bram brack

obsessions of late

2011-05-14T10:50:00.001+09:00

It's spring, how-de-doo...


hello wormy

I'm currently trying to make my box of an officetel a home.... What ever is an officetel you ask?

An officetel is a high rise with studio offices inside that are basically given to or sought out by people to also be apartments.

As an office, it's a great concept! There is somewhere to cook, eat, sleep, but as an apartment it's a bit on the suck side. Made as quickly as possible and probably breaking all non-existent building codes in Korea, these "apartments" are crappy, fall apart easily and are either super hot or freezing depending on the season it shouldn't be (no heat retention in winter / no air flow in summer).

But it's better than the all encompassing Korean housing style known as "villa". A villa is a small walk up building with about 10 apartments inside, the shower comes on a handle beside your toilet. So you can shit, brush your teeth AND wash your hair at the same time. So yes, I'm happier living in my (retardely expensive) officetel, and am currently trying to make it a home (as you know if you read the first line of this diatribe!).

How to make a space a home? I'm guessing put some shit on the walls and buy some plants. So this is what i've done and well hells bells, it worked. I'm feeling so much more "homey" these days that all i've been doing is staying home and baking, and now 9kg heavier, maybe i should rethink this homey methodology...

But I am obsessed (OBSESSED I SAY!) with my little plants. Especially the tomato seedlings that are growing and that a worm came out of! I feel like a worm in my plants is super good luck, so if they up and die, I might just jump out my window (but don't worry because i will put on the "safety harness" and attach it to the "hook" that comes with my officetel in case we ever need to jump out the window). A cat is also a nice addition to make your space a home. Too bad mine punches me in the face when I'm sleeping.

Obsession #2 is good ol' Sufjan Stevens (and he better be good because he's a christian and it pains me that i love his music because he is a christian (I'm so not down with listening to "christian music") so if he turned out to be a "bad" guy that would kill me just a little bit more) and his new album. Actually I'm not obsessed with his new album "The Age of Adz", for some reason I'm semi NOT obsessed with the album. But I am obsessed with the 25 minute song "Impossible soul" that comes last on the album. It's like the bonus mini-album, and by gods (that sufjan happens to love) it's the best little mini-album EVER! Why you ask, well I dunno, I'm not a music critic, i can't really express my feelings about it without using the adjectives - amazing, wonderful, awesome - which you don't really care about. So musically it just has everything and it makes me tingle, so i love it.

I am also obsessed with making cute photoshop icons for my hiking group (ninja poop image taken from cute ninja web site btw...). Said hiking group is also an ongoing obsession and every time I climb those mountain stairs I love it more and more. You should go take a hike, because honestly it's the best feeling ever. And maybe it will help me get rid of that homey 9kg I decided my body wanted, but actually doesn't at all.

solo saturday

2011-04-16T23:08:00.001+09:00

yes yes i love you too....

did i mention that i don't drink anymore? well that changed last night. i drank. 3 drinks (or maybe 6 because they were doubles). loaded off my rocket. and all the reasons why i stopped drinking presented themselves to my very haggled face this morning at 7am.

binge drinking
hitting on cutie Korean boys
wanting to smoke more than anything
getting into a strangers car for a ride home instead of taking a taxi
eating everything in sight when i got home (which means binge eating an entire squash!)
drunkenly using my computer....

felt like shit all day. it's funny, i have no problem not drinking, it has seriously been months now and I've been around alcohol and at parties where people are loaded - no problem! but I've noticed that whenever i hang out with certain friends i INSTANTLY want to party! WTF is that the only thing i can do with these friends?! I've spent hundreds of hours with these girls NOT drinking, but maybe truthfully, most of the time we have spent together has been with a giant glass of gin in our drunk hands. Is there a way to get over this? because i do want to see these people, but i don't want another repeat of last night....

must have been on SUPER sale...

so as the lord of alcohol punished me and made me feel like shit all day, i did not much of anything. mini bike ride around the river, shopping at the hideous people filled e-mart (why WHY would i even attempt to go there on a saturday). E-mart is koreas version of walmart. horrid yellow giant E, i hardly ever go there, but i went there today. like beating oneself with chains. it's packed, saturday in korea is like christmas in canada. you can't move for having your toes rolled over by a shopping cart that's being pushed by a 2 year old child while the parents are giving the ol' push and shove to a crowd of people surrounding the free samples of the crappiest cheese known to man.

I managed to get out alive with cans of things that i can't find at the korean market, the only place you should go to shop. oh wait I forgot to mention that most (no no.. ALL) korean supermarkets are filled with salespeople who yell at you to buy whatever they are standing in front of. OR if you are going into the low budget supermarket they have a dude on a mic (or if you are REALLY lucky two or three) at deafening volumes, just letting you know that you should buy the lettuce. oh and wait, those oranges are 5 for 4 chuns, and the cow meat is OH SO GOOD. you learn how to get in and get out of there so fast that shopping is a breeze.

This is also what I've been doing lately. Getting acupuncture treatment on my knee that I banged a few weeks ago hiking. Don't know if it's working, because it's only a muscular treatment, and I might have knocked the bone BUT it sure does feel crazy good! who wouldn't want to put tiny needles into their bodies? I'm wondering what else i can stab? my wrinkles?! oh wait, that's called botox.

tomorrow will be filled with hiking and i hope to heck i don't fall off any mountains. I'm so frustrated with my clumsy self. i have actually googled how not to be clumsy and will try to put into practice the "tips" i read. which included not taking and actually looking at what you are doing (ie watching where you put your feet). this will not be an easy feat for me as i have been known to be a talker. and a fool with my head in the clouds. can i bring myself down?

spring in hagye-dong

2011-04-14T08:53:00.001+09:00


spring sprung

April, how did you get here?! famous Aprils??? the only one I can think of is April the news reporter from teenage mutant ninja turtles...

I wake up before my alarm now, wunderbar. I used to lazily laze away in bed until 8am, but these days 6:30 seems to be the time my internal alarm clock goes off and wide awake i am. Or maybe, 6:30 is the time the sun makes its way through the filth/yellow dust lining my windows and wakes me up. either way i love it. not hearing my alarm go off is honestly the BEST thing ever. ugh to alarm clocks. i think alarms are like number 8 on my hate list... well going up to number 2 when they are fire alarms/car alarms/north korea is bombing us alarms, but maybe like number 50 (as in i don't care at all) when it's just the monthly "just in case we are bombed" practice alarms....

if you squint you can see the dirt

It's a new year (my year starts in March just so you know) and I have moved from Amsa-Dong to Hagye -Dong in Northern Seoul. It's nearly exactly where I want to be, close to bukhansan, suraksan and dobongsan. and look!! what's that outside the window?? why it's the hill i climb up and over to get to baramsan. Just in case you haven't noticed I'm still obsessed with hiking.

Moving was a giant pain in the ass, actually everything from Feb till tomorrow was a huge pain in the ass.. I left my old job with my old company (STILL waiting to get paid half of my severance...fuckers). I had to find a new job with a new company. Pretty straightforward right? well not if you are a picky picky person. I don't want to work in the morning (this is the time when i want to do EVERYTHING - such as blogging at 7am - and I don't feel like using this awesome energy on such horrible things... like work...) AND I don't want to work in the evening.

So basically I want to work from 1-5. And for the past 2 years that hasn't been a problem. but this year, well, it WAS a problem. finding a job that offered those hours, with the bonus of decent pay and the accepted extras (housing, flight, bonus, pension, medical) was next to impossible. As the job search continued, it seemed that well well, I was being a bit too picky (hogwash dear readers!) so finally i settled for a job from 1-6:30 (with a one hour break, but still, i would rather go home at 5:30) with 95% of the extras... That 5 percent being housing allowance instead of housing.

FML

Now this could lead me into a HUGE diatribe on housing - finding housing - and moving into said housing in Seoul, but I'll keep it short. Acquiring shelter should be easy, just walk into a real estate agent, go look at places and choose one! easy... not likely. I spent days looking at shitty shit holes that were in my "budget" (basically 500,000 per month). So then i upped the ante to 600,000 a month and found a wonderful little officetel in Hagye. Done and done right?! Fuck that shit... back to real estate office where they want to charge me nearly 700,000 for the real estate agent fee... after bursting into tears (my #1 stress tactic) and watching a yelling match ensue between fraudulent real estate assholes and new company manager, we get the fee down to 300,000.... still WTF, when i moved to amsa it was only 150,000...

hagye dong, here i am. a million apartments mirror image of each other, looked down upon by a giant mountain and lined by a busy river. I'm enjoying it and my new gym, and I'm getting used to my new school.... I'm enjoying waking up with the sun, writing a blog while i clean the toilet and bake squash (yup no joke) while listening to the bbc all before the hour of 8.

tin woman

2010-11-01T16:44:00.005+09:00

Today it's been decided, but, I guess it always was there. I am a person void of emotion, feeling, need for others, and well a bunch of other horrible adjectives that describe my insane ability to detach and remain emotionally separated from the people i should love.

Do I have no heart?

No, not 100% true, but a good % higher than your usual norae bang score.

Val is leaving today, and as things go, I probably won't see her again... ever even maybe.. but for some reason, this does not bother me. This doesn't make me cry, or feel sad that I won't see one
of my good friends anymore in Korea, it doesn't phase me that I will miss her, her wonderful singing and guitar playing ways. Fall bike rides, eating tuna and other fun activities we do together will not take place anymore, but all my brain computes to my heart is "oh well, see ya later! have a good trip". How does this happen?! How does it not affect me in the least to see people go, one after another, basically completely out of my life (well crackbook keeps us all updated with each other doesn't it), and I don't give a shit.

I don't want to be like this, an emotionless shell, but honestly, it's like I've been evolved for living in a country where you meet people and after a year or two they flee. OR for living a life where the 5 members of my family live in 5 different countries and we don't see each other more than once every few years.

So I have no heart. But as i said before, no not true.

The problem I realize is this, that when I do meet people who I hold super dear and don't ever want to let go (ie a boy/girlfriend) I decide that they get to have the 98% of my heart not used on anyone else and then they have to suffer that excess amount of love.

Not a good system I say! Not a good system you echo! but that's how I roll, I don't want people to depend on me, so, in turn, I usually don't depend on others for much. Ohhhh the therapist in you is thinking now about my eggshell childhood and how this has molded me into who i am, and well you are right! I had to say "hello, goodbye" once every year or two to my dad, my brother, sister, mother etc etc etc. you just can't keep crying you know.

So here I am in Korea, a shell of a person, who somewhere deep down has so much love. I guess I do put it out there but in a different way.... I put into my smile, and love it in turn when it's contagious and people respond with toothy grins. I put it into my stride, the muffins i bake for hiking friends, texts i send out to wish a happy friday or a good monday... Into making people feel good, accepted and happy. I put it into my punch, that only the sand bag at boxing gets to feel the impact of.

maybe I'm just way to self involved.

I had my monthly bike ride from Bundang to Amsa today, a wonderful fall morning, the sun shining on my face as I rode and sang the 30 odd km back home. A perfect fall day to make you feel happy if you were feeling down from having your friends go home... or in my case to make you feel happy because you are alive.

I'm taking a million pictures along the ride to make a video about the ride (because everyone must be interested in the bike ride from bundang to amsa!) and this makes me laugh because all the bikers going to the other way are just wondering what on earth I'm doing... and they are also wondering what on earth I'm all about in my shorty shorts and tights and blue bow in my hair.

I'm taking a million pictures of this man sitting on a bench surrounded by yellow flowers on a brown fall day (because the light was so great and I really wanted to capture the moment, but then after uploading the photos they were nothing like I though they would be and instead I will have the perfect imagine of the man and the flowers, but only in my mind)

soup AND stop motion!

2010-10-21T23:50:00.001+09:00

lately i'm obsessed with soup AND stop motion! so why not combine the two!!

osaka i remember thee well....

2010-10-09T22:39:00.003+09:00

I've been going to Japan every year since I arrived in Korea and the most wonderful of wonderful things there are the bike lanes, and all the bikers! It makes me so happy to see them, to remember them and now to share them with you. I made this vdieo from a collection of photos shot in Osaka back in 2007.

quitters never win

2010-10-06T08:54:00.007+09:00

Welcome to day 32 of my new life. Come on in, take a seat but leave your booze, smokes and anything delicious to eat at the door.

32 days ago (that's nearly 5 weeks yo!) I decided I was done! Done with the hangovers, the smelly smokey clothing, the stupid beer belly that I have even though I don't drink beer (well, unless I'm already drunk and well... fuck..... then I'll drink anything that has alcohol in it).... the empty wallet after a night out that I DIDN'T EVEN REMEMBER!

oh and there there is the guilt/shame feeling that I did something... I MUST have done something stupid, embarrassing, dangerous, or fucked up because well... I'm a crazy drunk! I'm not one to just have a few drinks and go home, no no no... not Andrea that's for sure!

During the past few years I have tried to reign in this behaviour, and I am a sight better than i used to be (cut to the movie about my life -scene 39 perhaps- where a younger drunk andrea is lost, crying and surrounded by a pack of boys), so I've definitely gown up some about my drinking habits, but not enough to the point where I haven't had to stop sending out my fair share of those "Sunday morning apology texts" ....

Drunk Andrea is FUN ANDREA and well... I like to have fun! and people tend to LOVE drunk Andrea... just watch her make a fool of herself maybe....

So cya later booze! well for now away, because, well quitters never win do they.... I plan to go 110 days without touching the devils poison. December 24th I will board a plane for Malaysia and once in my seat will order myself 10 gin and tonics...

So why quit drinking if I'm just going to start again? Well i think that after 110 days of abstinence I will hopefully realize something about my drinking habits - OK so I already KNOW a thing or two... but maybe I will able to ADMIT something about my drinking habits and REALLY realize what I am doing to my mind and body. And If i can do it, last 110 days, I really think that I will feel differently about drinking. I never NEVER though I could actually go this long (only 32 days!) but every day makes the next one a little easier and reaching my goal more important.

The worst part of my favourite activity is that it goes hand in hand with what just happens to be my second favourite activity, smoking. Wow doesn't that work out just perfect.

So now it's been 32 days without having a cigarette, which is crazier than 32 days without a jig of vodka. But somehow, and really REALLY i have no idea how, I haven't given in. Last sunday was actually the hardest, after hiking (which is the other only time I drink beer, because for some reason beer after hiking is THE BEST EVER) I really, really REALLY wanted a cigarette, I even though of buying a pack, having one and throwing the rest away, because then I would only have had 1 right... but I didn't do it, for some reason.

I really want this, this time.

So 32 days ago I decided I was finished with that life of debauchery and I went on a detox of sorts. I started taking some 한국 (Korean traditional medicine)which is made up of ginseng, tree bark and maybe dog shit (it tastes like dog shit that's for sure, not that I've ever eaten dog shit, but I used to own this big black lab and MY GOD sometimes when I had to bend over his droppings and poop n' scoop a big hot steaming.... ok wait, you get the picture...).

The 한국 also promotes weight loss, and you are not supposed to have any sugar, and defiantly not have any sugar coming from ALCOHOL! So, I thought, if I'm going to give up the devils poison, why not the cancer sticks too. Because dear readers remember, best friends need to stick together. so they can stick together - outta my life beatch!

So it's going super well in the sans booze et cigs department, and I have been sticking to the food regime more or less (less when i went to that wedding 2 weeks ago and there was an ice cream machine!!! like the one you get soft ice cream from, but hey you can control it YOURSELF!") and then there were the 3 days I spent in Busan during Chuseok (korean thanksgiving) where I was "on vacation" so I just ate whatever, but I still didn't drink/smoke!

And how do i feel.... My god I'm feeling pretty dang good! You know how bad you feel when you have a hangover, like that shitty, head pulsing, don't want to get out of bed soi'lljustlieherealldayandtheneatanentirepizzatomyself type of hangover? Well I basically feel 100% the opposite of that.

Now that is a good reason to go 110 days.

(it's too bad Marilyn makes it look so goooood)

and back i come

2010-10-02T14:52:00.009+09:00

what happens that drags me away from the world of blog and narrating in my head, what happens to me that it takes me nearly a full year before I want to actually talk about myself again (my favourite subject no less) in a blog style way, therefore what we should say the personal therapist way.

well i have no idea what happened, a million and one things, but nothing really... new hopes i have, new hobbies i enjoy, new legs i have acquired after an intensive going under surgery and now i am able to wear shorts and skirts for the first time in since... well i can remember... new friends, old friends I'm still loving... vacations had, new countries visited (Malaysia i loveeeee you!), boyfriends or boys should i say passed through the Andrea version of it's not going to work out dating regement...

