Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts
Showing posts with label weather. Show all posts

Friday, December 9, 2011

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

Friday, June 24, 2011

The good, the bad, the ugly...

Ok, so as promised, instead of a rant, a blog praising some of my less aggravating students. And also about some of the funny things they say because I think that some of them are little geniuses! So the Korean education system doesn't encourage a great deal of creative thinking, and it certainly doesn't produce a lot of it. But I do, and although I don't condemn them for not being able to, I do love it when they genuinely come up with some funny and innovative stuff. Like lately, I've been getting my second year students to make their own magic product, and some of the things they've come up with have been hilarious. As well as the usual stuff made with the vocabulary I've given them, there have been a few that have ventured outside the box and come up with some really good stuff. Although I don't know why, but a lot of them seem to like making skin creams with snails in them because they are slimy and have soft skin. I feel like I've seen an ad for something like that at Skin food or something. Anyway, enjoy!

My favourites from class 2-4 (girls):
~ Snack Wings! Secret ingredient: angel's tears. It will make you fly, you will have wonderful wings and it will be very delicious and healthy!
~ Super duper hot diet spray! Secret ingredient: unicorn's horn. It will make your fat be gone, it will make your body like a Hollywood stars', it will make you many boyfriends and you will smell like Queen Elizabeth!
~ Transform energy drink! Secret ingredient: bear toe nails, sheep's fur, apple leaves and deer blood. It will give you super powers and you will change, you will transform into animals, it will be a mystery drink and you should buy it because it will be cheap!

Class 2-5 (boys):
~ God body spray! Secret ingredients: God's hair, my gas, Tae-Hee's tooth. It will make you invisible, you will be able to go everywhere, it will make you  happy and it will make you very interesting!
~ Smile Happy Spray! Secret ingredient: shark tooth. It will make you feel so good, you will smile every day!
~ Beckham hair cream! Secret ingredient: Beckham's hair. It will make your hair like Beckham's hair style, you will play soccer very well, it will make you handsome, it will be awesome!
~ Soccer Energy Bar! Secret ingredient: frog's legs - tagline: kick like a frog! It will be very delicious, you will be able to do trick shots, you will be a soccer star and it will be discounted next week!

Funny ingredients have included:
Dragon Spray (to make your own dragon): iron 10%, soul 60%, black dragon fin 20%, hellfire 5%, gold 5%.
Special diet cream: sugar, solid magma, dragon's hair, snake's blood.
Junjae energy smart drink (the boys who made it are named Jun-Yeong and Jae-Hyeon): mouse tails, cow eyes, batwings, people blood.

Other great stuff they've produced (all second year I'm afraid - as mentioned earlier, I think that there is seriously something wrong with this year's first years, or perhaps it's the parenting that's behind it) is from the week before's activity of writing instructions to do something. These were my favourites from class 2-7:





In other news, it's Friday! Yay! It's raining quite a bit here (which I actually quite like) so it's not as steamy as usual, and since I don't seem to have quite kicked the kidney infection yet, the slightly lower temperature (and lots of Nurofen and water) is something I'm very happy about since it means I can actually eat hot food without ending up in a monsoon of my own sweat. On the upside, because I was so damp from sweat (post-hot shower), it did prevent me from accidentally setting myself on fire the other day when I turned my hibachi thing (portable gas stove that runs on canisters of butane gas) on so I shouldn't say it's all bad. The story: the spark didn't ignite so I thought the gas had run out. To test this, I tried triggering it again, but didn't think my way through it enough to turn the gas off first, hence a very beautiful bloom of fire up my chest and into my face and me screeching like a manic chicken. And ...yes, I'm that stupid.

Also, I'm having a Summer Christmas with some other Southern Hemisphererers tomorrow (since none of us were sufficiently impressed at having a winter Christmas last year with snow) so I am excited! In fact, with the rain and the heat, it's quite like the last couple of Christmases at home have been - thanks global warming! But sadly, I might not be able to truly represent as an Aussie by wearing thongs (flip flops to you North Americans with dirty minds) as I am currently both excited and disgusted at the same time by the present state of my feet. I tried the foot peeling pack from the Face Shop last Saturday when I was in Busan with mum and dad (mum tried one too!) and as promised, the dead skin has been peeling off to reveal the 'baby feet skin' underneath. While quite impressive, it's also been quite gross, and my feet now look like they have selective leprosy. I've been wearing socks everywhere (not fun in the 32 degree heat we had at the start of the week) to limit the amount of dead skin sloughing off my footsies onto the floor that I keep finding everywhere, and I've been scrubbing them every time I have a shower, but I still have to shake out my bedding (I tend to kick the socks off in the night) and vacuum every day anyway. Mine was 7000 won, but they also have them at Nature Republic for 4000 won and apparently at Tony Moly too.

