Happy 2012 everyone!

새해 복 많이 보내세요! (Much good luck/many happy wishes for the New Year!) ^_^

How was everyone's NYE? If you were lucky, I'm sure it was full of love and hope, spent with those dear to you. If you were super-lucky, I hope it was also full of fireworks! And possibly also at least a little alcohol. Because let's face it, that's what NYE is all about, right? Or maybe that's just the Australian in me talking... hehe^^

So I had quite a lovely weekend! Even lovelier because I took Thursday and Friday off so it was actually a four day weekend, and I got to pack some things to start sending home, Skype my parents, and (even better! Sorry Mum and Dad!) Skype my favourite Busan ladies, Nat and Christy! Even though Nat isn't actually there any more, I hold out hope that she'll be back before too long ^_^ This was a big thing because many failed attempts to navigate time differences and personal schedhules meant that Skyping opportunities have been few and far between. Oh and I also went to the boardgame cafe and actually WON a game of Settlers of Catan against Carey-Ann, aka Grand Catan-Master, and two others.

And then on Friday the real weekend started - Ryan and I set off for Deoksan, Resom Spaland and Moong Pension. I don't know if you know this about me, but I actually really like road trips, especially when they are to somewhere new. I love seeing the landscape change and looking for interesting buildings and natural formations, as well as having the chance to talk and listen to music and just chill productively with someone I like. Sound boring? Haha, maybe a little^^ Simple mind, simple pleasures I guess. The upshot was that the drive seemed to go pretty quickly, since it was only about an hour and a half away anyway, and we found our accomodation pretty easily too. It was a really nice place! Except for the fact that there was a distinct smell of gas in the kitchen (five minutes with everything open and some tissue stuffed up the gas nozzle later that night cured this) and we hadn't thought to bring any sauces or condiments for cooking (a good excuse to eat out!), it was lovely and very homey. There was plenty of space, and since it was an ondol style pension, the heating was fine and I think even the bathroom floor was heated a little too. Sadly we didn't have the time to really try the jacuzzi in the bathroom, but since we went to the Spa Castle anyway this wasn't such a big thing.
And OMG was the Spa Castle amazing! By the time we got there, it was getting a bit crowded since it was a Friday afternoon, and you could see why! We only really wanted to try the different spas, for which you pay the base rate of w24000 (our tickets were included in the cost of the pension), but if you want to go on any of the rides like the Tube Ride or the Wave Pool Ride, you have to pay extra for that - around w1000 or w2000 on average - as well as to rent the life jackets, so the cost can go up pretty quickly.
Oh and you have to wear those weird little Korean swimming caps, but you can wear a normal cap over it and frankly it wasn't a very heavily policed policy. But if you just want to kick back like us and relax in the many spas, there are plenty to try, inside and out. Warm water gets piped over the floor and stairs between levels outside so it's not so bad, but you can also just use the ones indoors if you want which are like big communal swimming pools.

Outside, as well as the various 'special water' ones like the blueberry and bokbunja (raspberry vinegar) ones, a hinoki spa (to help with skin irritations apparently) an 'alcohol' spa, and a green tea spa, there were 'themed' ones like the massage pool, the classic pool, the jazz pool, the gayageum pool and such, most of which just meant spas of various temperatures in some sort of special setting, like having classical or gayageum music played. There was also the 'romantic' spa, which could only fit about three couples in it, a really hot spa, a lukewarm spa, a spa-cafe (yes, the cafe is IN the spa), a dry sauna room, a 'health road' foot bath where you walk with one foot in the hot water and one in the cold (or if you do what we and most people did, you just want to sit in the hot water you can just about squeeze yourself in) and the most interesting one, a doctor fish spa!

It was only w5000 for half an hour or until the doctor fish ajumma kicked you out, and a full body thing, so we gave it a whirl. If you're like me and extremely ticklish, and also easily freaked out by things nibbling at you, it may take a while to get used to it, as the fish get spooked when you start giggling and will all swim away, but if you're like Ryan and quite calm, then you'll probably really get your money's worth and the only thing you'll have to worry about is fish swimming up your shorts. Some of the fish were quite big and not so cute (big as in maybe 5cms long) to have nibbling all the dead skin off you, but after we got used to it it wasn't too bad. Ryan even took the dare to put his face under for 30 seconds, but the fish were a) too scared or b) too smart to come near ^_^

So we spent a good few hours there. We might have tried some of the rides but it was getting late and had already gone dark and the temperatures were dropping - the attendants had actually started salting the walkways to stop them freezing over - so we went in search of dinner and had some delicious smoked samgyopsal and kalbi. The next day, we made good use of our kitchenette before we headed out and had a semi-English breakfast of baked beans, bacon, fried bread (no toaster) and fried tomatoes but since there were no knives or forks, or flat plates come to that, it was with a slightly Korean twist :) Ryan then headed off to his parent's place and I to Busan for NYE with Christy.

