Blogs from Cheongju, South Korea, Asia - page 2

Dear Blog Readers, I weed a little bit at 10am on Monday morning. This wasn’t because I’d drank a lot the previous evening and hadn’t had my morning bladder relief. No, it was because an air raid siren was going off. A real-life air raid siren! You know - the ones you see on old war movies as families race to the shelter as a fighter pilot sets a Zepplin on fire. Laura and I looked at each other in disbelief. Was this the North Korean invasion we’d been anticipating? We started looking on the internet and flicking through the TV channels. Mythbusters still wasn’t on. Damn. After a minute, the sirens stopped and it twigged. It was Memorial Day in Korea and this was its way of signalling a minute’s silence. Unfortunately for the people ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, It’s been a quiet week in Boeun. Maybe the eeriness of Mokpo has rubbed off from last weekend. We only have a few channels that are in English, and our ‘usual’, Discovery has suddenly changed to Discovery Korea so our staple supply of Mythbusters at 7:30am has been changed to some Korean men shouting at each other as they try to do an assault course dressed as women. Consequently, as if Monday morning wasn’t bad enough for the average human being, we’ve had to resort to CNN. Normally I’m choking on my cereal at the terrible reporting, the Cathay Pacific advert being played for the 20th time in as many minutes, Piers Morgan…well, just him being alive, and the ‘banter’ between the weather girl and the newsreader who clearly hate each other’s guts. ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, Having exhausted Boeun of all its tourist attractions (both of them), it was time to take Christine to Seoul. In Korea, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day have been rolled into one kimbab sized package and called, imaginatively, Parent’s Day. It was therefore fitting that we had at least one parent with us to celebrate the day with. We went straight to Gyeongbokgung Palace. The palace is built right in the heart of Seoul and is the Korean equivalent to the Taj Mahal. The architecture and grounds were truly stunning and although the palaces have had to be rebuilt because of the Japanese burning them down (twice), it still manages to hold onto its history and the authenticity. The Korean parent’s lapped up the traditional Korean folk music that had been put on especially ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, For all those suffering from the yellow dust this week; how about a double dose of blog reading medicine? Luckily for you, this is a short one. My brother managed to get hold of the video of us dog walking in Boeun a couple of a weeks ago. We were volunteering to walk the dogs in the animal sanctuary just outside Boeun as part of KAPS . Please click the link to visit their Facebook group for more information: I've put my own subtitles to the video on Facebook so you can check it out by clicking here. Many of you have asked for the video to download so I've uploaded a non-subtitled version on YouTube here and you can copy and paste the webpage to www.kee... read more

Dear Blog Readers, After showing a slide of a man jumping over a bull during a bull fight in Spain, Mr Oh stops me in my tracks, “Simon, I have a question.” The students, as well as I, wait in anticipation. Mr Oh, “In England, do you use the term ‘bullshit’?” “Erm…(stunned silence from everybody)…you can’t really say that word…anywhere.” I hoped that he noted the emphasis on ‘anywhere’ encompassed a place such as in front of 35 students in a middle school. He turned to the students and spoke in Korean for a minute, but it felt like an hour, with every other word being “shit” or “bull”, or sometimes, “bullshit.” He turned to me at the end waiting for my reaction (as though I completely understood what he had just said). I assumed it ... read more