The Paulsens in Korea

Goodbye! Hello!

2007-09-05T17:13:00.000-04:00

So to all none of you who read this anymore, we've left Korea, finished up our SE Asia adventure (which included a week in Taiwan, a week in Vietnam, a week in Laos, another week in Vietnam, a month living/working in Cambodia and a final week in Thailand) and have now officially moved in to our new apartment downtown Toronto.

It's a great location, so the smallness and high price of the place are compensated for, somewhat.

It was an amazing experience being in Korea, and Asia in general, and I can't imagine that we won't be back to at least a few of those countries in the years to come, but for right now it's time to reconcile ourselves to the fact that for the next two years we'll be broke in living in Canada.

Who knows where we'll end up after this round of schooling, hopefully somewhere interesting. We'll keep you posted somehow.

***end transmission***

A Christmas party, only a few weeks late!

2007-01-07T04:19:00.000-05:00

It finally happened! We (Lorie, Marco, Josh and myself) have been working on getting together a Christmas party that was originally going to be for 40 students, was pared down to twenty, was changed to January 20th, was changed to 40 students on the 7th and ended up on that date with 25 plus. Oddly enough, I was the organized one that had to be flexible and accommodating (it normally works the other way around). Regardless, we had our party, gave gifts and had a fantastic time! It was unfortunate that we learned about the student number change when we arrived, but that is just your standard Korean-English confusion. It happens so regularly that I should expect all information that I receive to be in a continuously transient state.

I was shocked at the reaction that the kids had to the gingerbread men. They were made and ready to go with the candy and icing to be put on and the kids were so focused on the activity that they were virtually silent. They were just completely absorbed by the placement of gum drop buttons. It was as if they were all mini Piccassos creating self portraits in gingerbread form. I will never underestimate the power of gingerbread again. It was a great contrast to our loud energized children doing the games - one set of kids silently focused and the other batch laughing and cheering loudly. We switched groups and the children just morphed into complete opposites depending on the task at hand. It was fascinating to watch.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of what went on. A big thank you to those who put time and energy into it!

Lorie:

Marco:

Josh:

Sense of scale:

Duck Duck Goose MADNESS!!

The Gingerbread Factory:

Waitin' for presents:

Finally finding a present wrapped specifically in a Spider Man sock: priceless

Well we're big rock singers we've got golden fingers and we're loved everywhere we go...

2006-11-10T23:29:00.000-05:00

Oh Dr.Hook, how great a debt everyone owes to you... *sniff*

Anyway, I realize that it's been quite some time between updates of late, so I thought I'd take a quick minute here to fill you in on some goings-on and some comings-up. I also realize that the last few posts have been exclusively about band stuff, but that's kinda what's new and going on.

We did go to the Chungju World Martial Arts Festival a while ago (like at the beginning of October...tee hee) and that was pretty rad. We saw demos from Brazil, Russia, France, New Zealand, South Africa, Kenya, Korea and Romania and for the most part they were quite good. All in all, good times, good times.

We've also been doing much more band stuff since the CD's come out, and we're stepping it up even more. We played a show at Pearl Jam on the 28th of October as a CD Release/Halloween party and had a blast. Here are some shots from that:

The following week we played a show at a big park downtown for a college's graduation party. It was actually the best stage set-up we've ever played with:

So much fun.

Anyway, from here, we've got 2 more shows up in Itaewon (in Seoul) and another one down south in a city called Gwangju, plus another one in the works for a different part of Seoul somewhere in there. We'll definitely try to get shots from those and keep you good folks updated.

Gotta run, ta for now!

CD

2006-10-21T08:43:00.000-04:00

EEEEEEEP! It's finally ready! Ry's band's CD is pressed and was released on October 28th! (And it sounds spectacular!!!) After long months and weeks of recording and hashing out the graphics - it's ready to go.

As I know you all are dying to see it, here are some pictures of the finished product.

And you can visit here to listen to some of the songs.

Yeah, that's right, he's wonderful and he's all mine (insert evil laughter here)

A timely update .... for once....

2006-09-12T13:04:00.000-04:00

Hi all.

Just thought it was about time for another update. I'll take some time to tell you about something that slipped through the cracks a while ago, and then give you the lowdown on recent doings.

Back at the beginning of August, our school closed down for a whopping three-day summer vacation, so we got some unexpected holiday time, which was nice. We tossed around some ideas about what we could do or where we could go, but ultimately it was decided that Becca needed a bit of recharge time before heading into our second contract, so she went home for about a week, on a whirlwind family-only tour of the motherland. She enjoyed herself thoroughly and returned fully recuperated and recharged. Also, she brought back loads of delicious Canadian snacks, which were awesome. Yes, they're all LONG gone by now.

While she was at home, I decided to do a little more exploring around Korea, so after going up to the airport to see her off I stayed overnight in Seoul, then took an early morning train down to Mokpo, a little city on the extreme bottom-left (or South-West for the map/compass-savvy) corner of Korea. I've always been somwhat curious about this little town, because way back when we were first trying to find jobs here, we were about to sign a contract with a couple schools in that selfsame city. This happened and we decided on Cheongju and haven't regretted it one bit, but as a result, I've always wanted to at least see the city in which we almost ended up... wait.... that still ends with a preposition.....

I've always wanted to at least see the city up in which we almost ended.

That's better.

Grammar is awesome.

Moving on...

So, I arrived in Mokpo at around 9:45am after about 2.5 hours on the KTX (Korea's bullet train) and it was a beautiful day. Extremely hot, but beautiful. I took some time to explore the town.

It's much smaller than Cheongju, but pretty nice. It's right on the coast, has a Marine Product Town:

a nice little beach:

and a random completely unexplained statue of a mermaid on a rock by the side of the ocean-view highway:

From there I caught a ferry out to an island called Heuksando, about 125ish kilometers off the coast. It was amazing. Completely unlike anything I've seen in Korea. Clean blue ocean water, relatively quiet streets, an almost total absense of neon lights. Just amazing. Here's a couple shots of my first impressions, and one of me, to prove that I didn't just get the picures out of a magazine.

The last one is taken from the top of one of the peaks on the island. I went for a hike up along one of the roads that the Lonely Planet guide assured me would lead me to another village (wrong) for about an hour and a half and ended up with some pretty impressive views and about ten pounds less sweat.

Anyway, by the time I got back to the first village where the ferry dropped us off, I found out to my delight (wrong) that there wasn't a single motel room available. I decided to mosey back to the ferry terminal to see if there was any way to get back to Mokpo for the night, and there wasn't, but the guy working the ticket booth was really helpful and called someone at the hotel that can just be seen in the top picture just above and found out that they had rooms open. Now these rooms were about 4 times as expensive as the ones that I originally wanted, but since the other option was sleepin on the street or in the ferry terminal, I decided not to quibble too much.

And the room was awesome. It actually had a bathtub. And a really great shower. And a comfy bed. And a balcony with a view like this:

I had a 30 minute shower then a two hour cold bath and then a three hour nap in the awesomely air conditioned room (had I mentioned that I had only had a short crappy night's sleep in a ratty Seoul yeogwan in the last 48 hours? and it had been stupidly hot the whole time?).

The downside to all this was that by the time I woke up, there weren't any restaurants open in the village, and the shuttle buses to the main village on the island had stopped running. It was about 10pm. Luckily the front desk people were awesome and within about 15 minutes of eventually getting the point across that I needed food sometime tonight, they had found me a bowl of rice, two kinds of kimchi and some ramyeon, which was delicious. Incidentally, kimchi made from onions makes the regular cabbage stuff just taste like un-dressed salad. It's intense.

Anyway, I ate my fill of the food that they didn't charge me anything for and went back to my room to enjoy (wrong) the amazing thespian talents of one Mr. Steven Seagal in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory on tv.

The next morning I hopped back on the ferry, explored a little more of Mokpo and got back on the train to Cheongju. All in all, really good times, although travelling solo is something of a let-down after being spoilt so thoroughly over the last couple years. Ah well.

Anyway, that brings you up to speed on that little missed story. Recently not a whole lot has been going on around here. I've now started the MTS program at Wycliffe College on a VERY part-time basis, being enrolled in a single online course. I'm actually quite looking forward to getting back into schooling mode, so it's pretty cool.

Anyway, if anything else exciting happens, I'll be sure to let you all know.

peace out, blog posse.

promised pictures

2006-08-31T02:32:00.000-04:00

So a really quick post for the main purpose of providing you with promised pictures from the wonderful Boryeong Mud Festival from a while ago.

Here they are:

And as a parting shot, here's my new scooter. Flaming red and 50cc of unbridled power. Probably something like 1.5 snarlin' horses at my command. Tremble in the light of the awesomeness!!

just a little interjection

2006-08-21T11:18:00.000-04:00

I realize that you're probably all wanting more mouth-watering tales of adventure and mishap in the mystical far-East, or to hear about the latest in a long line of ridiculously horrible "English" t-shirts seen on people who don't appreciate the hilarity of their clothes, but you're not getting any of that right now. I also realize that you've waited a really long time for any updates at all, but you'll just have to wait a bit longer.

Today was our second anniversary.

What an awesome gal.

Mr and Mrs Sheppard, thank you on behalf of everyone who has ever met her, and from me personally on more levels and for more reasons than I have time to list here.

Thus concludes the most ridiculously over-simplified blog-post in the history of the internet.

MUD FEST!

2006-08-07T07:24:00.000-04:00

Ryan and I recently went to one of the most interesting festivals I've ever been to. Around 50 foreigners from around our area all piled onto a bus to make our way down to the coastal city Daechon. Unfortunately, our bus was one of the peculiarities of Korea. For some unknown reason that must have evolved after several bottles of soju, someone invented the Norae bus. Not only is it a bus, but it also has a Karaoke (Noraebang in Korean - literally "singing room") machine and when the bus goes anywhere, said Karaoke enthusiast has a helpless, captive and I might go as far as to say desperate audience. Some inventors have NO foresight. I would not call the bus ride especially musical ( as I believe you require tone and rhythm for that), but it was nonetheless entertaining! Despite our initial horror- the bus ride was great.
The Daechon beach mud is renowned as having healthful properties that are fantastic for your skin. To advertise this they have a mud festival every year where along with routine festival activities, such as games, live entertainment and fire works - they also have a few unusual activities. Although I didn't venture into the mud wrestling pit - I did partake in the mud painting as well as the mud slide. Essentially, you covered yourself head to toe in mud (sometimes they dumped buckets of it on you) (with your bathing suit on of course), go on the mud slide (a slide for people covered in mud to go on), go mud wrestling or just sit and admire yourself as a mud person until you dried. Once that happened you race into the ocean (great waves that day) washed it all off, and got to start all over again. It was amazing!!! There's just something very cool about a festival where everyone walks around coated in mud.

We stayed in a minbok with the other foreigners the first night we were there. A minbok is basically a room with a floor and blankets that you rent. Ours was very different because it was the bottom of a house. We easily fit 20 people into the 3 rooms. It was a little surprising as it had no hot water or screens on the windows, but it worked well for a night and Ryan and I rented a love motel the following evening.

It was a fantastic weekend!

Pictures will be posted when we eventually get them from our friends, and for clarity's sake, this festival was "recent" as in "happened since our last post. I'm not sure how we get so behind with this thing...

Whew..... finally caught up (with the Thailand trip that happened over a month ago...)

2006-07-10T13:33:00.000-04:00

For starters, I suppose that we ought to take it as some kind of hint that it's been five days and no-one's commented on the last post. Seems all these three-week delays are catching up with us.

Well, no more! This one's comin' atcha a mere FIVE DAYS after our last post!!!

*insert more trumpet fanfare*

So yeah, in all seriousness we'll try to get better at that whole end of things.

Moving on.

The Thailand trip was, as has been stated again and again, awesome. I'm just trying to sift through and figure out what we haven't talked about yet.

Bangkok's pretty much been covered, so I'll stick with summing up our experiences in Kanchanaburi. They were great fun, and for the first day or so we were hanging out with an American guy (named Ryan) we met on the minibus from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi, which was pretty rad. He also had a Lonely Planet guide with him, which is how we found an awesome place to stay once we realized that the tour office that was supposed to show us to a hotel was already closed. It was a place called The Jolly Frog. It was awesome. One of the things that the Lonely Planet said about it was that the restaurant connected to it was awesome, and they were right about that too.

Awesome and cheap.

For under $4 I got an entire chicken barbecued on a metal spike:

Yeah. When I say "an entire chicken," that's what I mean. For the record, chicken spinal cord tastes a bit like pasta. I never would've guessed.

This place also had an awesome $4/night rafthouse that we thoroughly enjoyed. It didn't have quite the same rustic charm as the other one, but then again it also didn't have quite the same rustic infestation of cockroaches and enormous Thai spiders either, so it all works out in the end.

In fact, it really didn't have any bugs at all, which we thought was strange, since we were expecting a whole wackload of mosquitoes or something. Nothing. We couldn't figure it out until we looked up and saw on the ceiling the most effecting bug-repellent ever:

GECKOS!!

Dozens of them. They're so cool. Every one of the little pale specks you see on the ceiling is a gecko.

It also had a really nice courtyard area that for a while was surrounding a really good-looking girl, so I thought I'd get a picture:

Before moving on to the next super-rad thing that we saw while in Kanchanaburi (which will continue after the elephant tour ended) I'd like to take a moment to discus the magical nature of makeshift transportation.

BEHOLD!

Ever wonder what happens when you take a cool-looking boat and put an automobile engine block in the back? That happens, friend! A really cool boat.

Also, this is a typical Kanchanaburian taxi:

Guess where the passengers sit! I'll give you a hint, it's not on the bike, and if you look down you can always see road zipping by directly under your feet.

Back on track.

After the elephant experience, we went on another half-day tour to a Buddhist-owned wildlife sanctuary that specialized in the fostering of stray and orphaned cats.

Really big cats.

It's amazing how difficult it is to keep still and smile for a picture when the tiger you're petting twitches suddenly. There were other animals in the sanctuary, but none of them were as cool.

The next day, we rented a little scooter for the exorbitant price of roughly $6/day from a local shop.

It took a little bit to get used to, but after a little while we were both pretty pro at riding it, and let me tell you, it's SOOOOOOOOO fun.

Here are a couple pictures of it and us:

For those sharp-eyed observers among you who are currently asking yourselves "does that sign behind Rebecca in that last picture say something about a monkey school?" let me at last ease your mind.

*ahem*

YOU'RE FREAKIN' RIGHT IT DOES!!!

Yeah.

We found a place where they keep and train the single greatest animal on the face of this Earth. The majestic monkey.

Basically the way the first part of your Monkey School experience goes is that you pay about 50 cents for a bowl of bananas and then the guide shows you around the place, letting you feed the monkeys, some of which are in cages, and some of which are on long leashes tied to trees.

The one on my head is a white gibbon, and I need one really really badly now. She hung out with me the whole time we were there, just lounging around and relaxing. It was so freaking rad!

After the feeding and petting bit was over, we went and sat down for the show. By this point, a group of (go figure) Korean tourists had arrived so it wasn't just us there for the show, which consisted of monkeys picking numbers out of a bunch of mixed up bits of wood, rescuing hostages

and using their mad biking skills to impress the sexy ladies

After we were done at the monkey house and we bid our temporary Korean companions a hearty 안영이가세요, we were on our way. The thing that Kanchanaburi is most famous for is the presence of the bridge over the River Kwai. And here it is:

This one (obviously) isn't the one that was blown up in the movie starring Sir Alec Guiness, or even the historical dude his character was based on. There were two bridges. One was wooden and a few kilometres downstream from this metal one, and the other one was this metal one that I just referred to in the preceding clause of this sentence. This one was bombed by the allies and the middle of it was destroyed. As part of reparations payments, Japan had to provide the two slightly bigger and much more angular spans to repair the bridge after the war was over. Otherwise the bridge is original. It was a neat thing to be able to see, but it was after all only a bridge, so we decided to go eat at the floating restaurant just upstream of it.

It looked like this:

The food was amazing, but that hardly needs to be said at this point, and there was another cool thing about it. You could buy a bag of fish food for a few dozen baht and feed the river fish. We had a table right by the railing on the far end of the restaurant (sticking out into the middle of the river) so we took advantage of it and got a bag each. It was good fun and the fish seemed to enjoy it too.

After dinner Becca headed back to the Jolly Frog for a bit of a nap and I took the scooter out to the countryside for a spin and got some pictures of the scenery, just before and just after sunset.

So that was Kanchanaburi, and pretty much wraps up our Thailand trip for you.

On the way back we had a short stopover in Taipei. We were only there for about 40 minutes before we reboarded the plane, but we had time to see a rather blunt sign in the boarding gate.

