December 2009 Archives

"Sir, please don't point."

Ah, the shame! I had committed a cardinal sin of the DMZ. They'd told us repeatedly and from the start 'the first rule of the DMZ is, you do NOT talk about the DMZ.' Really. The second rule is no pointing at the North Koreans. No gestures, no faces, nothing. The instant my hand formed into a point, albeit at the blue UN buildings and not actually at North Korea, a sniper somewhere probably locked onto my face, dialing in the range in seconds, ready to take me out if I was so bold as to point twice. That's what he meant when he added the 'please.' Such is life when you're standing on the border of one of the most hostile, secluded, poor and insane countries on the planet.

The week following the airshow, I knew we had an all-school festival but I had no idea just how ridiculous it would be. I guess since Korean kids spend so much time studying that when they have a chance to have fun they go all out. The first thing I noticed when I got to school is the costumes. Each class of each grade had a class costume/uniform, in the photo above you can see 3-10 class is in pajamas, 3-9 is dressed like old women, etc.

The morning was taken up with physical activities. There was a relay race, tug-of-war, a race wearing scuba fins, jump-rope with giant ropes, and so on. Around lunchtime a whole heap of Lotteria burgers were delivered, which, by the way, are terrible, and then after lunch we moved into the gym for a talent show featuring a little talent and a lot of ridiculosity.

Hilary and I went to the Seoul airshow a couple weeks after Chuseok. I didn't even know it was happening until I got an email from my dad a few days prior letting me know it was taking place all that week. Unlike other airshows I've been to, the airshow at this airshow wasn't really the main event. During the week, closed to the public, was a huge arms bazaar. In giant tents divided up by nationality of the dealers, secretive and shady people (I'm just guessing here) made secretive and shady deals with other secretive and shady people for massive quantities of death-machines. The Airshow was really the Seoul International Aerospace and Defense Exhibition.

Once all those secretive and shady people had their fill of weapons, they let the public in for the weekend to ogle at all the latest in murder technology.

The weekend (Oct. 2-3) after GEPIK training was the weekend of Chuseok, the Korean version of Thanksgiving, and Hilary and I decided to go with Global Campus on a 2-day trip they were hosting. I didn't even know where we were going with them until we were already on the way, but we had no other plans and a 4-day weekend.

The trip was cool, we met mostly interesting people from around Gyeonggi-do (the province we're in) and had a pretty good time. Pictured above is a drunk/crazy Korean guy who joined us at the Gapyeong Bus Station, sang "Amazing Grace" and then followed us all the way to the Nami Island ferry. Our leader "J" tried to get rid of him by threatening to call the cops, and the man responded "I am a cop." Good times.

This post serves as my catching up summary, so please read it if you haven't.

The week after John's visit, I was scheduled to go to a GEPIK training/orientation session for 3 days. The best part about this was that meant I got to miss 3 days of school, and the worst part about this was that I was missing 3 days of school that I would've missed anyways. The students at my school at major exams that week, so I had absolutely zero classes to teach Mon-Thurs, and then Friday was off because of Chuseok, Korean thanksgiving. The following Monday was also part of the holiday weekend, so I had essentially a 10-day break (that could've been longer).

Please reference this post for more information. The focus here is going to be pictures, that post can provide some more info and context. Back in September, John came to Korea for work, so even though he was here a week we weren't able to see him much.

We met up with him at Jamsil station on Friday night (9/25), after he'd finished his week of work. The above photo is John and Hilary at a Thai restaurant in Jamsil where we ate dinner. We didn't do much else on Friday, but we planned to meet again on Saturday.

Elise & John in the roof garden at Coex Mall, Samseong-dong, Seoul.

Hey everyone, just a short notice about commenting. I shutdown commenting before because I was trying to restrict the amount of spam comments I received while at the same time allow people to comment but it ended up not letting anyone comment. Now you can comment again but if I start getting hit with too much spam it may have to go down again. Sorry!

EDIT: Comments are back down.

EDIT 2: Comments are back up.

Alright, so it's been a long time since I've written anything and because of that I'm going to fail at giving interesting details and funny anecdotes for lots of the things that have happened since about the beginning of September.

I think this post will serve as a very long and very uninteresting timeline of events beginning with the arrival of Hilary (9/4) and ending now in December. Later I will do individual posts for major events with my favorite photos.