Beer and Bananas

First order of business. In our last post I mentioned our favorite Korean TV show. After searching long and hard (or just asking Sunny Teacher) I found out the name and the concept of it. It's called 1 Night 2 Days and it's a travel show where a group of guys travel around Korea on the weekend. Here is a clip of it. I encourage you to watch at least 5 minutes of it. We generally have no idea what's going on but it's hilarious!

1 Night 2 Days

Our last meeting before Lunar New Year, or Seolla as they call it in Korea, our director handed us all envelopes with, "Thanks for teaching hard. I am proud of you. Happy Lunar New Year!" written on the outside, and $100,000 Won on the inside! Well...my envelope said that she was proud of me, but Dave's didn't. It is customary for your boss to give you a gift for the New Years. I was a nice surprise and very generous of her. As for our friends Kirsten and Keegan, they were not so fortunate....they got a box of very expensive apples. Let me put it in perspective for you. They come in a fancy box of 8 and cost roughly $80 USD. Each apple is individually wrapped in cushion foam and accessorized with a gold sticker. Luckily for us, Kirsten and Keegan wanted to share their mini fortune with us.

The most expensive apple I've every eaten

Last weekend in lieu of the holiday we decided to throw our first party at our apartment. Earlier in the week we sent out Facebook invites (surprisingly very popular and effective here in Korea, unlike home). Our friends Aaron and Jess walked in with a huge bag of packing peanut snacks. They told us it was their gift from their director for Lunar New Year. When their director gave it to them they thought it was just packing peanuts surrounding a gift, but the packaging WAS the gift! It was a huge hit for laughs, not so much for food.

Side story:
In Korea they are notorious for their "illustrious" snacks. You can find these snacks all over the place. You can find them at every convenient store, ever grocery store, they serve them to you at bars, and kids bring them to class. They're everywhere! They come in huge packages, small packages, and everything in between. These snacks all taste and look like Styrofoam.... Styrofoam made in a variety of shapes and colors, that is. No one seems to know what these snacks are made of.

A picture of our party....with the snacks in the middle

A sample of snacks

Another sample of snacks

Our party quickly turned into a flashback of 5th grade. The girls and the boys had little interaction. The girls sat around on the couches and chairs talking about girl things, while the boys hovered around the 2 maps that we have hanging in our apartment. (So typical!) After a while we got the brilliant idea to head to a norebang for some singing. We found ourselves at a live band karaoke dive bar. The place was dark and practically empty, except for a group of about 10 middle aged Koreans sitting across from us. We bought a round of drinks and before we knew it the North Americans stormed the stage. Pat, Tia and Dave started jaming away on the drums, guitar and bass. Pat even started singing! They sounded so good! Everyone in the audience was dying! The Koreans got up and started dancing and waving their arms. We followed. It was hilarious! Here is the video:

Pat, Tia and Dave's First Korean Band Performance

If you notice, Pat is singing only two words "kam-sah-aha-mnida" (which means thank you in Korean) and "Juseyo" (which means give me please in Korean). I like to think of a role reversal and a Korean coming to a live karaoke dive bar in the US and not knowing any other words but "Thank you," and "Give me please," and singing them!

After that, we sang a few karaoke songs together as a group and danced until our feet hurt. At one point in the night one of the guys from the group of Koreans pulled Dave and I aside and gave us a beer and bananas. Strange, I know. All in all, it was a fantastic night.

At school we are starting this new project for all of the students to video record themselves speaking English. Instead of our normal routine and classes we are now dedicating a week to writing, preparing, and practicing for their projects. Depending on the level, they are doing anything from singing a song to explaining the timeline of their lives. Yesterday we started writing and I got A LOT of funny essays. If I found a funny essay I would leave class and photo copy it so I could bring it home. (Genius, I know) Here is an excerpt from one of them from Steve, (who a few months ago fell off his bike and broke his front teeth and didn't want them to show so he would talk with his upper lip covering his teeth all the time) This is his timeline:

"My parents married in 2001. Why did they marry? I want to ask my father but not yet. I will. Anyway I was born in Mokpo in 2001. My brother was born when I was 5. I entered kindergarten near my house. When I was 6 years old, I hurted my head. I still have the wound. Do you want to see it? No no no. When I was 8 years old I entered school....."

