Anja!

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Been a little while since the last update, so I'll try and condense the last month or so down as much as I can!

Time is flying by here, I'm coming up to the 8 month mark now, I can hardly believe it! The weather here is transforming at a pace I've never seen anywhere else before. The absolutely brutal winter rapidly thawed into beautiful warm sunny days, and then over the last week it has just begun to get humid. And rainy. I'm sitting here at my desk sweating, as unfortunately my bedroom came without the luxury of air con. I may have a machine to dry my shoes but that's not much use in the middle of the night when I wake up sweating like a fat kid in a sweet shop.

Anyway, so I've been pretty busy over the last few weeks. Every weekend there seems to be something fun to go and do. We had a 3 day weekend a little while back, so a few of us headed up to Gangwon province up in the north-east to get out of Busan and hit the beaches and mountains up there. We spent the whole of Saturday chilling out at Jumunjin beach, a great little spot to watch people risking their lives trying out the various watersports with the less than reputable looking company doing business there. A few of us were swimming out at sea when in typical Korean fashion, a middle aged guy began wading out to us fully clothed with his backpack on to ask us if we wanted a game of 5 a side with him and his mates. His family was on the beach screaming at him that his bag was underwater but he didn't seem to care. I'm pleased to say we did the West proud and won 10 bottles of beer for our efforts.

The Sunday had us heading up to the Seoraksan National Park, which contains one of Korea's largest mountain ranges. Normally when I go on a hike I want to get to the top of the mountain and see the view from there. I'm not bothered about the rest of it. So I was a bit frustrated that the peak was a good 12 hour hike, 12 hours that we didn't have. However, we decided to just see how far we could get, and started climbing up through the valley. And it was stunning. I've seen the view from the top of loads of mountains, but this was something completely different. Everthing was so luscious and green - waterfalls and huge boulders everwhere. I felt like I was in the middle of a jungle in South America or something. Well except for the hoardes of Korean hikers everywhere. But as a side note, they are actually the most friendly hikers I've ever come across. It's pretty likely you'll have a processed sausage or some other snack thrust in front of your face as you pass them to help you along your way. We found a nice little pool in the river up there and had a refreshing dip in the icy cold waters before heading back down.

We got back into Busan late on Monday night. It was Buddha's birthday, and the temples in Korea are famous for hanging up lotus lanterns all over the temples on this day. We were close to one of Busan's more famous temples, Beomeosa, so headed up there on the offchance that the celebrations were still going on. We were rewarded by blankets of beautifully coloured lanterns strung up everwhere. The colours were amazing, and had an atmosphere to match. After exploring round the main temple, we walked off the main trail to a temple a bit further up the mountain. I often find in Korea that if you deviate from the crowded main paths even by the slightest bit, you will have a whole trail to yourself, and sure enough it was the case here. This temple was deserted with the exception of a handful of monks going about their business. In front of the temple was a quilt of lanterns, lit with candles, not electricity like the ones below. And the temple behind was full of golden statues of Buddha, and the most intricate decorations. Combined with the absolute silence and the fresh mountain air, it was such a peaceful moment. We sat and soaked up the atmosphere for a while, before heading back to the busy city life.

You may or may not know that Korea is hosting the World Expo this year. I had no idea what a world expo was. Never heard of them, but apparently they are a big deal. They used to showcase new inventions, such as the telephone. Now they seem to be more concerned with countries boasting about what they have to offer the world. The theme for Korea's expo is 'The Living Ocean and Coast', and it's located in the south-east of the country in a place called Yeosu. It's a really nice area to explore round there, with hundreds of islands lying offshore, so we decided to make a weekend of it. We headed to an island called Namhae on the Saturday, where we spent the day stand-up paddleboarding and kayaking round another one of the islands. I've never been stand-up paddleboarding before (after kayakers they are probably my next most hated watercraft when I'm out surfing), but it turns out there's a reason why so many people do it. Annoyingly it is quite fun.

That evening we headed down to a little village scattered down the edge of a steep mountain slope leading to the sea, called Darangee Village. It is perhaps one of my favourite places that I've been to in Korea. The steep slopes have been divided into flat strips of land for growing rice, and they look like a series of big steps leading down to the ocean below. Many of the paddies are completely underwater (I'm pretty sure this is what is supposed to be done to grow the rice...), but the water is so still it reflects everything. And from the right angle they look like a muddy Korean version of an infinity pool. We got there late in the evening when it was dark, but had an hour or two to explore the sleepy little village in the morning before we caught the ferry over to the expo in Yeosu.

