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.