Fall!

Hi all,

A lot has happened since the last update- we made it through open classes (where parents came to watch us teach and evaluate us), the last two veteran teachers leaving and two new ones replacing them (which means we are now the senior foreign teachers!), Hallowe'en, COREM Olympics, another round of tests and report cards, a bout of the flu for me and a cold for Gavin and the emergence of fall in Busan!

Korean artist Yahon Chang retrospective

 We've also been exploring the city, slowly but surely. Some recent highlights include the discovery of omurice (veg and rice wrapped in a thin omelet and topped with stuff), a visit to the Busan Museum of Modern Art, watching the leaves change, and a rainy afternoon at the historic fishing village museum.

 From the emerging Korean artists exhibit.

Omurice! With crab cakes!

As I mentioned above, Kyle and Jay are gone. They are headed back to Canada after a South Asian vacation extravaganza. This is the first full week for Ashley (Canada) and Cameron (New Zealand), our new foreign teachers. They have been tossed in the deep end, as is customary here, and seem to be managing very well. I'm really looking forward to spending more time with them (last weekend was a bust due to illness and foul weather).

Surprisingly, the most fun I've had in the last bit was at work! Hallowe'en is kind of a limbo holiday here. It exists because kids learn about it in English class via textbooks and their teachers, but it isn't celebrated outside of school. Hallowe'en specific candy is sold in stores, along with costumes, but they don't go trick-or-treating or have parties at home. 

Hallowe'en is a kindergarten thing at COREM, and we celebrated on the Friday before (the 28th). Thursday night all the kindergarten teachers were up decorating, and we did a pretty thorough job. There were pieces of coloured plastic taped over the lights, garbage bag streamers hanging from the ceiling, the windows were papered over, and I carved a big jack o'lantern. After hours of preparation, we were ready for the kids.

Jennifer and Amy with the finished product.

Friday morning we met in our regular classes, but we all made pouches for candy. I was in Banana class, the most advanced, and even they had a really hard time with the project. I think all the teachers ended up doing most of the work. 

Next was the costume fashion show. When asked who they wanted to see walk the runway first, they all started chanting "Lego Man, Lego Man," meaning Gavin, of course. A fantastic last minute costume idea. I was a mouse.

Some kids really got into it and hammed it up on the  runway, and others just ran to the basket of candy at the far end and back. Here are some of the best shots:

Chloe from Lemon werkin' it. 

Lego Man breaking it down for the children.

The Haunted House was next on the agenda and it garnered mixed reviews. The boys (Gavin, Jay and Kyle) hid in a pitch-black maze (they gym) and scared the kids by jumping out and yelling, or grabbing their feet etc. I was waiting at the end of the maze to send them back to the library. Some of the kids were totally exhilarated and wanted to go back through, others were crying, and a few were sporting paralyzed-by-fear silent grimaces (actually just Chloe). Here is Caleb the skeleton waiting to enter the haunted house, and my classic jack o'lantern:

And here's the four of us teachers (with Strawberry Thomas):

Squid ink.

Hello,

Gavin here. Today I'm writing about my very first evisceration.
Last week we decided to expand our cooking horizons to include squid. And the cheapest way to get squid is to buy the entire squid. So we headed home from Lotte mart with two full squid, a couple lemons and salad fixings.  We planned to make calamari, but first we needed to figure out how to gut a squid. One quick internet search later we were on our way.
Basically the insides of a squid is just a bag of ink, a bird beak and a glass feather with a bunch of tentacles poking out the bottom. Squeezing out the beak is the odd-feeling part and scooping out the ink sack without breaking is the hardest part. The glass feather is this thing called a quill. It's like the backbone of the squid and does look like a glass feather.
Having been a vegetarian for quite some time prior to coming here, and a non-eviscerator for longer still, I can report that once something's been chopped in half it's all of a sudden not that hard to keep dividing it up. Whole things are nice, but once you have it in parts it's easy enough to keep on cutting it.  I think this is probably a lot easier to say this about the grosser animals, like squid, than the cuter ones, like rabbits. Also, we've been watching a  lot of Man vs. Wild lately and I'm pretty desensitized by Bear Grylls' messy habit of eating live animals.
Anyway, we gave it a light batter (flour, salt and pepper, although next time we'll use cornstarch I think) and tossed the rings and tentacles in oil in a frypan on high for about 30 seconds and voila, delicious.
If you want to try for yourselves, here's the video I used to help me:

http://how2heroes.com/videos/techniques/how-to-clean-squid

Below are some pictures of the process.

