A year ago today I left New Zealand after having been there for a week and in Australia for eight months. I can't believe that was so long ago. I thought my time there was the fastest in my life, but now, having been here for over nine months, it is surreal how fast time goes. I want to go back in time and do it all over again, because these past two years have been absolutely amazing.
Another weekend has come and gone. Spent the entire weekend in Daejeon, which was nice; it feels like we've been on the move these past few weekends so it was great to be able to just relax and hang out with no real plans.
We had a new teacher arrive at our school last week, Tory from Tennessee, so we took her out on Thursday and Friday night to show her around and she seems to be settling in well.
I spent Saturday wandering around and doing some cloth shopping because the weather is warming up here and I am seriously lacking in in-between season clothing. Found a few shirts but nothing special. I can't wait to be home and raid stores like Smart Set and Jacob Connexion where all clothes fit properly and the sleeves don't cut off two inches too short!
Ended up playing poker on Saturday night. The people we play with on Tuesday nights also have a routine Saturday night game and normally we skip it but being that there was nothing special going on anywhere else we decided to feed our addiction . We stayed out until about 4:30 and just as we were getting back to our neighbourhood we ran into Richard and Tory coming home from their night out. Before we had left for the night Trey had seen a bunch of furniture outside of his apartment from a family that had moved, so he convinced Richard and I to help him move it into his place. Two couches, four chairs, and four flights of stairs later we had all the stuff moved in. Then we spent another few hours moving his aparment around and making it look like a real apartment, instead of the typical foreigner's apartment, which usually consists of a bed, a desk and a lot of empty space. As the sun was coming up I managed to get some sleep and missed most of Sunday morning.
In celebration of the Oscars Trey, Tom, Richard and I had planned a day of movie watching so we would know a little about some of the movies that have been nominated. I spent the past week downloading movies so we had all 5 of the best pictures nominations. Unfortunately due to my trust in pirated movies, I didn't check any of them after they had finished downloading, so Blood Diamond was in French, Notes on A Scandal was a terrible copy, and Babel just didn't work. We did watch The Queen, which was fantastic, Little Miss Sunshine, which I hope wins the best picture, and The Departed, which I also enjoyed but fell asleep through because by the time we got to watching it, it was well into the middle of the night.
Tonight we are hoping to catch the Oscars on TV here, we have seen the commercials advertising it, but are unsure of the time although it should be in the evening sometime, so hopefully we can catch some of it.
Hope everyone had a great weekend!
It's not the fact that two of my students drew a picture of me on the board with devil horns yesterday (jokingly of course)....it's the fact that they drew two wrinkle lines on the face.... :(
This past weekend was Lunar New Year and to celebrate it Tom, Richard, Trey and I signed up for an Adventure Korea Tour, which is a tour site organized for foreigners. Departure time was 8am from Seoul on Saturday morning, which meant we had to head up to Seoul on Friday night. We finished work, grabbed our luggage and headed to the train station. We hadn't made plans for where we were going to stay Friday night, our plan of action was to find the closest possible place to where the trip left so we could sleep as late as possible on Saturday morning. We ended up in Hongik area which is where we had spent New Years Eve and we couldn't find a love motel anywhere (which is just a really cheap, seedy hotel that would have sufficed for one night). We decided to go an even cheaper route and checked into a jjimjjabong. It was a really nice one and for seven dollars we got our sleeping wear provided, use of the saunas, hot tubs, use of the gym, dvd rooms, singing rooms, you name it, it was there... we were also provided with a floor mat and a room that was occupied by at least 100 other sleeping (and snoring) Koreans. A few hours later of restless sleep and my alarm was going off and it was time to start our tour.
The first day of the trip was in Pyeongchang, which is the city that is bidding on the 2014 Olympic games and we were at Pheonix Park, which is where the ski events will be held for the Olympics if they happen to win the bid. They won't. Anyhow the skiing was great, the weather was beautiful and there were tons of hills to choose from. After a couple of runs Trey and I were separated from Tom and Richard and we decided to explore some more of the slopes. Now the last time we went skiing was Trey's first time and he was a comical act to watch and was told a few times by ski patrol that he was "very dangerous skiier," but this time it was like he had been doing it his entire life and he managed to show me up after the first few runs down the hill. After going up one ski lift we saw that it was connected to a second lift that went way way up. Trey was up for it, and ever the follower, I tagged along. We reached the top and there were 4 different hill options. Most of them I couldn't see over the peak because they were so steep that had I been closer to the edge I surely would have tumbled down at warp speed. Trey picked one and off he went. The irrational side of my brain said, if Trey can do it, I can do it. So off I went. I wasn't doing too badly at the insanely steep mountain, as I was going as slow as possible from one side to the other. Then I fell. And because the hill was so steep I had a terrible time getting my ski back on and ski patrol tried to help but even they were having problems. What seemed like ages later, I was up and made it down the rest of the hill without killing myself or anybody else. Trey was sitting at the bottom, waiting and laughing, as he had already had a slice of pizza and a smoke in the time it took me to make it down. Soon after that it was time for dinner and we met back up with Tom and Richard. Night skiing was fairly uneventful, Trey and Tom went off to conquer the pro hills and I putzed about on the more relaxing hills.
