I'm loving Korean dentists at the moment. I had scaling (deep cleaning) done and had two cavities filled all for 30 dollars. It does help the dentist is a friend of a friend but what helps more is that I didn't go to the poorly named S&M Dental clinic just down the street.
Had a great little dinner at Nic and Rob's place on Saturday night. They basically live in a mansion with the best patio to take in the views of the city. I should have brought out my camera out but didn't want to appear as if I hadn't been in a nice house before so I acted cool. We ate a lot and chilled the whole night outside on the patio. Nic was not shy about refilling drinks and never once let my sparkling wine dip below half a glass.
At one point near the end of the night the topic moved from Rob's nurse stories (always disgustingly fun) onto Leonie's fostering of kangaroos as a child. Saejin and I refused to believe this story thinking the majority of Australians present were taking the piss out of us. When you start a story out about a baby kangaroo jumping on your head and you are Australian it's like a Canadian saying they have lived in an igloo. After five minutes of refusing to believe the details about these kangaroo stories started to sound real and I will now say they are true although I am waiting for the pictures as solid proof.
Living with Joone has been going alright. I'm slowly getting used to a new sleep schedual but when I only work half days I shouldn't complain if I get to bed later than I want. The worst thing in this place is Joone's ashtray. I know what he's getting for his next birthday.
A couple of weeks ago my former student's family asked me to go out for dinner. We had agreed to sushi a few weeks before but I was thinking sushi meant the Japanese variety with salmon and tuna as my options. Instead we went to a Korean restaurant where the first floors holds the fish for you to pick and upstairs we eat it. Luckily they had 도미 in Korean which my phone tells me is a sea bream. Neither word means anything to me but it is tasty when paired with soju. 
SeChan giving his normal look when asked to do anything. 
The family finding out the weight and price of dinner. 
After dinner we went to the pub for more drinks and fun. 
Around the time the soju and beer started to kick in so did the sugar from Sechan's multiple coke's and ice cream. Being a good Korean kid he started showing off the latest dance craze every Korean knows. 
SaeBin took a break from hanging off my neck to pose for her picture.
Good times.
Hard to believe this man is an actual professor travelling the world going to conferences and earning a living molding the minds of MBA students. No wonder businesses the world over are all failing.
Tony had his birthday a couple of Friday's ago. We went to a Thai fusion restaurant with the obvious name of Berlin, where Tony treated us to a set menu he had specially made for the group (the starter was a Korean dumpling but it was wrapped in rice paper, a chicken salad was next, followed by the best sliced steak and some chicken dish, we then had some fries and a green curry served with noodles). The food was amazing and I will definitely have to make it back there before leaving Seoul. 
It was the usual gang and things started off quietly. 
The late comers. 
Raidar was also there for his last night in Seoul before he headed back to Norway early the next morning. 
Things got a little louder after this when we all started in on the helium balloons that Chan Young brought along. Not wanting to be banned from the restaurant we headed off to Bliss where we could be louder and later in the night up to Soho. Here things turned dramatic when a pick pocket stole Tony's wallet from his bag but the bar staff saw it all and they caught the guy. Other than the wallet fiasco it was a great night out.
When you get news you have to be moved out in one week's time and your house is full of crap it leaves you with no time to post. We had the option of not taking the offer on the house but in Korea when you rent you deposit key money and you get it back when the next people take over your place. We had 10 million won tied up in the place and didn't want to risk having the place sit empty and then trying to get the money back while in Canada so we it took it. We also took being homeless for the last month we are here but thankfully Joone offered up a place in his house to keep us sheltered. He lives in Pucheon (the city between Seoul and Incheon) so it takes just over an hour to commute to Seoul but for my work it is relatively close and is about the same commute time I was doing before. Thankfully I'm on holiday for two of the last four weeks here so it isn't too bad.
The move itself was simple but the sorting of stuff the week before sucked. I threw out ten, twenty litre bags of garbage. Gave away another five boxes of stuff and then chucked the "maybe will keep stuff" into boxes we stored in Saejin's office that I have to sort through. The rest of the stuff all belonged to my school and we hired a moving crew to come pack it up and take away. (If you are looking for a job where you can smoke and ash on apartment floors, be rude and you like carrying sofas on your back the mover gig is worth checking out.)
When I got to Korea my first job was working for a shady, shady man who used to pay me in little white envelopes full of 10 000 won ($10) bills. It took two of them to pay me (envelopes not bills) and then I would rush back to my apartment and make tiny hidden piles of money in case I got robbed. Just a few weeks ago the newest, biggest bill came out, a 50 000 won. They have been talking about it for some time and had hardcore debates over who should be on it and then once decided they had a usual Korea argument over the size of Shin Saimdang's head (thanks Don). Anyway yesterday a student showed me the first real one I have seen. They are still in limited circulation. 
