Let the sun shine in!

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Well it seems as thought Korea has managed to skip spring entirely this year. The weather went from cloudy, rainy, cold and winter-coat wearing one week to short sleeves, endless sunshine and soaring temperatures! And no one is complaining here!!

Once we got off the high from our family's visit, life quickly went back to normal here. The weekend of April 24-5 was a big weekend of festivals in Yangsan. Firstly was the Gyeongnam province Sports Festival which features mostly university-aged athletes in over 20 different sports competing for a chance to represent the province at nationals. We went to check out the taekwondo, on the suggestion of our master, in hopes of learning some good sparring techniques. These athletes were amaaaaazing! There is no way we can do close to the moves they can do, but it was great to see how sparring really should look, compared to the pathetic bouts we call sparring!

That weekend was also home to the Yangsan Lifelong learning Festival, which I took part in! Among tons of tents featuring any and all kinds of learning booths was the English Market, where kids would come to "buy" something from the market with the fake US 1 dollar bills. My job? Make them speak English before making a sale! They put me in this ridiculous (awesome?) chef's costume as I manned the bakery section of the market. It was fun to meet so many young kids, and since I don't work with them on a daily basis, a nice change of pace. It was also fun to try and figure out who their foreign teacher was and hear what they thought of that teacher! Of course, the students from Mike's school loved "smiss teacher" and thought he was great!

Finally, was the rape festival. Err...I mean, the Rape Flower Festival. These flowers are bright yellow and grow along the banks of the river that cuts Yangsan in half. This was a true Korean festival, complete with kiddie rides, food, games and the cheesiest displays for photos among the flowers - ie a giant heart made from red flowers that you could stand inside to get a picture taken..ya...they're all over here!

So, we spent most of the weekend walking around town, enjoying the beautiful weather and all the festivals. Mike has hurt his foot at taekwondo the week before, so he was hobbling around, but keeping up with everyone else!

The following weekend we went to a Busan I'Parks soccer game with a group of foreign teachers. Busan was playing Seoul and was expected to lose the game, but unexpectedly, and to the delight of the crowd, wooped Seoul's butt 3-0! This was the first real soccer game I have ever seen, and while it wasn't the most exciting, it was fun! They had your typical people walking through the stands selling drinks and snacks, but they were all "ajummas" (aka, grandmas)! It was quite hot that day, and with the stadium blocking any form of wind, we all got quite sweaty quickly, which resulted in some creative forms of hats, including using newspaper to make a visor to block the sun!

Following the game, we went for a delicious dinner of spicy beef and rice soup (we forget the name of it) and a pub quiz at the foreigner-run bar in Yangsan, where my team of smarties (which did not include Mike) won first place! woohoo! I should qualify this by saying that out of the 30 questions we were asked, I knew the answer to 2, both of them being the only questions related celebrities and tabloids...guess we all know what websites I peruse on a daily basis! haha!

May 5 was Children's Day in Korea, which they might as well call Teacher's Day, because the kids get the day off school, which by default means that we do too! Luckily it was a beauty of a day, so of course we all hit the beach, along with pretty much every foreigner in the Busan area! There were few Koreans at the beach, but the few that were there, all went swimming with all their clothes on, then proceeded to sit on the sand in their soaking wet clothes. ya. Having a holiday on a Wednesday is wonderful, as it makes the week seem so short! Thursday felt like Monday and then the next day was Friday! If only EVERY week could feel like that!

Luck has been on my side this month as well, because May 7, Friday, was the anniversary of the opening of my school, which is a school holiday! While no one else had this day off, I was able to enjoy the weather, sleep in and chat with some friends!

So that brings us to this past weekend! Saturday Mike and I went to the United Nationals Memorial cemetery in Busan, which is a memorial for all the UN soldiers who fought and died during the Korean War. The park and cemetery were beautifully landscaped and was a really nice place to walk around. Reading the plaques and information, really made you feel proud to be a Canadian! There were 376 Canadian soldiers buried at this park, just a fraction of the actual number of casualties the Canadians suffered. We had arrived just before 2:00 and were fortunate enough to witness a flag-raising ceremony that they perform every few weeks for one of the countries. They do it in alphabetical order, and Denmark was the country on that particular day, meaning we missed Canada by one! Anyways, they had a military band playing, some army dudes shot their rifles and they raised the flag and it was all very cool!

