come out very well. i have one or two usable shots.

this afternoon i came home, feeling tired from a long weekend, had a small sleep and have been editing photos.

back to work tomorrow, but i’m not feeling too worried about the long day, because tuesday i start my holidays. i still need to go to the office in the afternoon. but for a whole week i can sleep in!

this. this is seriously one of the best short videos i’ve ever seen. i stumbled across it and i’m really glad that i did. i don’t know if it’s possible to understand how profound this is. what’s more, this sums up my opinions about life and the highly ravenous approach to life in korea.

if those thoughts aren’t enough to grab you, perhaps you’ll be more interested to know that it’s narrated by alan watts (famous buddhist philosopher) and animated by trey parker and matt stone (creators of southpark).

enjoy …

so, i got my girl, and i got my job, and i got my gold tooth, and i got my life. things aren’t perfect, but they’re cruising along nicely for the moment. i’ve been wrangling with banks in preparation for next year. i’ve finally found a bank that will give me an international debit card and a credit card. they also have high interest savings accounts, so i’m in the process of moving all my money over to them. monday or tuesday that should all be done.

yesterday i had my gold crown put in … finally. i had to wait while they remoulded the filling. when i went back to the dentist yesterday the filling was perfect and they cemented it in. it feels a little strange, but it’s very comfortable. after that i headed to cheonan to meet up with ryan. after a mixup at the bus stations, we finally got together and headed to gakwonsa temple. the temple was really awesome. the grounds are quite big and at first we couldn’t find the big sitting buddha. however, we were standing in front of the main temple and i looked to the left, there amongst the trees was the top of the buddha’s head sticking out.  we wandered around for a few hours and got a lot of shots. the weather was poor, so the shots aren’t as good as i had hoped. however, we liked the temple and buddha, so we plan to head back there in the future, when we can get blue skies.

today is washing day. i’ll probably end up chatting to senor culo, wash and clean my apartment, curse netherlands for losing to russia, edit photos and relax.