Merry Christmas to ME!!!

Hello All!




So first off, I must say how terrible I've been at keeping this thing updated lately. For those of you who check it, you can see that my last post was from Halloween, nearly two months ago! However, I don't think you have missed much.
As you know, I've decided to come home!!!! I'll get in Christmas Day and leave early-ish on New Year's Day (not a long break or good time to travel, but I know it will be well worth it)! Because I spent so much on tickets home and back to Korea, I decided I should lay low for a while and save money. I have been doing well with that and have only gone out to String and to dinner a few times. My most recent trip to dinner was last Saturday, December 18th, for a goodbye of sorts, since so many of us are leaving for the holidays. We went to my favorite somgyp sal restaurant. It's a Korean BBQ place and it's DELICIOUS!!! Afterwards we went to a Soju Cocktail Bar which I believe is called Fish and Grill. Soju, in case I haven't mentioned it before, is a Korean alcohol similar to vodka in that it's alcohol content is quite high and you can mix it with almost anything. The difference is it comes in a "beer bottle" and it's dirt cheap. It's Awesome! I'm bringing some home for people who want to try it. A soju cocktail is essentially a fruit icee with lots of soju in it and this bar has 8 or 9 flavors. We had a lot of fun, as you can see here.

It's supposed to be a funny picture. We were imitating some Koreans. As you can see, there are some new faces in the group. From left to right, we have Louis from Reno, Nevada, Me, Connie from Toronto, Kate, Trey from Oklahoma, Rhonda from Canada, Dan from Australia, Laura from Canada, and Fritz from New Zealand. This was early in the night.

The only other interesting tidbit is that I ate live octopus about a month ago. We were at String talking about it because Louis had just recently had it for the first time. We talked about going to try it later that week when all of sudden, we were leaving to go eat it right then. I tagged along with Louis, his Korean friend, Pete, and a guy named Wes who came here a few weeks prior to this point. So we go to this restaurant and order our food and some soju, because there's no way I was going to do this sober. :)

They bring out the soju. We all take a few shots. Then we hear this pounding noise coming from the back. I was told that this was the cooks taking the octopus, cutting off the tentacles and pounding it into chunks, between 1 1/2 and 3 inches long. Then a Korean lady brings out a single plate and sat it down in the middle of our small circular table. I look at the plate and see these chunks of tentacles slithering around like worms ready to get hooked as bait. I took one look and immediately backed my chair up a few feet with a very disgusted look on my face. I watched as the others decided how to eat this. The Korean man sitting next to me, who speaks very little English, took a few pieces and put it in this red sauce next to me. We were each given our own small dish of this sauce. He told me that the sauce helps to "kill" the octopus and sure enough, it stopped moving. As everyone else was eating this, I was getting up my courage, and asking questions about it. Strangely enough, I never asked how it would taste, just how it would feel in my mouth, moving around on it's own. I was told that I had to chew profusely so the suckers would not grip the insides of my cheek, tongue, or worst of all, throat. This had me really freaked out, but since the others seemed to be eating it no problem, I decided to give it a shot.

I took one of the pieces from my dish of red sauce, looked at it barely moving, put it in my mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed... It didn't taste bad or good. It was bland, from what I remember, of course I had it in my mouth for as short a time as possible before I knew it was safe to swallow. I only had one other piece, a much bigger one, but I was amazed at how the others and especially the Korean we were with took several pieces at once by chopstick in their mouth.

Unfortunately, I have no pictures or videos of this experience, which just means I'll have to get up the courage to do this at least one more time!

Until then, I will see you all soon! I will try to be better about posting on here, although I know I won't again until I go home and come back!

Halloween in Korea

I had two Halloween celebrations in Korea. The first was at my school and the second was Yeosu at a bar, about 45 minutes from where I live. At i-Sponge, Kate and I had to give a presentation about Halloween. So I put together a PowerPoint and we presented it to the group. This is a picture of about half of out students, and their friends who came, but there weren't many friends. After the presentation, we had pictures taken and then we broke off into two teams. There was a Kate team and an Ashley team, although I'm not sure why because Kate and I ended up staying together in the gym (pictured below) to lead the game, which turned out terribly. For the game, we did bobbing for apples. The apples were quite large so Kate cut them up. However, the kids still couldn't pick up the apples and it turned into chaos... oh well haha
We also had face painting, a haunted house, which was actually quite scary, and food, lots of food.

Yeosu was fun. I went as a vampire like at school. Connie, Kate and I went to Suncheon to meet a few people and then travel to Yeosu together so we split a cab to the bar when we got there. It was fun. I didn't take any pictures here so I'm only tagged in a few on Facebook but below you can see Connie, Will and myself.

