Air Con Time

Yesterday morning it suddenly started raining so hard and heavy that it woke me up. It stopped minutes before I left the house but then the temperatures started to climb making the afternoon a muggy mess. Luckily we finally got an instant message on our computers saying we could now use the air conditioners (air con in Korean) in our classrooms. It was a welcomed relief seeing as I have been using the air con at home now for the last couple of weeks. Saturday it came in particularly handy.

After a late night out on Friday I didn't want my Saturday to be a complete waste of a day so I planned on making a trip down to Yongsan to load up on DVDs. From my place to the subway station is a quick ten minute walk but on Saturday afternoon it was enough of a jaunt to get me sweating like crazy. If dripping in sweat wasn't bad enough I was sure my drippings were pure booze from the night before and having experienced sweating Korean businessmen on morning commutes I decided I wouldn't torture anyone else this way. So I re climbed the stairs back out into the furnace. I was never so relieved to get back home where I sat beneath the air con for the next two hours while drinking loads of water.

Carbon Copy Weekends.

The past two Saturdays have been almost carbon copies of one another. Both Joon and Ted have aged like Kimchi over the year and we all met up to celebrate. To sum up the two parties: they both started with meat and drinks, more drinks followed, then cakes made an appearance but were never eaten. The usual tom foolery happened and it was all good.

First up Joone's birthday:

We went to a great little restaurant near Tony's place and had three different kinds of meat for dinner to match the three different kinds of alcohol Joon picked out.


Thinly sliced pork that you then soak it a sweet sauce.


Disgusting seafood.


Raw beef mixed with a raw egg and tiny bits of Korean pears in it. My favourite Korean dish by far.

Teddy's Birthday:

Ted had us all in to his bar where he had the BBQ going for Hamburgers and chicken wings goodness. I got wrangled into prepping the salad and veggies where only after slicing up five or six onions and crying I learnt that to avoid tears you should chew gum.


Leoni and Don posing.


Joel and Wells chilaxing.


Ted with Jes and his new best friend Anthony.

"Dinner"

You would think by now that I would know that when you have "dinner" with a middle aged Korean father the "dinner" is actually a code word for drinks. Last week I agreed to dinner with my student's family and it ended up being fueled by soju.

It was a little weird drinking in front of my student but he didn't seem to mind and his four year old sister didn't either, spending the night either climbing all over me or running up to me every couple of minutes wanting to know the English word for whatever object she was thinking of.

Through broken English and Korean Se Chan's father told me that with each and every shot his daily work stress was floating away. He works as an engineer at one of the city's water treatment plants. When I asked if the tap water in Seoul is safe to drink he said by the health standards it is completely fine but his wife's opinion carries more weight and she believes it to be unsafe so he doesn't drink it.

It was a good "dinner" but near the end of it Se Chan's mom asked Se Chan to recite his English speech. SeChan isn't shy but being in public he was reluctant until he came up with a plan that I buy his some Lego if he does it. I agreed but my word wasn't good enough for him. I think he knew that the soju has influencing my agreement so he came over to my chair and had me record exactly what he would get out of it into his hand phone. Smart kid. They are a very nice family and it was a fun "dinner". I have a slight hangover to prove it.

Drag Me To Hell

Sunday and Monday night I had horrible sleeps. I was waking up every thirty minutes, shifting positions, punching my pillows and working out that my body temperature was both too hot and too cold at the same time. Generally I was hating life. Last night I thought a mid week movie would help change up the regular week routine and and then I had a brighter idea of choosing to see a horror movie. Drag me to Hell was awesome and just what I needed. It wasn't scary but it had more sudden jumpy parts than any other horror movie I have seen. There was also a lot of dark comedic parts and the usual gore fest but this time done for awkward laughs. The use of scary sounds was done perfectly and this movie is the best movie I have seen this summer.

English Camp

In typical Korean fashion I walked into school the other day to be told we were heading off to camp. I've done the camp almost ten times so it wasn't too much trouble putting some stuff together but it would have been nice to have known something the rest of the school knew about weeks earlier. Anyway it was a good day and they have pumped some extra money into the place and it looks great.




The obstacle course is the highlight of the day but the kids come back all sweaty and stinky. Thankfully I could go home when the day was up but I would not want to be sleeping there.



The newest feature that I loved was the blue screen where the kids practiced restaurant dialogues. It was a hit and the kids did a great job but when half the kids were wearing blue shirts they came off looking like floating talking heads.





The final event before cooking dinner was having teams build the tallest towers. There was a lot of stress as the buildings grew and lots of cheering when the opposing teams towers collapsed.

Two months today

I just handed over my plane ticket to be reimbursed and it's starting to feel like things are coming to an end. I made up my list of things to do (it's long) and another list of things the school needs to do. I'm done on August 15th and have been busy making plans for a small vacation later in the month. We will hit Thailand with friends from here then travelling by train down to Singapore to see Don before then taking a flight to Cambodia to stay with another friend there. The flight home then passes through Taipei for a day to eat as much Chinese food as is possible. It should be good fun but I do need to get my passport renewed before then because it expires in February and some countries won't let you in if there are less than six months left on it.

Pour Some Sugar On Me

There was a time that Onshin was a big school. Downstairs there are pictures of the graduating classes and before I joined the graduating (single) class had at least 35 students in it. Now it's a different story, the student population sits at 93. If you can't field a full soccer squad let alone a competent volleyball team you have to enter single sport events. From what I can tell about this trophy is from when they entered a niche event and won. Onshin is the proud winner of the Rick Allen award for the best impersonation of the drummer from Def Leppard. Rock on.

Tree Hugger's Toothpaste

With just over two months left it's time to go through all the crap I have collected over the years. In the tacky green plastic medicine cabinet I have about five tubes of the vilest toothpaste. Ever since I came to Korea I have been bringing toothpaste with me from Canada or buying black market stuff at a huge markup because Korean toothpaste is either way too sweet or (like the ones in my place) they are flavoured to taste like pine needles. I'm all for the environment and am a tree hugger in spirit (I don't like getting too dirty) but brushing my teeth with this stuff is too much. It's not the best start to the day but I also can't be wasteful and simply throw them out. This morning the bad taste left in my mouth wasn't too bad because I got to school and my co-teacher has the day off. I will also go home at lunch to do some running around and to meet Don for lunch before he heads off to his new Job at Visa Headquarters in Singapore. It's a good hump day.