We found a couple nice beers for the occasion. Paulaner White.

School!

Hi All,
I thought I'd put up something that shows what class here is like. These photos are of an exercise I did with my PK1-301 class. They're kids who've been through the kindergarten program and are in the first year of elementary school.

Part 1 of today's activity in PK1-301

I love teaching this class and I have them five days a week, more than any other class. They're quite mixed in abilities, with John who's able to carry on a relatively sophisticated conversation (for a seven-year-old) at one end and Sarah, who has difficulty forming even the simplest sentences at the other. There are two others- Thomas, major cutie, and Anna, a hyper-enthusiastic kid.
I've taught John and Thomas from the beginning and they are two of my favourites. I also teach John's little brother Chris from Melon class, another favourite. John probably takes the top spot though.
The textbook I have is a collection of picture books with complementary material, but it's meant for native English speakers so I have to make up my own exercises. Right now we're studying "Days with Frog and Toad." Today I had the kids draw pictures on the board of scenes from the book. Pretty much all kids love drawing, especially if it's on a large novel surface like a whiteboard, so I find it's a good way to get them involved in the lesson. They had to read the captions and draw representative pictures. Later, Beth

PK1-301: Sarah, John, Anna, Thomas

Part 2, with John sneaking into the picture.

Thanksgiving weekend noraebong

Happy Thanksgiving!
We just finished a lovely dinner of noodles with salmon and grilled zucchini while watching Terminator 2. Although we're in a festive mood tonight, the real celebration happened on Friday when we went to Long Life bar and a noraebang (Korean karaoke) with Kyle and Jay, the other foreign teachers here.

Ace!

Pirates!

Beer guitar!

Way more enthusiastic beer guitar.

Kyle intimidating Jay before as he deals.

Long Life serves their drinks in novelty glasses that look like tall, thin vases. Last time Gavin and I got the Queen size, but this time we went all-out and ordered Aces. It's incredibly inconvenient trying to drink out of a two foot long glass but also kind of fun. I only spilled once. 

One Ace in, Gavin ran back to the apartment for cards and we played euchre. After a 1-1 tie we decided to pick up some beers at the corner store and head to a noraebang. 

Twist and Shout

Some kind of '90s rock song

Two months in

Hello All,

I sincerely apologize for our month long blog absence. Things have been chugging away here…

The job has been going well. I’ve kind of gotten the hang of kindergarten, although I still prefer elementary classes. We have “open classes” this month where parents observe their kids being taught by us. It wouldn’t be stressful if our director wasn’t so intense. She wants us to prepare the lesson second-by-second to practice with the kids beforehand so they don’t screw up. So instead of real learning for two weeks they will be imitation learning so that the school looks better than it actually is for the open class. I’ll keep you updated on the outcome…

Here are some pictures of some of our preferred kindergarten classes from the Chusoek event we had at school.

Banana class: Eric, Amy, Jennifer, David

Melon class: Chris, Caleb, Grace, Olivia.

Other than work, we’ve been spending a lot of time outside since the weather has gone from unbearably hot and humid to warm, dry and sunny. These days the highs are between 20-25 degrees and the lowest it drops is about 10. We have retired the AC until next summer.

Being destroyed by the spicy seafood soup on our first PNU outing.

We picked up a set of crappy badminton rackets at Lotte and have been trekking up the mountain to the outdoor courts they have up there. There are five courts and a clubhouse/shack thing for spectating and hanging out. Even though the temperature has improved you still work up a sweat, so we usually bring a litre of Pocari Sweat, Korea’s answer to Gatorade, with us.

Scrabble at The Basement.

The Rugby Worlds were on recently and I found a bar online that allegedly played all the games AND sold fantastic nachos. In hopes of catching a few games, we took the subway to PNU (the neighbourhood that surrounds Pusan National University) and the aforementioned bar, “The Basement,” only to find it closed. Long story short, we wandered around the area, periodically checking back to see if it was open, before heading back to Hwamyeong. More recently we had a card night at our place with the other foreign teachers and ended up craving nachos. Our second attempt to make it to “The Basement” was successful and we ate fantastic (by Korean standards) nachos, played scrabble, and met some Koreans who speak English.

