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 ;)