24 Before 24 – Page 3 – Life In Limbo

24 Before 24: Go Trampolining

June 18, 2014

I’m doing 24 fun or new things before I turn 24. You can see the rest of my list here.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Dylan and I made quite the trek out to one of Busan’s many beaches, Dadaepo. The draw was the Dadaepo Sunset Fountain of Dreams (believe it or not that’s its real, official name), a water fountain show with multicoloured lights and water spray patterns, choreographed to music of all kinds. We’d been excited about theshow, but we hadn’t anticipated just how much we would love the beach itself.

It was absolutely stunning – when we looked to our right, it was all soft sand stretching as far as the eye could see, and on our left, green trees and big rocks curving around the coast. As is typical with these kinds of things, the photos don’t quite do it justice.

We arrived in the late afternoon and did the coastal walk (Korea is home to so many beautiful coastal walks that they’ve become one of our favourite pastimes) to the place where the walkway ended. From there we scampered over some rocks and dodged some creepy insects, ending up on a big rock listening to lovely music and talking as the sun started setting. It was a pretty blissful afternoon. The fountain was just icing on the cake!

But my favourite part of the day had to be the discovery of a free outdoor trampoline and the subsequent jumping around on it like a maniac until I had cramps from laughing so hard and my legs were too weak to catch me on the big bounces (resulting in quite a few painless tumbles & giggles). On the way from the bus stop to the beach, right on the main road, there was a little outdoor arcade, fairly run-down and with no employees. It was just open to the elements and to the public, and when we walked by there were just a few people in the batting cage. Everyone was utterly uninterested in the perfectly decent trampoline sitting unused right alongside them!

After a brief moment of looking around flabbergasted that it was free and that nobody was going to stop us, we climbed up the little ladder and onto the bouncy castle of our dreams. For me, it was one of those awesome moments in life where you get exactly what you want without having known that it was what you wanted. When I put “go trampolining” on my 24 Before 24 list, I’d pictured visiting one of the indoor trampoline rooms that are so common here in Korea. It never occurred to me that it would end up being an absolutely perfect moment – spontaneous, outdoors, with views of the fountain and the trees, full of giddy joy and hysterical laughter – and one that I was lucky enough to share with such a great friend. I know it sounds so cliché, but it made me feel like a kid again. Free and happy.

It was also an excellent reminder to stay open to new experiences and to doing things just because they’re insanely fun. If I hadn’t decided (totally arbitrarily) to put trampolining on my list this year, I might have walked right by that arcade without a second thought. I think we all get so used to doing things a certain way and going through the motions of our routines, but I want to remember to keep trying to incorporate joy and fun and impracticality into my life as much as I can. It’s really worth it.

24 Before 24: Go Camping and See the Sunrise from a Beach

June 9, 2014

I’m doing 24 fun or new things before I turn 24. You can see the rest of my list here.

It was a very good weekend for bucket list experiences. In three days, I spent about 10 hours in transport, didn’t get enough sleep and ate too much junk food. But it was a small price to pay for all the beautiful and awesome things I got to see and experience.

My friends and I spent one night camping on the beach of Bijindo, a beautiful, tiny island about 3 hours away from Busan. It’s very small, with only a handful of small shops in people’s homes selling beer, ramen noodles and packaged cookies and only one little restaurant serving about two dishes. It some ways it was a sad place, with lots of trash (and cute trash puppies) everywhere and half-built or run-down buildings, but the surrounding nature was so stunning that we barely noticed. A friend and I were lucky enough to stumble upon some locals having a flying lantern ritual and when we stopped to admire the process they quickly handed us a lantern or our own so that we could join in. Ours didn’t quite make it off the ground and almost set a bush on fire, but it was a pretty magical moment nonetheless, watching all the lanterns float up into the starry sky. Later that night I had one of the cooler experiences of my entire life when we swam and splashed around in the very cold, bioluminescent water. I’d never even heard of this phenomenon before, but I was quite literally in awe of the sparkling turqoise shimmers. It was unbelieveable. It seemed like magic (I’m still not convinced it wasn’t…) and I just felt this huge sense of wonder at this crazy beautiful world we live in.

We camped on the beach along with only a handful of other tents – most people who had visited the island during the day cleared out on the last ferry, leaving the place fairly quiet and peaceful. We weren’t really prepared for it to get so cold overnight, so it wasn’t a great sleep, but that made it easier to wake up for the beautiful sunrise. I realized only later that I don’t remember the last time I watched the sun rise at all, nevermind watching it from such a beautiful place. We were cold and shivering, but it was worth it.

Later that morning, we took a hike straight up the mountain, cutting through fields of produce and a very wild jungle of a forest. The whole island was pretty wild, with bugs the likes of which I’d never seen and bird calls the likes of which I’d never heard. We even sadly saw two dead dogs right as we arrived on the island. It just seemed like the place had its own ecosystem, which was really awesome. Who knows if it’s true, but the bioluminescence has me convinced. The forest itself was beautiful and felt like something straight out of Lord of the Rings, and the views from the top of the mountain were totally stunning.

