Crowds and Coasters

Hello everyone,

So it's been 2 weeks since the last post, but you didn't really miss anything. Last weekend was a quiet one with no big adventures because Ali was sick. The only excitement was Ali getting a new haircut, which was a big change but that we both like now. This weekend, however, Ali and I went to the self-proclaimed happiest place on Earth, Everland.
Ali's new haircut

Now, probably like you, we'd never heard of Everland before we came to Korea. Once here, we heard that it was a big amusement park similar to Wonderland. However, when we read about it, we were surprised to see it regarded as one of the top three amusement parks in the world in terms of attendance. We'd been eager to see it for awhile, and this month they have a whole halloween theme going on so we thought now would be a good time to go. Korea doesn't really have Halloween. Some big grocery stores have in recent years put up decorations and starting selling costumes but there's still no trick-or-treating on the actual day.

Using the subway and a bus, the quickest time to get to Everland is about 2 and a half hours so we didn't make it there until 1:30pm. Once inside, it quickly lived it up to its repuation as one of the most visited theme parks in the world; there were thousands and thousands of people. We walked around for awhile and when we came near the Halloween parade, we were jam-packed with people. Ali started to lose her mind a little bit. It was the first Halloween parade we saw, though. We also saw a really nice garden with every color of flower, with halloween decorations everywhere. It did feel very un-Korea and a lot like home to be around Halloween stuff so that was nice.
Jesse in the rose garden

After some more aimless walking we decided to make our way towards the world's largest wooden roller coaster (according to Everland). We got in what looked like a long line up, but was moving at a normal pace, and waited for our first ride of the day. Well... after every corner we rounded, we saw that the line kept going, sometimes twisting and turning through railings, and never seemed to stop. Every time we thought we were close, our hopes would quickly deflate as we would see that what we thought was the end of the line was really just the beginning of a new even longer line. Definitely, the longest amusement park line we've ever been in. It was slightly longer than 2 hours and you would think that no 2 minute roller coaster ride could live up to that hype... well... as we suspected, it didn't. But it was a really good roller coaster and now we can kick off the "Been on the biggest wooden roller coaster" item from the bucket list.

Afterwards, we walked around some more and checked out some animal exhibits. Everland is also kind of like a zoo with several themed animal areas to look at. We went to a bird zoo and an African animal zoo. We saw lots of cool animals.
Jesse and some birds

After some dinner, we made our way to another ride called the Amazon Express. This was around 7pm and rides were now down to 50 minute waits. The ride was the standard, eight people sitting in a circular inter tube, bouncing off walls down a raging river.

We then went down to the Alpine Horror village, an area where the "ghouls and ghosts" come out at night. It ended up being people dressed up in various Halloween costumes, none of which seemed to be a ghost or a ghoul. By this time, it was 8:30 so we made our way back home.

The amusement park itself didn't have that many rides, and was probably comparable to Wonderland except for having way more people and way fewer rides. Not sure if we'll ever see that many people again in an amusement park. Ali's kids once told her that she should be there at 9:30 when it opens. Now we know how true that is.

Ali's school has finished building a new kindergarten floor so she'll start teaching in her new and amazing classrooms tomorrow.

In other news, school has been going good for both of us. Next week is Halloween and we're not sure if we'll get up to anything Halloween-related but we'll soon see.

Anyway, hope all is well at home,

Ali and Jesse

PIFF

Hi Everyone!

This weekend Jesse and I headed South for the Busan (formally Pusan - P and B are basically the same sound in Korean so the romanization changes) International Film Festival, or PIFF, for short. Jesse is much more of a movie buff than I am so this trip was really exciting for him. He went online the second tickets went on sale and got tickets to a bunch of movies and would check back daily and got more tickets through cancellations. He wanted to see a lot of movies each day, but I would hit my limit around two movies a day so, for a couple movies, he just went by himself.



We took the KTX (high-speed train) from Seoul to Busan on Friday night and got in to Busan around midnight. Jesse wanted to get up at 5 in the morning to line up for some extra movie tickets so we went to sleep right away. Unfortunately, Jesse forgot to set his alarm so he didn't wake up until 7, missing the morning line-up.