Here you see me, Connie, Lindsey, as Poison Ivy, and Alex and Ian as the two main guys from the movie Fight Club.

Fireworks Festival in Busan :)

We went to Busan for their annual fireworks festival. We'd heard great things about the fireworks here and specifically about this show they put on in Busan. The festival was this past weekend, October 23rd and 24th. We left early Saturday morning by bus, which was extremely crowded. It took about 3 hours to get in to Busan and then we had to take the subway for a bit to get to the place we were staying, Connie has a friend in Busan so we stayed there. Everyone else got a few rooms to share. After we all got settled, we met at this bar called Fuzzy Navel around lunchtime. They serve the BEST Mexican food I've ever had, or maybe I just think it's that good because I've been totally deprived of Mexican food since getting to Korea. Anyway, I had tacos and they were fantastic. :)

Kelly and Bert met us here so that was pretty great to be able to see them, catch up a bit and exchange oddities about Korea. After lunch, we all broke off our own ways. There were about 15 of us at lunch. Kelly, Bert, Connie, Kate and I went shopping. We had to take a taxi to get there, and then we had to walk a bit because we told the taxi the wrong place but we finally made it. This is the mall we went to. They call it the largest department store in the world but it's clearly a mall. I should have taken pictures of this place. It's massive, at least 9 stories tall and it has all kinds of stores I recognize from home as well as other foreign stores and Korean stores. As you might imagine, most of this place is pretty high-end. They had all the big big brands there, like Coach, Chanel, Louis Vitton, and so many many more.

After shopping, we went to the beach they were shooting fireworks off at. We were supposed to meet everyone there because they were saving us a seat, however, we got there at 8:04pm. The fireworks started at 8pm and let's just say, EVERYONE comes to this festival. There were tons of people packed on this beach like sardines in a can. It was truly astonishing. If I wasn't so scared about being separated from the people I came there with, I would have taken pictures of the masses, not to mention the fireworks, but I was a little preoccupied being freaked out.

Don't get me wrong. I definitely enjoyed the show. The fireworks were absolutely incredible- much better than anything I've ever seen at home. They had colors, shapes, sounds and designs in their show I've never seen in fireworks and they had some that just stayed in the air, without fizzling out, for a good couple minutes. Best of all, they lasted a solid 45 minutes. About midway through the show, I managed to see the top of Kate's head and I began to call her and shove as best I could to reach her and when I finally did, I did not let go. I think we may have gained a new appreciation for each other that night haha

This is Connie and I after the fireworks show. There are a lot less people around now. Thankfully.

Daejeon Rock Festival

So a bunch of us went to the Rock Festival in Daejeon a few weekends ago. In Korea there are lots of festivals going on all the time. Daejeon had the rock festival, an international food festival, and some other cultural ones all going on the same weekend. There was food from a bunch of Asian countries and Mexico and Spain (that somehow makes it international) which we could pick from when we got there. I got some Indian curry which was pretty good but the meat I had was really bony and hard to eat. The rock bands were mostly "screamy" Korean groups but there were some foreigners singing too. The festival was supposed to play music until 5am but the police came and shut it down around 2 due to noise- makes no sense. Obviously a rock festival will be loud, but whatever. Here is one of the Korean groups on stage (not even sure if you can see anyone on stage in this picture though).They had this hot air balloon going next to the river, across the street from the rock festival. This was part of some other festival. All those dots in the sky are paper lanterns lit up. See my next picture for a group of people I don't know setting one off.

After things got shut down, we went to a couple bars and a Japanese restaurant before heading off to bed. Sorry this post is so lame. The Internet has been only letting me on for 10 minutes at a time, unless it's Skype, so I'm trying to crank this out quickly so Andrew has something to read. Next, I'll talk about this past weekend where I went to Busan for another festival. Try to enjoy!

Lisa Leaves, Ivy Takes us to the Lantern Festival and the Rest..

So not too much has happened since my last post. After hiking, I stayed in Gwangyang for the rest of my break from Chuseok and I got back into working. However a few weekends ago was a happy/sad time because another person went home, Lisa. She was part of the group who went hiking in Songnisan.

To send her off, we went out to dinner and then drinking after. The picture below shows Kate and I at the Indian restaurant in Suncheon that Lisa chose. Behind us you can see the big group of people we were with. Kate, Lizzie, Pete and I got there a little late so we had our own table.

