미안해!!!! (Sorry!)

 

 The Super Junior boys (a.k.a. the biggest boy band ever) singing "쏘리 쏘리" ("Sorry Sorry"). And yes, there are that many of them in the band!

It seems like I start most of my posts this way these days with an apology for my extreme laziness and lack of recent posting, and this isn't going to be any different. In my defence, I've been rather busy lately, not with anything particularly onerous, just the time-consuming business of having friends that I actually want to spend time with, so it's a busyness I'm rather glad to have ^^

This past weekend was a long weekend for Memorial Day yesterday (Monday, 6th of June) so I had a rather glorious time in Busan where I saw some baseball, drank (way too much) beer, went to the beach, ate hwaedopbap (회덮밥 - cold sashimi bibimbap) and (briefly) saw some of my lovely Busan buddies! Since it was a long weekend and the weather has been lovely and summery recently, and there was a Sand Festival at Haeundae, a lot of Cheongju people actually ended up there and weirdly enough many of us ended up congregating on the beach at around 11pm on Saturday night drinking beer, doing cartwheels in the sand and generally enjoying not being in Cheongju. Photos will be posted with greater details later (since I have less after school classes this week I might actually have time to post regularly! Hope you don't get sick of me this week dear readers! ㅋㅋㅋ) I also got a bit tanned (nothing like at home) so it was lovely^^

Anyway, apart from that, I also wanted to share a few interesting posts that I read recently. The first is one from the blog A New Yorker in Seoul that all foreigners coming to Korea should probably be told to read upon moving in before you get ideas about legal rights etc settled into your dumb foreign head, and it's especially helpful to know this if you are a foreign English teacher whose contract runs right up until the start date of the new year and whose school will probably want to bring in your replacement before your contract technically ends. Basically, a contract means diddly-squat. You. Will. Be. Screwed. Over. If they think they can get away with it (and they will really push it). I read this and immediately realised that I'm going to have to rethink my move-out plans even more than I had after seeing some friends last year go through this! Lara, Gerri and Neil, I think you'll find this resonates very closely to your last day in Cheongju!

**Gah, update. Gotta love last minute Korean-style plans, along the lines of "Do you have any plans? Because this is the plan that we have made for you that we expect you to attend in an hour's time. So your plans are now moot. Please cancel them." Dinner plans with Edi and Mr Smiley (co-teacher I have nicknamed that because he has only JUST started smiling at me at school, despite the fact that we have hung out quite a few times. And by smile I mean the tiniest possible lift at the corners of his mouth, flashed across his face like a squirrel on speed) and Om (yes, he's tall and has a deep voice so he's like Terry Pratchett's Om in Small Gods at his peak) are possibly still on, as the school admin people are promising to have me home by then, but I guess my plans of going to the gym and generally getting off my big fat butt are not. Oh well - this is why you should always go to the gym when you have the time to, (which was yesterday, instead of drinking vodka with Ead and scandalising her neighbours by sunbathing on her roof in bikinis) and not put it off until later. My bad.

The way a typical school dinner plan is made, a la Coree.