I'm all about the corduroy

Being a bit of geek, I use a site called ritetracker to monitor various statistics for my blog. I was just having a browse through some of the more obsure factoids and came across a list of google.com keywords used by people who have (apparently inadvertently) landed themselves at my site in the past. Here are my favourites: 5 'ARGOS' - I have never mention Argos. Not once. I have no idea how a google search for Argos could have lead anyone here, but apparently it is so. 4 'gunter's place seoul boot' - What this guy was actually looking for I have no idea. My Gunter was my creepy German room-mate in Osaka. 3 'milk in korean cuisine' - I am the fourth hit on google for this query! If the were looking for culinary tips, they must've been pretty disappointed to end up here since I was talking about a foul pineapple milk drink they gave us in the cafeteria one day. 2 'how far do zebra travl' - Hey, thanks to the mutual misspelling, I'm the top hit for this one! 1 'corduroy appreciation club' - I love that this search points to me, but I only show up on page 7. Maybe now that I've mentioned it twice my ranking with improve. Hmm. Corduroy. Corduroy Appreciation. Corduroy Corduroy Corduroy. See how many more hapless souls I can capture now.

Month 5

Well, it was five months yesterday, but close enough. I guess event of the month is Emma's leaving for home last weekend. I think our original pact was that neither of us would allow the other to leave within the first three months, but after that would be no hard feelings. So, she's gone, and so far seems happy with her decision, but if in the next 10 days she should change her mind, she does have a return ticket as it was cheaper than a single, so who knows? Shannon has one more week to go before she leaves to enjoy a few weeks back home in Des Moines (pronounced "de Moyne" apparently - who knew?) in Iowa; then fingers crossed, she'll be teaching English in Turkey from January. Hopefully she may let me swing by for a short visit next Summer en route to the UK! The first signs of Christmas have arrived just in time to remind me to get a bit of shopping done for the folks back home; it's very refreshing to get a break from the usual saturation of media and retail back home...and having so few (and so far, pretty tasteful) fairy lights around means that you actually do take a second to appreciate them. My main class for December is theatre, clearly something I was born to teach after my last foray into the world of dramatic arts. Whatever doesn't kill you, etc, etc... At least I have seemingly managed to hoodwink them into putting me on evening duty once again (and maybe for January and February too, but schedules are always subject to change), but whenever they finally do put me back on regular morning duty again, I will suffer greatly. But it would stop me being so lazy: my goal for the month is to get up at least once for the pre-9am breakfast - by popular demand they've recently started serving bagels, cereal and other Western delights to the staff, but I have yet to sample any...it's so cold in the mornings! The next month will be busy as we gear up to the special winter camps around the new year, but due to my working the evening shifts, I should at least get Christmas Eve and New Year's Day off (owing to them being on weekends) - but unfortunately not the days after either! The weekends will be busy too, but in the good way - with many leaving do's, birthdays, and Christmas meals to attend...though possibly not my birthday which I may end up celebrating in January owing to scheduling conflicts! And now dear readers, I am going to go watch the last ever episode of The West Wing, which I know none of you care about, and for that you are fools. Annyong.

Made in Korea!

Who knew?

Public service announcement

Ok, so while googling for the dreadful pun 'hard to swallow' which I regrettably used as the title for the previous post to check that it did actually mean 'hard to believe' as I thought, I have to admit I found myself drawn to this headline and, well, I just had to share it: Hard to Swallow: An Austrian lung specialist is encouraging better living through nose-picking. You're welcome.

Hard to Swallow

For lunch today, we had fried egg atop kimchified rice (not bad actually), cuttlefish soup, radish kimchi, pasta salad, and a dish which I have come to know as jam-chicken (the true nature of the sauce never being made entirely clear to me). For dinner we had bulgogi (cheap beef stew), rice (with, I'm gonna say, millet), cabbage soup with rice cakes, eggs (of a size comparable with a quail's but who can say) and, sure, kimchi. Fair enough, all standard fair, and all in all, not the worst menu here. However. This week we have a horde of government-sponsored kids in attendance. Actually I think the Bank of Korea might have something to do with it too. Anyway. For reasons that we clearly don't need to know (maybe they're malnourished), these subsidised kids are getting an unprecedented fourth meal every night this week before they go to bed (the other being breakfast which I never get up for). This extra meal - which of course is only for the subsidised kids, and not for the teachers or the kids from families who actually paid for them to come here - tonight comprises of: fajitas, sandwiches (which Koreans just do not eat, like, ever!), an orange, and something - coffee? hot choco? - in a Starbucks cup! They have never given we who may appreciate such food anything remotely like that to eat... And you just know half of it's ending up in the trash.

