Lets begin by saying "annyeonghaseyo", or in a more familiar language "hello" and that I'm sorry it has taken so long for me to update my blog... but we have been REALLY busy! :)
Over the past month, Alex and I have made new friends, done a 16km hike to a buddhist temple, travelled 3,5hours to see cherry blossoms and started playing squash and doing yoga... So, let me elaborate...
Firstly, I would like to mention that school for me has gotten a lot easier. My grade 1 middle school kids are totally cute and awesome, they listen to every word, repeat after me and shut up when i put my finger on my lips... this unfortunately, is the only grade that is so obedient. The other grades are uninterested, obnoxious, rude little buggers who will only behave if there is some sight of candy or chocolate... This is relatively easy to curve in your favour when you have learnt one simple trick: walk into the class with a HUGE bag of candy and then only give one or two students something at the very end of the lesson... this allows you to make a bag of candy last extremely long AND the kids stay focused. The only flaw here is the said bag of candy ends up back in my office with me - leading to expensive self treating...
So, lets get back on track and do the elaborating I mentioned... We have a new South African - Afrikaans guy from Stellenbosch who has joined our ranks. He is awesome - makes me feel like I'm at home. There is something about a thick Afrikaans accent coupled with a loud voice and a rugby player build that just screams SOUTH AFRICA! :)
A couple weeks back, we had a public holiday on a Wednesday due to elections... So we decided to make a trip to see a buddhist temple. This was actually quite a brave choice on the day because we woke up to find it was raining. Nevertheless, a group of us grabbed our umbrellas and started our journey. A bus trip, 8km walk and a bit of water from the sky later, we were at Baek Dam Sa buddhist temple where we indulged in some "tea" (which tasted like liquid molasses) and took photo's of temples that were closed (because we were out of season) - sounds like a fail, but it was an amazingly beautiful walk with good people and good conversation!
A week or so after this, Alex decided it would be a good idea to go to a cherry blossom festival - 3.5hrs and 3 bus trips away. This confused me slightly because we live in the countryside and already have cherry blossom trees in our towns, that were soon going to blossom. Anyhow, long story short, I'm an awesome boyfriend who likes to do things for my wonderful girlfriend, and so I agreed to make the trip... We got to the festival at around midday and were greeted by some of our orientation friends, we watched some traditional dancers beating on pots and pans and took some photo's of the "beautiful blossoms" we had travelled so far to see. We then decided we were hungry and went to find lunch. This proved to be unsuccessful when we ordered seafood pancakes (AKA cold chewy squid omelette that hasn't been cooked properly) and a few beers, because the bill set us back roughly R150 each. Anyhow, we had done it and we headed home so that we didn't have to spend more money on accomodation for the night. Here's the clincher: 7 hours of travelling, R500 of spends, crappy food and some snaps of flowers later we arrived home exhausted and went to bed - only to wake up the next morning and find that all the cherry blossoms had come out in our home towns.
All this travelling led to us being rather stiff, so we have added some squash and yoga to our weekly schedule... Squash is different here as they score like only Koreans can and Yoga proves interesting when you cannot understand any of the instructions - but hell... we are stretching and having fun! :)
I am off to a teachers dinner tonight where I expect I will be given live octopus and some other outrageous fishy dishes, so wish me luck! The problem is I cannot refuse food or not eat something when the principal is buying as it is considered VERY rude... So, I am currently trying to think of ways to smuggle excess octopus out of the restaurant and freeing them in the Sea of Japan. Ideas are welcome...
Hope everything is going well that side and I hope to hear from you all! I will try update this more regularly as well. Happy Birthday everyone who had one in April too!
My email is chrisashton18@gmail.com if you don't already know...
