Cory And Katy

So starting July 1st I will be starting my new job at a public school. I will be teaching a middle school that is about a 10 minute walk from our apartment. One of our friends left the middle school and is heading back to the States for a bit, and I ended up getting his job. It turned out to work out pretty well because I really wanted a job in our town. They originally wanted to stick me in a school that is an hour bus ride north of our town. So the fact that I don’t have to use public transportation to go to work is a big plus. Some other pluses are that Katy’s and my holidays/vacations are going to coincide so we have the ability to travel. Also I will be working with a good friend for a short while until he leaves in August. When I start my new job I will post up pictures of my school and students. So keep checking back for more updates! Also if you click on the pictures in the right sidebar you will go to our photo gallery where you can see our photos and make comments! Cheers!

For those of you who haven’t heard of Girl Generation, the K-pop sensation, it’s time to get in the know. Why? Because I’m their newest member!

Yeah, baby! I’m famous!

We took advantage of a four day weekend we had for Buddha’s birthday and a holiday called Children’s Day to take a trip to Seoul. On the first day, we mostly wandered around, but everywhere we went, we noticed policemen gathering around the entrances of subways wearing riot gear. At one point, we talked to a few of them and discovered they had been transported up to Seoul from Busan, and nobody was really sure why. The cops in Korea are much nicer than American cops though, and they let us take a picture with them.

As we made our way over to a “Hot Pink Parade” that was supposed to kick-off Seoul’s annual “Hi Seoul” festival, we noticed policemen that weren’t quite as friendly and LOTS of them.

It turns out, the parade was canceled due to a demonstration being held that night. The protest was due to it being the 1 year anniversary of South Korea allowing the import of US beef. Apparently, there was an embassy advisory for American’s to avoid the area, but we didn’t know that, so we were Canadian for the night. We enjoyed the folk music though, and got the hell out of the way whenever the cops started rushing at whatever crowd we were in.

On our second day, we woke up early to make our way to the start of our DMZ tour. The first stop of the tour was at Dorasan station, the last train station in South Korea, before a train would hypothetically get to North Korea and then hook up with the Trans-Siberian railway. The train no longer runs though, because North Korea doesn’t want South Koreans to go through their country. George Bush actually visited the station in 2002 (?) and signed a railroad tie that is on display inside the station, along with a giant poster of him signing it. At the station, they had passport stamps that one would hypothetically get if they traveled to North Korea, so we got a little crazy with stamping things. Including our passports. Don’t tell anyone.

This billboard was outside the station, next to the tracks.

After the station we went to the Dora observatory where we could actually see a town in North Korea, and when we looked through the binoculars available to us, we would even see people walking down the street and plowing fields.

This is the closest we'll probably ever get to North Korea.

When we finished at the Dora observatory, we took a monorail down into a tunnel that the North Koreans dug and the South Koreans discovered in 1978. It was only 50 miles north of Seoul and big enough for 30,000 North Korean soldiers to get through in just one hour. However, on the other side of the DMZ, the North Koreans are proclaiming the South Koreans dug the tunnel. He says, she says.

Finally, we ended our DMZ day with a big bulgogi meal. Because of the holiday weekend, we were unable to go to the city on the border where the UN talks are held, but maybe we’ll go again someday and check it out.

Upon our arrival back in Seoul, we walked through the area where the protest was the night before and discovered that the festival was going on like nothing ever happened. We arrived just in time for mask making! We got to spend an hour just sitting in the nice green grass, listening to bands play, and decoration white cardboard masks with floam. We were both quite proud of our finished products:

After our masks, we explored the grounds around the nearby Gwanghwamun Palace, where King Sejong revealed the Hangul alphabet to his kingdom. It was pretty, but it was just more old Korean architecture. Here are some pictures:

The next day we met up with our friend Lorna and did some traditional touristy things like checked out the markets and went up Seoul Tower. Never heard of it? Don’t worry, a picture comes forthwith:

When we came down from the tower, we ran into one of the coolest performances I’ve seen in Korea. Tibetan monks were in town for a China Festival and they performed incredible martial arts. They also had a mini-monk who was amazing:

maybe if we take just a few more months of hapkido...

What else happened that night? Oh yeah, we tried to go clubbing with some friends, but ended up in a part of town where most of bars were transgender clubs where they didn’t want us to come in. On the plus side, these are some of the most beautiful men I’ve ever seen:

Other fun stuff happened too, but I just don’t feel like writing about it anymore. And I’m sure you don’t feel like reading about it, so I guess we’re even.

This was a weekend filled with new and excited experiences. I’ve been hearing a lot about something called “Dr. Fish” since I’ve got here, so on Thursday night, I finally decided to go with my friends Greta and Star to check out a Dr. Fish cafe.

Dr. Fish are little fish who eat dead skin cells. It’s like the opposite of sushi- fish who eat raw human. At the Dr. Fish cafe (which we spent over an hour looking for) we enjoyed some food and drinks before heading over to fish-filled troughs which we stuck our feet in and let the fish have their way with us. Need a visual?

Feasting Fish

So, this isn’t actually one of our feet, but we all forgot our cameras, so I stole this off of somebody else’s blog. The feeling of the fish was really, really weird for the first half hour. Watching a fish swim at your foot so that he can chew on it is a little freaky. After half an hour though, the nibbling sensation just began to feel like a mini massage.

