drifter riff raff

Defending the president

2010-06-30T04:27:00.004+01:00

Last weekend was our friend Matt's birthday. He decided that, in order to celebrate, we should all head to Gwangju and play game he used to play at summer camp when he was younger. There are 2 teams, each with a president. The aim is to assassinate the president using water balloons, while the defending team uses bags of flour to take out the would be killers. The weather forecast was a little poor, but as the aim of the game is to get wet, we figured it'd be fine. Following the game, the idea was to go for dinner, drinks, watch the Korea world cup game at the Gwangju World Cup Stadium, then more drinking.

Nat, Nick and Jimmy joined us for Friday night in Buyeo with plans to take it easy and head to Gwangju in the morning. Four bottles of wine later we stumbled to our beds and woke up somewhat later than we planned. We still managed to make it in time though and were able to help with the filling of hundreds of water balloons. Nick seemed to spend the whole time soaking people with a water pistol, which was very helpful. An hour or so later, the game got under way. We split into 2 teams (boys vs girls) and played rounds - 3 balloons per player. It was loads of fun chasing each other about, throwing flour or water at the opposition and generally being foolish. The park we played in was quite busy, and we drew quite a crowd of intrigued and puzzled Koreans. Some of them may have been caught in the crossfire, but that was entirely unintentional and their own fault for standing next to the president. We managed 3 rounds each before the balloon levels started to get low. We agreed on a final round each with less balloons per player. The boys were on defense. Nearing the end of the round, I spotted one of the girls getting worryingly close and sprinted over to try and flour her before we lost our president. She dodged out of the way, and as I attempted to change direction, there were two horrible cracking noises, followed by excruciating pain. I dropped to the floor and was quickly surrounded by our friends - apparently Becky heard the noise from over 50 metres way! Urgh. Fortunately, Lokhee was able to call an ambulance and the nearest hospital was across the street, so it didn't take long.

Despite fears of fractures or breaks, the x-rays showed nothing of the kind. In fact they also didn't show the previous fractures I thought I'd had. Must've been the other ankle. It's hard to keep track of these things. The x-ray they took of my chest also failed to show anything interesting. I'm not entirely sure what they were looking for. I was already pretty certain the cracking sound had nothing to do with my chest. I also received a nice injection in the bum, which purported to be some kind of pain relief, but did nothing but slur my speech and make me seem a little amusing to Becky. After being rather painfully forced into a plastic support and bandaged up, I asked if they'd give me some crutches. I was told I didn't need crutches as it wasn't broken, despite the fact that I was unable to put any weight on my left foot. I demonstrated this and was told that we would have to pay for them. We agreed to pay, and I was grudgingly brought a crutch. At it's longest, it was about 3 inches too short for me, which is not ideal. Unfortunately for me (and the multitude of Koreans who are my height and taller. Koreans are not all that small), the hospital didn't have any bigger crutches. It also turned out that our health insurance is not much good if you're injured, only if you have a cold. My bill came to close to 100,000 won for 5 x-rays, a bum injection and a single crutch. Where's the NHS when you need them?

This ruined our plans for the rest of the weekend, as I could do nothing more than lie down. Some of our friends came over to Lokhee and Anthony's for some takeaway food, then headed out, leaving us to watch the somewhat disappointing game fom the bed. All in all, it wasn't quite the weekend we had in mind.

On Monday we went to hospital in Buyeo to have my ankle checked again, and the doctor says I've torn a ligament. I have another set of supports and bandages, an array of pills to take, and a few days off work. I hate to complain about not having to work, but it is more than a little boring sitting around watching tv all the time. Being up on the fourth floor limits my movements a bit - I have to hop up and down stairs and it takes quite a lot of energy! Ah well. At least it's not broken! Oh, also, due to the water based game we were playing, we are lacking in photos of the day. I got Nat to take some pictures with her waterproof camera, so as soon as we get a copy of those I'll put them up!

An island called Uido. Or Wuido. Wiido? OOOOido? I don't know. Something.

2010-06-08T06:47:00.010+01:00

I have delayed in writing this post in order to properly look back at it in good humour, without breaking down in tears. Not really, but the following post details a long weekend with loads of friends, which went quite wrong and ended in horror for Nick and Nat. Financially speaking. But we had fun, honest.
We spent the two weeks or so leading up to the long weekend in celebration of Buddha's birthday (he's about 2500 years old or something. That's older than Jesus! Wow.) trying to decide where we were going to go camping. This was complicated by the fact that practically everyone we know in Korea wanted to go, but to different places. Eventually we manaed to sort out our plan - we were going to camp on Gosapo beach (one of the sites we camped last year) with Nick, Nat, Nat's brother Daniel and their friends Steph, Danny and Dave from Dangjin on Thursday night, then meet a group of our Gwangju friends at Mokpo to catch a 3 hour ferry to Uido - a secluded island Lokhee had visited a few years ago - where we would camp for 2 nights, unless the forecasted rain came, in which case just for one night before heading back to Gwangju. I shall spare you the fine detail of the arguments and discussions, but suffice it to say we lost a few members of the group in this plan. Nevertheless, we ended up with a group of about 19 for the Uido part of the trip. That's lots!

So, straight after work on Thursday, Becky and I went straight down to Gosapo to set up camp. We arrived quite a bit earlier than anybody else, so spent a while scrounging for wood so we could make a fire. Hopefully no-one else in Korea wants to go and make a fire there now, because we used all the wood. Becky made the fire while I supervised. I don't like making fires. Too much pressure. About a million hours later, everyone else arrived and we set about firing fireworks and drinking and generally having good times.
The next morning we got up bright and early to make sure we could get to the ferry in time. Our convoy set off perfectly on time, and despite getting seperated en route, then getting slightly lost in Mokpo, we made it in plenty of time. After gathering a suitable number of beers and snacks for the trip and upsetting Koreans by being a large group of foreigners, we set off on the boat. It was much busier than when we went to Bigeumdo, but we managed to find space for all our gear and a few seats. This proved fortunate as the ferry ride turned out to be a little over 4 hours instead of 3. Anyway. Lokhee had spent ages calling around and had found a man on the island who confirmed we could camp there, and would charge us a small fee to have access to showers and toilets as he ran a small minbak. He also promised to come meet us off the boat with his truck to transport all our gear to the campsite. When we eventually arrived, he was standing on the small stretch of road that passed for a port, with no truck. He assured us it wasn't far (which it wasn't really) so we followed him along the road carrying all our belongings. The campsite was right on the beach at the bottom of an enormous sand dune, which is apparantly some kind of national treasure and therefore is not supposed to be rolled or jumped on. Walking is ok though. Being the respectable grown ups we are, we firmly stuck to this rule. Sort of. More of that later. We set up camp, and once again set about finding firewood to keep us going for the remainder of the weekend.
Daniel and I nominated ourselves to track down the little shop which was located somewhere on the island, so headed up the sand dune in the aforementioned respectable manner. We also went down the other side carefully and slowly, despite the steepness and enormous temptation to slide, roll, jump or otherwise make it more fun. The other side gave us a view across the bay to one of 2 very small groups of buildings on the island. They were too small to really be called villages, settlements might be more accurate. Anyway, we wandered about the tiny alleyways between the rundown houses, growing ever more dubious about the chances of finding a shop. This was a concern as we hadn't brought any water with us. Also nothing to mix with the rum that I'd brought. Eventually I saw a small sign in Korean that suggested there might be a shop. It was pointing at a building which appeared to be no more than a small house, or possibly a minbak for very, very small people. We tentatively walked into the small courtyard and asked the startled looking old Korean lady if there was a shop there in our best Korean ("Annyeonghaseyo... Mart? Mart-uh? Mart-euh? Neh? Ah, ok!"). She led us to a small room, about 6ft square, lined with small metal shelves, a kitchen fridge and the kind of fridge you find in small shops, which wasn't plugged in. The shelves were almost empty, so we cleaned out all the beer, water and lemonade available. Once we'd emptied the shop, we headed back towards our campsite and decided to ignore the advice of a helpful Korean man who suggested we should walk around the dune. Instead, we (literally) dragged our shopping up the very, very steep slope and collapsed at the top for a while. Then did some jumping.

By the time we got back to campsite it was getting a little dark and the campfire was going strong. We sat around drinking and chatting for a few hours (mostly listening to our friend Josh tell bizarre stories about being chased around by gangs, almost kidnapped by Mexican bandits and being attacked by a swarm of giant jellyfish), until it was suitably dark for us to get away with playing on the sand dune. A group of us (all male - the girls didn't seem that excited by our plans) climbed back up to the top and immediately dived down the other side, rolling all the way to the bottom. This was definitely way more fun that it really should be, considering our age range of between 22 and 30, so we did it 3 or 4 times, until the mouthfuls and eyes (and earfuls and pocketfuls etc etc) of sand were too much to take anymore. Good times. When we arrived back at the campsite again, 3 of the girls appeared from the sea carrying some huge fish that they claimed to have caught. Some enterprising camper decided to clean and cook them. Most sensible people decided not to try it, but being brave and/or stupid, I thought I'd give it a go. It was pretty good and didn't make me sick, which was quite surprising considering we later found out they just found them dead in a net. Hm. The act of stealing these fish was surely the karmic basis for the rubbishness still to come. If you believe in that kind of thing.

The following morning, said rubbishness started very early with strong winds and rain. Becky and I woke up around 6ish to discover our tent was less than waterproof. We tried to ride out the weather for a while, but it quickly became apparant that this was impossible. Puddles were forming. We decided the only option was to abandon tent and try to catch the 7am ferry off the island. I started running around frantically trying to bag up all our rubbish and wake everyone else up, while Becky started trying to get our sleeping bags and clothes etc into bags. The last person to wake up was Lokhee, who stuck her head out of her (completely waterproof) tent to say we couldn't get the 7am ferry as we had to buy tickets more than an hour in advance. Instead we'd have to wait until 4pm. We decided the next best option would be to sit in the minbaks, where we could get some food and stay out of the wind and rain, in hopes of the weather calming down and maing the rest of the day bearable. This was not to be. Instead the rain subsided occaisonally, just long enough to get our hopes up, before dashing them on the rocks with minbak-shaking winds and sideways rain. We remained in our little huts for the whole day, eating ramen noodles and attempting to entertain ourselves with silly games and jumping. The group had a temporary split, with half of us deciding to head back to Gwangju that afternoon, and the other half planning to stay on the island and hope for sunny weather the following day. This plan was abandoned when Lokhee discovered that the ferry company weren't planning on running any more ferrys, due to the horrendous weather. The 4pm was the last available, and the ferry company apparantly didn't really want to run that one either. This certainly didn't make the ferry ride any more appealing - I had visions of enormous waves and all of us being horribly seasick. Luckily, it wasn't too bad, despite having to sit next to the highly fragrant toilets and having to change boats after an hour. We got off the first ferry into hammering rain, only to discover that the boat we had to change to was going to leave from a different ferry port on the island. There were only 2 taxis, so most of us were left standing in the rain until we were able to squeeze on to a bus. At the second ferry port, we had to sit and wait for about an hour, during which Matt was acosted by a drunken Korean lady who seemed to be trying to sell him her children.
Eventually we made it back to Mokpo and our cars. Becky, Josh, Melissa and I got in faithful Ralphy, Nick, Nat and Dan got into Dolores, and Steph, Dave and Danny piled into... the other towner. I don't think it has a name. Towner 2 had a little trouble starting, but we eventually got moving and headed off to Gwangju. The rain was still unbelievably heavy. This problem, combined with the top speed for towners being about 20mph, made for a very long trip. But finally we arrived and checked into a motel. A few hours of drunken foolishness followed - the usual soju cocktails and karaoke, with an added bonus of me giving totally useless directions to people and getting them horribly lost in downtown Gwangju. Oops. We were also witness to a truly shocking fight outside one of the bars we visited - one participant was thrown head first into a car! Nasty. This was swiftly followed by a Korean man, who appeared to be dressed in the grey Buddhist outfit, walking down the street urinating all over the place. Luckily not onto us.

The following morning we did a little shopping and had some tasty food before we departed for our respective homes. Steph's towner once again struggled with starting and we had to call out a mechanic to come and fix things up. Luckily, that didn't take too long and we were soon under way. Not for long! Josh and Melissa had to get back to Wonju, which is just east of Seoul, but all the buses were sold out. After pointing the towners in the direction of the highway, Becky and I attempted to help Josh and Melissa figure out another way home. In the end, they decided to stay in Gwangju and go for an early morning bus back to Wonju - Josh had to do a presentation at his university at 3 o'clock Monday afternoon!

20 minutes later, Becky and I were getting onto the highway, joking about how likely it was that we would pass the slow moving towners enroute. This proved to be unfortunately prophetic. Less than 10 miles out of Gwangju we saw Dolores puttering along. I wound down my window to shout some friendly abuse and give them a wave, but could immeadietly hear their engine was stuggling somewhat. And if I can hear engine trouble, it must be bad. They pulled over not much further down the road, so we joined them and Nick told us they'd just lost all acceleration. We decided the best plan would be to come off at the next exit and find a mechanic. This plan was thwarted when they couldn't get it to start again. Luckily Nick and Nat have very friendly Korean colleagues who called a tow truck which arrived very speedily. After a brief moment of terror when the tow truck driver appeared to be attempting to reverse his truck down the extremely fast moving dual carriageway, we followed the truck to the nearest town. 10 minutes later, one of the mechanics walked into the waiting room, said "Engine..." and held up his arms in an X. Not a good sign. After a few calls back and forth between Nick, their co-teacher and the mechanic, it became clear that the engine was totally dead and would cost around 2million won to replace. More than the value of the car. The only realistic option was to sell it for scrap. With heavy hearts we emptied the towner and somehow managed to fit everything into our car, along with Nick, Nat and Dan. While we were loading the car up, I heard a horrible screech of tires and spun around just in time to see a small truck crash into a little Kia. Nick and I sprinted over to check the passengers were ok, which luckily they were, especially considering the whole wing of the Kia seemed to have disappeared. Fortunately there were lots of Koreans about to deal with things, as our communication skills are somewhat limited! We had a very odd drive home, with all of us dangerously close to becoming hysterical. This is entirely the fault of the car toad. We finally arrived at our apartment 6 hours after leaving Gwangju. The wonderful co-teacher had figured out a way for our refugees to get back to Dangjin in time for work in the morning, so we collapsed and ate pizza. If only our schools were as helpful (but that is a matter for another post).

I've attempted to keep this as brief as possible, as if I were to put in all the detail it would have to be a stand alone novel. Hopefully I've managed to convey the amount of stress we were subjected to though! We did manage to have quite a lot of fun in there too. All part of the excitement of being in Korea I suppose. At least no-one ended up in hospital! That won't happen for at least another two blog posts...

Daedunsan

2010-05-17T01:01:00.007+01:00

Although there are still hundreds of posts which should be written to fill in the gaps of the last year or so, the events of the last week are much clearer in my memory, therefore much easier to write about! After the months and months of seemingly endless winter lead us to drink our weekends away, we decided it'd be nice to wake up on a Sunday and not be hungover. So, accompanied by Nick and Nat (surprise!), we made our way to Daedunsan, a mountain standing at 890-ish feet which is only about 40 minutes from us. The day started out a little grey and unwelcoming, but cleared up quite nicely and made for good hiking weather. We started out after lunch and tried to take it easy, seeing as we are a little less fit than we'd like at the moment!

The start of the hike was a little taxing, as there were somewhat irregular steps made from rocks for quite some way up, but we managed to keep going, despite the constant distractions of chipmunks scampering about and gym equipment to play on. The main reason we decided to hike Daedunsan was the fact that there are two suspension bridges to cross which looked quite fun. The first was a standard bridge between two small peaks which swayed and bounced satisfyingly as we jumped up and down on it. The second was a little higher up, and was more of a suspension staircase than a bridge. It was very narrow, very steep and very wobbly. And quite unnerving. All good fun though!

Oddly, both bridges seemed to have been added after the path was made and the hike could be done without crossing either of them, although it would've been a lot less entertaining. From the top of the second bridge it was only a short hike to the top of the mountain, which gave amazing views and a place to rest. Then, because we're lazy and going down mountains is rubbish, we got in the cable car and made a speedy descent.

Back home in Buyeo, Becky cooked us a curry and we sat around drinking wine, playing Articulate, listening to music and prank calling Nat's sister Christina on Skype until 2am. Somehow this didn't lead us into hangovers the next day, so we'd managed to keep our pledge for the weekend. Yay! Nick and Nat cooked us the best fried breakfast we've had since the Philippines when we dragged ourselves out of bed in the morning, before we headed out to Muryungsa, a temple outside Buyeo.

It's quite secluded and not overly upkept (is that a word? I'm not sure it is. Hm. I mean it's nicely run down), giving it a somewhat more authentic feel than many temples in Korea. We're also drawing very close to Buddha's birthday (I'm not sure how old he is this year. Must be knocking on a fair bit though), so there are brightly coloured lanterns on display everywhere we go, which make everything seem very cheery and nice.
We followed up the walk around the temple buildings by crossing some extremely unsafe stepping stones across a tiny tiny river and jumping around off rocks and benches as part of our current favourite pastime.This week should be another good one as we get Friday off and are going for camping fun. As long as the volcano doesn't send it's ash any further towards the Uk, we should be joined by Nat's little brother on Thursday night, and a big group of other later on, so many good times shall follow.

We are no good at blogging. But pretty good at jumping.

2010-05-10T02:39:00.014+01:00

Ho hum. So, another series of months has passed with no update from us. Oops. Can't blame it on us having too much fun really, given the amount of time we spend sitting at computers at work now! I blame internet-blindness. So much time looking at pointless things on the internet can wipe your brain of anything really constructive (although it does lead you to amazingly pointless and fun websites like this... http://www.cowabduction.com/ ). But this last week has been especially good, and definitely warrants an update.The weather has finally started to turn after what feels like the longest winter in the history of winters. Not counting the ice age. That must've been the most depressing time ever. Um... Yes, so the arrival of warmth in Korea means the arrival of camping and shorts and general fun in the outside world. In order to welcome the good weather, we went for a weekend away with our friends, Nat and Nick. They've just bought a super cool van which goes by the name of Dolores, so after stopping by the park to watch my students at sports day, they gave Becky a break from the driving and took us down to Buan, a little south of Gunsan. There's a few nice beaches, some waterfalls and amazing temples in the area, not to mention all manner of odd theme parks and museums.

We skipped all the indoor options in favour of jumping around on beaches, and visiting the somewhat odd Chaeseokgang. According to the tourist information, this is a cliff which is not to be mistaken for a river. Hm. Apparantly, many many years ago in China, a man was drinking too much wine on his boat, when he saw the moon reflected in the water. Being drunk (and, let's face it, clearly pretty stupid) he thought the moon was actually IN the water and dived in to grab it. He drowned. Again, hm. Anyway, Chaeseokgang looks like the place in China where this fabulous story took place, which is why it has a name that means river. Hooray! We struggled to see any resemblance to a river. It's a cliff! Rivers are not made out of cliffs, they are made out of water. Usually.
Following that excitement, we drove around a little more, jumped off some things (it's the latest thing! Honest) then checked into a motel for the night. It hasn't quite got warm enough for camping yet. The next day we went to one of the temples, planning to head to a waterfall for some swimming. Unfortunately after we'd walked around for a while, we realised we'd gone to the wrong temple. It was a very nice temple though, and we finally got around to donating some money so we could right a message on one of the new roof tiles. Abandoning our plans for waterfalls, we went off on an exploratory drive and came across a really beautiful river. After parking up, we spent quite a long time trying to get down to the river from the road. Much more difficult than you might expect. Much crawling around in bushes later, I stumbled across 6 handbags in a little pile. Having rifled through them all we concluded that they must've been stolen and dumped off the road. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the fact that I'd got my fingerprints on them all made everyone panic and worry that I was going to get myself arrested, so we decided to take them to a police station before we headed home. In the end, the struggle down to the river proved entirely worthless, as there was a raging gale blowing through the valley and the water was freezing. So we took our new handbags to the police, gave our details with the help of Lokhee via telephone, and fled the area.

