Austen

When I finish my 12 months in Korea I am starting a PGCE English with Media and Drama at London Metropolitan University, yes I plan to teach English in Secondary schools. Luckily for me I managed to defer my place until 2010, which means that my year in Korea is giving me ALOT of valuable teaching experience to take back home with me. Already I am positive teaching in England is going to be very different to teaching in Korea, although I love my job, and I love teaching in Korea - I would allow any child of mine to be educated in Korea. It is just too much. I teach four year old's that are at school from 9am until 4pm, and 10 year old's that are at school from 8.30am until 8pm, they go to Public School until lunchtime and then head to me at Hagwon for the afternoon, seeing not only me for English, but teacher's for Maths, Art, Music, Korean etc etc. It's heavy.

Anyhow, that's enough of a tangent, one of the things I need to do for my PGCE is catch up on my reading and read all the books that are demmed 'essential' that I managed to miss out on at school, I started before I came to Korea and am having to continue whilst I am here, so far the only book I wish I had studied at school has been Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Thus as well as my 'normal diet, a sporadic mix that has recently contained Wally Lamb, William Fiennes, Richard Milward and umm Stephenie Meyer... I am also getting involved with the likes of Steinbeck, Sallinger et al. My biggest battle however is with Jane Austen.

It's somewhat embarrasing to say I have never managed to read a single Austen novel, I have tried but it just hasn't happened. However in my interview for London Met I admitted such in my interview and said one of my goals before starting my PGCE was to catch up on this and rectify my lack of Austen, a few weeks ago I ordered the complete novels. It arrived and has been used to prop open my door ever since. This afternoon i was spurred on after watching 'The Jane Austen Bookclub' on TV I managed to read the first chapter of Emma before deciding i really needed to update my blog... Blog updated I am returning to Emma.

This blog will now include not only updates on Korea but also my battle with the darling Jane.

Incheon Part 1

Last weekend 'Team Tokyo' headed to the airport in order to organise ourselves some re-entry visa's (the visa's we got issued with for Korea our single entry, which means if we leave Korea without clearance then it cancels out our working visa and we would be screwed). We took the handy airport bus from Munsan to the airport which took just over an hour and was good practice for when we have to catch it in Feb, after wandering around the aiport for a while, we finally found the office, filled in some forms and then waited in line to be seen. Lucky for us a charming Korean man came over and sorted us out almost straight away, so we gave in our forms handed him the 30,000 won each and let him do his thing with our passports. Not only did we get our re-entry visa's, me and Jenny also got our money back because the English don't have to pay due to special relations with Korea. Olleh. Unfortunately Shauna and Mary being Irish, did have to. After sorting out the visa's we had decided to take a hike into the city area or Incheon and have a nosey around. We took a bus from the aiport which took FOREVER, but eventually ended up on some kind of high street in Incheon City. By this point it was about 3pm and we were starving and being that Incheon is a port we went in search of some kind of Seafood. Handily, close to the bus stop was a seafood restaurant so we headed in and made our orders. Jenny -soup, Mary some kind of breadcrumbed thing and Me and Shauna decided to share a Korean Pizza/Pancake thing.... Jenny's soup arrived steaming hot to the point she couldn't eat it, Mary's meal arrived and so did mine and Shauna's, but alas it wasn't a Korean pancake but a GIANT bowl of steaming, spicey Seafood and noodles. It was IMMENSE. I have never see anything that big or red looking in my life. But it was amazing.

I am unsure of what excatly was in it - there were some good points - crabs, prawns, alot of tentacles but also some bad points, some kind of something which i tried which resembled the Kangaroo testicles the contestants on I'm a celebrity get me out of here are forced to eat. It was vile. All in all it was a good meal, and after we had finished, Jen partly gave up on her soup and got involved with the tentacles. We headed in the direction of Jayu Park, one of the major 'things to do in Incheon'.

Why move over David Bailey....

