MAN I'm bored

It's a strawberry!!!!

Swine flu?

Two weekends ago I went to the Gwangjang Market. Check out this magic:


This is the kind of stuff you need to get used to in Korea. Looks kind of gross, but to these people, it's a relaxing environment filled with all kinds of stick to your ribs comfort food. I pulled up a stool...

...and this was the view from where I was sitting. At one point I felt a tap on my shin and looked down. It was an old lady was crawling up from beneath the counter.

Neptune class plays Simon Says

My kindergarten kids are fast becoming my favourites.



Poor Rosie. She's the only one who really seems to know how the game is played, but the others make her feel cloistered by her own enlightenment.

Here she is trying to pose with her picture, but the others kept jumping in and ruining the shot.


POOR ROSIE!

Eric

This is Eric from my Neptune kindergarten class. He thinks I'm the coolest guy in the world and always comes to meet me before class starts. He had to draw a picture of himself but instead chose to draw me!

I had a really eventful weekend so expect a huge post soon!

Random photo post

A beautiful sight for very sore eyes.

So, the staff party I previously mentioned was on a Thursday night. Which meant that the next day was a WORKDAY. However, unlike normal workdays where I get to stew my ass at home until noon, I had to be in at 9:30 to partake in a mandatory staff, encouragement, skill promoting, exercise?

...

OK I'll be honest here and say I was definitely still drunk when I went in so I have no idea what it even was. There. I wouldn't do that if I had to teach children, but as I sipped soju till the wee hours of the morning with my Korean colleagues, I figured that any resulting misery would have nothing but company. Well I have no idea how these women pull themselves together so well, or at least how they hide it so well.

It wasn't that bad really, just a blotty mess that came and went with a grueling air of necessity.

Afterwards, rather than head home and collect myself and, oh I dunno, shower, I headed to Youido with my coworkers to check out the cherry blossoms before they wilted away for the year. I'm glad I went, however, I was expecting something akin to the Japanese hanami, where everyone sets up a blanket and just hangs out under the blossoms. This was actually something of a hike around almost the entire perimeter of the island. However, the entire hike was under the canopy of thousands of cherry blossom trees in full bloom. It was a labourious albeit beautiful experience.

It was a perfect day for couples to go out and flaunt their couple-ness. Unique to Korea are couple shirts, usually sold in pairs, with a male size and a female size. These two were one of many couples out on the promenade in fully synchronized regalia.

The next day, I made sure I was well-rested, as my Saturdays have lately become rather jam-packed events. This one was no different. It started with the usual morning visit to the hospital (no progress), followed by some necessary housework and a nap. That evening I met up with my bandmate Min to see his other band perform at Club Ssam. Once again, I was humbled by how incredibly talented some people are, especially the woman who sang and played contemporary jazz on a traditional Korean instrument. Look:



I could barely read the flyer, but I think her name was Seong Min Ah.

Here's Min's band. Min is the second from the left.

Backstage pass! (I also didn't have to pay the 20,000 won cover)

Anyways, Min bought me a hops drink (not code for a beer, an actual hops drink), and we met up with Gord for some samgyeopsal. It was cheap and delicious and oh so sinfully bad for me I'm sure.

Min dishing it out. I will miss these meals back in Canada.

The evening led Gord and I to Mixtape in Hongdae. The website looked promising so we went. It was pretty fun, albeit a pretty huge meat market. The music ranged from awesome (new Animal Collective!) to laughably bad (Smashing Pumpkins remix!!) and the atmosphere was a little cramped. Kind of weak, but somewhat of an oasis in the desert if you want to dance in Seoul and are not into throbbing techno or hip hop. We ran into another guy from Ottawa who looked like he was in utter rapture. When we asked him about Ottawa he replied "Man f***† Ottawa!" and I remember thinking at the time, "my god, I have definitely been to much better nights in Ottawa than THIS".

Sure enough Gord and I caught the very first subway home again in a greasy-haired, shambling state of disarray. Accomplished.

Weekend over!

† I'd like to keep this blog relatively profanity free out of respect for a few of my relatives and friends of my parents. Curiously, details of my unhealthy weekend lifestyle will remain faithfully intact.

Hahaha

Best part about the video I posted earlier happens about 4 seconds in when the camera pans to Mary and she seems to be stuck in this gesturing loop, like she's anamatronic or something. Gets me every time.

Staff Party

So with the weekend closing in, I figure that if I don't write about last weekend, I'll fall dreadfully behind again, so I'll briefly mention my staff party.

