New Year 2008

Well the last blog post left you hanging in Seoul at the GOA'L christmas party, right before I lost my camera. Luckily enough, Emily (Heather's twin sister) who lives in Seoul, got in touch with a guy who found my bag with everything in it and she posted it down for me. Thanks Emily!

This is one of the photos that was in my camera when it came back. Later that night in Seoul we went out to this Spanish themed bar and it had a drinking area where everyone sits on swings and the floor is covered in sand. Pretty cool. We lounged around there for a while drinking wine.

That's Emily on the left and Eric on the right.

Christmas and New Year came and went in a typically Korean fashion. Christmas is mainly celebrated as a marketing ploy, hence the pretty lights outside the department stores. New Year's has slightly more significance, but we still worked on the first of January. For christmas I didn't have my camera, but we ate a turkey dinner at Jordan and Michelle's house which was cosy and enjoyable.

The end of year CDI gathering was at the Grand Hotel this time. It was a pretty flashy event and quite better than last year's. Our company has grown a fair bit in a year and is still expanding. If you remember way back when I arrived down here, we were the first batch of teachers to work at the newly opened schools. At that time there were 4 Chungdahm schools here, but now there are 8 and they're still expanding. In this photo are the Korean staff from our branch in Saha-Gu (represent).

And here are the big shots, all the managerial staff from the various branches. Some of them are a little odd.

I never got around to eating any of that cake. Then again I'm not really a cake person. They also provided us with all the free beer we could drink plus some left over, so I got to walk out carrying a six-pack. Now that's what I call company perks.

Over the course of the night, there were various competitions between the branches. I participated in this one, the four-person drinking relay. The race was between all the branches, with four people in each, taking in turns to drink 500mL of beer in the fastest time. I'm not that good at drinking quickly, but we still won. Apparently there's a method for drinking super-quickly that's eluded me over the years.

Then they had a dancing competition where two teachers had to dance within a box. That's Logan and Nicole in the white box. We won this event too because Logan took off his shirt. We ended up winning the whole night overall actually.

Another competition was the arm-wrestling. Johnny Diamond went in this event for us but he came second. We say the other guy was cheating, of course.

This is Mr Kang, the CEO of our company giving a speech. I couldn't understand a word of what he was saying because he speaks in a complicated form of Korean. When he finished, the foreign teachers all clapped obligingly though. Logan told me he was saying "Hey everybody, I'm rich, so clap."

The food was good. I've found that expensive buffets are great in Korea, but they all tend to be uncannily similar. I theorize that there's an elite buffet school somewhere that pops out all the chefs for the expensive hotels.

While being quite common in Seoul, snow is a rarity in Busan and I've only seen it in light sprinkles twice this year. It still gets me excited though, because I spent a good 25 or so years of my life without seeing it fall from the sky. I was catching it in my mouth and eating it, until Heather told me it was polluted 'black' snow. Great.

Here's Jin and David from the Dongnae branch after we ate a seafood barbecue. It was still snowing lightly in this picture but it didn't really show up in the photo. On the right is my girlfriend hugging Emily. For some reason, she always ends up hugging that girl at some point in the night. She's a very huggy person in general.

Charlie's Angels? More like Mr Kang's Angels. This is Becky, Christine and Emily with Heather in the middle and they all work at CDI. It's always funny to watch Korean girls meet up and talk to each other, because they get excited easily and remind me of squeaky guinea pigs.

Heather's mother has a clothing shop in LotteMart that she opened a few months ago. Heather and I hung around there for a few hours one night and I was persuaded into trying on, and somehow purchasing this suit. I've never really worn suits, so I asked what the purpose of me buying it was. 'In case there is a wedding', was the answer. Hmmm.

Our company has recently expanded into a lower age group market for English tuition by opening up two new 'April English' schools in the city. These will cater for younger learners, with the program being more interactive and simplified. On the weekend they held an open day that I went along to. This branch is in Guseo-dong, near Pusan University.

The interior design is much brighter and more appealing for younger kids. I was quite impressed. I like the apple theme.

Library and seminar room with lots of CDI and Disney-related publications.

The parents lounge was especially nice, with some sort of modern pre-school feel to it.