His first movie was Cruel Season - a documentary about Korean sanitation workers. We had actually been curious about them since we got here because the garbage here is picked up, not by garbage trucks, but by random people with these little carts that they just push through the streets. Apparently, they actually are employees of the sanitation department but the job has no respect and people constantly push them and yell at them and tell them they aren't allowed to speak - it sounds pretty awful.

The next one he saw was Son of Babylon - an Iraqi movie about a boy trying to find his father who had been missing since the Gulf War. This ended up being his favorite movie of the festival.

While he was at these first two movies, I met my friend Jenn and we had lunch and walked all around Busan, which was lots of fun.

At 5:00, we had a movie together called Archipelago. It was a British movie and I really enjoyed it. It was about a family and the son was going to Africa to volunteer - really good.

After that, we had to rush to our next movie, which was an outdoor movie, seating 5000 people. It was neat to sit outside and see a movie. It was like being at a drive-in, minus the cars. The movie was called Here Comes the Bride and it was from the Philippines. It was a totally insane movie about 5 people who switch bodies during a solar eclipse. It was a comedy and was really weird. What surprised me the most was that, Filipino sounds like English and Spanish mixed together. Half of it was just English talking but, apparently, that's what the language sounds like.

The Outdoor Theatre

After the movie we just walked around downtown and checked out Busan. We went to a casino and played some slot machines. I was pretty sure I was a slot machine expert after winning $60 my first time at a casino but this time I lost $30... oh well.

Jesse at the Canadian party, walking the red carpet... not really

The next day, we saw two movies. The first was a New Zealand film called Desert but it was about Koreans living in New Zealand so it was mainly in Korean. It was pretty good.

The next one was the weirdest and least enjoyable one we saw. It was called Little Baby Jesus of Flandr and was a Belgian movie about these three guys who see a baby being born in the forest and think it's Jesus. The actors all had Downs Syndrome and it was filmed in black and white but it was far too artistic to be interesting. It had crazy screeching music for the whole thing and the story was bizarre and it had these really long shots of trees for, like ten minutes at a time. Neither of us liked it very much but it was interesting anyway.

After that, we went to see the famous Busan fish market which is one of the sights you must see while in Korea and is arguably the smelliest place on earth. It was cool to see, just thousands and thousands of tanks with crazy sea creatures that you can just buy and have cut up on the spot.




After the fish market, we caught the train back to Seoul and that was the end of the weekend.

All in all, we had a great time!

Happy Thanksgiving, Canada!
Ali and Jesse

War Memorial

Hello everyone. For those keeping count, we just finished 7 months and now only have 5 months left. I don't know it's felt for you, but I fell like it's blown by and Ali goes back and forth between feeling like 7 weeks and 7 years.

After living here this long we've developed a weekend balance between exploring everywhere and holding onto some money. We just had Chuseok in Jeju and next weekend is in Busan, so this weekend feel into the non-adventurous category, but nonetheless, we did get up to some stuff worth noting.

There's a group called "English Cafe" that is organized by a few Korean teachers to get the foreign public teachers together. They had organized 2 trips I went on before (mountain climbing and skating, which both featured English, but neither featured a cafe) and both were fun. For Saturday, they organized a trip to "The War Memorial of Korea." Despite what images that title gives you, it is not just a big statue with flowers around it (although they do have that). It is in fact a large museum that shows artifacts and exhibitions all detailing Korea's war history, which goes far beyond the Korean war. Ali and I had wanted to go here for awhile because we had heard good things about it so Ali came along on the trip too.

We met up with everyone on the subway and again, I discovered new foreigners in Uijeongbu. It seems like there's over a 100 now. They provided lunch for us, which was nice of them since Ali isn't technically part of the group.

Once we got in the museum, we were only with the group for a short time, since everyone wanders a museum at different paces. Our first part of the museum was an outside gallery showing all the countries and names of people who died from that country in the Korean war. I didn't realize how much of the world was involved in the Korean war. The Korean war was South Korea, U.S.A, Canada, Columbia, England, Luxembourg, Sweden, Ethiopia, Australia, Philippines, Turkey, Netherlands, France, New Zealand, Thailand, Greece, Belguim and South Africa vs. North Korea, China, Russia. If you can tell yet, I'm into museums and history.