I suppose it's better to warn people outright than to make it a surprise, but still!

Anyway, that was our trip to Thailand. It was an incredible amount of fun, and I highly and strongly recommend that you go there if the opportunity EVER arises. You totally won't regret it at all.

Ok, goodbye and I promise that we'll try to be a bit more regular with our posts and whatnot.

Later, all!

Thailand (Part 2)

2006-07-05T12:45:00.000-04:00

Dear All,

Thailand. ahhhhhhh......ahhhhhhhh. It was lovely. I knew we got holiday days, but I didn't really believe it until we got there. My first thought was that 5 days of holiday are not really that many, but when I actually thought about it's not that bad especially since all contract workers and part time staff get no holidays at all. The only way out is up, unless of course you're like my brother who has scored a great job (*pinching his cheeks *) - Way To Go Bruce!!! (*cheering squad in the background*) - sorry this mushiness must be done online because I would be dead if I tried it in person (I may still be worried if in Canada but being in Korea gives me a bit of a head start)

So, I digress. Bangkok itself was not my favorite place to visit but there are palaces and cute little shops with shiny objects. It's funny because I KNEW that I didn't need shiny objects and I would keep telling myself that as I walked down the street and yet I would end up at these stores with Ryan politely standing there not understanding the mystery of not NEEDING trinkets and yet completely engrossed with looking at said objects. Maybe it's just me?

Our favorite mode of transportation were the tuktuks by far. There's just something exciting about driving on highways on 4 wheelers (well three wheeler's actually). I think it's the "inches from instant death" feel that adds to the thrill.

While in Bankok we also had the pleasure of visiting some temples.

Next on the list was the fabulous Kanchanaburi - loved it - bathing elephants in the river?!!! It just doesn't get better than that I don't think. I've never really appreciated elephants to the extent that I do now. I don't really know how to explain why it was such an awesome experience - you're just going to have to try it some day I think.

Here are various pictures from that day:

This is a 1-year-old elephant that was wandering around. We weren't able to get too close because it wasn't trained yet and it would try to charge and bowl us over like a full-grown professional football player. Ergo, it could be argued that professional football players are exactly like baby elephants.

This is a 72-year-old elephant. It's a bunch bigger.

In Thailand, it is important to know that every time you get into a vehicle you will not be taken where you want to go immediately. We were ready for this, having talked to experienced Thailand travelers before departing, but did not understand the extent. It takes about an hour for the transportation to actually leave and realistically an hour isn't bad. On top of that, however, you will never be taken exactly where you want to go... initially. You are always taken to a friend's hotel or restaurant. And so on our trip down to the lovely city our bus stopped at a BEAUTIFUL guest house with breathtaking (in my mind) rafthouses on the river (for $4 a night).

We had already booked another hotel for that night so we reserved this area for the following evening. The inn that we stayed at that night after a bit of a coffuffle with not being able to find our tour office (that turned out to be a blessing as the exact same tour was in another location at 1/4th of the price) also had raft houses but was not quite as pretty. Ryan was not as much of a fan of the raft houses as they had no airconditioner but I loved it.

The next night we headed back to the first location that we saw the raft houses and went to our room. We were just hanging out reading when I saw it. A bug. A HUGE bug. At this point I would like to describe how I selflessly saved Ryan fron the enormous cockroach one handed and armed only with a paperback ... but my 'would like to describe' and 'what actually happened' did not cross paths. In fact, although the thought "I should do something" did cross my mind, my next immediate thought was "but if I move it might eat me". After Ryan had finished with the beast we began inspecting the cabin for other bugs and discovered 6 very large spiders. We decided that the $4 for the room was not actually a charge for the sleeping itself. I bet it takes time to cultivate cabins for the bug-killing connoisseurs.

Tune in for the last of this exciting trilogy... sometime.

Well folks, here it is! (finally) (....well, part of it)

2006-06-21T23:49:00.000-04:00

Welcome to our first Thailand-trip-related blog post!!

*trumpet fanfare*

Here's the way it's going to work. I'm going to be posting about general trip stuff, and a few of my favourite highlights, and Becca will be following up with a few of hers. Both will have pictures, and both will be amazing experiences!

So here's mine...

The flight over was good, despite the fact that although we were told when we booked our tickets that it was a direct flight we had a stopover in Hong Kong on the way there and Taipei on the way home. But all that was okay, since the stopovers weren't of the "stressful-yet-hilarious movie-family having to sprint from one side of a city-sized airport to the other just to wait another hour to board a plane where their seats had been rearranged and the main character ends up next to a woman who gives birth on his lap" kind of stopover. They were an easy "get off the plane for 30 minutes then get back on in the same place" kind of stopover, which I personally much prefer.

In the Hong Kong airport I saw one of the most terrifying "toys" I've ever seen in my life. It was actually a series of toys, with two of the scariest on display. One was called Robo-Sapien and was a 3-4foot tall beefy-looking robot that clearly demonstrated that mankind has learned nothing from films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Terminator. The other was called a Robo-Raptor and seems to have been designed to fly in the face of all the wisdom not only of the previously mentioned movies, but Jurassic Park as well. I have seen the end of civilization, people. Luckily it's still firmly ensconced in cardboard and cellophane at the moment, but God help us all if someone actually shells out and buys one. It's all over.

ANYWAY!

So we landed in Bangkok at about 4:00pm and could instantly tell that we were in a tropical paradise. It was the kind of muggy that is so starved for attention that it just wants to hug you all the time, and the only thing that can shake it is its arch-nemesis, AIR-CON! Seriously, don't listen to what Aunt Muggy tells you, Air-Con's really a good guy.

We eventually got through the airport, after having chosen the line that somehow managed to accomplish the impressive feat of processing only one passenger for every other employee's three, and set about finding a taxi. You know that part of the airport where family members wait for homecoming loved ones and hotel employees wait with little signs for their incoming VIP guests? That area was where we got our first taste of what was going to be a major part of our trip in what was otherwise a quite lovely and spectacular place. I had happened to ask someone how much a taxi would cost to get to Khaosan Rd (*the* place for travellers to start in Bangkok, a Vegas-like strip of market stalls, street vendors, restaurants and hotels. In fact, I'm going to show you a picture of it)

Incidentally, apart from what those "a picture is worth a thousand words" people would tell you, you can't possibly get the whole idea of Khaosan Rd from any picture, especially not this one. The whole place is alive with bustling activity, over-eager salespeople, the smell of pad thai and banana crepes cooking on street stalls and music oozing from the various restaurants and bars. It's quite the place.

Anyway (we're still actually in the airport at this point of our adventure, remember?) the guy I happened to ask told me that a taxi should cost about 300-350 baht (about $9-10). Great! Good deal for a 40-minute cab ride, I'd say. Anyway, as we leave the arrivals gate a woman in a suit comes up and says "air conditioned taxi, Khaosan Road?" so I say "how much." She responds, with a straight face that seems to deny the possibility that she does her deceptive and off-ripping work for fun, "900 baht."

Seriously. THRICE the price that I had been told about. I promptly turned and walked away without a second glance, went to the official taxi stand area and got in an air conditioned cab bound for Khaosan Rd, costing us 350baht.

This is a major part of visiting Thailand. Get ready for it if you're planning a trip. Everyone who talks to you is the most friendly local money can tempt. They *ALL* want your money. Which, in a way, is fair. But it's better to know full-well going in that generally if someone approaches you and tries to help, they've got a plan, and that plan ends with your money buying them stuff.

Another tidbit for anyone planning on travelling to Thailand. Book nothing in advance. Well, book your flights. Book them well in advance. We had to bump our trip back a month because by the time we got confirmation of our holidays we couldn't get tickets. Other than your flights, however, only book hotels or other things in advance if you want to pay several times more than what you'll pay if you just find a place when you get there. Tourism is the single largest industry in Thailand, and everyone and their mangy dogs have a hand in something that you could use, so there's no shortage of places to stay or eat, or book tours with or anything. Especially tours. On Khaosan Road we saw no fewer than 8 travel agencies booking trips and tours to various parts of Thailand ranging from jungles along the Burmese border to beach/island tours in the far south. To give a next-to-final example of this idea of not booking things, the hotel that we booked online in advance cost us 1800baht, which was still pretty good. You wouldn't get a hotel with air conditioning, a cable TV, a king-sized bed and a rooftop pool for $50 indlucing breakfast buffet in Canada. However, when we got to Kanchanaburi the next day, we stayed literally *on* the River Kwai in a quite nice rafthouse for $4/night.

Anyway, back to Bangkok. Bangkok has some neat things to see, but I wouldn't recommend spending more than a couple days there at most. I would like to have gone to see a Muay Thai match, but we couldn't schedule it. Next time :-). Other than that, we were able to see pretty much everything we wanted to in Bangkok in the 48-odd hours we were there. The coolest and cheapest mode of transportation around the city is by tuk-tuk. Observe:

It's like a motortrike with a tiny version of a gaudy 1970s living room strapped to it. It's quite the experience. Another thing about going anywhere in Thailand is that everyone is being paid commission by someone else to bring people to their place of business. Tuktuk drivers are not only not an exception, but they may actually set the standard for this practice. Anyway, we got a tuktuk driver that was willing to drive us around to four or five different temples for 10baht (about 30 cents) so we took him up on it. I'll mention right now that Becca was against the whole idea. She's much smarter than me. We did see some nifty temples, though:

We also saw a Thai example of a gigantic Buddha statue:

It's pretty big....I guess....

Possibly the most impressive part of these temples was the detail that went into their construction. They have so much incredibly intricate gold work done around the roof and windows and doors. It's amazing they haven't been looted for food money when right down the street from most of these there are entire neighbourhoods of shack-houses.

After the tuktuk ride to the temples, the driver took us to a tailor's shop. I bought pants, partly because I wanted some, but mostly cause I'm a sucker. They're actually nice though. Very light. Shut up.

After we finished with that, we went for a walk around the area surrounding Khaosan Rd. We saw a cool monument in the middle of an enormous roundabout:

as well as a stretch of road where hundreds of people clamoured to buy what turned out to be lottery tickets from stands on the sidewalk.

Also, we found a McDonalds that had a culturally-sensitive Ronald McDonald outside:

After a day and a bit in Bangkok we had had more or less enough so we booked ourselves on a "4:00pm" minibus to a town called Kanchanaburi. Catching that bus we found out that Thai time is even more off-kilter than Korean time. WAY more. Our bus left at about 5:30.

That's all for this post. More in the next exciting installments of...

TANGO IN THAILAND!*

*it should be noted that there was no actual tango-ing involved in the trip, and that this is just a clever pseudo-marketing ploy to make this blog sound enough like a suspsenseful 1940's radio drama that you want to, nay, are compelled to "tune in"* next time.

*it should also be noted that there is no special way that you need to access the next posts. Just show up and they'll be here soon. That is all.

Thailand posts coming soon, I promise...

2006-06-18T22:35:00.000-04:00

...but rather than get ever-further behind, I figured I'd throw an update out there regarding more recent events and the band, and then I'll backtrack this week to post a whack of Thailand pics and stories and everything.

This past weekend was a bit of a long/eventful one. Friday night was alright, we played at Pearl Jam again, though it was empty so it was more of a practice, which was something we needed anyway, so it wasn't too big a deal.

Saturday we had loads of plans up in Seoul, and despite various delays and setbacks, we managed to complete most of them. It did, however, make for quite a long day, since we left Cheongju at 2 (after waiting in the bus station for an hour or so) and didn't get to our ultimate destination until about 8:30.

That destination was a club near Honggik University called Slug.er club. We have more or less decided that we won't play at Club Spot again (the place that we played the last Seoul shows) because we're sick of playing in a punk club where the crowd will almost inevitably hate us for not being a punk band, so it was nice to be going somewhere else for a change. We were a little worried when we got there and saw all the dressed up, mohawked people milling around the front.

The club was tiny and incredibly hot. It was a raised stage in a basement, so there wasn't a lot of room on it. I hit my head later in the night walking back to the back room to get my stuff, which sucked. The show, however, actually went pretty well. Even with our bass player having been bitten by some kind of bug making his hand swell up pretty grossly. The crowd actually seemed pretty receptive, and the owner told us he was really impressed. He also owns another club or two in Seoul, as well as a recording studio and a small-name label/publicity company. He told us that he would like to record a CD for us, for free, as well as doing the recording for the one track that we're getting on the compilation CD as a prize for coming third in the Railart competition.

So that's cool, although it means that we're going to be in Seoul a lot more, which generally makes for a tiring weekend, but should be an interesting experience.

That's all for now. Like I said, posts about the Thailand trip are on their way, and I'll finish off this post with a teaser picture, just to prove that we actually went.

Also, the World Cup is on right now. Thought I'd mention it to those of you still back home in one of the two countries in the entire world where nobody cares. Korea's actually doing surprisingly well, having tied against France this morning at 4am (we went to a stadium in town where they were showing the game), although the tying goal was an incredibly lucky one. They still need to at least tie against Switzerland next weekend, but I think they can do it. I'm going up to Seoul Friday night to watch the game at 4am with a crowd that's reportedly going to push a million people outside of Seoul City Hall. Should be good times.

Okay, here's the promised Thailand picture.

To update you on the last two weeks before we leave for a bit...

2006-05-31T11:27:00.000-04:00

Dear All

Two weekends full of music to fill you in on!

The first we have pictures of and I'm quite happy to say that the park that we went to is probably the most beautiful place that we've been to in Korea.

This is the area that we stayed in

Fairly ordinary looking to us now!

However the water (below) is not. Near our Apatuh (as they say in Korean) is a river pretending to be a thin trickle of water for every season but the rainy one (coming up in July!).
A dirty brown stream that is nicer from far away actually. This river, however is actually swimmableicous.

The evening we were there (a couple Saturdays ago) I discovered that luckily there was still some Korean cuisine that I hate. (Ryan, in his sickness, actually quite likes it).

The dish that looks a little like compost and glue is called pajong. It's a little like an omelette, with green onions and other veggies in it, and not made entirely with egg, and disgusting. The bowl of mysterious potion-esque yellow liquid is actually called dongdongju, which is yet another type of traditional Korean wine. The red stuff that looks like muscle is actually kimchi and is fairly tasty.

Night was campfire fun filled with camp fire songs.

The next morning bright and early we got ready for an epic voyage to yonder Seoul. Unfortunately buses were in high demand as there was a lack of ... any ... so after phoning helpful koreans we were left with the option of hitch hiking (which is very safe here apparently) or Taxi - The taxi got there first and a crisis was averted.

This is the guys playing in the Seoul subway station ... and moving onto the next round of the competition!!!

That's it for that weekend.

Last weekend was super busy as well with a wedding. The most elaborate wedding I have ever been to. She had TWO wedding dresses (and then the traditional Korean dress - three!), fresh flowers everywhere you looked and a 6 course meal. I'd have to say that the wedding ceremony itself was the longest and most poignant of the three weddings that we have been to so far in Korea. (Still like mine better though). They provided buses to transfer the 600 people 2 hours away to the wedding site. It was unbelieveable.

Unfortunatley we have no picture! Sorry! Ryan also played another show in Seoul with 4 stitches in his second toe. It was fabulous as well.

That's it for now!

A brief treatise on Heaven and Hell, followed by how we spent last weekend

2006-05-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

So, for anyone wishing to have a pretty down-to-earth example of my personal take on Heaven and Hell, read on.

Hell will be sitting in your apartment, supposedly your own private refuge from the terrors and evils of the outside world, a place all your own, where you find solace and sanctuary in the arms of loved ones, surrounded by the familiar and the comfortable, while just outside and a block away, an enormous sound system blares into the otherwise beautiful and unsullied Saturday morning the abysmal sounds of Korean men wailing like clubbed seals and skinned banshees to gut-wrenching Karaoke tunes, giving their heart and soul in exchange for what I seriously hope is either an unimaginable amount of cash or some semblance of immortality (otherwise it's just not worth it). It will continue for hours until you, who for so long have been a relatively peaceful, fun-loving person, with no desire to inflict serious, lingering, tortuous harm to anyone (or their pets and/or children) actively consider the consequences of purchasing several sturdy bamboo sticks and wreaking your own terrible vengeance, transforming you into something you're not, and bending you to the will of the almighty darkness that spawned that unfathomable beast: Karaoke.

Heaven will be when the music stops, and all that remains is the injured (but indescribably relieved and irrespressably hopeful) sound of the sobbing of those remaining, those who have survived the unimaginable and will learn from their history to go on to create a better world for their children and their children's children. They will arise from their downtrodden state to form a choir, their voices raised in perfect harmony and merciful unison to proclaim the victory of light over darkness. The sun will emerge from its place behind the sheath of clouds, and will bathe the scene in intangible gold, lending its luminescence to the very rocks and earth and metal, erasing from all the memory of that terrible day. And there will be peace.

