Camping It Up

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

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!

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!