Goodbye! Hello!

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!

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...

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

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....

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

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

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.