Gavin realizing that he doesn't stand a chance. 

There’s a river that runs alongside the city (and our neighbourhood) where a massive park has been built with a bike path, all kinds of sports pitches, gardens, a rock foot massage path, a couple of outdoor gyms etc. One of the coolest parts is the boardwalk through the marshy riverbank. We walked down there the other day after school and saw a white heron and an otter (probably). It’s really great to be in a city of nearly 4 million and be able to walk 15 minutes to the mountains and 15 minutes to the water. I hope you like the photos, we had fun taking them. xo Beth

Hwamyeong from the boardwalk.

Down by the river.

         

I also must apologize for my even longer absence from the blogosphere. It’s not often that I’m out of the classroom and feeling like sitting down in front of a computer for anything other than Jersey Shore and Man vs. Wild (more on both of those later).

My schedule hasn’t changed much with the new session, but my attitude towards it has. Some classes I liked initially I’m not so fond of anymore and some classes that I hated I’m finding an uneasy peace with. A lot of people will tell you that all children are special and are basically little miracles every one. Nope. No dice. Some are just, to borrow a term from Beth, duds. That isn’t to say that they can’t at some future point pull out of their current pattern of idiocy and screaming, but it’s looking iffy for a few. Really, some kids will just scream for no reason, others can’t find a square on a page no matter what language it’s in. It gets you thinking about the nature vs. nurture debate. Go ahead and blame the parents, but man, it seems like a stretch sometimes. Sheesh.

Now for the good kids. Some kids are super smart and nice. They’re in kindergarten and are well on their way to handling a second language.  Amy’s 6 years old, cute as a button and can tell you a story about what she did on the weekend about as well as a native English roofer. Beth has her cousin Chloe who is 4 and also well on her way to being an excellent Englsih speaker (that’s what I write on report cards, the ‘well on their way…’ bit). The unfortunate reality is that hen you have larger class sizes, particularly in elementary, the good kids get sidelined by the  noisy and disruptive kids. Then you have your middle-of-the-road kids (I think I was one of these) who will be quiet and generally well-behaved and studious when most of the other kids are but who will get loud when it’s the only way to get in on what’s going on around them. Everyone’s somewhat susceptible to this from time to time a guess. That seems to be the case here.
In other news, we might have seen the last few moments of a drunk Korean's life two weeks ago. It was Saturday evening, around 7:00, and we decided to go to a local third story resto-bar called KKunorri. It's important to know that after work Korean businessmen habitually get shit-faced drunk. At KKunnori you get your own little room with coloured translucent walls. We were in our little room and had just ordered when a commotion started up outside. A jolly Korean guy was reeling down the hallway falling all over the place and landing at/on our corner. His friend came along and picked him up and escorted him away. A moment later this same guy careened back into view and tried to have relations with a girl caught in the same hallway as he was. She escaped and the drunk's buddy held him against our see-through wall and gave him a good slappin', through him in a headlock and escorted him the hell out of the place. We got and finished our food and left with in the next 20 minutes. As mentioned, the bar was on the third floor and when we left there were a tonne of official-looking guys milling around the stairs. We scooted through to the stairway and noticed that at the bottom of the first flight down the bottommost window-pane was smashed out. Weird, eh? We thought so too. On the ground floor I poked my head out of the back door and saw a huge pool of blood on the ground. So wht happened? We think inadvertent swan-dive out of the window...Whatever happened we are committed to staying away from the soju. At least off the ground floor.
More later.

The job

Hello all,           

            Now that we’ve been here for a full session I think it’s time to tell you about the job.

            We’re working at a hagwon, or cram school. Korean kids go to regular school and then cram schools afterwards. I think Gavin mentioned this in another blog posting, but there are a variety of types including math, music and English. The kids were on vacation for the month of August, so the session we just finished was called “intensives,” since there were more classes run than usual. Classes ran from about 9 am to 10 pm.

            The way COREM works (and I suspect most other hagwons) is that kindergarten classes run from 10 am to 2 pm, elementary classes are from 2 to 7 and middle school classes are from 5:30 to 8:30. Kindergarten classes are 35 min long and the rest are 40 with five minutes between them. Starting at the elementary level there are two streams- PK, Prep and Elite are for kids who’ve gone to English kindergarten and Pathos, Ethos, and Logos are for those who’ve been in the regular Korean system. Kindergarten kids are divided from youngest to oldest into Lemon, Melon, Pineapple, Strawberry and Banana. The youngest (Lemons) are four years old and Bananas are six.

