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greg 
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 21st, 2009|10:52 pm] |
update still coming, just had a thought to pop up here
top chef absolutely crushes hell's kitchen as far as cooking competition shows go. that is all |
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| every 6 months |
[Oct. 17th, 2009|09:37 pm] |
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in case anyone still checks this, i am still alive and well. still on jeju island in korea, but i am headed back to the states for good (or at least a while) in march. i want to write some more right now but my thoughts are in a giant jumbled heap. will update soon |
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| chef gregory ramsey |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|08:34 pm] |
i know to those of you that actually cook a lot, this may sound kinda stupid, but i am really pumped up about actually making tasty meals myself. i have never really cooked for myself, so this is a pretty new thing. for the past 4 years, i have basically eaten out a lot or made easy, easy meals (ex: mac & cheese, hot dogs, microwave frozen stuff). so yeah, learning to make stuff from scratch is pretty cool. tonight i made pepper steak with mashed potatoes and steamed broccoli and carrots. woo hoo!
give me a few years and maybe i can run a kitchen like gordon ramsey
YOU ARE A F**KING DISGRACE, YOU F**KING DONKEY!!! haha |
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| (no subject) |
[Mar. 20th, 2009|10:25 pm] |
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alright! update time. i have relocated once again! i am still in korea but i have moved on down to Jeju island. so far, everything is going well. finally got a job (at a foreign language center), an apartment (down near the ocean! score!), and a crew of friends (mostly canadian neo-mennonites, if that makes any sense). this has been a really interesting change from where i have been. for one, its not -40 anymore (big ups mongolia). two, they have more types of meat than just mutton. three, well, i dunno. lets just stick with the first two. overall, i think i am in a really excellent place right now. lots of stuff has been rollin around my noggin for quite some time, so its pretty cool to be somewhere that i have a good shot at getting some solid thinking going on. i will definitely try to get more posts up here on a regular basis |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 2nd, 2008|04:59 pm] |
ahh my twice yearly update. some interesting stats from my stay so far in korea
months here - 5
jobs - 2
number of jobs that have hosed me in some way - 2
amount of money i am currently owed by said jobs - 3.1 millon won (roughly $2,500 after the beating the won has taken in the currency markets)
number of girlfriends - 0
amount of soju drank - only God and my liver know
amount of delicious korean barbecue eaten - only God and my rapidly expanding spare tire know
overall, i am still upbeat and in a pretty good place. my last job did screw with me pretty good, but me and the other teachers that have been shafted are in a good position to get our pay. its a story i need to post up here sometime, but i will wait until my pay comes in and i can look back and just kinda laugh about it. right now, i am experiencing more heartburn than laughter. ah well, c'est la vie as my cheese munching brothers say. im headed back to mongolia sometime in the next week and a half to pick up my stuff, then probably back here to teach a winter camp. i have my sights set on teaching at a public elementary school on jeju island (a cool little island just off the southwestern coast of korea) but that wont start until march or so. i am pretty excited about that, because you ever get screwed over by the government and jeju is a kickass place. you can swim a bit more than half the year in the ocean and it is a really relaxed place. plus, i have a few friends down there i would love to hang with for a year. so yeah, thats my little update. i know i always say i will try to update more, so this time no promises. i will try though |
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| KOREA |
[Aug. 11th, 2008|05:21 pm] |
this shit is hot
if you have taught/lived/traveled anywhere in east Asia (especially Korea), this should make sense. if not, screw you |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 3rd, 2008|05:37 am] |
i seem to have a problem staying on track with this whole "updating" thing. here is a quick update on whats goin on with me
no longer workin in mongolia. right now i am teaching at another summer camp in korea. i am thinkin after i finish the camp i will stay on here for a year. its a good place to save money so i think i will bank a little and then get on with life.
i will try my best to update more, if anyone still even checks up on this damn thing |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 7th, 2007|05:31 pm] |
if i can manage to overcome my natural laziness, i will post here more often.
i am in mongolia now, at least until christmas. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 12th, 2007|03:20 pm] |
ok, time for a little korea update
at the moment, i am in seoul for the weekend. seoul i a really interesting city to visit, especially after having spent loads of time in tokyo and beijing. so far, i am really, really liking it. the people are pretty nice, things arent too expensive, and they have a plethora of american food. Popeye's, Burger King, Papa Johns, and Dunkin Donuts to name a few. for those of you who havent lived somewhere where you are cut off from the glories of artery clogging fast food, you just wouldnt understand how it feels to chow down on a whopper after years of crappy mcdonalds. to tell you the truth, i am a little bit worried about how good it actually made me feel haha....