This one is from a girl named Ellen:

"I was born in 2000. When I was a baby I used to suck my finger until six. So my tooth became strange. Recently I am treating my tooth. For my heath tooth I am exercising very hard...."

And, I had the class with my mean girls yesterday. At first they didn't want to do the project but they finally got into it. When I say they got into it, I mean they really got into it...in real detail. One of the girls, Holly, asked me how to say that her mom didn't have her the normal way. She made gestures to her stomach with a cutting motion. I asked, "Ohhhh your mom had a c-section? You came out of her stomach?" She said yes so I wrote "C-section" on the board. The other girl Stephanie, using a mix of words, gestures and phone translations to communicate she was "coming out the wrong way with her feet in the air" So, she was coming feet first which forced her mom to have a c-section. I thought it was so ridiculous but for once, I enjoyed the class.

This project is going to prove to be a bit stressful, tiring, but worth it because it makes me laugh!

That is all for now!

Much Love and many hugs
-Lindsey

You Gotta Read This Post, Bro!

This post is just a mix of funny stories and strange things that have been happening in our life here. There is no organization and I apologize for that.

Our first meeting at school after the new year was entertaining. Our director started out by saying that we are having this meeting because she wanted to celebrate a new year, introduce our new head teacher (Claire) and announce that she bought a new car. We asked her if she bought everyone a new car and she said, "no, but we can all go for a ride sometime!"

On Mondays I now have a period off in which I typically hang out with one of the Korean teachers, Sunny. Sunny is appropriately named, as her personally is nothing short of sunny and bright. She asked me what I was doing on the weekend and I said that Dave and I may go to a movie but we don't know what's playing. She helped me out and looked up the movies at the local cinema. The first one she said was, "Cat Wearing Shoes." I was confused. I asked her, "Cat Wearing Shoes?! I've never heard of that movie before!" It took me a few moments to realize that what she meant was "Puss in Boots!" hahahaha I thought it was very cute.

On Friday morning, around 7:50 AM we woke up to incessant ringing of our doorbell. Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong. It was our doorman from our apartment complex speaking in none other than, Korean. Of course we couldn't understand him and he couldn't understand us when we said,"We don't speak Korean" 100 times. We eventually heard the word "key" and realized that he wanted us to give him a key to our apartment. We made this inference due to the fact for the past week or so we have been woken up early with the sound of nail guns, hammering and banging in the surrounding apartments along. To accompany that, there were also weird intercom announcements that could be heard throughout the building (almost like someone is staring outside using a megaphone). From those strange sounds we figured they must be redoing something in every apartment. We told the Korean man that we wern't giving him our key. Who knows when they would come in and try to work on our apartment?! What felt like 15 min later, we eventually got him to leave our apartment but not before he tried to bring wood and supplies in our apartment by hand motions. We also refused. We mimed/ wrote on a piece of paper to call our director at 12:00 (we didn't want him to wake her up at such an hour).

We went to work that day and asked our director about the incident and if she had gotten a call. She didn't, so she called them. Turns out, we were right, they are doing construction on our apartment, and we needed to give our doorman our key. We also decided that that would be a good time to learn how to say, 'I don't speak Korean" in Korean (We probably should have learned that 3 months ago).

After work we went to his little office that looks surprisingly similar to a bedroom, equipped with a make shift bed, a TV and a huge digital clock. We wanted to know when they would be coming to our apartment. Again, after a mixture of pointing at clocks and calendars and writing out times and dates we thought we had an agreement that they would come on Saturday at 12:00 PM.

We went out that night, and boy what a night that was. We ended up meeting up with Kirsten, Keegan and Tia to bond over working at E. Bo Young Talking Club over a few drinks. We met one of Kirsten and Keegan's Korean co-workers, Oakman and Tia's director Randy who is a party animal to say the least. After that night we realized that we work at the most conservative E. Bo Young's.