Two days later we made our way up to Dangjin, where Nat and Nick reside. Wednesday was Children's Day in Korea, and a national holiday. Hooray! We piled into Dolores and went straight up to Mallipo, a beach town on the north coast of our province. A group of teachers from Dangjin joined us for a barbeque and some jumping around on the beach with fireworks, before proceeding to play drinking games and talk nonsense for a few hours. The next day we struggled out of bed and went out for some lunch. Our hangovers meant that fish was not an option, so we wandered around for a while trying to find somewhere that sold something else. Eventually we found a place selling a few other options, but regretted it somewhat when our food still hadn't arrived close on an hour later. Most of us had ordered bibimbap which requires literally no cooking, so we were a little puzzled and irritated by the delay. It was pretty good when it eventually arrived anyway, but sadly what little sun had been allocated to the day had all but disappeared by the time we left the restaurant. Unphased, we headed for the sand and sat around for a while. Nick and some of the other guys developed a fun new game called 'One Hit, which is basically volleyball without teams or a net. And the loser has to go in the sea. Just like normal volleyball! Good times were had by all. Except Danny and Dave who kept having to go in the sea.

The weather forecast was looking good for the weekend, so we made plans to go another beach on Saturday, this time with Jimmy, Dan and Maggie as well as Nick and Nat (who have become our siamese twins. But without the health issues or discomfort. Good siamese twins). We picked up Jimmy from the train station at Nonsan, and spent the afternoon in the sun playing more One Hit and eating pizza. In the evening we went for dinner and drinks, followed by a good couple of hours in a noraebang. The evening of fun was only dampened a slightly unpleasant experience in the noraebang. At some point I went out to pay for another hour, and got semi-chatting to two very friendly happy Korean guys who didn't really speak much English. After I'd been back in our room a little while, the door opened and a Korean girl walked in, followed by the younger of the two Korean guys. I walked over to say hello and see what they wanted, just in time to see the young guy punch the older manin the face, knocking him unconcious instantly. He dropped to the floor like a stone, with blood spilling from his mouth by the time he hit the floor. The younger guy just walked away with his girlfriend, who didn't seem to react at all. I ran to get the owner, while Nick very sensibly put the unconcious guy in the recovery position. We decided it'd be better if we then left them to it and carried on with our awesome singing demonstrations. Odd.
Although having read this post again it kind of seems like we didn't really achieve very much at all, we did it all with good friends and decent weather, which makes it fun and good times. So... I don't care. And there's still four months until we leave for us to do loads more good stuff. Excellent. We might even blog about it.

Friends friends friends

2010-03-02T00:52:00.003Z

Just under 2 weeks ago, our friends Nat and Nick from home moved out to Korea to work for a year. Becky and I have known them for a long time now (we met through Nat in fact!) so it's really nice to have them here. They're living in the same province as us, but on the northern side, near the coast. On the first weekend after they arrived, Becky and I drove up to visit them. Their town is bigger than Buyeo, a few more familiar shops and restaurants around, but seems to be in the only flat part of Korea we've found! We took a walk around town with them, went to a kimbab restaurant and translated as much of the menu as possible so they won't have to do too much risky guess work (the horror of the hotdog kimchi soup still lingers in my mind. Ick ick ick). After a tasty dak-galbi dinner, we introduced them to the wonder of Korean bars, soju and noraebang. Unfortunately Nick and Nat both decided it would be a good idea to video some our epic singing performances - most of which will hopefully never see the light of day. They certainly won't be featured on this blog!

When we awoke and recovered from the worst of the hangovers, we went to the bus station to figure out where they could visit using public transport - sadly not direct to Buyeo - then went for a bit of a drive up to the sea wall and posed for a lot of foolish jumping in the air pictures. The exertion used up what little energy we'd managed to muster, so after taking Nick and Nat to a supermarket to pick up some food and supplies, we drove back home.

After a somewhat dull final week of supposed winter vacation (we had to go into school! I had to teach! What kind of vacation involves working? Not my kind of vacation), we were in need of some more fun before starting back for a new school year. This conveniently coincided with a long weekend, so we dragged Nick and Nat down to Buyeo for a night, then drove to Muju for our second ski trip of the year. Lokhee and Anthony met us at the resort after I managed to send us the wrong way on a highway and add an extra 2 hours to our trip. Yay me! Once we'd got all our gear together, we headed slope-wards. The temperature has finally turned away from cold and snow (at least for the moment!) so the slopes were a little patchy and slushy, but still a lot of fun. Becky, consumate pro that she is, managed to finish her day without a fall. Unfortunately, the rest of us weren't so lucky, particularly the boys. Anthony and Nick crashed into each other, leaving Nick with a swollen knee. I was cruelly accosted by 2 seperate snowboarders, the first twisting my right knee, and the second knocking me into the air so I landed on top of the edge of his board, breaking my ski pole and twisting my left knee. Fun times! After I managed to drag myself up and ski slowly to the bottom, Nick and I decided we'd better not push our luck and sat out the last hour or so of our session. We'd convinced Anthony and Lokhee to stay the night with us at the resort, so all 6 of us piled into the car and headed off to find some suitable accomodation, alcohol and food. Many hours later, following many poor decisions concerning quantities of soju, we awoke and made the drive back up to Buyeo, this time taking extra care over navigation and taking in a tasty buffet lunch in Daejeon, where Nick and Nat got on their bus back to Dangjin.
Hopefully we'll continue to see a lot of them, as the last 2 weekends have been great. It's nice to have more English people to hang out with for a change, and especially English people as odd and excited about Korea as Nat and Nick. In fact, we will be seeing them again in 2 weeks, for my birthday celebration in Seoul. But hopefully at some point we'll have some stories that don't revolve around alcohol and hangovers. As soon as the weather gets a little more reliably warm, we'll be dragging out the tent and and hitting the beaches and national parks again. Can't wait!

Our escape to somewhere with heat

2010-02-10T01:30:00.005Z

After Becky left for Shanghai, I was left to mope around Buyeo and puzzle about how people can stand to move to a foreign country and live in a tiny place on their own. I found the 4 nights alone to be mind numbingly dull. There's only so much TV you can watch after all, and I've already read all the books we have (apart from the ones I was saving for the holiday...). Anyway, somehow I survived and got myself up to the airport about 5 hours too early. Ho hum. Numerous cups of coffee and a considerable amount of time watching people arrive home (which was way less entertaining and heart warming than Love Actually suggests it should be. Either Tony Curtis is a liar, or Korean people don't care much about their family going away on holiday. Or possibly I'm missing some kind of middle ground.) later, I boarded the 4 hour-ish flight to Manila. The flight is now in my top 3 worst flight experiences ever, thanks to the non-existent leg room, the exuberant baby-bouncing on the knee of the woman in front of me and the wailing of said baby after said bouncing (the other 2 would be the air-con breaking down on a flight to Australia and not being able to get a drink for 7 hours flying back from Chile.). Finally, I arrived in Manila just after midnight and got a couple of hours sleep before going back to the airport to meet Becky.

The next day we were picked up and taken on a 2 hour drive to get our boat to Puerto Galera, where we would be staying for the next 5 nights. A noisy, somewhat bouncy, but not uncomfortable ride across to the next island delivered us within a minute's walk of our hotel. It was right on the edge of a small bay, while our room was on the top floor, giving us a nice balcony with a view over the whole bay. Puerto Galera is descried by the Lonely Planet as 'a haven for foreign, alcoholic retirees' which is possibly not far off the mark - there were a terrifying array of leather skinned westerners with bellies down to their knees, all with very small, delicate looking young local ladies. It was a bit... wrong. But even their enormous bellies and dubious sexual preferences failed to get in the way of how beautiful the surroundings were. Palm trees, clear skies, beautiful seas and coral strewn across the beach... Ace.

Over the course of the week, we went swimming from the beach, took boat rides to nearby beaches, went snorkeling to look at coral and giant clams, got stung by jellyfish, swam in inland natural pools, drank fruit smoothies, ate steak for the first time in 18 months (hoooooooray!), got stung by jellyfish, visited a waterfall, took a ride in a jeepney with some slightly irritating Chinese tourists, got stung by jellyfish, avoided buying loads of crap souvenirs crossed a worryingly wobbly and buckly (that's not a real word is it? Buckly? It buckled a lot) suspension bridge, walked through the jungle and avoided getting killed by falling coconuts, visited a somewhat depressing tribal village, and ate a lot of excellent meals the like of which have not been seen in Korea since... well, ever. And got stung by jellyfish. Possibly other things happened too. It was really, really great. Except for the jellyfish. There were hundreds of them evilly floating around while we snorkeled, viciously drifting around stinging us all over the place and making me swallow huge gulps of sea water through my snorkel whilst trying to avoid them. Horrible little things.

The tribal village was also less than enjoyable. The tribe were the indigenous people of the island, who had been 'civilised' - by which I mean made to live all in one place in run down shacks, given shabby clothes and no way of making money other than farming. And forced to put up with hordes of gawking tourists parading around the village. In an obviously sincere, if misguided gesture, our guide bought a huge bag of snacks for us to hand out to the children as we walked around taking pictures. The wrappers from snacks given out by previous groups were strewn all over the floor and the children didn't really seem that excited about the snacks, aside from the fact that they were being given something extra to eat. Basically, it just seemed a bit wrong to treat the people as a tourist attraction instead of getting us to actually help them in some way.

Little niggles aside, we had a great time in Puerto Galera, and were very sad to be leaving. Especially knowing we'd be coming back to cold, cold Korea. But before that, we still had to get back to Manila and spend one night there. After another boat trip and drive, we went out to explore Manila a little. Being hot and tired, we decided the best place to explore would be an enormous shopping mall. Once we'd made it past the armed guards on the doors, we spent a while wandering about and eating, then went for a short walk out in the street. The sudden change in the crowds was really quite surprising. Clearly the guards were keeping anyone out who looked like they might not be able to afford to buy much, and the people who could afford to buy things were all getting there by car. We were quickly amongst throngs of people trying to sell us watches, DVDs, clothes and various other things, as well as beggars sending their tiny children after us. 200 metres away from the enormous swanky mall we passed some of the smelliest slums ever. At the end of the street we reached a pedestrian area by the sea, where we sat until we decided it'd probably be best not to be by the slums after dark, so headed back to the mall for dinner, then back to the hotel.In the morning we went out for a last walk before our flight home. We got a little lost, but had a pretty good walk around the area and a local park, which was basically an old cemetery but was really nice and peaceful and a pretty good end to the trip. Shortly after, we headed back to airport and endured another horrible flight with Cebu Pacific. For some reason the air stewardesses asked us to watch over some unaccompanied children on the flight, despite the fact that they were clearly Korean children and we had as much hope of communicating with the children as they did. Also, there were a fair amount of Korean adults on the plane who would've been far more suitable for the job. But not to worry, we didn't actually have to do anything for them in the end, so it didn't really matter. All in all, a pretty good holiday! Sadly, on arrival back to Korea, I seem to have hit by a vicious stomach bug which has left me in bed for 4 days. The doctor tried to get me to stay overnight in hospital on an IV, but that didn't sound too appealing, so I decided to skip it. Seems to be getting a little better now though, so hopefully all will be will in time for the forthcoming long weekend, so we can go do fun stuff again!

Shanghai with my little bro

2010-02-09T05:07:00.002Z

well we've settled into life in Buyeo quite nicely, although I'm not sure how we would survive without our frequent trips back to Gwangju (thanks to Lokhee and Anthony for their floor). It also helps that we have our new pal Ralphy; a blue Hyundai Elentra who starts even in the snow! Although not without a fair bit of whining. Buyeo is a little more "peaceful" than Gwangju.

So we've been slogging our guts out in the public schools of Buyeo (not quite the walk in the park that we'd anticipated) and after starting the year with a few weeks of winter camp, we were in need of a good holiday. Unfortunately due to our very stubborn (to put it nicely) schools our holidays only overlapped by a week, so I decided to jet of to Shanghai leaving poor Alan at work for a few more days.

Although I went to China in August, I knew that this trip would be a little different. Without the hospitality of Craig and Julia, it was back to some serious budget backpacking with Teej and his friends, Emily and Josh. However budget backpacking in China is not that hard. In fact we had an amazing hostel which for just over 5 quid a night included a buffet breakfast. We also managed to find some seriously cheap and delicious food.

The weather in Shanghai was not wonderful but coming from the Korean winter it felt pretty warm. on the first day it was raining so we decided to go and see the Shanghai museum which was very nice, followed by a lunch of soup and noodles. That evening we went to a small market near the hostel with all kinds of fresh (and breathing) food and lots of smiling people happy to pose for the camera. Teej and Josh bought a tasty chicken, squid and veg stir fry that was cooked up in the street on a little burner. Then we all went back to the hostel bar for some cheap Chinese beer.

The next day we took a trip to the water town of Zhujiajiao. Like a Chinese version of Venice, there are no roads in the town, just waterways with boats and footpaths. It took us almost 2 hours to get there on a bumpy bus and Shanghai stretched out for the entire way. The town has been preserved and is obviously a big tourist attraction but at this time of year it made a peaceful change from frantic Shanghai. There are still people living and working there, presumably most of them making money from tourism. The streets were narrow and jumbled, with small shops selling all sorts from embroidery to food, and washing hanging out of the upstairs windows. We walked along the little canals and over bridges. Our entrance ticket also allowed us to visit a beautiful Chinese garden and temple within the town. We even took a short boat ride with our own private boatman... awesome.

On Friday we did some exploring of central Shanghai. We walked around the french concession, admiring some of the grand and dilapidated old houses. Then we headed for the old town. A lovely area with busy streets full of markets stalls where all the buildings were covered in bamboo scaffolding and drying clothes. From here we found one of the big markets, selling art, antiques and lots of other souvenirs in some very impressive and traditional looking buildings (apart from the McDonald's). We perfected our bargaining skills and even had people running down the street to drop their prices. As the sun was setting we walked to the famous Bund, so that we could see the Shanghai skyline lit up in all it's glory. Unfortunately there seemed to be a huge amount of construction going on so although there were some pretty impressive buildings we didn't hang around for too long. We were getting hungry and dinner on the Bund would have blown a week's budget. We got a taxi to Nangjin Road and found a fancy looking hotpot restaurant in one of the malls as this meal was my treat as an early birthday present for Teej. The restaurant seemed to be full of Shanghai's young and hip, so we thought we would fit in nicely. The hotpots were truly delicious. We had 4 different flavours of broth over flames in the middle of the table, into these we dipped lamb and beef and noodles.

On Saturday we spent the morning fantasizing about fried breakfast, until sometime later Emily mentioned that she had seen it on the hostel menu, so we finally got up and ate it. After a late start to the day we had to go and get train tickets for Teej and co's onward journey. Getting train tickets in China is not an easy business, and unless you want to end up spending 24 hours in a cramped carriage with no guarantee of a seat, it requires knowledge, patience, timing and luck. Luckily they have at least 2 of the 4 so things haven't worked out too badly so far. After a final drink in the bar, I had to say a regretful farewell and go to catch the Maglev (fastest train in the world) to the airport. When I got to the Maglev station the last train of the day had already departed so I was left to get a rather expensive taxi to the airport. Can't complain though... off to meet Alan in Manila!

Thanks Teej, Josh and Emily. Was really great fun with you guys and I didn't even feel old. Wish it could've been for a bit longer.

Enormous update!

2009-12-02T04:01:00.005Z

Hello! I've been trying to bring us up-to-date for a while, but keep forgetting. In fact I keep writing posts and forgetting about them, so here are 2 posts squeezed into one not-entirely-coherent one. Lucky you!

Skipping over the multitude of things we've done but haven't written anything about, I'm going to move straight to the present exciting times. We are now semi-settled into our new home of Buyeo, a small town further north than Gwangju. It is very small, but seems really nice so far. We haven't had much time to explore yet, but it's a very old, traditional town and has a lot of historical sites. We're now working in separate schools, which is a little odd after having spent the last year together at all times! I'm in Buyeo Elementary and Becky is in 3 different schools, Buyeo, Gyuam and Baekje Elementary. It's a lot more work for her and a lot more hassle, but hopefully that'll be ok and she'll enjoy it. Thursday was our first day. I spent it observing my co-teacher in his 4 classes of the day, then sitting around on the internet, opening a new bank account and being force fed soju by the principal. A good start I feel! I also had to attend a teacher's meeting and stand up on stage in front of all the teachers in the school and introduce myself, which was a little nerve wracking. Becky was plunged straight into teaching, despite not having anything planned. Luckily she's a professional and didn't screw it up. Probably. That night we went out for dinner with some other foreign teachers that live here (once I'd had a lie down and recovered from my soju bender). Friday was even more entertaining. We were both at my school for the day, but neither of us had any classes, so we sat on the computers all morning, did a little lesson planning, had lunch then left to get our new car registered! Oh, by the way, we have a car now. Pretty exciting huh? Yes. I'll come back to that. We then finished early, so finished unpacking our stuff into our ace new apartment, then went out for dinner and drinking with even more local teachers. There's a really nice foreign community here, only about 20 teachers from various places and everyone seems pretty positive.

So. Our new apartment. It's older than the last one, but it's much bigger. We have our bedroom, a living room, a study, a kitchen and two balconies. Plus the bathroom obviously, which is a little old but it'll do. All the rooms except the bathroom have windows so it's nice and light inside. The rooms are pretty spacious, although we don't have much in the way of furniture which makes a bit of a difference.

My next class of the day have just come into the class and started screaming and shouting at each other, generally making it a bit hard to concentrate on what I'm writing. I'll have to do something else for a little while until they go away!

This space is to allow for an interlude of about a month or two.

Well, we've now been in Buyeo for close on 3 months. It's an interesting experience to say the least, very different to our previous year. There's quite a lot to get through here, so I suppose I should start somewhere near the beginning.
So, we finished in Gwangju a day after our visas expired, thanks to our wonderful, helpful and ever accommodating former employers. Ahem. The previous weekend we spent with the wonderful Robb and Yue Yeon helping us locate a car to buy in order to actually move all our belongings out of our old place. We ended up buying the first car we went to see, a Hyundai Elantra. It's about 15 years old but runs fine so far, and it was nice and cheap. It also fitted almost everything we own in the back. The young Korean guy that we bought the car off was very funny, he seemed unsure whether he should sell us the car because he was worried it would be too small for us, seeing as we're huge foreigners. While we went for a quick test drive (and almost crashed it into a parked car), Yue Yeon convinced him to drop the price by 100,000 as the fuel tank was empty! She also helped us out getting insurance and all the paperwork sorted. Thank god for saintly friends!

The next two days were spent frantically packing all our belongings up and squeezing everything we could into the car. We had to leave Becky's bike and a few other things behind to pick up later, but go most of our things in. It is kind of worrying how much stuff we've acquired over the last year. Once we were all loaded up and had said our goodbyes to MaeGok Dong, we headed to Daejeon to sort out our new visas, then drove to Buyeo to meet Sophie, the girl at the Chungnam Province education board. We weren't really prepared for this meeting, as it turned out we were actually going to meet almost the entire board of education, plus go to our schools and meet the principals! We were hoping to just pick up the key for our apartment and go move in, but sadly, this was not to be. After a couple of hours of being told how handsome and beautiful we are by countless nameless people we've not seen since, we were finally released and started carrying our things up to our new home. The apartment is great! It's much bigger than the old place and much lighter too. The building itself is a bit rundown and nasty looking, but the actual apartment is fine. We've since bought a sofa, but otherwise it came fully furnished. It also seems to stay quite warm, which is handy, because we can't figure out how to get the underfloor heating working. The snow started in earnest this week, so we should probably get to work on finding out what to do!

Buyeo itself is a huge change from Gwangju. It's very small and sleepy, but it is a nice place to live. We'd got used to a big variety in restaurants and things in Gwangju, and that is certainly not the case here. Seeing as our lives basically rotate around food, this has taken some getting used to, but isn't too big an issue most of the time. We are cooking more often now, particularly as we finish work earlier and also are provided with lunch at school. But this blog isn't supposed to be about food! It's about Buyeo. So. We live on the edge of town, about a 20 minute walk from the 'downtown' area where most of the shops and restaurants are. There isn't really a supermarket here, just a few small marts, so we have to go to nearby Nonsan HomePlus to get a lot of the shopping we want. It's only a 20 minute drive, so actually not too different to going to HomePlus in Gwangju! The foreigner community is a little different here too. There are about 20 foreigners around, mostly working in the public school system. There's the usual array of Americans, Canadians, South Africans and a couple of other Brits who live in the building next to us. There actually seems to be more South Africans than anything else, which is a bit of a change from wall to wall Canadians (not that there's anything wrong with either set, I'm just saying...). There's also quite a few older teachers here (again, just mentioning it...). Nightlife is a little different here too, mostly as it's basically non-existent. There are a couple of Hofs (pubs) and the usual noraebangs, but everything closes a lot earlier here. Going out for dinner after 9pm would probably be a mistake. Also, as it's such a small place, there's a high chance that someone working anywhere we want to go is the parent of one of our students, or the partner of a teacher at one of our schools, so we don't want to get caught doing something embarrassing. We are now far more discreet with our foolishness.