If i hang out my window I can steal the Internet, so maybe lack of having the Internet since I've moved to Amsa Dong has led me to not posting.. but that's just crap. But here I am again, hanging out my window, with nakji the garbage cat trying to catch the bugs that fly by!

Maybe I'm just a lazy asshole...

I just checked the stats of this blog and it seems by FAR the most popular post i ever wrote (which was an incredibly crappy post too.. ) was the one about my GREY HAIR!!! so here is a picture that is going to be labeled by me

" THIS IS WHAT PREMATURE GREY HAIR LOOKS LIKE!!"

so as the hair on my head grows and grows (which hair tends to do) it looks more yellow, more and more blonde! I don't want to be a blonde! I love being the grey headed crazy that i am! So why this yellow? Pollution, yup Korea's got a bit of that and MORE, so maybe that is the reason.

Maybe the length of my hair creates an illusion of yellow.. ok what the heck am I talking about...

Maybe it's because i don't wash my hair too frequently... this is NOT gross you freaks who think you are the authority on clean hair and how you should shampoo it every freaking day.. so I only get around to using that blue shampoo invented for grannies once or twice a week.

What else should I ramble about now... how about my current obsessions since well, it's been awhile since I wrote about them.

Since FOOD is my favourite subject let's start with that.

ADZUKI BEANS!!!

here is a photo of Japanese artist Takao Sakai wearing Adzuki beans as a beard on his face. I love you bean beard face man. So being a vegetarian (well ok fine I EAT FISH i'm not actually a vegetarian am I?) we need beans! And being a person who doesn't eat certain meats (is that better for all you vegetarian police out there), korea can sometimes be a hard and expensive place for "people who choose to fill their bellies with legumes instead of pig". Adzuki beans are super cheap here and they are super versatile!!! making everything from sweat red bean pancakes with honey to potato, squash and adzuki bean stew! I really think the cabbage phase of my life maybe over... (no no no... cabbage i love you too, you and the precious adzuki beans can be best friends in my I'M GOING TO BE PRETTY GASSY TONIGHT diet....

current EXERCISE obsession #2

HIKING AND BOXING

who would win??

Hiking I'm thinking because I'm way better at hiking than boxing... but love em both... love hiking so much though that I started another blog about hiking (well when I get around to making posts I will have started a new blog about hiking....) how i lost my toenails so you can read all about that obsession over there..

ok this is a lot of post to digest since it's been nothing but dead air over here since last November.... and I could go on to list other obsessions ( Truman Capote, gmarket.com, superstar king2, face masks you sleep in, bad kpop, bad top 40... the list doesn't end does it....)

swan song

guess what....

2010-09-23T08:49:00.002+09:00

and the sun breaks through

2009-11-08T11:58:00.005+09:00

it's been a not so nice weekend, full of gloomy clouds and gray skies. but suddenly after a huge amount of rain this morning the sun just burst through showering me and my little apartment in golden rays. wonderful.

I didn't do much this weekend, I think my lack of drinking is alienating me from my friends because, well... all we do is drink and since, i no longer drink as much, i don't see them as much. I have mixed feelings about this, it's not fun to go out to the bar and not get loaded, i 'm not able to handle that yet, so I just don't go out to the bar or I go for a short time and leave. I hate the fact that I'm really not having as much fun, because come on, getting drunk with your friends having good times, dancing your pants off and ending up at norae bang screaming your lungs out is what i call a good time.

But here's what I love: I'm loving the wake up early without a hangover feeling, and I especially love the feeling of what not smoking 2 packs of cigarettes and drinking a bottle of gin does for my body. and this is also all tied to me trying to loose weight - because i can drink my daily allowance of calories in gin, in urm... about an hour..... I love the fact that I'm not waking up with some random person beside me in my bed, because let's face it, alcohol and me being crazy has led me to making a few mistakes. I love not spending all my money on booze and instead saving it for gmarket haha... I'm definitely a fan of being able to go to the gym on Saturday morning instead of just lying hung over in my bed all day.

so what to do? I'm not able to do things in moderation, which sucks, but it's true. I'm an all or nothing kind of gal.

I watched the sun set the other day from the top of the mountain in our park. I haven't seen the sun set in ages... and right now I'm looking out the window for a rainbow, sun bursting through after the rain equals a rainbow right? well too bad for me, there's nothing but clouds in the sky.

here are some fall in Korea pictures ^^

fall down

2009-11-06T19:00:00.004+09:00

my week off has been spent doing much of nothing, lazing around, cleaning, organizing and antagonizing my crazy street cat. but I did however decide that i would take this week to visit every doctor possible. Korea has a really good cheap medical system that works well, if you have insurance. Most teachers here do have insurance which we usually pay about 40 bucks a month for and your employer pays the other half. and boy let me tell ya, there are a lot of doctors here! Koreans go to the doctor for EVERYTHING, a sniffle, a cold, vagina rejuvenation etc. and paying for prescriptions (as long as it's covered by insurance) is next to nothing (i love my 5 bux bag of xanax.)

So Monday was dermatologist day. I'm actually getting laser hair removal done on some special places of my body (ok fine since you asked, my armpits and my vjj) and this costs next to nothing compared to how much it would cost at home.

Tuesday i went to see my obgyn to get a pap which is NOT covered by insurance here - retardo....

Wednesday was dentist day, the dentist and I certainly have a killer memorable relationship, my mouth is full of fillings (thank god they are white or i would be embarrassed to open my mouth!) and I've had 2 root canals. after the exam the dentist looks at me and asks, "so do you have insurance?" never something you want to hear after your dentist pokes around your mouth with that cold scrapey thingie. gritting my rotting teeth i say "yes" and ask "why?". well low and behold one of my root canals isn't properly done and is causing inflammation (and yes some pain, but they pain isn't always there so really i can deal with it so let's not talk about this horrible idea of REDOING my root canal), well I nearly burst into tears. but then she takes about 5 more xrays and taps my tooth a million times and sticks some ice stick on it and my gums, and then decides that the procedure would be really expensive, has a high failure rate and maybe since my tooth doesn't really hurt right now, we can wait and see. YES, i love this wait and see attitude. don't try to fix it until my name is gummy. I then convinced her that she AND her 4 year old daughter should get some English lessons from me. and i got some gum work done as service! ohh service, it's the Korean word for when you get something for free. like sometimes you buy a bag of oranges and the fruit guy will throw in a rotten apple as service. or if you buy something really expensive (like a 300 dollar tent) they will throw in something that cost a dollar (we got a pair of socks i think) for service.

here is a picture of all the meds i was on for my not-swine-flu-flu last week. Oh and my domo-kun slipper.

street invasiveness

2009-11-03T13:40:00.006+09:00

how am i just finding out about google street view now!? whatever, I've just ~~wasted 2 hours~~ researched google street view for a good 2 hours... and WOW you can find pictures of places you know. how awesome. and sometimes there are people without heads or funny signs in the "views"....

95 Harrison St.

I used to live above this abc variety store (wow my future as an ESL teacher was totally chosen for me when I moved into this place!) That's my old bedroom window on the left, good times were had at this place, (wait I don't mean that in the hey there's my bedroom window, good times, nudge nudge way.....) family dinner was invented here, I finally finished university when I lived here and I only had one bike stolen from this place.

I lived with a guy named Adam Pearson here above the abc, he smelled like pencil crayon sharpenings and boy. Adam liked to collect everything under the sun and attach it somehow to his walls. He also always did all my dishes (and well, all the dishes of my extended family who would could over once a week to be fed) and never ate my food. All in all he was probably one of the best room mates I ever had. One of my most remembered memories about Adam is this one time (at abc camp) we got really really high and watched pet cemetery and totally scared the shit out of ourselves. We had to leave all the lights on when we went to bed. Adam dated this crazy native girl who woke me up at 4 in the morning one time, she was screaming and pounding on the door. I didn't like her so much AND she borrowed and lost this awesome black 1920's style had of mine that I had found at the value village for like a dollar. hate her.

My market bakery

I worked at this bakery (cleverly named "my market bakery") in Kensington Market for about 2 years. This was the last place I worked before starting my new exciting career as a babysitter in south korea. This bakery is pretty popular in the market, but not nearly as popular as the cheese store next store that my boss also owned. the cheese store being insanely popular for all the hot cheese boys who worked there. glad i never dated any of them. oh wait i did. I gained a few pounds to say the least working at this bread and brownie filled emporium. I really enjoyed working here, my co-workers were also as bitter and hateful of customers (especially those suburban yuppies who lined up for hours on the weekend) as I was, so we always got along famously. Elle magazine also approached my boss to do an interview about me working here, but I was gone to Korea before I even knew about it. too sad, i would have been totally famous.

The Royal

The Royal was most favourite place of employment ever! We totally used to use the fountain machine pop to mix our bevies (when we weren't on duty of course!) My boss was this guy named Tim whom I loved and adored, he was this rail thin guy who was kind of sad and broken like the theater, but he always wanted to make things better and could out-eat anyone in an all-you-can-eat sushi competition (thank god there were at least 10 all you can eat sushi places right across the street). The theater is beautiful on the inside (yes this picture does not show it justice!). It is a one screen theater all in art deco style and it has comfy reclining chairs. And it's totally awesome playing playstation on the big screen. Sometime in 2006 the owner (who had bought the theater in the 70's i think when the city was going to turn it into a parking lot) died, his kids took over and decided that this toronto historical landmark didn't deserve a chance and they sold it as soon as they could. leaving us all out of a job as well - thanks guys! But the community came together and got it deemed a historical building so they couldn't sell it to the condo developers and a post production film company bought it and kept it going. See there are happy endings. except i still didn't get my job back.

the infamous 437 Bathurst

This is the last house I lived at before moving to kimchi land. The house of 437 was an over the top explosion of love and debauchery, a yard full of squash and tomatoes and halls full of cats and craziness. I loved living here with the 5 others who knew how to have a drunk kitchen dance party any time of the day. I could write many stories about us but I'm out of time now.. so you will just have to wait!

Strathclyde Residence

So i can't exactly find my old place of residence in Glasgow on google street view, but it had to be around here somewhere!

spin your brains out

2009-11-02T15:10:00.006+09:00

It's Monday! I'm feeling better (pleaseeeeeee no swiney relapse this week for the love of g-d) and I went back to the gym this morning. The gym has become a more serious obsession as of late . A few reasons for this but the main reason being that I'm single and I have all this time on my hands that I choose to spend sweating my little butt off - and yes, i do have a little butt, (stacey stands behind me in boxing class and that other class were we have to do a million jumping jack thingies off of the step box, and she always tells me what a small butt i have.... but really now, compared to the pocket-sized butts of the korean ladies I don't feel like I have a small butt at all).... urm.. where was I.. oh little butt, gym... YES ok.. Anyway, so I spend a lot of time at the gym, which suits me just fine since I actually love going there and it makes me feel great.

So this morning after waking up (before my alarm as usual... why do i even turn that thing on?) I went to my favouritest spinning class and felt a million times better, goodbye feelings of crappyness from lying in bed for an entire week - they should have gym therapy or something... a shrink/trainer combo or something. amazing. my new future job. i will train you and listen to all your crappy life stories and fix your life.

Because of swine flu mania I don't have any classes this week. I'm pretty sure most public schools are closing down for 2 weeks or something like that, but our school has decided to stay open and just have shortened days. Yes, sending the children to school for a shorter period of time means that they won't get / give the flu because they aren't there as long. hrm... let's see if this works as well as the last plan they had, don't close down at all when 12 kids are infected. But I teach the after school program, the program that has some logic and decides that when the teacher is infected not to have any classes. Except i don't get paid for the week... Ohhhhhhhhhh there is always a catch isn't there. I've decided to bite the bullet and not fight this because 1. i love my job and 2. i love the company i work for (which actually owns wonderland THE worst hogwan franchise in korea) and 3. I want to resign with them and I plan on asking for a lot when I do so.

This blog is amazing http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com/ . This blogger extraordinaire has created these wonderful pictures representing someones missed connection message. And I'm not going to write about my longing for a missed connection about me (cuz we totally know there have already been DOZENS!) I want to make up a milliondy missed connections of amazingness and hopefully one gets turned into a beautiful pastel pictorial of sensational-ness.

i was sleeping on the train and you waved at me when i woke up - m4w - 22 (suwon/osan)

Date: 2009-10-25, 9:46PM KT

i was sleeping on the 1 train back from seoul, and as the train pulled into suwon station sometime after 8:00PM i woke up, and you waved at me, and smiled. i waved back, and then you got off the train, and as you were walking away you waved at me through the window. I've never seen anyone do that before today (wave at me, a stranger, in a black tshirt, jeans, and I had a bunch of stuff with me. ).

you were so pretty.

i wish i hadn't slept all that way, and had been able to talk to you or meet you somehow.

please, get in touch with me?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

fin.

no no nooooo november

2009-11-01T11:24:00.009+09:00

November... what are you? You are like this in between month of no holidays and usually a good intro into winter (blahhhh).
Now who doesn't love a good holiday?! I'm a teacher, holidays equal time off AND holidays mean hours and hours of useless worksheets for students based on said holiday. I guess there is American thanksgiving, but hells I'm not American and we don't get the day off for that.... remembrance day, but that took that day away from us and gave it to remembering soldiers... hrm... So november what are you good for? 4 long weeks before December (which equals ~~CHRISTMAS~~ 10 days off work!)

No swine test results yet, for some reason my results are taking 2 days longer, doesn't matter, i'm like 90% better, could even go to the gym tomorrow I think! I'm scared though about having another crazy relapse... Last night I went to S. apartment and drank a few glasses of wine with my friends who didn't object to swine flu face being there, which was nice.... I was wondering if someone was going to tell me not to come. I really can't believe I missed ~~halloween~~ gay chrstimas!!! It's absolutely one of my favourite days ever!

I guess I haven't written here in ages, I didn't even check when was the last time I made a post, but I'm assuming it must have been last spring!??! What happened since then, all the regular stuff, got a new job (LOVE IT), got a new cat (he's the devil), went through a KBF or 2 (that's a korean boy friend for all of you who don't know me .....). Read the book After Dark by my most favourite Haruki Murakami last night, and it was just ok. which made me sad. and then i woke up and it was november. which made me sad. and then my cat punched me in the face. and i'm laughing at typing this now, so guess it didn't make me so sad. life is good.

new cat new hat (love you gmarket - that's the website, not the cat, the cat is nakji)

swine time

2009-11-01T11:02:00.004+09:00

I've been sick now with (enter type of flu here) flu for about a week. But it's officially day three of stay at home and don't leave and spread your nasty germs to the general populace - oh and try to get better while you at it.

Day one - was Wednesday, I had gone to bed on Tuesday night feeling like a bag of shit. Basically shaking so hard because i was so cold, and sweating so hard because i had a fever.

This is the same crap I had gone through the week before when i came down with the flu, the only difference being that on Tuesday night my body hurt SO MUCH and it hurt to breathe (hey and guess what it still does). So Wednesday morning rolls around and what do i do? well try to shower.. hahah.. can't stay upright... and then get a taxi to school (yes my mission IS to infect all the little children!) I get to school, I tell my co-teacher that I'm going to the hospital and then Lauren one of my adorable students gives me a cookie, which I eat for breakfast.

I get to Seoul National hospital (and why exactly is it called that when it's located on the tancheon in Jungja-Dong?) and of course being the only foreigner around everyone rushes to help me.. HELLS NO... i wait for 20 minutes with the stupid number machine paper in my hand at reregistration while everyone and their grandmother ignores the ticket machine and just goes up to the window. Finally my number is called and I give a smug look of "well there we go, see the good people wait their turn" but there is no one there to see it because they have all been helped already. blah. Anyway, register, get ushered to the side of the hospital where the H1N1 festival is underway!

Woo hoo! H1N1 party! If you didn't come here with it you sure as hell are going to leave with it! About 100 people are milling around wearing masks, not wearing masks, coughing up something, sleeping, yelling etc etc... it really is a party! I get in a long line and finally my turn (well of course my turn is taken by some business man who clearly looks NOT SICK AT ALL - which is strange because now I notice that many people don't look sick at all, while i'm all feverish and sketchy-mc-flu face, so I'm wondering what are these not sick people doing here?!?!? question totally answered after)

I see the doctor, doctor confirms i have the flu (which type?!?!) She tells me i have the new flu... wtf?! The new flu, hrm... isn't that just the name which they have now given to the regular flu?! Well who knows, they do the tests for swine flu, and the results for that come back on Saturday. I go home, with my bag of meds, that cost 110,000!!! yikes! guess tamiflu is NOT covered by insurance. then sleep. sleep and sleep.

