Korea (July 25-28)

DAY 1

I arrived in Icheon, Seoul around 10pm and was met at the airport by both Sheila (Baha'i from Kochi) and Miho (from Kochi) who had arrived a few hours earlier. Together, we took the bus, then taxi to get to Sunghi's place, one of Sheila's students.

Sunghi's mom owns and runs a restaurant way out in the country. Their place was about a 20-30 min taxi cab from the outskirts of the city. By the time we found our way to their place, it was midnight. Sunghi's mom speaks Japanese, so we communicated with her mostly in Japanese, or sometimes through our in-house translator, Sunghi. Between English, Japanese and Korean, conversations were always...interesting..!

They also had the cutest little puppies! Only 3 months old, they were so adorable..!

Sunghi's mom is a very warm-hearted lady who asked us to call her okasan (meaning 'mom'). Since we'd only had what was served on the plane for dinner and it was now quite late, she prepared us a delicious meal. We really lucked out having an excellent chef as our host! Throughout our stay at their place, she prepared us many different kinds of Korean dishes. A lot of the food is very spicy, but so delicious!

We mentionned that we were all looking forward to trying akasuri, famous in Korea. The Japanese believe that Koreans have beautiful skin because they have akasuri done often. Akasuri is basically a whole body srubbing, getting rid of all the dead skin that accumulates on your body. You lay on a table butt naked and someone scrubs every inch of your body with what feels like a wash cloth with teeth. It was unlike anything I've ever experienced before....was it good? Well..it was until the lady forgot about my broken thumb and yanked on my hand...that was painful!! I learned the word for 'pain' in korean. Overall, it was good..you do feel squeaky clean once it's done. :) So after finishing our late night dinner at around 3am, we all headed down to a 24 hour onsen place (everything in Korea seems to be 24 hours) and all got a chance to experience akasuri.

DAY 2

It was a gorgeous day so we made the most of it by spending most of the day outdoors. We got up fairly early and made our way down to the Blue palace (government office, similar to the White house), then to Kyong Bok palace with Sunghi acting as our guide.

There, we go dressed up in traditional Korean outfits and had our pictures taken by a professional. Once done, we were allowed to take pictures with our cameras and wander around a bit. After having taken this picture:

we were approached by 3 tourist guys who wanted to take a picture with us. We didn't see any harm in it, so they took pictures with us one at a time. A few others who saw the guys taking pictures, came up to us and asked if they could as well. Then, there was a large Chinese (i think) tour group coming around the corner. The few people on the edge of the group came wanting to take pictures, then suddenly the whole rest of the group came as well..... It was becoming a little ridiculous...we should have charged!

Later in the evening, we met up with Kim at a cafe. The last time I saw Kim was maybe 8 years ago...it was so nice to see her again!! Though it's been such a long time since we last saw each other, she hasn't changed a bit...same ol' crazy Kim. :) We also met Miho's friend, Jasmine at the same cafe.

Jasmine is a Korean girl who spent 5 years in Paris and speaks almost flawless French, she can also get by in English though she has a strong accent. So in our group there was Kim, Jasmine and I who could speak French..it was nice to be able to speak French freely!

We went to out to dinner together, and made plans for the next day

DAY 3

We woke up this morning to the sound of rain beating down hard. Despite it being a short trek from the 'old' house to the restaurant, by the time we arrived we were all drenched. Umbrellas just didn't cut it for this kind of weather. Okasan offered us some towels to dry ourselves off.

We were getting ready for breakfast, setting the table and bringing the food over

when suddenly there was a loud BOOM! It sounded like it came from one of the side rooms, we rushed over to see what happened and found that a piece from the ceiling fan had fallen down allowing the rain to pour in! We got a bucket to catch the water and grabbed some towels to dry things off. A minute later, the same thing happened in another side of the room...and was quickly followed by water leaking then pouring from all the around the restaurant!!! It was raining inside! All the tables are equipped with an electric pot..we made sure they everything was unplugged as Osakan ran to shut off the main electric power switch. Before she could finish unplugging everthing, one of the cables snapped and flew around the room with sparks...

Once the repair man came over and was able to slow down the water, we spent a good while soaking up the water with towels and wrigging them into the big pots that we had scattered around the room to catch the water coming in.

Needless to say, it was a very unsual morning..!

A few hours later, having gotten most of the floor dried up, had breakfast etc.. we got ready to say goodbye. Oksasan is such a sweet lady, making us all feel like we were part of the family!