Back in Korea with mum and dad

2009-10-26T01:37:00.003Z

We arrived back at Incheon about 5 minutes before mum and dad, and successfully met up at arrivals. After a bit of lunch, we got on the coach and headed to Gwangju. The usually pleasant bus trip was somewhat ruined by a man in front of us constantly snorting and hocking up phlegm. We arrived in Gwangju and sat outside eating ice cream while Alan picked up our good-as-new laptop and then went back to the apartment and out for the local Galbi. Not quite as fancy as the restaurants we had become accustomed to in Beijing but very delicious!

The next day was my birthday, so I did something really fun and went to work! Mum and dad entertained themselves and met us at 9 when we finished. We got into taxis and went to Sangmu for some Vietnamese food. I'm sorry dad but I have to tell this story...We were walking into the building and I may have distracted dad with something interesting when I suddenly heard a huge bang. I turned around to see that dad had walked straight into the glass wall. For a split second everything seemed OK and then we saw the blood! A bit of panic and a confusing phone call later, we were in an ambulance and hurtling around the corner to Sangmu hospital. Where slightly differently from England, dad was x-rayed, stitched up, bandaged, drugged and jabbed in about an hour. So quickly that we still had time to grab some take-away and have a bit of a birthday meal at home. Mum and I got through the whole ordeal without getting a spot of blood on our fancy clothes (dad thinks this shows how much we cared). Unfortunately dad couldn't wear his glasses over the big bandage which had us all a bit worried that he might walk into something else.

The next couple of days were spent with us at work while mum and dad explored. At the weekend we decided to hire a car which wasn't as scary as we thought it might be (and has now inspired another decision), despite anyone not driving doing a lot of backseat driving. We drove to Wando, an island off the South coast (where Alan and I went when we first arrived in Korea) and stayed again in the big, strange hotel on the hill. The pebble beach was still lovely and almost deserted apart from the park ranger who recognised us from last time and was so excited that we'd visited twice, that he had brought a cameraman along so that he could give us a painful interview in very broken English. Me and mum were desperate for a swim so we drove to the other side of the island to a huge sandy beach which had also been deserted on our previous trip. Unfortunately August is beach month in Korea and this time it was packed with Koreans covered from head to toe and sitting under parasols to protect themselves from the sun. The water was very nice though so we had a swim and made a quick escape. Downtown we managed to find a fish restaurant with outdoor seating and ate a very nice fish soup.

On Sunday we made our way slowly back to Gwangju, stopping at Wolchulsan for a Kimbap picnic and a walk around a lovely lake, and then at a beautiful Buddhist temple where we walked along a little nature trail and I bought some pottery for Katy.

On Monday I had a day off work and so me, mum and dad went to Damyang to see the bamboo forest. The bamboo forest was OK and we also somehow ended up on an old film set which was quite interesting. Next we drove to the nearby national park and stopped for an outdoor lunch of Bibimbap at a lovely little restaurant. Unfortunately we arrived at the national park to discover that it was closed due to a landslide, from what we could understand. However we drove around for a little while and found the entrance to another park and mountain. We walked along the river and saw some really impressive waterfalls. Me and mum also managed to swim in a lovely clear pool, so everything turned out well in the end.

We did a few other things, including a visit to the market where mum and dad got the ultimate Korean experience of seeing dog meat. We also managed to go back to the Vietnamese restaurant and actually have a meal (after studying the glass wall we decided that it really is difficult to see). We've just found out that mum and dad will be back in April to do it all again at a slightly more relaxed pace with hopefully a few less injuries.

Beijing

2009-10-26T01:00:00.004Z

At the end of July we were given 4 days holiday which including the weekend gave us a total of 6 whole days of freedom… wow! The holiday began rather stressfully with a broken laptop and our flights seeming to have vanished from anywhere official (leading us to believe that we had perhaps bought fake tickets). However with phone calls all over the world, the problems were eventually sorted and we were up at 4am the next day to head to Incheon and board our flight to China.

We were both feeling a little bit snuffly but tried desperately to conceal this as we passed through the swine flu inspections and thankfully we must have kept cool enough not to alert the men at the body heat monitors, as they stamped our forms and waved us through. We waited to meet mum and dad and tried to convince ourselves that we could tell the difference between Korean and Chinese people. We met up with mum, dad and Craig in Craig’s car and were whisked away to Beijing. After a quick welcome drink at Craig and Julia’s Alan and I went to meet the wonderful driver Jacky who was to taxi us around for our entire visit. He took us to our hostel in the hutongs which was amazing. A traditional courtyard building with cats everywhere. We slept in the biggest bed I have ever seen and were even given muesli for breakfast, which after a year without was very exciting.

That night we met up with the others and went to an amazing Peking duck restaurant, again in a traditional courtyard building, though this one was somewhat grander than our hostel. I could quite easily spend this whole blog listing the spectacular food that we had in Beijing but that might be rather boring so I’ll just say that Craig and Julia made sure that we were constantly well-fed at the best of Beijing’s restaurant and it was very nice to have hosts who plan their days as much around food as we do.

The following morning Jacky picked us up and took us to meet the others at the silk market for a bit of shopping Chinese style. Initially we were a bit overwhelmed by all the sales pitches and the prospect of having to bargain. It was no problem though as we were lucky enough to have Julia doing the bargaining and therefore paid far less for everything. By the end of the trip we weren’t doing a bad job ourselves and came away with jewelery, carvings and paintings. After another delicious meal Craig took us on a boat trip along the river to the summer palace. All along the river there were people bravely fishing and swimming. The Beijing river couldn't even tempt mum in for a swim on a hot August day, which is really saying something. The summer palace was a beautiful sight. The lake was crammed full of lotuses and people were selling the seed pods as a refreshing snack. We walked around for a long time looking at all the extravagant buildings and then tried to find our way to the back gate. This was a little more complicated than expected and we got a bit lost, which wasn't altogether a bad thing as it led us to some really beautifully neglected areas of the palace that we would otherwise not have seen.

The following day was the great wall! Jacky picked us up and took us first to the ming tombs. We then made our way along the winding road to the Great Wall and almost immediately started catching little glimpses of it. I would probably have appreciated this more if I hadn't started feeling extremely sick, and by the time we arrived at the wall I had to run out of the car and throw up... not quite on the actual wall but still one of the more impressive places that I've been sick. We tried to explain to Jacky that we wanted some lunch and after a bit of confusion he disappeared for a while and returned with KFC. It wasn't exactly what we had in mind for our meal at The Great Wall of China, but we ate it politely and it gave us the needed fuel for our hike up the wall. When we got up on the wall we decided to go in the opposite direction from the crowd which proved to be a wise choice as after about half an hour of walking we had the wall almost completely to ourselves. Just us and an extremely posey couple (they must have been Korean).

The next morning we headed for Tianaman square and the Forbidden City. The crowds were out in force and as we queued to get in we wondered whether it would really be worth battling with the throng of umbrella wielding Chinese tourists, however once we pushed our way through the first gate and turned away from the main path we actually found some quite peaceful courtyards and some really beautiful buildings. That evening we went back to a hostel and had a nice beer in the courtyard, surrounded by the hostel cats and then went for a Chinese Shabu Shabu. A pot of boiling water to which we added lamb, beef and all kinds of vegetables. After dinner Alan and I went for a walk around the area with a vague and fruitless aim of finding H&M.

Our last day in Beijing was spent first at the temple of heaven and then in the Hutong district, eating more delicious food, looking at the lovely little shops and cycling around this lovely area on tandems. I am a huge fan of tandems now. Sitting on the back I was able to look around and take pictures without having to worry about steering and neither of us had to work as hard to keep the bike moving. We ended with a beer on the roof of a hutong before heading to an incredible old courtyard house which had been converted into a restaurant. The food was wonderful and we were also entertained by dancers and singers while we ate. A very very busy 5 days!

Not Entirely Topical Anymore...

2009-09-03T02:45:00.003+01:00

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

We're Still Here

2009-09-03T00:20:00.006+01:00

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.

Camping It Up

2009-06-17T00:58:00.013+01:00

Only a day left until my sister and Dave arrive and I'm still some way short of meeting my deadline for updating. Ooops. It's all because we keep doing stuff! Like having fun! Damn us and our evil wanting to have fun. Ah well. For this reason, I'm going to just skim throught the details. Let the pictures do the talking!

My best friends from home, Vicky and Dom, came out to visit us here in May. They explored Seoul and Busan while we were working, and came to stay with us for the middle weekend. We took them to our favourite galbi restaurant near the apartments on the first night, then to a small bar called Free Hug, where we introduced them to soju cocktails and made a random Korean friend. He tells me I'm better looking than David Beckham and he wishes he had a nose like mine, so he is one of my new favourite people.

The next day we showed them around downtown, did a little shopping and visited the pet cafe. As the name suggests, this is a cafe (not that we saw any drinks for sale really) filled with cats and dogs. We'd been meaning to go there for a while and thought this'd be the ideal opportunity. Despite having seen the way many Koreans like to dress up their dogs in comical outfits or dye small tufts of fur bright colours, we were a little unprepared for the terror in store. The animals were all dyed funny colours, shampooed to the point that their fur was all puffy and looking a little overfed and lazy. There was even an Old English sheepdog with it's floppy fringe tied into bunches. Not an attractive look. We lasted about 20 minutes before it all got a bit too much and we had to leave.

That night we had a few work friends over and went out for a few drinks at Speakeasy. Sunday we attempted to show off Yangdong market, but it all seemed to be closed for some reason. We relocated to a DVD room instead, then went for shabu shabu. They left the next day before we went to work. It was all too brief a visit really, I wish they could've just stayed out here with us! Hopefully they can arrange another trip during our second year and come see us some more, maybe when we've got some holiday and can actually see them properly!

The main source of fun in recent weeks has been camping trips. We've been to a beautiful island called Biguemdo and camped on the beach, and we've been to a beautiful national park called Gamagol and camped on the side of the road. The first trip required a taxi ride, a bus, another taxi, a ferry and then another taxi ride to get us to our destination. It still cost less than a train to the coast at home though. There were 4 couples, a small dog and one poor single guy who had to sleep on his own (but actually knew us from reading our blog! We're internet celebrities! Wow. Hi Mark!).

We brought bags of beer, music and fishing rods to keep us busy, as well as attempting to swim in the sea. It was very very cold so the swimming was very brief, but we were definitely in the water. I have pictures to prove it. We had some tasty food (and some ramen noodles) on the barbeque, a big fire and a lot of fun. In the morning we sat around sunbathing for a while, then went to a spicy chicken noodle restaurant, took some walks, dug a big hole in the sand and buried me up to my shoulders in it. Also got semi devoured by little bugs. Eventually we had to leave and take the ferry home. On board we had more beer and were force fed enormous shots of soju by friendly Korean men.

The following weekend was the birthday of one of the guys we went camping with, Anthony. We went out to a park just outside Gwangju called Sangson Youwonji (if I remember correctly). We had another barbeque and a few drinks in the sun, watched people throw themselves off a nearby mountain strapped to flimsy strips of material, hired duck shaped pedal boats and generally had good times.

Anthony's girlfriend then snuck off downtown to prepare a secret party for him, while we kept him busy with beer and failing to get off the bus when we should. Eventually we made it to a soju room - essentially a karaoke room, but instead of paying by the hour for singing, you pay for food and drink, stay as long as you want and sing for free - where Lokhee and her friends had decorated with balloons, banners and food. We drank and sang for a few hours before heading to Speakeasy for a few more drinks and some dancing. Another good night!

The weekend following was the second camping trip. We took a couple of buses carrying all our tents, sleeping bags and barbeque equipment, only to arrive and discover that camping was no longer allowed in the national park, despite the website saying it'd fine. Undeterred, we left all our stuff by the entrance to the park and set up the barbeque next to a small pool next to a little waterfall. People paddled in the water, ate some tasty food, drank beers, used the waterfall as a makeshift waterslide and caught tiny crayfish to cook on the barbeque.

Sadly, my camera battery died before most of the excitement happened, but I assure you it was amazing. We then made our way back to pick up our stuff and debated whether to just go home or find somewhere else to camp. After about 10 minutes walk, we found a small strip of grass on the side of the road and, rather than spending anymore time walking with all the bags, set up the tents. It was a pretty quiet road, so we weren't too bothered by cars. We wandered about in the dark trying to find firewood so we could make a campfire and somehow stumbled upon a huge stash of dry wood behind a tree, so dragged it back to camp and got started. After more barbeque, music and beer, we staggered to our tents and got a little sleep. The next day Lokhee took us to an amazing galbi restaurant in Damyang, a nearby town. Instead of the usual grill on each table, a line of Korean women were sat grilling huge buckets of meat and sending them out to the waiting tables. The meat was excellent and finished off a heavily meat orientated weekend nicely.

The only problem with having so much fun on all these excellent weekends is it makes going back to work a little harder. Could be worse though, eh?

Sleeping In Shop Doorways, Pita Bread and an Island

2009-06-03T00:15:00.009+01:00

Shortly after the departure of my parents, we found out Dan Henrickson was going to be here in Gwangju for a little while. Dan is a recruiter who gave us loads of excellent help and advice, even though we ended up getting our job on our steam. So we felt we owed him a drink and loosely arranged to meet him at Speakeasy on a Thursday night Open Mic night, thinking he'd be really busy (he has something like 70 teachers in Gwangju, 300 across Korea) so we'd just have a quick chat and a drink and then go home. As all the best nights go, one drink swiftly becomes 10 and soon we were dancing away to some sweet soul music like total fools, having all manner of giggles and making new friends. It turns out Dan is even nicer in person, so when he mentioned he was having a big gathering in Seoul that weekend we thought we might as well go along too - if only to deliver the cd I'd promised to make him! It coincided with a four day weekend, so we planned to spend a night in Seoul, then head to Gunsan and take a ferry to Seonyudo (reportedly South Korea's Polynesia...).

Being the frugal types that we are, we spent ages wandering around Sincheon looking for a cheap motel. We should've learnt from last time we came, and booked in advance! This time we were repeatedly told that it was 'Showtime' (i.e. when they get a large amount of 1 hour bookings...) and they were very busy so either full or really expensive. Eventually we found a really cheap little place above a chinese restaurant and got settled, before heading to the bar designated at foreigner hot spot of the night. En route we bumped into none other than Dan, his lovely wife Aggie and two of their Korean connections. This was handy as we didn't really have any clue where we were going. We were lead to a bar staffed by Aussies and Scots, given name badges and sent into the gradually expanding throng of teachers. Somehow, we ended up spending the whole night with one girl from Seoul and a huge group of Gwangju teachers that turned up seperately to us. We all went for galbi, chatted a lot, staggered to another bar and drank rather a lot of soju cocktails, staggered back to the first bar and drank more, hung out on the rooftop terrace and had a whole lot of fun. At some point, I decided it was time to leave and, without telling Becky (or so she claims. I think she was just so drunk she didn't understand me), went outside to wait for her. By the time she came out to find me, I'd fallen asleep in a shop doorway. But she managed to get me home to bed safely, so I began trying to sleep the whole mess off.

It didn't work all that well frankly. I woke up to realise I was very drunk still, and had to sober up while we went to find coffee and some food. We decided to head to Itaewon where one of our friends had told us there was a pita bread shop (or peter bread as we have learnt to say to avoid cross-Atlantic confusion). Regular readers of our blog (hi Mum and Dad! and Becky's Mum and Dad!) may remember our first trip to Seoul, where we thoroughly hated Itaewon. This hatred is gradually receding, if only for the number of amazing little restaurants selling all manner of exciting food. And the book shop. The pita place proved to be truly excellent and well worth the 45 confused minutes we spent walking up and down the street trying to find it.

Eventually we made it to the bus station and went to Gunsan to catch a ferry. We'd picked up somewhere that there weren't any evening ferries, but thought we'd head straight to the ferry terminal and stay in the closest motel we could find so we could get a nice early start. Saturday and Sunday had been blazing hot so we were really excited about the island trip. One very lengthy taxi ride later revealed the ferry terminal to be in the middle of nowehere on an industrial estate. Cue taxi ride straight back the way we came to a motel.

We awoke in the morning bright and early to catch the earliest ferry and really make the most of our time. We opened the shutters on the windows to discover the foggiest morning we have ever seen in Korea. Possibly anywhere.

Undaunted, we made our way to the ferry terminal and jumped on the first boat available. The fog seemed to lift a little on the way over, but was still lingering around blocking anything further than 15 metres away. So not much could be seen from the boat really. Having deposited our bags in a minbak, we took a walk around the island. Fortunately, the fog continued to clear as we walked, and we discovered we were on a very beautiful island. The only connection I could make to Polynesia was that it was a group of a lot of small islands, but it was very beautiful nonetheless. There was a distinct lack of places to eat things that weren't fish, so we settled on big pots of ramen (as far as I can tell, glorified pot noodles) for lunch, then decided to head to the beach. It wasn't quite hot enough to warrant a swim but we sat on the beach for a while relaxing and reading. After some time, Becky had dozed off and I was fully immersed in my book. I glanced up to discover that the fog had rolled back in, and I could no longer see the island across the water from us. As I watched, it continued to move in until I could barely see the sea at all anymore. 'Twas somewhat eerie. We swiftly retreated back to the minbak, having exhausted all the possibilities for walking we could handle for the day, until it was time to locate some dinner. We knew that we were going to have to have fish, we just didn't want it to be raw, so we peered in through restaurant windows until we found one with burners on the table. We managed to order a large bowl of stew with pieces of what appeared to be assorted fish which was pretty tasty. Sadly, there was no sign of a bar or aywhere to go post meal, so we bought a couple of beers from the small shop next door and went back to our room.

In the morning the weather was a little brighter, but we didn't want to end up getting back to Gwangju too late, so we went over to the ferry to go home. We met a couple of other foreigners who'd spent the night on the island and shared a cab with them from the ferry terminal back to Gunsan bus station and made our way home to Gwangju. All in all, although we didn't have the most amazing time there, it seemed like it'd be an amazing place to go in better weather, with a bigger group, especially if we prepared and took some food with us!

Visitors From Another Planet!

2009-05-27T00:59:00.006+01:00

Or at least, another continent.

My new blogging plan is to attempt to get up to date before Ann-Marie and Dave get out here to visit us. This is no small task, unless I gloss over a lot of the details. So, here goes!

My parents came to visit in April, squeezed neatly into the Easter holiday (not our holiday. We never get that long off work!). I woke up foolishly early hoping for a call to say they'd arrived safely at Incheon, then stayed awake hoping for a call saying they were safely en route and were at the rest stop halfway here, then sat around and fretted about the fact that we were going to have to leave for work before they arrived. As Becky and I were about 2 minutes from work, we got a call saying they were in taxi heading for the apartment. So I went straight back home and stood around looking out for them, only to see Dad peering out of a window as the taxi driver took them in completely the wrong direction. Luckily, I was in an energetic mood and was able to sprint after the taxi and rescue them! Unfortunately I then had to go straight to work.

After recovering from their jetlag a little, we spent the next few days going out for all our favourite Korean food (trying to avoid things with tentacles), re-exploring the neighbourhood we live in, sending them up mountains, drinking a litre and a half of whiskey and fighting a lot about who was going to pay for things. I took two unpaid holiday days so I could spend a little more time with them, so we went over to Busan for two nights. We took a long walk down the beach and visited Beomeosa, the enormous Buddhist temple, where we managed to catch part of the celebrations of Buddha's birthday.

We also managed to get Mum into a cable car up a mountain in the centre of Busan, which proved to be pretty painless and gave some amazing views, even if my insistence on trekking to visit a historic gate mentioned by the Lonely Planet guide proved a little wasted (it was a bit rubbish to be honest. A lot of historic Korean sites have had to be rebuilt thanks to the Japanese trying to destroy them all. This one looked like it had been built last week from scratch. Boo!). After introducing Mum and Dad to the wonder of a Dunkin' Donuts breakfast, we headed over to Tongyeong to meet Becky for the weekend. This proved to be the most terrifying bus ride experienced in Korea so far, thanks to our driver's somewhat cavalier attitude to speed limits.