*whew*

Now, I'm sure you've all noticed that it's only been one weekend, and there's another post here. I'm really trying to not get backlogged with this whole "keeping you people updated" thing, so here goes: the goings-on of last weekend.

Saturday, we went to Cheongnamdae, which is the name for the Korean President's summer retreat home (mansion), to watch a group of people do a belly-dance routine. We originally went as a favour for a foreigner friend of ours, who is going out with one of the dancers, but we actually had a really good time. After the dancing, there was a university Tae Kwon Do group who had loads of really cool tricks and stuff. Regretfully, I completely failed to remember a camera on this outing, so we are pictureless when it comes to the specific tricks, but I'll recount a few of my favourites for you.
1) three people stood in a row, each holding a breaking board at a slightly higher level than the person in front of him, while a fourth guy ran up, jumped, and successively broke all three boards before hitting the ground again. It gave it a really cool Matrix effect of him running up the boards and breaking them at the same time.
2)Some guy broke a stack of about 7 boards. With his face. It was cool.
3)At the end, this one guy got an apple and a knife and walked to the centre of the performance area. He put the apple on the end of the knife, then held it up in front of him. The he picked up a bell and rang it. At that point, we saw a blindfolded guy stand up, wait for the next bell, and then proceed towards the knife-apple guy. Then, after a few more bell rings, he jumped up and did a spinning kick, knocking the apple clean off the end of the knife. BLINDFOLDED! It was nifty.

Anyway, after we got back from that, we had a nap and then went to a local flower festival that we had been given tickets for, and thus felt obliged to check out. It was actually a fair bit cooler than it sounds (cause it would have to be). We saw acrobats:

and magicians (whose picture we didn't take). There was also a Russian fiddle/cello trio there performing.

When we first got there, we realized just how serious they were about their no-smoking policy.

It was a REALLY BIG SIGN!!!

Oh yeah, and the festival had the single worst name of any officially sanctioned festival. EVER.

Don't believe me? Look.

Still don't believe me? Look closer:

Yeah. Apparently it's supposed to be pronounced "rappay" but they're still a bunch of tools for not looking it up in a dictionary. Unbelievable.

On our way out we saw these kids playing on really cool contraptions that were similar to those little horses or other animals at the mall where you put in a quarter and it bobs back and forth for a few minutes, except these ones were driveable, and the kids were riding them around. We were really impressed, until we saw one from the front, and realized that they were obviously just the vanguard of an invading alien robot army.

ARE YOU SARAH CONNOR?!?!?

So that was Saturday.

On Sunday, my friend Jae-in invited us to his father's 60th birthday party. In Korea, the 60th is the biggest birthday and they go all-out, so it was at a banquet hall and had a bigger variety of Korean food at that one meal than I've seen, probably in any given month in this country. It was really cool.

So it was a really good weekend, all in all.

This weekend (it's Saturday today) we're going to Songnisan with a bunch of foreigners to go camping, and then on Sunday we're going up to Seoul. Our band entered a contest where we recorded one of our originals, sent in the CD and then waited. The second round, which we got to, is where we go to Seoul and perform that one song live for a panel of judges. The championship round is a couple weeks from now. The final winning band gets 2,000,000 won and a championship belt! No kidding.

Should be good times. I'll keep y'all posted.

Buh-bye!!

Big in Japan

2006-05-08T13:52:00.000-04:00

So here it is, folks. The long-awaited, much anticipated, extraordinarily over-hyped account of our magically mysterious tour of Fukuoka, Japan.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the specific location of Fukuoka in relation to the rest of Japan, the internet is full of useful maps on the subject. Enjoy them!

Anyway, enough of this, I hear you all saying, get on with it!

And on we get.

Our adventure begins at 8:25pm (local time, obviously) on the evening of Wednesday, May 3. We finished our last classes of the evening, and took our prepacked bags out into the street to catch a taxi to the bus station to catch a bus to Daejon. Daejon is the bigger city about 30-40 minutes from Cheongju. We were at the back of the line, however, so our trip started out with us standing on the intercity bus for the trip. Not so bad though, really. Once in Daejon we took another cab to the train station to take the super speedy KTX (the bullet-train) down to the bustling megatropolis of Busan. That trip was lovely as always, and went by without incident, although we came to realize that the Busan train station is a place with a sketchiness all unto itself in this country, with vagrants an hobos galore. An interesting experience is always to be had, let me tell you.

When we left the train station in search of a cheap motel (for you see, gentle reader, our ferry to Fukuoka didn't leave until 10am on the following morning) we saw the first two picture-worthy things of the trip. They were, in order of our noticing them:

A big tower of lanterns, no doubt in celebration of Buddha's birthday, which was that very weekend:

and an enormous animatronic dragon thing. Blinking eyes and twinkling lights all over it:

We found ourselves a 25,000 won motel room which, although it was spectacular as you can well imagine, we completely failed to take any photos of whatsoever.

The next morning we hopped aboard the Kobee II, the speedy hydrofoil which was to whisk us away to the Land of the Rising Sun. The weather was absolutely perfect, and the crossing was smooth as can be. We saw some islands that I'm positive were/are home to myriads of pirates and various bucklers of swash with buried treasure everywhere. They were neat.

Anyway, I didn't get any pictures of the way across either, because for all the cool islands and whatnot (truth be told, we only saw about 3) it was mostly just water for a really really long way, so it wasn't particularly noteworthy.

Once we arrived in Fukuoka, however, the noteworthy things just started piling up. Literally. The first couple cool things we saw involved piling things to save space. Quite a good idea actually. Observe:

Seriously, in Japan, no matter what you want parked, they'll find some way of parking other similar items on top. Genius!

Speaking of parking, we started noticing that the pay parking lots had curious little contraptions under the cars.

There exists two schools of thought, between the two of us, as to the purpose of said contraption. It could either be a security feature, making theft of the car that much more difficult, or it could be something that makes sure that the parker has to pay for their parking if they ever want to drive their pretty little car again. Now that I think about it, it might also be a combination of the both. What a bright country.

Thursday and Friday were also holidays in Japan, although we never found out exactly what the holidays were for, so there were things going on everywhere we went, including this little ceremony that was literally taking place on a chunk of sidewalk.

We stuck around for a bit, but not long enough to discern what was going on, since we had hotel rooms to find and bags to find a resting place for.

So walk around in seach for a hotel room we did. The problem of arriving in a little country with LOADS of people in it right on a public holiday made itself readily apparent pretty quickly, since the first two or three hotels we went to were completely booked solid for that night. Luckily we had our trusty hotel guide for the area so we had quite a few more options ahead of us, when we spotted this sign, shining out above the trees like a beacon of rest and relaxation (a little R&R would've been welcomed by R&R at this point, let me tell you):

We went in to the lobby, where we saw a neat little "menu" for their rooms, featuring a picture of them, and the ones that were free were still lit up. It even had the prices listed right there for our viewing pleasure. They were pretty decent, too. We thought we were in luck. We thought wrong. I, delighted and ignorant of things to come, approached the counter with barely concealed glee to ask about what room we could have, since there were obviously several available, and the exceptionally polite, quite aplogetic Japanese hotel clerk woman looks at me and says "so sorry, um... no room...uh....Japanese person only."

...

seriously.

So, since it was far to late to become fluent in Japanese, get a good tan and find a team of skilled plastic surgeons, we left, bitter, angry, and most importantly, hotel-less.

Luckily the next hotel we tried had awesome rooms available for that night, and we were able to find a slightly cheaper one for the following night too.

but STILL! Jeez.

So once we got our non-racist hotel room sorted out, we took a load off for a little while, and I flipped on the TV, because I firmly believe that when travelling, observation of the culture is an important learning experience.

The very first channel I turned on had this showing:

Yes, that's a domo-kun.

Yes, it rode onto the stage on a unicycle.

Yes, I almost cried with delight.

So after I recovered my senses and talked Becca into being seen in public with me again, we went for a walk to explore our new surroundings. Fukuoka's really a beautiful city, with a couple little rivers and canals running through it. We stopped halfway across a bridge over one of them and just took in the scenery, then spotted something...a little out of place...

See if you can see it too.

I think it's blatantly obvious, but that might just be because I took the picture. Either way, if you haven't spotted it yet, I'm not telling you what it is. You'll just have to look harder.

No. No hints.

While we're on the subject of visual oddities, check out the way they bind magazines in Japan:

So that's cool too.

Not much else happened that day, since we were pretty tired, so we just hit a couple other minor sightseeing spots and called it a night, but not before going to a convenience store and grabbing some tasty beverages, which included the following:

I guess once Kirk got fired from the Cracker Factory he moved to Japan and started making chocolate milk.

It was alright-tasting. About what you'd expect from Milhouse's dad.

So that was day one. Day two was a fair bit more packed with sight and sites.

We went to this place called Canal City, which was a pretty big shopping area that we had briefly seen the night before, and then we set off in search of the Kushido Shrine, which was in the same area. We eventually found it, and boy was it cool, and surprisingly (or maybe not) different from its Korean counterpart.

Outside was a big statue with loads of cool bits to it. We got a passer-by to stop passing by and take our picture with it.

Then we went to check out the shrine itself, which was beautiful. There was a wedding going on inside while we were there, so it was done up extra pretty-like.

In that picture, you can just see a frilly bush thing in the bottom-left corner. It was a bush, with a fence around it, and onto the fence people had tied little Buddhist prayers, not entirely unlike the prayers that are stuffed into the cracks of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

The shrines that we saw also always had these cool hand-washing fountains with little wooden ladles to use.

A short while later we saw the bride and groom being paraded around the block in what is undoubtedly the classiest rickshaw EVER!

Down the street from the shrine was a folk museum/marketplace thing where I bought certain sisters their birthday presents (but shhh...don't tell them), and saw in one of the buildings a Japanese man working a loom, making this really cool cloth, but taking forever to do it. Makes you wonder why they don't just invent some sort of machine to do it for him. I guess they don't like the guy much...

I kept asking myself, "I see no fruit. Where's the fruit?" but thought I was safer keeping the thought to myself.

Next, we ate lunch at a little curry place, where I had the best curry I've ever had in my entire life, and then went to a place called Ohori Park, which is a really awesome lake with a little archipelago strung together with bridges that you can walk through, and a path that lets you walk around it as well.

We walked through.

In one of the parts of the lake you could rent rowboats or paddle boats, but not just ordinary paddle boats, but paddle boats shaped like swans or, if you were feeling particularly saucy...

SPEED paddle boats!!! Saucy indeed.

In the park we came across a vending machine that housed a particularly cool-looking soft drink, and that particularly cool-looking soft-drink's...sequel?

Rad.

I also got a picture of Becca in one of the pagoda-type things that jutted out into the lake, generally making for a good photo spot. I figured I'd post it cause she's so darn cute.

From there, we went to check out some castle ruins, which weren't really all that impressive, photographically-speaking, but were still really cool, and then walked around a bit more before heading back to Canal City, where we got dinner (in a manner of speaking...).

On the way there, I saw this car, and decided it was definitely picture-worthy.

So the moment has come.

The unveiling, if you will.

And you will. Oh, will you ever.

Remember when I mentioned before that we had briefly explored Canal City on our first night? Well while we were there, we happened to walk past a restaurant called Asian Kitchen, which had little window displays in the walls featuring some of their delicious wares, and showcasing a dessert of such magnificent proportions that it was decided right then and there that the next evening, it would be mine.

Oh yes, it would be mine.

It was mine.

Ladies and gentlemen of the blog-reading community, I present to you without further ado, the BIGGEST FREAKING DESSERT EVER!!!!!

There it is. The breathtaking, noon-day-sun-blocking conglomeration of ice cream, whipped cream, bananas, pineapple, grapes, cake, corn flakes, chocolate sauce and strawberry syrup that was to be my main course for the evening.

The garnish (THE GARNISH) was a full 1/4 of a pineapple, and the glass was rimmed with 6 banana halves.

Needless to say, it was intense. Intense and delicious.

It was also a bit of a spectacle, because in addition to the white kid with the enormous noggin consuming a dessert that overshadows the aforementioned noggin, the waitress announced the arrival of this magnificent confection with, I swear I'm not making this up, a gong.

Then it arrived, sparklers blazing, only to be followed by the manager and a polaroid camera.

Yup, that's right. We're now immortalized on the wall of the Asian Kitchen in the Canal City shopping centre in the Hakata area of Fukuoka Japan.

I thought you might not believe that part, so i got a picture of the picture.

After we finished, because finish we did, we walked around for a while, and discovered the perfect example of why people with a dislike or physical aversion to anyting stroby and blinky should just stay away from east Asia entirely.

I dubbed it The Wall of Epilepsy.

Seriously, all of those screens are blinking rapidly with nothing but shiny bright designs, for no apparent reason whatsoever. It was nuts.

A while later, we decided to eat something real, so we got in line for some of the street stall that are pretty famous in Fukuoka.

We got some delicious (if somewhat overpriced) ramyan, and then headed back to the hotel to crash.

Saturday, our ferry was due to leave at 3:45, and we got a wake-up call at 10:10, informing us that check-out time was 10:00. So after rushing around making sure that everything got packed up and nothing got left behind, we checked out and went on our way.

The weather had deteriorated significantly from the glorious day before, and it was windy and drizzly, so our options were somewhat limited as far as touristy stuff was concerned.

As we were wandering around trying to decide what to do next, we came across a building that we had seen in the distance before, but not close up. We're still not entirely sure what it is, but the front of it was covered with terraced gardens and trees and stuff and the whole thing was quite impressive.

We consulted our trusty tourist map and found the Fukuoka City museum, which was as yet unvisited, and decided that with the weather being as it was, it was definitely a museum-type day. It was actually quite cool, with really extensive exhibits spanning centuries of history from that area alone. Very nice.

Good looking building too.

After we finished at the museum, we rushed back to the subway, then hopped in a taxi and went straight to the ferry terminal.

The ride back was much, MUCH choppier than the ride there ("The sea was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to bring back soup at a deli") but we made it, and by 11:25pm we were back at our apartment in Cheongju, after 3 hours on the ferry, 100 minutes on the bullet train, 5 minutes in one cab then 35 minutes in another (we had missed the last bus back from Daejon).

All in all, an excellent trip.

There. It's 4:30 in the morning and I can barely type anymore, but the blog has been, officially, updated.

BOOYAH!

so this is getting ridiculous

2006-05-06T12:29:00.000-04:00

speaking of course about how insanely infrequent our blog updating has been...

Loads of stuff has happened since the second week of April, when we last posted anything, but the biggest thing is that we just got back from a 3-day trip to Japan, so you all are in for a seriously picture-laden post in the very near future (I promise). I've got to select the pictures, resize them, upload them onto the hosting server and then we're good to go. Trust me, it'll be good.

To give you a hint, there's a picture of a soft drink that has a sequel, and me beside a dessert the size of my head...

More to come.

so this, too, is long overdue

2006-04-12T22:55:00.000-04:00

Hi all.

Again, apologies for the massive delays in posting and updating. You may remember that two or three weekends ago, we were playing a show in Seoul, and I told you that I'd let you know how it went after the weekend had passed.

Well, it has most certainly passed, and here's your update.

The show went well, we thought. It definitely went a million and a half times better than the last one. There was only one technical glitch this time, and it had to do with our guitarist restringing his guitar that day, which meant that even if he was perfectly in tune during sound check, he would be terribly, cat-torturingly out of tune once we actually started to play. Luckily, he had another guitar handy, which maintained all its strings and its tuning throughout the rest of the show.

So that was that for technical glitches, and there weren't too many glitches of the musical variety either, so all in all it was a good time.

The bass player had someone tape the show for us and he made a DVD and gave us some copies. I duly ripped my copy, and uploaded the video, so if you right-click on THIS LINK and select "save link as..." or "save target as..." you'll be able to download the video of the show. The file's aroung 200MB and it's about 30 minutes long. Some of the songs were cut in various places because they featured some technical or mixing screw-ups, but most of the show is there, and it's more than enough to get a decent idea.

We've since learned yet another ... *ahem* ... idiosyncrasy about Korean culture that we weren't informed of earlier. Basically the day after we played the first show (where we sounded like crap) we had heard back from the owner telling us that he wanted us to play there again. This time it'd been about two weeks with no word on any other places to play, so I asked Jae-in (the owner of Pearl Jam -- our local bar -- and our 'manager') what was up, and he told me that in Korea, it is considered pretty bad image construction for a band to have a drink before they play, and quite scandelous indeed for someone in the band to have a beer up on stage with them.

Bear in mind that this is a country where you can easily just have soju or makkali before (if not *for*) breakfast.

