Did you know...

... that in Korea, because of the smaller amount of snow, whenever a kid draws a snowman, there's only 2 balls of snow instead of three?

... that in Korea, presumably because the language is traditionally read vertically in columns reading from right to left (like Chinese), the "play" button on VCRs and tape players (and probably DVD players) is a triangle that points left instead of right, like in North America/Europe/Australia? (Psst... any family members remember my random question about the possibility of Hebrew VCRs doing this exact same thing? Not so crazy now, am I?)

... that in Korea, there are no street names or signs (well, there are, but they've only been around for the past couple years, and no-one uses them), and when you take a taxi, you have to give directions using landmarks instead of addresses? (but when ordering pizza, you give your mailing address, and they find you using that)

... that the British never actually had a chance to make Alaska part of Canada, but that the Russians sold it in 1867 because the British were enemies and the Russians would rather have sold it for 2 cents/acre (which they did) rather than have it captured by the British?

... that "are" is the only monosyllabic word in the English language (to he extent of my knowledge) to which you can add only one letter and have it become trisyllabic?

... that, if you have the appropriate attitude, "dance like nobody's watching" can be the exact same as "dance like everybody's watching"?

So a few weeks ago we went to Busan for my birthday trip...

...and this is finally the post telling/showing you all about it.

This will be a fairly lengthy post with lots of pictures, partly to make up for the last of posting activity over the last little while, but mostly cause it was an awesome trip with lots of cool things to see.

So we traveled on the KTX, Korea's bullet train. It's only been around a few years and it seems that most Koreans consider it vastly and prohibitively expensive, but then again they only pay 6000won to travel on a luxuy bus for 2 hours to get to Seoul from Cheongju, so what do they know about expensive travel? We decided that it'd be fun to go first class for our trip down to Busan, and then we'd slum it in coach for the return journey. So, for people planning on a trip to Korea and are looking to budget, a 2 hour ride on a train that averages about 285km/h in first class with free beverages and little snacks came to a grand total of 33,000 won each. Thoroughly ridiculous. A no-frills crappy Greyhound ride from Peterborough to Ottawa costs more than that.

In addition to the overal spiffiness of our particular train, I've always loved travelling by train. It just seems so much more comfortable than by bus, and generally the scenery is better. If you haven't had the pleasure, I highly recommend it. We only really got a couple pictures from the train though, and here's one. It shows a popular method of farming here, which involved inexplicably covering crops in huge greenhouses, almost as if they wanted to protect their harvest from the elements or something. Weird, eh?



Anyway, getting off the train and out of the station, this is the first view you get of the city of Busan (whose municipal bird is none other than the SEAGULL):



Pretty nice place, all around. It's the second-largest city in Korea, and one of the largest ports in Asia. Like Seoul, it's got a fairly large foreigner population. Unlike Seoul, most of the foreigners are either Russian (there's a steady stream of ferries connecting Busan with Vladivostok) or Filipino. Anyway, enough of that.

South Korea is incredibly lumpy, so it seems that most of the larger cities are built with super steep streets to accomodate for all the bumps inconveniently placed right where they wanted to build a city.

The back alleys are nice though:


Granted, this was a *nice* back alley, but still.

We wandered around for a bit and then decided that we'd better find a hotel/motel soon so we didn't have to lug all our stuff around with us all day. On the way we saw the first of several noteworthy signs of the weekend. This one was noteworthy because it brought into sharp focus the reality of living in a place where this sign could either be for a pet shop or a restaurant:



I'm not going to tell you which it is, you're just going to have to use your imagination. So the quest for the place to stay continued. We came across this place:



but we figured that even if it wasn't booked solid for the night, it was probably a bit out of our price range. The lantern-esque chandalier in the lobby was probably a good indication of that:



It did have a nice little path that led up to a courtyard-type place with a decent view, so we decided it was a good enough spot for a photo-op.



The place we eventually found was actually quite nice. It was still off a sketchy little back alley, but had a nice little aquarium in the lobby and the rooms were a decent size and nice and clean. All in all, a much better room than the one we got in Seoul, and this one only cost us 25,000 won instead of 30,000. It also had a round bed, which neither of us had ever scene before in real life.