            A note about Korean age: When a person is born here they are already considered to be a year old. On top of that, depending when they are born relative to the Lunar New Year, they could be another year older than their “real” age. This means the kindergarten kids are 5, 6, and 7 years old Korean age. At that age development is very pronounced so sometimes you get a kid who’s a lot smaller and less mature than his or her classmates and it will turn out that they’re a year younger than everyone else.

            So far I’ve been mostly an elementary and middle school teacher, with only four kindergarten classes per week and so far I’ve liked it that way. I had Strawberry three times and Melon once. Strawberry is one of the larger classes with nine students and I have to admit that they absolutely dominated me from the first. I do not have the Strawberry touch and most of my classes were spent trying to get the boys to sit down, stop screaming and jumping off things, and do their work. Screaming is a Korean child’s favourite pastime. I’m happy to report that my next session is Strawberry free, although it is kindergarten-heavy with 18 classes per week. Bring on the Lemons, Melons, Pineapples, and Bananas!!

            One of the Canadian teachers (Lisa) left his weekend and I’ve taken her schedule. I have 40 classes per week and Mon. Wed. and Fri. I teach ten, from 10 am to 7 pm. Everyday we get an hour lunch break and 20 min between 2:10 and 2:30 (the changeover from kindergarten to elementary). That means 6 hours and 40 min of actual teaching time. I have six classes on Tues and four on Thurs, so those days are very light. Gavin have just about the exact same schedule, which is nice because last session we had near opposite ones.

            Initially I was sad to find out I’d only be teaching a few elementary classes this session because I had a great time with them last month, but I’m keeping some of my favourite students and I’m sure I’ll get a handle on kindergarten soon. I liked elementary because you’re able to communicate with them but they’re still young enough to be really interested in the material.

            In terms of teaching, COREM has an extensive curriculum with tonnes of textbooks. You get to know which ones are good and which ones are duds pretty quickly. They have a “Hop, Skip, Jump” series that is made by COREM and kind of sucks. Each textbook has a syllabus that outlines which pages are to be taught each day, so there’s not a lot of planning to do on our end. Unless the book, as is the case with Hop, Skip and Jump, only provides enough fodder for about 15 min of teaching. Then we have to supplement the material with exercises of our own. It can be a pain but also a fun opportunity to do something more interesting with the kids. The lessons mostly wither focus on speaking or writing.

            Besides the classes that are taught out of a book, kindergarten and PK have gym classes (called Olympics or Playtime). Strawberry and Banana have a “multi activity” class that is either “show and tell,” a spelling bee or “cooking” class (where they make things like ice cream cookies, frozen yogurt bananas etc.). There is a science class, but Gavin will have to fill you in on that because I haven’t taught it.

            All in all the job is mostly low-stress and enjoyable, but it’s also very tiring to stand at the front of a class and (hopefully) be the center of attention all day. And there is the odd kid that you want to pull a Homer Simpson strangle move on everyday. That being said, it’s a great feeling to see a little kid poking their head out the door as you walk toward the class and hear them yell “Beth Teacher! Beth Teacher!” with a big smile.

I will post pictures to accompany this entry soon.

The pair went over the mountain...

Hello. Another weekend has gone by and we’ve seen yet another sunrise from the wrong end. We just wanted to se the new Planet of the Apes (we did. it’s good) and discuss over a casual pint. Well, toss a blanket over the window and pass me the Advil, ‘cause it’s 6am and there are another two hands yet to Rummy 500. Needless to say, we’re still getting used to Korean moderation. So far we have hit upon reasonably spaced out immoderate behaviour. But don’t despair; the weekend was not lost! After seeing to some housekeeping stuff and watching the original Planet of the Ape on Saturday, we made up for our early weekend appetites with late weekend healthy activities.

