My apologies for being so quiet over the past few months! School started again and Alex and I found ourselves rather busy. The holiday posts will be completed as soon as possible... I have decided to carry on from just after our trip so that I don't miss anything important! :)
Coming back to Korea to teach after having such an incredible holiday was rather difficult! We arrived back on the Sunday morning and had to be at school on the Monday. This was torture! Just before we had left for Indonesia, I held a summer camp with my youngest students all about traveling, so my Monday ended up being one of those days where I had to tell my story at least a hundred times to different students in broken simple English. The first student got a pretty positive and in depth summary of our trip, but as the day went on my story shortened into a simple "it was good" or a basic 'thumbs up' gesture and I felt like I needed another vacation.
Classes only started on the Thursday and most were moved or cancelled because students were practicing for their upcoming school festival which I had somehow been roped into performing at... After racking my brain for a song that they would enjoy I decided to rather do a song I was comfortable with and then attempt a near impossible feat of trying to learn a song in Korean. After countless hours with my Korean co-teacher drilling in the correct pronunciation, I had decided that I would get by. That Friday was the school festival and I spent the entire day taking photos and watching dances to songs from Psy (Gangnam Style), Miss A, Girls Generation, Super Junior, SHINee and other overplayed, extremely poppy songs. The most awkward was a rendition of some extremely sexual dance performed by my high school girls, which I had to face the following Monday. I stopped taking photos just to make sure I didn't seem creepy! I'm not sure it worked...
It was finally time to grab my guitar and first sing a song that nobody knew and follow that with a song in Korean to a room of around 800 Koreans. Nervous doesn't quite capture what I was feeling... Once I was up there though, it wasn't so bad... The crowd were enthusiastic and positive and I had a great time, despite coming in on the wrong note for the Korean song... :) (There is a video on my facebook page if you want to watch it).
After this week, the fun died down as I started working on my university assignments and suddenly all my free time was being poured into papers on boring things like operations management, countless analytical graphs and calculations that made my head sore. This was then worsened by a trip to the dentist where I was told that I needed 5 fillings and 2 root canals. At first I laughed it off, but after sending the xray to my dentist in South Africa who confirmed that my teeth had deteriorated that badly in just 8 months, I started to panic a little. I really had no sensitivity, so I'm not sure how it could be true... I put it off to think about it some more, after all, I f***ing HATE dentists. :)
The school-term was now in full swing, classes were starting to get more rowdy and I had been put in charge of English Chess Club, which seemed like a terrible idea at first, but has really turned out to be fun! (Also, I'm not too bad - YAY)
I met a rather talented musician here named Jarrett and we have been playing some music together when we can get together. He is one town over and if our girlfriends give us permission we can easily spend an entire weekend playing various musical instruments and drinking copious amounts of whiskey. We spent one weekend up in the mountains at a Korean friends cabin. He frequently has parties up there, which end up being HUGE drinking fests... This specific weekend gave Jarrett and I the opportunity to play once again for some people. It has really been a highlight for me, he is an exceptional musician who has helped me improve and gain confidence, while having a kuk load of fun!
On top of all this, I have started my own music review blog which is doing pretty well, I've had around 1500 views so far and hope it continues! I have also bought the websites alternatereview.co.za and alternatereview.com, so that I can start designing a fully fledged website. It is coming along nicely and I have been learning HTML, PHP and the like... Pretty awesome stuff!
This brings me right up to just before Alex's birthday, which I will tell you all about in my next post... It was a pretty great 5 day weekend spent traveling the country in a car. Yes, a CAR! I drove. For 5 days. A CAR! A. MA. ZING. (A car... with 4 wheels, a steering wheel and me controlling it).
Ok. I'm done.
Love and Miss everyone in South Africa!