Inside, we walked through various rooms that had interesting artifacts to look at from weapons to costumes to models of what the kingdoms looked like through the centuries. Korea's history is filled with fending off invasions from Mongolia, China and Japan. It's amazing that they still exist given all the attempts to invade.

The museum was also very up-to-date since it had a display looking at the sinking of the South Korean ship from March of this year.

We arrived at 3:30 and stayed until 6:00. Unfortunately, we were slow enough that we missed the War Experience room. Somehow, it recreates the atmosphere of being on the battlefield through sound, smell and scenery. We have read lots of great things about it but it closed at 5. Might have to go back next time we're in town.

Outside, we took pictures with all the weapons, tank and plane displays. It's refreshing to not see "Do not touch" signs (or at least not being able to read the ones that say that in Korean).
Ali showing her other side.

Me getting far away from Ali.



In other news, it's business as usual for me and Ali has been putting in lots of work hours this week for speech contests. If you know anyone coming to Korea, tell them to try to get a public teaching job.

We'll let you know how the Busan (or Pusan, depending on romanization) film festival goes next weekend.

Hope you're all well,
Ali and Jesse

Funny conversation my students had today

So today I was wearing my hair in braids and a gold hairband. Two of my girl students were talking, obviously thinking I couldn't hear them:

Girl 1: Teacher's hairband is very beautiful.
Girl 2: Yes. It is golden.
Girl 1: It is costing a lot of monies.
Girl 2: I think Teacher wears golden hairband because Teacher's hair is golden. Golden hairband. Golden hair.
Girl 1: Teacher's hair is made of gold?
Girl 2: Yes. It's golden.

Jeju - Korean Style

Hello everyone,
Our Chuseok holiday is now wrapping up. We'd planned to go to Jeju-do (the 'Hawaii of Korea' simply because it's an island) but had trouble getting plane or boat or train tickets so my co-teacher found a Korean travel/tour package for us. All the itineraries and everything with the tour was in Korean (because it's a tour for Koreans) so we weren't really sure what to expect or what we would see.

We caught our plane to Jeju on Tuesday at around 4:40 pm after a flight delay due to rain and windy weather. We were kind of disappointed that the trip didn't have an earlier flight, but there was nothing we could do about it. We got on the tour bus and we were in a group of about 15 Koreans. There were families as well as old people, but we were the only 20-somethings I think. We were off to a late start because of the flight delay so we stopped at dinner first, at what my internet-assisted translation told me was called "overturned clay pot." I suspect the translation wasn't perfect. After dinner, the "evening city tour" began and we drove around Jeju city, the capital of the island and the most urban city. We saw some nice sites on the coast including "dragonhead rock" which is a rock unsurprisingly shaped like a dragon's head, although Ali had trouble seeing it. It was at this time that someone on our tour group approached us and said that he spoke some English and we could ask him questions if we needed help. This turned out being very valuable because no one else spoke a word so we wouldn't have known what time to meet people without him. Dragonhead.

Afterwards we went to our hotel. For some strange reason I still don't understand why, everyone on the tour was staying at different hotels. Our hotel was pretty nice. Korea does seem to do hotels well; often, the rooms are big and prices are usually no more than $80 a night. The night with the tour group was over, but we had read about a place called Jeju Love Land in our guide book, and it seemed like we wouldn't be going there on the tour. So we called a cab and made our way down there. It's a park filled with partially nude statues to very nude statutes, which was very surprising to see in Korea, given their conservative stance towards that kind of stuff. It was also a weird to see Korean families and their little kids posing for pictures with large penis statues. One of the more family friendly statues.

The next day we had to be outside by 8:10 am for the tour bus. Our first stop was "Psyche World" and the "Queens House," two places not mentioned in our tour book. The Queen's House was kind of a museum of jewels and other Queen-related items. Most of the jewels were clearly plastic replicas of the crown jewels and many were clearly unlike the Queen's like bejeweled Hello Kitty statues. Quite bizarre. "Psyche World" is a museum said to have the largest collection of butterflies in the world. It had some interesting sights such as large dead beetles re-enacting various events throughout history. Both places were okay, but weren't things we would have chosen if we'd planned the trip ourselves. Just like the one the Queen rode in... right?