Tongyeong turned out to be a pretty cool place. We were under the impression it was a tiny town on the coast and were hoping for a nice beach. It was definitely on the coast. It turned out to be quite big and spread out, so we picked a motel in the harbour area. Using the tourist map we found, we attempted to make our way to the beach for a swim. Sadly, Korea's idea of a good swimming beach doesn't seem quite in line with mine - I quite like sand and I'd generally prefer not to have to dodge fishing boats. It seems all of Tongyeong's nice beaches are on the islands, which we sadly didn't have time to visit. Becky did manage to befriend a small Korean child who walked with us for 15 minutes or so until we stopped to write things in the 2 metre stretch of sand we were able to find.

Food was also a little awkward, as seems to be the way in the coastal towns. Obviously the emphasis is on seafood, and none of us were really in the mood for that (I rarely am to be honest), and we couldn't seem to find anything like galbi or our other 'safe' Korean favourites, so we settled on Pizza Hut. The Sunday was Dad's birthday, so Becky and I nipped out and bought more Dunkin' Donuts breakfast treats, then we headed to Tongyeong's cable car (advertised as the longest in Korea...). Sadly, the entire population of Jeollanamdo seems to have the same idea and there was barely enough room to spin a Korean child. Still, after almost two hours waiting, we were able to board and were whizzed up to the top. The views were incredible and proved to be well worth the wait. Then it was time to head back to Gwangju, so we took Dad to VIPs for a huge birthday dinner.

The remaining days were spent eating more, drinking more whiskey and sending Mum and Dad off on day trips to bamboo museums, traditonal Korean villages, Yangdong market and encouraging them to get lost trying to find their way to our apartment. All too soon it was time to say goodbye and pack them off to Incheon. It was amazing having them here with us, I just wish it could've been for longer and that we'd been able to take some proper holidays.

Belated Update no. 435...

2009-04-22T01:31:00.007+01:00

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

2009-04-04T02:44:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-02T04:43:00.004+01:00

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.

Other Things We've Been Getting Up To

2009-02-27T01:46:00.005Z

I just realised I forgot to post this blog despite having written it about 6 weeks ago or something. Oops. No wonder we've had complaints at our failure to update for a while. There's more coming I promise. Anyway. Until very recently, we hadn't really left Gwangju or done much in the way of seeing exciting new things since our trip to Busan, which is probably our longest stretch without travelling since we got here. Instead we have been filling our time with all manner of other thrilling pursuits. A couple of weeks ago we invited two students over for dinner. Becky and I both teach one of the girls, Bora, while our colleague Jocelyn teaches Haeyoung. Becky cooked two big curries and we liberated a big table from an apartment upstairs where our friend Mel used to live - she conveniently left her door unlocked when she returned to Canada. We also bought Jenga, just in case conversation ran a little dry. The girls turned up bringing a nice bottle of wine, a big tub of Baskin Robbins ice cream and chocolates for me (the meal was on Valentines Day, and in Korea it is tradition that girls give chocolate to boys. They then have to wait until White day on March 14th to get a gift back), as well a big dish of Korean noodles and some kimchi. Perfect dinner guests! It was a really fun night in the end and, although our Korean is still non-existent, we had some very funny chats about all kinds of things that I won't attempt to go into here (you never know who might read the blog...). Plus some Jenga fun. It was a good night, definitely to be be repeated, hopefully before Bora moves to New York in a couple of months.

One regular activity has been joining a quiz team with our colleagues Robb and Jimmy, plus one of Jimmy's friends. It takes place at Speakeasy after work every other Thursday, and normally ends up with us staying out to 2 or 3 am drinking more beer than is sensible on a school night. So far we've placed second once, third twice and for one glorious night... first. We've also won a free pitcher of beer for having the best team name 3 out of 4 times and a round of shots for getting 10/10 on a round. Last night was our second third placement, much to our disappointment. We also failed to get the free pitcher of beer. Boo! I blame this entirely on my enforced week of being alcohol free, which brings me nicely to the next of the exciting activities which has been consuming our time lately.

Rather less enjoyable than drinking and socialising, a depressing amount of time has been spent in the company of the dentist a couple of floors below our school. Both of us have had to have an alarming amount of fillings, as well as me needing a wisdom tooth extracted and a somewhat vigorous all round cleaning. This has been made worse by the fact that our wonderful dentist apparently prefers not to use any kind of anaesthetic while doing fillings, and is seemingly able to ignore his patients cries of pain. To be honest, he was such a quick worker that we managed to convince ourselves he was right, as it meant we didn't have to shuffle about post-treatment with our mouths all numb, trying not to drool everywhere. So as soon as he'd finished drilling away, it was all over and we could go on about our normal business. The extraction of the wisdom tooth was mercifully done with some variety of numbing injection and took less than 5 minutes. Sadly I can't say the same of the clean. It was truly excruciating and took a considerable amount of time, although it has left me with a nice Hollywood smile. The best thing about all of this was all the filling and the extraction were covered by our health insurance, so cost about £3 each. Ace!

Hopefully we'll have some more exciting things to be reported soon, as my cousin Mark will be joining us here in less than two weeks for a while. Also we have a rather stressful sounding work event coming up towards the end of March. We're all going out into the country for a weekend, and our bosses announced yesterday they've decided to make it a bit of a competition, based on the reality TV show 'Survivor' (I've only seen the English version, which is little more than an excuse to get loads of young people into swim wear. Apparently there's a little more to the US version), which a large cash prize plus two days of paid holiday for the winner. Hopefully this isn't going to lead to everyone in the office falling out!

Busan

2009-02-22T05:46:00.008Z

This is a ridiculously overdue blog which will hopefully bring us almost up to date with everything exciting (as we have had a quiet couple of weeks). We'd been back at work for three long weeks of winter program and just as I was beginning to think that I couldn't face another extra phonics session ("I have a zit, a zit, a zit, I have a zit, a zit sits and sits, today my zit sits and sits and grins, today my zit sins, today my zit wins"), the four day weekend arrived and we decided to go to Busan. The nice thing is that the trip was funded almost entirely by Christmas money from our families.

This four day weekend was in aid of Lunar New Year, an important time in the Korean calender and the time when everyone in the country becomes a year older (which now makes me 27 Korean age, and Alan 28). About a week before our planned trip we started to hear horror stories about the New Year traffic, and decided to buy bus tickets to Busan in advance for 7am. When I told one of my private students this she assured me that it wouldn't do any good as people would be setting out at 3am. However the morning came and not only was our bus empty but so were the roads (maybe this has something to do with the fact that people from Busan and Gwangju traditionally hate each other), so we arrived in Busan very quickly although a little cold as the bus driver decided to have the heating off for most of the journey. With the help of a very kind man we managed to get ourselves a subway pass and headed for Hyundai beach where we were pleased to find a gaggle of gaudy love motels. We had read about one called Sugar with huge Jacuzzis and round beds but it turned out to be a little pricey, so after a little bit of exploring we settled for a classy place in the shape of a castle, called Zeus. It was absolutely fine apart from that the abundance of synthetic material meaning that we gave each other electric shocks every time we touched.

We then went down to the beach, and although it seemed wrong not to go paddling, it was just a bit too nippy, so we wandered the streets by the sea front and to our joy stumbled upon a little Vietnamese restaurant where we had lunch and ogled the foreign families like we'd never seen a white child. After lunch we headed to the Jagalchi fish market. It was an amazing place with tank after tank of live crabs, squid and sea cucumbers all tended to by the tireless Korean ajumas (old women). Maybe this particular weekend wasn't the most sensible time to visit, as the market was packed with frantic Korean women all trying to get the best sea food for their family feasts. Korean shoppers are pushy at the best of times but this situation clearly didn't allow for much patience of tourists wielding cameras (fair enough really), so we had to keep up with the pace for fear of being trampled.

That evening we went for dinner at an Indian restaurant which was incredible, despite being by far the most expensive meal of our time in Korea and more than our hotel room. The chef was Indian and there was a group of Indian people eating... a good sign. Not even our table next to the worlds most unignorable American couple could detract from the joy of nan bread.

On Sunday we took the subway to Beomosa to see the famous temple. The Busan subway has given us some of the best opportunities for people watching since we've been in Korea, and this trip was particularly good as a woman struck up a conversation with me. We are always a bit apprehensive when people start talking to us in almost perfect English, as in the past they have more often than not turned out to be Jehovah's witnesses or something similar. This usually ends with one of us being stuck in an awkward conversation while the other looks out of the window and sniggers. However this lady was very friendly. She told me all about her family and showed me pictures and insisted on taking a photo of us. She even restrained herself from getting her bible out until just before she got off, and even then it was just to sing me a verse of a hymn.

Beomosa temple was really incredible and by far the best one we have visited in Korea. There must have been about 50 buildings, some which had been beautifully restored but my favorite were the ones that had been left in their slightly decaying state. After the temple we decided to investigate Texas Street, the Russian area of Busan with rather a bad reputation. It wasn't hugely exciting although it was strange to see all the shop signs in Russian and what were very clearly hostess bars.

That night we had another lavish meal, and one of the best buffets I have ever had. We stayed for a good couple of hours filling and refilling our plates before waddling back for our second night in the Zeus motel.

Our last day in Busan started at the aquarium, which was pretty impressive, especially the sharks.

In the afternoon we planned to take a gondola to the old city walls. It wasn't easy to find and after hitching a lift from a man who thought we were Russian we discovered that it was closed for the public holiday, and because of the cold and the fact that by now we were carrying all our luggage we decided not to attempt the hike, and to instead go and warm up at the bath house. Bathhouses are on practically every street in Korea and seem to be a bit of a national obsession for men and women of all ages. The bathhouse we chose is apparently the biggest in Korea and certainly seemed pretty impressive with it's domed roof. Inside Alan and I were given a locker key each (with this we could mount up a tab for anything we wanted inside) and had to go our separate ways. I was slightly apprehensive about the nudity, particularly as we get stared at even when we have our clothes on but as soon as I got into the locker room, all the women were naked and seemed perfectly comfortable so embarrassment seemed slightly foolish and I very quickly got used to it. The bathhouse itself was enormous, with a huge central tub under the domed roof and maybe 20 more tubs of varying temperatures around the edges, some containing salt or herbal mixtures. There were also shower areas around the edges where women viciously scrubbed themselves and each other with the rough clothes and soap provided. There was even an ice cream stall where people could go and purchase ice creams naked and walk around with them. I spent a while going from one tub to another (avoiding the cold ones), even daring to half submerge myself in the one that claimed to be 47 degrees. After a while I hired some pyjama type clothes and went to meet Alan in the communal area. It turned out that Alan had been unable to shake off his Britishness about nakedness and had eventually decided to give the baths a miss altogether, so had been relaxing in the communal area in his pyjamas and trying out the saunas and cold room. We decided to go and experience Dr. Fish, a 'therapeutic' treatment where you put your feet into a tub of little fish and allow them nibble away at your feet, which is supposed to be good for circulation. I don't really know how much good it did us but it really tickled so I suppose the laughter acts as some kind of therapy.

Feeling relaxed and with a good 4 hours to kill before our 10pm bus (we booked a late return in case of the dreaded traffic) we decided to go and see Changeling at the cinema which was very good. Another wonderful weekend in Korea.

A couple of days later I received this email from the woman that we met on the train:

Hello Becky!
I am Mikyung Jo.
We met in line 2 subway in Busan on 25th January.
I descended at Motgol. You were going to Beomuesa (via Seomyeon)
I send you a phtograph of you and your lover.
I hope your love will ba long.. forever.
Bye bye

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!

2009-02-18T12:41:00.003Z

My bike was stolen today. It was locked up in the car park outside our apartment, where it's been since we bought our bikes. Becky's bike is still here, which is odd as our bikes were locked together, and my bike had a totally flat tyre. Both of our locks are gone, which is also quite odd. Damn, damn, damn. This is very annoying. It'd almost be better if both bikes were gone, because then we wouldn't have as much of a dilemna over whether I should get a new one. Bike thieves are evil, evil people (see below for an artists impression of the man who is possibly responsible for stealing my bike). Especially galling is the fact that both of us have had conversations in the last week about how safe Korea is. This doesn't change the fact that I never feel unsafe here, but it does kind of take the nice innocent edge off. Booooooooooooo to bike thieves!!!!

Return To Gwangju

2009-02-14T06:20:00.006Z

Okeydokey. The blog is now a mere month and a half behind, so any week now we might actually catch up with current events. We might stop doing fun things for a little while just to allow this catch up to go a little speedier. Today has so far been spent in ways that couldn't be described as exactly enjoyable, but that is a tale for a later post.

After ditching our bags in our apartment and showing our house pests to their (our) room, we went straight back out and took the girls for shabu shabu, the perfect meal after a tiring day of Communist spotting and sitting on buses. As always, we ate far more than could be considered healthy, drank beers and bokbunja, then left barely able to walk. So we got a taxi.

The next day we managed to rouse the girls from their slumber at about 12pm, got some lunch, forced them to dress and took them to Muduengsan to do the nice easy little climb we did on our last trip. Unfortunately, the amount of snow fall in Gwangju wasn't taken into account while describing how fun and easy the walk was. This, plus the lack of any kind of sensible footwear between us (Converse do not make for great ice climbing shoes), turned what had previously been an hour and 30 minute stroll top to bottom, into a slightly stressful and considerably longer hike, involving a fair amount of sliding backwards and falling over. The change in the length of the hike meant we kind of lost all concept of how far up we'd actually gone, so shortly after every attempt to assure everyone it wasn't far to the top, we'd go round a corner and realise that actually, it was quite a long way to the top. Despite all this, we managed to reach the top at the start of a beautiful sunset and felt rather pleased with ourselves. Aside from the nagging suspicion I was harbouring that if we didn't hurry we were going to be on the mountain in the dark, which was far from appealing, coupled with the worry that the descent was going to be far icier due to the fact it had been hidden from the sun all day. Meaning if we hurried we were likely to spend a lot of time falling over. Fun!

Eventually we reached the bottom safe and sound, just ahead of total darkness. Feeling a little guilty for misleading everyone, we took them back to the warmth of the apartment and forced them to drink copious amounts of soju with a few of our colleagues. More drinking game style debauchery took place, followed by another trip to the Turkish bar and Speakeasy, the details of which shall remain mostly secret.

The following day we nursed our hangovers and went for a huge meal of pasta and pizza at a nice (and well priced) restaurant downtown which has become one of our regular eateries, Mi Piace. This was followed by a well deserved quiet night in, while Becky and I sulked about having to go back to work the next day. Over the next week we were only able to see the girls for a short time, but managed to pack them off on various exciting excursions. They also managed to make us a tasty dinner to come home to one night, which was rather nice. Sadly they had to leave us on Friday morning, so we took them to the bus station and, after a final ludicrous over-eating style lunch and emotional goodbyes, nipped off to work.

It was ace having them here, we had all manner of fun and they proved to be far more house trained than expected. It is very sad to think how long it could be until we see them all again, aside from all the other people at home. Now we can't wait for the rest of our visitors to get here!

DeeEmZee

2009-02-10T02:12:00.005Z

The next day was an early start as we joined a coachload of tourists headed for the DMZ. We didn't really know exactly what to expect, as we'd heard all kinds of things about dress codes and restrictions on photo taking etc, but the chance to get a sneaky peak over at North Korea was too tempting to pass up. There was a Korean tour guide on board who kept telling us about the area and seemed to be trying to make it all sound rather lovely and nice. She was possibly a bit too jovial for the job, a fact highlighted when we crossed the Imjin River. She told us how the river is often used by North Koreans trying to escape to South Korea, but they rarely survive so it's not uncommon to see bodies floating down the river. All this delivered with a smile and a giggle... Weird. On the way back across the river later in the day, she interrupted herself to exclaim 'Oh look, there's a body now!', only to laugh hysterically when we all leapt up to look and announce she was only kidding. She also insisted on referring to the North Koreans as 'very silly', for building an expensive modern city near to the border to make the country look more advanced than it really is, or for trying to erect a flag pole higher than South Korea's. Very silly isn't quite the term I'd use to describe Kim Jong Il to be honest. Psychotic maybe, but silly suggests he likes to play pranks on people, rather than the kind of person who'd spend millions on importing an entire brewery from Scotland brick-by-brick while millions of his people die of starvation.

Anyway! After having our passports checked by an armed soldier, we eventually arrived at our first stop - the 3rd Infiltration Tunnel. About 30 years or so ago, a North Korean official released the information that North Koreans were digging around 12 tunnels under the DMZ in order to invade the south. So far, 4 of these tunnels have been discovered (it worries me somewhat that they haven't found the others yet). We sadly weren't allowed to take our cameras down the tunnel but if you can imagine a tunnel that Becky couldn't quite stand up straight in with her hard hat on then you're pretty much there. It was a long and uncomfortable walk down to the end, but it was an interesting experience. Much of it had been painted black to look like coal - part of a cunning plot by the North Koreans to disguise the tunnel and make it seem innocent. 'Oops, we accidentally dug a tunnel into South Korea in an area where there's never been any coal! How foolish!'. See, they really are very silly. After an exhausting hike back up the tunnel, we were taken into a small cinema to watch a film about the DMZ. From the opening Top Gun style music and idyllic shots of a young girl chasing a butterfly around a field, it quickly became clear the video wasn't entirely without bias. Bizarre statements about the DMZ being an international symbol of peace and the last place on Earth where nature and man could co-exist in peace were bandied about over shots of Kim Jong Il shaking hands with people and smiling a lot. The closing scene was of the little girl again, with all kinds of animated animals running about and generally making the whole thing seem truly ridiculous.

Next up was the look out point, where you can actually take a peak over at North Korea. On arrival we discovered there was a yellow line about 3 metres from the wall, beyond which you aren't allowed to take photos. One of the first things we saw was a tourist being made to delete photos by a soldier. The next duty for the soldier was to pose for hundreds of photos with tourists, so while he was distracted, Becky took some sneaky pictures anyway. There were also some telescopes like the ones you get at the seaside so you could have a look at some small towns and people working in fields.

After piling back onto the bus, we headed for the train station, where we could get a train to the North Korean capital, Pyeongyang. Supposedly. We had read shortly before our trip that the border was completely closed recently on the North Korean side, due to the South Korean government announcing that they were cutting down the amount of money they gave to Kim Jong Il. When someone asked about this, the tour guide denied the claim completely. Anyway, we had a wander about and got some fake immigration stamps (we were told not to put these stamps in our passports, as apparently the last person who did got stopped at customs for 18 hours or something on his way out of Korea. It was still kind of tempting though). There was a small display with photos of George Bush helping to open the railway. My favourite picture was of him attempting to sign a concrete sleeper whilst holding his marker pen upside down.

Finally, we got back onto the coach and headed back to Seoul. Our tour guide obviously decided that she could relax and started telling us all about her drinking and shopping habits. As we passed the Parliament building in Seoul she said 'This is where the politicians spend all day sitting around telling lies'! She then told us we were going to make two extra stops at an amethyst factory and a green tea store - clearly some kind of deal was set up with the tour company to try to make extra money off us. The amethyst factory was frankly extremely dull and luckily the guide seemed to pick up on our unhappiness at this unexpected stop so skipped the green tea. After grabbing some food, we made our way to the bus station and headed back to Gwangju with the girls.

All in all, the DMZ was one of the weirdest places I've ever been. Although we found it hard to take anything we were told seriously and my description may seem somewhat negative, it really was interesting, quite sad and I'd say a must do for any visitor to Korea.

New Years Jiggery Pokery!

2009-02-04T14:06:00.006Z

After a couple of hours of sleeping, we headed out of our apartment to find some food and buy as much alcohol as we could carry. We decided to have a few drinks while playing card games and chatting, before heading down to the nearest bar to make sure we could be around other people at the important hour. Our drinking game got us suitably warmed up and lubricated, resulting in all manner of hilarity that probably shouldn't be mentioned here. This is a family blog!

Anyway, we went down to the bar, where luckily we found a barmaid who spoke a little english - just enough to take our orders of fruit juice and soju cocktails. Eventually the midnight hour approached, so we took great pleasure in joining the other two or three occupied tables in the countdown, then launched our own private performance of Auld Lang Syne.

The bar wasn't exactly swinging, so we soon headed off to a noraebang (we seem to have developed a liking for the karaoke here. I think it's because it's private, so you don't have to subject too many people to your drunken manglings of classic songs) where we spent the next 3 hours or so, making utter fools of ourselves. Good times were had by all!