All that she leaves behind

One of two empty or nearly empty water bottles... A Winnie-the-Pooh splashback... An iced Coffee drink, a gift from one of the kids; I guess she forgot to drink it after all... One mostly-used toilet roll... A single sturdy coat-hanger. Most certainly 'Out'.

She's gone...

Though I suppose I should say she's on her way - Emma's flight took off about three and a half hours ago, but she won't be landing until...well, to save the usual time zone confusion, she won't be landing for another eight hours or so. Rather her than me - we were so bored last time, but to be doing it alone is a bit daunting. She has sudoku though, so should be okay. Due to the timing of her final paycheck, Emma had to draw out and exchange her won at Incheon Airport. The largest South Korean banknote is only 10,000 won (about a fiver) so the withdrawal was an inch-thick, but we were still more excited by the post-exchange currency: For those not so lucky as to have any fifties lying around the house, the dude on the reverse is Sir John Houblon, the Bank of England's first governor. She wouldn't even let me have one as a souvenir. Here are my final moments with Emma until next summer: Flight KE 907 to London. Nearly ended up costing quite a bit more than expected - the baggage allowance is 20kg per bag, and Emma's main suitcase was a whopping 32kg! The lady on the check in desk said initially that the first 5kg that were excess were gratis, but that still left 7kg at about £12 per kg. Eventually, she relented and Emma was only charged for 3kg, thank goodness... Alone, after a much needed bite to eat at Lotteria, and a quick wander around the airport shops, I took myself off to the 'Panorama Lounge' to try and see the plane taking off... It was a bit of a swanky place actually, and the waiter hovering by my table implied I should probably but something. It cost 9000 won for an orange juice, so I picked the cheapest thing on the menu, which happily was a piece of blueberry chocolate cake for a mere 5000 won (more than enough for a full blown meal anywhere else). From my vantage point I could see seven or eight Korean Air planes waiting to go, so I decided to just wait for the first one to go after 1:15pm (Emma's departure time) and call that hers. After dragging out the consumption of my three-bite slice of cake to an excruciating twenty five minutes, one of the planes finally decided to move. I couldn't see any runway from the restaurant, so I just watched until it had taxied out of sight and I left. And home I came, all by myself. Tired as hell now - we had to leave SEV at 8:30am this morning, which I know is not that early really but having been on evening shift for the past three months I'm not used to getting up before 10am! Well. Bye then, Em. I'll miss you! (P.S. Um...now, try not to freak out Emma, but I seem to have your Friends Series 10 eps. 5-8 DVD!)

Emma

Emma's going home tomorrow! She's making the, um, final touches, to her packing right now. That's all for now.

Homework

Short post today; for Korean class tomorrow, I have to memorise this page-long introduction of myself ('of myself'? 'to myself'? Why do they both sound wrong? What hope have I got with Korean when I'm not even sure about English?): I've got the brunt of it down ok, but what's giving me most jip is that Korean uses lots of markers that indicate the grammatical roles of certain words within a sentence: subjects, objects, topics, etc. What's the difference between a subject and a topic? I'm still trying to get my own head around that...

More Salsa

Naturally, I took my own camera on the town last weekend, but since I spent most of the night engaged with an ever revolving circle of partners, I barely had chance to get any decent shots of my own. Thankfully, Mary seemingly took it upon herself to act as official party photographer, and she's just posted a hundred and fifty or so online. Here are some of my favourites. This is me and Mary herself, attempting a *cough* screw for the camera. Emma and Shawn; it looks here like they've just banged heads, but seeming to be having a good time nonetheless. Alicia and Siamack jammin' with more instruments the bar staff must've immediately regretted giving us. Emma with Anne and Claudia enjoying a break between dancing. I think this is either me dying of shame following a particularly dreadful performance, or gasping for breath near the end of the night as my voice began to utterly fail me. Can't be sure. (Aside: note Emma happily munching a Choco Diget, one of the my three biscuits of choice out here , the other two being Binches (which have a rather nice shiney chocolate coating on one side) and Oreos, half a pack of which I've dispatched since beginning this post...)