I had no idea what to expect from this expo. I imagined it would just be a bunch of companies showing off their latest products, and it would actually be fairly dull. I couldn't have been more wrong. I have heard so much criticism from other people about it, but I'm convinced they didn't go to the same one as us. We spent hours travelling the world in the international pavillions, going from country to country and trying out their food and drinks, checking out all the cool things they were selling in their shops, and to a lesser extent learning about what their future plans for the ocean were. To be honest I was mostly interested in the food and the shops, and was bitterly disappointed at the countries that didn't have anything on offer. I was well excited about getting some Vietnamese food for lunch, but was massively let down and had to settle for a Russian pancake (which was actually pretty good). Some of the countries had some really cool exhibits. Israel I think was my favourite, it had this huge dark room with massive wavy light tubes that glowed and changed colour, and were supposed to give the feeling of being really deep in the sea. Aside from the international pavilions, they had 8 other pavilions with different themes. The queues for some were massive, like for the aquarium and the robotic fish, so obviously we just went to the ones without queues. The most interesting one we went to was about how in the future we could have whole floating cities. They had scaled models of the homes we could live in, and it was fascinating to think that the world could be moving in this direction in the future. The grand finale was in the evening. The Big O Show was the most incredible show of light, fountains and fire I have ever seen in my life. The fountains and jets of water created screens allowing 3D images of fish, turtles, people and so on to fly around right in front of our eyes. It was absolutely spectacular - I felt like I was in the future!

I recently discovered that you could rent out little Pico sailing boats at my local beach, and so headed down there one weekend with a few friends to see what the deal was. Now I'm not a great sailor, and I haven't been sailing in months, and so wondered what they would say about me taking a boat out. It was pretty windy, and launching from the beach would mean negotiating through the surf - something I've never even considered doing before. Amazingly, I gave the guy 10,000 won (about 5 quid) - he gave me the boat and left us to it. Didn't ask if I'd even been sailing before. Or if I could swim. Just told us to bring it back at 5. Without trying to sound like a typical Western bureaucrat, I couldn't believe the complete lack of any safety there. What if someone went overboard - it's not like a motorboat where you can just point the boat and go. Getting through the surf was so hard, I managed to capsize plenty of times, but eventually we made it and had a good time flying around the bay. I'll definitely be heading back there again sometime soon, after the complete lack of surf it's good to be doing at least some watersports!

School news now - it's been pretty hectic the last few weeks. We have open class coming up in the middle of July, which is where the parents all come in and watch your lesson. Everyone is making such a massive deal about it, and I don't really understand why. If your doing your best, there's not much more you can do. No use getting too worked up over it, if the parent doesn't like it they can take their kid somewhere else! What annoys me about it is just how fake it all is. Everyone is coming up with all these elaborate lesson plans that they would never normally do (ok, myself included, I've given in to the peer pressure...). I think if I was a parent and saw one of these lessons and then found out from my kid that they never normally did this, I'd be fuming. But whatever, I've got to do it. As usual I didn't know about our lesson plans until I was leaving the night before they were due, when one of the other teachers asked me if I'd finished mine yet. 'Finished what yet?' I asked. Needless to say I had a fun evening that night. Then this week we had to perform all our lessons in front of all the other teachers, as if it was a real class. Rather than get embarassed about this as I usually would, I decided to take the opportunity to just go for it and treat all the other teachers like little kids and ask them stupid questions. I think it went fine though, didn't get any negative feedback anyway!

One day last month a new 3 year old arrived wearing a skirt. He looked like a boy, but he was wearing a skirt. The Korean teacher said he liked 'Gongju style', meaning he likes to dress like a princess. As if this wasn't funny enough, in the assembly that morning one of the Korean teachers got him to come to the front to introduce him to the other kids, but she wasn't sure if he was a girl or a boy. Half the kids were shouting 'Boy!', and the other half shouting 'Girl!'. I was in tears laughing, poor kid. Since then at the monthly birthday party where they get asked 'What do you want to be?', he replied 'A mummy'. I can't decide whether it's a good or bad thing that his parents are letting him dress and act like that? I guess if it makes him happier it's ok?!

As I've mentioned before, the longer I'm here, the less weird things I see. But last Saturday I experienced two things that reminded me of my early days here. I had my second experience of witnessing somebody taking a dump in public. On the main road of one of the more wealthy areas in town too. Just squatting over a drain going about his business. I really wonder what's going through his head at the time. Maybe it's for the thrill, I don't know?! The other weird thing that happened was on the bus going into Busan. It was packed, I was standing and carrying a big bag, when an ancient woman that must have been approaching 200 got on the bus and sat in the seat directly in front of me. She started tugging on my trousers, and patting her lap, saying anja (meaning 'sit'😉. I scratched around my brain trying to think of a phrase in Korean that could deal with this situation, but couldn't think of anything other than mumbling 'it's ok thanks' and hoped that she would get the picture. She didn't. For five minutes she was pulling on my trousers and slapping her lap, shouting at me to sit. I was getting increasingly embarassed in front of all these people to the point where I was just going to do it. If I broke her legs it was her fault. Luckily for all parties, she gave up before I could maneuver into her lap. A few minutes later though she started tugging on my bag, so I let her have it, and she looked after that for the rest of the journey. I'd read in Korea that it was customary for people to grab your bags on the bus and look after them for you if they are sitting down, but I have rarely come across it in the cities. Maybe that's what she was after the whole time, I'll never know!

Anway, I'll give it a rest for now, well done if you made it this far!

I miss you guys at home, and as ever make sure you keep in touch - I love hearing from you! Hope you are all doing well.

Love Ross x

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Comments

[Chris and Nikki]

Absolutely amazing picture!