My socks have been wet all day long. My pants from mid thigh down have been soaked and dried four times today. My shirt on the side I wear my purse (I don't need to label it a man bag, it's a purse) has been rung out only twice. Since seven this morning until three in the afternoon it has been pouring rain with winds to make an umbrella a useless accessory. It wouldn't have been too bad but today I went down to the Canadian Embassy before work to get a new passport made. So I was drenched walking to the subway, drenched again walking to the embassy, drenched a third time coming to work and to add insult to pickled skin just walking twenty meters to lunch today ended up with me and all the kids drenched again. It's just drizzling now and I can't wait to get home to change my clothes.
Seeing as we are moving out in just over a month our apartment is on the market for new renters. We had to get an extra key made and dropped it off with a real estate agent. They can now show the place whenever a client drops by looking for a place fitting the size and budget they want. Yesterday a young couple came by to see the place and because the agent is an ajuma she didn't even bother knocking on the door to see if we were home. Instead she jammed the key into the lock then started trying to open the door with all here might. Luckily, we had the security lock on because had they wanted to see the bathroom they would have gotten a sight of Saejin lathering up. I often forget to lock the door (a huge annoyance to Saejin) but will now have to remember to not only lock the door but to set the tiny security bolt.
Ajumi is the plural for an ajuma. An Ajuma is Korean for a married woman but it's in your best interest to avoid being hit to not to use this term for anyone younger than forty. Ajumi can be the nicest or evilest of people you will meet in Korea and tend to have many similar characteristics.
The look of an ajuma is easy to spot. They tend to have tight curly perms and their uniform is a floral shirt matched with a pair of comfortable pants. They are easy to spot because they travel in packs and will never stand behind you in line. If you are waiting for the next subway they have the sharpest elbows in the world and will sneak past you no matter how hard you try to keep them at bay. They also have impeccable aim and will throw their purses to lay claim to any empty seat available in the rare case they are behind you when entering a train or bus.
Once seated they will then quickly get a sense of the environment by staring (and I mean full on staring) at everyone around them. If there happens to be a drunk, or a crazy person, near them who is disrupting the atmosphere on the train they have magic powers that puts that person in check. It's an awesome sight to see.
If there is a toddler nearby, ajumi will volunteer to hold the kid and if the kid is unwilling out comes candy from their all important purse. (I've also been given candy from ajumi multiple times.) Because they have given everyone around a once over any flaw they see they will go about fixing the problem. On two separate occasions yesterday I saw ajumi pick stray hairs off the backs of unsuspecting strangers without their knowledge.
The scary side of the ajumi comes out when they go shopping. Give them a shopping cart and you will be run down if you are unlucky enough to be in the way of a sale. If no sale exists they will bargain to get the cheapest deal available. They are also scary when they are out drinking for the night. This usually only happens on rare occasions and they make the best of it. They love to eat, sing and dance.
When they head out to eat they make sure to hand feed anyone else looking hungry. They sing oldies but goodies and have a special dance where their thumbs, bums and heads to most of the work. Don't worry about them getting drunk though. They will drink anyone under the table and are often seen carrying their husbands home on their backs while yelling at them.
Sadly, I believe they are a dying breed. The next generation of ajumi are very conscious of their appearances and with plastic surgery being more of a right of passage than a trend new ajumi will stay young forever. Long live the ajumi.
Normally test days fall on a Wednesday a few weeks before the end of the term. According to the yearly schedual it was supposed to be next Wednesday but when I showed up to work today the kids were all last minute cramming with worried little looks on their faces.
Had I known it was today I would have asked for the morning off to run down to the Embassy to apply for my new passport. Instead I brought in nothing extra do to to kill time. I guess it's a day of YouTubeing (is it a verb yet? Do you drop the e? Add a b?) and reading for me. I may need a drink tonight to kill this boredom.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yesterday was hot. Yesterday I was hot. Yesterday I wanted nothing to do with the stuffy subway on my way home from work. I opted for a taxi and the best place to catch one to my place is right in front of a Dunkin' Donuts. There were no taxi's waiting so I went into the air conditioned shop for some relief and to appease my sudden cravings. Lately I have been doing great at getting out jogging at least three times a week while doing other forms of exercise on the other days. I have lost weight and shirts that used to be tight are options for me now. Two donuts to quell a sudden impulse wouldn't be sending me to summer fat camp so I did it. I then went outside, hailed a cab and with my little bag of donuts I started to sit down when the back of my pants split open. Nice.
Last Friday night started out quiet with me stretched out on bed reading my book when just before ten o'clock I got a call from Joel. We chatted for a bit and then the question about having a beer naturally came up. After more chatting and humming and hawing we chose to meet. I hopped into a taxi, took a the same old route and was soon walking the outdoor stairs to get down to Bliss. I came around the blind corner and noticed right away something was off.