Following the tour we met James, Sarah and Drew for a truly Korean experience - a baseball game! Now, Mike and I are both baseball lovers and have attended our fair share of games back home, but nothing like what we experienced here! First of all, the tickets were 7$ (nose bleeds, but the most expensive ones were only 25$!) AND you are allowed to bring in your own food and alcohol from outside! Score! So we got us a nice hot pepperoni pizza and some beers and settled in to watch the Lotte Giants take on the Doosan Bears. So the game begins and right off the bat, Lotte scores and takes a 10-0 lead in the first 4 innings. Besides the baseball, there is another "show" going on that attracts our attention, and that is in the stands! The fans have so many cheers and jingles for the team that they sing following a guy standing on a platform in the centre of the stands!

Everything about these baseball games is over the top and it's awesome! When they change pitchers, they use a MiniCooper to drive the new pitcher onto the field! The local tv comapny will literally run behind a player running home to get a good video of them sliding into the plate - interference anyone?!?!? Around the 7th inning they pass out these orange bags to everyone that are intended to be for your trash, but the fans have started the tradition of filling the bags with air, and tying them to their heads, creating an awesome sea of orange in the whole stadium (orange being the colour of the Giants). It was awesomely fun! Towards the end of the game we started to catch on to some of the words in the chants and we singing right along with the rest of the crowd! So you know the song "We ain't gonna take it" - no, we ain't gonna take it, we're not gonna take it Anymore!" well, this was one of the chants, but it went "Lotte Gi-ants-uh, Lotte Gi-ants-uh, Lotte Gi-ants-uh duh duh duh (which we replaced those last three words with an-y-more!)! What a fun fun night! Oh, and Lotte won, 11-1 in the end, which was awesome too!

As previous mentioned, Mike injured his foot at taekwondo a couple weeks ago and has since started physio to help it heal faster. His doctor is this little Korean man, Dr. Shin, who ironically has two kids who live and go to school in Canada, so naturally he LOVES Mike. He is in the process of getting his Canadian residency and was so eager to practice speaking English that has done all the x-rays and physio for free! nice-uh! So Sunday night we were going to take him and his wife out for dinner to thank them for their generosity, but when we arrived at their house, they insisted that they would cook for us! They wanted us to experience real Korean culture and food, and we were more than happy to accept. They took us to their rooftop balcony (amazing!) where we sat down at a grill and ate the most delicious samgipsal, with beef, rather than pork! yummmmy! Dr Shin's wife just kept putting more meat on the grill and I'm pretty sure between 6:00 and 11:00 when we left, there was rarely a moment when no food was being consumed! We had many different kinds of kimchi, aged for different lengths of time, we had rice cakes (ddeok), ramyeon, bamboo, which we thought we'd always been taught that humans can't digest bamboo, but the Dr's wife looked at my face and said "it's good for your skin so you should eat it." Point taken. And so I ate!

Oh, I almost forgot the insane amount of alcohol that was consumed that night! Koreans love soju. period. They drink it like water. At first the Dr brought out 3 cans of beer and one bottle of soju and he prepared Mike and I Soju Bombs, which is a mixture of beer and soju. That took close to half a bottle of soju, but not to worry! He soon brought out a whole BOX of soju (16 bottles), which I'm pretty sure over half got drank that night! Luckily for me, Mike told the doctor that I love beer so he was spared the terrible fate of doing soju shots all night, but Mike was not so lucky! We had a great night filled with lots of joking and sharing! A friend of the doctor's arrived and read our palms. Mike will have bad health and is not very smart, but will be rich. I have good health, am very smart and will be rich as well. So it's clear to see which one of us is benefiting more from this relationship! lol! We'll see if his predictions become a reality!

As we speak, all the students from my school are off on field trips for 3 days to various parts of the country, and I was not invited to go (hmmmph) but that means I have a couple days of freedom from school (again, the luck being on my side thing) so I've got a couple beach days planned before a weekend trip to Seoul with some friends, including the much anticipated DMZ tour! More on that next week!

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