Hockey night in..... Korea?

This past Friday we went on a field trip with our kindergarten kids to the apple orchard. It was a great day for the trip - the sun was shining and it wasn't too cold - it was such a fall thing to do. The apple orchard did not compare to the ones we have back home, but it was still fun to see the kids picking their own apples and playing some games. The big hit of the day was the swing - ohhh ahhhh. They even brought out a big long rope for us to play tug-o-war. All of the classes got a chance to go against each other to see which one was the strongest. At the end we even had a foreign teacher vs. Korean teacher tug off. I was sure we had this challenge in the bag - 5 foreign teachers, 2 of them being men, against 10 female Korean teachers. We were doing pretty well until about 20 little kids decided they would help out. We'll definately have to have a rematch someday.

Sunday a few of us went over to a restaurant downtown run by Canadians called the Holy Grill. This place has great food when you're craving something Western, but Sunday we went there for one particular reason - hockey. The guy who owns the bar tapes the Hockey Night in Canada games from the night before and then replays them Sunday. This Sunday was a Canadian showdown with Toronto playing Ottawa and Calgary vs. Edmonton. We only stayed to watch the first game and it was great to see Toronto kick Ottawa's butt. It's nice to have a little bit of Canada here in Korea.

New places. Familiar faces.

This past Friday after school I hopped on a bus and headed to Suji to visit some friends from teacher's college - Ryan and Allison. It was so nice to get away from my place in Daegu and see some familiar faces.

We had planned on spending some time in Seoul, so after a hearty breakfast - including Tim Horton's coffee!!!!! (Thanks to Ryan's mom) - we took a bus into the big city. We met up with a friend of Ryan and Alli's and went for a little hike up Mount Namsan to Seoul Tower. This place is the highest point in the city and is a great spot to see the view, even through all the pollution. The tower is the third tallest in the world at 240 meters tall , but since it is built on the top of the mountain it ends up being 483m above sea level. The hike up to the tower was great, aside from the smell of silk worms brewing at one of the random vendors. When we got up to the top we were greeted by two very strange and random acts taking place. The first was an older man hoola-hooping three hoops around his waist and one around his neck while holding batons. There were a lot of young kids around watching this guy, and there we were with them. This guy was so hilarious that I had to include a photo. Right behind this guy was another man jumping rope. We were in this area for about 30 minutes and the skipping guy did not stop once. Judging by the size of his calf muscles I think he skips quite often. Even on our way out of the tower and back down the mountain a couple hours later this guy was still skipping. We think he must have been raising money as he had something written on his shirt - Korean of course.

Sunday, after losing Alli to the Korean Soju gods, Ryan and I headed to Suwon, an ancient fortress city. It was a great day for a walk, so we walked pretty much walked the entire wall around the city. After the walk we headed back to Suji and then I took off on my trip back to Daegu. I am definately going to have to check out Seoul a few more times while I'm in South Korea.

In other news: I offically started taekwondo yesterday! I'll let you know if I make it through the week.

The Big Bang!

This weekend I lost my B-card. That's right. I finally had my first Korean bang* experiences.

* pronounced 'bong'

Friday night I went to the Noribang.

The staff of St. Peter Junior School was taken to Gyeongju for a little 'field trip' of sorts. After the hour drive east of Daegu, we arrived at a very nice hotel in a tourist area of the city. We all dropped off our bags and headed to the little grocery store downstairs, being told to pick out anything we wanted for snacks. Half an hour and two full bags later we made our way back upstairs to have our junk food feast and to play drinking games. After a couple hours of fun, and six forties of beer later we decided to check out what the hotel had to offer. This is when we stumbled upon the Noribang. A Noribang is literally a singing room. You walk into the place and are taken down a long hallway with doors on either side. Each door opens to a singing room, similar to karaoke, but instead of singing in a bar full of people you don't know, you sing in a small room with friends complete with tambourines and many microphones. Marla and I picked quite a few songs to sing together (my favourite being Journey- "don't stop believing") and also got a couple songs picked for us by our Korean co-workers ("don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me" - how random!). The funniest part about the whole thing is that they play all of the foreign music to random korean videos that have nothing to do with the song you are singing. This place was soooo much fun and we're definately going to frequent more noribangs in the future.

Saturday night I went to the DVD Bang.

Similar to a noribang, a DVD bang is a place with many small rooms where you watch movies (already released on DVD). We picked a random 24 hour bang downtown and were given the VIP room, which had a huge sort of couch that four of us could fully lay down and chillax on. After two movies we decided to call it a night and headed home at 3:30am. We're going to have to do more training before we try a 24hr DVD Bang-a-thon.