h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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.