After dinner most of the group went back to their apartments (most live in Suncheon) to get ready. We were already ready so we headed to a bar to kill some time. None of us had been here before and I forgot the name of this bar but it was really trendy and had these awesome beer towers. We enjoyed this :)
The party was supposed to be James Bond themed but I am not good at dressing up... In this picture is me, Lisa :), Kate, Shari, Sheba and Meghan. This is at San Antonio's where we went after the beer tower place and then after here we headed to a noraebong. It was late night but I think Lisa had fun!
During that next week, Ivy, the Korean teacher at our school, took us to the Jinju Lantern Festival. Jinju is about 45 minutes from Gwangyang. It was incredible! Here is a picture of Kate and me with two Korean girls who came up to us asking to get a picture with us. Under that is one of the sweet floats that was on the water. There are many more pictures on Facebook of this too. While here, we looked at all the floats in the water. They all lit up and some of them moved too. We also got paper lanterns which we wrote our hopes for the future on and then sent down the river. After this we had some pork and sting ray. Not a fan of sting ray. This was on a Thursday night and Ivy told us to make sure Jasmine didn't find out we were going because she would flip if she knew we went out drinking on a work night. We got home around 11:30 and we were all a little tired the next day but it was totally worth it!

Since this, there has only been one other weekend and a bunch of us met at a girl's high school in Suncheon for a softball game. I didn't take any pictures at it but there were at least 40 of us and most everyone played. Of course I didn't :) Haha

Also, Monday night there were some very loud, unexpected fireworks that scared the crap out of Kate and I who thought we might be getting bombed.. If you want, look at the videos of the fireworks I put on Facebook. Kate and I are talking nonsense throughout them but some of them are pretty cool.

As for this weekend, I think we are going to a rock festival in Daejeon. It is going on Saturday in a park and then Ivy wants to take us to some folk village Sunday so we'll see if that happens..

Until next time :)

Hiking at 속리산 (Songnisan) National Park

Over Chuseok, Korean Thanksgiving, Kate and I went hiking with some friends at a National Park that is about 3 and a half hours from Gwangyang. We went up Tuesday night so that we could leave early to eat and start hiking. We stayed a hotel in the middle of nowhere and the rooms where 30,000 Won each, which is about $26. That's crazy cheap and the room wasn't even that bad! There were no bugs, except Pete had a spider above his bed haha, and it was clean, except for some dust and cobwebs. Overall, totally worth it. It had a/c and free Internet. The Internet was spotty but still better than some places at home.

Anyway, we left there around 8am and then headed to the village outside the mountain we were going to hike, ate, bought the awesome rain ponchos you see below, and started hiking just after 10am. It cost 3,000 Won to hike all day. We were there for about 7 hours and it was rough. This was my first ever hiking experience and when you see a sign that read "Danger District" you can't help but get nervous.. Haha

Still, it was a lot of fun and I'm really glad I went. We we did get up to the top, were we up in the cloud bank and it was really foggy so we didn't see the view we were supposed to, but it was still a great experience and I want to go again soon because everyone says fall is the best time to go and it's getting much cooler. We hiked about 16km which is almost 10 miles. Special thanks to PETE. I never would have made it if you haven't carried my backpack over half of the way... Thanks :)

This is from the Boyeopsa Temple which we went to visit after hiking. It was in the park on the way out. There was a GIANT Buddha too.

On our way home, we stopped for food at TGI Fridays. We each got a 3 course meal for about $20. Here is the dessert we all picked!

Eel is Delish! :)

So this past Thursday night my boss took us out for dinner. We went to the restaurant in the picture below. While there we ate a lot of different things including kimchi, ginger, radish, rice, shrimp, a spicy soup that I didn't even realize was spicy (see bottom picture), and eel. I was very excited about trying this, ever since seeing it on TV back home. I was a little grossed out at first because when they brought it out, it was still moving. Check out my other pictures and videos of this on Facebook. However, once the shock of this wore off, I really got into it. Plus they gave us some free eel for being American, or at least foreign.

This is our group, minus me. The lady in black is our new secretary lady and we call her Big Mama. In the white is Michelle. She is our cook. She doesn't know a lot of English but she's really sweet. Across from her is our boss, Jasmine. She speaks good English. Next to her is Kate and then Ivy, our Korean co-teacher.

I added this picture just to show how they cut meat. They never use knives, always scissors and tongs or chopsticks. So here Ivy is cutting the eel while its still cooking over the grill. The other picture right before I tried eel for the first time! It was really very good!!

This is said to be the hottest chili pepper in Korea. I ate it. My mouth was on fire for at least 20 minutes! haha Still worth it. Notice the leaf with eel in my right hand ready to ball up and shove in my mouth after eating the pepper! haha After eating that I chugged some Coke, which didn't help at all, and then we served the spicy soup. I didn't even notice the spice because I just thought my mouth was still not happy about the pepper.. Good times :)