Day 2 - Thursday - i wake up and my bed is covered in blood! AUGHGHGHGH!!! I check myself and realize no my flu didn't turn into a deadly flesh eating disease or anything like that... my cat, who was neutered last week, has somehow managed to cut open his little ball sack. (sorry boy for the visuals) He now has a bloody raw ball sack. So i take my (wtf type of fu do i have?) butt over to the vet and really i have NO idea how to explain this... the balls were healing just fine, there was just a tiny little incision hole that was doing just fine, i really have no idea what the cat did, but now he has to pay the price and wear the cone around his head.... hahah... which he still manages to torture me through - did i mention my cat is not very nice...

The rest of the day was quite uneventful, I felt less sick and a lot less sore (yaahooo) but the pain when i breathe is still ever present and I watched nearly the entire first season of scrubs.

Day 3- Friday - It's still quite early so I'm sure I can write more on today's most exciting stuck in my house events later. I woke up feeling crappy because I had coughed my way through sleep town, waking myself up every 30 minutes. Also I have no appetite at all, but god dang am I a thirsty camel - I drank about 6 - 8 liters of water yesterday which also woke up me every hour during the night. So I'm sure I'll spend most of today sleeping - or cleaning my bathroom and doing laundry while standing on my head making a sock monkey. I'm definitely not the type of person that is able to lie down and get better, that's my problem I guess

2009-04-11T08:18:00.000+09:00

i have too much fun alone sometimes...

2009-02-08T06:21:00.003+09:00

have you seen me cry, tears like diamonds....

2009-02-08T05:21:00.004+09:00

at 5:22 in the morning and listening to Passion Pit, my most favourite new amazing awesomely awesome band. hahah... i just wrote bang. speaking of bangs mine are incredibly short due to the bad hair cut i received last week - my fantastic hairdresser was off the one day i went in to see her.. blahhhhh...

i am drunk, if you can not tell, but due to the marvels of spell check maybe you can't, so just to inform you I'm drunk.....skunk drunk...

passion pit....

i received a package from b.rock... and it included a milliondy new cds which i am thoroughly enjoying.

Justin is leaving, he is a good friend here in Korea, and i am terribly sad. he is my hiking bud (he's kicked my ass up a mere mountain or twenty) but this is what happens here... you meet amazing people and eventually we all leave... cept my leaving date is postponed x 1oo.... and maybe I'm happy because of that....

passion pit, I'm still enjoying the same song, you should download it, and have a time block to write a blog... 2 songs and then pass out.. cuz your drunk when you write you post remember..

lunar new years resolutions not going well btw... keep meeting boys who i think i will fall i love with but hey... i don't.. or wait..i do for a week...

btw... family dinner.... Korean chapter started last week and HECK it's amazing... i love these guys and the dinners and debauch we create....

xoxo nitty nats night....

one more song....

the Korean call to prayer....

2009-01-31T12:29:00.003+09:00

A few things wake me up early in the morning, my cat using me as a scratching post/spring board/ something to yell at, my insane inability to sleep in or go back to sleep and of course the Korean Loudspeaker.

The Korean Loudspeaker comes in 2 formats. The mechanical kind - an actual loudspeaker attached to a truck, wall, parking garage, store - or the human kind - a person chanting/screaming at the top of their lungs.

Today the mechanical kind gently shook me from my drunken slumber (god dang you soju cocktail!). The parking garage outside my window, for some reasons, has a loudspeaker attached to the front entrance and some dudes voice drones the same sentence over and over. What is he saying? you ask... What they all say!! ORANGES FOR SALE! GIVE ME YOUR OLD COMPUTERS! PARK HERE! LAUNDRY SERVICE! DESSERT!

I think I've posted about this before, because, well it's definitely part of life here in Korea. Living where I do now, we don't have many trucks with loudspeakers patrolling this neighbourhood. I think the days of the loudspeaker truck/person may actually be coming to a close.

When I lived in Meigum we had the laundry man. Every morning at 9 am a man would walk every floor of our building screaming something out, I've forgotten now, maybe it sounded like SEOULTAKKKKKK , i have no idea what laundry is in Korean. I don't remember how we figured out that this dude was a laundry guy, my first guess was that he was a chanting monk blessing our special building every day.

Then there was the ddok Seller (yummy Korean rice cakes). Every night at 7pm we heard this guy just screaming the same thing out over and over, and for the life of me it DID NOT sound like DDOK, which is what he was selling. We could hear him out of our window as he walked around screaming, so we ran outside one night and followed the yelling and found him. And then we ate some delicious ddok...

Then there is the computer truck (bring me your old computers), the orange trucks (which I currently frequent), the other random fruit trucks.... these I don't mind, but the parking lot loudspeaker has GOT TO GO!

stop - motion - photography - rules

2009-01-30T15:58:00.002+09:00

yoga for t-tards

2009-01-30T14:20:00.008+09:00

today is wonderful. amazing. and a lot of other adjectives that mean the former ones. I didn't have to work being the main reasons for this wonderful wonderfulness and the fact that I now never have to work mornings again is the other reasons for bliss.

So I woke up early, went to the gym for spinning class and then for the FIRST time in over a year I got to go to yoga class. ohhhOHHHhhhh.. I love yoga, I love the pain and the stretch and the rewards. I love lying on that stupid stinky blue yoga mat for 5 minutes at the end of class when I feel more relaxed and sane than I have ever felt before. I can't believe how long it's been, and thank god for my first class back into flexibility world, we were practicing easy yoga poses and breathing instead of that hard core Korean power yoga (that i also love - but didn't want today).

The gym makes me sane and happy. It rarely makes me feel bad - except for the one time that stupid pushy girl stole my bike in spinning class (this one time at band camp....) and I had to try to explain this to her and everyone else who was watching (STARING) and i felt like such an idiot/total bitch for fighting over a bike and because I was just yelling at her in English. Not a good day for me....

My other issue with the gym is that I absolutely hate being the fattest person there. Which I am. Sucks ass. Even the fatty Koreans don't seem to be as fat as me because they are so darn short and let's face it, I'm a giant. So I go to all these classes - also I'm the only 외국인 in any of these classes - and feel like I'm 10x bigger than I am. Should make me work out harder, but somehow it doesn't.

I hate even thinking about this subject, my body, being fat.... When I work out, which I'm usually somewhat of a champion at, I feel great, healthy and fit, I don't care about the fat. But maybe it's time to face the ~~facts~~FAT!

2009-01-26T15:15:00.006+09:00

so according to this piece of crap I am not going to have a good year. If you are also a 1979 baby, year of the Ram (or goat), you too are not going to have a good year. In fact you are going to have 7 unfavourable months, and 5 neutral months. And how about a good month.. no, not possible.

January is definitely one of my 7 unfavourable months, my bike was stolen yesterday. too sad. Who would steal my piece of crap bike!? It really is a piece of crap, and actually I was getting a little scared because the pedals felt kind of funny when i pushed them (and how often do you push a pedal like 100 times a minute?) and before I left Toronto I had an accident where my pedal fell off mid push and I fell to the pavement getting more than a bruise (you know my Indonesia sized bruise from falling down the stairs didn't even compare to this pedal-fall-off-Andrea-fall-down bruise.)

So anyway, get ready to have a shitty year - or you can ignore your horoscope completely which is basically the norm for me, I have NO idea the last time I read a horoscope, but somehow being the fake Asian wanna be I am, I just had to look didn't I.

So speaking about being a fake Asian wanna be, I have to admit that I am completely obsessed with K-pop and K-pop run off culture. Shameful as it sounds I actually like Big Bang.

and I like this song too.... shame shame...

I don't know when the obsession started, I used to have a TV and one day I started to realize that the bands I heard were appearing on most of the TV shows. Nearly all Korean singers/ bands appear in 3 or 4 different shows on TV, ranging from being an actor on a Korean drama, or being a host on some terrible reality show or being a participant on a love-connection type show or also being a judge on a talent type show. example...

This is star king (or stocking as most Koreans call it) and appearing on this show are people from all over Korea and sometimes other countries displaying their talents and trying to win some prize. The panel is made up of 15 different people who are all in different bands or in other comedy shows or are actors. They also appear in maybe 3 other shows each! I think this is nuts! Imagine in Canada if ever time you turned on the TV, Avril Lavine or Celine Dion or the Feist were on commercial for baskin robbins or Fido and then on about 5 programs a day, and oh btw they also appear on a soap opera! When do these people sleep?!?!?

but secretly I love it.

new years eve....again!설날

2009-01-26T01:15:00.006+09:00

Yay Asia, and your lunar new year! Having an extra holiday because of the moon is fine by me! And since I didn't make any resolutions or change my life on January 1st, I can do it all tonight!

So here goes...

urm... wait. I KNOW there are many things with my life I SHOULD change, but would I, will I?

Now i don't feel like listing all these things here and making myself sound like an ass. You and I already know the downfalls I have and don't need to make a list anyway (yes mostly related to drinking and stupidity...) And there are many things I don't want to tell you because writing it would be admitting a lot of failures and things about myself that I hate.

So what to do...

leave some thinking space for us all to think about our shortcomings

(here is some space)

and some more space for us to think about the changes.

(maybe extra space here because i would rather think about change than about the shortcomings....)

and what about some space to appreciate what I have or what I have done over the past year..

wait, better yet I could list these things, because it will make me feel better about all former mentions of the things I need to change... YES!

- I really appreciate my cat - sounds lame I know, but she really does make me happy and I am so glad that I found her.

- I'm happy that I went to India this year, because that was a

looooooong time dream of mine.

- I'm really happy about what I did in India (working with the kids and writing articles about it, AND having the kids photos put in a gallery show)

- I'm also happy and really grateful that my sister came to visit me, and not to mention the fact that she gave birth to my amazing little niece that I also got to see for the first time this year.

-I REALLY appreciate the fact that I have enough money to travel (urm... paying off those student loans needs to go on the "to do" list) and am able to see amazing cities, countries and experience new cultures.

-my friends and family. Especially my friends from toronto that I keep in touch with because it's sad to loose friends just because you move away. Especially my friends in korea because they keep me happy living far away from the friends and family I left.

-my bed that I'm about to crawl into at 1:32 in the morning

Happy 설날!

2009-01-23T14:06:00.004+09:00

adventures in stupid

2009-01-18T12:45:00.002+09:00

in this land of suburbia and winter and not leaving the homestead, friday and saturday can become predictable and interechangeable... getting drunk, usually in soyheon, deinately with a GREAT bunch of people and most likely followed by a non-sucessfull session of drunk norae bang.

This Friday certainly didn't derive from said plan. Drinking, dancing, singing, eating and then, well then we decided drunk at 8 am to get on a bus go out into the country for a tour of the HITE beer factory. Drunk like skunks of course. pass out on the bus for 2 hours and wake up in winter wonderland surrounded by beautiful mountains with a snowy frosting.

and the HEIGHT factory. thank god i was drunk or otherwise i wouldn't have had a single pint of beer.

i can't think of anything....

2009-01-10T11:50:00.003+09:00

I dreamt I had a slice of bread. So I woke up thinking I had a slice of bread and went to make an egg, to eat with this (nonexistent)slice of bread. The egg I pulled out of the carton had a feather stuck on it. Oh god, I hate being reminded that food i choose to eat in my slightly non-vegetarian - vegetarian diet was alive.

Flashback to the chickens in Baraka falling from the conveyer belt into the giant sorting machine. sick.

And I ate cham-chi last night, great hunks of tuna sashimi, my favourite food in the world right now actually..... some hunks turn the weird glass noodles that you don't eat red.... blood?? aughghgh...

Teri is coming home. hehehehhehehehehehe... home being korea, where I am and where she will soon-ish be..... hehehehhheh... jenny and i are actually pooping ourselves with excitement... but Teri is asking me what I will be doing next year after the next contract finishes, by that time it will be 3 and a half years I've lived in Korea... will it be time to go home... HELLS NO! But how can I predict where I will be though... things change, life, partners, options that will for sure dictate where my path will go. Ben's dad passed away on Thursday, and I can't help but think of my own dad and my family. I can't imagine going through what has just punched Ben in the face. I can't stop thinking about this.

recently....

2009-01-09T13:52:00.006+09:00

christmas came and went, and the strange-o concept i have of "feels like christmas" was absent this year, but this might be due to the fact that I was drunk on a plane and then on a tropical island. and this is totally ok with me this year, to not have that ever so christmassy christmas feeling... but just this once ok.... (I'm totally a sucker for christmas...)

so heavenly paradise called Gili Trawangan is where I spent a week, lying in a hammock, eating delicious foods, jumping out of the way of horses and bicycles (no cars or autobikes on the island) getting drunk with amazing friends and having basically the time of my life. We flew out of seoul on xmas day, had a little Christmas dinner courtesy of garuda air, the WORST airline ever, like seriously, they made us go and get our own glasses of gin and tonic.... which i couldn't even drink because i passed out from my five glasses of christmas wine. Land in Bali and head to tourist hell for one night, but our hotel was amazing and the taxi driver (which J so amazingly bargained down like a friggen local - exactly how i want to feel when i get back to india....) took us on this great back road adventure to our hotel. Bali is beautiful, clean, green, friendly and Hindu! i felt like i had arrived in a clean india without the traffic and peddlers....

After our adventures at hotel - with swim up bar by the way - we went on the fast boat (aka evil boat from hell that made my hands hurt from gripping so hard and my jaw hurt from all the clenching my face was undergoing) to Gili T. I really had no idea what to expect, I'd seen T's and J's pics and heard SO much about the place, but everyone has a different experience etc etc... but i couldn't have wished for more... clear blue water and a coral reef to boot... I became slightly addicted to snorkeling every morning - my back became slightly sun burnt - and seeing giant sea turtles and schools of fish and all the other amazing things that i had no idea where right below my knees when i went swimming..... and i totally had winter dry skin hands on the first few days so a lot of little fishes decided to bite my fingers...

Gili T is tiny, and only 300 people live there. And boy do these guys have a brotherhood... they kick people off the island if they cause problems or cause shit... We actually just hung out with the locals and met only a hand full of foreigners, maybe due to the fact that j already had made a lot of friends on the island or because we never made it past one bar sama sama where after that begins the to touristy - resort area. Val and I actually finally biked around the island after 5 days of being on it... hahah... lazy andrea on vacation....

We stayed on Gili for a week (i think, time and dates was just not somethings to even consider) and then headed over to the larger island of Lombok where we rented a private car and driver for the day to take us around the island and then off to the airport to fly back to Bali where we had 2 days and then home to korea. Sounds easy enough... well no car or diver ever showed up on lombok so we piled into some shanty little bus that took us straight to the airport where low and behold we had no airline tickets. FUCK FUCK FUCK.. you should have seen me panic at the airport where a. the ticket thing just wasn't going our way b. my korean bank card wouldn't work and i was officially out of money c. i hadn't pooped in nearly 3 days and d. i was friggen starving....

but lion air somehow had 4 tickets on their flight for the next morning so we went to the little resort area of Senggigi for a good nights rest (after some beach and then bar and pool action of course). Lombok is also fantastially beautiful, a palm tree, rice field dream with those little rice patty straw hats to boot. Off to Bali the next day where we rented a driver and car that SHOWED up - wow how convenient - and spent the day seeing a few major tourist attractions on the island. Lunch at the volcano and dinner on the beach after the scared monkey forest and the fire dance at Uluwatu. The people of Bali are beautiful. Seriously beautiful, friendly, warm and funny. So many people we met, especially those on the island had such a sense of humour.... We drove around and walked by people wearing their traditional clothing and sarongs. You would be hard pressed to go there and miss seeing a million temples, people giving offerings or their puja on the ground outside of temples, doors, on cars...

Coming back to korea, of course, was hard. It's freezing here and it's back to work, but apart from the loneliness i felt after spending an intensive amazing period with really close friends it wasn't so bad. I did miss Samsam a lot and chopsticks too! hahah... Definitely makes me want to travel more and more and more and more... which of course will happen... currently feeling warm and happy due to my duty free bottle of baileys and thinking of just last week.....

a rich account of one woman's journey.... into humdrumnessssss

2008-12-24T12:11:00.002+09:00

it snowed the other day, big fluffy snowflakes, that we watched fall from the bar as we drank our soju and read our futures.

then i broke the KBF's (korean boyfriend) heart over text messages and melting snow.... but hellooooo you are just too small and nice and i'm pure evil. live. alive.