I'm not sure why a round bed is unique enough to actually buy, but there you have it. The sheets were round, but apparently the round comforter would have been pushing the budget, so they went standardized with that particular accessory.

After dropping some stuff off in the room (nothing of particular monetary value, mind you, but Korea's still a really safe place to be, so we weren't terribly worried, and we were planning on taking the camera with us anyway), we decided to head down to Haeundae Beach, which is the largest and most famous in Korea. Apparently in August it's wall-to-ocean people, but this time of year it was not surprisingly fairly sparsely populated. It helped that due to the 40 minute subway ride to get there we didn't actually see it until after dark. The adventure started just after getting off the subway, however.

The weekend that we picked to go was the weekend where Busan was gearing up for the APEC summit, which we had seen posters for, and we saw the occasional person with an APEC name tag walking around downtown, but thus far hadn't actually popped up as being terribly relevant to us.

That was before we walked up the stairs to leave the subway station and find the entrance being supervised by no fewer than 15 fully equipped riot police. Shields, assault rifles, helmets, and half of them had katanas. Yeah.

And there were more. Oh so many more:


Three pairs of cops on each side of the street on every block to be precise. They were positioned so they were all facing the same way (the way we happened to be walking, coincidentally enough), and the guy in front was holding the shield, and the guy in back was the one with the katana. I think you can kinda make out the handle in the above picture. A little while before we took this picture we walked past a fenced in lot that they were apparently using as a command centre of sorts, and there were about 30-40 of them in there, fully equipped like the rest of them, and a bunch of vans and stuff too. We found one that spoke a little English and he told us that they were just there to provide extra security for APEC. Spooky.

In between the blocks of riot police and the beach itself, we saw the second noteworthy sign of the weekend. This one exemplifies the importance on restaurants only serving pork that used to be dead sexy.



We didn't eat there.

The beach was nice. The entire area along the beach before the sand starts is lined with literally hundreds of little fresh seafood stand-type "restaurants". This phenomenon is fairly common here, and we'll have to get some pictures of it to show you, but people basically run temporary tent restaurants, complete with tables and chairs and everything, out of the back of trucks or carts. There were also guys on the beach fishing with enormous fishing poles that they stuck into tubes sticking out of the sand and just waited while the line got washed out far enough to catch stuff. It was a bit too dark to get any good pictures, but we'll be going back some time, so we'll show you what it looks like then.

At the beach, there's also the largest aquarium in Korea, so we decided to go check it out. A lot of the stuff was quite similar to the one we visited in Seoul, so we won't post too many pictures, but there were more big sea creatures at this one. A bunch more sharks and huge croupers and stuff like that. They also had a two-story tank with a living reef inside where we saw someone with a pretty cushy job.



She just kinda floated there, waving occasionally to the people walking past or sitting and listening to the presentations. Pretty sweet deal actually.

They also had an aquatic petting zoo,


and a vortex that shrinks your head


The end of the path through the aquarium leads, in traditional fashion, to the gift shop, and then out into a little food court area, where we encountered the third noteworthy sign of the weekend. This one's baffling. I apologize for the fuzziness, I'm not sure why the camera didn't focus properly, but you get the idea nonetheless.



MMMMM!!! Baskin Queen... uh.... Dairy Robbins..... uh...... help?

It's actually just a Dairy Queen. I have no idea why they put this sign up. None whatsoever. But then again, there's a store called Roots Canada in downtown Cheongju that sells cheap knockoff no-name shoes and crappy handbags, so I guess I shouldn't expect any different.

We ate dinner at an awesome kalbi (Korean BBQ pork rib meat type place) restaurant, where we got our own private room for some reason. Since we had our camera with us, and we've been meaning to for a while, we thought we'd get a shot to show you a typical Korean dinner layout. The only thing you actually pay for on this table (in addition to the beer) is the meat currently sizzling away on the litle grill. All the side dishes are completely free for as many more helpings as you can eat.



So tasty.

And that concludes Saturday.

On Sunday we headed over to large park in the northern part of the city, where you can take a cable car to the top of one of the mountains for a spectacular view of the city. I have the following panorama in larger format, but I wanted to show you this cause even at this size you get an idea what the view is like.



