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!!

NYE

We spent New Year's Eve in Hongdae, a bunch of us foreign teacher's getting merry, eating random bits of streetfood and attempting to climb through hole's in wall's of bars (not me) My NYE outfit was scarily low key compared to every other new year's eve event I have ever attended, mainly because it was about minus 50 and Korea was still covered in Snow that had now turned to ICE!

The day after we decided we would definitely head down south to Busan for the weekend. I have a whole mass of photo's and stories from the weekend, it was amazingly perfect and the much needed break we oh so desperately required. The Busan posts will those be small sweet and simple and arriving over the next couple of days I PROMISE!.....

Seodaemun Prison

It was third time lucky when we went to visit the Seodaemun Prison on the first day of our Winter break, Wednesday the 29th... we had attempted to go twice before but for various reasons failed miserably, so on a freezing cold snowy day we went to discover a little about Korea's fairly bleak history! Seodaemun prison was built by the Japanese during their occupation of Korea during the Korean War, it is complete with some rather disturbing montage's of how prisoners were treated by the Japanese and full deatails of all the methods of torture, many of the people imprisoned in Seodaemun were Korean Patriots, fighting for Independence, those strongly against the Japanese occupation. The Prison itself is a huge complex of building's now used as somewhat of an education/history hall to fully depict what happened in Korea in the not so distant past.

You were able to go in the cell's and 'feel' the experience, I did, it wasn't a joyful moment...

Like I said, they have created pretty graphic montage's of scenes of torture, the Japanese don't come out that great... probably because they weren't very nice, to prisoners of war... or just any prisoners in general anywhere, ever...

So, after the bodies were tortured they were then disposed of in the below building and the dead were wheeled out the back door...

The obligatory picture of me in the prison, totally and utterley freezing.......

Boxing day and the rest of Christmas weekend!

We though one of the benefits of being in Korea for Christmas and suffering pre-christmas temperatures of as low as minus fricking 12, would be that we got a white christmas. It wasn't a white christmas, it was grey and cold and just pretty crap weather really. On Boxing day, or St Stephen's Day as the Irish refer to it, me and Mary headed into Seoul and went to the Art Gallery at Deoksugung Palace and to see the Warhol exhibiton at Seul Museum of Art by City Hall, both of which were great, the best thing was that Seoul itself had recieved a smattering of Snow late on Christmas day at Seoksugung Palace was somewhat of a magical white winter wonderland. After the art, we headed for food at a Vietnamese restaurant near City Hall and then wandered down to Kyobo were I bough myself a great little christmas gift, the new (ish) Wally Lamb novel ' The Hour I First Believed', I am now well into it, thanks to eleven hours on a train (more of that later) I have read his previous novels 'I know this much is True' and 'She's come Undone' and they are both incredible. I highly recommend him to EVERYONE!

On Sunday, it snowed in Munsan, we had to go to work on Monday morning and Munsan was a beautiful snow covered winter wonderland!

It's Christmas!

So Christmas eve was spent mainly at work, however as soon as we finished, we hauled ass down to the Frog and Toad in Ilsan and brought in Christmas with cocktails and a nice amount of shots! We headed back to Munsan (after a brief trip to McDonald's, quite the place to be on Christmas Eve in Korea it seemed?! and the purchase of a rather crazy singing rasta doll!)

Christmas day was spent cooking a bunch of random food, the best we could muster with four hobs, two microwaves s steamer and a toaster oven! We ended up with quite a feast, including garlic bread, chili con carne, dokboki wrapped in bacon, hash browns, pork, veg, the amazing stuffing my fabulous Mum sent me from the Uk and a whole bunch of random deserts, including my rather brilliant Rocky Road and an amazing Christmas Cake Mary found!

We then pretty much chilled out for the rest of the day, watched Love Actually, The Holiday, Four Christmas's, The Snowman and Father Christmas! All in all it was weird, totally bizarre but pretty cool!