Anyway, apparently we violated this unwritten rule, and thus had given the Club Spot owner pause. However, now that Jae-in has actually bothered to inform us of this little cultural tidbit, we seem to be back on track. At least that's what he says. He's contacting the stage managers for about 4-5 big outdoor summer rock festivals to see if he can get us on, and we're currently working on getting a CD together, since we've been told that recording in Korea is super cheap.

More updates as they come.

bye!

Another Show

2006-03-23T13:14:00.000-05:00

So this weekend we're playing in Seoul again. Same club, slightly bigger show.

If any of you are interested in dropping by, it's at Club Spot in Hongdae (the Honggik University area in Seoul) at 10pm.

Here's the poster for the show, and below it is the profiles poster for the bands playing. We're the newbies, so we're going first, but that just means that we get to make everyone disappointed with everything they hear from that point on, which we're okay with.

Either that, or we suck, but there are better bands to listen to later, so people won't be as angry at us for being terrible. We'll see how it goes.

It should be noted that the guy on the left in our picture isn't actually our bass player anymore, but since none of you know either him or the guy replacing him, that's all I feel the need to say about that at this point.

I'll let you know how it went after the weekend's over.

Later!

DMZ & More

2006-03-17T22:55:00.000-05:00

So last weekend we went on an excellent excursion with folks from our church to the DMZ.

It made for a very tiring weekend, since we had to leave Cheongju at 5:30am in order to get to Seoul in time for the tour, and I had decided that rather than deal with only getting a few hours of sleep, I might as well just stay awake and then sleep Saturday night. I think it worked.

Anyway, the DMZ tour itself was really cool. There's still a major section that I'd like to visit, but we've got tons more time for that.

Basically, there are two types of tours that you can take. One goes to Panmunjom, the re-unification village and Joint Security Area (the only place where both sides co-exist - in a way). The other, the one we were on, visits the Third Infiltration Tunnel.

Since the end of the Korean War (1950-53) the south has discovered 4 tunnels dug by the Northern army under the DMZ and into southern territory. The most recent one was found in the North-East part of the country -- in 1990.

Anyway, the third one was discovered in 1978, and is the one that got closest to Seoul. I think it reached within 45km. The tunnel was reportedly designed to move 30,000 troops per hour, although after having been inside a section of tunnel, I think that might be a bit of an overstatement. Either way, it's a pretty clear threat and a sobering idea to think that there may well be army folks tunneling under the DMZ at this very minute.

The other thing is that when the Korean War broke out, it only took the North 12 days to push all the way to Pusan before the South and UN forces combined to whomp them back almost all the way into China, before the North and China combined to whomp the South and UN all the way back to just about the exact place that they started, only with more living people on the peninsula and they were all three years younger.

The tunnel was neat. Crammed, but neat. After being discovered, the Northern army coated the walls of the tunnel in black coal dust-type-stuff to try and convince the South that it was really just a mining tunnel and not a military operation at all. The South wiped off the dust, revealing granite, and the rest kinda told itself.

Another neat bit of the tour was when we went up a mountain to a place called the Dora Observatory. It was (is?) a briefing room, and has the North-facing wall made entirely out of windows, ostensibly to allow the brief-ees to look at the jerks they're being told about by the brief-ers. It was really really hazy **side story here, I'll put it at the end** so it was quite hard to see much besides scenery, but outside they had those tourist binocular-things where you pop in a coin and get to see really far for about 3 minutes or something. I found some that said "for military use only" and then discovered that they were always on and didn't need any coins, and then discovered that they either didn't mean the sign that said "for military use only" or they weren't paying attention. Either that or I'm on a list now and have a very short time to live. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Anyway, the binoculars were surprisingly effective at cutting through the fog that I was expecting to be seeing close-up, and they actually revealed a decent view of the stuff that you could actually find. I saw the North's flag on a huge steel flagpole, a propaganda village, and an industrial complex at work. It was all very neat, and eerie at the same time.

One thing the tour guide told us is that up to a few years ago, both sides actually had enormous sound systems set up to blast the other side with propaganda about how awesome it was to live there. Any visitors to the observatory would be bombarded by party tunes from the North, along with a narrator that continuously told you (in Korean) how wonderful life was up there and how much everyone was enjoying having so little food that they have to boil the bark off trees and eat that for breakfast lunch and dinner. I was a little sad that they stopped doing that, since it would've been really cool to hear.

Incidentally, the reason that there are no pictures accompanying this post is that for the vast majority of the tour, you're not allowed to take pictures at all. Most of the time, if they see you taking pictures you run a very good chance of being arrested and treated as a likely spy for the North. I can't imagine that'd make for an awesome Saturday, so I left my camera at home.

So those were the two main stops on the tour. At some point I think I'll be going on another one with some other foreign folks from here to visit Panmunjom and then my "Biggest Military Standoff in the World" tour will finally be complete.

Oh yeah, one more thing. On this particular tour, they spent a lot of time really emphasizing the efforts to re-unify Korea (or Corea -- I'll explain that later too). To me, it seems like a pipe dream as long as there's still a Kim dynasty loony running stuff up North, but whatever. I suppose it's good to have dreams. Point of interest -- it's now very weird for me to say "South Korea" referring to the country in which we now live. I just call it Korea. It's even weird for me to hear other people call it that. Here, they just call it Korea. It's not two countries to Koreans, it's one that's been divided for 50 years. Any maps of Korea that you see in schools will have the entire peninsula, and all the provinces and cities of the North labelled in exactly the same way that the cities in the South are. Even officially, the country's aren't called North and South Korea. "North Korea" is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (which is funny because the only thing that's accurate about that name is the word "Korea") and "South Korea" is simply the "Republic of Korea."

The last place that we went on the tour was a newly build train station that eventually is supposed to be a connecting station to catch passenger trains to the North. It's quite huge, so they're really thinking big. Anyway, they had a couple passport stamps specifically for that place, so my passport has those in it now.

**side story ahead**

I found out why it was so hazy. Apparently every spring for a couple weeks the Gobi desert spends most of its time being battered by winds that kick up a whole crap-load of yellow sand/dust and carry it over the Yellow Sea and dump it on to Korea. This is completely normal for Koreans. To the point where Betty actually asked us, "You don't get yellow dust in the springtime in Canada?"

This weekend (it's Saturday today) we're playing at Pearl Jam for a birthday party, and next week there's another show in Seoul. Updates and information to follow. I'll put up the posters for the Seoul show too.

Later all!

Oh yeah, the Korea/Corea thing. Well you see kids, back in the day, Korea was spelled with a "C". At least, the western name for it was. The Koreans call their country 한국 which is fine cause it's their country and they can call it what they want. It reads Han Gook, which I think is the origin-point of "gook" as a racial slur against orientals (which is not a racial slur at all here, no matter what anyone tells you). Anyway, back to the story. Around the turn of the 20th century, Japan went on another conquering binge and took over Corea. Over the course of their near-50-year occupation, it occured to the Japanese that it was slanderous and horrifying to have a colonized state with a name that supercedes their alphabetically, so they renamed it with a "K" so that in an alphabetical list, Korea would be below Japan.

I swear I'm not making this up. I've got a shirt that I bought at Pearl Jam, and the owner always spells it Corea on everything -- business cards, shirts, everything.

Okay that's that. On with my Saturday!

Highlights from a visit

2006-03-07T09:42:00.000-05:00

So this post will more than make up for a couple weeks of blog inactivity, I promise. It will take you on a whirlwind journey through the neatest bits of the last couple weeks, and leave you gasping for air.

If it doesn't, once you're finished, go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again, but hold your breath this time. That oughta do it.

For starters, these last couple weeks, our friend Veronica has been here visiting from Peterborough. It's always great to see familiar faces and get to show people from back home around this crazy country (hint, hint, hint to anyone who's considering a trip to the far east!). We went to some pretty neat places, and hopefully she had a good time, notwithstanding the *ahem* eccentricities of Korean cuisine.

The rest of this post will be broken down into days, but not necessarily dates, cause my memory has enough trouble extending beyond breakfast this morning.

So without further ado:

DAY 1 (or something. The trip to Sangdangsanseong at any rate)

So some of you may remember seeing this post WAY back when. These pictures are from the same place, a mountain fortress about 4km outside of the city. Really quite a nice place, and we discovered that it's even nicer when it's not the day after you finished a 20-odd hour trip to a brand new country where you'll be living for the next terrifying year. Really, it's awesome. There's a 4.3km wall that follows a mountain ridge surrounding a valley area where historically the support troops, etc for the fortress would be housed and have their barracks and armories and other stuff. Now, however, there are a bunch of little restaurants and tiny hotels and stuff, as well as a little farming village in the valley.

Anyway, here's a picture of Veronica and Becca with one of the gates along the wall in the background.

And here's a shot looking along the wall into the distance.

So that was a neat day. Good times were (I think) had by all.

DAY 10 (or something. The first day of the concert weekend in Seoul anyway)

We were (as far as I was aware) supposed to be doing a sound check at the club at 6:00pm on Saturday, so Veronica, Becca and I headed up to Seoul Friday night, so we could get a day's sightseeing in beforehand. Jess and Brandon (awesome people) let us crash at their place on both nights of the weekend, which was excellent.

So on Saturday morning we awoke and got on our way. Our first stop was a palace called Changdeokgung, which served as a secondary palace compound for the ruling families of the Joseon dynasty (the primary palace is about ten minutes up the road from this one). Seoul has been the capital of the Korean peninsula for centuries, so there are loads of old palaces all over the place, and we've always been meaning to take a tour of one, so we were super excited. Brace yourself, cause there are a bunch of pictures on the way.

This is the main gate of the palace compound:

You aren't allowed inside the compound unless you're on a guided tour, which seemed a little silly at first, but once you combine the knowledge of how FREAKING HUGE this compound is with the fact that after only a few years of being open to the general public back in the 1970s, the whole place had to undergo about 5 years of renovations, it gets a little more understandable.

The next place we encountered was the Throne Hall:

It's a little hard to see in this picture, but if you look closely you can see the throne hall in the background. Just kidding. Actually, if you look closely at the ground, you can see that there is a walkway that's been raised in a two-tier fashion leading to the throne room. The highest tier was only to be walked on by the royal family. No-one else was allowed to set foot on it. The next tier was reserved for the royal family's closest servants and officials. The rest of the folks had to walk on the regular ground.

You'll also notice the rows of stones that look like headstones along the pathway. Those are rank indicators. During processions and other official ceremonies, various dignitaries and officials stood according to their level of office, each behind their designated rock.

Here's a better view of the rocks.

Inside the Throne Hall, as the more insightful of you have probably already guessed, is the Throne. It's really quite an impressive chair.

Say what you want about Korean dynasties. They knew how to build a chair.

The next bit that we saw were the various living quarters. Interesting tidbit. According to Confucianist moralism, the king and queen had to be separate during the day, so they each had their own separate living quarters. At night, however, they still shared a bedroom. And not just any bedroom, OH NO! A bedroom with THIS over the doorway!

That sign says in Chinese (roughly) "Place for the Making of Great Things"

Seriously.

They couldn't be together during the day, but at night they both tucked themselves in to the "Place for the Making of Great Things".

Moving on.

We also saw another group of living quarters, which also gave an excellent example of old-school ondol heating systems. For those of you not in "the know," the ondol heating system is perhaps Korea's greatest contribution to the maintenance of foot warmth ever. Almost every Korean building/room features this delightful invention. The modern incarnation is in the form of heated pipes running under the floor, causing the entire surface to be warm/hot, heating the rest of the room that way. Back in the day, they could only heat concrete-floored rooms, because there would actually be a furnace underneath, keeping everything NICE and toasty.

We also got to see a garage featuring some of the royal family's cars:

The picture didn't turn out wonderfully because the cars were all behind glass, but you get the idea.

The palace compound also features a "secret garden," thus named because only the royal family were allowed inside, lending it a certain ambiance of secrecy and mystery from the point of view of the common folk, who have a habit of being the ones responsible for coming up with the names for all these wacky places.

We didn't see it, not cause it's still a secret, but just cause it's closed during the winters. We did see a really cool lotus pond (completely devoid of ... lotuses? Loti?... flowers because it was, as I've implied, winter).

There was also a building that we found out was an ancient university right there as well. Looks like a sweet place to study.

On our way back out, we passed by a cool little stone archway. The inscription is made up of ancient-style Chinese characters, but the gist of it is that whenever you pass under the archway, you add a year to your lifespan.

I went under about 4-5 times, just to be safe, but I never stopped wondering how many people had hit their heads on the low stone, thereby drastically lowering their life expectancy. Then I stopped tempting the heathen gods and went about my business.

After the palace, we went to Insadong, a really neat market district that we also went to with my parents. It was insanely busy that day. Here are two pictures, facing opposite directions, to give you an idea of the crowds.

Just outside of the Insadong area, we stumbled upon a really cool looking gold-ish (if not golden) spire type thing. Right in the middle of a street.

It was about at this point that I was told over the phone that we didn't actually have a sound check planned for that night, which cause enough problems later at the actual show, but which had the pleasant bonus of allowing me to accompany other folks at dinner. We went to a place called Carnie Station, because 22,000won for a meal of all you can eat and drink sounds pretty sweet.

This is what we saw (bearing in mind that I kept the picture-taking in the restaurant to a minimum).

Basically, it's a help-yourself Korean BBQ restaurant. Magical.

Not really entirely worth it financially due to the overall cheapness of food here, but still something to see.

From there we went to the show, which you've already read about, so I'll skip ahead to...

DAY 11 (or something. The second day of the concert weekend in Seoul anyway)

So on Sunday we got up, fairly late, and proceeded to sit around for a while longer while we figured out, with Brandon and Jess, what we wanted to do with ourselves that day. We ended up deciding to go back to Insadong, since there was still some more shopping to be done and the crowds were such the day before that it was occasionally uncomfortable to just stroll around and look at all the really neat stuff they have there.

Including an inexplicably terrifying installation art display that was made to look like it was supposed to be the kind of thing that kids would play in, only without the inevitable psychological scarring that would invariably result in a 4-year-old's exposure to this:

WHAT THE CRAP IS THAT THING?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

JEEZ!!!

Anyway, after some more shopping, Brandon and Jess took us to this really rad restaurant (always avoid alliteration) that totally feels like you're eating in a huge treehouse. It's full of little rooms that seem to appear from nowhere, and semi-floors where you're able to sit, but not stand, and neat stuff like that.

This kinda gives you the idea:

The food was excellent, but the best part was this incredibly delicious bamboo leaf wine that they had. It comes in a bamboo chute decanter thing, and the cups are also bamboo. Totally awesome. Tasted like apple juice.

After dinner, we bid them a fond adieu (they're currently at the start of a one-month tour of S-E Asia -- jerks) and came back to Cheongju.

Another week of us doing our regular, fairly boring routine, and Veronica was on her way back to Canada, after an all-nighter, a 4:30am bus ride from Cheongju to Incheon, and then we took a 9am bus back to Cheongju, a cab back to our place, and fell into bed to sleep away the rest of our Saturday.

Good times.

So there's your long-awaited update. There's more stuff happening this weekend (hint: it involves the letters D, M and Z) so look for another update fairly soon.

Till then,

Ta-ta!

1st band night

2006-02-28T11:35:00.000-05:00

So the weekend of the 25th has past. Ryan, I and a whole bunch of Cheoungju people went to Seoul to eat at a tasty all you can eat buffet and then go to their show. The club itself was a fair size with a fairly good musical instrument setup. Here is the link to the poster advertising the show they played in.

As you can see this is not your typical club. Punk, acid hiphop and ska are the main types of music played there. The show, as you can see, was originally scheduled for March 18, but was bumped back a week. You can still get an idea of the type of club they were playing in.

The guys did a fantastic job despite some instrumental setbacks (the guy on guitar broke all of his strings and had to grab another guitar). The Beatles and YMCA sounded great!
This is my favorite picture of the evening!

Ryan was especially on beat (rythmatically correct), I might add. He's great!

They finished up there and we went our separate ways in Seoul only to be called back again to another bar at 3:00 am in the morning where they just played for fun. Brandon and Jess (friends of ours in Seoul) were kind enough to let us stay with them and come hear the shows.

All in all, a wonderful evening.

A post describing the rest of the weekend is on its way.

Valentine's Day and other exciting info

2006-02-16T09:11:00.000-05:00

Hello All!

Just wanted to let everyone know that although everywhere else February 14th is a day filled with "I love you" 's, the exchange of gifts and a romantic night out, here it is the official Korean chocolate day. Essentially, Valentine's day here is a holiday where females give chocolate to their enamoured male counterparts. It's been really funny these past two weeks because pink is a very big colour for men in these parts and so most of the chocolate filled baskets that have been done up are huge lacy pink affairs. It's great! Now, I would of course be rather morose during this post if this wonderful country had not made up its own holiday to counter the celebratory inbalance. White day, March 14, is a holiday designed for males giving females candy. I can't wait.

