Belated Update no. 435...

Once again, we have fallen hugely behind in our blogging. If I were in the mood for a bad pun, I might call it a blog-age. But luckily, I'm better than that.

Ok, well, there have been all manner of developments since our last sensible update, including visits from my cousin Mark and my mum and dad, visits to Jinju, Busan, Tongyeong and Seoul, my birthday, a Survivor themed weekend away, the departure of two of our friends and the arrival of new fun teachers to our little foreigner filled apartment area. I'm going to try to just give you the highlights.

So, firstly Mark arrived and stayed with us for about 10 days or so (minus a couple of nights at a templestay and in Daegu). We had to work for most of the time he was here, but we did manage to go out for some good food, copious amounts of alcohol, bad karaoke, climb the mounain in Gwangju and a trip to Jinju with our friend Sophie. We planned to stay overnight, but decided we'd be better off spending the money on booze in Gwangju than a hotel in Jinju so came home after a few hours spent posing on statues of animals in a school playground and exploring an enormous ancient fortress. There were a few really amazing sights there, including a room full of small gold statues of Buddha and a large assortment of temples, shrines and statues of Gandalf. Also, we took a look at the rock where a Korean lady threw herself into the river whilst holding on to a Japanese general, drowning them both.

Mark managed to escape Gwangju just in time to avoid the Survivor weekend, which frankly I had been dreading. In the end it wasn't too bad, as everyone decided to vote each other off by drawing names from a hat. High (low) points include intense bouts of retching following my attempt to eat a whole tin of silkworm larvae and some pig feet, passing an orange chin to chin with our co-teachers, starting a fire... with a match (not much of a real challenge that) and far too much physical contact with our friends. I then drew the short straw and got voted out in time to watch Becky hop uphill with a football between her legs, shortly before she had to lie on the floor and make a human target for water balloon tossing practice. Sadly, this was followed by a challenge which involving putting a Korean puzzle together and seemed to take about 4 hours. Our friend Jimmy and I took advantage of this time by starting to drink a huge amount of alcohol (actually, Jimmy started before we began the challenges), so the rest of the night passed speedily and involved some excellent food, a quiz and more bad karaoke. Becky's wet jeans and consumption of cold blood sausage and mandoo ended up winning her the second prize of some extra holiday days, so it paid off anyway!

Finally for this particular blog, this is a student's notebook I had to mark recently - note the sentence marked in red...

Please Do Not Adjust Your Set

We're trying to sort out our photo albums, as we've used all our free space. So hopefully soon the photo album link'll be all full of exciting looking albums again, but right now there's nothing.

Seoul searching

Last weekend we decided to get out of Gwangju and head for the bright lights of Seoul with our friend Jimmy. No real plans for the weekend other than eat food that is otherwise unavailable in Korea, and try and find the Rock Tigers (a Korean rock group that Alan and I discovered on the internet). The trip started well with a trip to a sandwich shop- sandwiches are definitely one of the things I miss most. With our tastebuds temporarily satisfied we headed to Sinchon, which we had heard was a good place to find a cheap motel.

We spent a good hour going from one motel to another comparing prices and often being told that we couldn't check in before 11pm (as they were still renting the rooms out by the hour) and finally found a cheap and not too grotty place called something like itchy! We then went for a wander around the area in the hope of finding something exciting for dinner. As we walked past a lovely little jewelery shop I noticed that the owner looked Indian so I took a chance and asked him if he knew of any Indian restaurants in the area. He not only knew a place but produced a menu with a map and address. We went for a drink and built up quite an appetite looking at the list of curries, basmati rice and naan bread, and then with me feeling slightly smug about my find headed back to the motel to get ready. Half an hour later, we were about to leave, just wanted to check the leaflet once more, but we couldn't find it anywhere! So we had to go out leafletness with no idea how to find the sought-after curry. I blame Jimmy.

Miraculously, after a lot of walking around in circles we mannaged to find another Indian restaurant which was really delicious. After dinner we went to a nice little bar and had a few drinks before going to a cool little club to see the Rock Tigers, who were playing Elvis Presley when we arrived. It was really great and wonderful to see lots of punky Koreans trying to crowd surf. We made it back to our not so swanky motel and passed out for a good few hours, before getting up, walking around aimlessly and going back to Gwangju.