We set out Sunday early afternoon to hike up the nearby Mt. Geumjeongsan (basically our backyard), aiming to get to the top on one of the many peaks. Ideally, we’d like to find our way to the notoriously difficult to locate Seokbulsa Temple. It’s carved out of the mountainside and rated #1 out of the top 68 things to do in Busan by Lonely Planet. It being a Sunday, and hiking being the most popular activity in Korea, the trails were busy. It was rare that you couldn’t se someone else ahead or behind you. That being said, there isn’t much underbrush and Koreans tend to be fully decked out in hiking garb (i.e. bright). 

A note on fashion: Korean men who are a bit over the hill end to dress like this a lot, and a staple part of this uniform is the mesh zip-up vest with baggy pockets, often in navy blue. They’re everywhere.

We didn’t find the temple. We did make it to the top of Paribong – one of the peaks of the mountain. We took some pictures and enjoyed the cool air at the top, or summit, as we mountain-types call it.

As you may know if you’ve ever walked up a hill and then down the other side, it’s a lot faster getting down. That was our experience as well. This is more the case when tackling a mountain. This becomes exponentially more the case when I hit a wasps nest with my hand on the way down and we have to run away and Beth gets stung like three times on the face and ear. Don’t worry, she’s fine, but there are some good swollen ear pictures here to remind me to look with my eyes, not my hands. Once we had lost the little stingers we tried to warn the solo hiker heading towards the agitated wasps of the impending danger. I succeeded in communicating my excitement only and he bounded away, eager to learn what had animated us so.   I posted the photos above, as trying to get the pictures where I want them on the page is aptly compared to getting 13 kindergarten kids who don't speak English to play a proper game of soccer. 

So we headed home, but not before trying our luck on an upside-down health machine, which are common amongst the equipment found in the ubiquitous public workout stations here. You’ll find a video of us blasting our abs below.  I saw an old man rocking one of these hard last week; he was pretty much going nuts on the thing. OK so I just posted this and it turns out the videos below is of Beth on one of the equally popular pendulum-type machine.  

‘til next time. Keep fit, have fun, and try to stay out of the rhubarb. 

Long weekend

            Hello! It was a long weekend for us here in Busan (National Liberation Day) so we made the most of it and checked out some of the features of our fine city. Friday night we went out with our fellow foreign teachers to a bar called “Thursday Party.” It was pretty fun and Gavin killed it on the beer pong table with another COREM teacher, Kyle. Before leaving the building we met up in Kyle’s room to have a few drinks. I had been warned about soju, a Korean alcohol that tastes like watered down vodka, but wasn’t deterred and had a few drinks of the stuff. Suffice to say the hangover took a day and a half to subside. I will not be indulging in soju anytime soon, or probably ever again.

Vendors and crowds at Nampodong market.

     So Saturday was a write-off (although laying in bed watching action movies all day wasn’t terrible). On Sunday we decided to venture down to the famous Jigalchi fish market and the nearby Nampodong market. I wanted to find some fun souvenirs to send to a couple of friends and we thought we might find some tasty fresh scallops to cook for dinner. I was not prepared for the crowds, noise, or sheer volume of stuff and quickly became overwhelmed. We spent a few hours wandering the narrow streets of Nampo, looking at the zillions of things for sale. You can pretty much buy anything there- clothes, shoes, toiletries, food, bedding etc. Eventually we found our way out of the mayhem and back onto a main street (thanks to Gavin’s sense of direction). We decided to check out the fish market and found it to be even more crowded than Nampodong. It was difficult to turn around and walk back against the rush to where we started, but we found our way out. At that point I was ready to get the heck out of there so we hopped on the metro and back to Hwamyeong (our lovely neighbourhood). The experience was kind of nuts, but I’m ready for round two now that I’m a little bit familiar with the place and how it works.

The trail on the mountain

A couple of massive slugs we passed en route.

       Yesterday we went hiking on a nearby mountain. Gavin had tried to find a route up the other day, without much success, so we went by Google maps and a map of Busan we have. We ended up walking along a wooden boardwalk-type path next to a road that wound up quite high. The walkable part ended at the entrance to what I think is an old fort that has been converted into a tourist attraction. After some wandering around, we decided to follow a couple of hikers we’d seen taking a path off the road. It wasn’t marked at all and didn’t look like much from the street, but it turned out to be well maintained. The only sketchy part was the cables hanging from the trees (probably not electrical) that we had to occasionally duck under. Also the heat and humidity were insane. I have never sweat so much in my life. It was like walking through 32-degree soup. The pictures do not do justice to how wet and hot it was. That being said, it was a great introduction to hiking in Korea and I’m sure we’ll do much, much more of it, especially when the weather gets a bit milder. We were surprised to find vegetable gardens along  the way, even after hiking for an hour! I guess they belong to the people that sell their produce on the side of the road in town. 