I am in need of upgrading my digital camera and have been looking around at options for a while, i find it hard to buy camera's in England let alone in Korea - especially ones that require technological knowledge! I just want something pretty and not too expensive... In the search for a potential digital camera I have also fallen in love with other types of camera - The entire Lomo family, mainly thanks to an old work colleague's beautiful pictures (Fraser @ M1 - whose not old, I just nolonger work with him!) and the Choco Instamax. So on friday, where thanks to timetabling schedules I managed to finish work at 2pm, I legged it into Seoul and came back with the latter, a beautiful Choco Instamax, Choco for it's stunningly gorgous colour. It is beautiful and I love it...

It is also not the most sensible practical camera i have ever owned so I am still searching. Also when it comes to Lomo's I am currently undecided between the Holga and the Diana.... any advice is welcome

Konichiwa???

The most exciting news to happen so far this year is that I have booked a three day trip to Tokyo with three of my fabulous friends, we are heading over for Lunar NYE on Feb 13th and I can not wait! Expect to see ALOT of photos!

26...

I should probably mention my Birthday as it was really good, I had some great cards and gifts from people back home and people here in Korea. On the wednesday night we headed out for a meal at a Galbi restaurant in Munsan followed by a few cocktails in one of the local bars. Saturday night a bunch of people headed in to Hongdae. We had a meal with one of our Korean friends before heading to a random selection of wicked bars, Oi bar, which i love for its resemblance to an Igloo, a great underground bar which let you request your own music, then we hit a club where the staff were so drunk they kept forgetting to charge people, they could also bareley mix drinks so everything came with Tequila in it. We then headed to another chilled out bar and had some wine before heading back for the evening, All in all it was a very good birthday!

I received this AMAZING cake from some friends, and it was so delicious, the pinkness tasted of strawberries and was one of the best cakes I have had for my birthday ever! (Apart from all the one's my mum made me as a child of course!)

Busan day 2: Haeundae Beach

After a good night's sleep, we woke up early and left the hotel and Seomyeon to head towards Haeundae beach about 30 minutes away on the end of the Jangsan line. Korea doesn't have many beaches and Haeundae is possibly one of the most popular beach in Korea let alone Busan. Nothing special when it comes to beaches, I have seen far more picturesque and beautiful beaches in my lifetime but the feeling of being on a beach was just incredible, it automatically made me feel refreshed, happy and exhilerated, full of positivity towards the year of head, and already making plans of July weekends spent lying on Haeundae basking in the sun. It was January 3rd, 2010 and cold, although nowhere near the level of coldness we had left in Munsan and the beach was full of people taking walks and just enjoying life. For me being on Haeundae beach was the best bit about our trip to Busan, looking at the sea, walking on the sand and attempting to catch the experience on film. I can't wait to get back there...

Having spent a few hours on the beach we then went for a wander around the local market, full of local ajumma's shopping, touting, peeling and chopping - unsurprisingly there was alot of fish for sale and some great looking belts - that weren't actually belt's!

Next, we got back on the Jangsan line and took the subway three stops south to a stop handily named 'Busan museum of Modern Art' and went to visit, you've guessed it, Busan Museum of Modern Art. It was worth a visit and they had an excellent exhibition of about Taiwan, some of the work was beautiful and it has definitely made me want to try and visit Taiwan before I head back west - the thought was already there, especially having spent the summer at ISIS Goldsmiths!