Fooling people into thinking there's a swing there.

Our next stop was "Jeju Circus World." I hadn't been to the circus in ages and it was actually pretty impressive. There were many acrobatic performances that defied physics as well as an unbelievable site of 5 motorcycles are riding around the inside of a sphere somehow not crashing into each other. Ali ended up falling asleep for part of it so clearly she wasn't as awestruck as me but it was pretty cool.

After a buffet Korean lunch, we went to what I translated earlier as "Mushroom Farm Experience". Now this has to be one of the most bizarre experiences on the trip. We drove up to a greenhouse and a person showed us around the tour house speaking Korean. Then we went into a room where and sat down for like 15 minutes while this guy talked about mushrooms, I think. He was holding one while he talked and this was a mushroom farm so that's what led me to that conclusion. And then we went to another room and sat in this room with all these boxes of mushroom powder. It was like a seminar or an infomercial that you would watch on TV with someone excitingly telling you the virtues of their product. After the speech, they went around with clipboards trying to get you to buy some. Luckily, that's one of the benefits of being a foreigner: salesperson immunity. No one ever bothers us trying to sell stuff like they do to other Koreans. Strangely, no one else seemed to find the situation odd. I wonder if this is normal in Korean tour vacations and sitting through seminars is as regular as going to the beach.

Afterwards, we went to the other side of the island to the 2nd biggest city called Seogwipo, and got on a ferry that showed around the part of the coast. It was a actually really good. I always enjoy ferries and seeing the more natural side of Jeju was nice. Once we docked, we walked over across a bridge to a small island called Saeseom and went on a nice walk around the perimeter of the island. One of the sights on the cruise.

These statues called "harabang" (I think) are located all over the island.They are very symbollic of Jeju.

Then our bus stopped along a park where we followed this long walking path along the coastline. Jeju was created by an underwater volcanic eruption so the coastlines and beaches are filled with black hardened lava and protuding rocks, which gives it a unique flavor. This one giant rock in particular came with an interesting story. When the Mongols invaded centuries ago, the story goes that the Koreans dressed this large rock up to look like a war general. The Mongols thought it was a Korean general the size of a giant and decided to all kill themselves.

Yep... if that rock was wearing a shirt and had a face drawn on, I would definitely lose my will to live.

The tour was over for the day but the group decided to go out for dinner at a Japanese restaurant. The dinner wasn't included in the price we paid so we declined because it was only 5pm and neither of us were hungry. The English speaking tourist told us the bus driver would take us to our hotel. The bus driver came out, spoke Korean, and then went back in the restaurant. After 5 minutes he came out with another guy and told us that he would take us to our hotel. Thinking it was a taxi at first, we were surprised to see it was just some guy with a car. He drove us back and we still have no idea what happened. We can just imagine our driver yelling inside the restaurant, "Does anyone want to drive these 2 waygooks to their hotel?" It was certainily bizarre to say the least. We just relaxed that night in our room. Other things we wanted to do on the island including a teddy bear museum and these lava tubes but both were closed by 6 so we didn't have time for them after the tour.

The next day, which was our third and last, we first went to a souvenir and crafts store. We wanted to get something souvenir-esque, but didn't want to spend too much money, so I settled for Jeju cactus chocolates, a curious name given the lack of cacti around here. Our next stop was elephant land, another circus-like show with elephants as the main performers. It was a good show as the elephants were cute and performed a number of tricks such as bowling, playing basketball, and taking bananas from the audience. Later, we stopped at a ranch where we could ride a pony. We didn't do it because they didn't let you 'ride' so much as let a guy walking pull the horse in a slow circle.

The elephants taking eating bananas, peels and all.

Then we went to a folk village where there was some nice relics of Korean folk homes but we had to sit in another seminar-type thing, albeit, a much shorter one. After lunch, we went to ilchulbong, which is in our tour book as one of the best things to see in the entire country and it was a beautiful sight. Ilchulbong, is an odd-looking mountain with a large crater on top, located on the eastern most tip on Jeju. It is supposed to be a fantastic place to watch the sunrise. However, we couldn't climb to the top because our tour bus was only there for 20 min.
The peak we should've climbed.

