Goodbye Korea

OMG!! I've finally out of Korea!

So my final days were pretty crazy. Make that super crazy. I think trying to send all of my stuff home was by far the most stressful. It's amazing how much crap you can accumulate over 15 months. I think I threw away like 80% of the stuff I had in my apartment. That pretty much left me with a total of 4 little 12 kg boxes. Which is not much! Aside from my backpack.

So I went to the post office with two suitcases. You can't send suitcases via the slow boat anymore. Good info to pass along to future travelers. So I had to transfer my stuff from two suitcases into two big boxes. Then I get ready to pay and the chic is like 400,000 won. WTF!! Yeah right! That's more then 400 USD! So then I had to reorganize my crap into three little boxes. So basically I looked like this total crazy person who keeps packing and unpacking bags in the corner of the post office. The best part was the three little old men who decided they needed to check out EVERYTHING in my bags. They seriously just stood there watching me. WTF...get a life old man! Sometimes Korea can really suck.

In the long run I sent three boxes that day via the slow boat (6-8 weeks). I sent another the next day all for a grand total of about 100,000 won.

So aside from all the crazy last minute stuff I had to deal with the hardest part was saying goodbye to the kids. When I left I was ok, I think I was still worrying about the little last minute things before I left. The kids had all wrote me little notes and cards so I was excited to read them on the plane after trying to sleep on the coldest freakin bus ever to Incheon! So I'm finally on the plane, settled in, ready to finally start actually thinking about traveling and I started reading their cards. I'm not going to lie, I might have shed a tear or two. God I'm such a sap. They were so cute though! I had the other two seats to myself but I was surrounded by super annoying old Korean tourists who were way too excited about the free whisky. I don't think I've ever seen people on a plane drink so much before.

Ok this is getting too long. I'm in Bangkok now but I haven't really done anything too exciting to talk about. I scored a hostel for 8 bucks, and now i'm gonna go grab some pad thai with my english neighbors and hang out until katie gets here tonight.

Hope everyone is well!

Peace!

SK

A Bit of the Real Korean BBQ

In case it looks different back in the states...





Korean BBQ is by far the best korean food! You get so much food it's insane. Most of the side dished I don't eat, but hey if there's kimchi I'm good.

My students

They study hard! haha :)

The Gwangju Zoo

My two Korean co-workers moved last weekend. I was sad because they were by far my two favorite locals to hang out with. Awe...tear.

Somehow we decided to go to the zoo. Now that I think about it, I think I've been to twice as many zoo's in Asia then I have in my entire life. I'm not even a zoo person. I guess I am now, but I used to try to avoid zoos at all costs. It's always the one thing you do when you get to a new city because you don't know what else there is to do.

So anyway, I've never been to a zoo like the one we have here in Gwangju. The strangest thing was definitely the dog exhibit... golden retrievers, dalmatians, and siberian huskies ect. Apparently these are considered exotic...haha.



Most of the animals looked pretty malnourished and depressed. Definitely not the happiest zoo I've been to over on this side of the world. It kind of reminded me of the opening chapter in Life of Pi (a good book if you haven't read it). They all had these crappy little cages made of painted plastic rocks and green felt. Poor little guys. :(

These were the three poor little penguins in their tiny little plastic box. They looked so sad and helpless huddled at the door.

29 days until I say goodbye to Korea

So sad. Maybe...lol.

So summer intensives sucked big time! I worked from like 9:30 until 7:30-8:30 at night. Ugh! I'm so happy to back to drinking cheap Korean beer after work and sleepin in until noon. That's the Korea I can deal with. Too bad I don't really sleep in until noon, but I could if I wanted to.

To uphold my promises from the last blog (the one i wrote about a hundred years ago) I will finally reveal some other good stuff from Beijing.

To begin I've never drank so much tea in my life! Seriously I think I drank like a gallon of tea... and no i don't remember the names of most of them. It started when I bought some tea that I actually liked after I went to the great wall. This was ok.

Then after wondering around the forbidden city for like 5 hours (I had started at the back) I made my way to Tienanmen Square. While I was dodging little old men scrapping gym off the ground this random Chinese girl started talking to me. Having been in Asia for over a year now, I've become used to random people trying to speak English to me. When I first got here it was really nice, now it's just kind of annoying. So anyway this girl was really nice, and her English was basically perfect so I walked around the square and talked to her for awhile. She told me a lot about Chinese culture as we walked to the oldest part of the city. This was definitely not on my to do list, but it was by far probably the coolest thing i did while i was there. I don't necessary believe in super long blogs so to summarize... we went to the oldest shoe shop, a traditional Chinese medicine store, and then to an old school tea house. Freakin a... we drank like seven different pots of tea! And...most of it tasted like dirt. Yum! Well, some of it I liked. The fruit tea was really sweet so that was by far my favorite and of course the one she hated.

Anyway the rest of Beijing was pretty much endless old school temples, palaces, beautiful parks, old men with huge bellies and no shirts, millions of bicycles, dirty air, relentless bartering, super cheap (pretty much everything), and some crazy (no way in hell would i put that in my mouth) food.

On a different note, my new goal is to write 15 blogs before I leave. I can do it!

K, hope everyone is well and missin me like crazy! j/k ;)

Beijing Stories ~

No pictures well ever do Beijing justice. It was so much more beautiful then I thought it was going to be. Of course the city has been cleaned up for the Olympics and the traffic has been cut in half but still. I was expecting a city more like Seoul. I was expecting there to be huge buildings with flashing neon lights and streets so crowded with people and bikes you can hardly walk. I didn't see any of that. The city has its downtown area with the huge buildings but you're not bombarded with "Vegas" like lights. The buildings are interesting and most have some sort of cool architectural design. I was a little freaked out by the CCTV (closed-circuit television) building though.

Anyway the food was amazing...so much better then Korea! I was slightly disappointed that it didn't taste better though. I had the idea in my head that Chinese food from china would taste way better then the knock off Chinese food at home. Turns out it tastes exactly the same...lol. Although I stuck to the basics and stayed away from things like shark fin soup, sea cucumbers, scorpions, and chicken feet. Either way it was a nice break from kimchi (i totally ate kimchi the second i got back though...haha).

K...back to work. Beijing part 3 coming soon (shopping, pollution, palaces, tea, traditional Chinese medicine, ect). :)

another day down

I can't sleep because all I keep thinking about is this 2x4 that hit me awhile back.

God I can't wait to go back to North America.

Beijing!

I can now say that I've walked on the Great Wall of China. How freakin cool is that!?!

So I took a million pics, but here are some of my favorites...








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I'll write more later, promise. :)