It was a very late night but it was okay, the construction workers were not coming unit 12 o'clock the next day....or so we thought. At around 8 AM we hear a key opening our door. No knock, just attempting to come in....at 8 AM on a Saturday! Um, where exactly did they thing we were? Luckily we have a second latch on the door so they couldn't' come in.

On Saturday night I got invited to a girls game night at my friend Miranda's apartment. It was full of movie popcorn, half baked cookies (my favorite), Dutch Blitz (my new favorite game), and tons of girl chatter.

On Sunday night we decided to switch up our usual Pizza School night and go to Nanta 5000 pizza. We love pizza night for 2 reasons: A.) we love pizza and B.) we love watching this crazy Korean TV show. We don't quite understand the concept or what is going on. The show seems to be based around 10 guys who just hang out and do silly things together. The live in the same room and travel around. They pull pranks on each other and usually have some sort of a made up game in which they complete. My favorite is pop-up-video style of commentary they use. It's flashy and colorful. I can't tell what it says, but the Korean's around us seem to laugh at it. Its just really ridiculous.

The story doesn't stop here....Dave was about 90% of the way through eating the entire pizza to himself. (They are not very big pizzas) and he looks at me and asks, "is this a rock that I found in my pizza?!" and my instant response was, "don't make a scene." He was mad but I just thought, "Hey, this is Korea. Nothing makes sense" Also, in my justification, he was 90% of the way through. The would have thought we were scam artist trying to get a free pizza.

The new week begins. We were expecting to have another 8 AM wake up due to the construction workers but we didn't. We hibernated unit the late hour of 10 AM (we are such bums). Work came and went, and when we got home we found our apartment completely turned upside down and we had new walls! It was very strange.

On Tuesday morning at around 11 AM, as we were just relaxing we got invaded again by some ajumas (older Korean ladies) who were wallpapering our new walls with hideous wallpaper. It was very nerve racking because they were standing on a high ladder looking as if they were going to fall at any minute. It was like she didn't want to move the ladder closer to where she needed to be so she would just stretch as far as she could. At one point a man was using the back of our couch as stepping stool. After they were finished they handed our key back to us with a half finished project in our apartment. We didn't know if they were finished (because nothing makes sense in Korea) or if they just made a mistake.

Well, they made a mistake in giving us back the key too early. In the middle of my class our director came into my room, "Liiiinndssseeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy, they are not finished with your apartment and they NEED to finish today. They have an emergency key, can they use it?!" I said of course they could. When we came back we found a brand new wall and windows in our apartment.

I also want to highlight that this construction work did not entail knocking down any walls or taking out any windows, but meerly putting a new wall in front of the old one, and putting a new set of windows in front of the old ones. So now, when we want to open our windows we need to open a 3 different sets to get some air. Not just panes...windows with locks.

You can see in this picture that they just put a wall in front of our existing one

Don't fall!!!!

Ugly wallpaper

Oh, I'm wicked hot. Let me open the 3 windows to get some air!

Hyundai and Samsung make everything, even window locks

Random Stories:

In one of our dialogues they use the word "bro." I find this comical for a few different reasons. One being that who on earth thought that we should teach the Koreans the word bro? Who actually uses the word bro? LAX bros- yes.  Jersey Shore cast-yes. Dog the bounty hunter- yes. Normal people-no. Case proven, but if you want further comedic relief from that awful choice of words I will lead you to the second funny part.... the voices they use on the dialogues are so wimpy. It sounds like an adult doing their worst impression of a sickly, wussy kid with a stuffy nose who uses far too my voice inflection for anyones good.

One day when I was sick, Dave took over 2 of my classes at Easy Academy. None of them had English names so Dave made up a bunch of very old people names for them. The next class some of them forgot them, but I continued the fun. Here is a list of the kids in my class; Bob, Ed, Edith, Joan (named after my crochet buddy in New Zealand), Elenore, Peggy (after my grandmother), Anne, and Billy. The kids love it, I love it, we are all happy campers!

We are still loving Korea and excited to do new things. We have Lunar New Year coming up this weekend, which for us, means a vacation. We get Monday and Tuesday off, making it a 4 day vacation. In Korea they celebrate Lunar New Year by spending a lot of time with their families and exchanging very expensive fruit. We won't be doing much for it because it is too cold to explore cities and we just feel like relaxing. We thought about going snowboarding but that seems too far fetched money wise, equipment wise, and more importantly safety wise. We all know what happened at Mt. Snow!