THE KINDY CLOSED! here is some space to think about me doing my happy dance or a jig since i am from the irish... .......

wasn't that nice. the kindy closed, i no longer have to teach a milliondy hours a day and deal with 7 year old shitheads who say " Andrea teacher, i'm happy when english time is over" (ok so it's only one kid BRIAN the pain in my ass) and i turned to him and replied with my ever so sweet smile " Andrea teacher is even happier when brian time is over", it only takes one bad apple...that i will squeeze and sit upon to shut up.... pulling ears is also fun... shit i'm sadistic today...

but i will have to leave my baby babies... i'm going to shed a tear or 100 at 1pm today when i say goodbye to these little munchkins that i adore....

Toronto i'm coming home, but wait, first i'm going to go to Indonesia.. yes, that's tomorrow...

(space for happy jig again...)

It's christmas eve,

this time last year i was another person with not so bad a hangover.... wasn't so into the gin and tonics i guess....

I was watching the snow fall from your attic window dear sista,

where i turned up the heat too high... there is such a difference between dry winter and damp winter...

the dampness chills me to the core

fuck that shit, i'm off to the BEACH!

xoxoxox merry xmas and all that!

everyone's gonna love you aka things i like

2008-12-24T11:12:00.011+09:00

paintings of korea from 1922

patterns

woodblocks

talking to my mum on skype

thimbles and fabrics

Jen Corace

my kindies

chinese festivities in 1922

you and me and me and you.....

A Smattering Of Scintillating

2008-11-27T14:43:00.005+09:00

life is boring lately, work, break, other work, gym, sleep.....Friday drink. so i guess there is the reason for lack of posting. i could bitch about work or rave about it, i could bitch and rave about the gym and drinking and sleeping too. hey, don't you just really want to know about that exciting dream i had?!?!?!

What happened lately... went to art show in Daegu, threw up on a cab. Went hiking, a lot, no barfing though....

Indonesia xmas plans, please no tsunamis and earthquakes from now on, ok (yes reader, you do have the ability to curb tsunamis and earthquakes! ) And xmas plans are tres exciting and heck only like 4 weeks away!

I'm am counting down in my head, 4 weeks till break (and i soooo need it from this schedule from esl hell) and then what, only 8 weeks more weeks till march and back to a normal life of not working like a crazy...

xoxo

2008-11-23T13:39:00.003+09:00

because

2008-11-23T13:03:00.003+09:00

when i taught at schoooooollllll...

2008-09-26T00:45:00.002+09:00

excited for this weekend, Daegu and art show...
biking home drunk with hole playing loud in my ears.. i know.. hole... hahahahha.. yup totally laughable..
why is korea better this time around, not that there was a time before, but i guess there was... pre march... the time before being....
shouldn't write drunk.
teri mcneil how great it is to hear your voice.. i totally just typed ~~tit~~ instead of it and i found it sooo funny...
should be a number six but there aint.. too tired...

boring bundang

2008-09-20T13:12:00.002+09:00

lately I haven't left bundang all that much... well actually i haven't left it at all.... Even though we had days off and I wanted to make plans and go to the city or county, I couldn't... I just stayed at home and got drunk. Good job andrea.

So it's just been me and Sam sam, my new computer (yee freaking haw!! but i do miss those Hangul characters...) and a bunch of bad dates from a recent post i made on Craig's list...

the schools are going well.. or at least going anyway, I've definitely gotten used to this new schedule and the extra piles of work..

I think I'm in love with one of the gym instructors. he has this tear shaped scar beside his lip on his cheek and all i think about when biking my butt off in front of him, is that i want to kiss that scar away. crazy i know. one of the many stupid things i think about when exercising..

it's raining it's pouring.

next weekend i'm going to party it up in Daegu! The Chingari kids pictures and my pictures were accepted into a gallery show! I'm tres excited!!

xoxo

mr h호박

2008-09-12T09:09:00.004+09:00

If life wasn't complicated enough I join this bag of shit.

I click on a profile and this is what I read:

i'll not accept those people:

1. the gays (including lesbians)

2. the people who judge a man by his appearance.

3. the egoists (i can't bear them)

4. over 33 years old.(sorry but nowadays, i feel i'm such old. dont wanna that feeling)

My Ideal Person:if u like travelling, conversation, advanture or u r warm hearted and broad-minded person, we can be good friends.

Favorite television shows: movie chanal
Favorite films: man on fire

aaaaaaaaahahahah the gays!!! They will never accept "the gays"! I'm glad this individual is looking for a warm hearted and broadminded person... idiot... and is movie chanal supposed to be The Movie Channel? I hate you whoever you are!

I've submitted an application to be part of an Art Show in Dageu and I think I've been accepted. My application was quite impressive... lol...

In one word describe what inspires you: LEFTOVERS

What is your favourite thing about Korea: EATING FROM THE SAME BOWL AS OTHERS

What does art mean to you?: STUFFING SOCKS AND SEWING BUTTONS ON THEM.

yup, I'm a winner....

I shouldn't watch

2008-09-07T20:55:00.005+09:00

documentaries on North Korea because they make me terrified to live anywhere close to the county....I have no idea what this one I am watching is called but it's mostly interviews with defectors and what they have to say... terrible and terrifying....

Now back to my own selfish blabber... this week was totally stressful due to the fact that my school decided to fire the other English teacher (they gave him a whole weekend notice!!) because the children didn't like him anymore. This guy had taught there for 4 years! 4 friggen years!!! No one is Korea stays at the same school for 4 years. Anyway, good bye Pete Teacher, oh and Andrea Teacher, can you take over his class and work more hours per week, and by the way, we aren't going to pay you anything extra. ha....hahahah... hahahah.. what a bunch of fucking idiots.. I can't believe they were actually surprised when I told them that I was "SO sorry" aka go fuck yourselves.

This was also the week of seeing Koreans actually biking on the road! Yes, surprise surprise I biked behind someone on the road for the FIRST time ever in my 2 year biking life in Korea.

Maybe drivers will start getting used to seeing bikers on the street and be able to drive by me without honking at me, yelling at me, trying to kill me, telling me to bike on the sidewalk because they are worried about me etc etc etc...

my cell phone is currently being held together with tape..

datum

2008-08-31T20:22:00.004+09:00

....weekend away in Muuido. sandy feet, sun shine and leaving Bundang is always welcome and wanted.

The weekend started too early though, with me meeting Korean Jenny and then western Jenny for drinks Wed and Thursday. Jason came down on Friday and a bunch of us went to eat 참치 (delicious raw tuna) and of course drink kettles of ohshipsayju. Jason and I talked at length about a big trip to Nepal and India come March or April - which leaves me quite clueless as to do come March when my contract is up and I'm free to go or stay and get another job... Now that I'm working hours that most would consider normal but I consider crazy, I'm leaning more towards going away after the contract is up because I know I'll be awfully burned out and dying for some backpacking anyway.

When ever dearest Jason stays over, he makes me stay up way too late and drink too much! It's not his fault, I'm easily persuaded - but I always regret it the next day, especially when we have to get up early to go to Muuido.

But we got up, and took the airport bus and then a bus to the ferry and then the ferry and then a bus to the beach... whew.. thank god transit is AMAZING in Korea. Everything is connected here by buses or subways or trains, and if it's not you can always take a cab for next to nothing. loves it.

We meet up with about 20 others and rented little huts on the beach. I love meeting people, but it makes me so sad because these people live so far away that I probably will never see them again. This has happened so many times, with the Chuncheon girls, and other people I've met while travelling. You know seoul isn't that far away , but when you meet someone who lives on the other side of Seoul and you live on the other side of the other side it sure doesn't make it easy to become close friends.

But anyway, booze makes up great friends for the night...

We sit around a bonfire with 3 people on guitar and the rest of us singing Bob Marley to our hearts content. One of laura's friends brought her fire spinning thingies so we all got to spin fire (auntie debs you would have been proud!)

The beach we went to was called Hanagae Beach and as nice as it was (and way friggen cheaper than the beach we went to in Jeollanamdo) the swimming sucked. The tide went out, wayyyyyyyy out and it was just mud flats for what seemed like miles. Also when the tide was in, the water never went past our knees. But it was fantastical to just get out for the weekend (and avoid monkey beach again for the 3rd weekend in a row! woo hoo!)

there is still sand in my ears...

my first attempt at using things...

2008-08-24T17:44:00.001+09:00

remember how much you loved spike from degrassi high?

2008-08-23T01:10:00.003+09:00

today was freaking melancholy.....listening to modest mouse in the rain provoked the mood for sure.

Friday night and I'm home sewing!

then after I finish making little sock monkey I decide to torture my poor cat... yup someone is bored !!

I just want to go dancing

can't stop the love

2008-08-21T22:16:00.004+09:00

today I was in such a good mood and grinning so wide i nearly ingested a dragonfly when I was biking along the Tanchon. but then again it sure is dragonfly season!

The cause of my good mood you ask? Who knows, having an extra hour before going to the new job definitely was a booster into wide smiles. Also the weather here is slowly changing and i'm so happy about the coolness (and not to be sick from stupid allergies and heat and have sweat drip down my back when i'm just standing around.. uck...)

I'm so tired now. working all these hours sure is killer and I have to bust my ass from job to job and then to the gym and then to go drinking of course. drinking with the cute vet who btw ISN'T married as was previously suspected.

I'm sure into Korean dudes these days.

garden love

2008-08-21T21:33:00.006+09:00

.....Since I'm posting about articles, here is one that I wrote for Alternatives Journal. Just click on the article and it will open up full sized in another window.

the write time

2008-08-21T17:46:00.004+09:00

the article I did on the Bhopal kids is now published in Sage magazine.. you can read the magazine and the article here!!

Jeollanamdo time

2008-08-16T16:12:00.011+09:00

12 days off is never enough, but it did give us enough time to hit some of the "hot spots" in Korea's most southern province Jeollanam-do.

My sister flew over for 2 weeks, and after partying at good ol' dubs and monkey beach in seoyheon, we got a train down to Boseong - green tea land!!

Julie had her first love motel experience, a lot cleaner than she expected..ㅋㅋㅋ

a taxi took us to the fields which grow something like 80% of Korea's green tea. they were pretty breathtaking to say the least...but I'm a sucker for symmetry. Well not much else to see in Boseong really, well, maybe there is but we sure didn't stick around. After locking ourselves inside the hotel room - and trying to mcgyver our way out (we finally realized that hey, i have a phone and we can call the hotel and scream 502, room 502 key no, in broken Korean - that someone will come rescue us!) we headed to Wando.

Wando is one of the many islands dotting the south west coast. I had read in the lonely planet that Sinji-do, a smaller island off the coast of
Wando had beautiful beaches. So I'm totally
picturing you know, quiet small island deserted beach.. ha..ya right. After our bus ride which drops you right off at Myeongsasimni beach, we walked into mayhem! Tents, people, people PEOPLE, food, more tents and those yellow swimming tubes EVERYWHERE!!! aughh.. but you know, the next day, tuesday everybody disappeared! it was fantastic! Our little tent was seriously one of the hand full of tents that were left, AND the tent adjoshe never came by, so we didn't have to pay for camping...score, since everything else at the beach was so friggen expensive! Soju - 3,000!!!! usually soju is urm.. what 1,300... Anyway, camping at the beach was nice and then we met these 3 Korean dudes who were awesome. We had a bbq tent party with them and the next day we all hiked up a mountain
to see a temple (in the scotching heat!).

My sister couldn't get over the Korean wearing clothes in the water phenomenon. I actually think that a lot more Koreans were wearing bathing suits and bikinis this year compared to last, but it's still shocking to see a whole mass of people going for a dip in their Sunday best.

So off we go back on the bus and another bus and head to Haenam, home of something special (a guy on the bus told me what it was, some kind of bird or something or maybe a reed... hahah..) to stay in the mountains of Duryunsan Provincial Park.

We went to this beautiful zen temple complex - Daedunsa Zen temple complex -that was really well hidden in the forest and sooooo huge and we got to hear some monks chanting and more fun temple stuff... When we got to the forest zen temple zone, (after hiking up some huge hills to the hostel we were staying at) we saw lots of people camping in the forest, which we though what idiots we are! we could have camped here, but you know.. it is cicada season and we probably wouldn't have been able to sleep....

1 sleep later and off to Gwangju (Koreas 5th largest city WOO HOO!) where we find another cozy love motel to bunk down in for our last 2 nights away. We travel to the Damyang to see the bamboo forest and bamboo craft fair. OMG what a let down! The forest was beautiful, but so hot and of course there were some nice plastic pandas to welcome us. We did get lost in it though - no english on the trail markers and the red trail and orange trail were basically the same colour. The market was the equivalent of those 3 stores in china town in Toronto that sell all that bamboo stuff made in China. We did eat some delicious haemul pajeong made from bamboo, drink some southern version of makalie (yuck) and have some bamboo noodles. delicious!

Gwangju is sort of like seoul or any other korean city really. We stayed by the bus station where nothing is going on... and thinking the "downtown" was within walking distance (which hey, it could be if you chose to walk to right way...) we ventured out to find some nightlife. The shopping area was nearly an exact replicate of Myeongdong in Seoul.

We never made it to the bar area which i'm sure would have been another replicate of hongdae or the like. We did norae bang it up though! Our last day it was too hot to do much, we stayed inside and saw the sights of the National Museum (pretty good museum actually) and watched Dark Night. Then the monsoon which had held out for the entire trip broke free and it rained. boy did it rain. then julie jumping over a puddle fell and broke her foot! But somehow we managed to get back home the next day and have a good ol' bday party for me! ta-da!

Bundang the great

2008-08-01T19:11:00.001+09:00

infatuation station

2008-08-01T09:59:00.003+09:00

this post could be a million bullet points to sum up the last month of non posting... well not a million because certainly i haven't been doing much... so just a few then.

. on my way to school i see a cat on the sidewalk. cats just don't hang out on the sidewalk in korea. an adjjuma wearing a huge visor comes along and pokes it with one of those picking up garbage thongs. now i'm crying because i've realized that the cat is half moving and this adjjuma is poking it with a picking up garbage thong. i call jenny, she can't understand me because i'm crying. i call korean jenny begging her to call the animal rescue service. ha... animal rescue service... in korea... for cats.. you got to be kidding. long story short korean jenny and i take street cat to the vet and it dies. oh poor little street cat. and the vet shows me two little baby kittens hit by cars at the age of zero and well... i become selfish and realize that i CAN have a baby kitten if i want and take one of them home (the brain damaged one with only 3 working legs). Jenny takes the other (the non brain damaged one with 4 working legs).

.dating a Korean boy who couldn't speak much English sure was hard. and not possible for me. frustration station - which made me feel like a bag of shit... who am i to become frustrated at someone because they can't speak English (especially when we are not in an English speaking country!!!) but frustration is how i felt. no babbling and I'm a babbler. maybe.

.my sister is here! she has now been asleep for 13 hours. we will travel to the south on Sunday and go camping and beaching and relaxing. please no more typhoons and monsoons. I'm so done with the rain.

.i've found me another job. with housing. whew. it's been a poor 5 months for me, so now I'm excited to be making money and to start actually saving (well paying back student loans). it's also time that i work more than 3 hours a day and stop getting pedicures at noon. i hope my new apartment is as nice as this one.

.i've stated actually enjoying my gym, which is great news because now i love going there. before i forced myself to get up at 7 in the morning and go run before making a mad dash for school. now it's all morning for me, (well, me and 3 working legged cat who makes so much shit in that litter box) and i go to the gym at night to join in spinning classes and box fit and some other fit classes that make me pant and sweat like i love.

.my sister and i will go on a picnic and play badminton. i've become obsessed with playing badminton, even though i am not a force to be reckoned with....

. i will drink a bottle of gin today because i love my liver.

. it's my b-day on the 11th so make sure you send me all packages via yesterday...

.폭력배

my 모리 is something special

2008-06-16T23:21:00.008+09:00

so i googled searched gray hair (and I may have mentioned before the fact that until about ohhh... a month or two ago I thought the spelling of gray was grey....) and couldn't believe what came up ....

this being one definition of premature gray hair...When more than half the hair is white by age 40, though, this is considered "premature."

Are you kidding me?!?! So then I googled searched images of ~~grey~~ gray hair and couldn't find one picture of anybody with anything close to what my hair looks like.

So now I'm feeling something special, sitting all here in my computer chair with the web cam on eating some kim chi and seaweed. with of course a head full of messy gray hair.

and talking to 홍일 on the phone...

My sister is probably coming to Korea for the fist two weeks of August. This makes me the happiest gal in Bundang! I'm so excited to show off my fantastic Korean skills! hahah.. yeah right... I'm just excited to show someone the amazingness of the all you can eat cham chi and kettles of obeksayju....

good night sweet thangs....

He shows up at my door....

