A new year, a new place

A year of living in Korea passed a couple of months ago, but I had spent some of that time in Seoul before I came to the nicer city. Because of that, my one year working contract with the school down here only just expired. Having not had my 'fill' of the country yet, I signed on for another year.

The company I've been working for, the Chungdahm Institute in Busan has been excellent in most areas. I'm glad I signed on with them from the beginning, and I'm happy to be working for them another year. And I'm not just saying that because I know some of the staff read this blog. Ha.
For the new contract, I got a chance to find new accommodation which we found in Seomyeon. The photo above is of my old room in Gaya-dong, with everything in a moderate state of disarray, ready for the big move the following day. The move itself went pretty smoothly.

Here's the living room of my new place in the middle of the city. I'm living with a flatmate now, Canadian John from the old branch and things are going as well as I could ask for. We have two bedrooms, a double loft (that could fit another person really) and an intelligent refrigerator that complains if you leave the door open too long. On the table there is my pet plant, Beeblebrox, who I've managed to look after for quite a while now. Usually my plants die inexplicably after a couple of months, but Beeblebrox is a survivor. He's watching me blog right now.

This is the bathroom, with bidet toilet and body shower. Using a bidet seems to make more hygienic sense, but call me old fashioned when I say that nothing's as good as some nice folded toilet paper. The shower is cool as well, it has multiple functions on it including a body shower where it sprays these directed nozzles all over the showeree. Much different from my old one, which sometimes had hot water for more than 3 minutes if I was lucky.

This is my new bedroom, which I've slowly been filling up with stuff. The view at night is quite nice and the windows are soundproofed fairly well. How much are we paying for this place you wonder? It's about AU$700 per month, split with my flatmate. So less than $100 dollars per week each. That's the good thing about living in Busan vs Seoul, accommodation and things in general are cheaper. The downside was that there was a heavy key-money (similar to bond money back home) of about AU$23,000. Our company paid half of it for us.

This is the view from the living room. Seomyeon is probably the busiest area of Busan, because it's a shopping district centered on a subway interchange point. And yes, right next door to us is the 7-luck casino. Most casinos in Korea are only open to foreigners, and all food and alcohol is free. If you use the freebies without playing too much though, you do get politely asked to leave and never come back.

Soon after moving into our new place, we played hosts for Eric's birthday party. There were lots of people drinking and talking and then we went down to the beach. It went pretty well.

Then, because the timing went a bit funny, our housewarming party was the following weekend. We invited some staff members and I cooked some food. Typical conversations at events like these will be half in Korean and half in English.

Looking back at us there, in the hat, is Paul. He often drinks a lot and forgets what happened the next day. Sometimes I forget too. It's all a part of living in Korea.

Living downstairs are our co-workers, Jef and Elissa. They have the identical apartment to us, just seven floors down. This photo is from the aftermath of their housewarming.

And this is the aftermath of Eric's birthday in our place. You may note distinct similarities and differences between the two.

For my new contract I got a promotion to a more supervisory role, where I watch CCTV videos of newer teachers. These are the first two new teachers at the Saha branch, John and Logan. As you can see they are quite happy chaps. Are they like that 24 hours a day?
Well, yes.

Here's another shot of them I had to include because Logan's face is rather entertaining. He belongs in a beer commercial.

And here are the other staff from the new branch on a night out in the neighbourhood. From left to right is Ken, Logan, Michelle, John, Christine, Me, Yang-min and squatting is Jordan. Just like it was at the old branch, we are all fairly easy-going and get along rather splendidly.

So anyway I decided that this new contract year would be a more productive one. I enrolled in Pusan National University for Korean language classes in the mornings. Right now they're running at 3 hours per day, 6 days per week and I haven't missed a class since I started 3 weeks ago. My Korean is fairly shoddy really, when I consider the time I've spent here. It's difficult to pick up a language if most of your co-workers and friends are English speakers and your job is an English teacher.

I took this photo at the beginning of the first day of class. The teacher is really nice and every lesson is taught in Korean. I'm actually the only westerner in my class, the others are Chinese, Japanese, Kazhakistani, Sri Lankan and Russian students.

