Halloween and a Kitten

This is the latest addition to our household, a 2 month old kitten. Her Korean name is 삼순이, but her English name is Cat Farrand-Ngo.
Cute, no?

We'll talk more about her later.


Although I've been in Busan for a year now, I'd never got around to visiting 'Little Texas' or Foreigners Street' which is near the harbour. It's a blend of multicultural themes, kind of like a rainbow chinatown and it has a seedy reputation for being frequented by individuals who like seedy areas. What does that mean? I'm not entirely sure.

There's a fairly large Russian population in the city and I've never had much contact with Russian culture in general. Russian writing reminds me of Greek.

We ate in a Russian restaurant and I was expecting some stroganoff, but apparently that's not the only thing they eat in Russia. Our lunch consisted of potatoes and chicken, in a minimalist-style cooking approach. It was alright.

John and I decided to buy a television to compliment our newly enlarged living quarters. After investigating the options, we ended up buying a brand new 42 inch plasma screen. It's awesome. In Korea, electronics are cheaper because of companies like LG and Samsung. This one cost us 1.4 million Korean won, or about US$1500 (and that's with the new exchange rate). The equivalent model would be about double the price back home.

In this photo, Tim is playing Halo 3 online through an X-Box 360 modem, while John is using wireless internet on his laptop. We broadcast our public wi-fi signal 24 hours a day, so that anybody nearby can use it for free. Our apartment has an excessive amount of connectivity, throughout the different rooms there are 4 cable TV and 10 modem ports built into the walls. We only ever need to use one of each.

Halloween was never really celebrated in Australia and I was always under the impression that there was supposed to be a spooky theme to all the costumes. Apparently not. Jef and Elissa hosted this party and there were a variety of ingenius outfits. In the foreground there is John, as a giant piece of kimbap. Holding the large silver spoon and dressed up like a dog at the back is Austen, whose costume was 'dog soup'.

Here's Geoff, an American football player and English teacher who dressed up as Mr Incredible. He's a very friendly guy and actually went to his class like this to surprise the kids. Later on in the night he got a little drunk and ran onto the road pretending to push back trucks and cars that were waiting at the traffic lights.

After my first real Halloween party, I was able to conclude that it was all simply an excuse to dress up and drink a lot. We'd do that often in Australia anyway, just without the dressing up part.

My outfit, at minimal cost, was ilban-sureggi (or 'general rubbish') man. In Korea you have to buy special waste bags to dispose of general rubbish, as opposed to food waste or recyclables. I put some armholes into a 50-litre one and sticky-taped some examples of general waste to it. But this guy on the left seemed to do it much better. One of those plastic bottles was actually filled with alcohol that he was drinking. He told me his name, but at parties like this I tend to forget these things for some reason.

And here he is getting into a taxi to the second venue, after a considerable amount of effort.

The second venue was the PNU area, where there were a variety of costume parties. One of our friends won a $100 bar tab.

A friend of a friend found a dead stray cat on the side of the road one day, with three kittens meowing next to it. So he put them in a box and took them home. He was looking for new owners and we ended up taking one. I've always been more of a dog person myself, but after a few days with a kitten, I've come to appreciate the feline species a lot more. Her Korean name (Sam-Soon Li), comes from a tv show character. She's very cute.
The cat, that is.

She's very friendly and playful. I managed to clip her nails (with a notable amount of kitten-protest) the other day and so she's destroying our materials slightly less now. She is already toilet-trained and meows like a squeaky door when she's hungry. She also meows when she finishes eating, just to let us know.

An interesting biological feature of kittens is when you pick them up by the scruff of the neck. This can be safely done up to a few months of age, and is usually done by the mother when they need to be moved somewhere. Whenever we pick her up like this, she turns her head on the side and keeps completely still, until you put her down. She also tucks her feet up like a little bunny rabbit, which I would assume is so that they don't drag on the ground. It's a useful mechanism to exploit when she suddenly starts chewing on the cushions.

One of the dishes I've been recently warming to is dwae-ji-guk-bap. It's basically a pork soup, with a whole lot of strange looking pork pieces in it. It's really good. I've been finding that a lot of the food I eat nowadays is completely different to what I typically ate in the first few months here.