You know what I realised? I think that this is the first and only time I've stayed up to watch the sunrise for NYE. I stayed up all night last year, but that was just so we could catch the first bus back from Seoul and I was in a nightclub in Seoul anyway so the rising sun could have been the Teletubbies baby for all I knew. At any rate, it's also definitely my last, at least my last in any Northern Hemisphere country where you risk freezing various parts of your anatomy off to wait for the bloody sun to take it's sweet time to haul itself over the horizon at 7.34am. Unfortunately it was a bit of a disappointment, and we never actually saw the sun or any kind of sun-coloured glow in all the fog. The only reason we knew it was sunrise (apart from the lightening sky) was when they let off all the golden wish balloons people had written their wishes on, which is supposed to co-incide. Apparently it's a little foggy every year, but this year was particularly bad.

And no, I was not wearing a skirt that said "skirt" too :p

Anyway, at least we had a fun night waiting for the non-sunrise. We had some yummy tacos for dinner, played Apples and Apples (a word association game), let off fireworks at midnight on the beach (freezing our arses off), went to a hole-in-the-wall makkolli place that did particularly yummy bacon-wrapped ggochi (꼬치 - snacks on sticks; I don't even know what everything was, besides wrapped in bacon!), and, of course, noraebang. I think all of us bar the superstrong Christy and Jessica micro-napped at some point in the night, and Tom and Bailey headed off home around 3am (now that they're an old married couple and all we could excuse them^^) but the rest of us more or less made it in one piece!

Midnight at Haeundae beach with Bailey, Danielle, Tom, Val, Dan, Jess, Christy

Christy showing off her incredibly long limbs - "It's like you're not even a real person - you're a cartoon character!!" (Jessica)

Rockin' it out at the noraebang!

Trying to use breakfast at Breezeburns to stay awake... ㅠㅠ~~~~~~*

So all in all it was a good NYE, and although there was no actual sunrise to see, it was fun seeing in the New Year together and a good start to 2012 to spend the last night of 2011 in such good company.

Which I suppose brings up New Year's resolutions - old hat I know, but it seems to be expected, going from everyone else's blogs. Let's see how many I can write with a straight face, haha :p

1. Ok, this sounds a tad bitchy, but it's one I've made every NYE for the last three years and the only one I've actually managed to keep and find useful. Don't waste time on people who aren't worth it. Conversely, spend more time with those who are and who appreciate it. I know I don't seem like it at times, but I'm kind of sentimental and an old-fashioned romantic about some things, and one of those things is about believing in people and friendships. So up until I made this, I found myself committing a lot of myself to certain people and certain friendships that ended up being a waste of time and energy, and finding myself ultimately disappointed when I should have been more realistic. People are sometimes unreliable, or two faced, or use other people to get what they want, or just plain jerks. It happens, move on, appreciate the ones who aren't.

2. Be more health conscious. Now I like to think that I do fairly well on this in general - I'm not and never will be an exercise junkie, or a gym person, so making a resolution to go to the gym every day is just unrealistic, but there are other ways I can keep fit and that are more than feasible, like resolving to exercise at least three or four times a week, even if it's just taking an hour long walk or going to a bellydancing class, which by the way I am keen to continue when I get back! This also involves being better about keeping to a low-GI diet (which I pretty much gave up on when I came to Korea, a.k.a. white-rice kingdom) to keep my IR in check, and making sure I get enough vitamin D, folate and zinc to help keep my immune system up. I haven't made much effort with those last three either lately, which may or may not have made any difference since I'm exposed on a daily basis to those little germ hotbeds known as 'children' and have had bronchitis three times this year, tonsilitis/throat infections twice, numerous colds, hayfever and gastro-enteritis. I've actually got bronchitis again now, which makes it twice in three months, and had an awful, nauseous, painful and very disgustingly mucousy two days when I ran out of medicine on Monday night until Ryan took me to see an ear nose and throat doctor yesterday who gave me some sort of nasal spray and bronchial steam thing, as well as more drugs. I don't know what the spray was but it was incredibly painful, so I'm glad it at least helped. Anyway, sorry for the digression! Upshot, be healthier, avoid germy children when possible.