It was kind of a strange night because I have been working for Ssangmun ECC for about a month now, and have developed a polite yet respectfully distant relationship with the majority of the staff there. The most of what I've seen from them has been their quiet office faces, and there is rarely a chance for interaction if it isn't business related. Heck, there's a whole group of employees who are sequestered in a completely separate office whom I never interact with, including the Hillary Clinton boss lady that intimidates the crap out of everyone.

This event was interesting because not only was it a gathering in a casual atmosphere, but unlike Canadian staff parties where the respectful office conduct is maintained throughout, Koreans like to bust down the wall entirely and let their pent up wild side ride free. And that's what everyone did that night.



As you can hear in that video, I got into the spirit after some initial apprehension.

It was an awesome night actually! I finally got to experience the diverse personalities that I work with, in a comfortable environment. I even met the staff who worked in the separate office, including the boss, who spoke to me for the first time ever with the words "Jon, one shot!".

Naturally, the best environment for these kinds of get-togethers are galbi restaurants. I guess there's just something about cooking meat that makes it a vector for camaraderie. I felt sorry for some of my coworkers who were either vegetarian, didn't drink or both.

Anyways here's some pictures:

Typical galbi restaurant.

Patty, Judy and Lara.

Tena (pronounced "Tenae") and Robin.

Iris and Stella, neither of whom I had talked to before that night.

Me and Roy, the guy I mentioned in my first entry, who showed me my apartment.

Judy was a lot of fun.

Skylar and Jacey.

Mary, the academic director, Hillary Clinton (I can never remember her Korean name) and Anna.

Susan

Stella wearing my glasses.

It was such a great night because now I am a lot for relaxed and jovial around the office when I talk to people. I even talk to people in the other office.

Anyways, those are my coworkers!

FATTY

My eating habits are terrible. People laugh when I tell them that I feel like I'm getting fat, but honestly, it's not like I will thicken to the average person's size before getting fat. No, it's more like, I'll maintain my sickly physique, but develop a spare tire around my waist or a waddle under my chin. Or just become very unhealthy and out of shape. Or both. Either way, I feel unhealthy.

I may be grasping for excuses here, but when you're alone in a foreign land and everything else around you is so alien, it's hard to resist eating fatty comfort food. Not to mention the fact that after a long day of acclimatizing my brain to the non-stop stimuli of a completely different culture, the last thing I feel inclined to do is take the first step towards learning how to cook healthy meals for myself at home. And it sure doesn't help that I can't even read any of the labels in the grocery store.

Anyone have any suggestions? If this goes on for any longer, this may be what greets you coming off the plane back in Ottawa:


On a brighter note, I just remembered how much I missed Photoshop.

Mountain Trek

So last weekend I went hiking around Bukhansan National Park with Gord and Charlotte and I feel great about it because a: I got tons of exercise and b: I surprised myself with how much I was physically able to accomplish.

Here's what we're talking about.

As you can see, Bukhansan is not just a national park, but also a large collection of mountains, some reaching as high as 836m above sea level. While we did not reach the highest summit in the park, we did climb a good 700m up and walked a few kilometers along the ridge connecting two lofty peaks.

The ridge was razor-thin and dropped steeply on both sides.

What made this climb so exceptional for me, was the fact that rather than having a nice cleared trail for you to leisurely walk up, Bukhansan elected to force it's climbers to scale some pretty rugged, very steep and sometimes outright dangerous terrain. I was occasionally gripped with fear when I tried to make a few ledges, or when my feet slid across loose gravel. My life was never at risk, but it was not a task to be taken lightly.

One such treacherous climb.

Another not-so-treacherous climb.

But still, there were guys and girls, some probably in their 70s, doing this trek, and they definitely had many years of experience and the gear to show for it. At times, we would stop to have a quick bite and relax, and they would offer us food and drinks (including beer?) in exchange for friendly camaraderie. Drinking beer during this hike would have been the worst idea. Some guys were even drinking soju!

This group insisted on taking a picture with us.

Every once and a while, we would come to a peak that provided an amazing vista over Seoul and the surrounding mountains. It's absolutely impossible to capture the splendor of being on top of a mountain and seeing for miles around in a picture, but these will have to do:

Gord and I during our climactic final battle.

From a distance Seoul looked like a giant circuit board, with it's ugly apartment complexes arranged in a utilitarian manner. But even that was breathtaking at the height we were at.

Occasionally we came across actual temples in the mountains, and some were surprisingly ornate and beautiful. We even came across a natural spring with clean drinking water!

Temple

Spring water

Great day to say the least. Worth waking up at 9am on a sunday! And it's funny because the park is so massively huge that we maybe explored about 5% of it! And if you are wondering why we all have bandannas around our necks in the pictures, it's because they also doubled as maps!

COOL!