Advertisement
Published: December 5th 2010
Snowfall
First snowfall in Boeun!Dear Blog Readers,
I can’t believe this is the fifteenth blog already. Scarily, that means we’re nearly a third of the way through our Korean adventure. The time is truly flying by! The continued threat from the North doesn’t seem to be affecting anybody here really. Tensions are high up on the border but the average Korean doesn’t seem too bothered at the moment from what I gather. I’m still trying to determine whether it is a good thing that people around the world are more worried about Korea than the Koreans. I will try and keep this blog a short one as I’ve been told that they are turning into ‘essays’, however, the statistics that I get from this website are very encouraging so it can’t be all bad.
I’m sat in a café again waiting for Laura to get back from ice skating. I didn’t understand anything on the café menu except ‘tea’. My hopes of a beautifully crafted English Breakfast Twinings tea have been dashed in what I can only describe as some compost, inside a tea bag, floating in luke-warm water – yes, I’ve accidently bought the ‘green’ tea. I’ve just passed a funny poster/banner.
Snowfall
View from our apartment overlooking the fields. It must have been about 30ft by 10ft and it was advertising ‘baby photos’. This seems quite sweet, except the ‘baby photo’ writing only takes up about a tenth of the poster. The rest is a 27ft by 9ft picture of a naked baby walking away from the camera, turning his head in a dramatic fashion-shoot-like pose – bare arse and all.
The last couple of weekends have been kimchi-making weekends where Korean family’s get together to produce enough kimchi to feed a small army. Well, maybe that should be a heavily fortified, American-contributed army. Anyway, this weekend seems to have been the pinnacle of the kimchi-making festivities as our town now smells like a large Boeun-sized cabbage has landed in the centre before being showered with spices, garlic, ginger, and of course, the red pepper paste, along with an all-important ‘special ingredient’, and finally left to decompose and ferment for a lengthy period of time. Consequently, the smell isn’t great. However, I’m not going to sit here and ridicule Korea’s national dish, simply because I genuinely think I’m starting to like the stuff! I still have it every lunch and I even found myself asking for more kimchi
Roast Pork
Dad helping me on Skype whilst I was making it! to fry onto our samgyeopsal BBQ last Sunday. Amazing!
It was a good start to the week feeling full of kimchi and telling myself that I am now one step closer to being cured of all horrible diseases, including cancer, obviously. A teacher at one of Laura’s schools is phenomenally patriotic and has already told her what some of the problems with England are, which I am not going to repeat in this blog because of its sheer lunacy. This week, however, he told her that eating dog actually originated in France. He showed her a website proving the fact, although I still believe he got the word dog and frog mixed up.
I had my second bout of speaking tests to assess this week. The standard that I have seen in the maths and physics papers is amazingly complex – some of the problems set are things I did in second year at University! However, what I am beginning to realise is that they are very good at remembering things, such as formulae or methods. However, if you ask something vaguely ‘outside the box’, it stumps them. For example, I had prepared some example questions and answers
Completed
Roast Pork with fried potatoes and sauce. for the students to help them prepare for the speaking test, Some of the students remembered the questions and answers off by heart, so sometimes I had the following:
“How many brothers or sisters do you have?”
“I have two brothers.”
“What is your younger brother called?”
“He is called Dom.”
“How old is he?”
“He is twenty-one years old.”
My journey to and from Naebuk always seems to bring with it an ‘only in Korea’ moment. You may recall from a previous blog how I saw a man climbing an electricity pylon on a rickety old wooden ladder. Well this week, this act of stupidity was trumped by a man who had scaled the poie without a ladder and was trying to tie together two electricity wires with his bare hands. I can only assume that he had no ladder to get down because he wasn’t expecting to be alive long enough to get to the conclusion of the job in hand.
Anyway, Laura’s back now. She just told me that whilst she was ice skating, a little girl kept speaking to her in Korean even after repeatedly insisting she had no idea what the little girl was saying. After a while, she wanted to get pushed by Laura around the rink so Laura obliged. However, disaster struck as they turned the corner since Laura begins to turn and the little girl, failing to be able to turn, has only one option - she goes flying into the side! Oops!
Tink and Laura
Advertisement
Tot: 0.068s; Tpl: 0.037s; cc: 6; qc: 26; dbt: 0.0202s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Dom
non-member comment
For a start, I'm 22...only joking. It's -16c here this very morning. Literally choking how cold it is! Anyway, not much news coming from this end. Getting prepared for the Christmas show and organising our decorations and stuff except Josh has gone to Norway for 10 days meaning he'll be back the day before the gig for the last practice. Luckily we've already organised our little in-set tricks so hopefully all is going to be well! I'll make sure I film this one! Talk soon, Dom