University of Dallas on Jeopardy

The $1200 question in the Colleges and Universities category during Double Jeopardy. One of the alumni had it DVR'd and snapped a picture of it to share on Facebook.  Glad they did because unless it's a rerun I doubt they get any other Jeopardy question love in the future.

The Expo & The Olympics

Me with Yeony and Suny at the train station.

On Wednesday I was planning on heading to the Expo in Yeosu and so after my morning run I headed to the train station. Unfortunately the train system didn't feel like cooperating with me. Haha. I purchased a train ticket for the next train headed towards the Expo which would have left fifteen minutes later and waited on the track for it and after that fifteen minutes, plus an additional 30 I gave up. Now I would've just thought it was me or something, but the fact that there were about ten ladies there that were Expo volunteers in their Expo shirts and passes made it seem like it wasn't my fault. My fault or not I really wasn't in the mood to see how long I'd have to wait in order for this train to decide when it was coming. I decided that it wasn't in the cards and went for a walk on the river. Normal whenever I walk on the river I go south towards Suncheon Bay, but this time I decided to mix it up and turn north. The northern part of the river resembles the San Gabriel in a lot of ways. There's occasional exercise and sitting areas distributed along the river and then there's areas where the water looks beautiful trickling down rocks. There were a couple spots that reminded me of right below the Blue Hole. Took some time with my iPod and my feet in the water just watching some of the herons and egrets that were cooling off in the water as well. On the walk as well I took some more photos of murals that had been painted on the walls that I enjoyed and also I found the international wall. I have this weird thing that I enjoy looking at and being able to remember what different country flags look like. Is there better things to do with my brain space? Absolutely. But nevertheless there's a strip of wall up the river towards the northern part of Suncheon that has tons of flags from different countries painted onto the wall with assorted facts written underneath them.

Suncheon's lion waterfall.

This peaceful sitting park that I found by the lion that i will definitely  have to revisit during the fall when it is cooler.

The international flag wall.

My heron friend while I was relaxing with my feet in the water.

An awesome bowling mural.

Baseball gets a shoutout in a mural.

A white egret and this is the spot that reminded me of the blue hole.  There's a couple other pictures that make it look a little better.

As soon as I saw this I knew I needed a picture.

A kid in a tree.  Kind of reminded me of me.

Suncheon is getting some new logoed drain covers tat are pretty cool.

On Friday I decided that I would make another attempt for the Expo. This time whenever I bought the ticket that train wasn't for an hour. I was glad I had brought my tablet with a couple tv shows loaded on it. When I was waiting for the train I noticed that there was another train on the board that was headed to the Expo. I along with 3 Expo volunteers this time and a couple dozen of other people were waiting on the platform for this earlier train. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Finally, the train that my ticket was actually for showed up. My ticket was only a standing ticket, but it didn't matter as the train was still insanely packed. Arrived at the Expo and bought my “foreigner group price ticket”. That's what it said. Apparently, if you're not Korean then it's just insanely cheap right now.

Giant skeleton birds of some sort with people walking on stilts and just bouncing their heads.

It says Yeo at the top and then has a picture of Yeony and Suny at the bottom. 

This one says Su at the top and has the Expo official logo at the bottom.

Inside the Expo there's people from all sorts of different places, and there's also a whole lot of Koreans. The buildings inside the Expo are really unique and very cool. The lines were a little ridiculous. However, the lines were only really bad for the typical “cool” exhibits that everyone would want to see. 3D aquarium, technology exhibit, ocean life exhibit etc. I didn't wait in line for any of these. I walked around enjoying the sights and the people that I saw until I stumbled upon the Korean Local Government Pavilion. This was a really cool collection of city exhibits from a lot of the locales in Korea. The really funny thing was that the lamest exhibit from a city that I saw was the one from Seoul. All it included was a slideshow on the wall. A third grader could have put this together. Other cities included facts about their economical and ecological resources and also big events that they've got coming to their cities in the n ext half decade. Suncheon's focused on the World Garden Expo that's next year, Incheon has the Asian games coming soon and so on and so forth. I then made my way back through my wandering to where the main gate was and the mascots Yeony and Suny (it's the city's name Yeosu broken up in case you were wondering) and was going to get my picture taken with them because Mom says that I'm not in enough of my picture. I'm a little too polite and nice and I was there for about 15 minutes holding my camera in hand with the lens open and offered to take pictures of couples or small groups and as so as they got the picture they pulled a David Copperfield and were out of there without even asking if I needed one.

The ceiling of this pavilion was a giant digital screen which was awesome.

I finally decided that waiting out in the heat wasn't the best use of my time so I decided to take advantage of the foreign country exhibits. From Pakistan, Egypt and India to the Ivory Coast, Panama, and Honduras. There were a lot of interesting facts to be learned and a lot of unique and intriguing exhibits. I love learning about what other countries have to offer so browsing through these pavilions was a real treat. Plus I ran into the exhibit operator for the Panama exhibit and it was nice to have someone to have a brief conversation in Spanish with. The other Koreans in the booth thought it was funny too. When I was walking in the Atlantic Ocean Pavilion there was a volunteer there that was this cute Korean that was passing out information pamphlets about the booths in this pavilion. She looked at me and smiled and turned around and picked up two pamphlets and asked me which one I needed, French or English. I took the English one and told her thanks. After a couple more hours of exhibits my knee was telling my it was time to call it a day so I returned to the train station. AT the train station they had another giant mascot statue of Yeony and Suny and once again I took pictures of several other couples and finally found an older lady that snagged a picture of me with them. The great thing about it being the end and the beginning of the rail trip is that the trains are sitting there early and you can just go sit and relax on them until the train comes.

I've been watching the Olympics and have been loving it. As usual most of the sports you get to see during prime time viewing hours are the sports that the individual country is actually good at. Think, how many times do we actually see badminton, ping pong or judo on the tv in the US coverage of the Olympics. The first three days were filled with fencing, which I always thought to be kind of a boring sounding sport but it's actually very exciting to watch. On Saturday I got to watch Eastern European women compete in pole vaulting. Later that night when we went out to a new beer spot  (has lots of different beers from around the world.  I enjoyed the cool refreshing flavors of Honey Brown as they were lacking in the Shiner department.)  that we found it was a lot of track bike racing. There was a guy from Ireland competing in one of the events and we were rooting for him to at least get a bronze but alas he fell short. This sparked the question, what sports does Ireland do well in. I offered that rugby and some soccer events are usually their stronger areas. Then again, medal or not they're still excelling at their sport enough to be considered to come to the Olympics to represent their country. There was some idiot honking his horn outside at about 4 this morning and that woke me up. Since I was awake I decided to hit the bathroom and also to see what event was on and it was the start of the men's 10,000 meter. I decided to grab a tea and watch it and I was in for quite a surprise. There was still a good size pack when they hit the bell lap, and that last 400 meters was crazy. That pack broke up so fast and it was cool to see an American, Galon Rupp (Caucasian) put a considerable kick in on the last lap and get the silver. It was very cool.