            I’ve added a few other pictures that don’t fit into longer narratives. And soon we will write about the teaching and the kids!

A garden on the mountain.

Gavin at the top, checking out some gardens.

 

Since the caption option isn't working, clockwise from top left: Gavin drinking a queen sized beer at a nearby bar called "Long Life." They have sizes that go up to ace, which looks like a yard glass. A view from outside our building. A rice triangle meal that is quick and cheap (about $1.50 for one) and therefore a popular lunch option. Finally, me drinking a queen as well.

       

Where we live

Greetings!

I’ve decided to change the colour of my entries because I don’t find purple to be harmonious with the overall look of the blog.

View from front entryway.

I think it’s time to give you a virtual tour of our accommodations here in Busan. One thing Gavin and I were both worried about before we got here was the size of our apartment. We knew it was going to be a one-room setup, and that the school was willing to bump up our salaries in exchange for living there, so we were wary lest it turn out to be a closet. Luckily that is not the case and it’s actually a pretty big room- big enough to fit a queen size bed, kitchenette, couch, tv, mini-fridge, various shelving units and two tables. The bathroom is bigger than any I’ve had in Canadian apartments. 
         Although I very enjoyed my time on Charlotte St. Chez Asta, I have to admit that this place is nicer. The bathroom is sweet. You have no idea how nice it is to be able to walk in and out of the shower without worrying about getting water all over the floor. Plus the floor's heated in there.  That thing you see up by the ceiling, above the bed, is our air conditioner. Everywhere is air conditioned and they come standard with any apartment. At least that seems to be the case. It's a life saver. Most days going outside is like walking into a thin broth, a thin fish broth. It's not as unpleasant as it sounds, but I wouldn't want that to be my indoor life too.  

Bathroom, shower is hidden from view in the righthand corner.

            The two main differences between a Korean apartment and a Canadian apartment is that the Korean bathroom is basically a giant shower. The water runs directly onto the floor, which is tile and has a drain in the middle. Ours has a tiny glass partition, but many don’t. I get the sense that baths aren’t really a thing here. The other difference is that they don’t use radiators but rather rooms are heated through the floor.

A large part of our place.

            









The building we live in is pretty standard in Korea. It’s eight stories with commercial space on the lower seven and residences on the eighth. There is a convenience store and a Baskin Robbins on the main floor, then a variety of schools (Taekwondo, music etc.) on the others. The street we’re on is one-way and so relatively quiet. We’re close to a busy street, but you can’t hear the traffic at all from our place. Overall, the area has a very neighbourhoodly feel to it.

            There are also tonnes of highrises all around where I think the majority of people live. There’s a complex going up near us that has more than 5,000 units. You get the sense that the city is only getting bigger, and fast.

 Our apartment window looks out onto a rooftop terrace (sounds swanky, but it’s basically an outdoor gym/play area for the students, although it doesn’t get used much). The bonus is that they’ve planted a big garden along the edge, so we’ve got greenery close at hand. The ladies who cook lunch for the kids are often out there picking peppers, lettuce, tomatoes and corn to use. From the shot on the terrace you can see one of the many mountains poking up from behind the highrises. If you're at ground level you'd never know that you were in a three sided bowl created by the mountains and a river to the west. The view is obscured 90% of the time by the 8+ floor buildings and their hundreds of neon signs. It's cool when you see catch  glimpse of the lush mountainside reminding you that you can get away from the busy street level in just a few minutes if you need/want to.

Our window is on the far end.

            We’ve figured out a lot of the Korean domestic ways, but not all of them. The washing machine is still a mystery, but garbage and recycling has been explained (you can only use specific garbage bags that are very expensive- nearly $1.00 each, I guess to encourage recycling). 

            All in all we’re settled in and are happy with the place. I wouldn’t want to spend my life living in a single room, but one year is certainly doable. 

Me, squinting, next to the garden. You can see high rises going up
in the background and a mountain behind them.

The eighth floor (dingy) hall.

Gavin on the roof.

            

First weekend with pictures.

