I'm too tired to think of a clever title.

Sorry.

I've got about 8 hrs of sleep in the last 60 hours or so, so if I slur my sentences, that's why.

Today was the longest day of my life. I swear this has been a blog theme before...but today was seriously never-ending. I feel like the last 3 days have melded into one dizzying hallucination and sometimes I get my dreams confused with reality. Mom - I promise I'm not on drugs.

My dreams have been SO VIVID as of late. Its as though I never really fall asleep, but rather am carried away into another world where I witness wonderful and horrific random things that probably mean a lot more than I am capable of understanding. Its like I live two lives, one in the conscious realm and another in the unconscious dream world. Erica was right - I am a thinker monster. And to get a good night's sleep, I must find a way to slay the beast.

Yesterday I went to work expecting the usual routine of Post-Camp planning alone in my classroom, when lo and behold it turned out to be a regular school day (no classes though, thank goodness). I love it when my CT tells me important information like that.

After work, I went home to pack and then headed to Trevor and Rachel's apt for dinner. Now Trevor and Rachel are currently in Bali, but they made the grave error of telling us that we could use/crash at/destroy their place while they were gone. Since they live MUCH closer to downtown Seoul than we do, Nate & Jess C., Hil and I decided to inhabit their apartment on Friday night so we could easily get to church for our leadership meeting on Saturday morning at 8:30 AM.

Now, Trevor and Rachel are from Canada. And their apartment was the temperature of Canada. And it took approximately FOREVER to heat...when we got there it was 12 degrees Celsius (53 Fahrenheit) and by the time we were ready for bed, it had inched up to 16 degrees (61 Fahrenheit) and so there we slept, freezing and shivering all night long. I don't know how the Canadians do it...must be all that ice hockey they play in the winter gets 'em used to it or something.

So I slept for a total of about 2 hours because my body kept waking me up to remind me that it was ridiculously cold.

We had a ministry meeting at church from 8:30-noon. I stayed awake the whole time, and was consequently very proud of myself.

After a light lunch at "the side dish place", as Hil calls it, we changed clothes and headed to Namsan for some hiking.

Namsan is a small mountain right in the middle of Seoul where they built the Seoul tower, as pictured below:


Namsan is the large hill in the distance with the white towers atop it. You can click on this picture to see more clearly.

You can either hike up Namsan or take a cable car up. Its a rather short hike, so we decided to do that. I should have counted the steps...there were probably at least 500. The hike was only 1160 meters (3480 feet - about 3/4 mile), but it was almost completely vertical. It wasn't to difficult - Korea has trained me to have great stamina when it comes to stairs, because there are so many of them in this stinking city. 500? No problem. Call me when you've got a real challenge. I barely broke a sweat.

I was pretty much toast after we got back from that excursion. The whole "not sleeping" thing coupled with the "mountain climbing" thing kind of caught up with me.

Here's your weekly excerpt:

"I am convinced that the essential meaning of true beauty exists in a dimension that is 90% incomprehensible to human beings. Beauty is so complex. And yet, we can all agree that some things are beautiful. Sunsets over the ocean, mountains shrouded in misty fog, flowers – Nature (God’s creation) is beautiful. But why? What is it about the way the wavelengths of sunlight hitting the atmosphere in just a certain way that makes it more beautiful than any other time? We can’t explain it. It’s just beautiful. And I think that’s how beauty is in general – you can’t explain it, but you know it when you see it, when you perceive it, when you experience it. We see beauty in a sunset. We can hear beauty in music. We can smell beauty in freshly cut flowers. Its all around us. Beauty in this way is objective.

When you look at a sunset sky, what do you perceive? Just think about color for a minute. What is color? And would it exist if our eyes weren’t capable of seeing it? Is it something inherent or something perceived? If we saw the whole world in a spectrum of black and white, would some shades of gray be more beautiful to us than others? Is God colorful? Will we be able to perceive it without the rods and cones that are at work in our visual process? Or will it be more than color? Something that exceeds color – something that makes ordinary colors seem dull and flat. We must not forget that we are being prepared for the revelation of another dimension, the dimension that C.S. Lewis describes in “The Great Divorce”, where our surroundings become too “real” for our bodies to handle. We are preparing for an eternity in Heaven."