After skiing we went up to our room, which was in a youth hostel and we were sharing it with four others. Two of them were a nice couple from Ottawa and they spent the night drinking with us and talking. After a bottle of wine and a few beers I was done for and went to sleep.
The next day we were off to another area a few hours away which was supposed to be cottage like and the most beautiful area of Korea. It wasn't that special but it was nice enough. We had a pension room that we shared with the Ottawa couple. There was a bbq dinner of samgyupsal and a bonfire, which they lit by stacking several pieces of wood, dousing it with a can of gasoline, while smoking a cigarette, and then taking a blow torch to it. Miracuously enough, nobody was hurt. After dinner we sat around the fire with the others on the trip, talking and laughing. By then it was getting kind of cold so we went and did noraebang for a few hours, which is the singing room, and then back to the fire around midnight. Finally we ended back in our room around one or so and we sat around talking for a few more hours before falling asleep.
We were supposed to go on a hike the next morning but when the tour guide started pounding on our door at 7:30 we decided to bail; they really should have had the physically enduring stuff before the night of drinking and debauchery. We left the cottage at two in the afternoon and started a long bus ride back to Seoul and then a train ride back to Daejeon.
All in all it was a great weekend, something a little different from the ordinary and a chance to mix with new people. It was a little expensive for what we got out of it but I would do it again. Unfortunately even though it was a three day weekend it still passed by just as fast as any other and now I have to head back to work today. Boo. Oh well, four day weeks are still better than five day ones!
If you've ever doubted that I am true blonde, you will be happy to know that I locked myself out of my apartment for the second time this month. It's a wonder I can dress myself in the mornings....
As soon as I was on my street going to work I realized what I had done..and then two seconds later I bumped into my landlord, but I didn't want to tell him because he already thinks I am an idiot, and I'm pretty sure he heard me get home at 4:30 this morning as well.... so I got to work and dreaded coming home all day, while trying to bribe my friends to go knock on my landlord's door and see if they would open the door for them so they could innocently grab my keys...(I'm such a loser)....when that didn't work I had to swallow my pride and knock on their door tonight...after standing in the entrance way for about 5 minutes, trying to unlock the door with my super powers (turns out I have none), I broke down and knocked.
My landlady gave me that "poor stupid foreigner" look and let me in. About five minutes later she knocked on my door with a bag full of persimmons, and if you remember last time I did it I got a platter full of grapes and apples. At first I thought it was a kind gesture, now I think they just probably figure I am not capable of buying groceries on my own...
Because I blame her for the way I am.
Went skiing again this weekend. This time we went to a place called Muju and the slopes were way better and there were a lot more of them. Friday night we had a low key night because we had to be up early and on the bus to Muju. Our friend Marcel came down from Incheon and spent the night going from pub to pub with us, and then we met Mary in the morning after a not-so-delicious McDonald's breakfast. Originally from our gang of people it was just going to be Tom and I because everybody else had other commitments or ways to spend their hard earned money, but after a few pitchers of beer we managed to convince Richard that he should come with us and give skiing a try, despite his resentment to all things outdoors or involving athletic ability. We had a quick stop at HomePlus to get him proper snow gear and after that we were off.
We arrived around noon and found out the skiing prices were quite expensive, but oh well, we were already there. I got lucky and a Korean man came up to me and asked me if I wanted a discount, I don't know whether it was because I was blond, foreign, or otherwise, but I said sure. He bought the slope and rental pass at his member price and sold it to me for a little more, which worked out well for both of us because I saved about twenty dollars.
Now if you remember my tales from our last ski weekend I was quite horrible and spent most of the day falling down and was quite bitter by the end of the day. Once we were all suited up we got on the first lift and those with more experience tried to give Richard some helpful tips. After we got off the lift (or fell off the lift in Richard's case) we were standing at the top looking down and I was remembering just how bad I was and wondering why I thought it was a good idea to come again. Oh well, too late now. I pushed off and started slowly down the slope. I stopped myself a little ways down to talk to Mary and Marcel and asked him what I was doing wrong to make my skis always cross. He said to lean harder on each leg when I was shifting weight.
I thought to myself, I can do that. And turns out, I could! It was like in that tiny bit of advice anything I had once known about skiing came back to me and for the rest of the day I was able to turn, stop, and move about on skis without problems, so much so that I only fell once the entire day!
Now to get to the title of this post, last time I was skiing I spent most of the time thinking "Oh god I'm gonna die!" "I'm gonna kill myself," ""Watch out for that tree!" and "Oh *&#@!" but this time because I was quite confident in my own ability my mind was free for other thinking and my thoughts went something like this: "These other people might not know how to ski either and crash into me and kill me," "That person is going way too fast," "Snowboarders are dangerous," and other thoughts of how I might be hurt or injured... so thanks mom, all your years of neuroticism towards Beth and I did not go unheard, in fact I think it was your voice in my thoughts I was hearing ;)
Actually for me, the purpose of this weekend was to practice for next weekend because it is Lunar New Years and Tom, Trey, Richard and I are heading off for a weekend trip arranged by a foreigner's travel group where we will be partaking in skiing and all sorts of other wintery activities and I wanted to get the practising out the way so I could enjoy myself more, and now I am really looking forward to it!
