Memories.

Goodbye to:
Korean dogs, with their painted toenails and coloured ears
Baseball on TV, on most channels, anytime of the day, anyday of the week
The noisiest gym in the world, with every TV on a different channel, turned up full volume
BigBang! I will miss your tunes, and you're pretty cute
JimJilBangs, I will never forget you, or the sight of so many bare-naked ladies

Goodbye to:
Samgyetang
Amazing raw fish restaurants
Kimchi, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was a love/hate relationship, good for my health, bad for my hangover

Goodbye to:
Loads of gimbap at 4am on friday nights
Stopping for late night snacks at the tents in the street, and it turning into more soju with the ajoshi's

Goodbye to:
Incoherent, hilarious, conversations on the bus with the ajumma fishing ladies, oh how you cheered my mornings
Slapstick exchanges with darling Heejin
Slapping Heejin after she pointed out my "white hairs, white hairs!!! hahahaha"
Laughter at my every attempt to speak Korean, which somehow sounds more Italian
Rarely getting where i need to go because of my terrible Korean
"Gem mah! Nice to meet you!" "No, no, we've met. You say 'nice to see you' " "Okay, okay."....next time...."Gem mah! Nice to meet you!" "No, no..." and so on and so on...

Goodbye to:
Absence of individual thought
Thinking INSIDE the box

Goodbye to:
Fish smell, fumes smell, cinnamon smell, kimchi smell, samgypsal smell,
The smoking pesticides truck circling the school yard during mozzie season, and the children playing in the haze
Muhaksan, you nearly killed me, but it was a great view
지리산 넉차 such a delicious green tea

Goodbye to:
Noise pollution
LotteMart
Working in country schools, tractors bumping past, people lazing in the streets
Big f*off bugs!!
Rice paddy fields, wild sunflowers, ponds filled with lotus flowers, unfinished bridges
Templestay, what a gorgeous memory

Goodbye to:
Cheap booze, formaldehyde and drunken soju debauchery
Cheap cigs
My gym instructor, who I've always had a crush on, but couldn't think of anything to say

Goodbye to:
Mrs Choi, Mr Kim, thanks for looking after me
Dream Bay (yer right)
Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hello....never did get that tattoo
Korea, wow. What a ride.xx.

Annyeong e keseyo

Goodbye, good bye, its time to go now
Goodbye, goodbye, its time to go now
I must say
You've made my day
Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

If I were staying, and you were leaving, the title of this post would be 'Annyeong e kaseyo'. Isn't that lovely? The translation is something about, 'i go in peace' or 'i stay in peace'. I quite like the 'peace' thing. Its missing these days....

Lyrics Born

"This situations gotten outta control
With all this stress and confrotation I just might overload
My problems follow me to sleep at night, wont let me go
The more I hide, the more they thrive deep down inside of my soul" -Lyrics Born

Can't wait to get home and see some music!!

Korea, Sparkling!

My thoughts on the tourism campaign aimed at boosting interest in Korea as a travel destination...

I think that "Korea Sparkling" is completely inaccurate campaign slogan by Korea Tourism Organisation. Korea doesn't sparkle, and neither it should. The awful websites sparkle with photoshopped clear skies and blue oceans but when people actually arrive here they see that Korea glows, subtly, behind the mist. (Or find out that what they thought was 'Dream Bay' is actually a harbour built in aid of a free-trade zone. They may very well have chosen this particular destination, 'Masan, Dream Bay', due to its visual promise of sun, sea and sushi, and be more than a little irate only to find the sushi in abundance. Nevertheless.) And, sadly, they will miss the pride and beauty that is behind that glow because they will primarily feel annoyed at being hoodwinked on the sites and the KTO will have no-one to blame but themselves for people missing out on what Korea truly has to offer....culture, temples, a lush countryside filled with helpful and welcoming people. Not to mention the cuisine. Perhaps they should offer cuisine tours of various regions. Promote packages focusing on well-being tours. Thats all I bloody hear about here. The tea fields, the springs, the healthy diet, people in the west (if thats what they're aiming for) are interested in that. The campaign is all wrong. Vegas sparkles, Korea lives and enlivens.

