Rafting...

...didn't happen. Since it rained for three weeks straight (including the typhoon) the rafting company canceled all trips for the weekend citing unsafe conditions. This was extra disapointing since the weather was beautiful the whole time. Not that we didn't have a fun weekend:

We spent Saturday afternoon at a temple an hour outside of the city. It was a pretty average temple but it did have a beautiful river running alongside.

A statue inside of the temple's main gate.

We stopped for lunch and dong-dong-ju, traditional Korean rice wine.

That night, we went for drinks and wandered to a nori bong where we sang till 2 am. This is Michelle and I singing Piano Man.

Jake and company dancing along to Locomotion.

Adam and I embarass ourselves while trying to dance.

Sunday was spent helping Sarah move into her new apartment, drinking, and playing cards. Tonight we are all getting dressed up and heading to a casino in the city center. Our week long Summer break starts on Wednesday and we are trying to pack in as much fun stuff as we can before our friends Jake and Maren leave for home next week. I'll keep you updated.

Third Strike

1. I live right up the hill from Sinpyeong subway station which is pretty convenient if I need to tell a cab driver how to find my apartment. Trouble is I suck with Korean and I had the Korean word for subway station confused. The word is jiachol but I had it confused with jigalchi which is actually the name of another subway stop. So I'd get into a cab and tell the driver sinpyeong jigalchi which is like getting into a cab in New York and saying Brooklyn Manhattan. Every driver I said it to would give me this really confused look as if to say "Well, which one?" and I would get really mad that no one understood me. It was 6 weeks before someone corrected me. I felt like an ass.

2. I got a coffee maker for Valentines day and was really excited to try it out. I went down to the supermarket but had some trouble finding ground coffee. With all the labels in Korean I had to squeeze every bag to see if it felt right. I found one and brought it home to brew a pot. It was good too, much better than the shitty instant coffee that I had been drinking for months. I went to empty the used coffee grounds from the machine and was surprised to find no grounds at all. After discounting the possiblity of having a magic coffee maker I realized that I had just brewed a pot of instant coffee. I felt like a moron.

3. After coming back from the mud fest Sarah and I both had bags full of damp clothes to wash. Sarah started a load of laundry and called to me inside.

"Where's your detergent?" she asked.

Exasperated, I replied "Right next to the machine, dear."

"You mean this?" she asked, showing me a container of liquid soap.

"Yeah," I said.

"This is fabric softener."

Turns out I had been washing my clothes for 6 months using fabric softener instead of soap. It explains why my clothes have been so soft but stains have been a real bitch to get out. I felt like and idiot.

Mud Fest

Yeah. The mud fest sucked. It sounded like so much fun. What with the mud and the beach and the fireworks and everything. It was cold, though, and it rained on and off the whole time.

In the first place, it took Sarah and I 6 hours to get to the fucking beach. Two different trains, a couple of cabs and a bus that was standing room only. Katie called me, drunk, while we were jammed into the aisle of the bus. "What is this, fucking 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles'?!" she asked. We got to Boryeong around 5 pm after promising Katie that we would be there around 1 and we checked into our shitty room that we were paying 3 times more than it should have been. Katie and her friends were already drunk and we quickly tried to catch up.

A drunk Korean guy kept talking to us while we were eating ramen and drinking on the shore. He kept ofering us more alcohol and disgusting pastries. He was smashed though and spent the majority of the time looking down Katie's shirt. We eventually moved on down the beach and found more alcohol. It gets a bit hazy after that but highlights included: me accidentally knocking Katie to the ground while trying to push her into the surf, jumproping, unsuccesfully trying to give everyone airplane rides and having beer thrown at me by Sandy. We found a few other friends and drank more on the boardwalk and watched the firework show, which was pretty good. Around 2 we headed back to the hotel and fell asleep. The entire first day was mud-less.

We woke up late the next day and wandered around in the rain. We did find the mud though. It wasn't the mud filled beach we had expected. They bring in large garbage cans full of mud and you have to scoop out handfulls to put on yourself. Lame. The mud slides and wrestling looked cool but the lines were rediculously long. Despite all that we did get a bit muddy and swam around in the surf with the couple hundred other people on the beach. We left around 4 and made our way back to Busan, getting in at 11. It was a long trip for a really mediocre weekend.

Rafting this weekend has to be better. Right?

Stuff

Hey everyone. It's been awhile so I thought I'd get a post down.

• It's been raining off and on for a week now, despite July 9th being the official end of the rainy season (and beginning of the Sweat-your-balls-off season). Everyone is saying that we're experiencing a typhoon, but if this is a typhoon, then typhoons are lame. It's just really rainy and windy. It did manage to cancel a half day of classes on Monday so I guess I should be more appreciative.
• Took the bullet train an hour north last weekend to the Costco in Daegu. There is only one store in the whole country and Daegu's got it (though I have no idea why, Daegu's small). Anyway, Sarah and I both went and bought as much food as we could carry back. Highlights included: Spinach ravioli, tomato soup, guacamole and two large boxes of honey nut cheerios. We're planning on going back in a month.
• My school is lame and everyone is starting to get really stressed. With everyone working overtime, open classes, birthday party preparation, unrealistic kindergarten expectations and our kinder director leaving in a month it's normal to be stressed. We start a new Summer intensive in August so we'll be working different and hopefully shorter hours and the new teacher (another Canadian) gets here in a few days.
• I've discovered www.torrentspy.com. It's great and I've been downloading like it's my job. The shitty weather is a perfect excuse for me to laze around my apartment watching entire seasons of 24, which kicks ass, by the way.
• I moved. There's been an apartment open down the hall since June when Joey and Suzy left. I finally took it and it's great. More room, a bigger bed and an air conditioner that doesn't drip all over my floor. They did, however, put my bathroom door on backwards and now water leaks under the jamb and onto my kitchen floor. And the light in the kitchen doesn't work. I've complained to the director and they should be fixed by the time I'm returning home.
• Sarah got a job teaching adults in a cool-sounding business scholarship program. She starts in August and will be moving into a new apartment in a closer part of the city.
• Mud festival, rafting, and Seoul concert are all still a go. We're trying to figure out how much we can fit into our vacation but it looks like we will be hitting the DMZ and some coastal islands as well. We bought an awesome tent that is self assembling (?) and all you have to do is remove it from the case and throw it and it pops up, ready to go. We had to try it in the mall and it worked, though we spent 10 minutes trying to fold it back up into the case.

That's the latest. Keep checking in. I'll have mud festival pictures up after the weekend...