My hectic schedule

We only have nine teams of kids here this week (contrast with the usual twenty-plus) so all our schedules are pretty barren this week. I do have night duty too, but it's hardly work - tonight all I had to do to earn my money was sit in the back of the room and watch The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for two hours!

Emma's Leaving Party

She doesn't go home until Saturday next weekend, but we on Saturday we all went out to celebrate Emma's time here. We started with a salsa bar, Bahia, to put our occasional students through their paces; to help summon up some of that latino spirit, the bar supplied us with a small orchestra of instruments, including but not limited to: maracas, tamborines, some kind of drum which I will call a bongo, and my personal favourite, the cowbells. It is now my opinion that no song could suffer if there was just a little more cowbell. Here's Emma rockin' it up... And Melodie getting down with the 'bongo': And of course there was plenty of the dancing, especially for me, as the male/female ratio was rather low as usual! At one point I just dropped to my knees after finishing a dance with Vanessa, I was too exhausted to even walk back over to where we were sitting... With my favourite partner: The recently departed Shawn and Melody dancing their recently learned Bachata: We stayed until they pretty much kicked us out mid-Merengue at about 2am or so, but this being Emma's last big night out here, and her not yet having Nore Banged, most of us moved on. There are Nore bang joints (singing rooms) on every street corner in Seoul, so in fact we only had to go upstairs to find one that could accommodate us: And of course the night wouldn't be complete without an embarrassing video or two: You can view the full video playlist here, if you really must. Annyonghi kaseyo, Emma.

The Snip

This morning, looking quite bushy-tailed as usual, and...wait for it... Though I may look a little drunk in the 'after' pic, I am in fact, not.

Due

Well. I can't log in hotmail to access the eight messages it claims I have waiting for me because of unusually high server activity. Lost season three is on an outrageous thirteen week hiatus, so my evening's downloading plans are scuppered. And finally, there's nobody in at my parent's house (I was trying to ring to disprove rumours of me being on my deathbed that were beginning to circulate as a result of my not posting anything since the weekend, when I said I was a bit ill). Hence, I thought I may as well write something. I may have to rush as there is to be a blogger outage at 12:30PM (PST), but I don't know when that is relative to me. Aah, I just checked, it's okay, I have 5 hours still... It's been a busy week, we've had many kids here so am looking especially forward to seeing them off tomorrow. Emma's leaving do is on Saturday night, we're going to the salsa bar we went to a few months ago, then maybe to a nore bang (Korean Karaoke) afterwards. Should be fun. Anyway, in eight more days, she's gone. We were without heating for much of this week, was not at all pleasant. Now it's been 'fixed', except that part of the 'solution' involves never being able to turn the heating off again. It's all or nothing apparently. I'm in the process of changing over my email to gmail, so please email at ryjones114@gmail.com from now on. I guess I'll be checking both for a while anyway just to make sure. Korean class was heated tonight. There's only me and Christa there, so our teacher likes to pit us off against each other by awarding stars for getting questions right and winning at the games she devises. Tonight I was just about ready to flip the table over when Christa started edging ahead of me during a quiz we were doing on the bank vocab. She'd not studied OR done her homework, but she was still managing to get the right answers by sheer guesswork, it was so unfair. Yeah, that's right, Welsh: guesswork. Anyway, her prize was a packet of octupus crisps, so it's unclear who really came out the winner.

Sparklering

As a consolation for the utter non-acknowledgement of the existence of Guy Fawkes Night over her, Emma treated us to a pack of fifty sparklers from E-mart. And, oh, did we have fun... These things were just waiting for the advert of digital cameras... Emma as winged demon. The shutter speed was still a little fast for the '-yan'. Lightsabre, kinda. Broken heart. We attracted a few of the neighbours... Who needs fireworks?

Happy Pepero Day!