Best of all, some of the classrooms have these blue screen 'ChromaKey' walls. An overhead camera records students giving presentations such as news reports here. Then the computer adds a selectable background and uploads the video. When the kids go home, their parents can watch their performance at home, with something like a news studio or the river Thames in the background.

This is Jajangmyeon, a Korean interpretation of Chinese food. The sauce is thick and mild and it usually has a seafood theme to it. We found a place near our apartment that turned out to be good value for money. You can get enough for three people as well as dumplings for around $11.

In the basement of the Lotte hotel near my apartment, we recently found a nice little bar. It's more expensive than most places, but isn't as crowded and has live jazz music on some nights. These guys were playing some sort of freestyle jazz and they were pretty good.

This is Aimee. I met her at the open day for the April English branch and she's from the US. After a while she told me that she randomly found my blog on the net one day while she was browsing and that gave her the idea to come and teach at CDI. And now here she is! It's good to know that the blog is informing others around the world, rather than just being a place for me to ferret away my photos. There's two more who have contacted me too, Liz and her boyfriend from Australia, who will also be coming over in February. Good stuff.

If you've been lurking around or just waltzed in and are looking for a change in your life, try coming to Korea. For most people it's an interesting experience and a nice break from life back home.

Get in touch. Seeya!

Guns, Thanksgiving and More Intestines

The end of the year is rapidly approaching. Seems like yesterday that it was New Year 2007. One day I think I'll wake up in Korea all of a sudden and say "Hey, wow... it's 2017 already and I'm 35".

Hopefully by that time I will have bought a house or something.

Is this yet another new addition to the household? Thankfully not. This 4 month old pup actually belongs to a friend of a friend and was just over for a visit. Because it hasn't been in the world very long, it didn't know how to get down if we put it on the drawers like this. It just stood and stared at us until we picked it up. I don't think I was too much brighter at 4 months of age too.

A while back it was (American) thanksgiving day, which is always a novelty to us Aussies. Devin and Tamara from the Gwangan branch hosted a turkey dinner at their house for all of the teachers at CDI. It was really good food.

More than 40 people showed up, but luckily they have a huge apartment. The logistics involved in catering for such a large group is always difficult, but they pulled it off flawlessly. There was plenty of turkey, salad, mashed potato, gravy and pie for everyone. I ate until I could eat no more, and then I felt sleepy and went home.
Have you heard that turkey makes you especially sleepy because it has the hormone tryptophan in it? I heard that a long time ago, but more recently I heard that it's an exaggerated claim and that turkey meat has about the same amount as pork.

In Beomnaegol, there is a cave bar. It's an artificial tunnel dug into the mountainside that used to be an old ammunition depot or something during the Korean war. It's pretty difficult to find if you don't know the way, but a large group of us managed to make the trek from the subway station. You can order food and there's usually water trickling down the sides of the walls. On the right hand side between the stone fence and the wall is a pool of water that has some dead bugs and stuff in it.

The speciality drink in the cave bar is dongdongju, homemade rice wine that is very similar to makkoli. It's the white liquid in the bowl there. As with makkoli, it tastes quite sweet and seems pretty mild until you stand up and try to navigate somewhere. Of all the alcohol in Korea, this stuff requires the most caution.

Who's that meat-head with a gun? Well, it's me of course. A couple of weeks ago we went to a shooting range down near the beach. The price was around $40 for ten bullets, so I chose a 9mm Beretta because it was cheapest. They also had Desert Eagles, Magnums and a Scorpion sub-machine gun for hire. I'm not particularly gun-crazy, but I think that you should try everything at least once in your life. Except things like suicide, cannibalism, reiki, etc.

In the lounge you can see everything on CCTV. The guns are really loud and had much more recoil than I expected.

Here are some of the more hilarious targets you can choose to fire at. Jordan chose the one on the left and managed to shoot the monkey-man in the eye, as well as the hostage. I'm not sure what the scenario is supposed to be for the poster on the right though. Kill or be killed, it's a dangerous world. I'm surprised they didn't have any 'terrorists'.

