Uninspired....

Lately I've felt a little uninspired to write in the past few weeks, not sure why. I guess it's just the lack of "new things" going on. I almost didn't write about the soccer game... I mean, I've been 4 or 5 times now... it's not quite as interesting as it was the first time...

I keep reminding myself that there are exciting things coming up soon to keep myself from getting feeling sad about the ordinary-ness of my life lately.

Next week: Friend coming from Japan to visit. Hopefully we should do some cool sightseeing and food eating while he's in town

Chuseok: For Chuseok I'll be going to grandmother's house (as usual) but this time to celebrate Chuseok. I'll try to snap some inconspicuous photos of anything interesting that happens. Then once the ceremonies are finished, we'll rush to Gimpo, hop on a plane and head to Jejudo, Korea's honeymoon island. It's one of three famous places in Korea that I've been meaning to go to and still haven't made it (the other two are Soraksan and Busan).

I think I'll have to get out of Seoul in October too and do something interesting... all the rain this summer has made life pretty boring. Let's hope it ends soon!

Nothin' but blue skies.....

Monday's weather was about as perfect as it can get. Pleasantly warm, sunny and not humid at all. It got so chilly last night that I actually woke up from the cold. I guess fall is finally here.

But, in other news, today was back to cloudy, this summer's general state. Usually Korea's rainy season finishes up around mid August, but it still seems to be going. We've now had two rain free days... I wonder if that means it's finally starting to turn up and show Seoul's usual fantastic fall weather....

More Soccer

Saturday I went to another FC Seoul game, my third this summer. I didn't sit with the crazy fans this time, but instead I sat above them where we had lots of room to spread out in the row in front of us and the row behind us too.

Just to illustrate again the relaxed nature of sporting events in Korea, we strolled in with three boxes of pizza, a shopping bag full of snacks and big bottles of beer in our hands and they just smiled and welcomed us as they checked our tickets.

Since I never wrote about the match I saw in July, I'll post some photos from that game too.

FC Seoul's Mascot (taken in July)

I couldn't get a clear photo of this, but the guy in the grey and white suit is Lee Cheong Yong, who plays for Bolton and is on the Korean national team. He kicked soccer balls into the crowd at the game in July (just after the world cup). He is also, incidentally, my friend's cousin's boyfriend. Korea is a small enough place that it's easy enough to have strange connections to famous people.

Someone in our group bought a vuvuzela, and we took turns blowing it. You know, they are really loud and obnoxious....
We weren't the only one with a vuvuzela either...

This time, Seoul championed over Gwangju with a 2-0 win. When a goal was scored, fireworks were released and people went nuts.

This coming Saturday is "foreigners day" at World Cup Stadium. With the purchase of a special 10,000 won ticket, you can get a free beer and a free hot dog. It's not bad, probably saving you at least 6,000 won. Koreans can also get in on this deal too, it's not only for foreigners, despite the name...

YouTube and Twitter

Now that I have my new (to me, got it used) iPod Touch, I'm starting to join the ranks of those highly connected people in the world. I don't really like technology following me everywhere I go, but, here I am, with a twitter account now. I've found that most places I go, contrary to what people say, don't have WiFi, but that's probably better anyhow because I don't want to be checking facebook and my email every 30 seconds like I do when I'm in front of a computer. But, anyway, I'll try to keep it updated with events and recommendations along with other thoughts about what I see around Korea. If you want to follow me, my address is @smileyjkl.

I've added a twitter feed near the bottom of the column on the right hand side, so you can read my updates without actually joining twitter as well.

While I was updating the twitter feed, I found a YouTube add-on too, so you'll find that all the way on the bottom. If you're interested, check out my youtube page too, the name is smileyjkl as well.

Typhoon Kompasu

The winds I heard whipping in the night didn't seem so bad until I woke up and made my way to work. While I slept, I heard some wind, but I thought it was just the beginning of the storm. I took my giant umbrella to work expecting to fight hurricane strength winds on my way home. As it turns out, the whole storm passed by early morning, but it did leave quite a wake behind it.

The first big piece of damage I saw was when I got out of Bangi station near my hagwon. Here, this tree was torn right out of the ground!

Here's a down power line I passed, one of several. Incidentally, my tv is more or less working, but the picture is much fuzzier than before... I think something got damaged in the storm..

But the thing I noticed everywhere was just lots and lots of leaves and debris scattered all over the streets. By 1pm they had been swept up into neat little piles like this by someone...

My coworkers didn't have such peaceful nights as I did. One of my coworkers lives in a rooftop a apartment and he told us that part of his neighbors roof actually came off and struck his apartment. He said it sounded as if someone had dropped a desk from the third story to the ground right in front of him.

I guess lots of windows were broken all around the city from flying debris like that. Schools were delayed until 11 o'clock and I heard that there were delays on some subway lines, though mine didn't seem to be affected at all. More or less it was buisness as usual for the rest of the day for most folks.

Detox

After doing some research online last week I decided to do a little experiment with my body....