Since it was raining so hard, we decided to do something indoors: we went shopping. We spent most of the day at one of the two big shopping centers downtown.

Around 6pm, I went to meet Kim after work in Gumnum while Sheila and Miho stayed at Jasmine's place. Kim and I headed to her apartement, in one of the most expgensive neighbourhood of Seoul.

After having dried up a little, we went out for dinner at a yaki niku place. I tried chicken feet, which tastes much better than it sounds!

We went out clubbing, then around 2am went to meet Kim's boyfriend way outside of Seoul city. He took us out for a late (3:30am..) dinner and then did some karaoke. I LOVE karaoke!! we had a blast. We finally made it home around 5:30am, and went straight to bed. I had left before Kim's mom had gotten home from work, and by the time we got back she was asleep, so I didn't get to see her.

DAY 4

Sheila, Miho and I made plans to go visit the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) today, the border between North and South Korea. Only approved tour buses are allowed in the area (you can't drive there yourself), and reservations must be made a few days ahead of time in order to go. The bus's departure time was set for 8am.

Neither Kim nor I heard the alarm go off, woke up too late to catch the subway to the meeting point. Within 2 minutes of having woken up, I was in a taxi heading downtown to the meeting spot. While changing, Kim's mom came in half asleep rubbing her eyes having just been woken up by Kim. My eyes were not quite open yet, I quickly gave her a hug before rushing out the front door. The last time I saw Kim's mom I was 12 years old!! I would have liked to have a chance to meet her under less rushed circumstances...but I was afraid I would miss the bus!

I thankfully made it on time. There was a large Japanese group, and only 4 English speakers (the 3 of us, and Katy from the States). We had our own personal English guide, Justin.

The tour took us to three main stops. The first was the 'freedom bridge', where POWs were exchanged from North to South.

At the entrance to the southern end, you could see the following:

The next stop was at a museum where we learned about the attempts that North Korea made to infiltrate South Korea by digging 4 tunnels. We then put on our protective hats, got into what looked like a mining cart and went down one of the tunnels. At the bottom, we walked to the furthest point allowed, a concrete cement wall. Beyond the wall, is another very thick concrete wall. Beyond that one are North Korean soldiers that patrol.

Outside the tunnel is the following sculputre

The DMZ zone is about 4 km wide. It's mostly devoid of any humans. There remains more than a million unexploded landmines left over from more violent times.

The last stop was at an observation deck, from where you could see the two famous villages (one named 'Propaganda Village', run by North Korea, the other 'Peace Village' run by the South. Beyond them, you can see North Korea. There's a yellow line beyond which you cannot take pictures...there are men in uniform everywhere making sure no one does anything they shouldn't be doing.

The last train station at the most northern point of South Korea as of now, but soon to be part of the Trans Eurasian Railway Network.

Knowing how much I love dogs, Sheila got me the cutest pillow which looked like Sunghi's puppy! Back on the tour bus, we took a picture with the early birthday present she got for me last night.

Justin commented on how cute it was, so we got a picture with him as well :)

On our way back, he was kind enough to have the bus drop us before the regular stop, and even came with us to show where a market he had mentioned was, as well as show us where to catch the airport bus (I was heading straight to the airport from the tour).

I made it back to Fukuoka, then Nagasaki, trying to catch some Zzz whenever I could. I had an excellent time on this trip!!

Bought a keitai!

I've just joined the preferred way of communicating here in Japan..I got myself a cell phone (W41s)!

I just got home with my new little toy. I think I need to invest some time into learning how to use all the neat features.

Teachers' English test

Students have to pass a test in order to receive their English license if they want to become English teachers. The test has a listening, writing and speaking component. For the spoken part, there are discussions that 6 students at a time have to participate in. There are 4 ALTs (me and 3 others) whose job is to facilite the discussion. I spent almost 7 hours with one group after another. Only 14 out of almost 120 students will pass the test. The atmostphere is very strict and severe...

There was a short meeting before we broke into groups for the test. When I arrived, one of the teachers came to say that he saw me on TV yesterday at the baseball game.

I was thinking of going to Amu Plaza to check out the phones since I was downtown. Instead, once the testing was done, Maria and I went out to Capriciosa (the Italian restaurant at Amu Plaza) for dinner. Wandering around downtown afterwards, we walked by massage parlour and decided to go in. We got a full body massage... 45 minutes later, we walked out feeling totally relaxed...wanted to just go to sleep. Instead, we went to get some purikura done. Just our luck, the machine freezes on us!! The silliest picture was stuck on the screen..it was embarrassing when the guy came to figure out what was wrong. He called over a second person, who eventually got it working.