Afterwards, we got on a ferry to go to Udo island, a much smaller island in the north east end, also called "Cow Island" due to it's shape from an arieal view. This provided some nice scenic views as the whole island is very rural with mostly farms and low stone walls dividing the land. We stopped at a peak and had time to climb to the top for a good view. Still on the island, we went to where the diving Grannies are located. In the 50's, there was a tax loophole where women weren't taxed on income but men were. So many wives in this village did the work of diving underwater, without breathing apparatuses, and collecting sea urchins and other fish. This became quite a big deal in a country that viewed women as inferior to men and the Government tried to ban the practice. It also didn't help that they wore loose white cotton which made the government make it illegal for men to watch them. 50 years later, now in their 70's, these women still work by diving into the water and swimming for shellfish. We just missed their actual work by minutes, and the area is now a tourist hotbed.
A view from Udo Island.

A statue of the famous diving grannies.

The rest of the day, we just had 1 or 2 stops at different small beaches where we just soaked our feet.


We were on a plane by 8 o'clock and back home in a few hours.

Overall, we liked Jeju and thought it had plenty to do for a 3 day break, but we didn't do all of those things on our tour. Some things could have been skipped and replaced but it was good overall. There were 3 things we didn't get to do in Jeju, which we would've loved to: climb Ilchulbong for sunrise, tour the world's largest underground lava tubes, and go to the Teddy bear musuem where teddy bears reenact events from that last century and "even the most skeptical come away impressed," according to the guide book. Ali went back to work on Friday and I'm not back until Monday. Ali also went to a training course on Saturday and I just hung out. It's been a nice break though, and now our next big thing is in 2 weekends when we go to the Busan film festival.

Hope you are all well,
Ali and Jesse

Hi everyone!

Happy Chuseok! Chuseok is Thanksgiving in Korea and it is where they thank their ancestors for all the blessings they've had in the year. Everyone gives gifts at Chuseok and the gifts are usually very practical things. Originally it was things like flour or eggs to help with all the Chuseok cooking but now the most common gifts are tuna, oil, and SPAM. My principal gave me a giant gift box with about 15 cans of tuna and five cans of spam. It is a very weird gift but when in Rome, I guess.

We haven't done too many exciting things this week. My school had a really rough week because we had two parent's days. The theme was 'Airport' so the kids rotated through six different rooms with their parents. I was in the Country Briefing Room so I had to show a Powerpoint about their destination country, teach them to say hello in a bunch of different countries, let them try on traditional clothes from around the world and teach them a traditional 'folk dance' which I had to make up on the spot. They seemed to have a lot of fun but it's always stressful around ECC when parents come. Then, on Friday, all the kids had a big Chuseok party where they all wore their hanboks (traditional Korean outfits) and got to cook seopyong (these gross little rice cakes with sesame seeds that everyone eats at Chuseok), make origami cushions, and play by the river. It was really hot out so the kids were all sweating to death in their hanboks but they still had fun.

Friday night my manager Reggie's parents were visiting so all the foreign and Korean teachers went out with them for bulgogi (a kind of boiled meat in a sauce) and it was lots of fun because Jesse and I were sitting with my Korean teachers and I don't get to hang out with them too much outside of work. They all have English names so they thought it was only fair to give Jesse and I Korean names. I am Gil Ha Eun and and Jesse is Ha Tae Won. All Korean names have three syllables.

After bulgogi, Jesse and I took my two new colleagues for a tour of downtown Uijeongbu. The two new teachers are from Michigan and Northern Ireland and they've had a busy first few weeks. Unfortunately, on our tour of downtown on a Friday night, all the American military was out and they were being so obnoxious and annoying. The whole downtown swarms with them and they even have their own military police that stand outside all the clubs in full military garb, to get involved whenever they get too out of hand.

After that, we met the Korean teachers for a drink and had fun talking with them outside of school, although I felt bad that they all had to speak English all night.

On Saturday, I went in to Seoul to meet another friend's parents. My friend Jenn from Busan had her mom and aunt visiting so my friend Marijke and I met them for dinner by Seoul Tower and toured around Seoul with them for awhile.

Anyway, tomorrow (Monday) I'm on holiday but Jesse is working and then, on Tuesday, we're headed to Jeju Island, which should be great. We'll let you know how that all goes.