Aquariums in front of restaurants still grab my attention. These octopi were unusually large. If you buy a live octopus from the fish markets, they just put it in a shopping bag for you and you take it home while it constantly tries to escape its doom.

Arriving at the hakwon one day, I saw these abseiling window-washers cleaning our windows. One of my long-standing daydreams has always been to give this job a try. You'd get to peer into people's offices while enjoying nice views of the city.

These guys weren't using any real safety equipment, just an adjustable plank to sit on. And below them was no warning sign if they dropped something. If you think that's dangerous, you should see the construction workers here. They just walk around on scaffolding 10 stories high without any safety equipment. Other times you'll be walking on the street and all of a sudden a gaping hole in the sidewalk will appear, without fencing around it, just a couple of witches hats. Korea in general has a more 'watch out for yourself' policy. On the whole, I think it's a good thing, considering all the lawsuits that go on back home over very common-senseless incidents, and the ridiculously high cost of public liability insurance.

Korean school has been going really well. We're approaching the end of the term soon, when we'll graduate and have a holiday. I've learned a fair bit, but it will be nice to have a break. This is from one of the special events we had last week. We took an excursion out on the campus and had an outdoor lesson for hangeul (Korean writing script) day.

This is a shirt that Ki-woo, the student in front of me at Korean school wears sometimes. It always makes me ponder. The writing says "Motionless-message: I have 'aiways' thought so".

Hmm, me too.

Saying goodbye to the Lee's Korea Blog readers this week are the Chungdahm Institute administration staff, at Michelle and Jordan's housewarming party.

They're saying: See you next time!

Gwangali Fire Flower Festival

In case you haven't noticed, Korea is a very food-orientated society. While I was eating out maybe twice a week or so in Australia, over here I eat out pretty much everyday. The food in simple diners like Kim-bap Cheon-guk (that literally translates to 'seaweed-rice heaven') is about the same price you'd pay if you were to buy the ingredients yourself and cook it at home. They'll deliver it to your house for free and then come back later and collect your dirty dishes. You can even ask them to pick up some beer from a convenience store along the way.
Street vendors are also a prominent part of the food system. Ajummas will set up stalls on the side of the road selling things like dried squid, sausages and skewered meat. At places like these when it's busy, you take and eat what you want. Then it's up to you to tell the ajumma what you ate and pay for it at the end. Middle school kids have a reputation for paying suspiciously small amounts of money. Takgatchi (teriyaki chicken on a stick) is my favourite thing to eat.

Meet Heather. She's previously been on the blog in subtle ways, but now we've been dating for a year so that deserves a proper introduction. Congratulations hunni.

I used to work with her in the old branch and we somehow gravitated towards each other. In this photo she's standing outside an auditorium in central Busan, where we went to see a cultural performance involving her private music instructor.

Across from the auditorium is the UN memorial park. Living in Korea now, it's sometimes easy to forget that around 50 years ago this country was at war with itself. The memorial park is well-kept and a nice escape from the surrounding suburbia.

Then the performance started. It was a mixture of traditional Korean music and dance including pansori (acapella story-telling), samulnori (drums) and a lady dancing with a handkerchief. I liked the drums most. Because Heather is a student of one of the performers, we got our tickets for free.
The Busan International Film Festival also came and went over the course of a week. Its primary focus is on giving publicity and support to new directors. We went to see two movies, a Dutch and a German one. The Dutch one was about divorce and the German one was about a disturbed wife who abuses her cop husband. Both of them were mildly depressing. I like independent films, but even more so when they are about happy topics. I don't want to point any fingers, but somebody in this photo chose both movies. Heehee.

We found a new chimchilbang (bath house) in Jung-dong. It has all the usual things like saunas, hot tubs and massage chairs. One of the chairs is called the O2 Zone. You pull down a large visor when it starts and it releases peppermint oxygenated air while playing sounds of the rainforest. Upstairs are these little heated cubby-holes, where you can just crawl in and take a nap.
And then you go outside to these wading pools and get puzzled because everyone has their legs stuck in the water like this.