And although this is getting incredibly lengthy, if you've read this far you will probably stick around for another paragraph, the weirdest thing I saw this weekend was when Marcel pulled out a kiwi from his pocket to eat. He just bit into it like an apple, skin and all! I kinda made a face and he said that he had read that all the nutrience of a kiwi was in the skin and just on the edge of the skin, as with most fruit, so he figured he should eat it, and said it didn't taste that bad. He offered me a bite but I declined imagining the texture of that furry fruit to be quite awful, but the first thing I did when I got home yesterday was went out and bought kiwi, washed one and bit into it. And it didn't taste any different than when you peel it, plus I felt healthier (though that is probably in my head), and now I think about all that time and energy wasted peeling kiwi in the past; from now on, I eat my kiwis with skin.
And just as a side note to anyone who has ever bought me a present and had me return it immediately...isn't it frustrating to know that things like maple syrup and a falsified plaque can bring me such gift-satisfaction?
ing to Marta's to turn ourselves into fairies, as was the theme for the party. Unfortunately most of us could not find fairy wings so we just looked like we were dressed up, and didn't really resemble fairies at all. I had fun making my outfit though, I took a plain black shirt and super-glued poker chips up the front and then glued pocket aces on my shirt. I also had a pair of kings sticking out of one of my pockets, and Queen/seven in my back pocket because that's my favourite hand for some odd reason. I actually didn't mind dressing up for it, normally I hate that sort of thing, the only thing I was dreading was possibly bumping into one of the guys from the poker league and having them laugh at me. As it turned out, later in the night I did bump into one of the guys, Michael, but he thought it was great and didn't make too much fun, though I will probably hear more about it on Tuesday...
n some sort of costume. Simone was wearing a bridal veil and a few Koreans actually asked her if it had been her wedding that day, which makes me wonder where exactly they thought her groom was. In our attempt to make the bachelorette more wild than the bachelor party that was going on in another area of Daejeon, we were all in our best party form and taking advantage of the All You Can Drink for $10. Somehow one of the girls started talking to a foreigner who I've seen around before, and it turned out that in one of his past jobs he had been a stripper. So he gave Rebecca a little bit of a show, nothing too crazy, it is Korea after all, but he got her sitting on a chair and had his shirt off and if people hadn't noticed the group of us before, they sure did after that. After that things settled down a little and we just drank and danced the night away.I realize I've been lacking on the posting front lately, and when I do I'm sure it is somewhat boring as it is routinely about the same kind of stuff. So I am going to do a small recap of a few things that are going on with me, that I never really mention.
I've been here eight and a half months now, can you believe it??? Where does time go?? It is crazy to think I've got just over 3 more to go. They are already talking about my departure at work and making replacement plans which is weird to think that soon I will just be a foreigner to them that has passed through. I've actually been considering doing a second year lately. Nothing is definite yet, it will be one of those things that I probably won't know for sure until I am just about to leave. I have known people who swear they will be back and change their minds, and many who swear they are only here for 1 year and end up being here 2 or 3, so right now it is just a thought... if I come back I've got a few decisions to make, if I want to be in a hagwon or a university; it is amazing how much bargaining power one year's experience gives me. Should I choose to come back I will only teach at a school that requires me to teach 5 hours or less a day, I refuse to teach kindergartens, and of course, I want more money. Can you imagine me giving those demands to somebody in Canada after working for one year?? The upside to university teaching is that the hours are minimal and I get a ridiculous amount of vacation time, but the pay is a little less, though I can make extra in private tutoring, and I also think it might look better on my resume when I am back to looking for a "real" job.
I would also like to do more travelling and I don't have any vacation time left here so it would be nice to have a few more opportunities next year to check out more of the Asian continent. I might take a short trip in May at the end of my contract and then fly back here and then have them fly me home after that. For those of you who know Lisa, she is getting married on July 20th and I'm the maid of honour, so I need to be home in good time to plan a crazy bachelorette and make her rethink her choice of a bridal party.
Hmmmm....what else??? Oh, for those of you who know Dave, he is coming to Korea to teach in a few weeks, as soon as he gets his visa sorted. He will actually be teaching at a school right across from me and living in my neighbourhood, so it will be good fun to have a familiar face here and introduce him into the Korean lifestyle. It's a little bizarre to think about having someone from home here, almost like two worlds colliding...he has seen the pictures though and hears most of the stories so hopefully I've prepared him well for what to expect and he doesn't think we are all too crazy!
Alright well that is all I've got to say for now. And as a side note, has anybody received their Thai post cards??? I sent out about a dozen while I was in Thailand and haven't heard of anyone getting one... I have a feeling they are sitting at the bottom of the atlantic ocean or something...