Somehow we managed to leave (actually, we got thrown out. Closing time comes earlier in small town Korea it seems) and head back to our apartment. My memory here becomes a little hazy, but I'm reasonably certain we went quickly and quietly to bed. Despite any claims to the contrary.

Fortunately we didn't have to be up too early the next day, so we made it to our bus in plenty of time and got back to Seoul. We arrived back at the same hostel, only to discover that we'd been double booked, and all that was available was a room sharing with a weird American we'd met earlier on in the trip, plus a small room in the owner's apartment. Becky and I took the small room, which turned out to be her son's old room. It was a little awkward, as our room was effectively in her kitchen and we had to share the family bathroom! All adds to the excitement though. We then rejoined the girls and headed out for food, shopping and a DVD bang - a room that can be hired to watch a DVD in! They have a huge selection of DVDs available, although it seems most of the time the rooms are hired by young Korean couples in search of... privacy. Ahem. This probably caused no end of confusion when I turned up with 4 girls! Anyway, we watched a somewhat confusing Korean horror film (A Tale of Two Sisters - worth a watch if you don't mind subtitles and deliberately hard to follow plots) and made for our beds, eager to get a good night's sleep prior to our DMZ trip the next morning.

Skiing!

2009-02-04T02:44:00.007Z

Right, it is time to do some serious catching up. The last month has flown by and we've been ridiculously busy mostly with extra work (winter programme at school designed to give the kids a lot more work to do during their school "holidays"). But that is all over now so it's time to start cooking, gyming and blogging again.

So... after a few fabulous days with the girls in Seoul we headed for the slopes of Yongpyong. It started in a rather disorganised manner, with our contact from the travel agency being one ticket short for the coach. He ran off to find another one and we spent a tense ten minutes trying to delay a slightly irate coach driver with melodramatic facial expressions and wild arm gesturing. Anyway we were soon on our way. It took a little longer than expected because of traffic and I think we got off in the wrong place meaning that by the time we got to the resort we should've already been skiing away for half an hour. Luckily we managed to rearrange our passes for the evening ski session instead. We found the Olive hotel and were a little hesitant as it looked a little out of our league, however they didn't laugh us out and it turned out to be the right place, and very nice it was. We then slipped around the icy little ski village in search of food and ended up in a galbi (BBQ) place. We had a delicious lamb meal, and considering the lack of sheep in this country probably shouldn't have been too surprised when the bill came to over 100, 000 Won.
At 5:30 we were picked up from the hotel and taken to the ski shop to get fitted for our fetching ski gear. I think mine definitely won first prize for style; red jacket and camouflage trousers (not all that effective against white snow so it's lucky that no one was trying to shoot me). By the time we'd managed to find enough coins to get all our things into lockers it was already dark and the slopes were all lit up by floodlights. The temperature on the big sign was -12. Brrrrr.

With me, Amy and Liz having a whole week of skiing experience each and Alan and Ellie having none we felt it wise to start small. We walked up a tiny little slope, put on our skis and just tried moving across it horizontally. No one fell over but Alan did seem to be having trouble moving at all. So we got on the lift for the easiest slope and went for it. I was pleased to find out that skiing really is just like riding a bike, although I also found out that doing it and teaching it are two very different things. Alan and Ellie both ended up on the ground a number of times, which is only right on a first attempt. This resulted in Ellie removing her skis, walking the rest of the way down and deciding that skiing wasn't for her. Fair enough, anyone may have made the same decision if they had been able to forget about the money that had been spent. So, we went up and down a few more times and Alan started to see the fun in between the terror. The third time down I lost sight of Alan. I kept looking back over my shoulder but couldn't see him anywhere. I was getting a bit concerned that he may have had a bad fall but when I reached the bottom he was standing there waiting. He'd beaten the rest of us down. He admits that this had less to do with skill and more to do with a complete loss of control, resulting in him plummeting straight down and somehow managing to stay on his feet.

The next day we were all feeling pretty cocky about our new and renewed skiing skills and headed to the slopes with talk of blue runs and trips to the top of the mountain. Our confidence was quickly dashed as we found ourselves for some reason a lot shakier in the cold light of day, but we kept going and by lunchtime had done a few of the smaller blue runs with only a few falls between us (including both me and Amy falling over when nearly stationary on flat ground). The only real casualty of the day was Liz's ski pole, which she dropped from a ski lift (punishment for laughing at all the other unfortunate poles we'd seen).

However she did a great job going down with only one and we managed to soon retrieve the other. In the afternoon we headed up the main gondola to the top of the mountain.

At the top we were hit by incredibly strong winds. It was really beautiful but on closer inspection we found that the top of the ski run had become pure ice, making it a very real possibility that you could accidentally slide onto the black run... eek.

We decided to give it a go but the wind and ice made it nearly impossible to to control the skis. Alan decided that he was perhaps getting in a little too deep for his second day of skiing and took the gondola back down. After the first bit the slope got quite a bit better but there were still some hairy bits. We made it down happy and unscathed in about half an hour.

After all the excitement we went home to sleep in preparation for New Year's eve!

Momentary Side Track Blog

2009-01-23T12:05:00.004Z

I feel I have to take a step out of trying to catch up on everything we've been up to over the last month (I can't believe it's almost a month since Christmas already!). The last couple of days it's started to warm up a little, which was a bit of a relief. Unfortunately, today we stepped out of our apartment block into a vicious, biting cold and discovered it'd started snowing again (see above picture of Becky and I on our way to work. Honest. That's us. We've bought matching trilbys). Now, I couldn't possibly count the number of times I've been in an English winter, praying for rain to stop and snow to start, thinking 'I could handle the cold if there was snow'. I mean, snow is ace, right? It's all white and fluffy and you can build snowmen and have snowball fights and schools close and the world is happy! No! This is not true! I am thoroughly sick of snow. Not that I'd prefer rain, don't get me wrong. But I have now decided I just wasn't built for cold weather at all. Winter is just plain depressing.

Seoul City Walking

2009-01-20T14:24:00.006Z

After our Christmas day fun, we headed up to Seoul to meet Becky's friends, Amy, Liz and Ellie. Due to their early arrival time this meant leaving Gwangju at silly o'clock in the morning so we arrived at the airport at about 9am. While waiting for them to arrive we saw a man dressed in a Winnie the Pooh outfit, holding a large bunch of flowers, who appeared to be waiting for someone. Possibly Christopher Robin. Sadly he was still waiting when we left so we didn't get to find out. Anyway, it was really good to see the girls get here. As nice as our friends and colleagues are here, it's nice to hear English accents and have English humour around.

We jumped on a bus to Seoul straight away and, 40 minutes later, arrived in Hapjeong and made straight for the hostel. After ditching our bags we hopped on the subway and made our way to Itaewon. Itaewon is an area we had heard much about from our colleagues so we had high hopes. Possibly too high, as we were thoroughly unimpressed and a little concerned that Seoul was going to be a bit of a letdown. It was dirtier than anywhere else we've been since arriving in Korea, quite a depressing looking place and full of foreigners (I should point out, when we say foreigners, we mean people who aren't from Korea). It was disconcerting to be around so many English speaking people! We stayed there for lunch anyway, so I got to have my first fry-up in a very long time. We decided to waste no more time there and jumped back on the subway in an effort to get to Insadong, which we'd read had nice traditional shops and loads of nice restaurants.

First stop was Deoksugong, an impressive palace and park across the square from City Hall. There was an art museum there too - it was quite nice but only really warranted a short visit. From there we tried to get to the shopping area, only to find we'd got off the subway a stop early and it was quite a walk to get there. So back on the subway it was! We then took a bit of stroll up the street but were again a little disappointed, as it seemed to be just a standard high street. As the girls were flagging somewhat due to the jet lag we went into a nice little coffee shop then headed back to the hostel. Reading the Lonely Planet on the subway we realised that actually we'd gone the wrong way from the subway and Insadong was somewhere else entirely! Oops. So our first day in Seoul was a little disorganised and disappointing.

The next day was much better. We went to actual Insadong in the morning, which was really pretty and had nice gift shops etc. We also got to see some traditional Korean dancing - I'm not sure exactly what it's called but it involves a lot of (mostly) men dancing around with various percussion instruments, a couple of horns, and very long ribbons or pom poms attached to their heads. It looks a lot more impressive than it sounds! We then found a little curry restaurant for lunch, which pleased Becky and I immensely.

After lunch we headed over to Seodaemun Prison, where the Japanese had held hundreds of Korean activists in extremely harsh and cruel conditions. On arrival, a young Korean guy who was working there asked me where we were from. He was very excited when I said 'England', and began pointing to the Machester United badge on his jacket and saying the name of some footballer or other. Using possibly the only bit of football knowledge I have, I managed to remember the name of a Korean footballer who plays in the UK - Park Ji Sung. This seemed to make him very happy, so he proceeded to follow us around the main museum, unlocking cell doors so we could pose inside and giving us some nice little pin badges as souveniers. In case we haven't made it clear enough in our previous blogs, Korean people are ace. All in all, it was a pretty depressing place, but well worth a visit, if only to learn more about the way the Koreans were treated by Japan. Next we headed to Dongdaemum Market. Dongdaemum is a total shopper's heaven. We only went into one of the many, many department stores and we spent at least 2, if not 3, hours lightly browsing the 8 floors. Sadly, I was still unable to find a jumper that fits me. Booo! We had our dinner on the top floor before heading back to the hostel again to prepare for a night out by drinking a large amount of soju.

Our night out was pretty ace. We went to the Hongik University area, a ludicrously short taxi ride away from our hostel and started trying to find a few bars mentioned in our guides. First up was Vinyl, a tiny little bar that served remarkably cheap cocktails in what appeared to be IV bags, whilst playing a lot of cool music. It's an ace little place which is an absolute must for any booze hungry tourist. After a couple of rounds of alarmingly coloured drinks we joined a group of Canadians on their bar crawl. I was determined to locate Skunk Hell, a dingy punk club listed in the Lonely Planet, and was overjoyed to discover it was right across the street from Vinyl. Unfortunately, it was also closed. Instead we went to an underground (as in downstairs, not secret or incredibly cool) hip hop bar and danced around poles, whilst trying to fend off the advances of a very drunk Korean man. Although initially he seemed to be offering us money for Becky, he soon switched his attention to whichever one of us was standing within arms reach. Including me. Fun! On the plus side, he did buy us quite an expensive round of drinks. Next up was the amusingly named Ho Bar, where we stayed for the remainder of the night. Good times were had by all. Probably. The photos suggest we had fun anyway!

After sleeping off our hangovers, we went back to the university area. It was really cool, full of cool boutique clothing shops, coffee shops, noraebangs and bars, as well as having all the Western style shops that Itaewon seemed to offer. Not really sure why everyone doesn't go there instead really! As the shopping didn't really have much to offer me, I spent most of my time taking pictures of weird and wonderful graffiti. Having said that, I was able to find some fabric paint at last - I've not found it in any art shops anywhere else, so may be able to turn out some new t-shirts soon. Also, we were all greatly entertained by the subtly named Condomania. That night was an early one, as we had to be early to go find our bus connection for our ski trip!

This post is probably long enough now, so the next section will follow soon. Maybe. Maybe not.

Christmas Time, Kimchi and Mulled Wine

2009-01-10T01:49:00.004Z

Hello! Once again, it's been quite a while since we last posted anything here and a whole pile of things have happened. I suppose it'd be easier if we just posted shorter blogs more often, instead of mammoth posts every few weeks, but that might mean missing out on some potential fun times by being sat with the laptop. Better to have more in the way of fun times I think.

Anyhoo. Can't think where to start... I suppose the Christmas party at school, which took place on Christmas Eve. It was very similar to the Halloween Party we had, except this time the only person in costume was me as Santa. My job consisted of hide in one of the downstairs classrooms for 30 minutes, then come out, hand out some presents to all the kids in a raffle style, then hand out more presents to each kid as they left the party. Then repeat 3 more times. It was suprisingly hard work, although I'm not sure Becky and the other teachers would agree, as they had to man the thrilling Christmas themed games for the rest of the time. Being Santa was kind of fun, but I can't see me going to Santa college and doing it professionally. Having two beards is just too itchy.

After the party our friends, Mike and Cecilia, invited everyone over for drinks, cake and chatting. Cecilia is an excellent cake-maker and seemed to be constantly whipping new cakes out throughout the night, which was highly pleasing! Much fun was had, and slightly more alcohol than I had planned, but eventually we headed back down to our own apartment for bed.

Christmas day itself was great. Firstly, it snowed, so I had my first ever white Christmas (sort of. Snow was definitely falling for about 2 hours or so, but nothing settled). Secondly, we had so many exciting presents from our families, including 3 stockings each! We got a lot of great presents, so a big thanks to everyone for sending us things and making us feel a bit closer to home. In traditional Christmas style, we decided to go and do some food shopping at the local supermarket after we'd opened all our presents, before going to our favourite local Korean restaurant and having bulgogi and bibimbap for lunch. Despite the fact that Korea is largely a Christian country, they don't seem to make much of a big deal out of Christmas. Most of the shops on our street were open, buses were running and taxis were available all day. This meant we could go out with everyone for dinner to a restaurant, rather than attempting some kind of home cooked meal for all the remaining teachers (the rest had managed to get away to far warmer locations for their Christmas breaks). So, as Korea doesn't seem to go for roast dinners at all, we settled on Italian and had pizza and pasta for Christmas dinner. It was very tasty, but I am feeling a definite craving for some roast potatoes. Thankfully, in one of our Christmas packages, we received some gravy granules so (if we get round to properly using our mini toaster oven) we may be able to fulfill this dream.

Business Meetings, Mountain Walking, Bake Sales and Christmas Trees

2008-12-15T16:13:00.006Z

All manner of excitement has happened since last we posted a proper update. It's hard to know where to start!

A couple of weeks ago our friends at work, Julie and Nicole, sent us all a message on facebook informing us of an important business meeting coming up. It seems that Korean businessmen tend to have their meetings in bars and get well and truly hammered in the process, so the idea was we'd all dress as businessy as possible and go out and lay waste to Gwangju. We had an agenda and all applied formally for positions with 'The Company', and met for pre meeting cheese, biscuits and wine at Julie's apartment. Copious amounts of soju and fruit juice were consumed - by me mostly. We were informed prior to the event that someone was pretty much expected to be extremely drunk before the meeting began, and I felt it was my duty to step up to the task. I succeeded very well. By the time we got in the taxi I was becoming somewhat slurry and feeling a little ill, although I blame the latter on the heat in the taxi. When we made it to our chosen drinking establishment, we wandered in and found a table for all 9 of us. In the process, I was accosted by a 40 year old Korean man who could speak about as much English as I can Korean, who proceeded to hug me and force me to join him and his friend at their table. They gave me some food and wouldn't let me leave for quite sometime, but I eventually managed to escape and join the others. At our table I found an alarming array of soju and fruit juice smoothies being passed around, along with a suprising amount of free chips and a seafood platter which came free with the drinks. From here on my recollection becomes a little hazy, but I distinctly remember making my interview presentation, being bought another jug of soju smoothie by a friendly table of young Koreans, dropping a large prawn on the floor and then discovering that the bill came to about 3000 won each... £1.50-ish. When we left the cold air thankfully sobered me up somewhat as we made our way over to Speakeasy. There we danced around like fools for a while, until I developed an evil case of hiccups and had to go home. All in all, a pretty fun night! It did lead to a Sunday spent mostly sulking about how bad a soju hangover is though.

The following weekend we heard there was a bake/book sale at the foreigner bar to raise money for an orphanage. We walked downtown as it was quite a nice day and eventually arrived at the bar. It was pretty packed out with foreigners (it seems quite weird to see so many non-Korean faces now, I'm so used to being the odd one out!), all scrabbling for exciting food. We bought some shortbread and peanut butter brownies, and some ludicrously cheap and exceptionally well thumbed second hand books - my favourite find is the Bob Dylan Chronicles volume 1 for a mere 2000 won - about £1! It was really nice to see it so busy, especially as we got to see an English girl, Steph, that we met a while back. It's very nice to hear English accents! After that we went for a tasty Italian meal. We found a nice place with a set menu including two pasta dishes, one pizza, a chicken salad, a plate of squid rings, a soft drink each - with free refills - a single dessert between the 4 of us and a weird hot drink claiming to be coffee but that smelt vaguely of cinnamon and tasted like bitter water. Yummy. All this for just 8000 won each... just £4!

The following day we made our third trip to Mudeungsan for a spot of hiking. When we arrived we bumped into one of Becky's private students, Ron. He is a nice kid, but very cheeky and, since discovering we're together, has taken to calling me Mr Brooke. He was much more polite on this occasion, possibly because he was with his father, and offered us some tasty Korean snacks! We decided to take slightly different route through a building site this time, as on our previous hikes we haven't reached anything that could really be called a peak, or found any truly spectacular views, despite the beauty of what we could see. We'd never really been able to break the cover of trees. The new route started off pretty hardcore, but after about 25 minutes of pretty hard going, we started to see some really nice views over the city. It also pretty quickly became much easier going and relaxed. The views just got better and better as we climbed until we eventually reached the real peak and could see over the whole city. We stopped at the top for a while, sitting on a rock to eat some tangerines, before heading back down. Despite our regular photo stops and a lunch break, the whole hike was over in maybe 2.5 hours and with no aches or pains. It was a really nice hike, but from the top we could see that we'd only really conquered a relatively small mountain, and the real challenge is probably about 3 times as long. Another time I think!

Finally, it has become very Christmassy in our little apartment. Thanks are due to my amazing sister for sending us a small Christmas tree and a whole bunch of decorations, and also to both of our wonderful families for sending us copious amounts of exciting looking presents and food. It wouldn't be Christmas without our stockings!

2008-12-15T01:27:00.005Z

Oh Korea, we love you. Let us count the ways...

Serbis! Whenever you buy anything, you get something else for free. Medicine (free vitamin drinks), cosmetics (free eye cream), bikes (free pump), Alcohol (free food), food (more food), cereal (free tea towel), hair gel (chocolate), Pyjama bottoms (free couple set hats). In special cases, walk down the street (mirrors, candy floss from a mobile phone shop).

Eating out is about as cheap as eating in.

People often give us things just because we're different (chestnuts, chewing gum).

People (especially kids) say hello to us everywhere. Small children love trying to chat to us and shouting out their random English phrases. Teenagers will shout at us when they're in packs or just after we've walked past, and then fall into hysterics when we respond. Adults usually restrain themselves from saying anything, and just watch us curiously.

Heated toilet seats. It really is so nice. Ooh and free mouthwash dispensers in restaurant toilets.

Condom machine in the hotel room.

Heated floors. Because feet really should get the most heat.

Service bells on the corner of the table in restaurants. No more trying to catch a waiter's attention. It took a little while to build up the courage to ring it for the first time, but now we love it!

Taking shoes off in restaurants. It makes me feel more relaxed and at home when I can sit on the floor and eat with my shoes off.

The food. Shabu Shabu and Gogi Mandu are amazing, as are many other things. Kimchi may not have become our favourite snack still, but there is a lot of tasty goodness about.

A naughty child is one who talks a little louder than you might like, or forgot their homework, rather than one who tried to stab another student.

Everything is available as couple set. Set menus, pyjamas, underwear, gym membership, duck statues... Just recently we've also started seeing couples sharing mittens on 'idiot strings', one mitten each while they held hands with their other hands. It seems to be incredibly special to be a couple in Korea. Although it would be preferred if we were married. Our students seem completely perplexed by the fact that we live together but aren't married.

But sometimes Korea, we find you a little harder to understand...

Supermarkets often seem to be arranged in a random order. When looking for specific biscuits the other day, we eventually found them nestled among the crisps, rather than on the more biscuity shelf in a completely different aisle.

Motorbikes on the pavement and using pedestrian crossings. We can understand that they'd rather not compete with the cars on the road, but it is slightly distressing when they speed towards you on the pavement.

Pedestrian crossings. When the green man shows (after you've waited 15 minutes), don't always walk, because cars will be trying to get across too.

Fighting when we expect to queue. Buying bus tickets can be particularly difficult and old women will shove you with all their might to get there first. I have become rather good at pushing forward to get on the bus now and saving a seat for Alan, who is finding his Britishness a little harder to shake.

Despite the fact that Korean girls wear the shortest skirts (and shorts) known to man - all year round no less - you'll still get disapproving glances for revealing your shoulders in summer. See also the restaurant that gave me the apron to cover my lower back.