The wading pool has Doctor Fish in it. You put your feet in the water and these fish will come and eat the dead skin off your feet. They have rough lips and just scrape away gently. Sometimes they fight each other over who gets to nibble which part of the foot. Now that's something worth fighting for.
It's really ticklish the first time, but then becomes quite enjoyable. I would highly recommend it.



Here's a video of the Doctor Fish in action, when we went back the following week during the rain. They were a little more timid this time around.



Every year at Gwangali beach they hold a 'Fire Flower' festival which consists of a laser show and a lot of fireworks. I heard that they set off 80,000 fireworks on the night, for a cost of one million dollars, and a million people crowd the beach area to watch them. In the background there is Gwangali bridge, which is one of the most prominent landmarks in Busan.
We were lucky enough to find a rooftop that we weren't supposed to be on. It was on the 20th floor of an apartment building but a sign at the entrance prohibited us from using it. But funnily enough the door wasn't locked. So we hid in this utility room until the time was right. That's Mi-Kyong on the right talking to Heather. Mi-Kyong is one of my classmates from Korean school who we've been hanging out with recently. She has lived in China for most of her life and now an avid reader of this blog. In this photo she's explaining a story she just wrote while we were waiting in the room, to Heather who is also fluent in Chinese. Funny stuff.

When the time was right we went out into the cold air and enjoyed the view. The fireworks were launched from the bridge and on a floating pontoon in the water. They could be seen from vantage points all over the city.

Powerful searchlights, lasers and music accompany the show, producing a variety of effects. My favourite parts were the 'smiley-face' fireworks and the biggest one they set-off, right in the middle of the show. The sky went dark and then a single flare climbed high into the sky and exploded. Its diameter was larger than the width of the two highest points of the bridge. Pretty impressive when you consider that the bridge is the longest in Korea and 7.5 kilometres long.



Photographs of fireworks never seem to do them justice. Here's a video I shot of the night. By the time they started, a few other people had found out about our viewing area

We took the subway home which was chaotic. Rivers of people were continuously streaming into the station, but luckily enough we were earlier than most. Even still, at the turnstiles everyone was so jammed in together that it was really difficult for me to put my hand in my jacket pocket to get my transit card.

Because Mi-Kyong is relatively new to Korea, we had her birthday at our place. Jef made her a jug of rather complicated Bloody Mary that had V8 juice, tobasco, celery seed and garlic in it. Sitting in the couch there is also Julayne, who came down from Seoul to see the film festival. Julayne was the captain of the soccer team that I volunteered to be a linesman for back at the IKAA Gathering. Anybody coming down from Seoul is welcome to have a beer at my place, as long as you're relatively nice.

See you soon!

A new year, a new place

A year of living in Korea passed a couple of months ago, but I had spent some of that time in Seoul before I came to the nicer city. Because of that, my one year working contract with the school down here only just expired. Having not had my 'fill' of the country yet, I signed on for another year.

The company I've been working for, the Chungdahm Institute in Busan has been excellent in most areas. I'm glad I signed on with them from the beginning, and I'm happy to be working for them another year. And I'm not just saying that because I know some of the staff read this blog. Ha.
For the new contract, I got a chance to find new accommodation which we found in Seomyeon. The photo above is of my old room in Gaya-dong, with everything in a moderate state of disarray, ready for the big move the following day. The move itself went pretty smoothly.

Here's the living room of my new place in the middle of the city. I'm living with a flatmate now, Canadian John from the old branch and things are going as well as I could ask for. We have two bedrooms, a double loft (that could fit another person really) and an intelligent refrigerator that complains if you leave the door open too long. On the table there is my pet plant, Beeblebrox, who I've managed to look after for quite a while now. Usually my plants die inexplicably after a couple of months, but Beeblebrox is a survivor. He's watching me blog right now.

This is the bathroom, with bidet toilet and body shower. Using a bidet seems to make more hygienic sense, but call me old fashioned when I say that nothing's as good as some nice folded toilet paper. The shower is cool as well, it has multiple functions on it including a body shower where it sprays these directed nozzles all over the showeree. Much different from my old one, which sometimes had hot water for more than 3 minutes if I was lucky.