Busan Day 1

The journey down to Busan from South Korea, gave a great insight to Korean landscape and made me realise that the entire country kind of looks exactly the same, fields of lush greenery, staggering mountains and expansive lakes contrasted with vast concrete jungles all sharing the same rather ugly network of cabling that runs through out. Mixed up inbetween are the remnants of past architecture, of buddhist temples and monuments dotted up mountains and in the middle of cities, the similarity i imagine is something to do with what happened when the majority of the country got flattened by the Korean war. Five and a half hours led to alot of people watching (I love people watching) and staring out the window, it also led to a rather random conversation with a Korean man who started to telling me about his job as a professor at Berkeley university in America and how he has hundreds of relatives all over Korea but was on his way to visit a few in Busan, he was utterly charming. Due to the mad dash in the morning to the station I had failed to eat breakfast or bring anything with me apart from christmas haribo (thanks Sarah!) so an inevitable trip to the buffet car became essential. Unfortunately the offerings revolved around dodgy sandwiches and alot of Kimchi (i went for the sandwich, which had kimchi in it!) but the most exciting thing about the buffet car was that it featured booths. Booths with noreabangs in and booths with computer games in, so yes you can sing kareoke and blast people with (fake) guns even when on a train.

On arrival in Busan we were in search of some accommodation so we headed to Busan Train Station tourist information and spoke to a very helpful lady who told us that due to the holiday season everything was booked and offered no other help apart from a vague snigger (something Korean's tend when in awkward or embarasing situations. She was lying, something we discovered as we headed to Seomyeon (both Rough Guide and Lonely Planet said good things about the area, it was central and we didn't have any better ideas). We found a hotel in about forty minutes, refreshed, unloaded some of the heavy stuff from our 'cringe' rucksacks and went to find some food. Eating in Korea is always an experience because about 99% of the time you have no idea what it is you have ordered, however we struck foodie gold by heading to a typical Korean place near to our hotel that was crammed with people all eating, all with happy faces. What we ended up getting was the same as everyone else, a kind of rice based, spicey mix of veg and chicken, cooked on a hotplate at our table, and some Korean Pizza - which resembles a savoury pancake and is pretty amazing.

After munching the food we went for a wander around Busan, just wandering, by this time it was early evening, and we were feeling rather tired... so as our hotel was right hear a cinema we decided that it would be fun to go and watch a film so we purchased four tickets to Sherlock Holmes before heading to Baskin Robbins to eat icecream - a very cultural experience... the film, like all western films was in English with Korean subs, so we had no issues with understanding it and i enjoyed seeing London and particularly enjoyed the reference to Chichester my hometown. After the cinema we headed to a bar had some drinks and then headed to bed. All wholly relieved we had managed to actually escape Paju!

Busan

So on Saturday am, Shauna, Jenny, Mary and myself trekked through a blizzard to catch the 835 train from Seoul to Busan, an epic journey of 5.5 hours all for a measely 27 won, which is about £13 one way. The train journey was an experience in itself and it is with a classic photo of us standing outside the train that i start what will be a multi posting pictorial account of what turned out to be 26 hours in Busan....

Isis

I spent my summer working for ISIS Goldsmiths, it was great experience and these pictures of all of the fabulous people I worked with had just 'emerged' , thought i'd share them...

miss you guys xxxxx

Some random party pics....

The Munsan Wonderland foreign teachers, Jenny, Mary and me!

The Munsan Wonderland foreign teacher's saying goodbye to Anthony, our canadian buddy who buggered off back to Canada... grrrr

Jenny, Cindy our fabulous Korean colleague and me on Lisa's Birthday at Outback in Ilsan..

The fabulous Lisa Mc Anulty and myself...

Queen Elizabeth and myself, she visited Korea on a whistlestop tour a few weeks back. She dyed her hair especially for the Korean's. She was fun, is a little waxy....

SNOW!

So we left Seoul Station heading towards Busan in a blizzard on Saturday morning at around 830 am, and finally got home to our warm beds at around midnight on Sunday night. On Monday morning we woke up to around four inches of thick, proper, powdery snow. It snowed all day. It finally stopped rather late on Monday and we now have around 6-8 inches in Munsan. The Korean's are very organised when it comes to snow, despite the fact that this snowfall is record breaking, they even started panicking. However the snow tractors were out the roads got cleared and most of Korea is now up and running as normal.

In need of food etc, me and Mary headed out into the snow and to have a gander and what state our beloved town was in!

* fyi, in the last picture, I haven't put on 3 stone, I am just wearing about 20 layers of clothing!!