Taxi drivers who watch TV. Don't get us wrong, we don't mean they shouldn't be allowed to watch confusing Korean soaps after a hard days work, but while they're driving? Having a TV screen next to the steering wheel seems somewhat dangerous, even if it doubles as a Sat Nav.

The gym's air con isn't switched on ever, even the height of summer (by all accounts, we weren't actually here then, but it was pretty toasty even by the time we got here). Some Koreans even work out in the sauna! On the other hand, windows are left open during snow in order to allow air to circulate through the building.

Unisex toilets, with the urinal located next to the shared sink.

There are loads of other things that fit into both categories, and we've only been here 3 months so far, so this list is sure to keep on growing. This is just a taster!

It's Been A While

2008-12-14T12:43:00.003Z

We haven't posted in ages, but I just wanted to say we've added a whole bunch of new photo albums today so go look at them! A new post with actual information and exciting things will follow. Soon. Probably.

what's in a name?

2008-11-24T15:26:00.002Z

An exciting part of teaching in Korea, is that whenever a new student joins a class, we get to give them an English name. Some kids have ended up (not always from our school) with some pretty strange names, as Alan has pointed out. Today was an exciting day, as I got to name my first child. So, TJ you now have a small Korean boy named after you (Tom, really. Thought TJ might be a bit confusing). I promise the first girl will be Katy.

Jeonju-The city of "love"

2008-11-24T13:53:00.004Z

We fancied another weekend away (one a month just isn't enough) and decided on the town of Jeonju, which was nearly our home at one point. It's only a one and a half hour coach trip from Gwangju (which is merciful, considering my recent tendency for nausea and vomiting!). We'd read about an intriguing motel in the lonely planet with big jacuzzis, so we decided to try and stay in our first Korean "Love Motel", the Mint Motel. We found it pretty easily. It looked fairly harmless from the outside, although not exactly classy. More like something you would find in the cheap bit of Las Vegas, with it's pink paint and palm tree pictures, but we ventured inside nevertheless. The lobby was extremely dark, it had UV lighting and a reception desk with a little opening which I called through. A woman stuck her head round and motioned a sleep sign with her head and hands, to which I nodded. This was quite a relief as we had been wondering how we would explain that we wanted the room for a full night and not just for the hour. Key in hand, we took the lift to the 3rd floor. Our first surprise came when we noticed the book shelf of pornographic videos (and Robocop) available for customers to take into their rooms. A little further on, we found a vending machine full of sex toys. Clearly a place designed for true "love". Our room was actually pretty amazing and didn't feel too seedy once we got past the condom vending machine in the corner, the blue light above the bed, the huge portrait window from the bedroom into the bathroom (complete with naked woman glazing) and the enormous flat-screen TV, which seemed only to show four channels with a choice of porn, cooking, home shopping, or more porn. As promised in the lonely planet it was very clean and there was a huge jacuzzi in the bathroom, so we were happy.

Hotel sorted, we went to explore Jeonju and managed to get a little bit lost in the process. First impressions were not wonderful as we were wandering through the outskirts and the streets were definitely somewhat more pungent than in Gwangju. We passed a couple of huge and gaudy wedding halls on the way, and stopped to watch as some of the couples came out in their hanbok (traditional Korean dress). When we eventually found the downtown area, it was nice, although very similar to Gwangju, except for the bizarre light canopy running above the main shopping street. We passed through, following signs to the hanok (traditional Korean building) village. The hanok village was beautiful, made up of genuinely old buildings and beautifully built imitations. In the centre there was an area where some of the buildings were shown as a museum, but for streets and streets around, there were others in use as shops (some with lovely craft gifts), restaurants and tea shops. In amongst these buildings was a beautiful, red brick, Catholic church, which was built by Italian missionaries on a spot where Korean catholics were executed.

One of the greatest discoveries of the weekend was down a little side street in the hanok village, where we found a small restaurant selling curry. There was no menu and just two options; hot curry, or mild curry. We decided it was best to go for the mild in a country where they have kimchi for breakfast. It was a wonderfully quirky little place, the food was delicious and we even got handmade banana lassi for pudding. All for about £2.50. Lovely. After dinner we found a funny little bar where we had a beer before heading back to our love motel.

The next morning we left the hotel (without ever having seen another guest) and did a bit more exploring in Jeonju, a little bit of Christmas shopping, eating a semi Italian lunch (we realised last night that we have only eaten one meal out since getting here, that wasn't served with kimchi. Sometimes I really enjoy it) before heading back to Gwangju.

Almost forgot. We witnessed what we assume is another korean tradition this weekend. We saw two separate wedding cars, where the bride was sitting in the open boot, leading the groom along with ribbon behind the car. Very funny

Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow!

2008-11-19T14:29:00.005Z

So, in the last couple of weeks there's been a pretty huge temperature drop here. This reached exciting new levels yesterday afternoon when it started snowing during our first lesson of the day. This caused huge excitement for my students, with me having to physically tear them away from the window and put them back in their seats. It stopped pretty quickly and started being all rainy instead, but overnight it snowed heavy and hard. We awoke this morning to incredibly bright light coming through the windows and braved the cold to open the windows and take a peek outside. The roads were pretty much snow free but everything else had a nice healthy covering, so I went for a quick walk taking some snaps in the immediate area around the apartment.

Although it is very cold here now and our school is somewhat lacking in heating (in that it has none at all - luckily some heaters are now on order so we won't have to teach in hats and gloves), I have to say it's much less depressing getting into winter here than at home. It's still sunny with blue skies and a happy lack of miserable clouds and biting winds - so far at least. If it stays like this, I'll be pretty happy. Especially as I managed to buy a new winter coat, scarf and hat for 23,000 won - about £11.50! Happy times. I'm praying for much more snow anyway. It makes me very happy!

On a thoroughly unrelated note, Becky's favourite Korean advert just came on tv. It features a nice slow motion shot of a young child running towards his mothers open arms and bouncing his head off her chest, before cutting to the product on sale... Car air bags! Ace.

Kids Say The Darndest Things

2008-11-16T10:31:00.004Z

One of the greatest pleasures of teaching here, is the funny things that the children say to us. Sometimes, they say such lovely things. A little girl told me last week that her mum says I'm very beautiful, although this was somewhat overshadowed when she told Alan that her mother had called him "handsome, like a God". They often tell me that Mr. Armstrong loves me, as if it's a shocking revelation, which is also pretty funny.

Some things that we tell them, also seem very funny to them. Alan tried to explain to his students that his mother was called Mrs. Armsrong, and that in fact his entire family shared the name. They found this very funny and probably still think that it was just a big joke! When I told one of my classes that I was from England, they looked confused "teacher? English in England?", meaning, do they speak English in England? When I said "I'm from England. I am ENGLISH", they found this hilarious, and started pointing at where it said "English" on the front of their exercise books, and saying "same same". I then had to explain that the fact that the language they learn and the name of my nationality are the same, is more than just a strange coincidence. I must confess that I made a big X with my arms and said "English, not from Canada, not from USA. English from England". I don't feel too bad though, because apparently Alan has also demonstrated this point on the board. It seems necessary, otherwise they are concerned that their teachers may not atually know how to speak English (especially when we accidentally write 'colour' rather than 'color' on the board).

At other times the things they say are just wierd. One of my students touched the moles on my arm, and asked me in wonder what they were. Alan's students seem mostly to be completely obssessed with his beard, oh and one class went through a stage of constantly calling him red panties, because on one ocassion when he lifted his arm to write on the board, they caught a glimpse of the red band at the top of his underwear. This continued until, one day, having had just about enough Alan came into class and threatened anyone who mentioned the nickname with 'no goodbye' (what we call detention).

Although still funny, some of the other things we hear are pretty tactless. I have been asked on a couple of occassions (when wearing baggy clothing, may I add) whether I have a baby in my belly, and once when I said no, they kindly told me that I was looking fat. The other day one of my sweetest students looked at me seriously and asked me why it was so black around my eyes. One of Alan's students informed him that he looks very old and now some of them have started calling him Grandfather teacher (although he claims that this is only because of the beard).

This very frank attitude to appearance is not always limited to the children. Our experience so far has only been positive, but there are lots of stories of others being refused to try on clothing because they are "very big". The funniest thing I've heard, was from an English girl we know, who works in a state school. When she met the director of education for the area, he asked her if she was pregnant. When she (slightly put out) informed him that she wasn't, he insisted, saying "are you sure? I think you should go to the hospital and check".

Hike Hike Hike

2008-11-09T10:15:00.009Z

Last week we went to Wolchulsan, a mountain about an hour and a half away from Gwangju, with Mel and Jocelyn. We'd heard all manner of different stories about how long it could take (anywhere between 4 and 8 hours depending on who you ask...) and how tiring it could be, so we decided to leave bright and early to ensure we didn't end up stranded up there in the dark. We arrived at the base of the mountain at about 9am and were greeted by a helpful man who, using a smattering of English and lots of gesturing, explained that there were two routes. We could go up to the Cloud Bridge (large suspension bridge) and then on to the main peak, before heading back to the start on a circular route, which would take 4 hours total. Or, instead of coming back, we could do the full 6 hour route across to a big temple, passing an 8 metre high Buddha along the way, then stay in a minbak overnight or get a taxi from the end back to the bus station. Hedging our bets somewhat, we decided to head to the top and see how we felt when we got there.

The hike started quite steeply, and we quickly arrived at metal steps which ended up making up maybe 80% of the way up. This may make it sound easy, but the steps were terrifyingly steep in places and there were points where they were either very far apart or very close together, making the walk really awkward. At other points of the cllimb were knotted ropes tied to the rocks, where we had to pull ourselves up, almost like actual rock climbing! Helpful signs along the way kept shocking us with the distance remaning until we reached the top, as well as constantly being convinced we could see the peak, only to turn a corner and find out that we had to go back down another 100 metres to reach the next upward stretch! The scenery all the way up was incredible, despite it being quite a misty morning when we started. The weather cleared gradually as we got closer to the top and gave us amazing views across the surrounding countryside. Also, as we're still in the midst of autumn (I'm trying to remember to say fall so as to not confuse our students or the other teachers, but I refuse to write it. Must hold on to my Englishness!) here, the colours of the leaves were spectacular. This lead to constant and very welcome photo stops along the whole route.

We eventually reached the top just short of the two hour estimate given by the helpful chap mentioned above and settled down with the soju drinking, kimbap eating Korean hikers to have our lunch and enjoy the view. After some discussion we decided that although we were still feeling pretty good, we may not be up to another four hours, so took the easier option of heading down. Sadly, after about 30 minutes of descent, we started to wonder if we might've been better of going for the longer route. The 6 hour route would've led us across the tops of the mountains and certainly would've required some up and downing. But frankly, it seems like that would've been a breeze in comparison with the way down. Gone were the terrifying steps and ropes, only to be replaced with a random assortment of variously sized rocks in no discernible pattern. There were many places I had to really stretch or jump to get between some rocks, grabbing hold of the nearest branch to maintain some semblence of balance. Gone too, were the majority of the views, although the colours of the leaves continued to amaze us. The helpful signs suddenly became hugely depressing as they appeared to show little to no difference in distance remaning. Despite all this, we reached the bottom before the predicted four hours were up and were thus very pleased. It was an incredible hike and the views more than made up for any whinges. We are already planning to do it again in the spring. Next time we may actually bother to do some pre-hike stretching, as both Becky and I were suffering somewhat in the leg department. In fact, my knee has been highly troublesome for most of the 7 days since we returned. Very annoying, but thankfully it now seems to be all better.

Also worth mentioning is the park we passed at the bottom, containing a great many bizarre statues with an alarming array of genitalia on display. Although in many ways Korea seems very conservative, they do seem to go in for some truly suprising exceptions to the rule. It certainly bodes well for our Christmas trip to the somewhat infamous Penis Park...

Updatery!

2008-11-05T14:43:00.007Z

Last Sunday we went for a second trip to Mudeungsan (the mountain in Gwangju). We went for lunch at the base of the mountain in one of the many small restaurants available. We sat down and quickly realised there were no helpful pictures of what we could be ordering, so accepted the first thing we were offered. Quite quickly we were brought an alarming array of small dishes with all manner of different things in them, some rice, a large bowl of soup, a plate of leafy veg and some incredibly fatty meat. We didn't really know what to do with it all, but managed to pick up some pointers from the other diners and a friendly Korean chap at the table next to us. Sadly I have to confess that it was the first meal that I haven't enjoyed since we got here. But it's all part of the fun really and I suppose considering the way we order our meals we're doing pretty well!We went for a walk after the food in an effort to find an art gallery and a tea plantation we'd read about. The art gallery was pretty easy to find, about 10 minutes up the hill. We didn't actually go in, as we didn't have our Biennale tickets and didn't want to pay the entrance fee, but there's some other free things connected to it, including the house a Korean artist used to live in for about 20 years, a video installation and some other bits and pieces. There wasn't really much there, but it was quite nice. We did encounter a small watermill that was being spun by 2 small Korean children, perched precariously on the edge of a shaking wooden box over a bit of a sharp fall, as their mother looked on! Sadly we didn't make it to the tea plantation despite being able to see it in the distance, but we did come across another pretty spectacular Buddhist temple where we might be able to go for a templestay at some point.

After our trip we concluded that our trainers aren't up to the job, mostly because we could feel all the rocks through the soles! So today we bought hiking boots. We're going on a long hike this weekend so decided it was time for proper boots. Korean hikers seem to take it very seriously indeed, they're all kitted out in special hiking gear from head to toe, so we also wanted to make sure we fit in properly! Actually, one pretty amazing thing about our life in Korea so far is the fact that we were paid 2 weeks wages at the start of October, which we've lived on for the last 5 weeks. From that money we've paid for our trips to Wando and Namhae, as well as all our food (we eat in restaurants for more than half our evening meals every week, and quite often for lunch too), our bikes, Biennale season tickets, some clothes, bits and pieces for the house, walking boots and a few nights of drinking. And we're not in anyway struggling now! Bodes well for our potential savings. As long as the exchange rate doesn't get any worse for the Won - at the moment it's going up and down like a yo-yo.

Finally, I'm sure anyone reading this will have noticed I have shaved off my beard. This is in no way connected to the note I was given by one of my students suggesting I remove it! In any case, I've terrified myself with the sight of my hairless chin and shall probably grow the beard back as soon as phsyically possible.

Ghostly Gwangju

2008-11-02T08:40:00.005Z

We'd been looking forward to Halloween for a while as it meant a day without teaching and an early finish... almost like a three day weekend. Or so we thought.

Our hopes were slightly quashed when we were told that we should come into school an hour early and lug furniture around in preparation for the party, oh and that we should also make at least ten decorations each for the following day. On Friday morning Alan and I got up and covered ourselves in make up. Alan was looking pretty creepy as the joker and I had great hopes that he might walk away with the best costume prize. All the teachers decided to walk to school together for moral support and just to make the Koreans think that white people are a little bit stranger (they're not really familiar with halloween here). The reactions we got were pretty funny. Some people pointed and laughed, some looked completely stunned and others just did their best to pretend that they hadn't noticed.

At school we were each put in charge of a game room. I had the musical chairs room and Alan had some kind of put your hand in the bag and identify the disgusting thing (is it a heart or eyeballs? No, it's a tomato!) room. We had a different party every hour, for four hours and it was actually a lot of fun, although the last set of kids may have had a slightly less enthusiastic group of teachers than the first.

At the end of the evening, we all had to vote for the best teacher's costume and there ended up being six prizes (far more than expected) cash prizes! I got fourth place (70,000 Won) and Alan got second (100,000), so between us we got about £80. A very nice little bonus. We did get to leave school early, so we headed to the pork bone soup restaurant where we got even more attention and scared a few kids (whose parents kept trying to force them to come and get pictures with us. After dinner we went to a bar near our apartment and spent the evening chatting.

My New Look

2008-10-30T15:48:00.004Z

All I need now is a Harley.

The Village Bikes

2008-10-26T04:35:00.010Z

We've bought bikes! Yay! They're pretty cheap but already they're proving to be worthwhile purchases. Straight after buying them yesterday, we rode down to the river that runs through the middle of the city. There're a fair amount of cycle paths about, which is handy as the roads are terrifying and full of crazy drivers. But the path running alongside the river is perfect for riding. A lot of it is freshly laid and nice and smooth. Anyway, we decided to ride around a bit with the vague idea of exploring somewhere new and maybe visiting the May 18th memorial park (May 18th is the date of a huge public uprising which is pretty legendary. Look it up!). So we headed off along the path. The map we have is a little sketchy on detail, not helped by the fact that most streets don't have any names at all, and anything that does have a name is obviously in Korean. So we took what we thought was the correct exit ramp and went up into a ludicrous traffic jam with 3 Korean policemen attempting to direct cars with random whistle blowing and arm waving. We decided it was walking time so dismounted and ducked off the busy road onto a much smaller street which turned out to be the start of a huge market.

Now, although being in Gwangju is very different to being somewhere like... Birmingham, it's not much like a lot of Asia (or so I'm told) as it is very developed, the streets are pretty clean, everywhere doesn't smell of sewage and it's not really a poor country. Particularly where we live, in MaeGok Dong. But this market was like plunging into a different world. Everything seemed very crammed in, the smells of different herbs, spices, vegetables and caged animals mixed everywhere and we got stared at more than anywhere we've been yet. It was ace! Loads of older Korean women were saying hello and waving at us, which is kind of unusual. It tends to just be the kids that get excited, the adults tend to ignore us or stare silently! I was a little overawed and pushing my bike so didn't take many pictures, damn me. But we will be returning sans bikes at some point so will soon be able to display the aceness to the world. We wandered through looking at endless stalls (by stalls I mean women sitting on the floor with food laid out on blankets and in baskets) of veg, fish and caged chickens for a while until we reached a busy road. We then decided it was time we got back to looking for the Memorial Park so hopped back on our bikes and headed up the hill. After a few minutes we started to get a little puzzled by the road signs as they all seemed to be directing us to things that should be a long way away and not to things that should be quite close. Eventually it dawned on us that we had somehow managed to ride the totally opposite direction down the river so were nowhere near the Memorial Park. Oops. It was a huge amount of fun anyway and I'm looking forward to doing lots more of bike related exploration in the future. Also anyone that comes to visit us can use our lovely bikes to get around (as long as they're very careful with them. Becky is insisting that we name them, so by the time we have visitors they will be like children. But less noisy and demanding. And easier to use for transportation)!

Today we are somewhat hungover as we had an unplanned, but very comical, night out last night. We got a little carried away in drinking games and got peer pressured into going to Speakeasy, so headed out with everyone else at about 12.30. We only ended up staying in Speakeasy for a couple of hours cos the music was a bit rubbish, so Nicole suggested we relocate to a Nori-Bang (karaoke room). This was our first experience of Korean karaoke and was kinda weird but fun. We had our own room with a bank of TV screens and lists of thankfully English tunes to choose from. For some totally unknown reason I ended up doing a lot of singing. Apologies to all who attended. It's a weird experience, as you're allowed to take in your own drink and food and stay pretty much as long as you want. I think the room was hired by time periods, but I'm not sure how long those periods were. We stayed for 3 of them anyway and left at around 6am, all sung out. I found out later that we were actually in a Nori-Bang with 'extras' in the form of... um, nice young ladies to keep you company. For money. Interesting! This may explain why I was approached by a friendly Korean girl on my way back from the toilet to our room. I didn't understand a word she said of course, so maybe she was just asking me the time or something. But I'd rather believe that I've had my first ever proposition by a lady of the night! Fun times.

Other exciting news - as well as Liz, Ellie and Amy having booked tickets to come abuse our hospitality at Christmas, Vicky and Dom are supposed to be booking their tickets tomorrow. Also our parents and my cousin Mark are getting their visiting plans in order, Nick and Nat are entertaining the possibility of working out here in the midst of their traveling extravaganza and Katy and Andrew are contemplating a visit as well I understand! Highly pleasing all round. Anyone else who wishes to join us is more than welcome! Specifically Ann-Marie and TJ would be nice.

Ooh, finally, this is a picture of one of my favourite students, Billy (almost all our students are given English names by the teachers here, often very strange names. In my classes I have a Lion, a Hunter and an unfortunate boy named Louise. Also I have a Steve who was known as Rose at his previous Hogwan). I have a one on one lesson with him twice a week, and he's very good fun. I have taught him to play shove ha'penny, and he brings me ice cream. Anyway, I told him I was going to put him on the internet and make him famous, so... here he is.