This is my new bedroom, which I've slowly been filling up with stuff. The view at night is quite nice and the windows are soundproofed fairly well. How much are we paying for this place you wonder? It's about AU$700 per month, split with my flatmate. So less than $100 dollars per week each. That's the good thing about living in Busan vs Seoul, accommodation and things in general are cheaper. The downside was that there was a heavy key-money (similar to bond money back home) of about AU$23,000. Our company paid half of it for us.

This is the view from the living room. Seomyeon is probably the busiest area of Busan, because it's a shopping district centered on a subway interchange point. And yes, right next door to us is the 7-luck casino. Most casinos in Korea are only open to foreigners, and all food and alcohol is free. If you use the freebies without playing too much though, you do get politely asked to leave and never come back.

Soon after moving into our new place, we played hosts for Eric's birthday party. There were lots of people drinking and talking and then we went down to the beach. It went pretty well.

Then, because the timing went a bit funny, our housewarming party was the following weekend. We invited some staff members and I cooked some food. Typical conversations at events like these will be half in Korean and half in English.

Looking back at us there, in the hat, is Paul. He often drinks a lot and forgets what happened the next day. Sometimes I forget too. It's all a part of living in Korea.

Living downstairs are our co-workers, Jef and Elissa. They have the identical apartment to us, just seven floors down. This photo is from the aftermath of their housewarming.

And this is the aftermath of Eric's birthday in our place. You may note distinct similarities and differences between the two.

For my new contract I got a promotion to a more supervisory role, where I watch CCTV videos of newer teachers. These are the first two new teachers at the Saha branch, John and Logan. As you can see they are quite happy chaps. Are they like that 24 hours a day?
Well, yes.

Here's another shot of them I had to include because Logan's face is rather entertaining. He belongs in a beer commercial.

And here are the other staff from the new branch on a night out in the neighbourhood. From left to right is Ken, Logan, Michelle, John, Christine, Me, Yang-min and squatting is Jordan. Just like it was at the old branch, we are all fairly easy-going and get along rather splendidly.

So anyway I decided that this new contract year would be a more productive one. I enrolled in Pusan National University for Korean language classes in the mornings. Right now they're running at 3 hours per day, 6 days per week and I haven't missed a class since I started 3 weeks ago. My Korean is fairly shoddy really, when I consider the time I've spent here. It's difficult to pick up a language if most of your co-workers and friends are English speakers and your job is an English teacher.

I took this photo at the beginning of the first day of class. The teacher is really nice and every lesson is taught in Korean. I'm actually the only westerner in my class, the others are Chinese, Japanese, Kazhakistani, Sri Lankan and Russian students.

Pusan National University is supposedly the best institution outside of Seoul. It's a nice campus with the mountains in the background and cheap food. Lunch is AU$1.50. It's nice to get back into uni life again too.

Between the subway and the campus is the PNU area, which is typical of the surroundings of any large Korean university. There are a lot of bars, karaoke rooms and restaurants tailored for a younger market. I walk through the area most days but don't have much time to enjoy it. Typically I'll wake up at 8:30am, eat brekky, travel to uni, take classes from 10am until 1pm, eat lunch and travel to work which I start around 2:30pm and finish at 10:30pm. Between uni and work there are 26 subway stops. So there's not much time for anything else during the week. But I like busy schedules, the same way I did in Australia. They keep me occupied.

Last Friday the Korean school took us for an excursion to see a Taekwondo instructor. We stretched, ran around, kicked the air and had some fun. The instructor was really friendly too, he told us that if we're learning Korean, we can come to his classes for free. Unfortuneately I don't have the time.

That's a picture of him there on the right. He's an 8th dan black belt instructor, which is quite high. On the left is his old teacher. Imagine if that guy was your father-in-law. Yikes.

And here's a picture of a fire we started at the last beach party of the summer. A bunch of us gathered at Gwangan beach to bid farewell to the warmer nights. Robyn Schultz, my fellow panelist from Seoul came down that night. Unfortunately we didn't take a picture together though. A big hello to everyone up in Seoul, you guys should come down here more often.

Anyway that's it for me! This weekend is Chuseok, which is kinda like Korean thanksgiving. So we get a nice four day weekend and time to relax.

Seeya!