Now to the most important part of this post. Ryan has been playing drums with a couple of guys when they all happen to be out at the pub at the same time for a while now. Shockingly, the bar owner (named Ji-aon, good guy) has scheduled them to play in a club in Seoul! Needless to say they are fantastic. It's great to sit back and listen to them play. I'm a little concerned about the throngs of Korean women "putting off their wears" as Ji-aon so eloquently put it. He has asserted that this is a norm for popular Korean bands. Although my initial reaction was to imagine purchasing a rather large beating stick, (nothing like 'lay'n the beats' I hear) I think I'm just going to go and encourage fully clothed appreciation for Ryan's band. They're playing on the 25th so wish them luck! They're awesome!

A visit

2006-02-12T11:57:00.000-05:00

So on January 27, 2006, a momentous occasion took place.

Pat and Judy Paulsen (also known as mom and dad to some) arrived in Korea.

That's right, folks!! THIS is the post talking about their whirlwind tour of this wild and wacky country, only slightly after-the-fact.

It was a really great visit, despite its brevity. On the Friday, Becca and I took at bus from Cheongju to Incheon (the city that actually has the international airport -- about 45-60 minutes away from Seoul) once I was finished work, and met them at the Incheon Airport Hotel. They were pretty jet lagged after the ridiculously long travel time, but we dragged them out to a galbi restaurant near the hotel, so they got their first taste of Korean cuisine right away. They weren't hungry, so they didn't eat much, but they both tried it, and liked it, which was a good sign.

Saturday, we went into Seoul, dropped off their luggage at Jess and Brandon's apartment, two friends of ours that have featured in a couple other fascinating installments thus far, and proceded to show them around a bit. We went to Insadong, a really cool pedestrian shopping neighbourhood with loads of little crafty-type shops and street vendors and cafes and the like. From Insadong, we then went to show them the aquarium at the COEX mall, which we've already shown you pictures of, so we're not going to bother doing so again. After the aquatic festivities, we went to Itaewon to eat at a fabulous Indian restaurant we frequent, and then down to the bus terminal to pick up our luggage and make our way back to our humble abode here in Cheongju.

Then sleep.

On Sunday, we slept in and lazed around a bit, and then went to church, showing them the various rooms and neat features of the church itself, and after the service going back home for a bit. When we got back, we took them to our favourite local galbi place, where they got a more expansive example of a typical Korean dinner spread (plus they were a little more awake for this one). We were really happy that it was even open, because most of Korea was closed in celebration of Solnal, the huge lunar new year holiday.

Monday was a trip to Songnisan, the national park about an hour away featuring the enormous Buddha statue and loads of really cool temple pagodas and stuff. It was regrettably cloudy and chilly that day, but the park is still spectacular, and a good time was had by all. After getting back to Cheongju, we went to an awesome chicken restaurant, then dad and I went and played poker with some other foreigners and mom and Becca went and hung out together for a while.

Tuesday I was supposed to work while Becca had the day off, but because she's awesome, she worked it out so she could switch with me, so in the morning we all hung out together and walked around our neighbourhood a bit, and in the afternoon, I took mom and dad down to the downtown area of Cheongju. We had coffee at the biggest coffee shop in town (called New Yorker for those who are curious by nature) and then went to check out the Yukgeori covered market, where you can browse anything from piles of frying pans to buckets of pig heads and pretty much everything in between.

Wednesday morning (we were still on a morning schedule at that point) mom and dad came into the school with us to see some of the kids we teach.

This picture was taken in my grade 3/4 split class immediately after one of the boys in the front row responded to my "How are you, Kevin?" with an exhuberant "I'M DIRTY!"

I swear I have no idea where he came up with that. I was as shocked as you are.

This is Becca with a class of three fourth-grade girls who have phenomenal English for having never studied outside of Korea. They're also really well behaved and less apt to say things like the kid in my class.

As soon as we were finished our classes for the morning (I still had a middle school class later that afternoon) we rushed hope, got mom and dad and their luggage and jumped in a taxi to head down to the bus terminal, where we bid our goodbyes, hardly able to believe that the visit was over already, and put them on a bus to make the 2.5 hour trip to Incheon by themselves.

They survived.

All in all, as I've said, it was awesome to have them, despite the short length of their stay, and anyone else who'd like to come for a visit is more than welcome!

That's all for now, folks!!

A trip to Seoul that wasn't the most recent trip, but happened since the one we talked about in our last post.

2006-02-07T00:14:00.000-05:00

So a while ago (I'm not even sure exactly when at this point -- a couple weekends ago at any rate) we went to Seoul (again) to visit Brandon and Jess, a couple that we met doing out TESL course in Peterborough.

It was good fun as always.

On the way to their new place (still in Itaewon, but about ten minutes' walk from where they used to live) we had to take a pedestrian underpass that we'd never been in before, and there was some really neat graffiti.

What was really striking was both the size of these pictures, and the medium in which they were drawn. They're entirely drawn using black permanent marker, and they're huge. We didn't get a shot of one of us standing beside them for scale, cause we didn't think of it, but they're about my height on the wall.

Anyway, so that was cool.

Once we got to Jess and Brandon's place, they showed us around their new apartment, which was beautiful. We went up to see the view from their roof, which is accessed via a particularly precarious stairway.

That night we went to hang out with some friends of theirs, and on the way stopped and got the best pizza I've had so far in Korea. It was also the most unique, since we bought it out of the back of a truck.

5,000 won got you a roughly 8-10 inch pizza with whatever toppings he had that you wanted, and it was delicious to the max.

The next day, Jess and Becca went to see a performance of Notre Dame de Paris, performed by the original French cast. Apparently it was spectacular, but I didn't go, so that's about all the details you're going to get from me.

Brandon and I went to check out Insadong, which is a neat little somewhat touristy market area. It was cool, because it was touristy without being full of Itaewon-style crappy tourist souvenir shops and more traditional craft and artisan shops as well as restaurants everywhere and loads of stuff to see. It was awesome.

I didn't get any pictures of Insadong, but I did get a shot of a really cool high-rise building on the way back.

I later found out that this is the (a?) Samsung building.

I also got a picture of a parked car to give y'all an idea of how steep some of the streets/driveways are in parts of Seoul. As I've said before, Korea's a very lumpy country, so the bigger cities all end up seeping up hills and around mountains and stuff, resulting in some awesome winding alleys and streets, but also some very steep climbs for cars.

That's not even the steepest incline we've seen cars parked on, it just happened to be positioned to give a good idea of the angle.

Anyway, that about sums up that trip, and we've gotten *REALLY* behind on our updating (for anyone still left reading this), so hopefully within the next day or two there'll be a couple more posts.

Bye for now!

A trip to Seoul that happened a while ago...

2006-01-23T07:45:00.000-05:00

So a few weeks ago we went to Seoul with a Korean family that Becca met at dance class.

It was fun, although there were some misadventures with finding them and getting to the right bus/train/subway station etc, but once those were cleared up, we had a pretty good time.

We met up with some extended family of the girls that do dance with Becca (an aunt and a tiny and incredibly cute little cousin), and drove downtown Seoul to go to the National Palace Museum, which is conveniently located right next to ... you guessed it... a palace! YAY!!!!!

By the way, these pictures aren't in chronological order, just "the way I choose to tell the story" order. Deal with it.

Anyway, inside the museum there were all sorts of artifacts and paintings and stuff from the various dynasties of Korea. No, they didn't have different versions of the 1970s soap opera. I mean like "series of kings spanning decades and centuries" type dynasties. We got our pictures taken with the kids and family in front of some murals of various palaces and royal ceremonies.

Observe:

After the museum tour, we drove to meet the uncle responsible for the cute baby cousin. However, on the way, we decided to stop for more pictures in front of some incredible light displays outside of a department store downtown.

After meeting up with the uncle in question, we also go to meet another aunt and a grandmother of the family. The uncle lived for a long time in the US, and actually works for the USDA in Seoul. He speaks a ridiculous number of languages, too. Anyway, for dinner we went to TGI Friday's, which was awesome, cause we haven't had that much in the way of western food (I had a pizzadilla!!). Here's a shot of Becca and the mom of the kids that take dance:

And another with the uncle, aunt and aforementioned cute little cousin:

Anyway, that pretty much brings us to the end of the day. It was a great time and we really enjoyed ourselves.

It was a while ago, and stuff's happened since, so there'll hopefully be another post coming shortly with more pictures of a different trip to Seoul, among other things!

Bye!

Christmas and Family

2006-01-14T00:28:00.000-05:00

My family came to visit! It was amazing to have them here after being away for 4 months (I can't believe it's been this long). It was quite a task to get them. They arrived in Korea on Christmas day. It was an eventful day, I mean, of course, Christmas has always been eventful and this by no means was more eventful than, say, the first Christmas, but you know what I mean. Chrtistmas is not really a big deal here in Korea. Thirty percent of the population is Christian but the holiday is quite small in comparison to the two main holidays Chuseok and Solnal. This has the benefit of lessoning the materialistic feel of a Christmas in North America that begins the day after Halloween, but there was a feel that Christmas came without the Chebang that it is entitled to!

Christmas morning we made our way to the car rental shop to pick up the car that we had reserved to pick up my parents, brother and their luggage. Unfortunately upon arrival we were told that a Korean licence was not sufficent to rent a car. Pardon? We're in Korea. For some reason, Koreans can use Korean licences to get cars. Unfortunately, foreigners can only use International Drivers licences to get cars in Korea. We didn't get it, but it's really not all that unusual here for plans to change. We were presented with the option of renting a car without any insurance. We declined as in Korea you get honked at if you stop at a red light at night and the country does not believe in stop signs (amazingly they figure it out though).
And so we arrived at the bus station, took the bus to Incheon, the airport, and waited for their flight. Due to a miscommunication about flights we were sort-of maybe waiting at the wrong gate. Miraculously, my brother stumbled upon us waiting for them and it all got sorted out. Thank goodness!

The rest of the trip went smoothly and we didn't lose them again. Christmas was spectacular and they brought us many much missed items from home - my grandmothers' jam and shortbread cookies along with Christmas presents, and maple and oreo cookies!
My parents came into the school we work at and got to see some of the students who are participating in a penpal program with their school. Bruce came out with us for his first $17 all you can drink night and experienced the neon jungle that is Korea after 9:00pm.
For New Years we went to Seoul and my parents Christmas shopped it up. We were actually able to rent a car with insurance with another company and got them to Daecheon near the ocean. A little too cold for swimming but the beach is renowned for sea shells. There they had exciting cultural and language barrier experiences that are quite frequent. The two elevators in the hotel went only to odd or even floors. Try understanding that in Korean. Pools here have very specific rules and regulations. Who really knows what they are?! The lifeguards just kind of yell sometimes. All in all I think they had a good time. We were a little worried about what kind of food they would enjoy but I think that we've been here long enough to safely navigate towards the galbi bliss as opposed to the octopus (think spicy rubber bands in hot water, and you're close).

Anyway, it was a phenomenal visit. We loved it. We want some more of it. Therefore if anyone is intersted in vacationing in Korea, we would love to have you!

So we've been bad...

2006-01-12T21:32:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, yes. It's been forever since our last update.

The first reason is that we were busy hosting Becca's family. After they left, we've just been lazy. There. I said it.

However, this isn't the (possibly) long-awaited update. This is the promise of a fothcoming update. The visit with Becca's parents and brother was phenomenal. Loads of fun (I think) had by all. New foods were tried, new traffic laws (and their inability to actually affect what happens on the road) were witnessed, and Korean fermented beverages were sampled. Good times had by all (again, I think).

Anyway, a more detailed update coming up. This is just to let people know that we're still alive, and that the visit was awesome.

Oh yeah, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!! (which in Korean I believe is spelled 세헤 복마니 파드세요 - but either way it sounds like "se-he-bokmani-padusayo")

New souvenir

2005-12-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

So Yesterday (Monday) morning I got a Korean driver's licence in preparation for the car rental and pick-up of Becca's parents, who arrive on the 25th (that's Christmas to the holiday-ly impaired) -- about which we are ridiculously excited, I might add.

I thought that it (the licence) would be harder to get, since I didn't even think to get an international licence before we left Canada, but all I needed to bring was my alien card, passport, three pictures (which cost 7000 won at a local dept store), my Canadian driver's licence and 10,000 won.

I filled in the forms, paid the money, and got an eye exam. Then they wanted to make sure that I could do one deep knee bend in a row, and was fully capable of wiggling my fingers.

Seriously. I had to squat then stand up again and wiggle the fingers on both hands in order to get my licence. But no road test. Just finger wiggling and squats.

Anyway, now I can legally drive (a car) in Korea, and have a nifty souvenir. Also, it seems that this licence doesn't expire for another 10 years, which is neat. I'm not sure why, but It's neat.

here it is:

A kimchi-making, plate-tossing extravaganza!

2005-12-17T07:46:00.000-05:00

So Saturday night we had our early Christmas present to ourselves. We went to this. They're usually based in Seoul, and I'd heard good things, so when I found out that they were in Cheongju for the weekend, I jumped on the chance.

It was intense.

Basically, it's an almost completely non-verbal performance, which is obviously right up our alley. The show was a kind of cross between Stomp, The Iron Chef, The Court Jester, an old kung fu movie and the Three Stooges. Translation: it was awesome.

The premise is that there are three chefs at a wedding hall, two men and a woman, and there's a wedding for which they have 1 hour to prepare. Now, normally this wouldn't be a problem, but these particular chefs can't seem to resist the temptation to drum on anything and everything they have at their disposal. Add to the mix the managers clumsy and lazy nephew and WATCH OUT! You've got a recipe for DISASTER!

Anyway, it was a whole lot funnier than either of us were expecting, and they did cool things like take people from the audience up on stage, and throw things into the crowd. Such a great show. So if you ever find yourself in Korea and can't think of anything to do, and happen to see a poster that Nanta is performing in your town, you now know what you have to do.

Birthday

2005-12-12T07:29:00.000-05:00

My birthday....

Was amazing! The entire day was really wonderful. At work they got cake and a present for me! The present was a beautiful Korean tea set thing -- very unique. The cake was also ... unique. Nothing beats sweet potato on pizza apparently here. Sweet potato ice cream is likewise a favorite. I was utterly shocked though, at the Sweet potato cake that everyone enjoyed in the office! They actually cook the sweet potatoes and make a mush that they put as a layer of the cake. It wasn't that bad. Ryan was unfortunately on another anti vegetable binge in hopes of catching scurvy and therefore did not partake in the potato fun. (they have a lot of potato fun in Korea).

On the Friday night we had real cake (delicious) and also crab. Now I had mentioned that us cooking crab would be a neat thing to do together for my birthday and there happen to be an abundance of live crabs in the supermarket. What I didn't know, unfortunately is that the arch nemesis of Ryan, from the aquarium we went to, were also at the grocery store. I'm at work and Ryan has gone off to pick out a crab. He comes back and mentions that we do not have a pot large enough to hold the crab that he has gotten so it will be cooked at the grocery store. I become suspicious. We have rather large pots you see. Unusual, but perhaps crabs have longer legs than I am imagining. I get home and find a ferocious looking gigantic crab that Ryan is gleefully attempting to hack the limbs off. The giant crabs differ from normal crabs in several ways but the most important of these is the spikes that they have protruding from their exoskeleton. Think of a giant rose stem you initially hack off and then break open to eat. I think it was the best birthday present ever to have Ryan assert his 'provider' role while wrestling with a giant dead spiky thing. It was hilarious!

The following day we went to Seoul (that's right, it was a two day affair!) where I got a birthday present of boots and did Christmas shopping.

Well that's about it!

EDIT: photo server's back up. Here are the pictures:

First off, the crab itself:

Secondly, the epic battle:

It's...

2005-12-03T11:05:00.000-05:00

SNOWING!!!!!

Did you know...

2005-11-29T03:57:00.000-05:00

... 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...

2005-11-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

...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

2005-11-19T13:19:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-16T11:55:00.000-05:00

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?

2005-11-11T14:57:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-07T21:37:00.000-05:00

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...

2005-11-05T22:42:00.000-05:00

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.

Korean Kontradictions, Aircraft acrobatics and aquariums

2005-10-25T10:55:00.000-04:00

So before I go into details about this past weekend, let me first say this: for those of you unaware, I happen to be married to the greatest person ever. Just thought I ought to clear that up.