Oh, and I also bought the 'Secret Garden' manhwa (만화 - comic book) to try and a) help my Korean and b) actually get me interested in dramas, since everyone seems to have loved this one. So hopefully I will have the time this weekend to get started on it and it will be a good incentive to improve my Korean. Anyway, happy Friday everyone! Hope y'all have brilliant weekends ^_^

Tuesday, March 22, 2011

ㅊ_ㅊ z z z ~

Something funky for your face - I've seen a 35yo man wearing the lips one
Don't you think that Konglish emoticon looks sleepy? I do, which is incidentally how I'm feeling. Yes, I'm sick. Again. I got some awful 24 hour bug last Tuesday and almost fainted in class, but a visit to the doctor and lots of sleep (every free period, lunch, and as soon as I got home for the whole evening for the rest of the week) sorted me out. Until Saturday. Ok, so maybe it has something to do with the green beer I had on Friday (St Patty's day dontcha-know?) and then going out again in Hongdae on Saturday (although I didn't really drink any alcohol and barely made it to 1am) but I have a feeling it's more to do with the Yellow Dust. Apparently it was really bad on Saturday, so bad that a lot of people in Cheongju didn't even go outside. In my little absent-minded cocoon I didn't even notice! I thought the air was a bit dirty because of smog or something, but barely anyone in Seoul was wearing a facemask, which is the usual indicator, and it's a lot further north than Cheongju so you'd think it would be worse. Mind you, Koreans get pretty fanatical about the Yellow Dust - don't go outside, close and seal all windows and doors, if you have to go outside wash your face and hair when you get in and shake your clothes, etc. - and with good reason. For those of you unfamiliar with such a lovely sounding Spring phenomenon, the Yellow Dust is a potent mix of dirt, dust, sand, and largely industrial chemical waste blowing down from Siberia and Northern China, thanks to growing erosion, drought and deforestation. Because there are a lot of Easterlies in this area, it gets pretty bad around Beijing, North Korea and South Korea, and if there's a strong enough carrying wind apparently it can even make it as far as the West Coast in the USA. On bad days, it looks like yellow fog, and you can usually smell it if you go outside. This is an article about a bad bout of it last year in Beijing and another about the growing toxicity of it this year.

Anyway, so walking around in that all afternoon in Seoul certainly didn't help my cough and my throat looks red raw as a result. Luckily I always have my students to cheer me up :) Those of you on Facebook will have probably seen my post about the very smooth year 7 boy (1st grade, 13 yo) who tried out this gem of a pick-up line: "Teacher, I am very handsome guy! Let's have conversation... you know, me, you, we have secret meeting, so-gae-ting, ok? *waggles eyebrows at me Groucho Marx style*" to which I replied (trying not to laugh too much) "Ok, well if you want conversation you can come to my conversation class after school on Wednesdays." He looked very deflated and sadly told me "Oh ...no after school because I must go to hagwon.Sorry." (So-gae-ting/소개팅 or 'meeting'/미팅 = date).


My other favourite this week was from two of my third year students in my Monday conversation class that gave me a nice start to the week. Because they don't have me for regular classes any more, apparently Monday is their favourite day of the week "because I can meet you!" This may or may not have had something to do with the candy I'd given them that lesson, but they are generally sweet girls so I am choosing to believe not :) 


And one more - as part of my first year conversation class students' placement test I asked them to tell me about a place they'd like to go and why. This was my favourite response (although I couldn't really mark it as correct):

Hello? Amy ^^
I'm Su Jung.
Nice to meet you.
I'm sorry... I don't study English very well... But I will be smart!!! looking for me!! HA! HA! HA!
Amy!! I like you very much!!^^
Goodbye~ :-)
Your student, Giyomi ♥ Su Jung.


Oh and my favourite - discussing 'frequency' and asking the 2nd graders (yr 8) for things they never do, as well as the usual "kill, smoke, drink alcohol", the fat kid (his name is 으뜸/U-Ddum - doesn't that even sound roly-poly??) shouted out "DIET!". Hahaha ^_^


Anyway, hope that brightens your day as much as it did mine. Jenkins out!