It's alive!!!

Last night we went for sashimi for JB's birthday. Sashimi or Korean style raw fish in Pusan is usually quite the dining event. It typically begins with personally choosing live fish from tanks laid out on the ground floor of a building that is stacked high with restaurants. Once you have sentenced a bucket full of fish to a filleted fate you proceed upstairs to the designated restaurant that your fish vendor belongs to. 

As a bonus, for being foreign, funny and/or weird looking, a bunch of sea urchins, sea penises (yes that is their name) and octopuses were sent up to our table. Most of these extras were sliced and diced and looked only vaguely horrible in their deep red, pink, purple or grey splendor. The octopus on the other hand was still writhing as a mass of expanding and contracting tentacles in a small porcelain dish when it arrived at our table. 

If you live in Korea for a year you are bound to have to try this sidedish eventually. Last night was my night. The entire experience was fascinating and disgusting in equal parts and ultimately not completely successful. Watching the writhing pieces of purple sucker cover tentacles is really quite mesmerizing. Watching it curl around your chopsticks is intriguing. Putting it in your mouth doesn't happen before several fortifying shots of soju have boosted ones courage and provided the comforting thought that once swallowed it will be undoubtably be killed on arrival. My tentacle of choice was actually particularly feisty. So feisty in fact that it managed to escaped certain death by squirming its way out the side of my mouth. I now have a new rule about food: if it physically leaves my mouth on its own accord that's a clear sign it should not be eaten. It also had the consistency of snot so I wasn't too broken up when it ended up on my plate rather than my stomach. What can I say, I tried but it was not to be.

Youtube has a sweet video of exactly what this whole ordeal looks like.

Those Lazy Hazy ...Teaching Days

I am approaching four months in Korea. I have become one of thousands of Canadians who have landed legit teaching jobs solely because their mother tongue happens to be in vogue. I cannot help but feel it's cheating a little bit. 

Teaching at an English Academy in Korea is pretty easy. I have a weekly schedule for each of my five classes that I update every week. Every minute is scheduled. I teach new spelling words, reading, writing, grammar, handwriting, math and science. Each subject is allocated about 10-30 minutes. I play a lot of games too. There're reading games and math games but usually I play a lot of Hangman and I-Spy.

I teach 5 different levels of students. The smallest kids I teach, High Beginner, are around 6 or 7 years old. (I am always vaguely unsure about their ages because "Korean Age" is one or two years more than "Western Age.") They're pretty cute but also have ridiculous amounts of energy. On average I spend half the time telling them to "sit down!" "be quiet!" "sit down!" "get your books!"... I find HB makes me appreciate the easier higher levels. 

I also have one terrible level. They were actually my favorite class when I took over in March. However, about 2-3 months ago the class as a whole hit puberty and every since has been full of little monsters. They can be cute, they have a tendency to sing the song of the week together. But I have also run my voice ragged trying to control them. 

At the end of the day I like my job very much and I would highly recommend a year in Korea to anyone looking for a bit of an adventure.

The view from my classroom window. 

It's a bird! It's a plane! No it's..... a bulldozer???

Korea has some very weird beach activity. 

It's happened more than once that I've had to flee my part of the beach because I am inches away from being plowed over by a bull dozer. Yes that's right. A bulldozer. On the beach. It was zero-ing in on my beach blanket so much so that I swear the driver must have had a hit out on me. 

Other alternatives abound of course. Maybe the object of the day is to plow over as many foreigners as possible not just me. Even the most reasonable explanation, leveling the sand, seems highly ridiculous. What's the point? It's a beach. My personal favourite came from E: the driver must have had the bulldozer idling away at home, got bored and decided to drive about on Gwang-ali. 

Never a boring day in Korea that's for sure.

Better Late than Never

It was Buddha’s birthday around a month ago. To celebrate I took the KTX up to Seoul where I met E and her Daejeon crew at some foreigner oriented festivities. The lateness of this post is partly due to my jet-set way of life last month and also procrastination. Here is my long await *cough* *cough* post on Buddha’s bday.

Buddha’s bday is also known as the Lotus Lantern Festival. Needless to say we saw a lot of lanterns. (You can view my Facebook pics of them all here.) Specifically for foreigners there was a lotus lantern-making event. About 200 foreigners spent two hours of their Sunday afternoon feverishly twisting and gluing pretty bits of paper in an attempt to make a lantern. In the end prizes were awarded (yours truly got away with a “Lotus Lantern Maker” prize) and then we dispersed into the light drizzle of Insadong Street to check out what else there was to see.

That night there was a pretty and very lengthy parade. The highlight of which was the soldiers who did some pretty impressive tricks with their guns. The least impressive was the pseudo female soldiers who followed in short skirts and fake guns.

All in all it was a short and sweet trip to Seoul.

Island Hopping

Check my pics here.