Secondly, I'd like to share with you something I've learned about Korea. This place is a land of contradicions. For starters, I present this picture, which, although it is most likely simply another error in translation, presents a good example of what I'm talking about:

Another aspect of Korean society is that it is incredibly contradictory about body image and sexuality. For instance, although there is a word for sex in Korean, it is rarely if ever used. They almost always speak in inuendo rather than say the word sex. Also, despite the fact that relatively provocative images are still seen in the media, conservative is the word when it comes to standard Korean dress, especially for women. All of this was what made the following display at the entrance to a housewares store that much more surprising.

A housewares store, don't forget.

So these are cushions on sale that are supposed to be representations (apparently) of the breasts of Cameron Diaz and Beyonce from Destiny's Child. So weird.

Anyway, on to the actual events of the weekend. Becca had prepared a surprise for Saturday, which was amazing since she doesn't particularly like all the logistic stuff involved in things like this, especially in another language. This weekend was the Seoul International Air Show, which she (correctly) thought that I would be interested in attending. It was awesome. We got there a little late since there were a couple accidents backing up traffic on the freeway, adding an extra 45 minutes to the bus travelling time, but we still got near enough to the airfield to watch (for free!) some acrobatic flight teams doing some neat tricks. Observe some of their sky art:

On our way back to the subway after the airshow, we witnessed an interesting thing about Koreans: their absolutely screwed up (non-existant?) taste buds. I mean, any country where the children thoroughly enjoy the taste of rotten cabbage covered in red pepper paste has obviously got its share of culinary difficulties, but this crap completely takes the cake:

What's that, you ask? Well I'll tell you. That, my friends and family, is a big pot of boiled silk-worm larvae. And the kiddies LOVE it. That's an actual Korean child (no paid actors here, let me tell you) digging into a paper cup full of the little wormy critters, served piping-hot and nauseatingly aromatic at roadside stands in various corners and events all over Korea. Yeah.

Right beside the pot above is another pot serving up cups full of river snails. This guy sat down right beside us, slurping away on them. They're really tiny, and you need to just suck them out of their shells. I've actually tried them, and they're not *bad*, per se, just useless. They're so small that you can hardly even notice them before you swallow them. Not a lot of point, in my opinion, but this guy seemed to be enjoying them:

But enough about horrendous "food". The next place we went was an incredibly pleasant surprise. Becca had read about this place called the COEX mall, where they've got loads of neat interactive stuff to do and see, including (according to the book she was reading) a couple sound-proof booths containing drum kits that you can wail away on for free. She figured that it'd be fun (which it would have been) so we decided to mosey on down and see what was available. Unfortunately, we weren't able to find any such mythical place in the mall. We did see the housewares store with the interesting array of pillows seen above, and we did see something you wouldn't see in Canada, store-wise:

Yup. It's a board game cafe. You go in, order a capuccino and sit down to play a round of your favourite board game with your friends. They're also all over the place here.

Anyway, the really cool part was the aquarium that they have in this mall-thingy. I wasn't holding out too much hope for it, being that it's an aquarium inside a mall, but we paid the 14,000 won each to get in and started on our way.

It started out fairly dull, featuring various forms of tiny, household-pet-sized freshwater fish in household-pet-sized aquariums, so we were getting a little worried, but it turned out to get better and better the further along we went.

Before we got to any really big fish, we entered a little room where they had a bunch of installation-art-esque aquariums set up. Like so:

They also had a Coke machine, a fridge and a couple TVs (185 channels -- nothin' but fish). Overall a pretty neat way of caging fish.

Then came the really rad stuff. They had an amazing array of fish from all over the world in this aquarium. Stuff ranging from huge (and apparently irrisistably attractive) river fish from the Amazon:

to awesomely huge moray eels:

to incredibly cool things called sea dragons:

They also had a couple of those really big aquariums featuring full-wall windows and sharks, sea turtles and marlins swimming around inside (so freakin' cool) including those neat plexiglass tunnels you can walk through and have sharks etc swim right over your head.

They also had a tank with a few giant spider crabs inside. These things are terrifyingly huge. For anyone who hasn't heard the story, I've developed a healthy respect for the strength of crabs since I saw a medium sized one snap a thick, hard, plastic ashtray in two with its one big crushin' claw. *shudder*

That said, it's easy to understand how I found this a little unnerving:

For size reference, the body of this jerk is about the size of my outspread hand.

So, I was busy marvelling at the size and potential bone-crushingness of this little fella, when I happened to look up and see the following. Again, for size reference, the rock to which this particular monster is attached was roughly the size of my torso, if not a little bit bigger. I don't even care if you believe me. I still shudder a little to think about it.

Ridiculous.

Oh yeah, and before we left, I got caught in some sort of weird undersea vortex.

I got out safely though. Boy was *that* an adventure!

Anyway, once the aquarium experience was finished, we decided to go and eat at an Indian restaurant that Becca had read about in Itaewon. It was delicious, but not quite as delicious as the last (cheaper) Indian buffet restaurant we visited, which was good cause now we know we can save money and have incredibly excellent Indian food at the first place. Anyway, the food was still spectacular. Afterwards, we decided that we had most likely missed the last bus back to Cheongju, so we'd better get a room somewhere so we didn't have a repeat of our last little Itaewon experience. Wanna see what 30,000 won will get you by way of a hotel room in a grubby area of Seoul? No? Then would the concerned parents involved kindly look elsewhere while scrolling down to the next bit of this post? Thank you.

Here's our room (note that Becca was at the doorway and was still too close to even get the opposite wall fully into the picture):

I'm lying across the bed sideways, so don't think that. It was a regular double bed, but it stretched the whole way from one wall to the other, and probably would have done the same the other way. However, the room did have a decent shower in the bathroom, clean sheets/bedding a tiny TV (that actually worked once I fiddled with the cable connection a bit) and an air conditioner, so it really wasn't that bad.

Here's the grand entrance:

I would've taken pictures of the surrounding neighbourhood (at night) but I was afraid that our parents may have some sort of coronary, so I figured it'd be best to try to catch it at its most flattering. What do you think?

To those of you currently worrying about parental mental health, I know for a fact that both of my parents have stayed in places of the same, or lesser, quality, so they'll be alright. To the Sheppards, if there are any lasting psychological injuries as a result of these pictures, I offer my heartfelt apologies.

So that brings us to another incredibly long, potentially boring, post updating y'all on our weekend wanderings. Hope you've enjoyed the retelling, and there are more pictures of the aquarium available if you would really like. I'll most likely wait until I talk to you on MSN or until we get back though. HAHAHA!

I'm going to bed. G'night.

Our trip to Songnisan

2005-10-20T14:18:00.000-04:00

So last weekend was our first non-Seoul-related experience with Korea outside of Cheongju by ourselves.

Shut up! It was a big step!

Anyway, we went to a national park near us called Songnisan. It's about a 90 minute bus ride away, and due to the wonderfully cheap transportation here, only cost us 5600won each, one-way.

This trip showed us a couple things:
1)It's interesting to be in a place where Buddhism is an actual religion, rather than mostly just a fad.
2) Korea can actually be a beautiful country, once you get away from the relatively dirty, crowded and noisy cities:

3) Buddha is always *HUGE*

Seriously:

The latter is a relief of Buddha carved into the side of a huge rock. The former is sortof the main attraction of Songnisan, but before I'll get into details in a second. I found it odd that we paid admission to get in to this park (a meagre 8000won each, but still) when it is a fully-functional place of worship for Buddhists in Korea. All the pagodas surrounding the huge Buddha statue had other smaller (but still enormous in their own right) statues, and places for people to light incense/candles and mats for prostrating yourself in prayer. I just wonder how the pilgrims feel about being charged upon entry. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, technically, it's a lot closer to here, if here is where I'm writing, and there is where most of you are reading, but that's irrelevant too.

So, about that huge statue...

It's apparently the second biggest statue of Buddha in Korea, and I swear it wasn't Maxwell Smart who told me. It's 33m high. Until a couple years ago, it was made of bronze, having been completed in this most recent incarnation (GET IT? HAH!!!) in 1994. In 2002 it was covered in solid gold. For some very peculiar reasons....

Does anyone else find at least one of those reasons a bit out of place? I mean, it's tenuous at best to link world peace with laying over 160 pounds of solid gold onto a 33 metre Buddha statue, but "to commemorate the successful organization of the 2002 World Cup"? I don't know much about the specifics of "guardian Buddhism", but I'd be willing to hazard a guess that whatever's involved in its "inheritance" may have actually been the driving reason behind this little endeavour, and the rest are just "Miss America"-style filler reasons, but that may be just me.

In addition to the statue and carvings, there were a bunch of pagodas around, like this one:

...which is the tallest one in Korea. All of them were incredibly beautiful in design, inside and out, but we were informed in no uncertain terms (and without the slightest use of English) that taking pictures inside was a definite no-no. In fact, at the doorway to the above temple, the fact that I pointed to my camera with an inquiring look at an elderly Korean custodian was enough to convince her that at any moment, I was about to completely surrender myself to a veritable orgy of sacriligious shutter-happiness, and needed to be physically shooed away from the pagoda as rapidly as possible. The whole thing was quite amusing. I kept the camera hidden while exploring the inside of the other pagodas (which I was completely free to do).

The temple complex was imressive and everything, but was still only the second coolest thing we saw that day. As you may imagine, a national park (even in a country the size of Korea) encompasses a larger area that just a few pagodas and an enormous gold statue. There are several mountains to climb - with peaks all around the 1000m-high mark - and temples and neat things to see scattered all over the place. One of these was a little path where you could walk barefoot on little pebbles of yellow ocher, which is believed to be able to relieve symptoms of any number of things, including things that we weren't even aware were diseases.

The coolest thing that we saw was also the last before heading home that afternoon. On a big tourist map billboard across the street from the main bus station, there were marked all the main hiking paths up the mountain, to Bopjusa (the name of the temple complex with the huge statue) and around the little village. It also had temples and rest areas marked with little icons.

A bit away from everything else were two temple-esque icons with no marked paths leading to them, and not much in the way of labels. We thought it'd be fun to try to track one of them down. We were also thinking that there would be fewer people around, so it would make for a quieter time. Right on both counts.

We walked down a road that seemed to be heading in the general direction of the closest temple-thing. Keep in mind that apart from the big billboard thing, the maps didn't have these spots listed. After a while on that little road, we notice the village dwindling into widely spaced, more rural-looking dwellings, and finally just into fields of various crops. Then the road itself dwindled into a concrete bath just barely wider than one vehicle. After about 15-20 minutes walking down that path, there was a branch leading off towards the forested mountain, which was just dirt track. We followed that for about 15 minutes, now starting up the mountain, until it ended in a little cul-de-sac. Off from the cul-de-sac was a barely-cleared forest trail, marked by a string of paper lanterns hung through the trees. This was mostly where it started to get cool. The only person we had seen since the village started dwindling away was an old man sitting by the side of the dirt path with a little cart full of sticks and a little saw, smoking away at a pipe. He smiled and waved as we walked past.

So, we started climbing the path through the woods. This'll give you an idea of what the path was like:

Yeah, you see that little blue paper lantern. That's the trail marker. Anyway, we climbed that path for about 30 minutes and finally reached a tiny hermitage, completely nestled up on the side of this mountain. This is the view the hermits have:

It was amazingly quiet and really quite awe-inspiring to think that people actually live there, totally cut off from everything and everyone, just hanging out on the side of their mountain. I think anyone who lives that far into the wilderness deserves to call it "their mountain."

There was a building that was apparently the living quarters, a small garden, and a little temple area, much less ornate than the ones at the tourist centre:

Anyway, that was one of the coolest things we've seen so far. We decided to save the actual mountain climb, which takes approx 3 hours on the way up and 2 on the way down (probably significantly less if you're not picky about your physical well-being upon arrival at the base), for another visit where we can come early and take our time enjoying the scenery.

Is it unusual for me to have had the M*A*S*H theme song stuck in my head intermittently for the past 6 weeks?

First Air Raid Drill

2005-10-16T06:03:00.000-04:00

That's right - Wednesday at 1:00pm in the afternoon we were sitting casually reading at home and a siren starts. Except that it is much louder than a regular siren, cycles at a much slower rate and did not fade away as an ambulance siren would have as the ambulance speeds off. Needless to say this is a very disturbing sound that makes one question how far away the end of the world really is. We look outside and there is no one on the street - no cars drive by. We called Betty, the Korean in charge of our happiness, who is indisposed at the time and does not answer.

Is there a bomb shelter we should go to? Where is this shelter? Should we go outside?

The siren ceases much to our relief only to be replaced by the sound of several planes flying low overhead - increasing our concern once again.

Fifteen minutes later, as there have been no explosions and the world appears to be in the same location as it was before all of the clamor began, we chose to ignore the interuption and file it away in our "So this is what it's like to live in Korea" box of extraordinary.

Upon our arrival at work we were told by Betty that the ruckus had been an air raid drill as they are still in a cold war with North Korea. All Koreans are well aquainted with these drills as they are proformed approximately once a month. Everyone driving must stop while the alarm is sounding and those outside must rush indoors (although the rushing indoors is no longer as mandatory as these drills have gone on for years). Can you imagine air raid drills being a normal event in Canada?!

Another weekend. Funny how these things keep popping up...

2005-10-09T12:48:00.000-04:00

So here we are at the end of another weekend.

This'll be a quick post, I promise, but it does have some neat pictures, so you'll want to read on!

On Saturday, we went to The Cheongju International Craft Biennal 2005 to see what all the fuss was about, and to snoop around for nifty Xmas presents. All in all, it was an amazing place, and we're going again sometime soon after we get our first paycheque (WHICH IS TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!). So many neat things to see, and so many cool things priced very very low (by North American standards).

There were two main sections that we went through. The first was the international craft trade show section thingy. This featured various countries displaying and selling various folk crafts and curios, and was thoroughly impressive. The second was slightly less impressive (only slightly) and featured craftsmen (inclusive term here, men and women represented) from all over Korea.

The first really interesting thing that we saw wasn't part of the show at all, but was a peculiar little creature we found zipping around a bunch of flowers that lined the footbridge, over the main road, leading to the festival. It was a really bizarre thing that kinda looked like a really convincing cross between a tiny hummingbird and a huge moth. Not including its straw/snout appendage thing (what are those called, anyway?), the thing was about two inches long. I hereby dub it the hummingmoth:

Either way it was very cool.

So one of the first things we see as we walk into the main plaza after buying our tickets to the festival (which only cost us 8,000 won each), was a pagoda housing an absolutely enormous bell:

The bell was rung using a huge log chained to the ceiling, which was at this particular time also chained firmly to the floor, immediately squishing any ideas of *someone's* to maybe have a go at ringing the biggest bell ever. I won't mention any names, but I'm sure you can figure out who I'm talking about. It may not be the biggest bell ever, either, but it was easily 15 feet high, which is pretty big for a bell, so quit your nitpicking.

Anyway, I'm not sure what country it was, but the first room we went to in the international display building had several incredibly detailed wood carved cabinet-type things. They were purely ornamental, as there was too much carving to allow for any actual storage space, but looked completely unassuming from the outside. When opened, they looked like this:

They also had a number of dining room sets made out of teak that looked very cool, and some other wood and ceramic crafts that were almost as impressive. Mom, we bought your Christmas present at this booth, but we're not risking shipping, so you'll have to wait until the end of January to get it.

Another room in the building contained one of the most extravagant/impressive things I've ever seen. Observe:

Yes folks, it's a queen size bed made entirely out of jade, with hand-carved head and footboards. Yours for only $30,000. I'm not joking about either of those statements. It was, in a word, unbelievable, so I won't hold it against you if you think that I'm somehow making this up.

So we saw a bunch of other really cool stuff (including an incredibly impressive female drum/dance troupe - ask me and I'll send you the video, pictures are useless) and then proceeded to our school's parent-teacher night, where we were introduced, and then spent the remainder of the event standing around being ignored by the Korean parents who were reportedly able to speak English, just entirely unwilling to do so.

After that all the teachers went out for an awesome dinner, on the director's tab, so that made it all worth it.

In the realm of getting stuff cheap over here, I've found a guy selling a 3-year-old 50cc scooter for about 500,000 won, and a place where I can get an enormous breaded pork cutlet with all the trimmings for about 3500won. Additionally, I found out that we can get a full, 160-channel satellite service package for 20,000 won/month. About 10-15 of the channels are in English. The jury's still definitely out on the scooter and on the satellite, I just think it's cool that you can get stuff for so little money here.

Anyway, that's it for this post. That wasn't so bad, was it?

Next weekend we're hoping to take off and check out another part of Korea, so hopefully there'll be interesting stories to share by next week, and if anything else exciting happens, we'll let you know. bye.

Last weekend

2005-10-06T22:52:00.000-04:00

So this post is about last weekend, and since this weekend is rapidly approaching, we thought we'd post now, so we didn't get too far behind.