I have found that I have some digestion problems when I'm in Korea. As far as I remember it wasn't a problem when I was in America and it got to a point last week that I had to take drastic measures to fix whatever was wrong.

I'm not a person who likes taking drugs when it's not necessary, so I wanted to try somthing else. I read about doing a colon detox on various sites on the web. While every site had slighly different recomendations the overall message was for somewhere between 3 days and a week cut out everything from your diet except fruits, vegetables (preferably raw) and the occasional bean, barley or brown rice.

Here's my usual diet: copious amounts of white rice (like minimum 4 servings per day), meat, noodles and Korean stews. Vegetables and fruit? Not unless it's mixed with one of those four options. My one healthy meal is a breakfast of yogurt (sweetened) and Japanese natto (fermented beans... delicious by the way) which I only eat when there's an absence of Korean stew and rice in my refrigerator in the morning. Oh, and let's not forget pizza and fried chicken (usually served with beer). I like those too...

I guess it's no wonder I have digestion problems. How I'm not 200 pounds is really a mystery to me.

So. Here was the challenge for the week. Eat no meat. No dairy. No oil. No salt. No fat. No white rice (in fact, no starches at all for the first two days). No spicy food. Basically eat as many raw fruits and veggies as possible. And lots of water (warm water is better, supposedly).

I started on Monday rather spur of the moment. I didn't prepare any lunch so I wound up buying a pack of 5 bananas and an apple and eating that for lunch. I didn't feel too well after that but the desired effect was not reached.

That night I went to the market and stocked up on lots of fruits, veggies and tofu.

Kiwi and plum juice before

Kiwi and plum juice after

I was very proud of myself the next day. I woke up early enough to make fresh juice made from kiwis and plums (which I bought for 3,000 and 5,000 respectably for a copious quantities of each). As I drank my juice I made a lunch to bring to work, a salad made with green pepper, carrot, tomato and onion.

Lunch on day 2

Now, of course, as my stomach is accustomed to receiving it's daily fill of rice, it was a little confused. Breakfast was fine as I never stuff myself at that time in the morning. But I'm used to a big lunch, snack around 4:30 and then a decent sized dinner around 9 or 10 pm when I get home. Eating the salad for lunch kept me happy until 2:00 or 3:00 at which time I had a fruit for a snack, but that left me waiting until 9:00 or 10:00 to eat dinner. Which was again rather unfufilling.

I suddenly had a lot more sympathy for vegans. Or maybe just complete confusion as to how someone could choose to live like that. But... I bet their digestive tracks are in proper working order...

Amazingly I kept up this diet until Friday when we had market day when it all went to hell. Actually, when I say it went to hell, I mean that I had one bowl of rice, some chicken and some ddeokbokki. The rest of the day was still healthy.... oh yea, I had some bread too.

Since Friday I've resumed my regular diet, on lite mode, with freshly blended fruit juice in the morning and smaller portions of rice (and more brown rice at home!).

My birthday breakfast on Saturday a la boyfriend: 미역국 (seaweed soup always eaten on birthdays) and a version of 비빔밥 (bibimbap) with brown rice, sesame leaves, onions and sprouts mixed with chili paste.

Did the detox work? Well, not really as well as I'd hoped. But I still feel good about myself for being a vegan for nearly 5 days. I eventually broke down after stomach pains on my birthday and bought some semi-natural semi-chemical medicine to solve the problem. Now I just need to keep my body in order so I don't have problems again....

Market Day at SLP

My school has an interesting way of motivating students that I really enjoy. Our students work hard to do homework, do well on quizzes and raise their hands in class in order to earn stamps. Once collecting 60 stamps the students can trade it in for an SLP "dollar" or "euro" (in the SLP system the exchange rate between the dollar and euro are even. A few smart students tried to get away with buying more with fewer euros because they know the real exchange rate is better. That didn't fly with me...)
Every few months we cancel classes and host "Market Day". Market day is a day of games, shopping and movies. Here they have an opportunity to spend the money they earned over the previous months. While the activities change from market day to market day, our market day last week consisted of 4 rooms. Movie (Night at the Museum 2), Market, Cafe and Golden Bell.


I was mostly working in the market this time. They had an interesting twist to the market this time as well. This time they asked students to bring in used toys and books to sell as well. When I first heard this I was worried they were trying to cheat the kids out of getting some cool (new) stationary, but what actually happened though was they got all the usual things, plus sold used things as well. It worked well. The kids loved getting "new" books and some of the used toys were cool enough (and cheap enough in SLP dollars) to entice kids to buy them.

This time they had a cafe which was separate from the market. They went all out and even got ddeokbokki (rice cakes in a spicy sauce) for the kids to purchase. The teachers also went wild for the ddeokbokki and we were all stopping by all day to pick up some more throughout the day.


I didn't watch the Golden Bell game, but I know it was based on a TV quiz show and they used English questions based on what the kids had been studying for the last few months.

Anyway, the kids all really liked it and it was a nice break from teaching for two days. Our next event will be Halloween!