anyways, i have gotten to meet up with my buddy nick paul from high school. he has been over here for about 2 years, so he is my guide to the wonders of seoul. it is always a lot of fun to see old friends from home. speaking of which, the indomitable joe simmons (also from high school) visited me in beijing a few weeks back. we did all the wonderful touristy things (Great Wall, Forbidden City) and kinda chilled out for a bit in the smoggy streets of the 'jing. i thought joe was going to mess himself the first time i took him to one of the dollar-a-disc dvd shops.
so anyways, yeah i am korea for the moment. i have about another 3 weeks here teaching at an english summer camp (Camp Eng-Land) then i am back to beijing for a little bit. right now i am trying to decide what to do after that. my main plan right now is to head up to mongolia for a bit. with the money i have earned here in korea i can afford to just hang out in ulaan bataar for a few months, which definitely appeals to the slackass in me. also, there are different english camps going on year round here in korea, so whenever i start to run out of money i could just pop over and work for a few weeks. not too bad if i say so myself. the other idea i am kicking around is to come back to korea and get a job. they pay pretty damn well here, and from what nick tells me you can go out and have an active social life and still save a few hundred bucks a month. sounds pretty sweet to me. so yeah, i am thinking about coming here to korea for a while, work, save, and then head back to the states via the trans siberian railroad and europe. i have a few weeks to figure everything out so i will be sure to update you all as to what i decide.
oh, and if one or two of you living in nebraska could call my parents and tell them i am still alive and kicking i would greatly appreciate it |
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| back, god only knows for how long |
[Aug. 1st, 2007|09:57 pm] |
i am currently in korea teaching at a summer camp. just felt i should post something up since the great firewall of china has been blocking livejournal for a few months. i will try to put up some sort of post detailing the past few months in the near future.
anyone still read this thing? |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 15th, 2007|05:46 pm] |
my time so far in ulaan baatar has been all sorts of up and down.
UP:
-met some cool people
-good food (mutton steak, mashed potatos, buuz (kind of dumpling) to name a few)
-celebrated valentine's day at a bar/restaurant called the BRAU HAUS with a few of the people i met at another bar
-my own room for only 6 bucks a night
-some wild nights out on the town
-the hottest girls on earth......really. except for brazil. and kazakhstan.
DOWN:
-got my damn wallet stolen. that makes two times in asia (well, technically the first time i lost it but who really cares about details)
-still cant read cyrillic
-avoiding the swarms of prostitutes
-not much snow
overall though, it is excellent. i am seriously thinking about moving here. decent beer, good food, hot women, low cost of living......what's not to love? plus, i hear the summer is dry and not scorching hot. that would be a welcome change. time to ponder..... |
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| PART ÕΨР|
[Feb. 10th, 2007|03:49 pm] |
let's see, where were we....ah yes, customs hell.
so, we finally roll up to the border after what had to be one of the longer 5 minute car rides of my existence. we all line up in the departure hall so that the chinese authorities can get out our passports and make sure we are leaving the country for good. apparently, not a lot of americanos come through this particular customs office, because my arrival was a hell of an event. i had about 3 customs officers trying out their english on me (with various degrees of success) while another 2 or 3 officers came out of nowhere to just stare at me the whole time. ahh.....china. they had an inordinate amount of trouble with my passport. apparently, they had a very difficult time finding my current chinese visa, despite the fact that i handed it to them open to the correct visa page. as they flipped back and forth, i pointed out the right page to them about 5 times before they finally figured it out on their own. and to think, it only took the combined efforts of about 5 customs officials! from there, me and the crabby mongols climbed back into the rattling SUV of doom and headed down to the mongolian arrival hall. this is where my day took a turn for the better. after waiting in line for about 20 minutes, the customs guy scanned my passport, stamped it, and let me on my way. it was really an amazing feat considering the amount of trouble his middle kingdom counterparts had. from there, i was informed by the driver of the death machine that we had to wait for the jeep to clear customs. i thought, ok, no problem. chill out here a little bit, grab a coffee, exchange some money, rock and roll. what i didnt realize at the time was that our car was about 20th in line and the customs officials had just gone on a seemingly endless lunch break.