The delay is mostly because we had to wait until we resized and uploaded the pictures we're about to share with you lovely people.

Anyway, moving on. Friday night was pretty routine. We went out with the other foreigners for a few drinks and had a fair bit of fun.

Saturday was when the adventures really started. Due to whatever holiday caused it to be a long weekend, there was a big to do at the park near our place. We went for a bit of a walk to see what was going on, and there was a stage set up and a bunch of seats on the lawn. The first act was unusual in that I have never seen 75-100 people entertained by small children skipping rope to English songs for at least half an hour. After returning from our walk to find these small children STILL skipping, we noticed that the next act involved these adorable children practicing sword form on the the grass nearby before their big performance started.

About 10 minutes later, the skippers left and the tiny swordsmen stepped on the stage. They had a much shorter performance than the skippers, but were quite good, managing to stay mostly together throughout their demonstration:

Once the tiny ones were finished, there was a group of adults who were demonstrating next. That was super cool. Almost all of their forms demonstrations ended with them slicing to bits either a bamboo stick about 3-4 inches thick, or a 6-10 inch-thick bundle of straw, with their various weapons. They also had a pair of archers who would stand with their backs to the target (in this case a picture of a tiger's head) and then spin around together and fire, never missing, which was important.

This guy:

...who doesn't necessarily seem all that impressive in this picture, was actually able, as a part of his form, stab his katana right through the centre of the bamboo staff with one hand, which is much more difficult than it might seem to some of you. Really impressive.

These guys were also really quite impressive. Big long-staff battle axe things (anyone out there help me out with the correct name for this weapon?) and much jumping around and spinning before finally slicing to bits their own hunk of straw. Quite neat. The guy on the end must have been super-important or something cause he had to cut three clumps, instead of just one.

So, after the stabbing coolness had ended the music volume increased and it was difficult to hear ourselves think even in our apartment as the music was so loud.

Why stay in Cheongju and suffer from very bad English music when you can take a bus to Seoul to eat dinner?
And in half an hour we were on our way in exceptionally comfortable, pseudo-airline seats as
shown below:

One of the first things that we noticed as we entered the Seoul subway system was a rather large warning sign above a glass cabinet-type thing.

In case you can't quite make out the creepiness of it all, it's a sign giving instructions on how to use the emergency gas masks that they have generously supplied. Observe a close-up:

I'm not sure what's creepier, the fact that they have complimentary gas masks in the subway stations, or the fact that there were only about 30 of them. I'll let you be the judge.

Upon arriving in Itaewon - the Island of English in the heart of Korea - we promptly found an Indian restaurant and proceeded to devour an incredibly delicious dinner of various curries, butter chicken, nan bread, rice and the best gulab jamin (Indian desserts) that have ever been tasted, anywhere. Thoroughly stuffed (this particular restaurant was an all-you-can eat buffet for around $12), we decided to go for a walk around town to give ourselves time to feel a little less huge before hopping back on a bus to come home.

As we were walking down the main street (just as a quick reminder, Itaewon is in Seoul - a city of over 11 million people) we hear some English folks calling after us. We didn't turn around, cause they weren't clearly talking to us. Until, that is, they yelled "Trent University!" which made us spin around quite instantly. The girls that were calling we had never met, but the guy looked vaguely familiar. Turns out that Ryan had an English class with him in 3rd year at Trent. The three of them were up visiting a friend of theirs that lived in Seoul, a guy named Simon that was at our TESL course in Peterborough, and who we knew from Trent as well. Very weird. We didn't even know that he was living in Seoul.

Such a small world. We ended up spending time hanging out with them which was tonnes of unexpected fun. Unfortunately, another unforeseen event was that of the subway and bus station closing for the night around 12:00. When we realized this at 2:00 am in the morning we decided to get a hotel room. Unfortunately the area that we were in at the time had hotels where rooms ran between 300 000 to 200 000 won. As the bus station opened at 6:00 the next morning we decided that our best option was to dance the night away in Itaewon as all the bars are open until around 4:00 and then a few stay open until 5:30. At 5:30 we waited for the subway to open with several other individuals, most of whom looked as though they had been out all night too.

After arriving back in Cheoungju we crashed for a few hours and then ran to the church retreat for the Sunday Monday. We stayed in a beautiful smaller country church that was overlooked by mountains.

The food they served was fantastic which was such a relief. We didn't get to do as much hiking as we would have liked but we have a few pictures.

The first is a tomb - they bury their dead sitting up into the side of the mountains like this:

This one was taken from the side of a mountain as we climbed up it. On the other side of the valley there was a ginseng field being overlooked by a hillside cemetery featuring more of the peculiar burial mounds. These ones had headstones, though.

Well, that was last weekend. There will be another post coming fairly soon, as we've accumulated several pictures and stories, but we don't want to bog down this post with anything else. So keep your eyes peeled.

bye!

So we've been here for a month now

2005-09-29T21:46:00.000-04:00

Our one month aniversary of being here has come and I feel slightly morose as I think of all of the things that I haven't figured out yet. We're finally settled in to the point that we can get to work, do laundry, enjoy three types of authentic Korean cusine and it's taken us an entire month to get that far.

I think what bothers me the most is the fact that there are so many things that we cannot do by ourselves. For instance, Betty gave us curtains that match our apartment. Muchly appreciated! The problem surfaces when we try to hang these curtains. At the normal store that we visit there are no curtain rods big enough. So we must now find another store that sells curtain rods. Where? I don't know. Now assuming that we do find a curtain rod long enough, a new problem surfaces. All of the walls in our apartment are made out of concrete. We now require a concrete drill. Where do we get a concrete drill - we're still trying to find a curtain rod!!!!!

It's funny because we were so sure that after buying a phrase book we would be ready for anything. The security they lend makes any traveller feel self assured trudging along new paths. Until you try to use it. The thing that you must remeber about phrase books is that it allows you to communicate your ideas in broken and badly accented Korean, but does not allow for the reverse to occur. You can ask as many questions as you want - but you will NEVER understand the answer to your question. Therefore the phrase "Do you sell curtain rods" although it appears as though it is a useful tool accomplishes less than one might have hoped.

Charades, however, has become an art form.

I know what you are asking. You work with Koreans, surely some of them could help you. True. There is one woman, Betty, who has been assigned to helping us. The church that we have found also has memebers that are very pleased to answer questions and the like.

The problem is that we do not wish to kill these individuals with questions. Any given day there are at least 5 questions we need answered. Betty is an extremely busy woman. A simple question such as "where can we buy ant traps" (ants are very comon in Korea) becomes a fantastic ordeal where she must stop what she is working on, rush out of the building and deliver ant traps to us as if our happiness rested soley on this purchase.

It seems as though, in Korea, it is not enough to simply direct questioners to the questioned location. Therefore they have not truely helped us unless they have inconvienced themselves and gone and personally gotten what we require. Due to this unusal 'mother hen' atmosphere, we refrain from asking more than one question a day so as not to give any new found friends heart attacks.

This environment however, maintains our ignorance as we still do not know where to get ant traps and will need to ask for her help again when we run out. Frustratingly circular.

Word of warning

2005-09-27T04:59:00.000-04:00

Just so you're aware, if you're ever in Korea and you order food and get it delivered, DO NOT THROW OUT YOUR DISHES!!!

The styrofoam ones are okay, and the cutlery consists of wooden chopsticks, so those can go too, but make sure you do not toss the plastic dishes. I thought they were a bit thick to be disposable, but everything here is wasteful like that, so I only hesitated for a second before throwing out my bowl. I was a little surprised, therefore, when the delivery guy showed up at the school (yeah. I was at work at the time) looking for the bowl. I had to get another teacher to explain what had happened and offered to pay for it, but he was new so he went rooting through the garbage can to look for it, and he must have either found it, or been told by his boss that it wasn't that big a deal, cause he never came back looking for it.

Anyway, so that's stupid westerner moment #1. I'm sure there will be more.

No wait, that was number 2. Number one was when I tried to tip the cab driver, only to find out later that here in Korea tipping is almost considered an insult. The idea behind this is that a tip implies that the receiver is so poor, they *must* need the extra money on top of what they're making in salary. The practical and benefitial upshot of this, of course, is that it's really easy to calculate who pays what in a restaurant. No cents, all even numbers, tax included in the menu list price, and no tip to consider. Awesome.

no wonder I couldn't figure it out

2005-09-24T11:25:00.000-04:00

So I saw a sign today explaining the way cab fares work here. It's no wonder I was having trouble figuring out the system.

First 2km - 1500won
Every 176m thereafter - 100won
Every 43 seconds of waiting time (under 15km/h) - 100won

WHO THE CRAP chooses numbers that are that random? 176 metres? I'm not actually complaining, cause it's still really cheap to take a taxi - WAY cheaper than in Canada, but STILL!

Our trip to Seoul...

2005-09-21T12:54:00.000-04:00

So this past weekend was Chuseok - Korean thanksgiving - and as you know we decided to head up to Seoul to visit some friends from our TESL course in Peterborough, Brandon and Jess.

Let me start off by saying that the trip was a blast. We had loads of fun and saw some neat places. We didn't see a whole lot of Seoul, since we stayed almost exclusively in Itaewon, which is the international section of the city, where foreigners from various countries (they have an inexplicably large Nigerian population, for instance) seem to outnumber actual Koreans.

The fact that there is a lot of English (in addition to Russian, Nigerian, and a number of other languages) spoken in Itaewon, didn't necessarily have any impact on the accuracy of the local signage. We found our way to Itaewon without trouble, since the Seoul subway system is ridiculously helpful (all the announcements for stops are made in Korean, Chinese and English, which displays above the doorways in the three languages, and the maps all have English on them too), and then just had to walk up the street from our stop to find a phone to get Brandon and Jess to come and collect us.

As a side note, this is what the subway stop near their place looks like on the inside (for some reason):

Anyway, back to the story. They had to come get us because (helpfully) there are no street names in Korea, so directing through the narrow alleyways of inner city Seoul is as close to impossible as you can get. As we were trying to find a payphone, we happened to stop in front of a Lingerie shop. I looked up at the sign above the store, and, barely holding back laughter, had to get a picture to share with all of you:

This kicked off Saturday night. What a way to start. Anyway, from there, we went back to their apartment to drop our stuff off before dinner which was at an amazing Thai restaurant, which we will most certainly be visiting again. So delicious.

After dinner, we thought that since we were in the area, we would take Brandon up on his offer to show us "some of the filthiest bars in Seoul." How could we pass that up? So we went to The Loft first, which was a dirty, but surprisingly well-behaved, bar that claims to be a "German-style pub" despite the fact that the most german thing about it was that they serve Jagermeister. From there, we went to a disturbingly gross hip-hop type club called Polly's Kettle. For Peterborough folks, picture the Rooster, but dirtier, and with lesser-known music. The feature of this place was their specialty drink, called a Kettle. A kettle is basically Tang mixed with soju (Korean liquor made from fermented sweet potato - and tastes as good as it sounds), but served in the bottom two thirds of a 2-litre plastic pop bottle that's been cut with scissors. I thought it'd be hard to describe, so I got a picture:

As mentioned before, alcohol is cheap here, as long as it's not imported. Those monstrosities (which I shared with Becca) only cost 5000 won each.

The next place we went was a little western-style pub called Scrooges, and wasn't really anything specacular either way, but it was quieter so we could actually converse while sitting. They also served Molson Canadian, which in Canada I don't ever drink, but thought I would this once for the sake of the cliche. I found out that the Canadian they serve here in Korea is WAY better. It has to be, it says it's imported!

Seriously, it's as gross as it is back home.

The second last place we went that night (the very last was a noraebong - Korean karaoke, and I didn't bother to get pics of it) was the most incredible concept I've ever seen. Observe:

Yeah, that's right, the floor is covered in AMAZING white beach sand, and there's a raised wooden boardwalk running in between the sections. It's just the most unspeakably good bar-related idea since serving alcoholic beverages. The drinks were a bit pricy, but they were delicious fruity-type cocktails. Again for Peterborough folks, picture the Sapphire Room, only with that atmosphere. Same type of relaxed music, only a little quieter.

So that was Saturday. A good evening all around.

Sunday we went to an big Chuseok celebration at a Korean folk village in another part of Seoul. The school where Brandon and Jess work has about 40 Canadian teachers, and one of the other ones has a student who volunteers at this folk village, so that's how we came to know about this event in the first place.

The thing that is still taking some getting used to is the Buddhist symbol adorning all the temples around here. I got a shot of one on the way into the folk village, and I think you'll see what I mean.

For the record, the German swastika was a mirror image of that, and was rotated 45 degrees, but it's a testament to the lasting effect of WWII that you don't even register that (if you know it at all) until a couple seconds of astonishment pass by.

We all got dressed up in traditional Korean outfits called hanboks, and then after standing around being stared at by the Koreans, we all were ushered under a tent-like covering and were taught how to make Songpyeon (Korean steamed rice cakes), which turned out to, in my opinion, not be very good, but were entertaining to make. They're kind of like perogies where the shell is a rice dough-y stuff and the filling is either sesame seeds or sweet red bean stuff. The peculiar part of this was all the Korean jockeying for position to get the best shot of us. I think I had my picture taken more over the course of that 45 minutes than I ever have before.

Anyway, here are some shots of us in the hanboks. The Korean-looking girl is Angela, the one whose student set us up with the info. She's from Winnipeg. The other couple is Brandon and Jess.

After that was over, we went and ate dinner at another awesome restaurant (I don't remember the name -- it was a bistro-type place) and then went to Angela's apartment and played a cutthroat game of Monopoly until 12:30am. We called the game short and just counted our assets (I came in second) since we'd been out at the noraebong until 5:30am the previous night, and we were all pretty tired.

Monday we hopped on the bus back to Cheongju.

The next time we take an intercity bus, I'll have to be sure to get a picture, because they're absolutely astounding. They seriously make taking the Greyhound look like travelling on a livestock freight truck. The seats are leather, and they're huge. They look like they've been taken out of the highest-class section of a REALLY nice airline, and they recline to a ridiculous degree and have an insane amount of legroom. They're also impeccably on time, which is nice. I'll have to get a picture.

Anyway, that was our long weekend. Now it's back to the grindstone, but for a shorter week, which is nice. This coming weekend there's a KOTESOL (a professional organization for ESL teachers in Korea) conference in Daejon (a city of about 1.5 million around 30 minutes from Cheongju) on Saturday that we're going to. Should prove to be interesting.

Anyway, more later.

One more question, should I be putting fewer pictures on these things? The posts seem really long, and if anyone's having trouble with loading the pictures or anything, or would just like me to talk less, just let me know.

Okay, I'm actually done now. Bye.

More pictures and other useless information

2005-09-16T13:43:00.000-04:00

So I rearranged the blog itself so that the pictures won't get cut off by the menu on the right, cause now the menu's on the left. Nifty, huh?

This week has absolutely flown by. I can't believe that it's already our second Friday. So weird. School's going better now. Becca's parents' suggested an absolutely BRILLIANT technique for getting tiny people to shut the crap up while we're trying to teach, and it's worked perfectly so far. So a big thanks to them!

We still have yet to explore the "western bars" area of the city. This town's got 3 or 4 major universities in it, and the university district surrounding one of the bigger ones is apparently the place where all the foreign teachers go to hang out. We've been meaning to get there at some point, and it looks like next weekend will be decent for it, so we'll let you know how that goes. I think that there's this weird understanding between foreigners here. When you pass another white person on the street, it's not exactly an open-armed welcome, but just a nod and a simple "hey, howsit goin?" like they're someone you just kinda see all the time at school or something, even if you've never seen them before. I wonder what it's like to be at the social spots. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Tomorrow evening we go to Seoul. I'm excited, both to see some familiar faces (the folks we're visiting are a couple that were in our TESL course, and I'm pretty sure that I had a class with the girl at Trent a couple years ago), and to see the city. They've been there since July, so they're going to show us around a bit. Also, on Sunday there's a celebration for foreigners for Chusok where they get us all traditional Korean outfits and there are some sort of festivities planned. Not really sure what they are yet, but hopefully it'll be awesome, cause we're going.

Just for the sake of clarity, Chusok is the Korean version of thanksgiving -- the harvest moon festival to be precise. It's a huge three-day affair, with the day before and the day after the actual day of Chusok being holidays too. We got majorly ripped off this year (THANKS ALOT, MOON!!) cause Chusok falls on a Sunday, which means that Saturday's a holiday (fat lot of good that does) and we get Monday off. I know it's still a long weekend, but if it fell on a Tuesday, we'd get Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off - paid. That would've been sweet. As it is, though, there are pleasant surprises to this. We got presents from the school. We each got socks, 100,000 won (which we were genuinely surprised and ridiculously excited about, since that'll pay for our trip to Seoul this weekend) and a gift box, which is the focus of the first picture of this post... Observe:

Yeah. It's 8 cans of tuna (4 regular and 4 hot pepper tuna) and 4 cans of Korean spam. Canned luncheon meat to be exact. MMMMMMMM!!!!!!