2008-06-13T09:17:00.003+09:00

bearing gifts of morning time coffee, chusock sized boxes of melons, kim chi (that his mum made) and once at 6:30 in the morning with an umbrella. I'm trying to figure out if it's him being uber Korean and having to bring me something each time he comes to my house or if he is just the most amazing person ever.

But the language barrier is strong, and I'm feeling it a lot, mostly because I just can't ramble on and on at a high speed about anything and everything. it's just not possible. If we are together and someone calls me, i switch from slow English for beginners to BFF on the phone with swearing and slang in .1 seconds and his face contorts and he has a different English to study.

But it's really nice having a Korean boyfriend (well, I'm saying boyfriend here but really i have no idea!) because I get a TOTALLY new view of Korea. Korean people's houses and Korean friends who don't speak English or are not English teachers. Trips to the countryside and places that only Koreans seem to know.

my Korean is somehow not improving though. ha...

Last weekend was a long one, with no work on Friday. Jenny and I decided to have a little shit show and started our day with a drunken picnic and continued it all day through bars and nori bang.

being drunk all day in the park is a great way to meet new friends...

smitten little kitten

2008-06-06T00:43:00.003+09:00

And i had to actually explain to him that korean's have bigger heads....

this was of course after putting on the giant helmet (which is for the oh such much fun autobike, and not for any sort of mental delayed development at not understanding slash denial at how large korean head size really is....)

some eye candy...

2008-06-05T19:58:00.007+09:00

look at how absolutely adorable my 5 year old's are...

picking blackberries makes me excited! reminds me of the
days as a young lass in the brambles in Ireland...

ok this picture is absolute halair... i'm so into it, probably
singing some song (most likely ABC rock) that the kids are
so not into.... what i really mean to say is...
teaching your children makes me make this face....

well no, not really....

you know it's going to rain now

2008-06-05T10:39:00.005+09:00

and also rain 5 out of every 7 days for the next two months. monsoon season divinely blows. we were supposed to go camping this weekend, another long weekend (whooo hoooo), but it's been raining (and i mean RAINING!) everyday since... urm.. maybe last week sometime... I also keep on biking to work and other various places hoping that I'll be biking through those 1 hour no rain blocks that sometimes appear. today made it - dry pants and all! the last 3 days, not so lucky!

So I'm really into owls. why? i dunno, big eyes and the twisty head thing and maybe because of the word hooters...ha..no .. i think it's mostly that 70's feeling of brown and orange colours and memories of crocheted and knitted owls for years ago. can't wait for owl tattoos someday....

nothing much today, prattle and ramble and bramble bee me.

last week we took the kids to 양방 for a picnic at a cottage that my boss owns. we had a wonderful time (until the rain of course) picking blackberries and eating watermelon and I just couldn't help thinking how wonderful it was that this was my job.

outta touch

2008-06-02T23:28:00.004+09:00

with a large group of misfits that i call my friends and that i clearly belong with. It's like I've forgotten that the phone and the post exist. I like writing letters but now i'm lazy and maybe slightly depressed or just not wanting to do a lot of things i used to really enjoy. Anyway, this out of touch-ness has got to end because really one day i will show up at your door and I would like it if we remembered each other's faces.

but enough of that. It's monday. should we talk about the weekend. I haven't posted on here in awhile, mostly to avoid talking about my life, which HEY i don't have to talk about it because really do you want to read paragraphs of me going on and on about this bar and that gin and tonic that threw me over the edge...

but this weekend, fantastical. 1st Hong Il and I had a day date planned (this is pony tail boy) where we scooted all around town on his little scooter. being me of course i was terrified the moment i got on the thing, i really really REALLY don't trust people driving me on any kind of two wheeled vehicle. I won't sit on the back of your bike unless i'm drunk and it takes a lot to put me on the back of a scooter. but by the end of the night i was like, holy shit i've never had so much fun. We biked to this huge market (like the food terminal down in etobicoke) and i met his brother the fruit wholesaler.. lol.. then we went to Lotte Dept. Store , which is just a giant mall, to go ICE SKATING!!! yay! thank god i went with nash and brock in Amsterdam because I was totally not scared at all and didn't fall once! woot woot.... and ice skating on our first "date", really, best ever.... then 2nd, kim and alex called on friday and yay yay! they come to bundang for the weekend, so i meet kim and we run around town to bars with friends and then end up in Hongdae (the cool area to go and party) and dance at seoul's version of the dance cave until maybe 7 in the morning. and it ain't no party like a dance cave party unless the make outs are a flowing like booze.

here is a picture of me on one of the 20 hour train rides in india. i love it because i want it again and again and again.
it's june now and life is ever changing.

i'm really happy for a bunch of things this month.

ponytails included.

my students are fantastical and it's a long weekend AGAIN....

let's just hope this early monsoon we are having will not last forever...

ciao bellas and different fellas

and another one bites my ass

2008-05-27T22:59:00.002+09:00

well, no I don't even know you, so no, I don't like you, no matter how drunk and nice and flirtatious i seem. Maybe i shouldn't act like i like you if i don't.... but i have no idea how to turn off the nice sometimes....

You on the other hand, I really like you, I know you and love you and you are my life.... and by the way I miss you.

And then there's you, and you don't know i like you... but i do and make me some more animals please. And that ponytail is cute. cute as fuck.

weekends spent away from home

2008-05-18T21:05:00.009+09:00

are wonderful and make me feel like I'm traveling again, even though guess what aj, you're not really, but you can pretend, well until you get to school on Monday morning.

But let's just pretend for the moment that Monday morning doesn't exist.

1. i am obsessing with the mid to late 90's, especially by watching a million videos on you tube where bands are running through the streets of Toronto....
do i actually miss snowy days on bloor street??? ack! i miss snowy days on bloor street when i was 16 and waiting outside of lees palace to see a million bad bands that i was in love with.....

2. Japan for 6 days wasn't long enough. le sigh. I love it there, the people, the environmental responsibility that is practiced by the country. The small streets, with small wooden house and garbage cans, and no one staring and temples and bicycles and this strange sense of total normality even though it's Japan. And they make the best sushi. and they have shoe dryers when you come in from the rain with wet shoes. We stayed with a little man in his wooden house/hostel and felt like a quirky family for 3 days. biking all over Kyoto, the most beautiful little streets and giant gorgeous gardens surrounding temples. Off to Osaka which for some reason REALLY reminds me of Toronto! There are homeless people, there are stray cats, and bicycles and a little dirt on the streets. I met a dude when i was buying traditional Japanese work boots in the seedier area of town and we went out for lunch and beers and he took me on a bike tour of the city... awesome. randomness makes my life better...

3. I went with Justin and Jagz to Wonju for the weekend. An hour or 2 outside of bundang. We went to visit friends Kim and Alex who have moved out there now for university jobs. Could i live in the country? Could i stay here again next year maybe and get a good university job and work out in the middle of the country. If Kim and Alex are going to stay there for another year, then maybe... but jeez i gotta not think about next year now cuz I'm so not that type of person! But I definitely want to do something new come march, be it move to a new country or relocate to a new job etc etc...

it's raining a lot.
drip drop.
drip drop.

oh no oh dear

2008-05-06T21:06:00.005+09:00

I'm feeling slightly worthless. set off by my uselessness. less ness use.

Judith (my buddy from India) was in Myanmar with her son and just got out yesterday. The letter she had sent me last week spoke of the struggle of the people living there, and this was before the shit hit the fan. And now the shit has hit the fan, the decrepit fan, the falling apart fan where there are bad sparks when you plug it in and there's not even enough motion to create a wind to send those ribbons attached to the cage flying. i can't imagine or understand the struggle of those people and this was before the cyclone.

Oh no, here we go - i feel worthless and existentialism is telling me to go and do something significant and give some meaning to my life. aim, design, end goal, intent, mark, pint, purpose, target, view. WHY.

I'm feeling guilty because i cried over stupid king kong when he died in that stupid movie that cost a milliondy dollars to make. I feel guilty because i want to buy new shoes. I feel guilty because i want to help people for my own selfish reasons. but doesn't everybody? mother Theresa was totally doing it for her own reasons (all those hot indian men! I'm going to get struck down for that one)

I sound 19.

time to stop being 19 and figure out a solution. that's being at least 21. but my problem is that i don't want to spend time inside of myself. I don't know how. that's why i love distraction. give me a good ol' distraction any day. so, how do people self-reflect and move on and change and all that shat? make decisions about life. figure it out. or do they just get drunk or fall on their head and suddenly "get it".

probably not. cuz..well i would have REALLY gotten it by now...wouldn't i....

anyway, this disaster will fade and the flowers on my windowsill will die and i will feel this way time and time again (unless i just get up now and run away! yippee!!!!!).

this here is a distraction for both you and me. me and you. and you and me.

eating sugared squash

2008-05-04T10:50:00.002+09:00

for breakfast is nearly as good as 구고마 (delicious sweet potatoes) and i have to thank Bradley hall for the introduction into the world of squash and the baking of it, which i now do in a tiny little toaster oven in my tiny little box of an apartment. I've been thinking about what i want... and i think bad things about thinking about what i want, i want not to want, but hell.. omg i want... and what i really want is a house with a garden or balcony... which lets face it, is NOT possible here in korea, and the problem is that i want this NOW. now now now... gimme.. greedy..

(Teri i'm jealous of your pig and garden, it's like we could change lives for 10 min to realize that we are ok where we are... )

A sleeping boy lies in my bed. pillow stained faces and stiff arms from sleeping in a mass mess of hugs. I am not comfortable sleeping with people....and I am not talking about sex here, because well.. that's not what i'm talking about. I'm talking about getting used to sleeping beside someone, listening to them, thinking about them.. and for me this is incredibly hard. maybe for others too? i dunno. but usually when i meet someone and we fall asleep next to each other i have the worst possible sleeps ever and this goes on for awhile. their breathing annoys me, and it's too hot and my god, how i can stop thinking about them and put my brain to sleep when here they are skin lightly brushing my arm and hands rubbing my back. can't turn brain off.

It's a 3 day long weekend. Hurray! and next week i fly to japan for 5 days. Hurray again! so 2 weeks of only 3 day teaching.. may is my kind of month. Today is also my sisters bday and i feel lousy cuz i bought her a card and was too lazy to go post it. i'm sorry.

now i will go jump on someones head and drink coffee and relax before going into seoul to do some dancing and dancing and well drinking.

hey guess i'm feeling better... a little displaced tho...

bushwacker

2008-05-01T19:40:00.004+09:00

i'm feeling sad and sleepy-headed today, maybe too much booze lately.

and then my thoughts turn to detoxing and reorganization. re-org of life. re-org, bjork.

what i'm obsessed with today:

the randomness of life.

seeing a glass elevator full of balloons.

reading till my eyes hurt.

making lists of things that i miss (my record player, my sewing machine, a typewriter in a mint green box that never worked, toronto times, family dinners, friends).

making lists of things that i want (a sewing machine, a typewriter in a mint green box that works, brown boots, tattoos of owls, friends).

i joined a new gym in my little sunae village (please read that in a french accent, village i mean with the sh sound... ok rambling too much...) there is no gym like my old gym and the ladies i did the yoga with every morning. but maybe i'm sad because there are no longer mornings. well there are but i spend them inside a classroom with the little tinker tots. ok i gotta shutup! life aint so bad. sorry for the vent.

sleepyhead should go to bed. enough said.

gospel sundays take me away

2008-04-28T17:20:00.004+09:00

and belly says to brain, hey i'm too big, and legs tell it they are too tired and can't run anymore, and hey, they can't really run anyway... and bum, oh bum, he's a little depressed that there is enough on one side for two of him, and wait, why is bum male? bum should soo be a girl... all insecure and image conscious, but no, bum is a boy. a boy bum. and at the end of it all brain doesn't listen and mouth ends up working overtime when everything else is on lazytime.

i'm having body issues today. feeling too fat. feeling like too many people are staring at me. and they ARE. but maybe because i'm me and i'm in korea and well people stare no matter how big your buddah belly is.

what a weekend!! seeing faces that had disappeared for months and squealing with delight (and you know my squeal...and my drunk squeal). i'm really into drunk texting these days. not a good idea when you like a boy and really want him to know so you try to convey this information while drunk though the cell phone. oh dear. it has finally stopped raining and the mountains that i can see from my window are looking lush and green and i'm remembering the green lushness of the summer in the countryside and i'm getting excited again and again.

rainy days

2008-04-22T22:50:00.004+09:00

make me sleepy, sad, happy and lonely all jumbled into one Andrea in a giant yellow raincoat biking in the rain. The yellow raincoat makes the world sound different and I feel like I'm inside a tent (which gives me that instant- happy- tenty- feeling) because the raincoat makes the rain sound like how the rain sounds when you are hearing it from inside a tent.. you know?!

Alternatives journal is publishing my piece on Sambhavna's garden in their summer issue, and SAGE is doing the Chingari story in their spring issue - how freaking exciting is that!! I finally feel like I'm doing something - not that i feel like I've been doing nothing forever, but you know, i guess yeah, i sort of feel like I've been doing nothing for awhile now.

I taught a class on Monday that had 21, 13 year old students in it... 21!!! that's 3x what I'm used to, and for some reason i became nervous and was blushing, omg, the constant blushing! I'm pretty used to teaching the 6 year olds who never question and just want to give you their undying love. "why is your face so red teacher?" .. omg kid, shut up because now I'm a cherry!

so in regard to the subject of my cherry red face, here is a picture i took of the river by my house. banks lined with the most beautiful cherry blossoms in full bloom on the trees, and how sad...they have all floated away now on the wind, and a lot of them floated into my mouth/face/hair/eyes while i was biking, but hey, being showered in cherry blossoms petals by the wind can't be anyone's complaint!

fin

dancing to the music in my head

2008-04-21T22:20:00.002+09:00

I now live for the weekend. I've never lived for the weekend before. when i lived in Toronto i didn't even have a weekend, my off days were weekdays and hey, when i lived in Toronto everyday was Friday (well..especially during those nash and andrea days...) but now it's weekday flying by and HEY! here's friday and let's party. this weekend was a party. dancing my pants off, well, my shoes off (why do i always take my shoes off? dirty tights, dirty feet and killer sore feet the next day) of course this all night dancing happened after Justin and i did an all day biking to the han river beside Seoul, a 4 hour biking experience that i do once in awhile to remember just how sore your ass can get from a bike seat.

Sunday was an impromptu picnic in the park where we found a hidden tennis court that was like a ghost town..(well we took the back road way up to court, so maybe it just gave us the feeling of an abandoned ghost town tennis court in the middle of a huge park in Korea...) drinking wine, eating bread and cheese and talking till the wee hours... I'm really into eating onions these days.

goodnight pumpkins of the world.

all i want to do is ride bikes with you

2008-04-16T08:55:00.004+09:00

how beautiful is spring in korea? Even though the cherry blossoms don't last longer than a heart beat or blink of an eye, it makes you appreciate them so much more. And all the colours and the warmth, oh i feel like I'm in love... Last year at this time I was watching Teri and a million Korean men run a half marathon through all the spring time wonder. I think about this time last year, and i feel like I'm in that same place, with a little difference here and there (accumulated knowledge about myself and accumulated travel etc) and it's strange. strange because it seems the last whatever with whomever didn't even happen. a fog covered hazy whatever. and you know, not upset about it at all. at first i was pretty upset. "I'm in the exact same place i was a year ago" type of feeling, but now, i realize the differences and the realization feels good.

Justin, Aer and I went away for the weekend, hiking, staying in minbaks (little rooms attached to a Koreans home for people to rent out) going to the most famous temple in Korea. There was even a farm festival. For the first time in my Korean life i completely noticed the difference in the Korean accent between the city folk and country bumpkins. it felt great, like I've been here long enough and let in to some secret group - the group for those who have lived in korea long enough to distinguish the different Korean accents.

I met a lot of people who have lived here for 2 years or longer. There is a lot of stigma attached to foreigners who stay in korea a long time, and this stigma is attached BY other foreigners. It's like they are saying... what?!!? you have been here 4 years?!?!?! what the fuck are you doing with your life? And even being here nearly 2 years I've gotten this from many people who just came here. And i hate it. who the fuck cares how long you stay here, maybe it's their career choice. After meeting these people I could picture myself hanging out in Asia for a lot longer. Time moves strangely after a certain period. I remember last year counting down the months, the weeks (till what? i have no idea, but i remember doing a lot of counting ) now, time flies and i hardly notice it at all. I'm rambling.

xo

eating sweet potatoes, cuz i aint sweet enough.

2008-04-06T23:53:00.005+09:00

spring comes in and we take those cutie-pie kids to the park to learn how to plant flowers. not that we actually got to plant the flowers, no no, we just put them in pots and brought them back to the school. kind of funny, kind of korean.. but hey a day out in the sun, well actually an hour, because that's all i have to work on Fridays.