The bar was as busy as normal, Ted and Lucky were hard at work (if you call standing and drinking behind the bar work) and the hulking size of Nick was hunkered down at the corner of the bar with an over sized woman in polyester as his drinking partner. A few more steps into the bar I realised it was the one and only Patti O Doors.
For those not in the know Patti o Doors is Rob in drag and will be the host of Bingo night at Bliss. This has been much talked about for a long time and last Friday was the dress rehearsal. While Bingo sounds (and can be) boring we had good fun playing a couple of rounds with free drinks as the prize. I was lucky enough to come out as a winner despite not being able to understand the way thirty is pronounced in Aussie English. Joel made the right call on heading out that night.
Miss Doors.
The winning ticket. (To win, make sure the cards have a seven on them.)
Miss Doors mingling with friends after the games were done.
Heidi (one of my closest friends I've met here) finally had her wedding with Min today. It was to be in a luxurious resort in Mexico with each couple having their own separate bungalow with hot tubs on the patio but with the Swine Flu scare they cancelled at the last minute. They are now in lesser resort in Jamaica but after getting a twenty digit number pop up on my phone today, I can say they aren't bothered where they are. They were having a dance off and through the music, laughing and drunken hellos I so wish I could have made it. Unfortunately my holiday (unemployement?) isn't for another few months. Nicole kept telling me that I was there in spirit and that I have made my way into some of the pictures. Not exactly sure what that means but when there is booze involved I'm sure they came up with some sort of plan. I'm thinking some random dirty Rastafarian wig cropped up on someones' hand.
Saturday night's BBQ at Bliss was great. I was one of the first to show and was put in charge of lighting the thing. Ever since childhood when I made the family BBQ jump when I tried lighting it I quickly passed this duty off on William. I took a supervisory role and stood well back from any glass and outside of the range I predicted the tank would blow to. Trying not to feel completely useless I volunteered to scrub off the remains of the last BBQ and nine month old grease is not a pretty sight.
The usual gang showed (minus one who was too busy reading a book) and we got into our drink and talking. The second best part of the night came when a very, very drunk girl who sometimes pops into the bar came. I have spoken to her before but she is loud and not really the kind of person I click with. Having her in the bar was entertaining as she worked her way along the bar bumping into conversations. We were definitely being nice to her and trying to make small talk but when you ask, "Where were you earlier today?" and get told, "I'm a translator" and then told the names of objects on the bar in basic Korean you lose interest. It became a sort of sport to then pass her off on each other whenever we could before excusing ourselves. She finally got placed in a bar chair and eventually figured out she was too drunk to be out and she quietly left.
The best part of the night was to finally meet Tony's friend JS. Tony talks about him often but we have never been able to meet him as he's in the military and rarely gets time off base. He had the past week out and he came by for some drink. He is a younger Korean and unfortunately he got cornered by Joon and Saejin who went into doing shots and downing beer like water. Poor JS played the role of younger Korean and super politely drank when told to. Whenever any of us Westerners came up to tell Joon and Saejin to let the non-drinker drink slowly they gave us an excuse that it's "Korean military culture" to drink this way. Basically telling us we don't understand the unique culture and he would be fine. He did his best by eventually hiding in a corner but not until Joon ran up a huge tab at the bar and seeing as he's older he had to pay. All in all it was a fun party and under my new drinking rules I wasn't hung over the next day.
I found out about this list of summer movies released in 1984 and was amazed by how many of these movies are still well known. There are many out there saying 1984 was the best summer for movies. Now the summer movies are all big budgeted, full of explosions, bad stories and brands that expect people will go to them no matter how shitty they are. I think the reason so many of these movies are still popular is that they were some of the first ones on video (in both Betamax and VHS), movie channels and replayed every holiday. 
These are my top three picks from that summer and I would still sit though them now. 
These are my next three picks and The NeverEnding Story is the only one on this list I actually saw at the theatre. 
Comedies and Sci-Fi movies end my top ten from that summer. 
Honorable mention to this next group and I remember seeing all of them but I imagine they are as bad as their movie posters sell them as being. I would give the Muppet Take Manhattan another go because I remember having ordered the picture book for the movie at school from the monthly book sale. They used to send home fliers full of books you could choose to order with a cheque and five weeks later it showed up, do schools still do these sales? 
I have never actually seen these last four but imagine now they would be the ones I would watch. There were a bunch of other movies also released that summer (May to August) but I didn't know any of them. Anyway yesterday was test day and as you can tell I had a lot of free time on my hands. Can't wait until this weekend and the planned BBQ for Saturday.
