The weekends

This weekend has been fun, again typical of my stay here in Korea, the weekends involve a lot of drinking, talking, sitting in the sun, and most notably, zero sleep.

I'm currently sitting in a cafe after my morning class, I am very very tired, I worked out that I did not sleep between 9am Saturday and midnight Sunday. On Saturday morning we, being the usual group of friends, met in Sinsa and made our way to the outdoor swimming pool nearby. Now, anyone would think that going swimming is a fairly simple and fairly relaxed affair, but as with everything in Korea there are odd rules; firstly you must, I repeat must be wearing a hat at all times, whether it be a swimming hat, beanie or baseball cap, you must wear one, the reasoning behind this baffles me, maybe it's to stop unwanted pregnancies from sharing the same water. The next oddity is that what seems to be a routine part of the swimming process is the lifeguard whistling periodically indicating that everyone gets out of the pool, only to then be told that you may re-enter.
Swimming was excellent, though some off thing seems to have happened to my skin, it has gone red and hurts to the touch, I will see medical advice and get back to you with the diagnosis.
One more note, is that I met a famous person, though unknown to me, he is actually s member of one of the most popular boy bands in Korea 2am, he was very cute looking, I guess around 18 years old, and very camp, but he seemed very popular as there was a group of photographers and a film crew surrounding him. I said a few strange things to him in Korean, mostly along the lines of hello and a brief introduction to my 'best friend' who happened to be a greenfly which had been sitting my arm for about 20 minutes.

Around 8 or 9 we made out way home to get ready for the night's leaving parties, Joe, an Australian and one of my best friend here leaves today, which is a sad occasion, but it's all part of the process. The night went well and we saw off our departing friends, Joe and Amanda, Amanda being a member of the wider friendship circle, who I seem to have met a few times but never remember, still she seemed like a nice girl. Around 8am I roused back to semi-consciousness sitting in a hot pool in a Jim Chil Bang (Sauna). I made my way home and had a shower before heading off to meet the guys in a park, for relaxation and what I was hoping to be sleep time, but little of this emerged, and for the first 3 hours it ended up just being Hyewon and I, which was cool, but being in a two-some doesn't allow much opportunity for sleep. Around 4 or 5 we had a pretty good group at the park, so we filled our time with beer, football and the usual wacky conversations, ranging from serious issues to the absurd. Around 8pm we made our way to Itaewon to meet Bora and her mum, it was fun and I had a really tasty Thai green curry.

In all the weekend was fun, though as I say run-of-the-mill, it still baffles me how humanity has managed to evolve at a fantastic rate, creating the arts and sciences, but still feel it necessary to spend more time working than they dedicate to leisure or hobbies, something has obviously gone wrong here seeing as cutting back on work time would render unemployment unnecessary, thus balancing social situations and I can only assume the global economy. Though the thoughts which result from my meandering social inquiries are rarely accurate or well informed.

Thanks for reading my blog guys, and just so you know the veil of malcontent which many of you have noted from the style in which I document my experiences is not a reflection on the way I go about my life, it is merely the result of fatigue, maybe I will make an entry when slightly drunk or rested, maybe then my style of writing will seem more jovial and contented.

Korean fallacies

Before you make the obvious and not funny joke regarding the name of the title of this entry, no it is not about Korean people's penis', fallacies not phallus'.

There are many purely fabricated stories floating around this little off-shoot peninsula of East Asia. Before I enlighten you to the mystery of "Fan-death" and the "Korean tongue syndrome", I will mention a couple of the strangest conversations I have ever had.

One student when we were discussing food, allergies, diets and vegetarianism, was convinced, and trying to inform me that a man is not a 'real man' if he does not eat meat or fish, apparently it is a fairly common belief that men need many forms of ingested aphrodisiacs to enable him to 'perform' in the baby making process. This student of mine, in the common broken English of newly enrolled language students (this is not an insult to language students or Korean people, for I attempt in vain to study Korean), this student tried to tell me that a non-carnivorous human could indeed not sustain an erection, due to the language difficulties I could not tell if this was a question or an attempt to inform me of problems I may endure. Two words, "VERY strange".

Fan death refers to sleeping with a fan on in your bedroom, apparently a "Scientific" study here in Korea found that sleeping in a room with a fan on reduces the levels of oxygen so dramatically that the dormant person will die from suffocation. After informing people that I have indeed slept in rooms with a fan on and consequently not died, therefore this story is balderdash, I was told that I am indeed wrong due to the 'Scientific' study proving the contrary to my anecdotal evidence.