Note: From now on we will be colour coding our entries to make them more legible. Gavin is green and Beth is purple. Black is the hive-mind.

Hey everyone, Gavin here. First off, a note about my new food habits. I have so far eaten a jellyfish salad, dried squid, fried herring, raw whitefish (all in one meal) and mussels and fake crab in a soup. So far I have positive reviews of the herring, raw fish and, surprisingly, the jellyfish. Jellyfish salad is kind of sweet and a little bit tangy – like a fruit. A fruit of the sea.

It would be hard being straight veggie here, although not impossible, but for whatever reason, the attitudes that I’ve encountered up ‘til now about even having a fish-inclusive diet range from skeptical to something like incredulity. I don’t think these responses have tonnes to do with food availability, but more to do with taste and the possibility that having me along for the ride might limit the amount of pork and beef that arrives at the table, or that I might create some bad feelings surround whatever does. Anywho, I’ll be attempting to clean and prepare a whole fish tonight for dinner. We’ll let you know how that goes along with a recipe if all goes well. If not, we’ll be in hospital getting our throats deboned.

Gavin breaking in our new kitchen with eggs and homefries.                     

Good morning! Due to jet lag I’ve become quite the morning person. It started with waking up at 4:30, then 5:30, and today it was 6:30, although I managed to stay in bed until 7. Gavin doesn’t seem to have been affected by the time change in the least- he has slept soundly through the night since day one.

Yesterday we tackled the grocery store, with modest success. The “Lotte Mart” I mentioned in the last posting has a big grocery section on the bottom level that pretty much looks like a Loblaws. The differences are that there are tonnes of samples to try, even of prepared foods like stir-fry mixes that they make in front of you. We picked up some bananas, a loaf of bread (which in hindsight was a mistake since we don’t have a toaster or an oven or anything to make sandwiches with yet), chocolate digestive cookies called “Diget,” etc. Figuring out how to cook like a Korean is going to take some time and research I think. All the foreign teachers swear that it is cheaper to go out for all your meals, but we met a South African guy named Greg who assured us this is not true. You have to take advantage of the markets and maybe learn some new techniques, so I think this will be our plan.

Along the sidewalks are these ladies who sell produce out of baskets and we’d noticed one of them selling red peppers on our way to the store. As expected hers were much cheaper than those at “Lotte Mart,” so we bought some from her and she threw in an extra one free of charge. I think that bodes well for the big market.

The temple 

Later on we went to Haeundae, which is the most popular beach area, and met up with Sophie, a friend from Montreal who’s teaching in Ulsan, and some of her teacher friends (including another Gavin). We grossly underestimated the time it would take to get there and were 30 mins late. But at least we discovered the subway is easy to use and very comfortable. They were hanging out at the bus station drinking this milky looking rice wine I have yet to encounter, so we didn’t have to feel too bad for our tardiness.

The reason for the outing was to visit a temple on the outskirts of the city. I think it is called Haedong Yonggunsa and it’s unique in Korea due to being right on the ocean. The most amazing part for me was the deafening sound of cicadas in the trees. It was loud to the point that conversation was difficult. The temple itself was kind of neat but hard to really absorb amid the throngs of Korean tourists. At one point we were walking up a path and a little crab sidled out from under         a rock and scurried along beside us.
After our temple trip we headed back into the busier part of Haeundae for some food. After a brief squabble about where to dine we went to an ex-pat resto-bar called The Wolfhound. There we learned that when you’re in Korea it is in your best interests to go to a Korean restaurant. I had a grilled cheese (either a Kraft slice or Cheese Whiz) served with 6 fries. Beth fared little better with her BLT. Having shat on the ‘Hound, I was a necessary learning experience and would have happened sooner or later. Also, I’d like to point out how weird it is to be in a restaurant with people smoking. It brought back memories of The Only circa 2004. Oh, and if you’re ever in Korea and are faced with ordering either Hite or Cass beer, take the Cass.

The trip to the grocery store and the long journeys to and from the temple really took it out of me (and Gavin too I think), so when we got home we quickly picked up some stuff from “Lotte Mart” and headed home to watch the latest Weeds episode and fall asleep. Here are a few more pictures from the temple.

 

Us posing next to our Zodiac sign statues. We later discovered that Gavin is actually a dog, not a rooster.

From the decorative temple roof.

Gavin in front of the huge golden Buddha.