Much love,
Lindsey

Korea has Seoul...but no T-shirts that say that

Hello all! Last week we spent our winter vacation in the Korean capital of Seoul and had a fantastic time. First of all, Seoul is really, really big, like 10.4 million people big, and that is just the city proper. The metropolitan area is the third largest in the world (behind Tokyo and Dehli) with 23.6 million people!!! Thats literally half of South Korea's population. The city is pretty old too. The first settlements of Seoul are thought to be from 17 B.C. Also, the actual official name of Seoul is "Seoul Special City" which is probably the best city title globally. Well, enough of my history lesson, on with the story...

So we took the 4 hour bus ride up to Seoul Special City only to find it was snow/raining so we didn't do much exploring. We hadn't planned anything so it worked out better anyway. We just hung out in a cafe and waited for Lindsey's friend Ben to get out of work. Ben and Lindsey worked together on the Cape and are good friends and Ben just so happens to be living in Seoul right now. He arrived in August and is teaching at a school for smart children. Ben was generous enough to let us crash on his couch for 4 nights. THANKS BEN!!!! Once we met Ben we went out to get some dinner at a fried chicken place near his apartment and it was delicious! We wanted to eat like westerns in Seoul because its the one place we can. We get our fair share of Korean food here in Mokpo, aside from pizza theres really no way of escaping it. Then we just hung out at Ben's and talked for a long time before passing out. It was sort of like a slumber party with no hair braiding, boy calling, or pillow fights.

Despite our late night of talking we woke up early to get out and see the city. We still had basically no plan so armed with tourist and metro maps and Lonely Planet Korea we just got on the Metro and set off for the city center. We first stumbled upon one of the several palaces there are in the city. Most have been rebuilt several times because they have been destroyed by Mongols or Chinese or Japanese or North Korean invaders a few times over the years but the palace was still pretty impressive. Especially after the nights light coating of snow.

Next we headed to one of the many, many markets: Nam Dae Mun Market. There are just thousands of people walking around small alley ways buying and selling clothes, bags, food, toys, what ever you want. When you walk by the restaurants in the back alleys you are walking right in the kitchens and have people asking you to come in and have spicy fish soup.

After having some street food (delicious pancake things full of cinnamon sugar) and purchasing a Korean flag for our apartment we headed to Namsam Park. This is the large park at the center of the city and ended up being more walking than we expected. We were heading to Seoul Tower but wanted to wait til dusk so we headed to a Hanok village. Hanoks are traditional Korean family homes that would house as many generations of family that you had. Along the way a random Korean man stopped to say hello to us (not uncommon) but upon learning we were going to the Hanok village decided he would be our guide (uncommon). He said it was sort of confusing so he best show us and to his credit it was. He had lived in LA for several years but was living in Seoul for a while to retain his citizenship or something. Upon arriving at the Hanok village he became our personal tour guide and began to explain all of the different rooms, how/what they were used for, and who lived where. At one point we got a little worried the situation was going to turn into a scam and he was going to ask us for money for showing us around but he never did. He just gave us his name (Shin) and number and told us to call him if we come to Seoul again and he will show us around.

We finally headed to the Seoul Tower. This tower sits upon the top of a huge hill in the center of the city and provides 360 views as far as the eye can see and all you can see is Seoul. It was, again, an unexpectedly long hike up to the tower (we could have taken a cable car but we are cheap) but it was very worth it. We got some much deserved and delicious hamburgers upon arrival at the top and then headed for our final destination. The view is unbelievable. Seoul just keeps going in every direction. While watching around downtown Manhattan the builds are all larger than life and overwhelming in a way. Seoul just keeps spreading and the buildings aren't as tall and the city isn't quite so overwhelming. We went to the top of the tower for dusk to watch the sun rise and to see the city transform from day to night. It was all worth the wait too. It was really beautiful to watch.