3. Spend more time with my loved ones while I can. Good lord that sounds awful - ever since reading Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One", those words make me think "corpse". But don't worry, I don't have a stack of corpses I keep and dress up and have tea parties with, I just mean close friends and family, especially in light of the fact that I've spent the last two years away from home, even though it's been great and I've made many new friends that are just as dear to me :)

4. Travel to at least one new country. Haha, there's always a selfish resolution in there somewhere, right? What's the New Year without a bit of self-indulgence? ^_^

Ok, done. I'm not going to ask for your ideas about anything I've missed, since I'm sure there are many things I need to improve about myself. But any constructive feedback is always welcome :)

Happy New Year y'all!

Merry Wednesday Good Gentlefolk!

Apparently a middle school student died recently in Cheongju after getting into a fight with another students/other students. Has anyone else heard anything about this? My co-teacher told me about it on Tuesday, after one of her homeroom students ended up in hospital with a possible broken rib after being punched in the chest by another student and finding it hard to breathe (he turned out to be ok). I think she said it was at Seo-Gyeong Middle School but I'm not sure - she might have said Seo-Gyo or Seo-Hyeon. Which brings to mind the stabbing incident at my school last year - I can't remember if I blogged about this or not (I certainly should have if I didn't), but last year after the movie "아저씨" ("Ajosshi" or in it's English title "The Man From Nowhere") came out which features a lot of violence, apparently it became popular amongst the second year boys to mimic the stuff done in the movie. To this end, one of them brought a knife to school (I think, or he could have been using his craft knife which all students quite ridiculously have and are allowed to carry around at all times, even when they aren't using them in any subjects, to semi-disastrous results) and was mock-stabbing his classmates. And of course, ended up actually stabbing one of them, sending the stabbed student to hospital for stitches and making the student who stabbed him have a panic attack and start crying because he genuinely thought he'd killed his friend. Which I guess was quite a smart move (although involuntary) because it made it harder to punish him for it since he was already mid-nervous breakdown. And then of course there was the incident with Jin-Seon. Don't get the wrong idea, it's not always the boys - the first year girls have been in trouble for going to visit their friends at other schools and starting scrag-fights there too, where apparently the go-to move is scratching up each other's faces. *Sigh* Teenagers.

Anyway, today is my last day of regular school before my winter camps start. I'm taking tomorrow and Friday off to use up my holiday days since they don't get paid out if I don't use them, and am overjoyed at the prospect of never having to teach my Thursday and Friday classes again (a jubilation that has lasted since last week). Hooray! Today I also only had one class with my favourite 1st graders - the "super-smart" class (my co-teacher's nickname for them). But unfortunately I completely stuffed up on that one - our timetables got changed so I had them first period instead of sixth (I normally wouldn't have class until 3rd period anyway), and wouldn't you know it, but I turned my phone off last night (so losing the alarm on it) and forgot to set my clock alarm, so I didn't wake up until 8.53am, 33 minutes AFTER I was supposed to be at school and 3 minutes AFTER my first class was supposed to start. On any other day it wouldn't have mattered but of course today... *double sigh* It's official - I'm a cotton-headed ninny muggins (I've been watching "Elf" with some of my students ㅋㅋ). Luckily my co-teacher knew that I wouldn't do something like that on purpose and wasn't angry - it's also her homeroom group so they were fine.

놈놈놈 (nom nom nom, haha^^)

I guess it's really a pretty typical way of ending my school year - violence and tardiness, although it's a nice change that it's me being late for once and not my students. If it was any other class than my good class I might still have wandered in 20 minutes late, just to be a jerk and interrupt their movie, since they do it to me all the time. Anyway, I better get going with finishing stuff for my winter camps! I have 20 hours of conversation class across the first two weeks, then 10 hours of a teacher's class and 10 hours of a students' class in the third week so I'll be pretty busy. And after last year, this time I know for sure not to be stupid enough to tell the VP or Principal about the class magazine/newspaper we're making, no matter how proud I am of my students :) Oh and it's 오징어덮밥 (ojing-eo deopbap, as in the picture above), which I love, with egg and vegetable soup (계란야채국) - which I also love! - and chocolate cake for lunch because it's Wednesday, so hooray!

Oh and one last reason to be happy: Ryan also has the day off on Friday! At least I hope so - if he doesn't I'm going to turn up at his hagwon, take a kitchen knife out of my bag and sit there glaring angrily at his boss while I stroke the knife blade for the whole day. A bit of a complicated story there that I won't go into, but it basically involves his boss dicking around and telling the Korean teachers that they had Friday off, then didn't, getting angry that they assumed they did, and then telling them that they DID have the day off and he was faking it to encourage them to work harder. Hi-LAR-ious, no?