The next is the story about Korean people's tongue's being different, therefore people needing tongue surgery in order to speak English correctly. I am yet to come up with a response to this story, I am literally struck-dumb.

I find stories such as these one of the fantastic parts of living abroad, they are the subtle differences that make life here surreal and interesting, I suppose we have urban myths of our own in the UK, but it's not the same when you have heard them all of your life in your native tongue, they must be heard first time, spoken in broken English from and unlikely source, and then the affect is perfect, the classic 'lost in translation and culture story'.

Fun days out

One thing is pivotal on determining whether you have a good or a bad weekend in Korea and that is the weather, Korea hosts a mixture of indoor and outdoor activities, but due to the inebriation effects of alcohol the indoor events, which are dominated by drinking, are harder to document or recall.

Here is a picture from Ellie's birthday, some people, myself not included, have access to the roofs of their building, creating a great space for relaxing. The day was dominated by good food (which I must mention due to our discovery of an amazing cheese shop) and wine. Good times were had.


If the weather is good we attempt to make trips to one of the many parks in Seoul, just like in the UK they are well known but underused, especially by me. It's a good place to kick back and relax, and certainly beats sitting in my bewilderingly hot apartment. In this picture I'm pretending I know how to play chess, I took my time making moves to pretend that I had a strategy and even feign that I was thinking more than one move ahead.

So far whilst being in Korea I have made it to the beach a meagre three times, the most recent was an overnight camping trip to Donghae, this was a wind and rain filled camp-out, but it was worth it, even if we did spend most of the time in Hoff (beer hall/ snack bar). Still could be worse, I swam in the sea and used my tent.


Check in again at a later date....

Sam and Ayumi

There have been a few highlights of my time in Korea, others being skiing, hiking and swimming in the sea.

The day I returned from visiting Pusan and Namhae I had messages on the Internet from Mule and Ayumi saying that they were in Seoul and wanted to meet up.

We had a cool day in the Park and Youido. Here's a photo to prove it.


I had a great time attempting to pretend that I can speak Korean and possibly less convincingly I pretended that I knew what was in Seoul and where the best places to go are.

Good times, I have really enjoyed the visits from my friends, it's strange how pleasant a bit of home familiarity is when you are living away from home.

First six months in Korea

OK so my first six months in Korea has been a mixed bag. I will systematically summarise the good times, the best times, the occasional bad time and what seems to dominate the agenda here, the repetitive.
Once arriving in Korea I remember thinking about once again being in a place I knew literally nothing about, badly prepared, money issues, and only being vaguely prepared for what was to come, solitude seemed to be the only worry present in my mind.

My first day was interesting: the area where I live, literally 100 yards away from the school is really nice, urban and busy yet with it's own charm, though I'm sure this is just a generic Korean charm. After arriving I met the staff and went for a walk and food with the boss Ms Park and Mr Moon one of the receptionists, it was interesting and on the way they stopped in a shop and bought me a very ugly bed spread, which I think is great. It was odd that the people assigned to showing me around seem to be the only staff members who can not speak English. This was both amusing and exhausting seeing as I hadn't slept in a long time and was still half drunk from the flights medicinal drinking.


My time over the first six months in Korea has been spent; procrastinating, attempting to learn Korean, making new friends, drinking, eating, experimenting with facial hair, cutting my hair off and generally trying to work out what to do next whilst enjoying the present.




To date work has been interesting, though it is very repetitive, I spend most of the week looking forward to the weekend and attempting to do something vaguely productive in the week. My weekends though, have been mostly spent drinking too much, playing the foreigner idiot aimlessly exploring and with little or no culture involved. But life is good, money is being saved, and fun times are being had, it's just odd that the life of work is spent mostly hoping for the times that you will not be working. Despite my vocal malcontent I am enjoying it here, and I do like my job, I'm just once again questioning what the ultimate goal of everything is, dumb hey.

My job consists of 3 parts, the first is teaching children between the ages of 9 and 12. This part of my job consists of attempting to teach English through various methods, though the only one which I can see working is where I can get them to speak English without them noticing, for this I mainly bribe them with candy and game time.
The second part is teaching Middle school children between the ages of 12 and 15, these kids are either the nicest, or are as I like to put it "little shits". But the motives for their awkwardness ranges from them either being painfully shy or just plain insolence. I suppose it's too much to ask for young teenagers to be dedicated students.
The third part of my job involves teaching adults, this is by far my favourite part, not least due to the dedication of the students, but due to the fact that they are more interesting people in general.