Anyway, I've got a couple more pics of weird Korean food-related products. The first is an example of the only sized can of pop you can get here. Taller but much more narrow than its Canadian cousin:

The next is a baffling display of wasted educational opportunity. In a land so obsessed with teaching their children English, you'd think that any chance to teach kids any English would be welcome. Apparently not:

Can anyone else think of any reason at all to have crocodiles forming a letter "B"? Or a squirrel in the shape of a "V"? It'd be so EASY to have foxes make an "F", but NO, they've gotta be making an "N". So. Weird.

This next one is one of my favourite things that we've seen so far. It's a placemat from a restaurant downtown where there was a dinner for ESL teachers, and it's got some of the most bafflingly hilarious mis-uses of English I've ever seen. I asked to take the placemat home, and assuming it survives the year, I intend to frame it once we get back to Canada. I might frame it here, come to think of it, if I find a place to do it.

Below the price list is written "All vegetables and fruits we use in our dishes are fresh and environment friendly products." Awesome. Try to pick out all the errors on the rest of the menu. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

That's all for now, except for the pics of our apartment to follow, but there are a few things that I hope to get pictures of in our neighbourhood, like the incredible Korean parking habits, the abundance of neon, and the pick-up trucks full of fruit that have loudspeakers on the top blaring out their contents while meandering through the narrow streets with all the subtlety of Kareem Abdul Jabbar at a KKK rally. They're really annoying.

Anyway, here are the pics of our apartment to close out this (really long -- sorry) post. More to come after the weekend, when we'll have pics of Seoul to share.

Our kitchen. This is what you enter as soon as you walk in the door. Every other room branches off from it.

Our bathroom. Korean bathrooms don't have separate showers, they just have tile everywhere and a drain in the middle of the room. At least this one has a western-style toilet. The big green thing in the corner's the washing machine.

Our spare room. We've got a bed in there in case anyone wants to come visit, and a wardrobe cause there are no closets in the entire apartment.

And finally, our bed/living room. Two pictures, one from the door, the other from the bed. Decent size, really, and we decided to keep the bed in there cause that's where they installed the air conditioner, and we figured that a spare room might come in handy.

So we're testing our photo capability....

2005-09-14T11:18:00.000-04:00

Okay, so the pictures we're posting here were taken on our second day in Korea. Michael, the teacher that we replaced, took us up to Sandangsanseong, which is a mountain fortress about 4km north of the city. A very cool place, with a good hike up around the wall, which I believe goes 1.5 km around the central part of the enclosure.

The way it's set up is that there's a valley in the middle with a little cluster of shops/restaurants, etc (which we didn't go to see this time -- we will soon though) and a wall that runs along the ridgeline surrounding the valley. It makes for some nice views, and a merciful breeze if the day is a bit warm, which it was.

I've got a bunch of other pictures (like of our apartment and some interesting examples of Konglish) but this is the guinea pig post, trying to see if this new image hosting service works.

Here goes...

This is a view of part of Cheongju from somewhere along the wall of the fortress:

This one's Becca and I at roughly the same spot along the wall. Michael's taking the picture.

More pictures to come, as well as an update featuring some more of the random oddities involved in this whole "living in Korea" thing.

Until next time...

Well, the red lights are long, and I could use a calculator...

2005-09-11T11:18:00.000-04:00

Hey hey.

Well that's one week (and a day -- weekend really flew by quick) done.

Another random sighting to add to the "only in Korea" list: apparently instead of having squeegee kids at stoplights here, there are guys selling calculators.

First week of teaching went well. Apparently this week will be a fair bit tougher, since we've been told that the kids view the first week as a kind of observation period to size up new teachers and week two is "test the boundaries" week. Should be fun. It's a good thing I like yelling at small children.

What else.....

Oh yeah, we were going to visit some friends of ours from our TESL course next weekend. They live in Seoul and moved there in July, so they'd be able to show us around a bit. These plans may be in jeopardy due to an interesting Korean holiday called Chusok. It's basically Korean Thanksgiving, and it's a three day holiday (which this year falls on a Sunday, meaning that we only actually get Monday off work - stupid everything) where everyone in Korea has to go to the house of the oldest male relative on their Father's side, and almost all of them drive. This is a lot of traffic. Apparently, they're estimating that there will be 21 million cars on the road for the weekend.

And you lot thought cottage country traffic was bad on May 24.

Anyway, due to this, the normally 90 minute journey to Seoul from Cheongju is estimated to take just over 5 hours, and while inter-city buses in Korea have their own lanes on the expressways, I'm not sure if we'll risk it, or if we'll just stay here in town and hide. More on that as it develops.

An exciting developement on the money-saving front. It's come to my attention that the basic monthly charge for a phone line is only 5200 won. Add to that the fact that our internet (through some interesting wheelings and dealings on the part of the internet company and the teacher we're replacing -- we just took over his account and get all the "long-term customer" bonuses and discounts) is only 22,000 won/month, and our heating bill is almost guarenteed to be under 70-80,000/month, we're in great shape to have all our monthly expenses (excluding food) come to under 100,000 won/month. Most other things seem to be fairly comperable in price (except alcohol - more on that later) so it's nice to see that the whole "cheap Korean living" thing turns out to be true for something, anyway.

So a quick note about the alcohol. Seems you can get alcohol anywhere. Convenience stores, gas stations, department stores, you name it. Most of this alcohol seems to be whisky, and most of the whisky seems to be scotch. It's a bit cheaper than in Canada, which strikes me as weird. A Johnnie Walker black label gift set seems like it should cost more than 30,000 won. The most amazing thing that we've seen in the alcohol department is the soju, which is a kind of Korean version of Sake. It's awful, for the record. However, there's something to be said for getting a value for you dollar. So without further ado, I present the price for a 3.6 LITRE (plastic) bottle of soju (30% alcohol by volume):

4,000 won.

yeah.
(for those of you who are currently looking puzzled and slightly anticlimactic, use the currency converter link in the link section. For those of you who have, but still look slightly confused/let down, go to the LCBO and check out the price for the cheapest vodka you can find.)

Speaking of the links, I've updated them. So there. Some useful, some not, feel free to check them out. Or not. Up to you, really. I mean, what am I going to do about it if you don't. How am I even going to know? I'm not. Don't worry. I'm not watching you or anything.

Stop scratching yourself.

I'm not watching, I promise.

It's evidently far too late for me to be doing this. I'm going to bed.

Man to Man, Joy Mart and other odd names for convenience stores...

2005-09-09T12:44:00.000-04:00

Hi again.

Well in the last 18-24 hours this apartment has become infinitely more liveable.

We now have a fridge (read: freedom from oppresive ubiquitous Korean restaurants and their terrifying obsession with pickled cabbage), a microwave, air conditioning (read: freedom from having to take ice cold showers three times a day to keep relatively cool), a phone (ability to be connected to the outside world while still in our apartment -- imagine that) and the internet (read: freedom from reliance upon the *interesting* sensory strain/overload that seems to be Korean internet cafes).

So a lot has changed around here, and it's making us feel a million times better. Having the internet set up is a *huge* psychological boost. It's amazing what the knowledge that you're connected to everyone you're not going to see for quite some time can do for your general mood.

Also, for those who are interested, we've got a phone number and an address. The phone number's for our apartment, but the mailing adress is for the school, because our whole building (maybe 6-8 apartments) has only one mailbox, and it's small, and on the outside of the building with no front, let alone lock. So everything that gets sent to us will be safe and secure at the school that we work for. According to our predecessor, it's a beautiful system.

So, without further ado, our phone number (assuming that you're dialing from Canada, and including every button you have to push):

011-82-43-292-2959

(011 is the International Direct Dial prefix for Canada, 82 is Korea's country code and the rest is our area code and phone number).

Our address is:

Ryan and/or Rebecca Paulsen
Jongro M School
360-181, 1594 Yongamdong
Sangdang-gu, Cheongju,
Republic of Korea

So that's that. Oh yeah, and if anyone does want to call, you're absolutely more than welcome, but just to clarify, we're 13 hour ahead of Estern Standard Time. You do the math. We're generally on our way to work between2:30 and 3 in the afternoon, and the latest we get finished is around 10-ish.

So that's what's been goin' on 'round these parts. I've probably got more, but I'll leave that until I'm more awake, cause right now I can't really think of anything else.

Oh yeah, and as for the title of this post, does anyone else think that "Man to Man" is a weird name for a convenience store? I sure do.

peace out.

Our first staff night out and general oddities

2005-09-08T09:23:00.000-04:00

Last night Ryan and I went out for our first staff social ever. It was difficult in that only three people understood English well enough that they could have any sort of conversation with us. Despite the language barrier we learned how to eat several dishes that resembled entrails and other substances that should never be eaten. That said, most of it was at least edible and none of the dishes contained any real entrails.

Korea is renowned for its drinking culture. Initially upon learning this Ryan and I were a little hesitant as it is socially inappropriate for you to refuse alcohol if you are male. All my fears have been laid to rest due to last night. Although there is a large drinking culture, Ryan is twice the size of all of the Koreans we have met so far. They were shocked that he could consume two beers and two shots of Soju (similar taste to vodka but only half the alcohol). It's very comforting to know that Ryan can drink our employers under the table without trying. This is important because in Korean culture you are not allowed to refuse an alcoholic drink from your boss or superior.

Other odd things that we have noticed in Korea so far - we recieved a catologue for a regular store in the area. It was all in Korean and sold clothes and furniture. There are several models in the catologue but there aren't any Korean models. They are all white. In fact, all of the ad models that we have seen have been white and emaciated - more so than in Canada. There is obviously this preoccupation with being extremely thin and with white being the most beautiful skin colour. Very odd.

oops ran out of time - more oddities later!

And we're now in charge of tiny people....weird.

2005-09-07T07:14:00.000-04:00

Hi again.

First off, thanks to everyone for commenting. It's really awesome to see that people are actually reading our little rantings, and care enough to comment, etc. So thanks!

Anyway, moving on.

What haven't we said yet...oh yeah, TEACHING.

So the plan originally was that we would get a solid week of classroom observation before we started teaching. The Korean office of immigration saw to it that that was a non-option. Stupid visa delays.

What actually ended up happening is that we flew into Seoul (as you know) Saturday morning, and we were informed that the teacher Rebecca was replacing was teaching until Tuesday, so she would have 2 days of observation at the main branch of the school, and on Monday I would be going to the other branch (where I'll end up teaching on Tuesdays and Thursdays) to observe classes for one night, and then I'd start teaching on my own on Tuesday.

That plan also didn't happen. What *DID* happen was that we both showed up to the main branch on Monday to find out that Becca was still going to be observing for a couple days, but that there was nobody to cover the other classes, so I would be teaching right away. So I had exactly 45 minutes to look at the textbooks for a grade 3 class, two grade 5 classes and a grade 6 class and figure out what/how I was going to teach all of them.

No stress though, seriously.

*sigh*

anyway, the classes went well for the most part. Kids, it turns out, are kids wherever they are. Some are gold, some are....well......somewhat less desireable than gold. Let's leave it at that.

Since then it's already gotten a bit easier. I think I'm getting the hang of this. I have a couple classes that I actively look forward to, which is really nice, and totally makes up for the classes containing the second type of kid.

The apartment's slowly looking more and more like a home now. We spent a solid afternoon scrubbing it, and Becca had a couple hours off while I was still teaching at the second school, so she got a lot of unpacking done (cause she's awesome) so now it's a lot more liveable. We thought we were going to have to pay for an air conditioner, but we found out that the school is actually going to cover that (!) so hopefully that will get installed on Friday too. If all goes well, it'll be a *lot* more like home by early next week, what with the introduction of a phone, the internet, cable, and an air conditioner. So awesome.

The food still sucks. Will update as the situation progresses.

That last bit actually has one exception already. They have this meat here (I can't remember the name right now -- I'll let you know later) that's the same cut as bacon, and looks like bacon, only it's huge. Picture a strip of bacon three times as thick and about twice as long. The restaurant where we ate this wonderful(ly fatty) stuff was set up so that you sat on the floor at a table with a rotisserie/grill in the middle, and the owner comes by and puts two trays of red hot coals in the middle, then puts skewers of this meat on the rotisserie to cook. In the meantime, the lid for the rotisserie is a grill where you can heat up the side dishes, then when everything's done, you wrap it in a leaf of lettuce and chow down. It was actually surprisingly tasty.

As a parting note (cause there's a staff dinner in 20 minutes welcoming us to the school and saying goodbye to Michael, the Kiwi teacher that we're replacing), Korean internet cafes are interesting places. This one has about 50 computers, all with 19" flat screens and the computers are all awesome, with about 90% of them being used to play come form of online game. To my right, as I type this, is a Korean guy, probably about my age (maybe a little older), playing some sort of online multiplayer 1st person shooter game. To my left is a Korean woman who, to my surprise, is actually about 40, playing what looks like a Korean PC version of Mariokart. The air is thick with smoke and the horrible cacophonous symphony of bullets flying, spells being cast and ear-bleedingly terrible Korean techno music accompanying any number of inane arcade-style online games. Truly something to behold.

I have to go now.

More updates to come, keep the comments rolling!!

Apartment and the first day

2005-09-04T18:44:00.000-04:00

I assumed that the first day would be the easy one due to excitment etc. To be honest - it was terrifying! The person who picked us up from the airport was wonderful and drove us to our apartment...... our extremely empty, surprisingly spacious yet sweltering apartment. We're looking into getting air-conditioning as we take several cold showers a day! The apartment itself is situated in a poorer area and although clean, it has no closet space or fridge yet. Moreover you cannot drink the water that comes into an appartment here as it has not been treated. In Korean apartments there are no sinks or showers in the bathroom. The entire bathroom is tiled and it is a giant showering area. The one thing that reminds me of home is the ugly wallpaper that could easily be found in any Canadian student housing.

The first day we decided to go for a walk and buy some of the things we had not brought that we would need such as food, towels, shampoo etc. Interestingly though, even determining what was a shop was difficult and finding the ones we required was impossible. There were store-like fronts with nothing inside with open doors, nauseating smells emerging from what we assumed were restaurants, and places that looked as though they sold food-like items but we could not read the packaging to determine what it was that we would be purchasing. We finally concluded our search by finding a corner store that sold coke! Best coke ever. Armed with that along with a bottle of water and another bottle of what we presumed was dishsoap we decided to call it a day and ended our frustrating shopping experience victoriously.....

Fortunately Michael, the individual who picked us up from the airport came by soon afterwards and began to show us around. It's amazing how simply understanding where grocery and department stores are located can make you feel more secure. Something about being able to attain basic necessities and not starve to death I suppose!

We still cannot work the phones but hope to rectify that today to call our parents.

Today is our first day of observation before we begin teaching so I suppose I should go and prepare.

well, here we are!

2005-09-03T07:38:00.000-04:00

So we're officially residents of Korea.

We arrived at the Incheon airport, after a 13.5 hour flight, at 2:30am local time, Saturday, August 3rd. It's now 8:40pm, and we're both exhausted, so a more thorough update will follow once we're more rested and we've got the webernet set up at our apartment, which will hopefully have sheets delivered to it by the time we get back in a few minutes!

Bye for now.

A new Blog!

2005-08-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

Howdy all!

This is partly a test post, and partly an introductory post. So let's all compromise...

Welcome to our Testaductory post on our "Life in Cheongju" blog!

We decided to set this up to make it easier for us to update people, and easier for people to be updated. This way, your e-mail inbox isn't being cluttered with mass e-mails and/or pictures from us, and you'll still be able to catch up on what we're doing on the far side of the world, if you so desire.

So, we haven't left yet, but we will be (apparently) on Tuesday, August 30th. After we get to Korea, we'll be staying in a hotel for the first few days, and then from there into our new apartment, about which we know absolutely nothing at this point, but will update as we get more info.

Once we're into our new apartment, I have no idea how long it will take for us to get set up with internet access, so it may be a few weeks before you actually see interesting/relevant updates on this blog (IE, ones that actually were posted from Korea). Please be patient, we'll have it up and running ASAP.

A good hint to you lot would be to notice whether or not we're occasionally on MSN, which tends to imply that we have access to the webernet.

One ground rule:

To any and all those who have any horrible secrets about us, or the burning desire to use any level of profanity/obscenity (you know who you are), please refrain from doing so in the comments, since this blog could be read by anyone we know, including relatives. Thanks! More to come!