The city continues to wrap around to the right of the picture, but that was as far as the mountain would let me see.

This is where I was standing to take those shots:



It was neat. At the bottom of the cable car there a bunch of attractions to the park, including a couple little carnival-type rides, a marine history museum, and a little shop where a couple of old guys made these awesome Korean traditional crafts.



Nice guys. They didn't speak a word of English, but they were for some reason really excited that we were from Canada, which is always nice to hear.

Anyway, so that was our wonderful weekend in Busan. I'll conclude this post with a picture of the train station on Sunday night just as we were going to get on the last train, which was completely full except for two first-class seats, which we happily occupied. G'night.

Yeah yeah, we're behind, posting-wise

Anyway, so my birthday was actually about 10 days ago, as most of you were apparently aware (thanks for the good words, by the way!), but this is the post about what happened around here for the "occasion".

For starters, let me try to explain the screwed up way that Koreans count your age. Despite the fact that my "international" age is now 24, here in Korea, I'm actually 26. This is quite complicated, and I'm not even really sure that I understand it fully, so if you don't quite get it, don't worry about it. The thing is that traditionally, Koreans only concerned themselves with their birth year, forgetting about the month completely, so basically when the new year (according to the lunar calendar, which the also traditionally use) rolls around, everyone becomes one year older, regardless of how long they've actually been alive at this point. The fact now, however, is that birthdays *do* matter, as in the specific day, so you also really ought to get one year older on that day as well, and you do. Additionally, there's a combination of counting the time spent in the womb as part of your age, and giving your age as in "I'm in my ___th year" rather than "I've been alive for ___ years." So basically, if I had lived my whole life in Korea, I would likely be something like 417 years old right now, and it'd be awesome.

However, being as I've only been here for a few months now, I only actually gained two years, cause I was born in November, so when I was born, I was one, and then two months later, on the lunar new year, I turned two, but then I guess we now still count by my birthday, so I don't have to wait until the next lunar new year to turn 26, or maybe I do, but either way I'm at least one year older here than I would be in Canada, so it turns out I'm *WAY* further in the future than the mere 14 hours that I thought I was.

Suckers.

Anyway, so for my birthday, which fell on a Thursday, we had a little party in the teacher's office at school, where all the other teachers present sung happy birthday to me, and I got cake (which we all shared obviously) and a little wooden wall hanging thing:



I also got a couple Korean flags, one a bit bigger than the other. I'm not sure what we'll do with the second one, but the bigger one's currently up on the wall in the second room:



Notice the four trigrams aren't the same, as I had always thought they were, never having had the opportunity or reason to closely examine the Korean flag. The three unbroken lines in the top left (top right in this orientation) represents Heaven, and the three broken lines in the bottom right (bottom left here). In the top right (bottom right here) the two broken lines separated by an unbroken line represents water, and the two unbroken lines separated by the broken one in the bottom left (top left here) represents fire. Neat huh? Go impress your friends.

A neat little thing that I got from another staff member (one of the Korean middle-school English teachers) was this little keychain, which is actually kinda cute:



Think she's calling me fat?
Don't answer that.

The last staff-related birthday thing we did was the dinner that the elementary school teachers (minus 2) went out for. In Korea, the person whose birthday it is pays for everyone else, which is kinda neat, and thanks to the cheap food in Korea, not that expensive. I think for 8 of us to eat and have pop the total came to about 75,000. That was on Wednesday of this past week.

Anyway, the best bits of the birthday were at home. Becca had gotten a cake for us:

which was delicious in every way. In our time here we've learned how to eat cake with chopsticks, which took a bit of work, let me tell you.

The cake was all well and good, but the absolute best part was the thing she got me for a present. And here it is:





It's called an Ess-Board and it's freakin' rad. It's like a next-gen skateboard. The main difference, apart from the looks and the noticeably missing 3rd and 4th wheels, is that with this, you don't need to push off the ground to keep it moving. You don't even really need to do it to start it moving, but it's easier if you do. The middle of it rotates, so as you're going down the street, you just kinda carve like you would on a snowboard and that pushed you along. It's really quite neat, and it actually feels a lot like snowboarding. I'm getting the hang of it quite well, and am almost able to actually take it places that I'm going apart from the corner store at the end of the street, which I can get to no problem. It's awesome cause it's also small enough that I'll be able to ship it home without too much trouble when we're done here, which is helpful.

