Journal Entries
Look mum, I'm on tv!
Posted Feb 10, 2002
On our last Tuesday in Korea we went out to the folk village, which was pretty good...very traditaional, no nasty neon lights or concrete, just traditional Korean houses and people wearing traditaional Korean clothes - we ran into a guy early in the day who was obviously in charge of the place (he had that 'ringmaster' look about him 
) - his English was pretty good, he figured out we were from "home of koala and kangaroo!" - every time he saw us he ran up to us and tried to get us to do something. He cornered us down in the market and got us to beat this huge ball of rice with a huge mallot (I could barely lift it!) for a tv camera...they were making some documentary on foreigners interacting with and discovering Korean culture, so they got us to do it a couple of times so that they could get the right angle 
This is while, I might add, we hadn't showered or changed our clothes for about 5 days, and we were having a competition to see who had the most disgusting hair...not the best advertisment for Australia 
So then the guy says "come, come, you eat with us"....well, we never turn down free food, we were on a budget after all, so we followed him into this little housing enclosure...
He got us to dress up in traditional Korean costumes, and then sit around at a table with an old Confucian man and eat a traditional Korean new years meal, complete with rice wine, and then we had to bow to the older man and say something in Korean.
Deciding this wasn't enough, they interviewed us, asked us what our opinion of Korean culture was (look in a thesaurus under the word 'good', I think I used every possible synonym ), then gave us a bag full of rice snacks and sent us on our way.
So, if you happen to be in Korea on Monday the 11th of February and you catch the news at 9pm on kbs, the smelly looking white girl with the two dirty guys in the bad-fitting Korean clothes is me!
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Latest reply: Feb 10, 2002
Krazy Koreans...
Posted Feb 4, 2002
Only 2 days left in this brilliant little country 
I've had an awesome time for the last couple of weeks - been staying in some very dodgy places, eating pretty badly (a diet of white bread and strawberry jam, coupled with bananas, mandarins, and choccy biscuits isn't really all that good ), with the occasional good meal - Korean food is awesome! The temples we've seen have been pretty impressive (although all of them have been "rebuilt and reconstructed several times"...we saw that phrase on at least 20 different signs ) - we've done some really nice walks...hiked to the top of a mountain, meandered through the red light districts of some cities (don't ask ) - we saw the fish market at 6am in Busan, which was unreal, danced with some old Koreans in the street, been given free food, drink, and acommodation in countless different places...stolen lots of chopsticks, shot glasses, signs, flags...slept in some disgusting hotels, on the floor of a boat, on buses, in taxis, in a wheatfield at the top of a crater, drank a lot of beer and soju and just a little bit of absinthe, and met some really fantastic people who've all been so generous and helpful and wonderfully great.
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Latest reply: Feb 4, 2002
Korea #3
Posted Jan 20, 2002
Camp is finally over and we've been set loose on the big wide world!! We left the resort at the same time as the kids on Saturday morning, and got back to Seoul at about 10...had to hang around in the office for a couple of hours (it was a sit in to make sure one of our friends got paid) and then went out for lunch...we had a pretty good meal by following our usual methods - find a dingy restaurant (cheap cheap cheap) - this one was a shoes-off, sit on mats on the heated floor place - and point at random things on the menu. We ended up with Kalbi Tag yesterday, which was a sort of beef-rib soup thing. The most interesting part of any meal is always trying to figure out why on earth the owner is laughing at you - usually it's because we didn't put the sauce in the right bowl, or we should have mixed the green stuff with the rice...most meals come with 4 or 5 side dishes (usually 2 sorts of kimch'i, some pickled radishes, which are very cooling, and yesterday there was a thing of mushrooms and a thing of apple and mandarin in mayo...) and rice. You can tell how good a restaurant is by (a) whether the chopsticks and spoons are in a tupperware container on the table or in a metal box built into it, (b) whether there's a roll of toilet paper or a box of tissues (tissues classy, toilet paper not - even less classy is the toilet paper rolls stuck at strategic spots around the restaurant - the pub we went to in the village we were living in had these...), and (c) the cleanliness of the glasses they give the water to you in - we've been places where they've gone brown on the insides...the food's still SO much better than camp food though - the mush they fed us there was pretty awful, especially after 4 weeks of the same food on the same days!
This weekend I'm staying with a friend at one of his friend's houses...well, when I say house, I mean one-room apartment - there's a toilet and room for two mats on the floor - seriously, it's tiny. I think the guy is regretting having us to stay cos both of us are walking biohazards...we've got awful colds and other strange diseases from the 1000 children we had to teach! Every day is an adventure, you don't know *what* you're going to cough up!