I do realise that for much of the world today is Remembrance day, a time of solemn reflection n'all, but we in Korea choose to celebrate the much more upbeat Pepero day instead - quite possibly the most commercial national holiday I've ever come across. Pepero is the name of a long chocolate-covered biscuity confection. Somehow, their manufacturer, Lotte, masters of Korea (they're behind everything) have managed to successfully push forth a national (albeit unofficial) day into the public consciousness. It seems to be much like valentine's day, but really just for kids, and instead of cards, all the shops have been selling special packs of Peperos with hearts and flowers blazened across the packaging. Really bizarre. Oh, and it's November 11th as the date (11/11) looks like four Pepero sticks. Likewise, the Corduroy Appreciation Club celebrate Corduroy Appreciation Day because it's the date that most resembles corduroy. You can't make this stuff up. In other news (if you're still reading) the SEV exodus officially began today, with Shawn and Melody of Canada being transferred down to Suwon (three hours away) to finally start the jobs they came here to do two months ago. Their apartment was the official gaming headquarters around here. On at least six nights out of seven, it'd be a fare bet that there'd be a card or dice game of some sort going on over at their place, so they'll certainly be missed. Emma leaves in exactly a fortnight, and Shannon will be leaving just after my birthday, so it's all gonna feel very strange around these parts come Christmas. Also, I have a sore throat. This would've been more newsworthy yesterday when I was actually off work because of it (and related symptoms) but there you go.

Bath House

One of the "most do" things in Korea must be a visit to a bath house. I've never got around to it before now, for various reasons, but tonight I finally did. Since we only have a shower in our apartments, I was really looking forward to a nice soak in a bath for a change. The last time I did was when I went to the water park with Katie, and nice as that was, it wasn't very relaxing as there were so many people around. I think most of Korea's bath houses are variations on a theme: this one had four hot jacuzzis and spas (since I still don't know much Korea I couldn't really tell you the difference), two cold baths (which I was strangely drawn to, although the colder of the two was near-ice and actually not too pleasant) and two saunas, one wet and one dry (the latter being hotter, and my favourite of the two). I think there were other things on different floors of the building too, but we didn't have time. "We" is me and Christa, but I didn't actually see that much of her in the baths. Because of course the men and women are segregated as soon as you enter. Why? Because you have to do all this naked, did I not mention? I had been a little nervous beforehand (and yes, this may well be one of the 'various reasons' I hadn't been before), but honestly, once you're naked, the only weird thing is just how quickly you get used to it. I'm naked, you're naked, so what? There was one slightly awkward moment when another guy came and joined me in the sauna - are you supposed to acknowledge each other? Make small talk? I stared at the ceiling. Anyhow, it was all very relaxing and I shall certainly be back...

Can I really be getting hayfever in November?

I wouldn't've thought so either, but it does feel that way...

Snow!

For probably the first time since we got here, the temperature here was lower than that back home - only by a couple of degrees I think, but it was enough for it to snow! Although, not for a long, and it was pretty pathetic. The weather's pretty inconsistent here - this weekend we had some of the heaviest rain we've ever had here, but tomorrow's supposed to be sunny again, and by Wednesday we should be back up to a very pleasant 19 degrees (10 more than it is now). P.S. I'm so tired of always having an empty fridge! Getting my two main meals for free everyday means I hardly ever bother going shopping. In my fridge right now I have...two bottles of water, and...that's it. In a good week I sometimes have orange juice and milk. This is not a good week. Which is why I'm sat here eating peanut butter out of the jar. Off a knife. How depressing.

The Mudpuddle

Yesterday was performance night for our theatre classes. It was not the complete disaster I had been anticipating, but that's not to say that I'm not glad it's over. My group were terrors. Individually they were all (mostly) decent kids, but together there was a very destructive group dynamic going on. I don't think I got through a single script read-through without at least on punch been thrown. And it was often the little girls beating up on the guys three years older than them so I was at a bit of a loss... We- well, they - handmade all their own props... This kid (the one in the middle if you couldn't guess) must have ADHD or something. He was the bane of my life this week. He alternated between three distinct personalities: comedian, violent hoodlum, and catatonic mental patient (my favourite, as at least he was quiet). One of my kids went home sick halfway through the week, but the show must go on, so I ended up being narrator number 2. I was just relieved he hadn't been playing the mud monster... And this is narrator number 1. English name: Undertaker.

Summit

Finally today we reached the summit of Mount Bukhansan, and with perfect timing to see the autumn colours too - any later and there would've been no leaves left on the trees; as it was the trees were already getting pretty bare up near the summit. The foliage was pretty blazing. Christa came too, of course. At the summit, moments before accidentally throwing the wrapper from a packet of chocolate digestives over the edge of the cliff. How far do you have to go to get a bit of peace and quiet around these parts? This is queue to get to the summit...