All in all -- super-rad birthday. The other (incredibly amazing) bit to it was the trip we took to Pusan last weekend, which we will post details/pictures of when it's not shortly after 3am.

G'night.

Ice cream sandwiches

So there are other more interesting and relevant posts on the way, with pictures and details and stories galore. There's the one talking about my birthday. There's another talking about our recent trip to Pusan on the South-East coast.

This one, however, will talk about ice cream sandwiches. Or more specifically, the ice cream sandwich that I am eating right at this very moment.

It's delicious.

Not just "run-of-the-mill ice cream sandwich" delicious, mind you, but "holy crap I'm eating what is possibly the greatest single example of dessert/snack-related ingenuity in the history of mankind, and it's got flavour to boot" delicious.

Yeah. That kind.

To give a bit of a snapshot into my background in ice cream sandwiches, we go way back. I've always enjoyed a quality ice cream sandwich, and for that matter have almost always been able to find some good in ice cream sandwiches that are mediocre at best. I do, however, have my share of problems with them.

For starters, I have wussy teeth. I'm man enough to admit it. I can't bite popsicles or chomp on ice cream, and I never have been able to. My teeth just can't handle the cold of it all. Therefore, my experience with ice cream sandwiches has always been akin to an unrequited love scenario. I've always loved the taste, but the experience has left a lot to be desired, since I usually have to wait until they melt a little, at which point when I try to break off pieces (yeah, that's right: I need two hands to eat them) they just kinda smush out the sides making a royal (but tasty) mess. The other thing is that the ice cream melts rather quickly, being exposed to the warmer air on all but two sides, and taking some heat from the warmth of your hands on the two that are slightly more protected. And your hands get cold and messy whilst eating them.

So those are my beefs with ice cream sandwiches.

Then I came to Korea.

Here, in this magical country, they have found solutions to all of my ice cream sandwich-related problems.

Their ice cream sandwiches (or at least the only kind of ice cream sandwich that I've seen) are ice cream completely encased in - get this - waffle.

I *KNOW*! Amazing, isn't it?

The waffle acts as a perfect insulator, so your hands don't get cold, the ice cream doesn't melt, and when it does, it's trapped so it doesn't get everywhere, *and* you can bite it cause the waffle is, as mentioned already, a great insulator so it's not cold at all.

All in all it's a ridiculously pleasant experience, and I wish that you all could try it. Unfortunately, you'll either have to come visit, start an ice cream sandwich factory (at which I expect to be offered a cushy job upon my return to the Western Hemisphere in exchange for giving you the idea) or just content yourself with the imagery conjured up by my adoring post devoted to this remarkable invention.

That's it. Just talking about an ice cream sandwich. I'm finished it, so the moment's fading somewhat, so I'll end here before I run out of steam.

A real post will be on the way soon, I promise. Pictures and everything.

Remember Halloween?

I forgot how much I wanted to talk about Halloween here. Korea does not celebrate Halloween so it is made into a big deal at the Hogwons as an "English" Holiday. Ryan and I were told that we were in charge of creating a Halloween party. Normally they had the children Knock on classroom doors and have a teacher or two jump out at them but since there were fewer staff in on the Halloween party we needed an alternate scare tactic. That being said, Ryan and I dreamed up a maze room filled with bags of gross feeling substances to touch as well as a hand that reached out to grab them half way through and a scare at the end as well. There was haunted music to boot and initially we planed a games room as well as we had more time to fill.

Of course, a few days before Halloween all of the elementary teachers want to be involved in Halloween giving us 8 teachers and 80 minutes with the students rather than 40. There was a miscommunication (is that what not being told means?) about the activities planned as they wanted to proceed with the games room but only had two games to play in them for an hour with the children. They of course had decided to do a snack time but did not inform us.
As Halloween is an English Holiday all of the fame or blame (depending on how the activity goes) tends to rest on the foreigners so we spent an entire night preparing more activities to fill this supposed time gap that was never really there. Regardless, Halloween was a success in that we scared the little kids so badly that some of them couldn't move and stood in one spot screaming rather than running for the door.