The last week of camp was pretty good - the skiing was awful, because it warmed up to about 13 degrees - most of the snow turned to slush...they had to do a massive comb-over on the moguls just to keep the runs covered! By the end of the week it had cooled down again though, and they had started making snow again. It's a bit sad that camp's finished...it's great that we don't have to deal with the whinging whining bratty children anymore, but it's sad that there are people we won't be seeing ever again - 3 foreigners have already gone home, and more are going this week. Tomorrow we're going to a National park (food and accomodation paid for by our boss) which should be good - it's up in the north, near the DMZ...after that the vague thought is to go through Daegu, a province in the west, down to Busan, which is a southern port where you can get a ferry to pretty much anywhere, and across to Jeju island, which is about 80km from end to end...should be good!! We've got friends scattered all over the country now, so accomodation shouldn't be too much of a problem - after sleeping for 4 weeks in rooms full of children who hit you in their sleep, we can all sleep pretty much anywhere. Subway stations ar not out of the question.
So far Korea has been brilliant. The people have been great, the kids weren't really *that* bad, just a little bit annoying...I'm tired out, but that probably has more to do with not getting to bed before 5am the last three days than any work I've done - the camp itself was more a babysitting job than anything else...I would definately do it again. Everyone turned into kleptomaniacs at the end of camp, especially the Australians...we have banners and posters and flags and slippers and pillows...someone even got a 3L beer jug from the chicken place (dodgy pub we went to a fair bit).
Oh, and this has nothing to do with Korea - I got into Outdoor Ed!! Very unexpected, cos I applied so hellishly late, but very very good. Should be lotsa fun. 
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Latest reply: Jan 20, 2002
Korea #2
Posted Dec 27, 2001
Every week we have a new group of 240 campers - we get
saturday and sunday off to go into soeul or whatever.
This week my group is 7-8 year-olds - 10 of 'em - me
and the Korean counsellor (everyone is paired with a
Korean Counsellor of the opposite sex to make life
easy for the kids) are with them pretty much 24/7 -
the girls sleep in my room and the boys in his, we get
them up at 7 in the morning and do warm-ups, have
breakfast; toast (actually it's just warmed-up bread)
juice and frosted flakes, English lessons for 1.5
hours, then some sort of activity - today it was
Winter Olymipcs, so there was sledding and relays and
some inside games as well, then lunch, skiing for 3
hours, shower time (you try getting 10 girls through
one shower in an hour!!! The two guys that have the
youngest group of boys - 5 year olds - chuck 8 of them
in the bath at once and hose them down!), then english
review, song time (my favourite!), dinner, then some
sort of other activity - yesterday we had a carnival
with face painting etc, then bedtime at around
9:30...yell at them a couple of times and they're
usually asleep by 10:30. So it's pretty hectic, and
you can't go anywhere without hearing "teecha,
teecha!!", but it's great. The kids are fantastic.
Their english isn't very good, but we have heaps of
fun with them!
The food here is pretty ordinary - breakfast is always
the same thing, lunch is usually plain rice with
kimchi, seaweed soup...yesterday we had hamburger
patties (the dodgy kind) which was just about the
first meat all week...it's all very hot and spicy -
I'm a pro with the chopsticks now though! Some
Koreans eat with chopsticks in one hand and a spoon in
the other, just shovelling the food in...they eat rice
with a spoon, not chopsticks, which is nice and easy!
Dinner is usually pretty much the same thing...maybe a
different sauce on the ride or something. Tonight we
had a very western meal - no kimchi (!!!) - spaghetti,
a bread roll, and cream of chicken soup, plus about 50
mandarins - whenever they serve fruit we all pounce on
it! We almost started a food fight in the cafeteria
tonight - the counsellors were all throwing pieces of
mandarine to each other...bad teecha.
Skiing is pretty good - there are only three runs, and
the snow is all man-made and fairly icy, but I've got
the best ski-group so I'm happy! We have 5 in our
group - one of the kids can almost sort of do
parallel, the others have heaps of guts and will try
anything! There's a mogul area made on one of the
runs - they wanted a go on it today so I let
them...disaster. They all fell over about 5 times!!
Kept going though. Very gutsy! We took them down a
black run in the afternoon (shouting "SLOWLY!!" the
whole way) - one of the little girls doesn't really
know how to stop, so she smacked into a fence, snapped
her pole in two, flipped about 5 times...I thought for
sure she'd have something broken - there was blood
coming out of her mouth...luckily ski patrol was right
there and piggy-backed her straight down to the
hospital bit...by the time I followed them to the
bottom of the lift she was walking out going "teecha
teecha, one more time?!"