I got home late, but all in all was a nice day. If I get access to a scanner, I will post the pictures from the purikura machine. They're kinda funny looking :)

To buy or not to buy..

Since coming back from Osaka, I have been to visit several cell phone shops. There are 3 main cell phone companies here: Docomo, AU and Vodafone. They each have a wide variety of phones available, with all kinds of neat functions. It's difficult to decide on one, and the fact that no one speaks any English at any of the stores/kiosks doesn't make it any easier.

Since I've also been thinking of getting an MP3 player, I thought I would get a cell phone that could double as one. I finally decided on the W41k. It was perfect. On top of having the option of adding a 2GiG card (hold plenty of songs!) it had a subwoofer built into the charger. It also had a 3.2 megapixel camera. And it looked cool :)

http://www.phoneyworld.com/newspage.aspx?n=1757

Oh yeah, and the phone cost $1. That's right, practically free!

I went down to the store during lunch to buy it today. It took a while to get through all the paperwork, (the sales lady only spoke Japanese, and I had to write everything in kanji) but eventually got through it all. For some reason, it took longer than usual to get it activated, and I needed to get back to school. So I said I would come back later on to pick up the phone.

When I returned after school, the sales lady handed me a bag with everything in it. She pulled out the cell phone and said she wanted to show me something. When I leaned over to take a closer look, I noticed it was still all in Japanese. I asked if she could change it to English, she said sure. She fiddled around with it for much longer than I thought it should take to change the language. She said she was having a little trouble finding the right menu to change it to English. She called the company for help. They told her that this phone doesn't have the option of displaying English!!

After having spent so much time looking into different phones, looking things up on the internet, and finally deciding on one.....it was really disappointing not to be able to get it. I was more than disappointed, I was crushed. I really had my heart set on this phone. Last night, when Iwata san came over, I was telling her all about it, and how excited I was about it. At school, I had spoken to many teachers about it, asking what they thought of it etc.

All the sales people were very apologetic, because the first sales lady for yesterday had said that all the phones could be used in English.

I was too disappointed to look at any other phones, I'll go another time.

The baseball team at my school had a big game today. Since I didn't have any classes in the afternoon, I thought I would go with them to cheer them on. Some members of the brass band were going, as well as a couple of teachers who didn't have classes. It was a big game, if they had won they would have gone on to koshien, where scouts come to recruit to play professionally..so it's a pretty big deal to make it there. Unfortunately, they didn't win...the final score was 5-7.

The TV crew was there. When I got back to school, I ran into kyoto sensei (the vice-principal) in the hallway, and he said he saw me on TV. All the teachers had followed the game on TV in the staff room.

Sports Festival at Bunko

As I usually do on Tuesdsays, I headed to Bunko today. In the morning, we had regular classes, but in the afternoon there was the Sports Festival.

The Sports Festival is usually the biggest high school event of the year. At Seiryo, students start preparing for it months in advance. Many tents are set up around the school grounds under which parents will be standing cheering the students on. There are many kinds of races (relays, tug-0-wars, 3 legged race etc..) that the students participate in.

However, at Bunko there are very few students, only about 40 in total. The sports festival has quite a different feel....

The girls had a volleyball tournament:

The boys had a basketball tournament:

I was asked by many of the students, and teachers if I could play with them...I wish I could have joined them!!

Osaka - Nara - Mie (July 14-18)

I didn't get a chance to write about the trip when I got back, and now it seems like such a long time ago..We traveled around Osaka, Nara and Mie for 5 days. Erica and I arrived on Friday and were joined by Renee the following day. The first 3 days, we had beautiful weather! The following 2 days were overcast and wet..it gave us some relief from the heat!!! Here are some pictures from the trip:

Arrived at the Osaka train station!

View from the Sky building in Osaka

Daibutsu den, the largest wooden Buddha in the world, in Nara.

Hiking the trail in Akame falls (in Ise)

Deer used to be considered magical animals in Nara..and can still be seen wandering around the streets freely today.

The most sacred Shinto shrine, in Ise (Mie prefecture)

It felt like we spent a lot of time on trains....here I am making the most of our time off our feet.

Osaka castle

Random pics