New Years in Pohang

If there is one thing I learned this New Years, it would be that spending New Years on the coast is a BAD idea ... unless you are some place tropical. Korea is not tropical.

We finally got a few days off work and had a five day weekend over the New Years holiday. My idea was to get out of Daegu and see some more of the country. So me and my friends Sarai and Marla decided to head to Pohang. Pohang is a smaller costal city on the south eastern side of the country. We chose this location for two reasons. One being that a friend of mine from University is living there right now, and two being that they were having a "sunrise festival" on the beach for New Years Eve.

Seeing my friend Jeremy was great. He took us out for some good food and to a few different bars. I even hopped back in the pool for a "workout". It was great to get back in the pool and I'm looking to find a pool in my area that has lane swimming - no luck so far.

For New Years Eve we traveled to a very isolated spot at the most Eastern point of Korea - a peninsula in Pohang - for the sunrise festival. When we arrived at the festival we went to one of the many food tents to have some traditional Korean soup, hoping this would help to get the warmth in our bodies and keep it there for the night. We then went to the stage to watch some of the performances, and of course the countdown to midnight.

There was supposed to be a 'tonne' of stuff going on from midnight until the sunrise, but at about 1am the stage went black and it looked like everyone was leaving. With really nothing to do and 6 or so hours to kill until the sun starting to come up we spent our time going between a souvenir shop and a convenience store where we had countless cups of coffee and bowls of soup. One of the funniest memories of the night was walking into the souvenir shop to see about a hundred Koreans sitting cross legged in the aisles sleeping - weird! I have never been so happy in my life to see the sun come up. As soon as the sky started lightening, hundreds of people started coming back (where they went for 6 hours we will never know). It was actually a really cool feeling to be standing at the side of the ocean watching the first sunrise of the New Year. It was definately a New Years I will never forget.

The Holidays

Wow! I can't believe it's been almost an entire month since I've made my last post. I would make the excuse that it's the holiday season and I'm too busy, but that wasn't the case this year. You see, Christmas isn't that big a deal here in Korea. I know some friends that even had to teach on Christmas day (I can't believe parents would make their kids go to school). But, my friends and I still wanted to get in the spirit a bit, so we all set up mini Christmas trees to make it feel a bit more like Christmas. On Christmas Eve, a couple friends and I sat around my apartment watching some Christmas classics such as Elf, and A Christmas Story while feasting on Kraft Dinner (shipped from home - thanks Mom and Dad!) and Guiness. We piled our gifts sent from home under my Christmas tree and actually waited until the morning to open them. That night, a local restaurant here in Daegu had a Christmas dinner party, so we bought tickets and celebrated with friends over turkey, ham and all the sides. It was just like being back home. The next day it was back to work as usual... no boxing day shopping this year : (

Palgongsan #2

When I first got to Daegu I felt that every weekend I had to be doing something, going somewhere, seeing the sights of the City. Now after being here for more than two months and it being winter and all, I am not doing the touristy things nearly as much. But, since my friend Marla's dad was in town visiting we thought that we should get out and see a new place in Daegu. We decided to go visit the Donghwasa Temple at Palgong Mountain. This was not my first trip to Palgongsan (san = mountain in Hangul), but it was my first trip to this part of the big mountain range. The village around the Donghwasa temple and the temple itself were beautiful and very peaceful. We thought we had seen everything in the village, but stopped into the tourist information booth to see if there was a gift shop anywhere in the area. Luckily we did this because we almost missed seeing the Tongil-daebul Buddah statue. This statue was built in 1992, and is the largest in the world - 33m high! It was definately the highlight of the trip.

Slacking

So, I have to admit that I have been a slacker lately with this blog. I apologize and I'm going to try harder this month to post every week. I feel like I have finally gotten into a steady routine here and that sometimes there just isn't much to write about. Either that or the things that I found extremely exciting/strange/crazy when I got here have now become the norm.

So here is what I've been up to the past little while:

Last Saturday a few of us went to see a performance that was part of the Korea in Motion festival going on in Daegu. Out of the many performances we chose the one called "The Ballerina who Loves B-Boyz". Does this sound very "Save the Last Dance" to anyone else? It was really good - lots of amazing breakdancing and hip hop music. Sorry about the lousy photo, it was difficult to get a good shot in the theatre.

This past Wendnesday was my official 2 month mark! It's hard to believe that I have been here for two months already (even though some days it seems like I've been here forever). Ten more to go!!

This Saturday we went to Seomun Market, the biggest market in Daegu, to try to do a bit of Christmas shopping. This market is huge, with sections for food, clothing, bedding and other goods!! It's very easy to get yourself lost, or find youself thinking you're in a new area, but then pass by a shop you just went into ten minutes ago. It was a fun time, well mostly - I would advise staying away from the rooster/chicken isle where they have hundreds of them for sale, both dead and alive.

After the Market we met up with friends at the Ariana Brau, a restaurant within the Ariana Hotel that has an all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink-beer buffet. It was an all Canadian crew out for the night to celebrate our friend Laura's birthday - a new Daeguite who I was connected with through a friend from back home (thanks Paddy!). I think we all got our money's worth with the beer alone. After dinner we went downtown to hit up a variety of bars. We ended up finding the place that we were looking for - a hookah bar - and spent quite a bit of time there in the chill atmosphere. A birthday night cannot be complete without a bit of soju and dancing, so we picked up a couple bottles of soju from the convenience store, and drank our way to the dance club Monkey. Good times were had by all!

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.