The Weekend!

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Our first Weekend!

Friday

So after our first full day of teaching on our own one of our coworkers took us out for a night to relax. After a $4 taxi ride we were part way across the city at a Korean barbeque, which is very popular, where we had samgyeopsal, similar to thick-cut bacon, but it’s actually pork belly. The traditional way to eat it is to barbeque it in small pieces, then place it on a lettuce leaf with some weird tasting soy bean and hot pepper paste and maybe a slice of radish. Then you wrap it all up and pop it in your mouth. I (Rachel) loved this! Scott just ate the meat off the grill and dipped it in sesame oil mixed with salt and sometimes pepper, which is also delicious. This food is so much fun! Then we went to a ‘foreigner’ bar called Pearl Jam. Met some Irish men who were just a little rowdy, had some drinks. Oh, and watched magic? Yes! One of the guys who works at the bar is a regular Houdini. He was quite impressive! We were still catching up on sleep and were pretty tired so we took a cab back home and tried to sleep on our rock hard bed!

Saturday

So Saturday we spent the day walking around our neighbourhood. There is a big department store maybe a 10 minute walk away called Lotte Mart (pronounced “Lotté”). It has pretty much everything in it. It’s sort of like the Korean version of Wal-Mart. The set up is very different then what we’re used to in Canada. There are no stores in the mall; instead there are lots of little vendors. Each has their own space where they set up their wares. It makes everything seem very open and also makes the “stores” much smaller. It’s very similar to a market back home... minus the food. At the bottom of the Lotte Mart is a grocery store where you can get pretty much anything except cheese. Oh, and, *hint hint,* for birthdays and Christmas, please send CHEESE! (We would post our address, except we haven’t figured it out yet) We hear rumours that the Costco (oh yes there is a Costco here) has good cheese but that it’s terribly expensive.

Anyways...

Cheongju is growing rapidly, and the way they are developing is really neat. They are building in these suburb districts (like where we live), similar to Toronto, only each suburb has its own little downtown. So on Saturday, after leaving the Lotte Mart we explored our “downtown” and found a market! Sweet! And what did we see in the market? Lots of unidentifiable foods, a few butchers selling some crazy expensive beef... Oh, and a man walking around selling things from a little trolley playing ridiculously loud music and wearing a bra on his back and a patch-work jumpsuit. Check out the picture! It’s neat to be a “minority” though; we spent all day walking around and didn’t see any other Westerners!
Also on Saturday, we had our first grocery shopping experience! There is a grocery store about a 5 minute walk from our place. The only problem is that we had no idea what to get. There aren’t many varieties of fruit (which is what I live on in Canada) and the veggies are very different. It’s also not as big as we’re used to and we can’t read any of the labels so we don’t know what is actually in the packages. Mostly we had to rely on the pictures, which are not always reality. Sometimes they have English on the bags, but it is a 50/50 chance whether the English will actually help you or hinder you, since most of it doesn’t actually make sense! The only thing it's good for is a laugh
The rest of the evening was spent relaxing and watching some movies that we brought along.

Sunday

Sunday was Scott’s birthday! The teachers at our school were nice enough and awesome enough to reserve us a table at a really fancy western restaurant called Apple Farms, located in the actual downtown area (called shinae in Korean). It was very expensive but everyone seemed very keen to go. It was some of the best food we’ve eaten in South Korea so far. The whole table ordered a bunch of beef ribs (which is ridiculously expensive here) which was super delicious! On top of that there was a buffet with a wide range of foods, mostly Korean. There was sushi as well. The best sushi I’ve EVER, EVER, EVER eaten... it’s completely different from the sushi in Canada. Even Scott enjoyed it! Great food, great people... not much more to say... At the end of the meal, it is Apple Farm’s custom (although it may be a semi-Korean custom, don’t really know) for the birthday boy or girl to throw a pair of dice. The resulting numbers are deducted from the cost of the meal as a percentage. In our case, Scott rolled the dice and got a four and then a five, resulting in a discount of 9%, hurray! Too bad he couldn’t roll 12 but at least it wasn’t 2... Also, the dice were HUGE.

After the meal, one of our co-workers, Ed, took us on a tour of Shinae. It’s a really awesome area. It consists of one main road with many little side-streets branching off. It’s mostly closed off to vehicles, with a few exceptions. At one end are lots of western stores, like the body shop, nike, starbucks, dunkin doughnuts, burger king, pizza hut, and many more. There are also lots of Korean stores. They vary from high end shoe stores to simple bedding and clothing stores. At the other, there is a market like the one we visited on Saturday that sold food. This is where we saw some crazy Korean foods like silk worms, all sorts of tentacles, and, unfortunately, dog... 😞 It was here we also bought our mattress pads so that we could sleep comfortably on our bed! All in all, we had a great time. We haven’t even scratched the surface.... Shinae seems to go on forever.

There was also a really awesome park nearby. There were lots of old Korean structures, which we took photos of. There is also the oldest known Korean tree in the middle. It’s very wide and around 900 years old. The rest of the park was filled with old people, either gambling with sticks or lounging around.
By the end of the day we were very tired, so we decided to go home and get some sleep for the long week ahead.

More to come.

Keep scrolling down to see more pictures, also there is another page!

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Photos

Crazy guy
See the bra?