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!

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.

We are now settled and getting cozy in our town of Gijang. Cozy is a nice way of putting it, because our studio apartment Katy’s school set us up in is very, very… cozy. Actually, we just learned that the Korean name for such apartments is wonrum. Get it? Get it? No worries though… this type of apartment is generally what English teachers get. Ours is at least clean, somewhat modernized, and within walking distance to everything we need. The only con is that we basically have to do a backbend over our bathroom sink to wash our hair.

In one shot you can see our kitchen, laundry room, bathroom, dining room, living room, and bedroom.

Over the weekend, we decided to explore some neat things our town has to offer. We hiked up a nearby mountain and got a great view of Gijang. We could even see how close the sea is to our house! Lots of other people were hiking that day and when we reached the peak, a couple of different families offered us some of their food after seeing we only brought a couple of oranges with us. Apparently, the big thing is to bring a huge spread up to the top of the mountain and eat there for lunch. We heard some families even bring grills with them! Anyway, one family in particular made us sit down and eat their meal with them. Delicious!

This is the view of our town from the top of the mountain.

The happy hikers.

This is the nice family who shared their kimchee with us.

We took a different way down and came across a small Buddhist temple. Some of the women in the kitchen made us come in and they gave us fruit and coffee. One of the monks even sat down with us and tried out some of his English. After we ate, we were full and we hadn’t even paid for any food all day! So far in our journey, we’ve encountered nothing but hospitality and generosity. After a short tour the facilities, the monk pointed us up towards a fresh spring, and we followed a path up to find some of the most delicious water we’ve ever had.

Buddha-belly luck!

It's like you can see the inner peace in my eyes.

Best. Water. Ever.

Sorry it’s been so long between posts. We’ll try to be better! Don’t forget about us! We’re still alive!  And if you want to see more pictures, you can check out our gallery in the sidebar or my (Katy’s) facebook page.

The gods smiled upon us when EPIK chose to have our orientation in Cheonan.  While the fabulous EPIK staff is busting their bums teaching us the language, pedagogy, and how to negotiate our way around Korea, we enlisted some fabulous people of our own to show us the ropes of Korean karaoke, called noraebang.   My (Katy) dear, dear friend Tracy and her wonderful husband D have been living in Cheonan for the last year teaching English at a private school, and we were lucky enough to have our first week here during their last week.

Tracy and D met us at the Dankook University, where we are staying, and poured their year’s worth of acquired knowledge into our brains as they took us to their apartment and then out for some Korean barbeque with some of their other teacher friends.  After the delicious lesson in grilling pork right at the table and wrapping it in a lettuce leaf (so good!), we headed off to a bar to consume countless kettles of rice wine and then left to go sing the night away!

The noraebang was AMAZING.  Each group gets their own little room to sing to their hearts content, so the group of us piled in to do our thing.  I’m not even sure how long we all stayed out, but our university dorms are locked between 1 and 5, so instead of getting in before 1, we decided our time with D and Tracy was so precious that we’d just stay out until the doors opened back up.  So that’s what we did!

It didn’t prepare us too well for the tour of the Korean folk village we took a field trip to this morning though.  I was pretty miserable between the pounding headache, crappy cold weather, and awful Korean food, but there we saw some great traditional performances while were were there and…

MORE NORAEBANG!  I swear, Korea and I were meant to be.  We had a badass charter bus to get back to the University and it was decked out with neon cosmic decor on the ceiling, flashing colored LEDs, a television screen, tambourines, and a microphone.  Yes, we karaoked the whole trip back.  BRILLIANT.  I of course wooed the passengers with a rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, which actually was really bad because I still have a hoarse throat from the night before when I lost my voice.

If I get to noraebang this much the rest of the year, I may never leave this wonderful land.  Sorry, folks, but I have priorities.