Defending the president

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.