We scared them to the point that I felt horrible because they were screaming, but oddly enough, they loved it and wanted to go again. I just don't understand these children.

There'll hopefully be pictures of us in our costumes coming soon, assuming we can find a scanner somewhere.

!-->side note from Ryan: Thanks for all the birthday wishes! According to the Korean method of figuring out age, I'm now 26, so for all you suckers who were just a little ahead of me in the "seniority due to age" department, EAT THAT!

Seriously, they count the time in the womb when they consider your age, and they don't pay attention to month, only year, so basically it boils down to the idea that when I was born I was 1 and then a month and a half later when New Year's rolled around, I turned 2. Neat, eh?

More of what ordinary Korean life looks like

Well I must say that we are getting accustomed to the sights around here! I have taken some pictures of weird and wacky things that I believe that people will enjoy!

Ryan is presently sick and hacking and coughing away in our apartment right now. He went to the doctor and the most interesting thing happened. They prescribed pills for his tonsillitis but they are 6 of them he has to take three times a day - all are packaged so that he tears open the plastic and voila - the right number of pills! Here is a picture.



Also, the doctor who he went to see called us later that night to ensure that he was feeling better and that the medication was working! It's so weird.

Other things that are interesting to note: It is now Korean autumn. The leaves have turned as they do in Canada, perhaps slightly more brilliant but that perception is most likely due to the fact that they have fewer pine trees.




These were taken right beside our apartment.

Also we have the required Mc Donalds shot. This place has normal McDonald food but with Korean alterations. For instance,
They also have thick plastic cups that get recycled (which we determined by playing a game of charades with an employee).



interestingly, however, McDonalds is not nearly as busy as the street vendors.
This is a picture of the little stands they use. The streets are full of them. They normally sell chicken on a stick, weird red sauce with a pasta type log (called dokboki) and even baked sweet potatoes which people eat without butter or salt.





We have had the opportunity to peruse the street market of Cheongju and were able to find several cute pigs that we just had to take a picture of. They were frozen of course and at the time that we took a picture they were using a saw to cut them apart.



The other somewhat bizarre thing about Koreans and foodstuffs is the way that their food courts are set up. They *look* like western food courts, but instead of going and ordering from each individual restaurant, they have a main cashier area, and you pick from a list (divided by individual restaurant) and then you go and collect your food from your establishment of choice when your number's called. To help you decide, they always have a big glass display case featuring wax models of all the dishes that are available. It kinda helps when you still don't know what all the different Korean words are.



Here's another translated sign from an area close by. The interesting thing often with the signs is not that they are necessarily grammatically incorrect, but that they are things that native speakers would never say.



These two pictures are of the same building, the school that we work at. All of the buildings are very high and the Hogwan are a type of no frill education locations that rent out one or two floors of lager apartment complexes. For instance, the second floor of our Hogwan is an orthopedic clinic.




Lastly, here is the path that I roller blade or occasionally if feeling brave, run on.



It runs along the "river" which Canada would classify as more of a stream. It also runs straight into town which is marked by this eccentric walking bridge. It appears skeletal in form but is quite beautiful overall.





that's all folks

So we've been lazy...

Okay, so for starters, I'd like to say that we really do appreciate all of you checking in on our blog as often as you do. It's really nice to know that we're keeping in touch.

You may have noticed that it's been a ridiculously long time since our last post (about two weeks....) and for that we apologize.

I think the reason is that we're getting so used to living here that the little things don't really seem as weird anymore, so it just seems like there's less to talk about. It's also getting closer to the time when we get our next paycheque, so there's not necessarily a whole lot of the last one kicking around, so we haven't been doing any trips or anything. And I have bronchitis right now too. However, we've taken some pictures of our general neighbourhood area to show you folks, and we'll get those up ASAP.

Also, we've been kinda preoccupied lately because we're both working on something for this. Yeah. 50,000 words in 30 days, which works out to just under 1700 words every day for the entire month. So it's been a little hectic in the writing stuff department.

However, that's not really an excuse, so we'll definitely be a little more conscientious about updating more frequently.