Pusan National University is supposedly the best institution outside of Seoul. It's a nice campus with the mountains in the background and cheap food. Lunch is AU$1.50. It's nice to get back into uni life again too.

Between the subway and the campus is the PNU area, which is typical of the surroundings of any large Korean university. There are a lot of bars, karaoke rooms and restaurants tailored for a younger market. I walk through the area most days but don't have much time to enjoy it. Typically I'll wake up at 8:30am, eat brekky, travel to uni, take classes from 10am until 1pm, eat lunch and travel to work which I start around 2:30pm and finish at 10:30pm. Between uni and work there are 26 subway stops. So there's not much time for anything else during the week. But I like busy schedules, the same way I did in Australia. They keep me occupied.

Last Friday the Korean school took us for an excursion to see a Taekwondo instructor. We stretched, ran around, kicked the air and had some fun. The instructor was really friendly too, he told us that if we're learning Korean, we can come to his classes for free. Unfortuneately I don't have the time.

That's a picture of him there on the right. He's an 8th dan black belt instructor, which is quite high. On the left is his old teacher. Imagine if that guy was your father-in-law. Yikes.

And here's a picture of a fire we started at the last beach party of the summer. A bunch of us gathered at Gwangan beach to bid farewell to the warmer nights. Robyn Schultz, my fellow panelist from Seoul came down that night. Unfortunately we didn't take a picture together though. A big hello to everyone up in Seoul, you guys should come down here more often.

Anyway that's it for me! This weekend is Chuseok, which is kinda like Korean thanksgiving. So we get a nice four day weekend and time to relax.

Seeya!

Interlude

We just got back from Beijing on Monday and it was a refreshing and fascinating escape from the sanctuary that has become Korea. I feel completely comfortable and at home in this country now, but it certainly is a nice thing to travel elsewhere for a while.

Because it will take me a while to organise the Beijing photos into a coherent narrative, I thought it timely to put up photos for this mini-post. These are from the weekend before we went to China, when we went out in Hwamyeong for dinner and drinks. I don't work for the Hwamyeong branch but Heather does, so sometimes I get to tag along and absorb more than my fair share of their merriment. In this photo are some of the Hwamyeong staff, slightly tipsy after a long dinner and eager to find ii-cha (the Korean word for 'any second establishment to drink at after finishing dinner').

Ii-cha turned out to be a karaoke room. Here food and wine flowed freely and all who were present imbibed dubious quantities while others serenaded dancing co-workers.

That guy with the tambourine is actually a bus driver for the school who became very jovial indeed. He stood up in the middle of dinner and announced to us "I driving Bus Number 2. Berry goot! Sankyou."
We finished up in the wee hours of the morning and I ended up hitting the sack around 5:30am.

That was well planned because the following day I had to get up at 7:30am to get the train to Seoul. At the train station I was feeling a little snoozy, but I still couldn't help noticing the name of this coffee and sandwich shop. I like coffee and I like sandwiches, but coffee in sandwich? What an amazing idea.

We walked into the train station, and with sandwiches on my mind I had to buy one. This thoughtful pearl of wisdom greeted me at the counter of another shop.

I chewed my sandwich a little more thoughtfully after reading that.

The reason we went to Seoul was for leadership training. The company paid for us to go up there and participate in a workshop at the Yeoksam Cultural Centre. We arrived around midday and had a quick lunch before meandering in.

The lecture theatre reminded me a little of my days at university. The presentations weren't too bad, a lot of things were fairly common knowledge but it wasn't a waste of time.
I met up with Ben, who you may possibly remember as my room mate in Seoul from Canada, who I lived with for a while during training. That was a long time ago. He's living in Daejeon now and engaged to a Korean woman.

After dinner we had optional team-building exercises which we were a little apprehensive of, especially when we had to take off our shoes. They actually turned out to be the highlight of the trip (as well as me winning $10 at the casino later that night, hooray).

These were the people running the show, various CDI workers from Seoul who each had a different challenge for us to complete as a team. We, the teams, had come from all across the country even as far as Jeju Island.

Before long we were blindfolded and frantically yelling orders to each other. In this exercise we had to cross an 'acid river' by stepping on tiles that could mysteriously wash away if no one was standing on them. Four out of seven of our team members were blindfolded which increased the difficulty by an order of magnitude. We passed.