They have an enourmous amount of over-staffing
here...there are alway people standing around doing
nothing - in the cafeteria if you drop a plate they
pounce on it - so many people for every job! Like,
one person to hand plates to the person dishing out
the soup.
On Boxing day all us Aussies put on tshirts (one guy
even went shorts and thongs as well!) and went out
into the snow to play cricket - we got some very very
weird looks! I think we scare the koreans...we're so
very different to anything they're used to!
Ok, it's late so teecha is going to bed now. Agh!
When I get back my English is going to be shocking -
I'm talking a lot in fragmented sentances; "lunch now,
then ski. Shower after."
Hope you all had a great Chrissy - Happy new year if I
don't get online again before then!!
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Latest reply: Dec 27, 2001
Korea #1
Posted Dec 22, 2001
I'm sitting in a PC room in the village where the Chonmasan ski resort is (I have no idea what the name of the town is) - it's really cold outside (-6 or something 
) but all the snow on the mountain is man-made - there is only a little tiny bit of real snow. There are only 5 or 6 runs on the mountain - we get to go night-skiing tonight!!
Getting ahead of myself here - back to the beginning!
Our plane from Melbourne was delayed twice - once before boarding and again before take-off, which meant we only had 40 minutes or so to get through customs etc in Sydney - we thought that that would be fine, but there were airport people waiting for us and running us to the gate to make sure we got there! It was all good though, got on the plane, got served dinner - possibly the best airline food I've ever had - beef and rice and veggies in a *proper* bowl, none of this plastic stuff thank you very much! - the rest of the flight was uneventful and boring - 10 hours of sleepnessness - ugh. We touched down in Korea - the temperature was -6C...in Melbourne it was 28, and we had -6. On went the jumpers and coats, and we went through customs - one guy didn't have his visa so he bluffed his way through - we met up with everyone and got the bus back to the SLP offices in Soeul - an hour and a half in the worst traffic jam I've ever seen - it was only about 30km or so, but the traffic was awful. We all (24 of us; 14 Aussies, 8 Canadians, 2 Americans) got picked up by our host families and went back to their apartments - mine had to go to work so I just slept for a couple of hours and then got up to play with their kids when they got home from school. The apartment was really small - everyone in Soeul lives in apartments, and they're all really compact - population density is something like 480 per square km!! They had friends over for dinner so they had 'traditional' Korean food...octopus and stuff...I kind of ate around it The kimchee - national dish - it's like a pickled spiced cabbage - very very hot - weird. Not too bad with rice. They use metal chopsticks here, which are a bit harder to hold, but I've mastered them now
On Thursday all the counsellors (foreign and Korean) counsellors did a sightseeing thing - went to Kyonbukkang palace, which was interesting, and walked through some markets - people lay their stuff out on the streets and on benches and stuff and yell at you as you walk past!
Yesterday was orientation at SLP, they told us about the format of the camp etc - I finally have some sort of idea about what I'm doing here!!! At night my host father took me and his eldest daughter (9) to the top of '63' - it has another name but I have no idea what it is - it's the tallest building in Korea - at night it was amazing - we could see all the lights and all the buildings - so many apartments! There is no real center to Soeul, no tallest buildings or anything like that, just apartments and then some business buildings - the cars are all really nice because the subway is excellent, so only people who can really afford cars get them...all the streets have at least 3 lanes going in each direction though! We also went to a Korean restaurant - the Koreans eat everything in small dishes...every meal comes with Kimchee, soup (usually seeweed - very salty) and rice - we had some sort of beef, which was still attached at one end to the bone...marinated and partly cooked - they bring a plate of hot coals to the table and put a grill on top, and you cook the meeat yourself, then dip it in sauce and wrap it up in lettuce leaves - it's unreal! Very very nice - most Korean food is really good, and there is so much! If you like something, they keep giving you more - my host family couldn't understand why I wasn't eating! That said, the food at camp is going to be pretty dodgy, we had lunch earlier today and it was fairly ordinary, especially compared to the last three days of such great food!
Camp is going to be so much fun - the kids arrive on Monday for this week and next week, then Sunday for the other two weeks - we get to ski for at least 2 hours every day, everyone is really nice - it's going to be great!
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Latest reply: Dec 22, 2001
cafram - in the states.
Researcher U43948
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