Cory And Katy

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.