The rest of the weekend was also a bit of a dream. I finally tried a Mexican-style restaurant in my area (a big deal for Korea) and found out that the people were lovely, the atmosphere was awesome, and the food was amazing (an even bigger deal). Then Sunday we admired the huge sand sculptures on our local beach and then made a big trek out to a beach a lot further away, across the city. The draw was the “sunset fountain of dreams” – a water and light show choreographed to music – but we had time to kill before the show. We spent the day exploring the beautiful beach, taking a gorgeous coastal walk, talking and listening to music on a rock surrounded on one side by water and on the other by forest, practicing handstands and taking lots of pictures. The show was great, but the best part of the whole trip for me was discovering a trampoline at a run-down little arcade right near the beach. Dylan and I jumped on it for a long time, laughing our heads off and getting weird looks from passersby.

It was a wonderful weekend, full of beautiful and special moments with wonderful people that already feel like great memories. I feel really, really lucky.

24 Before 24: Website Makeovers

June 5, 2014

I’m not 100% done with sprucing up my blog design, but that’s mostly because I don’t think I’ll ever be completely finished tweaking my website to look and act the way I want it to. Every so often I’m overcome with a need to fix a million small things all at once, which means long to-do lists and even longer hours spent trying to figure out one seemingly simple thing. That happened earlier this Spring and thankfully, for now that storm has passed. Lots of things have been updated and more things will continue to be, slowly and steadily. But I think my fit of productivity has given me permission to call this item on my 24 list done!

What exactly did I do? Nothing overly dramatic, just a lot of little changes, which I’m posting about here in case you’re curious. If you usually read in a blog reader, hop on over to the site to see if you like it!

So: I added pagination to the bottom of every page to make navigation easier. I created a Free Downloads page to store my e-book, my wallpapers and the occasional spreadsheet. It’s not perfect yet, but at least it’s there. I updated my Books page to include a hyperlink to every single book I’ve read for the past five years. My travel page now applies to all my travels (not just my trip to Europe) and is now more well-organized. I added new sidebar buttons for different categories and a popular posts widget. I created consistent graphics for all my sidebar sections – they’re the prettiest colour of blue! I updated my header and my Welcome photo and I changed my whole colour scheme to be less pink (though if you highlight anything you’ll still catch a glimpse).

I changed the fonts to one of my favourites and I cleaned up my categories. I added an Archive page to make it easier to find things. I added better options for subscription (Feedly, Bloglovin’ and RSS) to the bottom of the site. I changed the colour of my links and added streamlined social media buttons to the sidebar.

For my personal site, I switched to a very basic theme with a design I liked. I also added a small photography portfolio and links to my social media pages. I pared it down to be very minimal but still effective for connecting anyone looking for me on the web to all the different things I do. I might go back one day and redesign it to look more like my blog, but for now it gets the job done.

I still want to make a few of my pages a little prettier, and do a bunch of other small fixes that are probably boring to anyone without a blog. Possibly this whole blog post is boring to anyone without a blog! But blog design is something that I love to do, and I find it very satisfying. I got a comment recently from someone saying that my blog was really easy to navigate, and hearing that made me so happy. While I want my blog to be pretty, I also want it to be functional and helpful. I’m happy that a lot of the tweaks I’ve made in the last few months have made it more of both.

You can see the rest of my 24 List here.

24 Before 24: Get a Tarot Reading

May 15, 2014

I’m doing 24 fun new things before I turn 24. You can see the rest of the list here.

Getting a tarot card reading has always seemed so fun and exciting to me. Like most people, I am equal parts skeptical and giddy when it comes to mysterious things like having my fortune told or getting my palm read. I always think it sounds a little bogus, but not enough to discount it entirely – there’s always still a part of me that wants to believe in the magic of it.

This was one of the things on my first list that I never got around to, so I was excited to get the chance to have this experience while I was in Seoul! It was kind of fun, but kind of strange, too. It made me feel a little weird afterwards, but it was overall a pretty cool experience.

In downtown Seoul we walked past a whole line-up of tents offering fortune-telling services – apparently they are quite common in Korea. I got excited, then remembered that I didn’t speak Korean. But my friend offered to translate for me, and before I knew it we’d ducked into one of the tents! It was very kind of her to offer, and it ended up being a fun thing for us to do together.

Initially I’d thought to just get the tarot card reading, but after learning it only applies to the next 3 months of your life, I thought I’d go for something potentially more interesting: a reading of my birth chart! I gave the sweet woman who ran the tent (dressed totally normally by the way, and no crystal ball in sight!) my birth date and time, and she typed it all into her computer to find my chart.

The results weren’t overly surprising. According to my birth chart: I can be stubborn, I always have an opinion and I like to get my way. I’m a great teacher, I like learning, and I’m good with languages. I should get married later in life, after age 30. It will be important to me that both me and my partner are passionate and work hard at our respective careers – she went so far as to suggest the possibility of being a “weekend couple”! I should work to build a specialized, professional career (whatever that means).

And that was it, really! Nothing overly dramatic or revealing. The whole time I was in the tent though, I had this sense of forboding, like she was going to say something I really didn’t want to hear. For a while afterwards, I felt a little uneasy and couldn’t put my finger on exactly why. So while I wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility of doing a tarot reading again in the future, or even looking deeper into my birth chart, for now I’m happy to have done it and am closing the book on this one.