This weekend was sun shine and sun smiles, and sometimes i grin so wide ...and of course because I'm the big white headed rainbow i am, people are always ALWAYS staring at me, but then the grin catches and they're grinning and I'm grinning even wider and laughing to myself.. ok maybe i am going crazy. I feel different though, I don't know if India changed me or if i had to change once I came back and really really had to change.. but I feel different, calmer, oh so much calmer. i can't even remember the last time i threw a pot at somebody's head (ok so that never happened, but boy could it have). India was all about learning how to relax because let's face it I'm pretty much a freak that can't sit still for any amount of time because there is too much to do and i don't have enough time to do it. why am I (or maybe wassssss...) like that. terrified that if i don't do this or that or go here or there or stand on my head while reading a book and eating soup I'm going to collapse? I'm glad I'm getting over it, and hey it only took 28 or India or a heart break. chose your own adventure.
and i don't ever feel like I've eaten a bowl of glass for lunch or brunch or brinner. which unfortunately used to happen all the time. ohh life learning lessons my friends.

ok enough banter.

It was Cindy's wedding today. And here we are... so cute and whoah.. all wearing white like little angels, except for the woman of the day wearing her traditional hanbok (she did get married in a huge white wedding dress though, and there was this woman, and her job was to fluff... fluff dresses, and wipe away tears with a q-tip. "what do you do?" "ohh i wipe away tears with a q-tip"). I miss working with these people SO much, that is the shitty thing about working at my new job, 6 pregnant women who can't speak any English and one western dude that doesn't really work at the same time as me. Korea weddings are pretty much like their western friends.. people, dresses, pictures, posing and food. but the concept here is get in and get out. and then the loudspeaker came on 10 min till you have to leave. hahah.. no wedding nori bangs here.

have i told you that I'm also totally obsessed with my new web cam. well now you know, or can see.

things to know.

1. dating Korean boys who can't speak a word of English doesn't work. no matter how cute he is.
2. mascara stained pillows no longer exist in my world - I've decided.
3. I'm sorry i led everyone to believe i was coming home and ready to borrow couches and beds and hearts when I'm not. but you still love me!

4. Teri mcneil should come back to Korea, because i say so.

drunk at 2:55

2008-04-05T02:43:00.002+09:00

waking up to the sun shining on your face is magical and makes the morning. this is not my morning face.. this is my drunk owl night face..

loving my job.. OHH sooo loving my job and things seem to be going fantastical to the upteemth degree, which is NOT what i expected, but hey, the unexpected can be for the best...

I've decided to stay in Korea.. for a year.. oh my god.. how am i going to stay for a year i say.. thinking about CHRISTMAS in Korea.. a milliondy miles away but that's what I'm in for, I'll make it...

the greatest part of late has been reconnecting with friends and having so much to do and planning trips to the country.. the country! can't wait.. and it's nearly spring. the trees are doing that whole blossoming bit that they seem to do, which makes me feel good about life in general.

happy post. finally.
good night my lovers.

my freckles

2008-03-10T21:10:00.004+09:00

are fading faster than you can say "Anapurna", and so are the memories of being in india. im semi giving up on korea. once again i don't know what to do. i've given myself one month.

the pros of staying:
-my job is FANTASTIC. the kids are AMAZING and lovely and they call all pronounce my name (this is a biggie believe me!!)
-my apartment (minus the fact that i got to put up all the dosh for it) is super cozy and i've made it into a craftastic pad (kristin remember kraft korner????)

cons:
-feeling lonely often, too often.
-not having the needed paperwork yet for the job...
-being ready to go, when i feel stuck here...

blah. today i feel blah. yesterday great, the last few days fucking fantastic.. but today blah.

day four

2008-03-07T12:48:00.002+09:00

yesterday i picked up my bike and i zoomed (well andrea styles zoomed which means not zoomed at all...) around bundang singing stevie wonder at the top of my lungs. who doesn't love a girl with white hair on a granny bike singing superstition...? I'm so happy to have my bike back and to see that winter didn't destroy it as i was worried it would have. I went to teach a lesson yesterday and the woman has a 27 month old kid, and for the hour i was there the kid was breastfeeding. is this normal? do kids older than 2 breast feed? and the kid was GIANT like a 3 year old, so maybe that's why she needed an hour of milk... strange...

i'm staying at my friend's house for this week and it's interesting living with a korean family. her parents can't speak much english so poor Hwa sun has to sit and listen to her mother and then translate everything and wait for my response and do the same. and from watching Tarumina and Darmesh do this all the time in india, i know it can be exhausting.

and i get to eat fish and rice for breakfast.

so the past few days have been better and better. the initial shock has worn off and i'm feeling alright. well nearly all right. i'm so happy to have my friends. to get letters from everyone and to know that i have so many close connections with people in so many places. and this makes me wonder why i don't have this in korea. you know, i left india after meeting some amazing people in bhopal that i know i will keep in contact with ...and i have such an easy time making friends all over, but why the hell not in korealand? maybe things will change now that the situation is make friends or be alone.

ciao bellas

smoking cigarettes in a PC room because i don't konw what else to do...

2008-03-04T18:21:00.004+09:00

i think today could be the worst day of my life so far. returning to korea with a heart full of love and a stomach full of pain, louis greeted me at the airport with the most unfortunate news, that he was no longer in love with me. no longer attracted to me. no longer no longer no.... what the fuck to do. my little french man, my bestest friend, my heart, my poor broken heart. i'm crying and crying and surrounded by video games and surrounded by korean and i want to go home. it's all i can think. why the fuck what the fuck etc etc and ohmygod my stomach pain lessened... because i guess somewhere deep down inside i knew it was coming. and what the fuck to do.. what am i going to do. i spent too much time here with him that i don't know what to do here without him. i'm homeless for a week and confused as fuck. we were supposed to move into a new apartment together on sunday, but now i have to pay the rent alone and now i have to be there alone and now... and now..and tears and sad... i want my nash and my brock and my sister and my emily and i want it all in one and i want to be sane...

so long, farewell, i don't know how to spell in german...

2008-03-03T13:27:00.004+09:00

how can i say goodbye to india? well however i do it today, i will be doing it from the toilet i'm sure. i've been sick for 90% of the time i've been here, i do believe. india and my stomach do not agree. and now i go home. and what do i go home to? i don't know. louis and i have not communicated in a week because well... i have no idea... he doesn't call me and doesn't answer his phone or email which leads me to believe that i may return to korea to face some horrible situation i didn't think would be the outcome of this trip. and for a small part i think my latest bout of stomach pain is due to this situation.... i'm so confused and angry and ramblely... blah. blah x 20000000.

anyway, ignore the above verbal diarrhea (since i'm full of it anyway) and what else. today i forgot i was back in Delhi and wore a dress. after the walk of shame i just did to go get breakfast I'm weary of going back outside to walk to the hotel to change my clothes.

home i go ...

tansportation woes!

2008-02-28T20:48:00.003+09:00

16 hours on a rocky bus up to the Dali lamas house wasn't fun and i met the mountains with my head in a bag and shitting my pants. guess who suffers from motion sickness... up the mountains, a few days later down the mountains, through Delhi and on a plane (that was late so of course we missed our connection flight therefore having to buy ourselves new tickets for the next flight) to Goa. Ohh the beach and the sunburnt skin that was the outcome. Emily and i are now terrified of cows (thanks stupid cows in Varanasi - the most amazing love i have for that place), train lagged and on our last stop together in Mumbai - which is amazing! yay city life!
I am tired and happy and loving this india land still to the umpteenth degree. exciting news is that we are getting the kids photos published by SAGE magazine! andd..what else... I am back in korea in 5 days - scary. i've had some horrible news today and a million things are swirling in my little pea head. it's hot here, boy is it hot and i'm not looking foward to returning to korean spring. but i am looking forward to returning to kroea despite the fact that i'm a little nervous to return and to situations i may be returning to.

god speed...

bye bye bhopal

2008-02-12T22:07:00.001+09:00

All of Ishrat's friends gather outside of her house to have their picture taken. The little girl with the hennaed hair kept telling me to take off my goggles (sunglasses!). They also wouldn't stop screaming DIDI(older sister) at me at the top of their lungs, even though it was Ishrat who was controlling the camera...and the camera is what they want...

Out of all our kids, I think that Ishrat lives in the worst conditions. Her colony is definitely the most tight on space and when we went to her house it seemed just to be a front room and a cooking area with a curtain for a door. Her colony also seems to be the one with the most children, leering men and babies! When we first came to her house and we were inside teaching her about the camera, over 20 people were spilling in the doorway..

This picture is by Shabans, from our day at the park. We all ate at this little park restaurant but the food wasn't the type of food most of the kids are used to (they usually eat subgee (potatoes or peas or cauliflower), rice and dalh) so all of us had to finish off plates of Chinese style noodles!

We think that Shifan's older sister took these pictures at her school.

These pictures were taken by Shifan when we went to the park

Arman took this picture of the walls surrounding the playground outside of his school.

The school is a pretty big building with 4 or 5 different rooms. I didn't really get that much information about the school because I didn't go with a translator (Armans older sister took me around to each of the rooms telling me " lunch room" "school room" "physio room" which was helpful but a little evident.... Most of the children that were at the school on the day I was there were mostly kids with growth problems due to CP (and I'm not really sure what other illnesses...) so these kids are of perfect mental capabilities and of perfect I WANNA TAKE A PICTURE WITH YOUR CAMERA capabilities, i had to fight off a little boy for a good 10 minutes!

So ya... these are some pictures from the photo project. We've developed the pictures at two different shops and have had shitty results at both! The last shop we asked for a cd and clearly just assumed they would scan the negatives at a high resolution, oh who were we kidding, the quality is HORRIFIC! and you can see on the last picture that they didn't even cut it proper. The shop also decides which pictures from your roll are fit to print so images that thy don't consider in focus or framed they don't print (the picture above (the red one) by Shabhan wasn't printed!)

Anyway...what else!

Em and I are off tonight for our 3 week mega tour of India. I have no idea how we are going to fit what we have planed into the coming 3 weeks, but hey, we've included 4 days on the beach in Goa so that should help us relax someeee.... The past 3 days have been excellent, thank god for the turn around in my moodiness sate of being, I guess I get moody often, but maybe it doesn't last for long... tis good I think.

I've been all over Bhopal by myself the past two days, which is sort of a feat considering the way one feels when outside the clinic alone and all the attention that is placed upon you by EVERYONE... a little tiring...... a lot tiring!! I feel pretty comfortable here which makes me a little sad to leave because i just kind of had Bhopal figured out... but no... not too sad, because i'm really really excited to see more of India and then get back home. I feel like I've been gone away forever!!! It's been nearly 2 months now, not THAT long at all, but i am thinking about my own bed and space again...

Me and my googles, taken by Ishrat...

snotty nosed andrea

2008-02-10T14:56:00.000+09:00

I just received an email from one of my old Keric Students Rachel! What a nice surprise and what a sweet email. The letters we receive from our students are clearly ESL works of art, the kids usually write bluntly and in a straight forward manner (with a little bit of backwards English thrown in) but something about the wording and the way the letters sound comes out so sweet and makes me smile, widely.

Yesterday we spent the day with the photo project kids. Everyone met at Chingari and the kids got their cameras and pictures back and YAY! was it exciting! All the kids showed up (which was something incredible considering it's not easy for people to get around - the bus may not be an option because money isn't an option or constraints with the movement of some of the children) and we went through their photos, scolding parents and siblings for taking the bulk of the pictures (something that clearly happened when a lot of the pictures are at adult eye level) and asking the children which pictures they took, and which ones are their favourites. One of the girls, Ishrat had told us at her house last week, when we asked her what she wanted to take pictures of, she had said herself, well receiving her prints back from the lab we laughed so hard because there she was in EVER picture on the roll striking a pose for the camera. So a little explaining was done as to who should be taking the pictures. And then off we went... filling up autos and the chingari bus, a caravan of 30 of us headed for a park in New Bhopal. The kids were great, Shifan (who has CP) was running RUNNING all over the place snapping this and that. I can't wait to upload the photos and scan what the kids took pictures of.

On Monday I'm going to the State School that a bunch of the Kids go to, (Chingari pays their tuitions, buys their uniforms and busses them back and forth) so the kids can take some pictures of school and their teachers. I'm really excited to go because secretly in my head I want to see what it would be like to work in a school like this (orrrrrrr maybe work in the new school that Chingari is opening when they open up their rehabilitation center for the kids).

anyway, what else...we are leaving on Tuesday! I can't wait, can not wait to go to Varanasi (and hope hope hope it's not overrun by touts and scammers). Writing this post has actually made me feel so much better, I don't want to be down down...
My body is letting me down. I now have a cold, insomnia and I still have the shits. Adding this to my unstable emotional state from having to switch to a new birth control (something I'm going to have to do AGAIN in 1 month) is making me have a hard day. But (a la rocky) hey, forget about it.... I will be fine tomorrow...pumping some fits in the air and jump up yelling raspberry!

shits and giggles and children that change your life

2008-02-08T16:31:00.001+09:00

5 more days left in Bhopal and I just got over my second bout of travelers diarrhea so hopefully I’m good to go...

The last week has been an educational experience in everything that is truly India.. Emily and I have started a photo project with 7 children living in the Basties (the slums, the communities, the colonies, whatever you wanna call them) around Bhopal. Of these Children 3 are physically special needs (they have physical deformities such as bow leggedness, which prevents them from standing or walking normally), 3 are mentally special needs, and 1 is Yogiata, the sister of 2 brothers who were born with physical abnormalities. All these children are born from parents who were somewhere in old Bhopal the night of December 2nd 1984 when the gas cloud from the exploded pesticide factory Union Carbide passed over their homes and changed their lives.

We went into the Basties with a woman who works for Chingari Trust she brought us to each of the homes that the children live at. What an amazing experience to have chai in these houses and get to meet the people who experienced the worst when the carbine factory exploded and hear what they say about that night and what has happened since. Going to the basties is ... pretty insane... these people live in the smallest of spaces, with the largest amount of family, and some of them have next to nothing. And then there are the kids. Adil, Radisha Bi's (one of the women who started Chingari) nephew sat in my lap and covered my eyes before giving me giant bear hugs and kissed me a million times. how can you hold back the tears. How can I type this and not feel what I felt then, I can't. The tears flow. His little legs bent all sorts of ways that they shouldn't be. And his 16 year old body the size of a 3 year old...

the kids in the photo project are so clearly excited that it's terribly contagious. I can't wait to see what kind of pictures we get back and what we can do as the next step.

ok veggie burger calls...

happiness is a warm bed

2008-01-31T19:10:00.001+09:00

It's cold here at night time. not canada cold (hahahahhahhaha terri...) but cold enough that emily and i hide inside my mosquito net bed, under the blankets with beer and gin and a hot mac on our laps while we watch weeds...ohhh weeds, we just finished the second season and I actually really really liked it. I just soo relate to the drug dealing black people or the rich white people. ~~yeah right~~

I'm really happy. I love my life at the moment. haha.. i just typed money instead of moment. my life is money. easy money. India is easy in so many ways. I forget where I am and what I do and the future. All that future thinking that i did when i originally went to korea has gone flying out the window. It's all in the moment and the moment is happy sunshine on my face with delicious lunch in my belly. I am so lucky. So lucky that i can come and travel and do these things, SEE these things, and then put them out of my mind. That's the luckiest part i think. Slums, oh yeah...slums slums...what..lunch oh ok.... buy more kortas...oh ok...
back to work...

dalh farts and anticipating hearts

2008-01-30T14:46:00.000+09:00

my lag in posting is making me irate because i narrate my days in my head when instead i want to narrate it here, but alas the annoying internet connection is sllllowwww, snail slow...India has been good to me so far. I actually absolutely love it. The smell of cow shit, goat shit, dog shit mixed with curry, fresh pineapples, smoke, the garden, incense and people makes me happy. Not horse shit though, that just stinks!

I wake up inside a mosquito net of dreams and rise to the sun and coffee and sometimes the poops. Eat some eggs or grilled cheese sandwiches and start doing my work for the day (organizing law files in Sambhavna's library or wandering around smoking cigarettes, taking rickshaw rides to a restaurant and paying a dollar for the most delicious lunch ever, reading, reading and stretching). I'm living at Sambhavna clinic, deep inside the lanes of Kwasi Camp or Bafna colony, i don't really know which one it's called. The area is predominately Muslim, with women walking though dusty lane ways in the all covering black burquas and the loudspeakers (which are seriously 10 feet away from my bedroom window) blasting (AND I MEAN BLASTING) the call to prayer 5 times a day, this wakes me up every night. I actually had a dream that a man was in my room singing to me, but it was the call to prayer playing mean tricks on me. We live in old Bhopal, where it's poor and there are slums and camps and no women on the streets at dark. I spit on the street and fit right in. well no, not really, but i still like it.