Six Months Down, Six to Go

And is the soju bottle half-full or half-empty? I guess that depends on which day of the week the question is asked, its been drunk and re-filled innumerable times since I've been here. There's the anticipation of the first sip, alot of fun to be had half-way through and sense of regret, and a terribly heavy head, once the bottle is polished off. So, yeah, at this half-way mark, I'm having fun, and surely there'll be no regrets once the year comes to a close, though can't be sure about the heavy head, especially considering the amount of freaking walls its been banged against.

Vacation came to an end this last weekend and, to be honest, I am looking forward to getting back to work. The students are what make being here so much fun, they are so adorable and cheering

.

I find Mondays particularly amusing....I spend the day at a country school called Gusan, in Sujeong-ri, which is about 25minutes bus ride from Masan. At this school my office is actually the school nurse's office, as she has Mondays off, and all day long I have visits from little cherubs with splinters, headaches, tummy aches, and various other diversion tactics from their regular class. Little do they know that I am completely ignorant about the creams and lotions I am using on their wounds, as its all in Korean (ha!), but with a swab here and a bandage there and a sticker on their hand they are good to go. I dread the day a student's mamma removes the bandage only to find their soft little skin festering away, but, HA, that'll teach the f'ers to preserve their beer with FORMALDEHYDE.

Yes, I believe it is true. A Korean (and some South-East Asian beers, as I've been reading) brewing company seems to believe that formaldehyde is the most efficient and economic preservative to use in the brewing process of their most popular drop, Hite, hence hangovers verging on hallucinatory since drinking the shite here in Korea. A recent move to the peninsula's next finest drop, Cass, has seen my hangovers improve 100%, if that makes sense for a hangover to 'improve', ifyknowatimean. Perhaps its all balderdash, really, I'm only getting this theory from the www and that doesn't mean anything. It kind of wouldn't make sense for a country so obsessed with well-being to choose formic acid as their poison, 'scuse the slang, but then they smoke like trains. I guess its good to combat the bad with good, and those who know me well will agree I can hardly point a finger at hypocrites (; .

Muhak Massacre!

Masan is a small town with a big mountain called Muhaksan. Last week my friends and I decided (reluctantly, at least, on my part) to climb to the top for what we'd heard to be a magnificent view of 'Dream Bay', aka, 'Free Trade Zone'. Korean Tourism website developers have well solid photoshop skills. We met at the corner store and my friend told me exactly what we were in for:

Nevertheless, we tied out laces, filled our water bottles, packed our Gimbap (Korean picnic food) and set out on a marvellous, clear day.

We began positively, with Stephanie setting a cracking pace, Kristen in the middle, Shawn and I babbling away at the back, and Shawn loving the trees. It was hard work and, I cannot lie, I wasn't necessarily quiet about it. There was whinging and cursing and sweating and puffing, all the way to the top. And a contributing factor to the breathlessness was that I swore I could smell the pungent aroma of men's love juice! Every few metres I would get this 'whoof!' in my face and would run giggling like a teen; I didn't want to say anything because I thought my friends would think I was so sexually deprived I was inventing a SMELL in my imagination. Eventually though, I could stand it no longer, and asked quite casually, "Can anyone else smell cum?" to which they all burst out laughing, which is exactly what I was afraid of! Luckily though, Kristen is a hiker from way back and had experienced the same thing on other hikes; apparently its the perfume of a particular flower. So, we spent the next 100 metres sniffing out the source and Eureka! here's the little charmer:

Thank goodness it wasn't my imagination otherwise I'd be checking into therapy of some description.

We continued on our way and finally reached the peak, and it was really worth it...

Especially for the well-deserved Hite at the end!

Korean Killer

At dinner last night with Mrs Che, the discussion veered towards the food on the table and its individual health benefits. (Our conversations have to revolve around tangible subjects otherwise we get nowhere! For example, after dinner I was invited to join their family at the cinema for the Incredible Hulk (?) and was instead, quite surprisingly, dropped off in front of my building and bid adieu...no idea what happened there, I was looking forward to popcorn!) Her husband was telling me that we were seated in front of a myriad of cancer-fighting foods and spices: kimchi, garlic, pickled vegetables, green peppers, ginseng, dwen jan (soybean). He believes that if we eat these foods everyday we are making our bodies strong and we can beat disease, especially cancer. I believe that the foods have many health benefits but the fact that the incidence of stomach cancer is higher in Korea than any other developed nation makes me a little sceptical of the anticarcinogenic theory...