This video is from a different challenge called Minefield. The mines consisted of sticky pieces that had to be avoided. The difficulty lay in that one person outside the minefield had to tell two others who were blindfolded how to step across the area. It was also a race, with both teams starting at opposite ends, resulting in an inevitable collision in the middle. The first team to cross the field received 3 points, but there was minus 1 point for every mine stepped on.

Here's the solution to a challenge called Toxic Waste, in which the teams had to dispose the contents of the green bucket into the orange bag while keeping well away from it. The only materials available were some strings and a piece of rubber. Good fun.
I came back to Busan by train the following day and left for Beijing three days later.

The next few posts will be all about Beijing, which is an enormous city of skyscrapers and history. I'll pop them out in succession as time permits.

See you then!

Two years in Korea

According to the little purple stamp on my passport, July 21st 2006 was when I first landed in Korea's Incheon airport. Thinking back to that time, I realise that a lot has happened since. Every once in a while I rift through my earlier blog posts and in a strange way it sometimes feels like it was somebody else who was living that life. Maybe I should lay off the beer for a while.

A couple of weeks ago it was Heather's brother-in-law's birthday. We went to a buffet restaurant in Migliore called Todai. The food was quite spectacular and some of the earlier LKB readers may remember an old post about the Di Maris buffet in Jangsan. This restaurant was quite similar, but within walking distance of my apartment.

Todai is a franchise and apparently has outlets all over the world, even in Las Vegas. Koreans love family restaurants, so chains like VIPs, TGIF, Outback Steakhouse and this one are always packed on the weekends. The restaurant has a seating capacity of around 500, but you still have to make a reservation.

Here are Heather's father, mother and niece. They don't speak any English, but these days I talk to Heather's mother on the phone in Korean for conversation practice. I still speak Korean like a toddler though.

And here's Heather's brother-in-law. I don't think he appreciates being photographed, even if it's for a celebrity appearance on Lee's Korea Blog.

Yikes.

Heather's niece is called Ji-Ae. She is adored by the family and spends most of her time running around and exploring.

At the Todai buffet there was a chocolate fountain that you dip skewered fruit into. Ji-Ae was very interested in licking off the chocolate, but not so interested in eating the fruit.

"Hey! Who licked all the chocolate off my fruit??"

Here is a nicely sculptured watermelon. Back in the days when I used to cook, I could cut butterflies out of carrots.

Here are some of the Hwamyeong staff who I went to dinner with a while ago. The main reason I included this picture is because that white necked bottle on the left is $60 sake (Japanese rice wine). It tasted around 10% better than $5 sake.

As the weather warms up, house parties are more common among the English teaching community. I didn't know whose house this was, but it was a good time. There were around 30 of us crammed into a single room. The cops politely asked us to leave at around 1am and we obliged.

Here are Jef's friends, Maria Kwak (top), who is a CDI trainer in Seoul and Jennifer Esterline (bottom) who is an adoptee and designs mobile phones for Nokia.

Someone recently told me that I always make that face when I pose for cameras. Is it true?

Last post I was talking about how I landed a promotion at CDI. Now I have more responsibilities and am a little busier, but I'm enjoying it overall. Now I work in the office at the human resources department and interview new teachers as well as look after the April English program. This is part of the whiteboard in our office, showing our timeline for recruiting new teachers for the fall term. We have to bring in 30 new teachers by August 25th.


Korea is a little further ahead of Australia in terms of gadgets and things. My housekey and traffic card are microchip systems, rather than the aging technology I used back home. I shot this video last week of the fingerprint identification system that deactivates the alarm at my new workplace. Much cooler and more convenient than punching in a number password.

One of my co-workers, Kelly Park has decided to escape from the chaos and travel the world with her boyfriend, Joon Son. This is their travel plan over the next few years. Amazing, isn't it?

If any readers are living in any of these destinations and would like to help out two Koreans looking for part-time work, get in touch. They're not afraid to get their hands dirty and you'll find that they are overqualified for most positions. Joon was the previous CEO of the 13 CDI schools down here.