We recently realised that there's a ten pin bowling alley right near our house. The computer system is a bit old and you can't enter your name on the screen, but it's cheap and fun. Also, when the game's finished you can continue playing for free until the attendants tell you to stop. In this photo, Johnny-boy Ngo (my flatmate) is pretending to throw a ball at another guy we call 'Johnny blonde'. There are a lot of Johns in Korea, so we have to give them different nicknames. At Dongnae branch there is a Korean John that we call John-Actually (because he has a habit of using the word 'actually' to start every sentence) and at our branch we have a John that we refer to as Johnny Diamond. If you're called John and you're coming to Korea, think about choosing a nickname for yourself.

In some of the busier subway stations in Korea you can find ticket outlets for the movies like this one. This way you can figure out what you want to watch and get the tickets before reaching the cinema.

Here are some of my co-workers reading on the subway as they like to do. From the left is Nicole from New York, then Michelle from Ireland and Jordan from Canada. I haven't read a fiction novel since high school, partly because I'm usually busy and partly because I find Wikipedia much more interesting.

And here are the other two teachers that I work with, John and Logan from Philadelphia. At the U2 bar in Haeundae, when there's no band on stage apparently foreigners are allowed up to pretend they're rockstars for a fleeting moment. Well, no one complained anyway.

My students these days are usually pretty good. After teaching here for over a year, I've come to learn a few tricks of the trade and the job gets easier. When the students misbehave in class I make them write out lines like these during their breaktime. These two were written by some naughty elementary schoolers who were noisy and forgot their homework. You can click the photo to enlarge the text.

Last blog post we saw an intestine dish called makchang. In my quest for more intestinal knowledge here in Korea, I recently stumbled across a new kind of intestine called yang-gopchang, which is larger and comes from a cow instead of a pig. It's slightly pricier and slightly chewier. Restaurants in the Hwamyeong area of Busan specialize in this particular variety.

And here's Emily and Miya from the Hwamyeong branch. They're particularly happy in this photo due to the delightful anticipation of consuming aforementioned intestines.

Last weekend we went up to Seoul for the GOA'L christmas party which included a nice dinner and lots of merriment. Unfortunately I managed to leave my bag there and Heather's sister is going to send the contents down sometime. In the bag was my camera and MP3 player, so this blog post is missing a few of photos (I was lucky enough to put the memory stick for these photos in my jacket pocket). But that also means I missed out on taking some shots of Eric and Maria who came down from Seoul this weekend to visit. C'est la vie.

Hopefully it will arrive soon and blogging may continue.

Seeya!

Halloween and a Kitten

This is the latest addition to our household, a 2 month old kitten. Her Korean name is 삼순이, but her English name is Cat Farrand-Ngo.

Cute, no?

We'll talk more about her later.


Although I've been in Busan for a year now, I'd never got around to visiting 'Little Texas' or Foreigners Street' which is near the harbour. It's a blend of multicultural themes, kind of like a rainbow chinatown and it has a seedy reputation for being frequented by individuals who like seedy areas. What does that mean? I'm not entirely sure.

There's a fairly large Russian population in the city and I've never had much contact with Russian culture in general. Russian writing reminds me of Greek.

We ate in a Russian restaurant and I was expecting some stroganoff, but apparently that's not the only thing they eat in Russia. Our lunch consisted of potatoes and chicken, in a minimalist-style cooking approach. It was alright.

John and I decided to buy a television to compliment our newly enlarged living quarters. After investigating the options, we ended up buying a brand new 42 inch plasma screen. It's awesome. In Korea, electronics are cheaper because of companies like LG and Samsung. This one cost us 1.4 million Korean won, or about US$1500 (and that's with the new exchange rate). The equivalent model would be about double the price back home.

In this photo, Tim is playing Halo 3 online through an X-Box 360 modem, while John is using wireless internet on his laptop. We broadcast our public wi-fi signal 24 hours a day, so that anybody nearby can use it for free. Our apartment has an excessive amount of connectivity, throughout the different rooms there are 4 cable TV and 10 modem ports built into the walls. We only ever need to use one of each.