so i headed over to the exchange counter, traded about 200 yuan (roughly 25 bucks) for around 28,000 tughrik. of course, they have bills galore, all the way from 10 tughriks to 20,000. a lot of the smaller items you get (drinks, smokes, snack) are under 1,000, so you end up with a pretty sizeable wad in your pocket after only a few purchases. its a nice feeling. everytime i feel that money roll in my pocket, i feel like the guy on the monopoly box. i should get a monocle. anyways, after exchanging some cash i went to the little snack bar to get something to grub on. at that moment, i had a strange realization: i have absolutely no idea how to speak mongolian. and since they use cyrillic, i was kind of out the whole reading game as well. the only cyrillic i know is that CCCP really means SSSR. and so i ended up ordering three coffees somehow instead of the one i wanted. this endeared me to the rest of the people at the counter since two of them got some free coffee. it was while i was there fumbling around in a mixture of languages trying to be understood that i met my main man Tsedee. he is a student in mongolia who also helps his dad out with the family export/import business. i think he was the only guy in the place who knew any english, so he offered to help me out. as we waited for the customs guys to work their way through the cars, we figured out both of us were en route to ulaan baatar (UB from here out) so we decided to head up together. we decided to ditch our respective rides and walked over to a group of jeeps cleared by customs already and wrangled two seats into town. once there, we bought our tickets (5 bucks for the 12 hour ride to UB) and got some grub. mongolian food kicks ass. for the most part, they eat mutton, beef, potatoes, dumplings, rice, and bread: my kind of food.
at 5 we boarded the train up to UB. it was then that i discovered why our seats were so cheap: we were in a sleeper car equipped with 5 beds per compartment but with about 7 or 8 people crammed in. however, this ended up being a lot of fun. the other people in our compartment were really nice and pretty interested to have a big american sitting with them. they peppered me with questions, which Tsedee dutifully translated. then they busted out a bottle of vodka and passed it around. it is pretty amazing how easy it is to communicate with people through extensive use of body language and liberal quantities of vodka. i also discovered an interesting custom that the mongolians have: when someone steps on your foot, they immediately stop and shake your hand. i guess its their way of avoiding confrontation. of course, with my clown shoe size feet, i ended up getting my feet stepped on quite a bit and eventually ended up shaking hands with about half the train.
at about 10 pm, the train stopped in a small ton for about a half an hour. we all poured out into the bitter ass cold and went in search of food. on the train platform, there were tons of people with little carts selling everything from pepsi to milk to sandwiches to full meals in a box. Tsedee took me to a cart to get some "aramug" to eat. i decided, hey, why the hell not. much to my surprise, aramug is nothing more than gigantic mongolian versions of "pigs in a blanket". ladies and gentlemen, i do believe mongolia is my heaven. we grabbed our napkin wrapped bundles of goodness and got back on the train. everyone crashed when the train started up again, and i even managed a couple hours of sleep before pulling in, bright and early, to UB central station. and in a way, thats when my trip really began. but i will leave all that for another day. for now, i am off to the bar to get some delicious Mustanger beer as well as some quality reading time in. till next time......
* for those of you who give a damn, currently i am reading "Space" by James Michener. great book for those of you who liked "The Right Stuff" |
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| MONGOLIA |
[Feb. 7th, 2007|06:33 pm] |
finally, after roughly 48 hours on the road, i have arrived in Ulaan Baatar. i decided to go off the beaten track on my way here from beijing. instead of the relatively painless 30 hour train ride, i took at 6pm sleeper bus from Beijing to the border town of Erlian. the sleeper bus was tons of fun, mainly for the following reasons:
-no toilet on board
-no english speakers on board
-aisles which are just wide enough for me to squeeze through sideways
-a top bunk (yes, no chairs, only barrack stlye bunks) which was decidedly smaller than my enviable frame
so, i spent the entire night trying not to roll off onto the floor, as well as avoiding all liquids so i didnt need to take a number 1 or 2 (interesting side note: i discovered that the chinese and mongolians also refer to their excrement using numbers 1 and 2. THE MORE YOU KNOW!) we arrived there at about 5:30 in the am. of course, there was no comfy bus station to hang out in until wonderful things like restaurants opened up, so instead i went to a hotel and pleaded with the night clerk to let me hang out on one of the couches. she finally took pity on me and allowed me to crash for a while. at about 7, i decided to walk down the road and find either a restaurant or taxi, despite the fact that the temperature was somewhere between siberian gulag and witch's tit. after failing to find an open restaurant, i got a taxi to the border. of course, the border is closed at 7 in the morning. apparently border guards like their rest like most normal people. so i headed back to town and sat in the train terminal for a few hours. after kickin it there til 10, i got another taxi and headed back to the border. this time i discovered you are not allowed to walk across the border. instead, you must pay a taxi driver with an official permit to drive you through. of course, my taxi driver did not have one. so we head back to town. now, we end up cruising the town looking for a ride across the border. my taxi driver finally finds me a jeep to ride along in. now, when you read the word jeep, you probably think grand cherokee, or even those ugly ass liberty models. oh no. this is a primo soviet era badboy with a cloth roof and everything literally taped together. apparently, there werent any other rides to the border available at the moment, so i was stuck with that or nothing. of course, i decided to go with the tally-ho spirit and hopped in. what i didnt know when i got in was that i wasnt the only passenger. apparently, they also pack the jeep with as many people/cargo as is humanly possible. i got squeezed in between two old grumpy mongolian ladies and a couple bales of t-shirts. awesome! i regret now not taking pictures, but at the time i was still trying to figure out if the whole thing was a setup and they were really going to drive me into the desert and feed me to the sarlaac. thankfully, no. instead, we trucked along at a good 5 mph up to the border. once there, we entered customs hell.
