Annyeonghi Kaseyo (Goodbye in Korean)

It seems like a month ago when I saw the countdown to Karl's arrival hit Nonuple zeros (nine zeros), but in actuality it's just been an action packed week. It's hard to believe that my best friend has already come and gone to the other side of the world to see me, but he has. I put Karl on a bus to the airport just yesterday, and I'm glad to say that I got an email confirming his safe arrival back in Dirty Jersey just hours ago.

But since the day he arrived in Seoul I hadn't had a chance to blog so there is a lot to catch up on. Palace's, parties, club night, birthdays, New Years, Seoul Tower, shopping, bus rides, subway rides, ball pits, and just saying "eating" as a topic doesn't give what we did the justice it deserves.

I was right when I said "Capt'n Karl is here...and he's all business." He came knowing that he had only one week to experience everything Korea had to offer so we had to get right to work. But I wanted Karl to see not only what Korea had to offer but what my experience in Korea has been like too. So the night he arrived I took him to a local restaurant where my friends joined us for what most foreigners consider their favorite Korean dish, Daeji Galbi. Daeji Galbi is barbecued pork ribs, and pretty much everyone likes them in Korea.

After dinner we headed to my apartment for some after dinner drinks and what was supposed to be a calm first night, for Karl to recover from his flight, turned into a
full blown welcoming party.

Karl got his first tastes of Korean alcohol; Soju, Macoli, and the local beers, Cass, Hite, and OB. Plus, he also got introduced to his KING SIZED BED that I got for him to sleep on while he was here. It was an all around good night. But it was just night number one. Take a look and check back soon for updates.

Summer Vacation in Southeast Asia

It only seems like a few days ago when I got back from France, but now I'm back from Thailand and Cambodia.

One of the main reasons I thought teaching abroad sounded like an enticing idea was VACATION TIME. You know, enlightening the young minds of the world, passing on knowledge, helping the youth of the world grow into respectable, well rounded, English speaking young adults, taking in the richness of a new culture, and then of course, VACATION TIME.

If you were unaware of my teaching situation for the nearly 6 months that I've been here it has been 8 AM to 4 PM Monday through Friday. During which, I teach 17 (45 min) classes a week to classes of 30 to 35 high school aged students. However, during the summer for two weeks my teaching hours were 9 AM to 12 PM, where I usually only had to teach for half of that time to classes of 2 to 6 high school students. It was basically heaven in comparison, if there is really any comparison at all. I mean, heaven and hell are both places you spend your eternal afterlife but the comparisons seem to stop there. And that's not to say that teaching for around 13 hours a week is hell either, it's that the summer classes were just THAT GOOD! I was in such a good mood I even carried all of our luggage when it started raining.

Small classes are wonderful. I can almost remember the students names. The students actually listen, speak, and sometimes even learn. We can play, have fun, and joke around when the classes are small, but when the class size is between 30 and 35 it's hard to do anything. Even the best laid out lesson plans can crumble in presence of 30 Korean students, 60 busy hands, 300 grubby little fingers, and from what I've heard they must be hiding more mouths somewhere because I can count no less than 1000 voices in those rooms sometimes. That is when they are speaking Korean, of course, when English is being spoken I need only to look in a mirror to see where the noise is coming from. But that was all forgotten for the summer. Two weeks with good students, good lessons, great hours, and more free time than I knew what to do with.

After those two glorious weeks were over the real summer vacation began; 2 weeks off. I chose to visit two countries in Southeast Asia on my two weeks of freedom, Thailand and Cambodia. I would have preferred to do the whole tour of Southeast Asia; Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore, but the two week constraint made me focus my efforts. So I chose one of the wonders of the world "Angkor Wat" in Cambodia, and the world renowned beautiful beaches of Thailand. Check out the excitement on my face on the plane ride over there...do not disturb me while I'm sleeping.

I am here to tell you that Thailand and Cambodia are great too. If you get the chance, GO! If not, well then I have roughly 500 pictures that you can look at and live vicariously through here.