Halloween was never really celebrated in Australia and I was always under the impression that there was supposed to be a spooky theme to all the costumes. Apparently not. Jef and Elissa hosted this party and there were a variety of ingenius outfits. In the foreground there is John, as a giant piece of kimbap. Holding the large silver spoon and dressed up like a dog at the back is Austen, whose costume was 'dog soup'.

Here's Geoff, an American football player and English teacher who dressed up as Mr Incredible. He's a very friendly guy and actually went to his class like this to surprise the kids. Later on in the night he got a little drunk and ran onto the road pretending to push back trucks and cars that were waiting at the traffic lights.

After my first real Halloween party, I was able to conclude that it was all simply an excuse to dress up and drink a lot. We'd do that often in Australia anyway, just without the dressing up part.

My outfit, at minimal cost, was ilban-sureggi (or 'general rubbish') man. In Korea you have to buy special waste bags to dispose of general rubbish, as opposed to food waste or recyclables. I put some armholes into a 50-litre one and sticky-taped some examples of general waste to it. But this guy on the left seemed to do it much better. One of those plastic bottles was actually filled with alcohol that he was drinking. He told me his name, but at parties like this I tend to forget these things for some reason.

And here he is getting into a taxi to the second venue, after a considerable amount of effort.

The second venue was the PNU area, where there were a variety of costume parties. One of our friends won a $100 bar tab.

A friend of a friend found a dead stray cat on the side of the road one day, with three kittens meowing next to it. So he put them in a box and took them home. He was looking for new owners and we ended up taking one. I've always been more of a dog person myself, but after a few days with a kitten, I've come to appreciate the feline species a lot more. Her Korean name (Sam-Soon Li), comes from a tv show character. She's very cute.
The cat, that is.

She's very friendly and playful. I managed to clip her nails (with a notable amount of kitten-protest) the other day and so she's destroying our materials slightly less now. She is already toilet-trained and meows like a squeaky door when she's hungry. She also meows when she finishes eating, just to let us know.

An interesting biological feature of kittens is when you pick them up by the scruff of the neck. This can be safely done up to a few months of age, and is usually done by the mother when they need to be moved somewhere. Whenever we pick her up like this, she turns her head on the side and keeps completely still, until you put her down. She also tucks her feet up like a little bunny rabbit, which I would assume is so that they don't drag on the ground. It's a useful mechanism to exploit when she suddenly starts chewing on the cushions.

One of the dishes I've been recently warming to is dwae-ji-guk-bap. It's basically a pork soup, with a whole lot of strange looking pork pieces in it. It's really good. I've been finding that a lot of the food I eat nowadays is completely different to what I typically ate in the first few months here.

Aquariums in front of restaurants still grab my attention. These octopi were unusually large. If you buy a live octopus from the fish markets, they just put it in a shopping bag for you and you take it home while it constantly tries to escape its doom.

Arriving at the hakwon one day, I saw these abseiling window-washers cleaning our windows. One of my long-standing daydreams has always been to give this job a try. You'd get to peer into people's offices while enjoying nice views of the city.

These guys weren't using any real safety equipment, just an adjustable plank to sit on. And below them was no warning sign if they dropped something. If you think that's dangerous, you should see the construction workers here. They just walk around on scaffolding 10 stories high without any safety equipment. Other times you'll be walking on the street and all of a sudden a gaping hole in the sidewalk will appear, without fencing around it, just a couple of witches hats. Korea in general has a more 'watch out for yourself' policy. On the whole, I think it's a good thing, considering all the lawsuits that go on back home over very common-senseless incidents, and the ridiculously high cost of public liability insurance.

Korean school has been going really well. We're approaching the end of the term soon, when we'll graduate and have a holiday. I've learned a fair bit, but it will be nice to have a break. This is from one of the special events we had last week. We took an excursion out on the campus and had an outdoor lesson for hangeul (Korean writing script) day.

This is a shirt that Ki-woo, the student in front of me at Korean school wears sometimes. It always makes me ponder. The writing says "Motionless-message: I have 'aiways' thought so".

Hmm, me too.

Saying goodbye to the Lee's Korea Blog readers this week are the Chungdahm Institute administration staff, at Michelle and Jordan's housewarming party.

They're saying: See you next time!