The next day we slept in way to long and went out for lunch with Ben and then we bought a dozen Krispy Kreme Donuts because that was the logical thing to do. We each at 2 after lunch haha. Having wasted half our day we headed toward the Itawon neighborhood. This is where all the foreigners live in Seoul, or at least a large concentration, particularly of US soldiers. The US still has around 28,000 troops here in Seoul because the Korean War never officially ended. The South refused to sign the armistice and now has the most heavily militarized boarder on earth. Itawon was really fun though. We just walked around through neighborhoods of Indian and Muslim families, streets of antique and strange furniture. There is a plus size market there which was all hilariously big on me. Which is ridiculous because all Korean clothes are too small for me so I don't know what they need a plus size market for. After walking around we met some friends from Mokpo at a craft beer  joint and shared stories and information about our time in Seoul. For dinner we met Ben and went back to the friend chicken place from the first night cause I loved it. It was delicious all over again. Then we made a mistake. We bought some cheap beer and headed back to the apartment and ate the rest of our donuts and then drank some cheep Korean beer. Needless to say none of our stomachs were too happy with our decision making that night.

For our last day we woke up early having wasted half of the previous day in bed (or on the couch). We immediately headed for a street food market our friends had told us about the night before and walked through the rows and rows of people cooking some of the same dishes for a whole row but knowing you can really get whatever you want. We had some delicious fried things (great after the previous nights food) made of corn paste and onion. We then headed to one of our favorite places in Seoul. It was in the back of a warehouse labeled "Textiles" and past where you would think of going. It was a second hand cloths market and just had stalls and stalls and stalls of clothes. Probably a hundred different ones. Since I can't find clothes that fit here I went a little crazy but it was great. There was weird, there was practical, there was really whatever you wanted. I bought a sweater, 3 flannels, and a hat. Lindsey bought 2 flannels. Everyone gave us "friend prices" for the clothes and we got to haggle a bit which was fun.

We ended up spending the rest of the afternoon walking around these ridiculous markets of stores overflowing with stuff into the streets. Electronics, old refrigerators, records, tables of old cell phones, outdoor gear, old shoes, literally whatever you want its there. After not quite finding the place we were told about though we headed back to Ben's to wait because it was New Years Eve.

After Ben exposing us to Modern Family, we headed out for a night on the town. We couldn't decide on where to have dinner and ended up at a restaurant that serves the same food that we had had for the lunch the previous day. There was a pair of drunk elderly folks that they were trying to get to leave but that old woman was having none of that until she finished her food. Afterwards we headed to the Ho Bar which is as nice as it sounds. We debating buying a bottle because that is the cool thing to do in Korea. You get some friends and go get a bottle at a bar because in the end it is cheaper than buying round after round of drinks. Plus, you get to feel like you are in a Jay-Z video. We finally just settled for a round of beer and shots. This ended up costing what half a bottle would due to the fact that the cheap beer was very conveniently "sold out."

After finishing our drinks we had decided we had had enough of buying expensive drinks at cheap bars and headed to the local convenient store. We bought some cheap beer and soju (the Korean liquor of choice that is available everywhere and seemingly appropriate to drink anytime) and hung out in a park. We made somac which is when you put the soju in the beer. We had a great time and talked the night away. When it came down the New Years we headed to the metro to go down one stop to where they ring a giant bell. There are apparently huge crowds and its the place to be buuuut we missed it. We got on the train to late and celebrated the New Year in the Seoul metro system with some random guy from Michigan and his Korean girlfriend. To be fair, New Years is not such a big event in Korea. The Lunar New Year (Jan. 23rd) is the New Years that matters here. There is a 3 day vacation and everyone celebrates with their families. The calendar New Year was not such a big deal.

After a long night of walking around Seoul we headed back to Ben's and passed out. We then slept in way too long and missed our bus home. We had to exchange our tickets for the next bus and slept most of the way home. We came home and ate pizza and watched TV and just relaxed. We had to start work again the next day and it hardly felt like we had relaxed on our vacation. We were constantly doing something. We can relax on the Lunar New Year though when all the Koreans are going crazy.

We had a great time and Seoul and loved it. It is an amazing city and looking forward to going back when we can. Many thanks to our host Ben who we will also hopefully see again soon.

- Dave