Anyway, now that he apparently DOES actually have the day off, we can do what we had planned to do which is go to Deoksan to the Reesom Spa Castle, which is a warm water theme park, and then stay at this cute pension which has a jacuzzi in the room! How awesome is that?? Ryan originally tried to book us a place that had the in-room jacuzzi outside because he knows that I like outdoor spas, but since it will be the New Year's weekend places are pretty full up, so we couldn't find one that was free and also not horrendously expensive (like more than 400 000 won). And then I'm going down to Busan to meet up with my favourite ladies, including the Cheongju posse and my KBFF II, for what I'm sure will be an amazing NYE! So it will be a very exciting three day weekend ^_^

Oh and I'm meeting one of Ryan's sisters on Sunday for an early dinner/late lunch before she heads back to Seoul on the KTX and we go back to Cheongju, so wish me luck! I'm obviously going to have to go easy the night before so I don't look like I just fell out of a tree on Sunday when I meet her, haha :p

Anyway, happy Wednesday everyone! Hope you're having a delicious lunch today, if not a brilliant day :)

Tangential post is tangential

Or should that be 'tangental'? Hmm. I've obviously been spending too much time on 9gag with the internet memes as my only friends. Too obviously when you consider I was playing Taboo last night and the word was "alone" so I said "the internet meme, forever ...?" But at least my friend got it straight away! I guess we're both sad and forever alone together...? Haha^^

Anyway, so I'm not dealing with student cuteness or ranting about how 'special' they are just yet - I'll save that to rant together since it's quite depressing. Or would be if I was sticking around for another year! Woohoo for resigning instead of re-signing! Haha, I know, I'm a dork^^

Instead, I'm going to post some photos from the lovely weekend I had in Busan with Christy, decorating her Christmas tree and missing Nat. We also had some delicious dwaeji gukbab (돼지국밥) or porky rice-soup which is basically soup with sliced pork that you add rice to AFTER it's cooked and enjoy with some nice eye-wateringly sharp kimchi. It's a specialty of Busan and delicious.

Our star/angel substitute

Danielle, Christy, Christy's friend Charlie

JP, quite drunk ㅋㅋㅋㅋ

맛있는 부산 돼지국밥 (delicious Busan dwaeji guk-bap)

In other news, it started snowing very gently last night, making for a very gloomy walk home from the bus stop. Today the sky had another whirl at it, making my students very excited. Don't know if you can see it here, but if you can, those white bits are the frosty chunks of slippery death that people call snow.

*sigh* Oh well, at least I get to use my wellingtons more now!



 



Oh and also, one thing that I like about this cold weather - it's perfect time for juk! (죽) Aka congee, aka rice porridge. I had some last week with Michelle - she had samgye-juk (삼계죽) which is like samgyetang (spring chicken soup) but with juk instead, and I had the sogogi nakji-juk (쇠고기낚지죽)
which was beef and octopus. Yum yum yummity!

Happy Friday everyone! Hope you're having a less snowy day. Oh and look, the sunshine is out now. Gotta love that temperamental weather :p

Summer Birthdays and Summer Shenanigans

So I have no idea what 'shenanigans' means in Minnesota, but apparently it's something big enough to get into a tizzy and storm out of a bar over.

Oh and hello readers! <insert half-arsed excuse for not updating my blog more frequently to cover reality of extreme laziness here> At least this month I have a valid excuse or two to keep the lame ones company though - principally, the end of semester and the simultaneous start of summer camp, and secondarily, my birthday! (huzzah!) As a testament to my ageing faculties, and partly in defence of my long absence, it did actually take me a while and a random question from a teacher about my exact age to remember that it was in fact my birthday soon. Having failed to remember that, it was also a bit of a trial to remember exactly how old I was turning and the difference in age between 23 and 25, possibly because of afore-mentioned failure to remember exactly how old I am. (Darn math! You kids these days with your subtractions and divisions and whatchamacallits!) Celebrating a joint birthday with a borrowed KBFF (since both of our originals have left!), Christy and I had a lovely day of manicures, pedicures, Harry Potter movies and cake around Nampo-dong in Busan. Luckily, Christy doesn't seem to have been afflicted with early-onset dementia like me, and was most gentle in her mockery of my extremely blonde weekend, even when I was surprised that the cherry and almond ice-cream cake we had chosen after much discussion in the store had cherries in it. Later, we went out for Christy's birthday with her friends and had a quiet but fun night out at a nearby bar and of course noraebang, topped by the most magnificent night-club I've ever been to! Aptly named Superdome, the culmination of the evening was the roof opening to music from the Star Wars movies and being showered in fake snow. Beautiful! (I just realised that I didn't in fact get a video of this like I thought so you'll have to go there to see this wonder for yourselves!) It was also quite entertaining  - singing and dancing from the stage-shows, and an ajumma being physically dragged out of the club by five bouncers after getting mouthy, throwing beer all over people on the dance floor and then trying to take them all on and refusing to leave. Haha, Busan never fails in fun^^