We flew out of Seoul and into Bangkok where I just barely missed Carmen Sandiego. We strategically (accidentally) planned our visit to coincide with the "Mo Chit Weekend Market" in Bangkok, the largest outdoor market in Asia (so we were told). It was huge though. As Rachel put it, "It has everything you'd ever want, ever!", and it was extremely cheap. But all I wanted was the t-shirt that said "How's your day go?" for my Italian friend Karl but those Thia's don't sell a shirt larger than a boys medium. So I'm looking good in it now, and Karl has to do without, it's bitter sweet. The night in Bangkok was even odder than I can go into here on this blog, and they don't let you take pictures, but there really are some places on this planet where rules just don't seem to apply. It's like the Thunderdome, only anything can go in and out, 2 men, 3 women, it doesn't matter. The next morning it was a 5 hour bus ride to the Cambodian border.

Angkor Wat is one of the wonders of the world, what more do I need to say? It's really interesting. Whenever ancient civilizations create huge buildings and tombs and then fall off the face of the earth without explanation they leave behind ruins for travelers like myself to climb all over, and tell their friends about how cultured they are for visiting ancient ruins. It makes you feel like a little kid when you're in places like that. Everything you look at is interesting, and you want to check it out, and climb on it. We also had our own personal "Tuk Tuk" driver for our 2 days there, who drove us anywhere we wanted to go, and then waited for however long to take us back. It's like getting a taxi in New York City but your his only client until you leave and he comes up to you right after you cross the George Washington Bridge, oh yea, and he only costs 25 bucks.

We ended up flying out of Siem Reap airport the day after visiting Angkor Wat because the only road that leads to and from the border is the worst road on the face of the earth. On the way there 3 hours of bouncing up and down, ducking my head, hitting my head, biting my tongue, and sharing the road with farm animals was the kind of experience your happy to have done once, but don't ever want to do again.

So it was back to Thailand, but this time to the beach. And I don't just mean "to the beach" I mean actually to where they shot the movie "The Beach", a film about finding a legendary island paradise (heaven on earth type of place).

Yeah, I did that. I also played with monkey's, rode elephants, climbed dangerously unsafe rock faces in sandals, went kayaking, ate exotic foods, drank enough fruit smoothies to kill a lesser man, and got a little tan. And in case you were wondering two weeks is just enough time to get sunburned, have the sunburn fade into a dark tan, and then peel so you lose your tan by the time you return home. Wear sunscreen.

Then I finished off the trip with another movie island visit, "James Bond Island". The 1974 film "The Man with the Golden Gun" was shot on what is now know as "James Bond Island".

So Now I'm back home, or well, back in Seoul at least. The weather here has been surprisingly nice since returning, which is really sweet considering my friends told me we left Korea before the worst week of weather all year. Alright, I need to get back in the swing of things here but there will be more posts about Korea to come, I shouldn't be visiting anymore countries for a little while now :/


P.S. - Mr. Jong, probably my best Korean teacher friend here, who can barely speak English dropped this gem of a word on me in conversation today:

floccinaucinihilipilification: "the act or habit of estimating or describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation".

With 29 letters, it is the longest non-technical word in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.

We can't have a coherent conversation about the color of billiards balls, but he knows this word. I try to teach him things like "Hello my name is Mr. Jong", but I guess he feels floccinaucinihilipilification for my teaching.

Bored???

Even while I made this blog so that people I know can keep up to date with what I'm doing in Korea, I've started to hope that maybe anyone might check out my blog when they have some spare time. Obviously, that is wishful thinking, but after almost 3 full months of blogging, you have to lie to yourself and tell yourself that people ARE READING what you write. Otherwise, I'd be writing for nothing, or no one, and that wouldn't last long.

So if you do come to this blog because you know me, or like what I write or whatever, maybe you will like similar things that I do. I came across three video's recently that I thought were good enough to share on my blog. If you have some time to kill, which I know a lot of you do, I'm suggesting that you check them out.