Friday, Star and I left work early to meet up with Cory and continue our fishy fun at an anchovy festival. My town, Gijang, is the anchovy festival capital of South Korea, and boy, do they know how to get down with their fish.

mmmm, mouthwatering cuisine

Thank goodness... I had a hankering for random whale parts.

I don't even know what this is.

This a very traditional way of harvesting the anchovies... but we definitely got smacked by flying anchovies more than once, and that stank don't go away.

These ladies are popping off the anchovy heads and squeezing out the guts.

This lady used and abused us with her drunken dancing. At one point, she tried to physically force soju down my mouth. It worked out though, because her friends made up for it by buying us fried anchovies and beer!

Star and Cory doing their best impression of Daebyon Harbor's mascot anchovies

The anchovy festival was really great and as the only 3 foreigners there, Cory, Star, and I got a lot of attention. The festival’s PR people got a video of us and took pictures of us, and we left the harbor full of food, without paying for a thing. We can’t wait for the next festival!

Well, this past weekend I (Cory) finished my TESOL Certification and attended a TESOL conference in Haeundae. For those of you who don’t know, TESOL stands for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. A TESOL certificate is good to have here, because if I end up being an English teacher then I get extra pay. Plus, it’s nice to have on a resume. The gentleman is in picture above is the CEO of the ASIAN EFL Journal who hosted the conference and offered the certification course. I learned a lot about tasked based learning, which is supposed to be really effective here in Korea. Also, I met some really interesting people, including a guy who used to run Track and Cross Country back in high school, and ran the same distance of races as I did. He runs a lot of 10k races here, and we may end up getting together some time to run.

We have always told you that we are ninjas, but we think you never actually believed us. Are you calling us liars?! Well, folks, it is time for us to tell you that we told you so.

Tonight, we received our blue belts. For those of you unfamiliar with martial arts, the belts begin at white, then yellow, and then blue. However, when you are already ninjas, like we are, you get to go from white to blue, like we did. Yes!! We have blue belts!!

Do you want to see pictures? Yes? Well, here you go!

Koreans calculate age differently than we do in the states, which kind of sucks because we’re considered 1-2 years older. Koreans count the baby’s time in the mother’s womb as a year, so when a baby is born, s/he is already 1 year old. Then, all Koreans become one year older at the New Year. So, if a baby is born 2 weeks before the New Year, s/he is already 2 years old in Korean age, when s/he would be considered just 2 weeks old in Western cultures.

So, since we aged 2 years just by stepping off of the plane here, I think Cory’s 27th birthday was just a little less painful, because his Korean age (28) stayed the same.

To celebrate, Cory came to my (Katy’s) school and ate lunch with me and all the other subject teachers at my school. We had a great lunch and some delicious Korean chocolate cake. My co-teacher even presented him with singing Korean children. Not really, but some students who didn’t perform a song they learned in class very well came to the teacher’s lunch room and had to perform. It was adorable!

The big thrill of the night was the spa we went to in the evening. Korean spas are a big deal, and most are fed with natural spring water. We went to a new, ritzy spa with our friends Curran and Star. You have to get naked with all the Koreans and soak in delightful baths, so we wanted there to be at least two of us of each gender. We get stared at so much here anyway that we thought people might be straight up gawking at us in the spas. Fortunately, I think there is some sort of nonspoken rule about avoiding eye contact or something, because everyone in the spa was very respectful of everyone else’s privacy. Being naked with Koreans was much more fun than I thought it could be! The best part of the baths were the massage streams. Mmmmm. After soaking for 30-45 minutes, we got out and put on clothes given to us by the spa. Star and I joined Cory and Curran in the coed outdoor foot baths for some delightful foot-soaking before heading to all sorts of themed hot rooms. Yes… the rooms have a theme and they are hot. People like to just chill out and relax in them, but we were quite ADD and made the rounds to as many of the rooms as possible.

After the spa, we went to a burger joint that Star and her husband, Anthony, say are the “best burgers in Busan.” And they were delicious. No words, just picture:

This burger actually costs more than 4 hours at the spa. And it’s so worth every bite.

Mrs. Park is head of the english department at Katy’s school. At work she is pretty serious, but after work she is a ton of fun. In this video she is dancing with me while Katy and Star are enjoying the show.

After only a month into this adventure, I have been exposed to what may be my favorite cultural difference between South Koreans and U.S. Americans.  In SK, workplaces take out their employees on a somewhat frequent basis and actually ENCOURAGE the employees to drink too much.  We got to experience this cultural difference firsthand when Katy’s elementary school took us out to a seafood restaurant last week.

While you may be thinking, “Wow! A country where you get brownie points at work for drinking with your co-workers on someone else’s dime?!?! What could be better?!”  Well, stop thinking that.  When I say seafood restaurant, I mean a raw fish restaurant… and not good raw fish.  And when I say drink, I mean soju.  Soju is the Korean go-to alcohol, and it basically tastes like a weak vodka.  Raw fish + soju = fake swallowing.  Don’t get me wrong; we definitely tasted a few new things and did some obligatory shots of soju with the principal and vice-principal, but we were not to the point we couldn’t stand up straight, like many of our fellow teachers.

Mmmm, doesn't it make your mouth water?

How's that snail, Katy?

That good, eh?

What about that red-pointy thing, Cory?

Are you ready for seconds?

So after raw fish and soju, all of the teachers headed next door to noraebang.  We have some great videos of the event, but we’re still working on formatting them so we can embed them on our blog.

In other news, we now have internet at our apartment, so fear not, readers.  You will be getting more Cory and Katy action in the future.  Prepare yourselves accordingly.