Jay Fraser

Every spring the cherry tress blossom and looks pretty nice. This picture is just outside of the city where I live, Gwangju. Usually all the famous places for cherry blossoms are just packed with people, but not many people know about this road. It's a road going out to a smaller suburb city, Hwasoon, where I used to live a few years ago. During the springtime, I'd get on my motorcycle and just ride around, not know where the road was going, but having a great time exploring. This road was one of the ones I found. It's actually used to be the main road to Hwasoon going over a hill, but sometime in the past they built a newer road and just tunneled through the hill. Almost no one goes up here these days, but every spring I take a ride up and get some pictures.

Downtown Gwangju. This is not one of the main roads, but a side street not too far from the river picture above. In the background is the old law building at Chosun University. I've taught a few classes in there. This picture is a bit misleading, the university is not nearly as close as it seems in this picture. I just like all the signs and the crowded street. Most of the signage is in Korean, and there are a number that use Korean characters to spell English words, such as ta-ul for towel.

The haze in the sky is not all smog, on that day we were also having the "yellow dust" blow over from China. Every spring the prevailing winds blow dust from China to Korea and does this to the air. A few days ago, this dust combined with clouds turned the sky black. Seriously black. It was 12:30 pm, lunch time, and it was as dark as about 45 minutes after sunset. Sky a kind of dark, dark gray and everything else black. Cars had to turn on their lights, streetlights turned on, everything. It lasted for about 15 minutes, then came back to just a dark rainy day. I've never seen anything like it before. Maybe an eclipse would be the same, sure was strange!

Chosun University, where I work, by night. I took this from the engineering building looking toward the soccer fields and main building. The main building, the one with all the peaks in the back, is one of the longest buildings in Asia. It's about 300 metres from one end to the other. Chosun has about 20,000 students and there are about 20 foreign English teachers to teach the freshman classes conversational English.

My apartment. Everything has been changed from when I bought it, flooring, paint, cabinets, lights, wallpaper, really everything. I'm pretty happy how it turned out.

We had a lot of snow in December, the since I've been here, and actually, the most in something like 40 years. It was crazy, but I loved it!

This was a salt truck trying to spread salt over several inches of packed snow. It made for a mess over the next few days.