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