however, i am bushed so i will finish this tale up tomorrow. enjoy for now |
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| on the road again |
[Jan. 25th, 2007|12:04 am] |
i have finally gotten off my butt and started my winter travel. most normal people like to go where it's warmer, but i am a different brand of knucklehead. i arrived this morning (after an 11 hour trip on a sleeper train) to the northern city of Harbin. it's a pretty kick ass place. its only a few hours from the russian border so the influence of russian culture is evident. then again, it is also only a few hours from the north korean border, but i dont think that there has been a lot cultural exchange going on lately hehe....
the area Harbin is in is what was formerly known as Manchuria. for those of you with the inclination to find this place on a map, check the northeast corner of China. it is directly north of the Korean peninsula and west of Vladivostok. i really wanted to go travel in Siberia, but russian tourist visas cost like a quarter of my monthly salary (just so you arent too shocked, i really dont make very much money). bummer. however, i will hang out here in Harbin for about a week or so. next week, i am going to Ulaan Bataar in Mongolia for a while. if it is as nice and cold as Harbin i will be a very happy man. if i can find a few more shops with big size clothes, i will be a very, VERY happy man.
when i arrived this morning, i called one of my former students. she is a professor of materials engineering at one of the universities in Harbin. she is awesome. actually, i gave her her english name for class: Susie. for those of you who went to PLHS, yes, i named her for Susie. very similar sweetess levels. as soon as i called, she skipped out of work and came over to my hostel to greet me. she had a bunch of meetings today, but she introduced me to one of here master's degree students to help show me around the city. his name is mike, and he is the biggest chinese guy i have seen in a long time (roughly the same size as me). he was a great help in finding some big clothes shops. after shopping, we hit up a korean bbq place and gorged ourselves on cook it yourself bbq and delicious harbin beer. afterwards, i wandered about aimlessly, checking out the downtown area. harbin is very famous for its ice sculpture festivals, so at the moment downtown there tons of giant sculptures everywhere. full size grand pianos, castles, strange geometric things i havent figured out yet, etc. later this week i will go out with another friend from school to see the ice lantern festival. apparently, they light up all of their sculptures from the inside and it looks pretty awesome at night. i am pumped. so, thats what i am up to at the moment. what are you all up to? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 20th, 2007|06:09 pm] |
today was an epic day. went out to an area of beijing with two awesome dvd shops. picked up the following:
Entourage - Season 3
Lost - Season 2
The Office - Seasons 1 & 2
Deadwood - Season 3
Home Improvement - Seasons 1 & 2
Studio 60 - Season 1
24 - Season 2
Arrested Development - All Seasons
Undeclared - All Seasons
American History X
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The Illusionist
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Apocalypto
followed this spree up with a large New York style pizza from the Kro's Nest and 4 bottles of soju, 4 cans of red bull, and 2 big bottles of coke.
all this for about 100 dollars. i am very, very pleased.
china rocks |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 20th, 2006|01:29 pm] |
my new favorite mixed drink is a simple concotion of my own design. its possible it has been done elsewhere because the damn thing is so easy to make, but i havent heard of it. the mix is this:
one 1.25 liter bottle of Coke (5 parts)
one 750 ml bottle of soju (a korean alcohol, only about 20% alcohol, also known as shochu to my japanese friends) (3 parts)
two 250 ml cans of redbull (2 parts)
basically half coke, half mix of soju and red bull
i need a name for it. i have spent countless minutes pondering this question under the influence of said drink and its attendant fog. as of yet, nothing. suggestions put forward by my liquor soused friends here in beijing are as follows:
Hutt's Tonic or Greg's Tonic (fairly straightforward, but not sexy enough)
Jabba Juice (has its own particular charms)
Greg you are a fucking pussy (said by friend chugging whiskey)
i value each suggestion i receive (minus that last one). so please friends, offer up your own ideas here
*** i will actually update this thing with my adventures in china soon, have patience |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 22nd, 2006|03:09 pm] |
quote of the week, courtesy of my buddy sean
"i don't trust condoms from a country with a billion people"
i dont know why, but that gets funnier every time i think about it.
maybe its just me hahaha |
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