The next weekend (last weekend), birthday celebrations were set to continue with a trip to Pohang, a coastal city in Gyeongsangbuk-do. Looking for a quiet weekend after a cocktail party on Friday night that had featured some particularly lethal drinking games, things didn't quite go to plan. Mostly due to the afore-mentioned drinking games and a challenge to the theme of "I don't get drunk. Drunk is for people from weak countries", a friend that I'll call Irish Pride (IP) barely made it to the bus (she had our tickets so we were very lucky that she has a conscience!) and having made it to the bus, trooper that she was held it in for 2 hours before we got to the rest stop before hurling her guts up. Off the bus at the other end and another chuck up, a run to the chemist (the fastest I've ever been able to explain a problem and buy the correct medicine for it!), another 40 minutes on a city bus, and 15 minutes walk with a stop or two along the way, and we were at the beach.

At this point, the less hungover of us wanted to get something to eat, so we continued down the beach. IP definitely needed a rest so she decided to hang back and have a nap as was. Being too hungover to take stock, the place she chose was unfortunately right in the middle of the beach with no shade. Being good friends that we are, when we'd eaten and come back to find her, the first order of business was of course photographic evidence of her solitude amongst the crowds. I'm sure at this point that the Korean tourists around were wondering what kind of people we were to be sniggering and taking photos of this poor hapless person evidently not very well that we'd apparently just stumbled on. Even after we'd woken her up and all gone off together, I'm sure they were still unimpressed, as we were also the only ones wearing bikinis (the usual Korean swimming outfit being not that much different from normal clothes, i.e. fully dressed), and after taking a dip we all promptly fell asleep on the sand, then after waking up took more photos of others still asleep.

IP on IV

Anyway, so after an otherwise relaxed afternoon on the beach where we'd all been at least a little burnt, it started getting cloudy and sprinkling, so we decided to leave and go find a motel. Getting up however, IP (at this point as red as a lobster, mostly from the walk from the bus) started getting the shakes. Protesting that she was ok, the rest of us got bossy and called a taxi to take her to a hospital. It was revealed at this point that she'd also had a bit of a cheeky chuck on the beach and buried the evidence. Which meant that she hadn't been able to keep down any water. The first taxi took us to a hospital nearby that proved to be closed, but luckily a woman (who must have been a nurse that normally works there or something) saw IP's state, called us another taxi and gave us some good advice to stop us freaking out that IP's hands were turning blue and she couldn't stand up by herself. Luckily IP was ok when sitting down, so she didn't redecorate the taxi. Whether it was to the driver's credit for understanding the urgency of the situation or just because he was afraid of that happening, he got us back to the city in under 20 minutes, where it seemed like it would normally take at least 30. Fortunately, a nurse at the hospital spoke enough English that they could figure out some treatment for IP (since the gaps in my Korean medical vocabulary are more like crevasses and the others don't really speak Korean). An injection of something miraculous for her migraine and a litre and a half of IV fluid for the dehydration later, things were looking less dire. Possibly gazing at the handsome English speaking male nurse and discussing the link between education and good looks amongst Korean medical staff for a couple of hours helped. At any rate, it was more than enough time for her sympathetic friends to take another photo. Hehe ㅋ ㅋ ㅋ


Anyway, so a steak dinner and the obligatory noraebang later, and it was a good birthday weekend where no-one died! Sadly it was drizzling that night so the fire work we tried didn't do anything and we were all to scared to go pick it up, but I did get a 'Happy Birthday' song from the staff at Outback Steakhouse and a commemorative photograph so it was all good :)


As a follow up, yesterday I went to the dermatologists with IP as her face had puffed up and started blistering quite badly - kind of like 3rd degree burns. They gave her some medicine, an injection, and some magic ointment though that seems to be doing the trick. She's sworn off the tipple but we'll have to see how long that lasts!


And that's the saga of my last two birthday-related weekends :)

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.