The city of Bhopal is quite big and we tend to go to two areas, the chowk (market) in the old town and the new market in new bhopal. The auto (rickshaw) ride to anywhere is also an adventure in itself. Transit is FUN! Last weekend another volunteer Judith and I went to Sanchi a town an hour or two away from here that has a hugeeeee Buddhist site from the 6th century on top of the hill. There were these things called stupas, huge round tombs with stairs and gates and there were ruins of many monasteries. I really had never EVER seen anything like it. On such a large scale anyway. The bus ride to Sanchi was fantastic, it was the first time I've taken the bus anywhere. But alas India seems to be the best of things and the worst, the worst ruins everything of course. But you can't let it get to you. The biggest problem in India is the men. They stare, they leer, they have a sexual maturity of the age of 13.... and 90% of the men are like this. It infuriates me to no end, but you have to let it go and ignore it when they stare STARE at you and bump into you to touch your tits, or grab your ass (thank god i haven't had this experience, poor emmie...). Emmie and I have 12 more days here in Bhopal and then we are off for super India adventure time! and in less than 5 weeks my body will be back on planes and trains and then to my heart of heats. exciting.

days 5 and i'm alive

2008-01-16T00:50:00.000+09:00

I have the shits. oh the india shits. but it ain't so bad and hopefully I won't get the full blown delhi belly that so many folks get here, but i'm sure it's going to come sometime... The past few days have definitely made me calm down a bit from the shock of first arrival. It's shocking and poor and dirty and all but hey...it's home for the next bit so get used to it...

The clinic really is the savour of it all. It's really really amazing to start my trip off here and get used to the land of loud before i really have to plunge right into it. I've started working on my project which is researching on the medicinal garden they have here. Today I spent time with Ratna the woman who runs the garden and made her explain all the ins and outs of it to me. now i'm in love with her. This woman is amazing. She came to the clinic to work in the garden and didn't know much about it, now she is the authority on medicinal herbs. She knows everything about that herbs and what they are used for and what they can do etc etc.

So many people here are like that, insanely inspiring in awesome ways.

i have to go poop again now so i'll cut this short.

SURPRISE

2008-01-12T22:04:00.000+09:00

is kind of how i feel right now. india should be called intimidatia or something of the like. it's a bag of everything and my emotions are on high or maybe on low because I'm in a little shell shock bubble also. and today is only my second day, or really my first day because i just taxied through Delhi to get to the train and then get to Bhopal yesterday. how do i write whats it's like or how I'm feeling or reacting...because i don't even know how to explain it. i guess picturing what you see in the movies or read is pretty accurate, but then again I'm not Patrick swayze so maybe don't think about the movies (that one with patric swayze being pretty pretty bad). it's overwhelming and scary and beautiful and dirty and poor (sooooo sooo soo poor) it's nothing I've ever seen or done before, ever. ever ever.

the train ride from delhi to bhopal was great. I've never had a sleeper train before and the voices of my neighbours and the rocking motion put me to sleep pretty soon after i lay down. i woke up various times throughout the night usually when we pulled into a station, and i could see the foggy shapes of people waiting at the train station. it was pretty ghostly. the countryside was fantastical. brown and green beauty with fog and sparse trees. arriving in Bhopal was a little like arriving in Delhi (except i had a wonderful Emily Gibson there to meet me!), tuk tuk crazy, yelling, screaming, people seeing you and wanting your attention, money, whatever...

the clinic that i will be staying at for the next month is absolutely beautiful. it's peaceful and airy and just magnificent! there are other volunteers here from all over the place working on various projects, staff that work at the clinic, and chipmunks of the indian kind galore! I've been shadowing ms. emily jane all day and have been trying to get my bearings etc. and smoking a lot of cigarettes. and eating especially delicious food that cost next to nothing.

last week i was in Amsterdam with brock and nash. oh what joy to see nash!! hahah, i nearly shit my pants! we had a good time drinking and eating and getting tattoos..well just me! it kind of feels like a year ago now, india is too overwhelming to try to get my brain to understand. i'm kind of on auto pilot. i haven't talked to Louis in an eternity and it's also making me sad. oh emotional overload, and i guess that's why i write here! to pawn it off to you dear readers!

night!

tis the eve of the new year and...

2008-01-01T00:52:00.000+09:00

i just realized that i'll be 28 in 2008 and 29 in 2009 and how have i not noticed this until now...hrm... yes that's what i'm thinking of on this day of days. Well i guess this is some kind of new year post or it could be a travel post (i'm traveling at the moment) or it could be some emotional dissertation, that i'm sure it will be no matter what.

i'm in north holland, and it's a freaking adorable tiny town. and it's full of bikes and indie looking boys with geek glasses riding them. and grandmas and mum's with babies and it's all on the bike! i'm in holland and i can drink the tap water. i didn't realize this until i was here for half a day and looking for a water bottle. drinking water from the tap is a luxury that i wish we had in korea. i think i'll appreciate it even more when i'm drunk/hung over next week and all i'm going to have to do is turn on the tap to rehydrate myself. amazing. i'm in the real version of that street in canada's wonderland and i'm visiting my family which is going amazingly well now.... not so at first..ohh a little strange and a little loaded with comments and assumptions and not knowing each other at all (i haven't seen them in 2 and a half years and i only see my dad once ever year or so) but we are getting used to each other which is good, but of course we will all part and recollect maybe in 2 more years...

well it's new years eve and i'm thinking about things and i'm missing louis more than anything. how hard this is, and how much in love i am and all and emotional run off.... but here are some things i want to accomplish. and i think this is good to make a list. and who knows...

i want to study yoga hardcore and maybe become a yoga instructor for the fat types...i want to be fit, fit fitter and i want to bike, a lot, around a cournty (a small one, a flat one, maybe the one i'm in..) and be able to do it AND not hate it. I want to pay off my student loans and be debt free and feel free to do anything and go anywhere and not have to worry about monthly payments. i want to be less crazed and more aware and be kind to my mother. i want to travel to a million places and i want to see a milliondy things and i want to do it with the boy i love.

bambino where are you?! i could drink you and sing into you and of course nash and michael would be at my side!
happy last day of the year!

what else to do on a saturday night...

2007-11-10T21:23:00.000+09:00

omg. loves it.

where the lazy things are

2007-11-03T12:31:00.000+09:00

Tomorrow i'm going to trust korean equipment regardless of my non-korean size and jump off a cliff to go hand gliding. ekkk... how exciting. today i'm just going to be lazy and think about the 1 million things i could be doing instead of upload cd's onto louis computer and fussing over making the perfect play list for the ipod. this playlist includes including the spice girls which nash sent to me by mistake (the cd was labeled final fantasy and i was soo excited to hear little owen sing us some gay songs so imagine my surprise when i'm transported back to those much music watching days and i can clearly see the video for wannabe in my head).

i'm home alone for the first time in what seems like a milliondy years, maybe since march when i moved in with jenny. i've always lived with other people, only that one time when i subletted that little place on brunswick for 6 months and the roommate went to Vancouver for 4 of them...maybe that was the closest i've come to living alone, and then in Korea for 5 months. i remember the feeling of complete loneliness that i felt when i first got here, especially when i was just in my little apartment doing nothing. i would come home and think that my shirt on the ground was patches or that sweater in a ball on the bed was tasha the cat and wish that it was them so at least i would be able to hear the sound of my own voice without thinking i was just talking to myself. now i talk to the plants.

2007-11-01T20:41:00.001+09:00

i'm a mess, in this picture a glowing mess. coffee cups flying and then i stink like coffee and the kitchen is covered in stinky grinds and morning time bliss that has definitely been wiped away by screaming children and my crazy brain. but today wasn't too bad. i got to teach the "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" chant song to a class full of little guys (age 4 not speaking a lick of english) and then to the older kids who made up the best doo wop dance moves to it. dancing with laughing beasts for 30 min actually made my day. but the best of me is wiped away by nothing, a word a flick a i dunnoooooo and i'm not who i was 5 min ago. i downloaded guided by voices and nearly cried over the flood of amazing times in my head that rushed to my head like new blood. i'm sad that i missed toronto time halloween, which we all know halloween is the best holiday when your gay. god, straight people have no idea why halloween is amazing, it's like a present for the queers and i loved it. and i miss it.

ouch my tonsills!

2007-10-28T19:24:00.000+09:00

What a weekend, i spent it being hopped up on pills and crying over the pain. how do children who get tonsillitis cope with this sort of thing? I couldn't imagine not crying about the pain...but maybe it was also due to the intense ear pain i was having from the blood cloth the doctor found in my ear. Going to see the doctor in Korea is definitely an interesting experience. I go see the doctor who helped me though my sinus infection last march (she also happens to be the parent of my student), a lot of doctors here are traditional and western medicine practitioners at the same time... so this doctor examines my ear and throat and tells me to open wide for the acupuncture she is about to preform on my tonsil. yes this will hurt she reassures me...but it actually didn't hurt as much as i though it would. Then she preforms the same pokey treatment on my ear showing me my bloody results too... kind of interesting....i enjoyed seeing it. I paid my 5,000 won (around $5) and went downstairs to the pharmacy to see mother superior for my pills. A typical 3 day party pack of non-descript antibiotics and other meds for the low price of about $3. Then I go to school where the director freaks out over my lack of voice and ambition to be there for the day, she is especially freaking out since monday (tomorrow) is open class where all the parents come into school and see what their kids are learning and decide if they want to keep them there. I sleep though the day go home and feel like shit, cursing louis for not being there to take care of me, because now i was feeling SO sorry for myself and my raw bestial tonsils. Saturday i wake up feeling 100 times worse and we take a cab to the doctor who is, of course, on holiday. So upstairs i go to the other doctor in the building (i swear every building here has 2 or 3 doctors inside). This doctor does these homeopathic tests on me by making me put out my arm and resisting her pressure as she pushes down on it. she touches spots on my face and body and if i can't resist the pressure it means that's where i have the illness. this doctor studied medicine at Harvard by the way.... so she pressurizes me and decides that I'm immune to the pills i'm taking, then she puts her hands on some pills and pushes on my arm again, when i can't resist that's the pill i should take. crazy. then she gave me two shots in the bum! korean doctors LOVE to give you shots in the bum, every time i go to the doctor (the last time for a bladder infection) they are all over the i wanna give you a shot in the bum! But the shot actually did make me feel better, and the pills made me feel better, but not to say recovered in any sense of a recovery with tonsils being ok and it not being a pain in the ass to swallow my own spit. Louis has taken care of me all weekend buying me bread and allowing me to be stinky (well he only made fun of my stinky armpits 2 times....). i wish i had another day off.... tomorrow i have to go be clean and better and jolly with these parents and try to speak loud and clearly when for sure they are going to think i have some speech impediment and some drooling problem from the non-swallowing i will be doing.

mindless drivel, prattel, ramble etc

2007-10-18T12:24:00.001+09:00

safety first in korea, that's what i always say! This is just the good ol' sidewalk after a building was blasted. Glass is just everywhere and bricks, well, the bricks seem to be arranged in a particular order, one conducive to falling over them and into the glass. Today I decided that my favourite person is the coffee lady. everyday she makes me happy, even though i think she secretly hates louis and i.

next thursday my yoga class is going to go hiking (ironically it's up the mountain i got lost on, on sunday) and i'm really excited! i love this medley of offbeat women that i make an ass of myself in front of everyday!

a post without a picture....

2007-10-16T20:15:00.001+09:00

because blogger is being incongruous as usual! So it's just words today. formidable. The past weeks have been a little on the boring side. we don't go away very often anymore, and now my multi entry visa is expired so there's no leaving the country (until i'm leaving it for good of course!). I've been a scatterbrain extraordinaire as of late, on sunday when i was hiking our good ol' junja-dong mountain (which, my god, i've been up and down A LOT of times) i got lost! plain ol' lost in the woods. i ended up on a golf course facing a long walk home. but it was an experience (picture me trying to ask the adjashie at the gate where i was....). I'm enjoying my daily days at the gym and am trying pretty hard again to loose weight, the problem is my body just doesn't want to let it go! And now it's cold outside so my brain just believes that fat is even more valuable! Well....cold in the sense that i am cold, doesn't necessarily mean that it IS cold, some would just use the word cool. or brisk, or wonderful even. but i'm a shivering mess on my bike morning and night time. please remember that i also donned my winter coat in canada around mid october! it's soup and tea time, all the time!

jeju do etc etc

2007-10-06T09:28:00.000+09:00

For Chuseok (korean thanksgiving) Louis and I headed off to Jeju-Do, a small island 5 hours ferry ride off the coast of Korea. When we arrived in Jeju do (which is supposed to be a tropical paradise!) it was gray and rainy and nothing like what we expected! Everyone has told us that jeju is unlike any place in korea blahblahlbhahb but i swear to you, every town that i have been in, in korea, looks exactly the same! Little dirty coloured apartments from the late 70's lining the road with 3 convenient stores, 6 restaurants and something else mixed in. well, i'm exaggerating a bit, but seriously, the towns in jeju looked just like the towns i had been in that morning before catching the dang ferry, so it was bit of a surprise. So off we went anyway on our adventure around the island. We took a bus through the north coast and stayed at a little village on the north east side where there was a volcanic crater that you could hike up and see. it was pretty interesting and beautiful, but of course there were speakers everywhere pumping out bad bad bad music (like chim chimmy chim chim from mary poppins!!!!). Because i'm a prat and wouldn't stand in the road with my thumb out louis hitched us a ride with a nice family in a large car and we got them to take us down the east coast and to a traditional korean village. In July, a few of us went to a very well known korean traditional

house in the traditional village

near Andong in the center of Korea, there we stayed with a little grandmother who owned a minbak (a small room for rent). That traditional village was really touristy and even though there were koreans living and working and doing their thing in the village it still felt like it was ok to be there. THIS village on jeju do was pretty much the opposite. Even though we saw a tour group being led around, we felt sooooo intrusive and didn't feel like we should be there at all. So off we go again hitchhiking to another area where there were lava tubes under the ground (oh did i mention that this used to be a volcanic island) . These tubes where giant hollowed out caves that the lave created (i'm guessing here i really don't have much of an idea) so we were able to go inside them and walk around. Of course they were spectacular, soooooo huge and interesting looking but of course of course there were the speakers, blaring music (this time bossanova maybe for those that didn't appreciate the earlier elevator music) and coloured lights everywhere! bahhhhhhhhhhhh. korea always does this!!! Dresses everything up in the most ridiculous way!!! From there we hitch hike some more because this was a week ago i can't even remember now what people picked us up. But anyway they brought us to a little town on the south coast where we rented bikes and started biking around the south side

of the island. I just have to insert something here that is driving me nuts... BLOGGER I HATE YOU! these templates suck and i wish i remember how to do html so i didn't need to use them because i can't get the pictures to go where i want them to go EVEN THOUGH there is this drag function! bahhhhhhhh.... sorry.... ok... island, hitch hiking biking and we find ourselves on a beautiful beach where we camped for the night and swam in the morning. I felt soooo lucky at this point! Being on a beach at the end of September, swimming in the salty ocean getting new freckles, being with the boy that i'm madly in love with etc etc, but as soon as we started biking the next day it wore off, but onlyyyy when biking uphill! biking down hill was like having renewed faith in myself and mankind and not thinking about how much i hate biking or how out of shape i must be (my uphill biking thoughts along with, ohhh where are the shards of glass on the road, i'm going to pop my tired and then i don't have to do this muuuuhahahaha...)
another interjection that this template sucks and i can't move the picture below to the right friggen side of the screen! aughhhh...

Anyway..... that's it for jeju do/our last vacation from school!!! 11 more weeks kids! yeee haw! i really don't feel like i'm ready to leave korea, but ohhhh my god am i ready to leave my freaking job!!! I have finally made some gym friends! After three months at the gym someone finally talked to me!!! woo hoo!! My gym is not frequented by foreigners so it was a tuff one to make friends at! Anyway, one is my hot yoga instructor (who i totally think is a lesbo! but she tells me she loves men....hrm...) and the other one is a girl from the yoga class. We three hung out this week and even though their English is limited (especially hot not lesbo instructor) we hung out talking for 3 hours! All right, it's Saturday and i'm off to the gyno! there is your mental picture for the day boys and girls... muhah...

god speed.

old videos from summer vacation

2007-09-28T11:34:00.000+09:00

These are some old videos from July when we went to Ulleungdo for our summer vacation. We hitchhiked around the island and got picked up by this tour bus which was full with a korea family, of course we sang along to the korean songs they played.