My latest weekend escape from Pusan took me to the fabulous Geoje Island. It is a mere 45 minutes ferry ride from Pusan harbour. My enthusiasm for ferries, however, is waning due to the fact in Korea they are always completely enclosed. There is no opportunity to go out on deck, which is clearly the best part.  It’s my theory that the sun-fearing culture in Korea has conspired to build boats with zero outdoor exposure. What a pity. Ferry rides have now been reduced to nap time.

The scenery of Geoje reminded me of Jurassic Park. The inevitably hilly landscape was particularly peaky and covered in lush forest. A and I were headed for Hakdong beach in the South East. We found it in a protected cove surrounded by towering hills. We had a smashing view from our motel of the pebble beach and South Sea. The weekend was largely spent lounging on the beach, a highly pleasing activity indeed.

In classic island style the bus system on Geoje left something to be desired. Whenever we got it into our minds to take a bus we would go to a random stop and wait hoping a bus would drive by. Returning to the ferry terminal on Sunday we waited at a stop (on the beach) for 75 minutes before a bus came. 

Good times island hopping!

Japan: Take Two

On Wednesday my boss came up to me and said: “Tomorrow you will go to Japan.”

For all that the communication is somewhat lacking at work I really don’t mind discovering I am being thrown into a five-day holiday. Due to lucky timing I was to go to Japan on a Thursday and would be able to stay until Tuesday morning due to a holiday in Korea.

As it was my second trip to Japan I was considerably more relaxed. I slept through the entire 3-hour journey, harbor to harbor. I met J2 getting off the ferry. She is essentially my clone here in Korea. We have the same name, same age, we were both on our second trip to Fukuoka, went to the same French camp…. kinda nuts actually. We hit it off –being clones and all- and had a marvelous time in Japan.

J2 introduced me to bike rentals at our hotel. On my first visit I had tried to navigate the public transit system or walk. This time the city was much more navigable. We toured temples and gardens and even happened upon an older Japanese man, dressed to the nines, who gave us the low down on one of the temples we were admiring.

I left Fukuoka Friday afternoon in favor of a more famous city, Kyoto. I took the Shinkansen (aka high speed train) because it turned a 9-hour bus ride into a mere 3-hour train trip. Not having planned to go to Japan I wasn’t terribly organized when I got to Kyoto. I didn’t have a map, tourist book or even a phone number of a hostel. I had been counting on leaching info from the tourist info center but I discovered it had, regrettably, closed its doors an hour before I arrived. So my only option seemed to be hassling random western tourists for information on hostels. This did eventually work. However I do not recommend it. Considering how really unpleasant it was to be alone, clueless and without accommodation in a Japanese city at night I immediately booked places to stay for the rest of my time in Japan.

Kyoto is the old capital of Japan and positively a Disneyland of temples. My intention was to rent a bike and tool around the city finding what temples I might. I woke up to find a steady rain pouring down on the city and thought better of my original plan. So I walked to some nearby temples but was totally soaked (and wearing only sandals) I concluded it was more of a museum day after all.

Thanks to Facebook I connected with a Mt.A friend currently living in Japan. As luck should have it she wasn’t very far from where I was and we made plans to meet in Osaka. Three days before this I had no idea I was even going to Japan. Suddenly I found myself aboard a rapid train to Osaka for a night on the town with J3. Life’s pretty good.

Osaka was terrific. To get the total urban Japanese experience we stayed in a capsule. It’s a pretty sweet experience. The capsule, which felt very much like sleeping in un upside-down overgrown bathtub, is fully decked out with TV, stereo and lighting. You have a locker for your things where they have provided pjs and towels. If you want to chill out they have a hot tub and sauna à la public bath style popular over here. We weren’t the chilling out visitors and actually only managed a few short hours of sleep in our capsule before we were forced to check out (they charge extra for every hour after ten o’clock that you may stay).

After Osaka we headed to Nara a beautiful but touristy town. It has many impressive temples on offer complete with equally massive buddhas. Wandering the grounds around the temples are herds of deer. I’m told they are messengers of God. I guess God has a lot to say in Nara.

I went back to Kyoto for my last day in Japan. Probably one of my favorite things about my trip was the abundant opportunity to rent and ride a bike. As I may have blogged before biking in Pusan is more of an extreme sport than useful mode of transportation. I took full advantage of having a bike in Kyoto and biked to the Imperial Palace as well as the Gold and Silver Temples and stopped at many interesting temples in between.

Japan pretty much rocks my socks.

Here are pics of the trip.

Ping Pong

Before I was able to update my blog with my stunning tales of Daejeon and Seoul I am jetting off to Japan... again. I found out yesterday during class I am leaving today at the crack of dawn. I managed to get my trip extended until next Tuesday (it's a long weekend courtesy of Buddha's b-day). I'll hopefully head to Kyoto from Fukuoka to see "the cultural center" of Japan. So stay tuned for amazing updates next week!