what else to do on a saturday night...

omg. loves it.

where the lazy things are

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 the 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 the cat 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.

i'm a mess, in this picture a glowing mess. I sent coffee cups flying and then i stink like coffee and the kitchen is covered in stinky grinds and morning time bliss 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, we all know halloween is the best holiday when you are gay.  it's like a present for the queers and i love it. and i miss it.

ouch my tonsills!

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. This i find kind of interesting. 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!  doctors here 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. I wish i had another day off work. 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

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 the pair of us.

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!

jeju do etc etc

For Chuseok (korean thanksgiving) we 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 at all like what we expected. Everyone 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 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 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 there were also loud speakers everywhere!! And they were pumping out bad bad bad music (like chim chimmy chim chim from mary poppins!). We hitched a ride with a nice family in a large car and 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

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 as a tourist. THIS village on jeju do was pretty much the opposite. Even though we saw a tour group being led around, we felt sooooo intrusive like we were invasive 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, so huge cold and wet and very 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 mary poppins music) and coloured neon lights everywhere! bahhhhhhhhhhhh. Why does this happen here? It feels like things are dressed up in the most ridiculous way. Anyway  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 someone did and 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 in love with etc etc, but as soon as we started biking the next day that high wore off, but really 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.

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 and im done. 

 i really don't feel like i'm ready to leave korea, but ohhhh my god am i ready to leave my freaking job. 

Also I have finally made some gym friends. After three months at the gym someone finally talked to me  My gym is not frequented by foreigners so it was a tuff one to make friends at.  Anyway, one new friend 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 there is a language barrier, we ended up talking for hours.

 All right, it's Saturday and i'm off to the gyno!

god speed.

old videos from summer vacation

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

oh the korean gift sets!

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....

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 until the last possible minute. maybe it will be a few days before, who knows.  i just have to have some blind faith that it will happen and work out because most things here are like that.

When i came to korea i had very little information from my recruiter about what date i would actually come until probably the week before i got on the plane.

I'm terrible excited to go to holland. I get to see my niece whom I've never met,  and of course see my sister and her husband. My dad has also decided to come to holland for Christmas. 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 not seeing your family for some time and then here you go, all together again 24/7 for a week does bring up some...feelings. 

I would like to 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 be able to do it) 

 From there I go to...

the India. this is the trip I've been excitied for forever.  Ii've spent years reading Indian novels and being obsessed with the land of babu Gandhi. I am feeling anxious also, which makes my stomach hurt like eating glass (yeah i eat broken windows all the time ok so I know what that feels like). This feeling 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.

Then the plan is Taiwan. 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,a lot of money when you find the right job teaching 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 building, and they have a 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.

I'm also dreaming that in September to 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. i'm rambling too much today, maybe it's because i haven't written a blog posting in awhile.  when ever i start writing it's very negative, or too emotional or about my relationship with Lois and how I feel anxious all.the.time. 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.....

agosto finito!

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 very happy that i came here.

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!)

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

Over the weekend we went to Cheongchon and Gangchon two small towns in the Gangwon-do province. Cheongchon was a hole in the ground really though.  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 at $30 a night and are usually pretty clean and the love decor can be quite pleasing), 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). 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. 

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! 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, oops! 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 certain aspects of architecture and profit and no planning in korea. I feel so ignorant / arrogant making blatant blanket statements about korean culture (and architecture and planning) 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

I belong back in the 20's where all the ladies go to finishing schools and are all lesbos, 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 cicada. 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

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! and i know, you are thinking, oh andrea  it takes like 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 that social group. but 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 feel like there are 3 independence day holidays) 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. the whole expat 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  relationships.

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

sushi x 10

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. the kids here in korea are taught to hate hate hate their neighbours from such an early age due to the atrocities that

the Korean people endured during the loooong japanese occupation in korea. come on Japan admit that you were wrong, get on it with it. 

We took the train (the fast train to Busan is so reasonably priced and gets you across the country in 4.5 hours). Then we got to the ferry terminal by taxi, and then took a ferry to Fukuoka. It was super early when we arrived, we fell asleep in the park like the gross travelers we are.

 

And also sticker booths are everywhere.

instant satisfaction

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

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, maybe the gym, my little apartment, or school... oh ho ho...friend no more.

 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-bak. yeah...i have no idea... but it did freak me out when i took off the packaging and it was all like ah-ho-bak andrea.. ah-ho-bak.

hungry...

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, it's in the middle of nowhere (3hrs ferry ride out east from any land) Also I think it was more like a pirates retirement island. the koreans seem to be 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, 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 (we hung out in the church for a bit), we hitch hiked with a mini tour bus filled with a korean family and sank bus karakoe with them, and we 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 soilder boy 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 and we had to pack up the tent and leave.

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

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 ps. life is great.

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