Ewwwwwwww Gross!

Last night I returned to my shoe-box to find an uninvited creature had taken up residency on my wall. I guess I'd never seen a cockroach before. They're huge! And I gotta say I wasn't much of a fan. Trying to psych myself up to squash it proved very difficult. I got more and more freaked out and less and less convinced I could touch it. Then it flew out from the wall straight at my head and it was game over for me. I tried to recruit reinforcements but as luck would have it nobody in my building was home. In the meantime it had scuttled away somewhere and all I could imagine was it dive-bombing me as soon as I entered my room. Thankfully A finally got home we teamed up against the sucker and after a fairly destructive 15 minutes in which my apartment was thoroughly trashed A got him with one of my hikers.

Yuck!

Holy destruction Batman! You can see the remnants of the king kong bug between my shoes and the blue bucket.

Waiting for a Typhoon

July is supposed to be rainy season in Korea. So far there was more rain in June. When B informed me there was to be a  typhoon on the weekend I was pretty excited. Saturday dawned hot and sticky as usual but with a wicked warm wind kicking up some pretty impressive waves. The beaches were jammed with swimmers. The lifeguards had their hands full keeping everybody in the shallow. 

My Saturday night was dedicated to typhoon watching down on the beach. Sadly it came to naught when it rained for a grand total of 5 minutes. Hope was restored on Sunday when we were assured the typhoon would arrive at 4 pm. But again we were thwarted! The lifeguards herded everybody out of the water and all we got was a mere sprinkling. 

I still have hope though maybe next week!

The crowds on Haeundae were out of control! All there to revel in the pre-typhoon waves.

Mud, Mud Glorious Mud

I attended debauchery central a few weekends ago aka The Boryeong Mud Festival. The idea for the festival is fairly enterprising and intended to bring money to the otherwise desolate city on the sea. Fancy spa quality mud is shipped in and set up in various containers and slip 'n slide contraptions. The entire weekend consists of a crowd of young people (mostly foreigners) covered head to toe in mud hanging out on one the biggest beaches in Korea. The ice cream sales were through the roof. Probably so were the beer sales. 

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.