Bratwurst and Kimchi

2008-10-22T02:12:00.005+01:00

We've been here for five and a half weeks and still having an amazing time. There are so many things we want to do, there's never a dull moment. Sometimes it's a bit daunting trying to pick the way to spend a weekend, so we were pretty grateful last weekend when that decision was made for us. Mike and his wife Cecelia, had plans to go and join a group of friends on Namhae and invited us to come along. It meant getting up at six on Saturday morning but turned out to be well worth it.

The journey started pretty eventfully with an interesting taxi driver who spoke pretty great English. We were sharing a taxi with Sophie and Freya, so first of all the driver seemed pretty impressed that Alan had three women, he got more and more manic and excited throughout the jouney, also talking to us in arabic. Like all the other friendly people we seem to meet, he handed out chestnuts for us to eat on the journey.

We had to get two coaches to the island which is connected to the mainland by an amazing bridge (like a small replica of the Golden Gate bridge). When we got to Namhae we had to wait for some others to arrive so we could get taxis, which was fine as we sat in the blazing sun eating chestnuts given to us by a friendly old lady. We got in a taxi and drove away to the middle of nowhere along steep winding roads, past garlic world and other exciting places. Then we arrived at the German village where we were staying, yes that's right German village. Tucked away among the hills on this little island, with a view of the sea, is a German village, complete with terra-cotta roofs, wooden paneling and potted geraniums. It was all very surreal and we were staying in an amazing house right at the top of the hill. The place was made even more surreal when we knocked on a neighbour's door to buy Bratwurst and were greeted by an old german man and his German speaking, Korean wife. Apparently a lot of Korean women went to work as nurses in Germany and came back to Korea with their German husbands to form this village.

After a lot of introductions and a bit of lunch on our terrace, we headed down the hill to the sea for a dip (a walk that was much easier going, than coming back)We found a stony beach and probably to the shock of any Korean watching, went swimming in the middle of October. The water was actually quite warm and it was such a hot day that we dried out pretty quickly. Ha ha, swimming and sunbathing in October!

Back at the house, we were in time for the long anticipated bean bag tournament. This is a game that involves trying to throw bean bags onto a wooden platform, or ideally into the hole in the middle. Teams of two were picked at random, which was a good thing for us novices as we were paired off with some slightly more experienced team mates. Unfortunately, Alan was knocked out in the first round, but me and my partner (who probably had a bit more to do with it than me), made it to the finals, but unfortunately didn't get the 60,000 cash prize. The rest of the evening was spent eating, drinking and playing cards ... lovely.

As much as we would all have liked to stay, the next morning, it was back on the buses and home to Gwangju. We were back quite early, so wandered down to the Biennale park for the final day of the Kimchi festival. Really, quite a big festival all dedicated to the nation's biggest love. There was stand after stand of Kimchi sellers for tasting, but unfortunately our tastebuds haven't quite developed the ability to distinguish between the different tastes under the spice. We also got to see some traditional Korean drumming, and some dreadlocked Koreans playing instruments made from vegetables.

The reason I have had time to write this morning is that it's raining outside so we have decided to stay in. We might also do a bit of work on our Hangul (Korean) reading. I think this is worth mentioning, as we have seen so little rain since we've been here that it has come as a surprise. Maybe this is the end of the hot days, I hope not, but I suppose winter has to start sometime.

Konglish

2008-10-21T15:59:00.004+01:00

So Becky and I were just doing a bit of research into plans for our Christmas break with Liz, Amy and Ellie when we stumbled upon a site featuring Konglish. This is a term for English words which have been adapted and adopted into Korean. Some of them are kinda comedy...

kuh-pul-seh-teu (커플세트; "couple set") - matching clothing worn by a young couple on a date.

bu-king (부킹; "booking") - the process whereby a group of Korean friends of one sex is introduced to a group of Korean friends of the opposite sex. This activity only occurs in night clubs and is sanctioned and run by the night club. Often a fee is required for booking.

pu-rin-teu (프린트; "print") - Konglish for Xerox photocopying.

But the best one is only really funny because the youngest students at our school start in classes called Magic Time. So imagine our suprise to see the following phrase...

meh-jeek-ta-eem (매직타임 "Magic Time") - when a woman is menstruating

Hmm. I wonder if our boss is aware of this...

Tiredness Kills!

2008-10-17T15:22:00.001+01:00

So... my post from last night is somewhat rubbish and a little poorly typed. For this I send endless apologies. Sorry.

Big Trouble In Little Gwangju

2008-10-16T16:20:00.006+01:00

There isn't really any trouble in Gwangju. And Gwangju isn't little. I just felt like referencing Kurt Russell.

Um. So, haven't updated since the Wando info. But fun things have happened, so here be updatery. Last weekend was good, we had a few of the other teachers over for drinking fun and were up until about 4.30 just chatting and listening to music etc last Friday, which was cool. Then Saturday (after Becky impressively made it to the gym in the morning) we went into Downtown Gwangju where all the shopping fun is. There was some kind of festival taking place, with scarily young girls doing inappropriate dances in scary outfits and makeup on a little stage, people in costume and on stilts parading around, bands playing, lots of K-Pop and all manner of strangeness. Ace. We went home about 8pm, had a bit of a snooze to refresh, then went drinking again. After a few drinks at Jasmin's place, we went back downtown to a Turkish bar - basically there were cushions everywhere and lots of curtains. No Turks as far as I could see, but it was fun anyway. Then at about 1.30am onto Speakeasy for dancing and giggles. I spent a lot of the night laughing as the girls tried to wriggle away from various slight weird drunk men - particularly starey-intense-dude who was too weird for words. Much drinking and dancing. We left there about 4.30 (I think) and headed to Soul Train. I was kind of excited about the prospect of listening to and dancing to some soul, but when we got there it turned out they weren't playing soul at all. Not even R&B. It sounded more like Travis. Weird. Anyway, we only stayed for about 20 minutes before deciding maybe it was time to bed.

The next day we struggled out of bed in the early afternoon and made our way to Chosun University where the GIC put on an International festival every year. This basically consisted of a whole bunch of food stalls and a stage with talent show and entertainment. There were a few other bits but that was the interesting stuff. The food was ace, although inexplicably we had to buy food vouchers - a 5000 won note got you a 5000 won food voucher. Can't quite figure out why this was, it seemed like it would've been easier to use real money, but I'm sure there was logic in there somewhere. Anyway, there was loads of African, Indonesian, Chinese, Nepali, Indian, Philippino and Mexican (I feel like I'm missing something out... hmmm. Oh, western food was represented by crepes. Seemed weird to me.) food, which we sampled as much of as was physically possible. African was the best for me, especially as we got a whole plateful for about 50p - pretty good value. It was also Indonesia Day, so Indonesia was very well represented with dancers and singers galore. After a while we decided to rest our bloated stomachs and watch the talent show. Between acts they started announcing winners of the raffle - our little group managed to win 4 tickets to the Biennale, about 8 free coffee vouchers and a new Sony Cybershot camera! Sadly the camera didn't come to me as Sophie had the winning ticket. This is especially unfortunate as my camera seems to be a little unwell at the moment. Bugger. Hopefully it's just a temporary setback. Um... Yeah, so eventually we headed back home for more sleepings.

This week has been officially a month since we arrived, fun times! Feel pretty settled now, and more comfortable with the more crazy things Korea has to offer. Like people riding their mopeds on the pavement through busy streets and thrill seeking taxis drivers running red lights. And being given candy floss by a lady from a phone shop. But it was still highly disconcerting a couple of days ago to hear an air raid siren going off shortly after we arrived at school. It seems every so often they have a drill just in case Kim Jong Il goes crazier and sends some planes over the border to attack us. Apparently all we're expected to do is go inside the nearest building. I guess Korean buildings must be designed to withstand explosions! Who needs bomb shelters eh? Also, the creative mangling of the English language will be forever entertaining.

Anyway, I'm going to go to bed now. Becky's laptop is still set to English time, but I think's silly o'clock. now. Gnight!

Almost forgot!

2008-10-09T02:55:00.004+01:00

While we were at the pebbly beach and exploring the little village, we stumbled upon a chicken pen containing a frankly hideous looking freak of nature, which I immediately named Cat-Rabbit. This is due to the fact that it looked like the unfortunate offspring of a cat and a rabbit. I took many pictures of it and became quickly attached to it, especially as it seemed to be very friendly and desperate for attention (not water or food as Becky insisted. It wanted love!). Please see below pictures of the unfortunate beast. If anyone wants to donate money to my new charity dedicated to saving the poor Cat-Rabbit please send cheques made payable to Alan Armstrong.

ps If you look at these pictures and think 'That's not a Cat-Rabbit, that's a fluffy guinea pig' or something, please keep it to yourself. You'll spoil my fun. Also my new theme tune for Cat-Rabbit won't be as useful. And I'll have to cancel my order for 500 Cat-Rabbit t-shirts.

Wandorific!

2008-10-09T01:19:00.008+01:00

Continuing from Becky's previous post...

We arrived back in Wando Bus Terminal (you have to stress the 'al' in Terminal here, or people won't have a clue what you mean) and started trying to find a bus to Myeongsashimni Beach on the next island, which is joined to Wando itself by a big bridge. The bus timetable was up on the wall but as you might expect, it was all in Korean and we couldn't figure any of it out. After standing around looking puzzled for some time, a frendly Korean man came over to help. Sadly, it seemed he was actually more of a drunk Korean man who didn't speak any English, so he was very little help indeed and wouldn't leave us alone until a younger Korean guy came and took him away from us. Shortly after, a Korean woman came up to us and asked, in English, if we needed help. Hooray! Salvation! Korean people do seem very happy to help, it happens all the time. Anyway, she got us on the right bus and we were soon trundling across the island. It was kind of a busy bus, so we were standing. This is annoying for me as it means I can't see out of the windows. Boo! After about 20 minutes Becky spotted a beach, so we leapt off the bus and walked down the road to an absolutely beautiful sandy beach.

We'd read about a guesthouse village at the far end of the beach (just barely visible in the picture) so decided to ignore the motel right next to us and explore a little. Sadly, we forgot how distances can seem really misleading on beaches and it took a very long time to get there. The blazing heat made it seem even further too! But we made it in the end, only to discover that maybe we should've thought about the name a little more - guesthouse village. Not motel/hotel village. Everything seemed to be more like holiday apartments, as well as seeming highly closed. There were also no restaurants, which was highly troubling, as we hadn't eaten a proper meal since lunch the previous day and were way past lunchtime. We did find a room eventually, with a nice view over the sea. It was more expensive than we wanted, but really it worked out pretty cheaply - roughly £25 between us for a night. The room didn't have what we might call a bed, they'd gone for the Korean style mat and pile of blankets on the floor instead, which was actually more comfortable than you might think. Not sure I could cope with it for a whole year though! The nice little lady that gave us the room brought us 2 huge round pears which were really nice - she also gave us a big bag of fruit when we left!

After we got ourselves settled, we headed all the way back down to the other end of the beach to find some food. The first place we tried shooed us away, she obviously couldn't be bothered to cook! But we found somewhere in the end and did our standard 'no idea what the menu says, just point at someone else's table and hope for the best'. We watched as one of the women climbed onto the fish tanks lining the front of the restaurant and fished out first a handful of shellfish, then 2 large fish... They brought us a huge array of side dishes with about 4 different kinds of kimchi, swiftly followed by a gas stove and a large bowl containing the two fish. The shellfish must've gone to someone else. Now, you probably aren't aware of this, but I am somewhat squeamish when it comes to fish. I don't like the boneyness and I really don't like fish heads. So I was slightly uncomfortable to be faced with a dish holding 2 entire fish... But I manned up and started trying to eat it without looking my fish in the eye sockets. It was actually delicious, although my first mouthful had about 6 bones in it. Over the course of the meal, I also managed to accidentally poke my fish in the eye socket, pull out the entire spine and upset myself by accidentally looking at the wrong side of the fish head. By wrong side I mean inside. Ick ick ick! Was very tasty though.

After our meal we wandered off and went in search of ice cream. We bumped into Brandon and Aviom (not sure of the correct spelling!), 2 guys we'd met earlier in the day who were on bikes touring the area and had a bit of a chat, then met a guy called Jonathan who was working in Wando and told us what the bus times were so we'd be able to get back to the bus terminal the next day. It's kinda nice meeting people like that, it breaks up the panic of not being able to talk to everyone else properly! For example, in the shop where we eventually found ice creams. The old lady outside started jabbering at Becky semi-angrily and gesturing at her. We had no idea what she meant at all, but suspect it was something to do with the fact that Becky was wearing a dress which didn't cover her legs and shoulders. Or maybe it was something else entirely! Who knows?! We can get by ok without speaking Korean really, but sometimes I do worry that we won't know if we're doing something wrong or offending someone. Fingers crossed though, eh?

Anyway. Becky went for a quick dip in the sea after we'd eaten our ice creams. I decided it'd cooled off too much for me to go in, so stayed safely on the beach and watched. More entertainment followed when Becky got out and started trying to change. Four Koreans turned up in their standard beach wear of trousers, shirts and jumpers, plus hats and started trying to take pictures of her! I hasten to add, she wasn't standing around naked or anything, she was wrapped in a sarong, but they were clearly highly amused and or shocked by this! Fun. As soon as Becky was able to dress in peace we headed back to the safety of our little apartment.

The next day was sadly miserable and overcast, it actually started raining as we walked back down the beach to get the bus. Either our info about bus times was wrong, or it was vastly different on Sundays, but we waited patiently for about 30 minutes before giving up and getting a taxi. We arrived about 10 minutes before the next bus to Gwangju so prepared ourselves for a fight for the seats, but luckily got on pretty much first and sat down safely. A couple of hours later we were back in the bustle of Gwangju. It's actually really nice to be back here, as lovely as Wando was. This is really our home now, and that feels pretty great.

Weekend in Wando

2008-10-08T04:21:00.003+01:00

It’s Sunday afternoon and we have just got back to Gwangju after a long weekend away. We had Friday off work as it was a national holiday celebrating Korea’s creation (something to do with a bear which sounds slightly far-fetched, but we’re not complaining). After studying the lonely planet we decided to head South for the island of Wando. Friday morning we got a taxi to the bus station and bought our tickets, managing to fight our way forward past the old Korean women who seem prepared to mow down anyone who stands in their way (queuing in general is a bit of a foreign concept in Korea). We then made the mistake of hanging back until our bus arrived, not knowing that when it did everyone would surge onto it and we would be left without a place. Luckily, there was another one half an hour later and we managed to get a seat. The journey took about two and a half hours and we were surprised to see how much countryside there really is in Korea.

When we arrived in Wando we walked down to the port to explore. It seemed like a pretty busy little fishing port but everything was quiet because of the holiday so we had a bit of lunch and decided to try and find a motel from the lonely planet that was a bit out of the way, on top of a hill. We waved down a taxi and were reassured when he nodded at the name of the hotel and drove off purposefully. Unfortunately, he pulled over about a minute and a half later outside a hotel we had just walked past. After studying the lonely planet, a phone call to a friend and questions to a few other drivers, we were off again. Eventually we pulled up outside a stunning hotel on top of a hill. Worrying that we might not be able to afford it, we walked in and found the whole place deserted. It made me think of the shining, wandering around the empty corridors. Half an hour later we managed to find someone and mime to her that we wanted somewhere to sleep, and for less than fifteen quid we got a nice 1950’s style hotel room. The view from the hotel was amazing and it was only a ten minute walk down to a little stony beach. We spent the rest of the day wandering around convincing ourselves that the hotel would open it’s little bar in the evening and we would be able to find something to eat. By about eight in the evening, however, there was still no sign of life and we had to face the fact that we were going to have to find another source of food. We set off down the very very dark road in the direction of another guest house that we had noticed from the taxi. When we got there, there was a family eating a tasty looking soup outside and a man ushered us over and sat us down on a platform. Unfortunately he called someone else who through various gestures told us that we couldn’t get food. Back on the road and we eventually reached a tiny village with a shop the size of a large wardrobe where we managed to get some crisps, biscuits and a couple of beers. We carried our feast back to the hotel and ate on top of the hill outside.

The next morning, there seemed to be a little more energy in the hotel and it had lost some of it’s mysteriousness, there was even a little group of Koreans sitting outside drinking coffee, who got very excited and started clapping their hands when we said that we were from England. We’ve had this reaction a few times and can only assume it’s because we’re not American. Despite this, we felt that we should move on and see a bit more of Wando, and maybe find somewhere to have a proper meal, so we trudged back to the little village, this time through a small wood, where miraculously we managed to get ourselves onto a bus back to the main port.

How do you tell if your house was burgled by a Korean?

2008-10-02T12:44:00.003+01:00

Your dog is gone and your homework is all done! Yes, we have English-teacher-working-in-Korea jokes! Hoooray!

So, I just uploaded more pictures. Today was a great day, we went to the Gwangju Biennale, which is a huge modern art exhibition not far from our apartment. We bought season tickets for about £15, which get us in as many times as we want, plus entrance to 3 other museums, including the more traditional art gallery, the folk museum and... somewhere else. Bargain! The Tate Modern should take some pointers there... Anyway, it was ace. Sadly it's only on until November, so none of our visitors will be able to see it. Booo. Ah well. We'll be able to spend hours there so yay! Also, when we left to go find some lunch, a group of Korean school boys shouted hello to us (this happens on a daily basis. I imagine the novelty will wear off at some point, but right now it's kinda nice) then asked if they could take a picture with us. For comedy purposes we said yes, then Becky took this pic of me with them. Fun times were had by all!

Also, I finished work 2 hours early, because my two private lessons were cancelled tonight. Handy! I'm currently awaiting the return of Becky so we can go get some dinner.

Aids-Aids-Aids Aids-Aids-Aids-Aids

2008-10-01T03:48:00.002+01:00

We don't have aids! Isn't that reassuring? We were tested yesterday morning. We lined up, took a numbered ticket like at a deli counter, then when our number was called went up and got our blood tests. We then gave a little sample of urine to be tested and were in and out within 30 minutes! Our test results came through by the afternoon. Speedy and pleasing! So this really means we are drug free, disease free, and elligible for a years employment in Korea! Woop woop.

Blogular updatery

2008-09-29T02:58:00.003+01:00

Ok, so this is an attempt to try to update on all the things we did before we actually got online. Loads of stuff happened, and I'm pretty sure it'd be kind of dull to just do a day by day account. But I'm gonna do it anyway! Ha. No I'm not. Just some of it.

So, the first night we went straight out to find some food. But as we arrived in the middle of the national holiday we were a bit limited, so ended up buying a tin of tuna, some pasta and a pasta sauce. Fun! The next day we just wandered about a bit exploring the local area and went for dinner at a restaurant, which may be called Duck and Duck, which had the Korean table barbecue (there seems to be some kind of importance attached to ducks in Korean restaurants. Almost all of the restaurants we've been to have 2 ducks in their window, or on the signs... A quick google search has revealed this - 'Traditional Korean Weddings always include a pair of Korean Wedding Ducks to represent a peaceful marriage with many children and no separations. Mandarin Ducks mate for life, and are revered by the Korean people as symbols of loyalty and fidelity in a marriage. After the marriage, the Wedding Ducks are placed in the home of the newlyweds where they can be easily seen. If the ducks are facing each other, nose to nose, then the marriage is happy. If the ducks are facing away from each other, tail to tail, then the couple is fighting. If a Korean couple is fighting, then one of them will often point to the Wedding Ducks, reminding them both of their peaceful Wedding, and they will stop fighting.' Wow! Not sure what this has to do with restaurants though). We walked into the restaurant and were greeted by all of the very excitable staff. We sat at our table and were given a menu which sadly had no pictures or english writing, but luckily the really helpful waiter quickly realised we were lacking in the Korean language department, and brought out three dishes for us to choose from. We picked one and were soon given a large dish with meat and veg all covered in sauce, along with a bowl of cold bean sprout soup, some kimchi, pickled radish, a small bowl of peeled garlic cloves, some large sesame leaves plus some other bits and pieces. The idea is to cook the meat up yourself, then make little wraps out of everything. Luckily, we already knew this, as we would've been totally baffled! Anyway, the food was really good and really cheap so we left very happy.