Love,
Ali and Jesse

I'll leave you with some photos and videos of my kindi kids on their Chuseok party:



The kids walking down to the river.




This video is of my Newton class saying hello to Canada and just playing around.

Flights and Farewells

Hello everyone,
So we haven't posted a new entry for a few weeks now and that's because we haven't really done anything new and exciting over here during that time. That's soon to change as our Chuseok Jeju island trip approaches, but we thought we would check in now and let you know what we've been up to so you don't think we've just been watching paint dry this whole time.

Two weekends ago, six of our friends were all leaving for home so it was a weekend full of goodbye parties. On the Friday night the party was an Ajima-Ajashi theme. That means people were supposed to dress up like old Korean women and men in their very distinctive style of dress. Old Korean women wear lots of floral, MC Hammer style pants, giant sun visors, long gloves, and often aprons. Korean men are less distinctive but often wear arm warmers, hiking gear, and similar stuff to old men in Canada with socks pulled up to their knees, collared t-shirts, etc. Anyway, lots of people didn't really dress up because they were afraid of offending everyone. Ali and I just bought sun visors in a half-hearted costume attempt.

We all went for galbi (a huge group of us) and then went to a bar downtown which is one of the only bars that permits US military so it was, consequently, jammed with military guys. Not the most fun ever.


Here's a big group shot of us and our friends outside the galbi restaurant.

The next day we were supposed to have a goodbye party on the roof of one of our friend's apartments but, because monsoon season was delayed this year, it was pouring. Instead, people rented out a huge hotel room for the goodbye party. It was lots of fun with tons of great food but then the hotel staff started freaking out seeing all the waygooks (foreigners) coming past the front desk so we moved to our friend's apartment and had lots of fun anyway, but it was really sad saying goodbye to our friends.

Last week, Ali went to Canada for her cousin's wedding, leaving me here to fend for myself. Since Ali saw most of the people that read this blog, there's no need to go into much detail on her trip.
The day she was leaving was slightly exciting because we both saw our first typhoon. It petered out by mid-morning but it was just crazy strong winds and rain. Apparently five people died from it in Seoul. There was lots of damage to be seen and Ali's morning classes were canceled. Pretty exciting and thankfully her flights weren't delayed because of it.
While she was gone, I had to make appearances to represent the Ali-Jesse image so we wouldn't be forgotten. I went out with Ali's coworkers for a Korean dinner and had a funny encounter. Outside the restaurant, a mother and child were walking by when the mother stopped and said "English teacher?" It turned out I taught her daughter (1 of 350 kids I teach so it's hard to remember them all). I was expecting to say a quick "hi" but the mother wanted me to have a conversation with her daughter (so I guess she could see the English she's learned). The only problem was the daughter was very shy and was clinging to her mom's leg. I said "how are you?" to her and she answered while still hiding behind her mom. The mother then said to me, "She wants to ask you question." She then grabbed her daughter's arm and pushed her towards me. "You ask teacher question now." The girl in her most timid voice says, "How are you?" I said, "I'm fine. Thanks for asking. Are you going to dinner now?" That must've too much for because she was back hiding behind her mom. Then the mom yanks her arm again to push her towards me to talk. It went like this for about a minute. The parents really want to see their children use English with a foreigner. Not sure if the mother thinks I'm a bad teacher though, given how little confidence her daughter had with me.

Later in the evening, we went to a norae-bang (karaoke) because there was a couple of new people with us who hadn't been yet, so that was fun.

The next day I went to a baseball game with everyone, taking advantage of Ali's absence since our opinions on baseball differ greatly. I have fun at baseball games but this one was very hot even though it started at 5pm. The heat has been bad for awhile now and only recently has shown signs of slowing down in exchange for warm damp days.

This weekend Ali had to work on Saturday to compensate for the extra day she gets off at Chuseok. She didn't get home until 8 on Saturday so we didn't do anything. Tomorrow, Sunday, we will probably just relax around Uijeongbu because Ali is still getting over her jet-lag and it's only a one-day weekend for her.

Anyway, it's only one more week until Chuseok so we'll let you know how that goes.

Talk to you soon,

Ali and Jesse