Video #1:
Out of all of these videos, I think this one is the MUST SEE of the bunch. For all of you native English speakers out there, who don't realize the rest of the world is dying to learn our language, this should open your eyes a little. It opened my eyes, and made my jaw hit the floor. I can't even believe it was made on this planet. But either way TAKE A LOOK! It's an English lesson / Exercise video for Japanese speakers.
If you laughed as hard as I did at that video, please check out a related one that comes up after the video finishes (YouTube is getting pretty high tech). It's called "Learn English Korean Style".

Video #2:
If you know me, you know I'm kind of a softy sometimes. This is just a heartwarming clip. I don't really watch shows like American Idol, but I came across this clip and it blew me away. It starts of slow, but I thought there was a good enough pay off in the end to put it on my blog.


Video #3:
If you're not in the serious mood, skip this one for now. It is a one man rant on global warming, but an educated rant. When I first watched this video, as the video starts I wanted to hate the guy speaking. Then he started to get pretty interesting, but I still didn't want to like him. Thennnn, he won me over, and I liked him. But in the end he was really lame, and I just thought he was a loser. However, he did bring up some good points, and this topic is somthing we all need to think about, dispite his lack of charisma. If you're up to it, and got 10 minutes, give it a look.



If after all that you are still bored, and still have more time to kill, try finding your house on my map at the bottom of the page. It sounds lame but when you zoom it as far as it goes, for some reason it's intersting. I found my school in Korea, my home in New Jersey, my high school, Giant Stadium, and I can't explain it but it's fun. Take my word for it and give it a try. If you don't like it you just burned some more boring time anyway.

I've Made It...

Wow, what a trip. I left Newark airport at 8:25 AM on March 20th and took a 6 hour flight to meet my brother in Seattle. However, that didn't happen. It seems the flights to Korea don't get the best gate accessibility. I was told I might miss my flight if I tried to go have lunch (with a 2 hour layover), but I had left my cell phone in New Jersey. So here I am, waiting for my plane, not able to meet my brother, and not able to contact him either. Then I hear my name paged over an announcement, but the incompetent workers at Seattle airport didn't know how to contact the people who were paging me. I told them how it is supposed to work, they told me they knew, I replied, I don't think you do. So I had to unpack my computer, get Kevin's cell phone number and spend 2 dollars at a public pay phone (who knew they were still around?) for 4 minutes just to say I'm sorry to my brother. Hey Kev, I'm really sorry, that sucked, I wish I could have seen you. But moving on. While waiting for the plane I met another girl who was going to South Korea to teach for a year, Anand. We had a nice wait for the plane and met two guys who looked 15 years old, but were really 18 & 19 who were flying to Thailand for a Moy Thai fighting camp. I know it's a random thing, but these kids looked like the kids who are comedic side kicks in teenage melodrama's (ie: small, kinda nerdy, try to be cute) basically the opposite of what I think of when I think Ultimate Fighter. It was very weird, but I do wish them the best. It started already, I love meeting new people with interesting stories. Then the plane. It was a HUGE plane, but it was awesome. There were like 1000 movies on demand for free, free alcohol, free games, and apparently babies couldn't even cry on this plane, it was that good. Plus I got two meals, that I got to eat with medal silverware!!! A spoon, fork and KNIFE!!! They gave out two KNIVES to each person on one trip. My dental floss was confiscated on my trip from Newark to Seattle, but apparently it's the Thunderdome when you fly internationally. But after 12 long hours, and only one bathroom break (which was one more then I was hoping for) I arrived in South Korea. Two teachers were there with a sign that read "PAUL KROLL", of course I asked them if there car had Bud Light. They didn't get the joke, but I went with them anyway. On the ride to my apartment they made me really nervous, laughing when describing the size of my apartment as being very small. Also telling me I might not have a stove, and it's a 5th floor walkup. All news to me, and when you hear it in really broken English, it makes it sound even worse (Ex: "Room, BERY BERY SMALL, hahaha). So after getting caught in traffic for a professional soccer game on the way to my apt, carrying bags that weighed 55, 30, 26 and 24 pounds up 5 flights of stairs, almost 20 hours of being cramped in a plane, all while knowing I have to get up for school at 8AM the next day...The last thing I wanted to see was a terrible apartment. Well, I opened the door and I couldn't believe what I saw...