Not Entirely Topical Anymore...

This is possibly my favourite bit of homework I've seen since I got here...

We're Still Here

Oh god, we are so bad at this blogging thing. We're so far behind it's ridiculous. In partial defense, my sister had promised to write a blog about her trip out here, but has failed to deliver thus far. Obviously the blogging skills run in the family. And we've been trying to deal with a somewhat more important issue of late - what is going to happen in 2 weeks when our contract finishes? This has been a source of a great deal of stress and no small amount of depression for both of us over the last 2 or 3 months. We've had numerous jobs lined up only to fall through, been lied to by recruiters and schools, had to accept that we'll be leaving Gwangju and we're now having issues with our visas. At the moment our boss is insisting on extending our visas by one day to ensure we work a full year (because we arrived on a public holiday we missed one day at the start), despite the fact that this will mean we have to go to Japan for a couple of days to arrange our new visas, instead of just visiting the nearest immigration office to our new school. In short this shouldn't have been a surprise given his normal conduct, but is infuriating nonetheless. And much more expensive than we would like. But on the plus side, our new jobs look pretty good and we'll get to tick Japan off our visited countries list.

Talking of which, since we last updated, we've been visited by Ann-Marie and Dave (my sister and her boyfriend), eaten a lot of food, had a flying visit from Becky's dad, followed quickly by a trip to China for a week with both of Becky's parents before spending another week with them in Korea, seen Oasis, Patti Smith and Bassment Jaxx play a ski resort near Seoul, panicked by the total breakdown of the laptop, been camping on another beach, worked stupidly hard on our pointless summer program at school, visited more national parks, had many birthday celebrations/goodbye parties for various friends (and Becky!), spent time in a Gwangju hospital (not me for once. This is a story for Becky to tell), I made us couple set Drifter Riff Raff clothing and we've witnessed some of the heaviest rain ever. Also, just before Ann-Marie and Dave got here we visited a green tea plantation which I forgot to write about before.

I'll let Becky write about her parents' visit and hopefully Ann-Marie will eventually deliver her write up of their visit. I'll just say this - as always, it was amazing to have the visitors, but heartbreaking to see them go. If everyone wants to book second trips for the next 12 months that'd be just perfect. Oh, also, while Ann-Marie and Dave were here we all visited the bathhouse in Busan, and I managed to get past my fear of being naked in front of other people. It was fun! Not being naked, that was just ok (and mostly only because I took out my contact lenses and convinced myself if I could barely see anyone then surely they couldn't really see me either. Except for the little kid in a snorkel mask who swam right up to me and hovered over my lap while Dave and I were sitting in the pool. These kids are odd sometimes), but the actual baths were great. And now I've been naked in front of my sister's boyfriend, so that's some kind of landmark event I suppose. Not one I'd ever planned to achieve, but hey. It's all experience. Right?

So, as mentioned above, we went to a green tea plantation in nearby Boseong. It was a nice bus ride through Korean countryside for an hour or so, followed by another bus ride into the middle of nowhere - we couldn't see any signs or anything, but all the young Korean couples with fancy cameras got off the bus so we thought we were probably in the right place. We followed the slightly confused looking couples into what appeared to be the plantation, but were unable to find any green tea. This was a little confusing, until we went a little way up a hill and caught a glimpse of green tea on the far side. It seemed we just went out of the wrong exit from the car park, so we soon arrived in the plantation proper. It was easy to tell, as there there shops selling green tea in bags, green tea in bottles, green tea in cups, green tea ice cream, green tea related clothing, green tea bibimbap and green tea crockery. Joking aside, it was really a beautiful place, even on a slightly overcast day. It was very... green. Ha. Just look at the pictures. The visit was followed by the ever more common bus home panic - we're sitting in the middle of nowhere with no bus timetable and not a vehicle on the horizon... Luckily a bus eventually arrived and took us back home again.

I'm reasonably certain I'm missing something exciting and fun out here, but the next thing to really talk about is the Jisan Valley Rock Festival.

We heard somewhere there were actual rock festivals in Korea, which was initially a bit of a shock, as it's pretty much impossible to hear any rock music anywhere outside of foreigner bars. Following some detailed searching (hooray Wikipedia!) we discovered in previous years Korea has had visits from Muse, Rage Against the Machine, Placebo, Franz Ferdinand, The Strokes and loads more, thanks to sharing the weekend and therefore much of the line up with Japan's Fuji Rock festival. A quick glance at the Fuji line up for this year got us somewhat excited and we started checking the festival website everyday. Long story short... due to complex reasons, there were 2 festivals the same weekend in Korea and the usually great line up was thus spread over 2 different locations. We went for the slightly better line up, although as we had to work on Friday we missed the 3 bands I most wanted to see. Ah well. We went with four friends and between us booked accomodation in what we expected to be a little room we could all squeeze into. We were originally going to camp, but we were worried about waking up in puddles of water (our tent isn't exactly waterproof). The room turned out to be huge and in an enormous, swanky looking hotel, so that was pleasing. We saw loads of Korean rock bands, some good, some dubious at best. One band, Windy City, turned out to be a reggae band - the Korean singer even spoke in Jamaican patois. Which was odd. But they were great, there was a really dancey happy feeling in the whole tent. Bassment Jaxx were ludicrously good fun. Patti Smith was really good and seemed as though she possibly hasn't changed at all in 40 years, ranting about nuclear weapons and peace for everyone etc. Jet turned out to only really have one song, which they played early on, then followed it with variations on the theme for an hour. Bit boring. Oasis, however, were truly excellent. We decided not to try to get in close, and sat up on the edge of the valley where we had a clear view of the stage and perfect sound. No need for too much detail but they played all the songs we really wanted to hear. Which is lucky really if they've really split up for good. The Korean rock fans were ace too. So many were really dressed up in outfits which wouldn't seem that eird at home, but here really stand out. Huge amounts of tattoos (very unusual), mean in full face make up, piercings, mohican haircuts... And it was a very happy, friendly crowd too. They went absolutely mad for every single band, jumping up and down and cheering widely for every word uttered through a microphone. The only downside of the whole weekend was having to run to get a bus home, which took about 5 hours, getting to bed at 5.30ish, only to have to get up for the start of the school summer program 5 hours later. Worth it though.

If only the summer program had been worth it. For anyone. Now, we have attempted to keep any complaints about our school and boss etc from our peaceful little blog over our year here. But We're almost finished, and I feel one little rant is acceptable. The summer program consists of an extra hour of teaching a day, a lot of extra work for the students and a lot of extra preparation and marking work for us. This is the same as the winter program we did in January, except then we were being paid extra for it. This time we weren't given any extra money. In fact, our boss didn't charge the parents any extra either. It's the most pointless exercise in the world, as the students don't learn anything new - it was in fact the exact same material we used in the winter program, which was the same as had been used the previous summer... and it was clearly originally put together with little thought for the abilities of the children it was going to be given to. It also meant we had to rush through our normal work even quicker as well, meaning we didn't really have time to make sure any of the children understood any of the material at all. We've now stopped using those books altogether as our boss has launched new books (that's another issue I won't go into now). So, basically, we didn't make any money out of it, our boss didn't make any money out of it and the students didn't learn anything at all. We're just more tired and bitter than we were before. Excellent.

Ahem. I apologise for that. Just be thankful we've held that kind of thing back all this time! Anyway, I'm going to add pictures to this post and finish there. More updates to follow sometime in the next 12 months. Probably. I'll leave you with some startling news from our new school books.