And for me the wheels of destiny are also turning. Recently I was accepted into Seoul National University for a doctoral program in biotechnology. I had declined a PhD offer in Australia in order to come to Korea, but it has always lingered in the back of my mind. Soon I will be traveling to Seoul to have a look at the campus, but my decision still isn't final. I really like the company that I currently work for and it does have an interesting set of challenges. I get more fulfillment from a place where I'm needed, rather than a place where I'm supposed to be.
If that makes any sense.

For the meantime, I've contacted the department head at SNU and deferred the position until January. Exciting times.

Last weekend was the 2008 Boryeong Mud Festival. I went last year and blogged it, but I decided to go again this year. Shiraz Moe, a fellow teacher in Busan, was nice enough to organise the whole trip for us, including booking the hotel and coach bus. So on Saturday morning, 30 English teachers congregated at the agreed meeting place and set off for the west coast of Korea.

It was a six hour journey. Along the highways of Korea there are numerous small towns that make their living from operating large rest stops. They are all very similar and have a cafeteria, some shops and high capacity toilets. The food available is so homogeneously identical that sometimes you wonder if you've traveled far at all.

Over the course of the day, coach buses and cars will continuously stream in. The cafeterias are set up to take your order and feed you within 20 minutes, which is the standard coach bus waiting time.

Erick was rummaging through the back alleys of the convenience store and found these curious oddities. They're called Dick Sticks.

He quipped "I wouldn't know what they'd taste like. "

On the way we also stopped off at the Hite beer factory. Hite is Korea's biggest brewer and holds 55% of the market share for domestic beer products. If you look closely in this photo, that worker in the middle has a patch over his eye. He might have been a beer pirate.

A woman from the company began to take us on a tour, but she couldn't speak any English. She called out and asked if anyone could translate for her. So Emily went up to the front and began translating a whole bunch of Hite facts for us. A bottle of beer takes 30 days from start to finish and the factory produces 1000 bottles per minute.

Then we walked around the factory, with Emily still translating along the way. Although she had never been a tour guide before, no one could tell. The real tour guide would whisper the information in her ear and then she'd announce it to the crowd.

This is what we looked like. There were so many of us that the ones at the back couldn't hear anything. I don't know why Erick is smiling like that. Maybe he just ate another one of his sticks.

This is a wax sculpture of Park Ji-Sung, a Korean who plays for Manchester United. He's wildly popular amongst elementary schoolers here. He is also a spokesperson for Hite beer.
Now that's an interesting combination.

This is the factory floor, with kilometres of conveyor belts winding their way through mechanical boxes and checkpoints. The factory was closed for the day, so everything was in suspended animation.

And here's where all the action happens - the beer master control room. If you work in this room, you literally have the power to stop and start the rivers of beer as it moves around the factory. It also has alerts for when there's not enough beer, which of course would be a critical situation. I like to imagine there's a place like this somewhere in my head.

And here are the kegs, ready to be shipped off to the happy dining tables of Koreans enjoying BBQ all over the country. I forgot how many litres of beer per day they make, but it was an impressive number.

Then at the end of the tour they gave us free unlimited beer, which was nice. We all got tanked up, with the beer being much crisper than normal. When we all got on the bus later, it wasn't long before half of us were begging the bus driver for a pee stop.

Here's Emily, with a well-earned beer after her tour guiding. Hite actually tastes pretty much identical to the two other major Korean beer brands, which are Oriental Brewery and Cass.

And here's Heather posing with her beer. She's saying to the LKB readers "A Hite a day keeps the doctor away."

In the same area they were selling this shirt, of which I bought the last one. It contains an interesting misprint and reads "Let's drink fresh teste of the Hite. Hite is our new good friend." I don't know how much of a good friend I am, but I don't have that kind of devotion. We actually told the lady behind the counter what it translated to and she was surprised. I think they'll fix it up for the next print run.

And here we are at the end of a long day of factory-touring. In the background is a wax sculpture of Jang-dong Gwan, a famous Korean movie actor.

I'll split this post up so that it wouldn't be too long. When I have time next I'll pick up where I left off and continue with the rest of the Mud Festival weekend.

See you soon!