After we left the island we tried to bike from Sokcho to the DMZ (the demilitarized zone between north and south korea) we biked too much in the hot sun and gave up, i think we were only about 5 km away. This is us camping.

camping and biking around rice fields...i'm a pretty lucky gal.

oh the korean gift sets!

2007-09-20T17:14:00.000+09:00

Chusok (korean thanksgiving) starts next week, it's a 3 day celebration of the new season, being with family, 3 days off of school and of course the korean gift sets. i can't even explain how interesting the whole gift set idea is. my first experience with it was walking into the supermarket when i came to korea last year (right after chusok) and seeing the left over chusock gift sets still on display. imagine, 10 cans of spam tightly packed in a beautiful box... or the 3 bottles of olive oil in a finely decorated box, now imagine it 100 fold on a giant display! Today i received some chusok gifts from my students and one from my boss. luckily there was no spam anywhere in sight! instead i received a gift box with 6 tubes of toothpase and shampoo and conditioner!!! crazy! and don't worry assholes, i know it wasn't anything personal for my boss to give me such a hygienic gift because all of us at school received similar gift boxes. WHAT am i going to do with 6 tubes of toothpaste?!?!?! hand them out to the broken smiled adjumas selling weird korean grass and spinach outside the subway?

the next year in stolen pictures....

2007-09-10T13:49:00.000+09:00

a lot of planning is underway. hopefully my hogwan will get everything a ok and i will be on a plane heading to Amsterdam come Decmber 21st. but a la Korean styles i won't know about the booking of my ticket there until the last possible minute. maybe it will be a few days before... who knows... i just have to have some faith that it will happen and work out because most things here are like that, working out like mad gym women, but totally last minute. I'm terrible excited to go to holland. i get to see my niece whom i've never met and of course my sister and her husband. my dad has also decided to come to holland for christams. i'm going to be an optimist and not write anything negative about this now. it's too far away to think about now anyway. but yes, holland, is it terrible cold there in winter? i wanna bike my ass off while high (well maybe... i don't know if i can smoke the pot anymore since those reoccurring bad episodes involving me and pot and the anxiety, but god, i'm going to be in amsterdam so i better just suck it up...) From there i go to

the India. this is the trip i've been waiting for all my life.... i've spent years reading Indian novels and being obsessed with the land of babu Gandhi. this trip however is making me anxious... just circumstances relating to the traveling there etc etc. anxiety makes my stomach hurt like eating glass (yeah i eat broken windows all the time ok...). and it doesn't go away for long periods of time. i can't go to sleep because i feel anxious and then i get anxious that i'm not asleep and i have to get up in too few hours. it's a bad cycle.

louis exgirlfriend/best friend is planning to join us on our India adventures. this makes me anxious. but i shouldn't care. i'm not worried for typical reasons like "oh my god, what if he falls in love with her again blabhalbhlahb" i'm creating some crazy jealous anxiety over their connection that has held them together for so long and what if i don't fit into it and i can't travel with them. i don't want this trip to be bad. i soooo don't want this trip to be bad. and it's india, it's going to be SOOOOO hard. the last thing i wanna be is the crazy girlfriend. blah. if all goes as planned from India we will head to

Taiwan in March. this here is taiwan. god what beauty awaits us!!!! i haven't researched it enough so i don't really know what to write about taiwan. i'm assuming that it will be the same situation work wise as korea, mad money when you find the right job teaching bratty rich kids their abc's. i'm not feeling the love for my job of late. our school is merging with another school that has moved in to our school with their kindergarten (we only teach elementary kids starting in the late afternoon). i think our school and the new school made some deal with yours truly being the pawn who was going to be used to teach at both schools. meaning that the new school thought they were going to get an english teacher for free. i declared that when my contract was up (oct 9th) i would not renew and i would quit. there is no way in hell i am coming in at 10 am every morning again. after much intolerance on my part and much begging on their part i agreed to come in at 1pm everyday. i still don't like it.

our new plan is to stay in Taiwan until September and then take the trans Siberian railway half way around the world!!! well, looking at it on a map it looks like half way around the world!!!
this trip looks unbelievable and unimaginable! i'm not letting myself dare to dream yet because everything seems to be too good. but this is the plan. i'm rambling too much today, maybe it's because i haven't written a blog posting in awhile. i dunno. when ever i start writing it's negative, too emotional and or about my relationship. these are not the things i want to bore you with dear reader. i want to spark the travel bug withing you and get you to join me on a train that goes 10,000 km across two continents.... yes yes... yes.....

eye candy

2007-09-02T22:51:00.000+09:00

what we do for fun because we have nothing else to do. but it's ok.. the video above actually scares the shit out of me. and you can see my underwear.

louis is teaching me how to play the guitar and now it hurts to type here. my hands have been causing me a multitude of problems lately. i'm a crabby ol' whitehairedwitchbagwitharthriticfingers waybeforemytime. the end.

but not really the end because i could ramble all day. this weekend was a semi bag of shit. i'm back on birth control after my week of fakeperiod and the birth control hormone injection back into my system makes me a messed up freak. the xanax brings me back. which is really too bad.
i need to stop writing before more anymore bullshit flows from my fingerlips.

love lover

agosto finito!

2007-08-31T13:33:00.001+09:00

It's over, August is over and thank fuck for that! This had to be one of the hardest months ever and now it's done. glory glory. School is back to the normal starting time of lateness, where i get myself in there by 2:20 each day. this means back to yoga morning classes and getting to stay at the gym for 3 hours a day. this equals happiness. It's a great cycle of me feeling normal and therefore not fighting with the boy that i'm a smitten kitten with. but we still fight. and i've turned into a throwing, screaming crazy sometime over the past month too, and hopefully i will shed that skin and leave it to rot with august.

September makes me happy. last year september saw me recovered from the salmonella hell that poisoned me for most of the month. and it also brought me decisions (because i don't bring them to myself that's for sure) one of which was to come to korea and i'm happy that i came here. I'm soooo happy that i came here. and most of it is due to meeting louis. ~~too cheesy!~~

soup is nice and makes me happy, as does bread and cheese which i have just ate a mountain of. missing people (even though this is sad) makes me happy because i know i have made strong connections with people and i think about them and they think about me.. (you better be freaking thinking about me assholes!). korea is the land of lacking connections to people. but that is a sad thing so i'm not going to digress.

blogging funnily enough makes me happy. it's too bad that now i've started to narrate my life in my head in lieu of making a post.

ciao bella!

weekend fun

2007-08-29T13:44:00.000+09:00

Over the weekend we went to Cheongchon and Gangchon two small towns in the Gangwon-do province. Cheongchon was a hole in the ground. After sleeping in an awesome round bed love motel (love motels are motels used mostly by hookers and business men or husbands or what not, and they are pretty cheap and are usually pretty clean and nice), we rented bikes to bike around Cheongchon's brown dirty ugly lake. My god, lonely planet told us that this was the gateway into the east of korea, well it was the gateway into grumpy andrea et louis. We moved on to Gangchon which is a town 30 min away by bus (it costs 80 cents to take the bus there, i love korea's cheap transit!). gangchon is notorious for being the student party town and as soon as our bus pulled in we saw lines of scooters, ATVs and bikes for rent. YEE HAW!

We rented a scooter which was amazing, and i actually drove the thing which i though i wouldn't be able to do. Of course i drove like a freaking granny and would slow down 100 meters from anything, but hey i drove. so if it counts as driving, i drove for my first time ever! I have heard that everyone in Taiwan has a scooter so i' m hoping that when we move there we get scooter s too. It's kind of the laziest form of fun, i kept thinking about how this would be so much fun on a bike, but god, all that pedal work! We also took a spill off the scooter...doh.... but luckily we were turning and going ohhhh about 2 km an hour when we fell.

when we were in Cheongchon we ended up finding this outdoor pool (in the middle of nowhere it seemed) and spending some hours cooling off there. Beside the outdoor pool was this weird zoo/amusement park that was totally run down and semi decrepit. This is the video of me harassing the poor caged monkey. There were even bears there in these tiny cages. it was SOOO sad, we couldn't' figure out how they had the money to run the place, because it was also a ghost town. the zoo seemed to exemplify korea. I feel so ignorant / arrogant making blatant statements about korean culture and what it's like here, because who the hell am i to judge/impose my cultural idealism etc etc, but sometimes i'm just like "ohhhh korea, you are so ...korean...." The zoo was like that. built and let go.

tiny town

2007-08-21T10:45:00.000+09:00

I belong back in the 20's where all the ladies go to finishing schools and are all lesbo, knitting and making embroidered goddesses with hair the looks like mine. Well maybe in my mind i belong there, so maybe i'll just romanticise about it for awhile. because the romanticising stops when you have to think about what they did after the finishing school (well the white ladies with the money who went to the finishing school) when they probably left all their lesbos lovers and went off to be beaten by the ex solider husband and never became the car mechanic with the embroidered tool holders. this sounds like a bad movie. i bet it is a bad movie.

All around me korean children are armed with nets and are out and about catching dragonflies and butterflies and other flies that are swarming around the semi suburban landscape.

There are these huge bugs in the trees that make this electrical sounding sound that i can't get over. At first i though it was a bird gone electric or super crazy wire noises but it's not it's a bug. One of my students came to class with one of these giant ugly looking things in his pocket. While screaming and swatting him and the bug with my book i managed to get him to trow it out the window. In the end of it all the bug wasn't that big, but all i could think about was it getting tangled in my hair.

i love you mary blair.

"If I could put my words in song
And tell what's there enjoyed,
All men would to my gardens throng,
And leave the cities void."

green tea ice cream yum

2007-08-16T14:06:00.000+09:00

it's hot...soo hot, too hot and humid like a mutherfucker to boot. for example you put some chips in a bowl to share over a nice friendly monopoly game and by the end of the game the chips are soggy because of the humidity! WTF! and i know, you are thinking, oh andrea... it takes 6 hours to play monopoly that's why you had soggy chips but no...we even finished the game way early.. then there is the cereal that goes soggy inside the bag inside the box. and jenny warned me about drying your clothes and how it takes 3 days for them to dry i was all like sure sure....whatever..but no..it takes 3 days for them to dry.

a whole bunch of us were supposed to go camping this weekend on the islands just an hour or 2 outside of seoul, but thank you monsoon for ruining our plans of tents and bonfires. this would also be the fist time in a longgggggg time that i would hang out with the windsor crew (there were at one time about 40 kids here from windsor ontairo teaching, but now i think about 10 of them remain) which i was really looking forward to. A girl named andrea from windsor used to work at my school and we became friends and then i became friends with all her friends which was like having friends again!!!! but then andrea left and that was sort of my connection to the group..... but whatever.. i'm not going to whine about not having friends because it's not that hard to meet people here if you really want to.

yesterday was a national holiday, maybe another independence day (i think there are about 5 of them!) so louis and i spent the day lazing around, going to the gym and drinking and eating bad food to counterbalance our productive gym session. we ended up playing pictionary at a terrible bar with a sports theme to it... but the pictionary was fun (except when i got the word sonar and felt like an idiot because i really didn't know what the hell sonar was...) anyway, it was amazingly wonderful to have a mid week day off of work.....and of course spend it with louis. i don't understand how we are not sick of each other yet.....it seems like it's going the opposite way and we are becoming more obsessed with each other. the whole korea situation makes it this way though. it's intense here! you don't know many people, you can't speak the language, you are lacking in friends etc etc this must lead somewhat to the intensity of our relationship. but i love it and i wouldn't want it any other way.

the sun is beaming in the window and i'm happy that it hasn't rained yet today.

sushi x 10

2007-08-14T20:44:00.000+09:00

japan, oh japan. how can i sing your praises so, maybe in a magically magic way and then magically korea will become you....

infrastructure that is competent and working, bicycles bicycles bicycles and bicycle lanes that are not part of the sidewalk which is filled with people. where did poor little Korea go wrong?! the kids here are taught to hate hate hate their slanty eyed neighbours from such an early age due to the atrocities that the Korean people endured during the loooong japanese occupation in korea. but come on, it's over....japan admit that you were wrong, get on it with it. korea is only kicking itself in the ass by ignoring everything about japan and not
applying their techniques to the development of korea... or something....

and sticker booths are everywhere.

instant satisfaction

2007-08-10T06:51:00.001+09:00

my instant camera that i ordered online from the korean ebay-e type store, came in the mail today! Happy bday to me! Of course i spent the morning taking pictures of the many little children swarming all around me and ended up wasting my precious film on their grubby little faces... haha.. i don't really mean that...

This picture however was not taken by an instant camera of that kind, but an instant camera of another. It's Friday and thank fuck! I'm exhausted from this week. I only slept for 4 hours last night which leaves me feeling like a bag of shit. But we are going to japan tonight so i gotta pull it together or just try try try tyrrrrrrryyyy to sleep on the bus/train/boat combo - which i know i probably won't end up doing. Anyway, it's leaving season here in Korea, most of the people i've met here have now left. It's a strange feeling because you make these sort of strange friendships with people knowing that you are all the opposite of static from here on in. It leads to strange goodbyes that's for sure! Lisa left last night and it was like, "well see you around", which is like WTF no!!!! it's not see you around, maybe i won't ever see you again! but ya, no it's still see you around.....

cats and dogs

2007-08-09T14:45:00.000+09:00

the monsoon and i are not friends. Before life was ok between us, it seemed that whenever it was raining i was conveniently inside somewhere or other...the gym, my little apartment, school... oh ho ho...not anymore.... Because I'm me of course i still bike through the rain, but now it's like biking through a swimming pool. I always just assume that oh...the rain has GOT to stop sometime, and of course this stopping time will magically coincide with my departure time. but no, it's swimming pools ahoy and wet pants and dangerously slippy flip flops that make me go flip flop flying at every step on the wet tiled curbs, lane ways etc etc...So today i was all like, "that's it!! it's lunchtime i have some time i will bike home" and literally as soon as i stepped out of the door the skies opened up... why am i rambling about the weather...maybe life is boring today. Here is a photo of a zucchini that says something in Hangul... wait it says ah-ho-ban. yeah...i have no idea... but it did freak me out when i took off the packaging and it was all like ah-ho-ban andrea.. ah-ho-ban.

hungry...

2007-08-08T19:36:00.000+09:00

i just got home from school (i always feel like a kid when i say that or write it.... on the other end of the spectrum when i say my kids or my children (instead of my students) i feel like a granny) and i'm hungry. food rules my life. it's kind of unfair. many reasons and reasonettes and much outrage on my part that i am so controlled by it. basically if it's not put in my body at the exact time i'm hungry i turn into a beast...and for those who live with me i would say i become more like a beast of burden. ~~thank god i'm such a gem or i would end up alone in this world.~~

This picture is from our recent trip to ullengdo, a small island off the coast of korea. The island was actually a pirate island years and years ago.... but it's the freaking middle of nowhere (3hrs ferry ride that was soooooo fast and bumpy!) i think it was more like a pirates retirement island. the koreans are embarrassed about this bootylicious past and there are no plaques or theme parks of any kind commemerating their history. Ullengdo like most of the country side in korea, was absolutely breathtaking. Most of the time I felt like i was in the jungle in south America, the lushness of it all makes you want to paint the world green...or something like that... Louis (he's french it's louie) and I hiked our asses off and got across the mountains and through the island in 2 days. We also were accosted by a pastor to stay at his house, hitch hiked with a tour bus filled with a korean family and were woken up at 5 in the morning when we camped by accident on the army's terrain. The situation was pretty funny (though not funny at all) because i was half asleep and trying to speak broken korean to a military man with a huge gun ... we actually tried to convince them to let us stay and sleep for a few more hours... this did NOT fly..... trips are fun!

This weekend we are going to japan to party it up in the wilderness....

as we speak i am being pampered with baguette and brie. de-lish.

sweet potato pie

2007-08-07T17:39:00.000+09:00

i like this picture because i look about 12 years old in it. it also reminds me of the winter that i stole mark bucks bunny fur hat and usually slept in a pile with 4 or 5 roommates/friends/lovers/cats. i am at school right now and my stomach hurts because i tried to eat 4 sweet potatoes in a row. gluttony sweet potato styles.

So this blog is probably going to end up being an extension of my live journal, which was i guess an extension of my hairballs site... by which i mean that the sole purpose of this blog will be to narrate the voices in my head to you dear reader. so I'm guessing this will be a messing of the mind etc etc etc.

ps. life is great.

2007-08-03T13:47:00.000+09:00

it's a yeasty irsh cake... hrm...