The next day we were at work. Jason picked us up and drove us to an Italian restaurant for lunch. His cousin Liam also works at the school and joined us for lunch, so we had a long chat and loads of tasty food, although it did seem a bit strange to be eating Italian food. Turns out we were quite lucky anyway, one of the girls at the school was apparently taken to McDonalds on her first day! We were given a quick tour of the school, introduced to the other teachers and spent a couple of hours sitting in on lessons. Luckily we didn't have to stay for a full day, as we were both still feeling quite jetlagged. Over the next week we gradually went from observing lessons to taking some over. We are now mostly teaching on our own, just being observed every now and again. It's quite fun, the kids are mostly very well behaved and the day passes very fast.

But talking about work is yawnsome. At the next weekend we were shown the way to downtown Gwangju and wandered around the streets looking at all the dressed up Koreans and saw our first examples of a Korean couple dressed in matching clothes - quite a common sight! Weird. We sat in Starbucks for a while people watching and chatting with Jasmin, Liz and Jocelyn, then met up with Sophie, Freya and Mel to go for some food and drinking fun. We wound up at Mike and Dave's Speakeasy, basically a bar started by Canadians for foreign teachers. There was a live band playing a mix of covers and originals which was pretty cool, plus a dj playing all kinds of different western music. We ended up staying until about 3am meeting various other people from all over the place and dancing like fools. Was very very fun. See the drunken looking pics in our album for evidence! I woke up the next day with a hugely swollen elbow, and assumed I must've fallen over and bashed it at some point. But despite the swelling going down quite quickly at first, it's swollen back up this weekend so we're wondering if maybe it's a weird infected bite or something. Hopefully I'm not going to have to have it amputated or anything, that'd be inconvenient. I like having two arms.

Ok, this post is getting long and I want to do other things now. Basically the first 2 weeks of our lives in Korea have been great and filled with copious amounts of good food and fun times. Hopefully this shall continue! Bye!

Mount Mudeung

2008-09-28T12:23:00.004+01:00

We had a really nice day today. We got ourselves up and organised and walked the two minutes down the road to the bus stop. Bus 54 is the only bus that we know how to get (we can't read any of the bus stop signs or timetables) as it's the one that goes to downtown Gwangju. One of the teachers at our school told us that she had heard a vague rumour that if you stayed on the bus the whole way, it went to Mt Mudeung. We decided to give it a go and about forty minutes later we were getting off and joining the other Gwangjuites, dressed in their full hiking gear, and heading towards the mountain.

All along the road there were stalls selling hiking gear and picnics consisting mostly of rice and kimchi. At the foot of the mountain we found a big Buddhist temple called Jeungsimsa. You can check out the photos to see how beautiful it is. There weren't many other people around other than a couple of hikers praying in front of the golden Buddha and a monk playing with a stray dog. Tucked away in a corner was a massive bell with a very satisfying ring. When we left the temple there was a guitarist playing on a little stage outside, who surreally started playing Rivers of Babylon and Take Me Home Country Roads. There were also volunteers selling food, so we sat down at a little table and had noodles and Korean pancake (not very easy to eat with chopsticks), served with the mandatory side dish of kimchi.

After lunch we picked a trail at random and hiked up beside a little stream, having to stop to occasionally let Koreans past, who seem to take their hiking very seriously indeed. A few people tried to speak to us on the way, fooled into thinking that we could speak Korean by our ability to say "hello". Everyone is very friendly and I love the fact that they seem to get very excited every time we speak to them, or wave to them, or sometimes even when we just look in their direction. One girl gasped as she walked past, we're not sure why but my theory is that she just couldn't believe how hairy Alan's chin is.

The bus ride home was also quite entertaining as a drunk/crazy woman got on and started shouting at people, of course we have no idea what she was saying but it certainly seemed to be causing some offense. This evening we used skype for the first time and called England for free... woo!

Soju and fruit juice

2008-09-26T18:23:00.003+01:00

Ok, quick post! So we've now been teaching for two weeks and it's been all manner of fun and hijinks. But right now I just wanted to talk about tonight. We've been out for dinner with some of the other teachers and had a highly tasty pork spine broth. Mmmmmm yummy. The only downer of the meal is finding bits of artery and spinal cord. But it was otherwise very good. Honest.

Then we were hanging out at Jasmin's (American) apartment with Liz (Canadian), Mel (Canadian), Sophie (Kiwi) and Freya (Canadian). I am now the official man-cot (male mascot, duh) of the mostly female teaching group. Woop. Um, so we drank a whole heap of Soju with various fruit juices. We bought lots of Soju last week, tasted some neat and almost spat it right back out, as it's pretty nasty stuff. But with fruit juice it's hard to even tell it's there so it's very easy to drink. Hence I am now feeling a bit drunk, although it doesn't feel like I've drunk anything. Anyway, we played Cranium and chatted and had heaps of fun.

I like it here.

At some point very soon there'll be a proper update of what we've been up to since we've been here, but right now I'm gonna go try to call my parents before I go to bed. Bye!

Alan

Home sweet home

2008-09-26T01:56:00.003+01:00

Well… where do I begin? Sunny old England is all starting to seem like a distant memory already. Having stalked (Ok, I admit that I was the one who did most of the stalking) numerous other people living in Korea, we were somewhat apprehensive about the size of our apartment. The idea of the two of us shuffling around each other in a small box for a year was not too appealing, so we were very relieved when we opened the door to our third floor apartment (which is actually second floor, by proper English flooring standards) and found that we had two small bedrooms as well as a living area and bathroom. It’s pretty nice, despite being covered floor to ceiling (yes, ceiling) in pink wallpaper! We’ve had a few teething problems; firstly our bed kept collapsing onto the floor in the middle of the night which was a bit of a shock, but Alan seems to have fixed that. Our bathroom also takes a bit of getting used to, as the shower drenches the entire room and if we forget to switch the setting back to washbasin after use, we risk being drenched in water, fully dressed, when trying to wash our hands. A lesson that I have had to learn the hard way (twice!) As for the washing machine, it seems to be very advanced and technical, unfortunately we can’t understand what anything is. I pressed buttons until water came out and the things seem to be clean (just wish I could remember what I did).

We're here! Woop woop hooray!

2008-09-23T02:15:00.002+01:00

So! We finally made it to Korea and have now been here a week and a little bit. But before we tell you about how amazing everything is here and all that gubbins, I'm going to tell you about our flight, as it was not as simple as it may seem to get here! Hold your breath for tales of excitement, wonderment and Korean food children!

Alrighty, so our loving parents (and Katy) drove us both to Heathrow on Saturday 13th, meaning that they got to meet for the first time. Considering it was Heathrow, check-in was pretty quick and speedy. Had some food with the families, said final goodbyes, then went through security to wait for our plane. Which is where it all got difficult. We sat next to the screen waiting for our gate to be announced. We waited. Then we waited some more. Then all the flights departing at the same time as ours got announced so got a bit more excited. So we waited some more. But still nothing! So from then on we waited and worried. Then all the flights departing at the same time as ours started doing the last call things, which made us worry a bit more. Anyway, eventually they called our flight, we boarded and ended up departing an hour late for sunny Frankfurt. The flight was only about an hour and a half, but this meant that by the time we arrived, we were too late for check in for our connecting flight to Incheon. Oh no! But! No need for panics, Lufthansa helpfully rebooked us on to a Korean Air flight instead, leaving 2 hours later. So we spent about an hour trying to figure out where we were supposed to go to re-check in (Frankfurt airport is quite nice really, much better than Heathrow, but they still seem to be building it, which was a bit weird when we had to walk through the bit they were building). But we made it to our flight anyway and it was all smiles and happy things.

So! We got on our flight to Incheon, which was hugely undersold so we had 3 seats to ourselves, and could also steal the free bottles of water off all the seats around us. As it was Korean Air, we also got the little touch screen TV things in the back of all the seats, so I watched Be Kind Rewind, In Bruges, The Bank Job and Iron Man (plus a bit of the Forbidden Kingdom which was so bad I had to turn it off), while completely failing to sleep. Fun! Becky unfortunately seemed to get horribly ill and was feeling all wretched so was trying to sleep most of the way there. Anyway, really the best thing for me was the fact that we got our first korean meals. Not that I really know what we were eating, but it was pretty good anyway! There are photos, so when we post the album have a look. It's exciting. While we were flying I kept opening my little window blind thingy to look out and see if I could see anything below, so got to see Russia and China, which was kind of fun. But not as fun as realising we were getting to Korea. Or landing and realising we were actually on Korean soil at last! Customs and luggage were quick and easy, once we'd figured out where we to go (through the section marked 'Foreigners' obviously), so we soon stepped out into a blazing hot Korean morning. Becky bought our bus tickets to Gwangju, which was made very easy by the fact that the girl in the ticket booth spoke perfect English, and very soon after we were on the bus to our new home. The bus seats were huge! Kind of like business class seats. But without the massive expense. As we'd arrived on Chuseok (Korean thanksgiving - described as the worst time of the year to travel in Korea by Lonely Planet), traffic was pretty bad, so it took nearly 6 hours to get to Gwangju - it's normally about 4 hours. We both tried to stay awake and see a bit of Korea, but fell asleep after about an hour or so. There was a toilet break about half way there, which was our first real 'oh my god everyone's Korean here' experience. Also, we didn't know exactly what the bus driver had said about how long we had to stop so, not wanting to end up stranded in the middle of nowhere, didn't really explore the shops etc. Eventually we made it to Gwangju anyway. Our boss, Jason, came to pick us up and take us to our new apartment, showing us the school on the way. Within a few minutes we were carrying our bags to our new home. But I'll let Becky tell you all about that in her next post.

We're here though, and it's amazing.

Photo post! Containing pictures! In photographic format!

2008-09-07T22:42:00.005+01:00

Ok! So, here are exciting pictures of us outside the embassy with our visas! Yay! Oops I just deleted me. Gah. Um, well, this computer is being annoying so I'm gonna leave me out of it. Becky thinks her face is some kind of pictorial definition of relief meeting joy in this picture, which is understandable if you've read our updating post and/or are aware of 'The Saga of the Visas of Alan and Becky' (as I would like it be known from now on).

Also, here is a picture of our actual visas as the other pic isn't too clear. And finally the flight details for our um... flights. We're really going! Woop woop!

2008-09-04T22:45:00.003+01:00

Hello, Becky here.

Bravo on the blog updating dearest Alan. Summarising the tiresome experiences of the last couple of months must have been almost as painful as living them. However, I feel that I need to add a few words. Our return to London was marvelous not only because Alan got to see Greig (although I'm sure that Greig is marvelous, and I'm not just saying that because I know that he reads our blog), but also because we got to spend the night sleeping with Cina and Hoolie which was lovely. On top of that, the next day we had a nice lunch with Lizzy and said emotional goodbyes (only to see her again the very next day in Birmingham).

I would also like to add that after a little talk with me and my bro, Alan has realised that reading The Long Goodbye, whilst saying painfully drawn-out goodbyes is actually not ironic at all, but in fact rather apt.

An update blog! Featuring elephants.

2008-09-04T17:45:00.004+01:00

Okay! So, it's been a while since there was any updating done. And all manner of thrilling wonderment has occurred. So I'm now going to tell you about it. In blog-ular format.

Right. Um, so... what was the last thing we posted about? Not the music thing, that was pointless. Oh, the apostilling. And kimchi. Or gimchi as it is sometimes known. Ok, well since then we have sent all our documents off to Korea to be approved by the Embassy, which took a week-ish. At which point they told us my degree certificate had to be in a sealed envelope (i.e. in an envelope with the uni seal on it, not an envelope that had been sealed. OBVIOUSLY we sealed the envelope before we sent it, or everything would've fallen out. duh). So I had to rush off and get another copy sealed and resend it. Then, about 10 days later we got our visa application numbers back from our employer, so rushed off to London as quick as our tiny legs would carry us so the Korean Embassy could put pretty stamps in our passports. We were under the impression this would be done in a day, then we'd go straight to some kind of internet-enabled portal and advise Jason he could book us some shiny tickets on one of those winged vehicles. Sadly, the not-that-friendly chap in the Korean Embassy stamped all over our hopes and dreams by declaring that we'd be able to collect our passports in 5 working days. not counting that day. Thanks to the stupid bank holiday this meant we had to go back the following Friday. By which time Jason had gone away for a few days so couldn't book the aforementioned shiny tickets. Booooo! On the plus side, it meant I got to see my friend Greig, which was fun. And we got to go back to Birmingham in order to celebrate the quarter century of Nicky, which was good also.

Anyhoo, Jason has now returned from his... wherever it was he went and booked us flights as of about 3 hours ago! Woop and indeed hooray! Just when we were in the middle of performing an elaborate celebratory song and dance (with a chorus line, dancing elephants and 3 part harmony) Becky burst the brief bubble of joy by noticing that although the flight is booked for Saturday, it is actually booked for Saturday 13th, meaning another 10 days in England! Noooooo! This does mean I get to see my parents again but... my god. I am poor. I haven't been paid since 23rd July! I need to get out there if only to have something to do! More importantly, the flight seems to have been booked in the name of Rebecca Bullard. Not mine obviously. That'd be a serious error. No. It should read Rebecca Brooke Bullard. This is bad. Becky has spent ages and ages on the phone trying to get this sorted, but it seems Jason will have to cancel the ticket and rebook with the correct name. Damn and indeed blast. So we have to wait until he wakes up and sorts it out before we continue our celebratory dance.

So. In relatively brief detail, that brings you (the reader) up to date in the life of us. And if anyone wants to come visit me in exciting thrilling sunny Bourne over the next week-ish, that'd be just swell.

Right now, I'm going to go finish reading The Long Goodbye. Actually, it never occurred to me when I started reading it, but that's kind of ironic. I mean, I started saying my goodbyes about... oooh 7 weeks ago now. That's a pretty long goodbye. Well, technically it's not, I haven't been saying goodbye that entire time. But y'know... you see what I mean. Shut up.

nothing important to say

2008-07-17T21:14:00.003+01:00

Just switched our blog design a little bit because our previous layout was a bit rubbish. Now it's much better, but we still need to figure out how to do all the little things. Like get rid of the weird picture thing in the blog header up there. What the hell is it anyway? Hm. Anyway. Oh and also something about layout of the posts, cos in my previous post something weird happened with the pictures and they look stupid.

On a side note, Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip are a bit rubbish, and I'm now seriously doubting whether I can live with Becky for a whole year if she has them on her iTunes thing. I may be able to get over it, as she has announced that she will be doing all the cleaning of our apartment, making my life a lot easier. Also, while she's cleaning, I can be skipping the occasional slightly dubious songs on iTunes. I mean, there's things like Matt Costa, Bob Dylan, Elliott Smith etc, so that makes up for the Ronan Keating album... ick.

getting things done

2008-07-15T22:00:00.003+01:00

Ok, so firstly I want to clarify, the domestic violence Becky mentioned in her last post was her hitting me. I am a calm and peaceful boyfriend.

Anyway. We went back to London on Sunday, to sort our apostilles. What's an apostille I hear you ask? It's when you pay a faceless bureaucrat an awful lot of money to pretend he's done some work. And all he does is get a minion to stick a photocopied sheet onto the back of your police check. Hohum. But if thats what it takes to get to Korea... So, we drove (Becky drove) to London and stayed with Becky's uncle and family, which was cool. Then Becky made me get up early to head to the Foreign Office legalisation department near Trafalgar Square. Which, despite my whinging, was a very good idea, as it took a good couple of hours to sort out the aforementioned paper pushing, and probably would've taken much longer if we'd got there much later. We did get semi-lost, not helped by the 'helpful' chap who directed us in completely the wrong direction before demanding money from us. To lying beggar man - I'm glad I didn't pay you for your directions, you're rubbish.

Uh, so yes. Once we'd got the seal of approval on our police checks (I don't mean to go on about this stuff, but I do find it very annoying that we had to pay for a police check when we've never committed - or at least never been caught - a crime, then to have to pay further to get it officially recognised. What did we pay for in the first place? Can't the police get the money they need by fining people for dropping litter or something?) it meant we could finally send off all our documents to Korea. This includes degree certificates, passport photos, signed contracts, the police checks and a self certificated health form ('Do you have, or have you ever had Aids or HIV?' um... yes, yes, I had Aids but now I'm all better...). So hopefully that means all we have to do now is do an interview at the Korean Embassy and we're all set! Exciting. And scary.

We then went for a little wander about in London, accidentally ending up back at the little Korean shop that scared us so much last time. This time we were more brave and decided to buy some kimchi to try. We were nearly put off when we saw the strange snacks on sale... But we stuck to our guns and found a jar of kimchi in the fridge. More of that later.

On the drive home we had 2 life threatening experiences - firstly Becky was so sleepy she thought she was gonna fall asleep at the wheel until we managed to find some services and get some coke and something for me to read to her to keep us both awake. Secondly, and frankly more scary, we nearly ran out of fuel while driving through Nechells past Stab City and other such friendly areas. Car doors locked. Luckily we're still alive. Yay!

Today we decided to try the kimchi. It's not as vile tasting as people have suggested, luckily. But it was very hot. I think I may have enjoyed it slightly more than Becky did...

finally a job!

2008-07-15T21:25:00.002+01:00

Oh dear, I think this blog is leading to domestic violence...

Right, um. There have been many many changes since we last wrote. We decided not to go for the Jeonju job in the end because the hours of work kept changing and we were worried that we might end up working very different hours from each other. It was an extremely difficult, one day we were saying "let's go for it" and the next "let's just say no" and we went on like this for quite a while before being forced into making a decision.

I have to admit that after that I went into extreme panic mode and started emailing about 20 jobs and recruiters a day leading to much confusion on Alan's (and even my) part, as we never really knew who we were talking to and which job they were offering us. I realised that things had got a bit out of control when I answered the phone "Hi Kim" to Sam, our recruiter. It also didn't help that I had already accidentally emailed him a message meant for Alan, wishing that I was still in bed with him, a few days earlier (come to think of it, maybe that's why he was still keen to work with us).

We answered more and more bizarre questions; do we do drugs? Do we have aids? Why aren't we married? "never", "of course not", "very soon" (cough cough). We had just about reached a point when we couldn't face another interview at 7.30 am with a person we couldn't understand, who wished that we were American, when we heard from Jason. The job seemed good (3-9, Gwangju, couple apartment) and after one email he called us for an interview and we decided to take it straight away... phew! Everything seems pretty much perfect (I'll be getting paid a bit more than Alan which is fine by me) and although we're really sad not to be going through Dan, our original recruiter, we are really really excited about Gwangju!

Ooh and the school is called "You and I", which I like.

Becky's first entry

2008-06-10T21:42:00.008+01:00

I just wanted to write a quick post because things are starting to get quite exciting. We woke up early this morning to have another "interview" with the school in Jeonju. This time Alan got to talk, in fact he got to talk to about five people. One of them made him guess her accent... um, Korean? (nope, Australian apparently). Alan's convinced (maybe rightly) that relieved at the fact that they were getting a chance to speak to the man, they offered us the job! Hooray! and seemed to expect an immediate answer. However Alan did tell them that he should probably discuss it with me first. Thanks "Alan you are a very nice man"

So, fingers crossed, Jeonju it is.

On a slightly different note; me and Alan have been doing lots of research and thought it might be nice to experience something rather than just reading about it. So when we went to London last week we decided to visit a Korean shop. The idea was to buy some Korean food (particularly Kimchi) and prepare our pallets, however things didn't really go as planned. The shop was bright and colourful and completely overwhelming! There were some tasty looking things, including green tea cheesecake, but we couldn't understand any of the packaging, so unsure of what was raw, cooked or edible, we left empty handed and slightly dazed.

Alan's First Blog.

2008-06-08T22:42:00.003+01:00

Ok! So this is blogging. I'm blogging. On my blog. Our blog. Sorry Becky.
Right, so I guess the first blog should be explaining where we are now and why we don't know what's going on really. We've been registered with an independent Canadian recruitment agency run by a nice man called Dan for a few months now. He worked in Korea teaching English for a while so we're hoping he'll be able to find us something we'll like. So far we've had 3 interviews for 3 different schools. Well, I say we, but really Becky's had three, I've had one. Becky answered the phone on our first and third interviews and the interviewers (if they can be so-called) didn't want to speak to me! I'm hoping this is because they've already decided they want me to go, but they need to make sure Becky is up to the task. She's not.
Anyway, so far the jobs we've been offered have been with start dates in July or the start of August, which is a bit early for us. Also we want a big apartment so we can have lots of guests. We don't want to live in Seoul, but aren't too bothered where else we go. Looks quite likely we'll be going to Jeonju at the moment, but this may change!
Right. I'm going to bed now as we may have a 7.30am interview with Sean, the Jeonju school chappy. Fun!

Alan