Visitors From Another Planet!

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...

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

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

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

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

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

Please Do Not Adjust Your Set

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

Seoul searching

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

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

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

Other Things We've Been Getting Up To

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

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!!

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!!!!