Visitors (Part 1 of several)

OK, so I've been meaning to post this for a really long time now, but finally (I think), here it is:

This blog is deeply committed to the avoidance of slush, sentimentality and most things romantic. One of my pet hates is crowing about relationships on the internet, but, just this once, I'm going to do it. So yes, I do have a girlfriend. Her name is Linda and she's from the USA. Here she is, looking charming as usual:

Linda came to visit for a couple of weeks at the end of June. We spent the first weekend in Seoul and Suwon, but didn't really do all that much except watch the England vs USA "soccer" game. In the end, a draw was probably the best for all concerned.

I was working during her visit, so talking to Linda became my lesson for the week. This actually wasn't the horrific experience that I thought it might be. My students were actually pretty kind with their questions. Particular highlights included "How did he propose?" (Linda's response: "He didn't"), "Have you seen his six-pack?" (Linda's response: outright laughter) and "Have you had plastic surgery on your nose?" (Linda's response: confused look).

After this, I remembered I had a camera, so here are some photos and words about what we got up to during the rest of the trip.

Dano Festival

The Dano Festival is a festival of all Eastern Asian culture that takes place in Gangneung each year. Linda and I were invited by the teachers at Geomun Elementary School, and spent a nice afternoon watching puppet shows, traditional drumming and trying out some traditional Korean printing. We also sampled some makkoli made at the festival (I will learn to do this for myself) and ate rice cakes, as well as touring the endless market stalls selling all manner of Korean curiosities, and some good old fashioned Korean tat as well.

Us in front of the festival gate. As usual I am failing to smile at all here.

A stick throwing game traditionally (if I head a won for every time I heard "Korean traditional" over the course of the afternoon I'd be able to afford a half size tin of Coca-cola) played by ladies in the Korean royal court back in the day. Final scores, Alex 2, Linda 0. The nice lady in the Korean traditional (sigh) dress even gave me a tube of toothpaste for my efforts.

After the festival tour, we retired to the seaside for a raw-fish meal. I'd had one before and not been too impressed, but this turned out to be excellent. The sheer range of seafood we started with was amazing, and included crab, shrimp and seemingly hundreds of other things of which I do not know the names. The fish itself is slightly lacking in flavour compared to say, tuna, but once you've dunked it in chilli sauce/wasabi soy, it's all about the texture, which is just chewy enough without being a pain. The fact that the meal is finished off with a spicy fish stew makes this a really great meal, and is definitely vying, with about 7 other things, for the title of my favourite Korean food.

Our (Korean traditional) "starter"

Gyeongpo Dae, Gyeongpo Beach and the Live Club

On Saturday we headed down to Gyeongpo Dae and Gyeongpo Beach. Bad planning on my part left us very little time to do anything before having dinner with one of my co-teachers, but we just had time to have a wander around and take a few photos:

Sittin' on the Dock of the Dae.

Korean Traditional Artwork

Some flowers.

Sad me.

Unamused Linda.

After that we met Mr Ham, one of my elementary school co-teachers, for dinner. As it turned out, we were gatecrashing his elementary school class reunion (they do it every month, so it wasn't quite as bad as that makes it sound). No-one really spoke much English, which made it rather awkward (as most things Korean seem to be), especially as Mr Ham had to look after us all night, but we still had a good time getting around rather a lot of duck for the second time in less than a week (Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm).

After that it was off to the "Live Club". I was quite excited. I don't get to see much live music here, so the thought of a nice acoustic set accompanied by a few quiet beers sounded pretty good. What I didn't figure on was the live music being provided by ourselves. This of course, meant I had to sing, and with a distinct lack of "Mack the Knife" in the choices, left me in a bit of a bind. In the end I went with what I know, and attempted "Easy Like Sunday Morning". Now, sometimes I can be OK at singing (needs citation), but I need to be drunk. In the case of singing in front of a bunch of Korean strangers, I need to be reeling drunk. I was only a bit tipsy here, so what followed was the most horrific, nervous, stuttering performance of the song ever heard. I can only apologise to the towering prophet that is Lionel Richie for sh*tting so completely on his work. At one stage both the club hostess and one of the group joined me onstage to try to help out, but this just made me even more nervous. I also realised what a freaking long song it is (Karaoke tip: never pick anything with a guitar solo) giving me even more time to die on stage. Eventually, deliverance came, the song ended and I sat down to consider my future karaoke career.

"I wanna be hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh..."

The crowd goes wild. And tries not to look. And especially not to listen.

I did get drunk enough afterwards though.

OK, I'm calling time on this blog post for the evening. More tomorrow I think as I'm determined to get all the photos online. I'm off to read Franny and Zooey by J.D.Salinger, drink a little pomegranate tea and fall asleep. That really makes me sound like an arse, doesn't it?

A

Football: Me, The World Cup and Korean Men

I'm writing this at 8pm my time to try to stay awake, having been so since 3.30am this morning. This for once, was not due to a bout of insomnia but a deliberate decision to wake up and watch the World Cup final. For the second World Cup in a row, I found myself up in the middle of the night watching the final in an Asian country (last time I was in Japan).

I'm going to have my two cents here and say that I enjoyed the game. While it may not have been a footballing classic, there was plenty of incident, a decent amount of chances for either side (including some inexplicable misses) and if nothing else, the chance to feel sorry for Howard Webb, who increasingly looked like King Canute trying to stem a tide of Dutch bad tackles and Spanish whingers (seriously Sergio Busquets, grow up). I'm glad the Spanish won. Whilst they weren't at their best all tournament (even against Germany) I admire the football that they try to play, and I would take Xavi and Iniesta over any other central midfielders in the world, as long as there's a decent holding midfielder in there with them. I was a bit disappointed that Iniesta was deployed wide so often. On the occasions that he drifted inside in the final his interplay was great. The little flicks he can produce so naturally are the sort that Steven Gerrard can't produce without sending a press release to the national press announcing it several days in advance. The Dutch, for their part, were a bit of a surprise. I at least expected a little subtlety from them in trying to boot the Spanish up in the air, but none was forthcoming. Maybe it was too much to expect from Mark Van Bommel, but he must know his stuff about South African grocery stores on last night's evidence. Still, football is about winning any way that you can, and anyone who doesn't think so is Arsene Wenger, so don't beat up on the Dutch for trying, OK?

As for England, I'm afraid I stopped caring a long time before the tournament started. For me the golden generation is looking a lot like the statue at the end of The Happy Prince, except they kept all the gold leaf for themselves. I thought when they were leaking the final goal against Germany that that might be it, so I was distressed to hear "Lamps" and "Stevie G" pledge their futures to England. Anyway, what was interesting was that Joachim Loew took similar gambles on Klose and Podolski as Capello did on Heskey and Lennon. They had, by all accounts, had dreadful seasons in Germany, but fit in to the system than Loew wanted to play. Could the same have worked for Capeloo with a bit more luck? Probably not, it's Emile Heskey after all. Anyway, I don't know what goes wrong with England at major tournaments, but I'd say it was definitely time that we let somebody else have a shot. At least they might run around a bit, and maybe even control a pass.

As for my own football, I've just been forced by illness to miss out on my own major tournament: the Jinbu Invitational. I completely wore myself out last weekend and the early part of the week, racking up 80km in mountainous bike rides interspersed with some pretty hard football training. What really got me was a trip to the Bangadari spring near Jinbu, to drink some of the mineral water. "It's good for health" they told me. Well, I would have invited "them" to come and inspect what was coming out of me for the rest of the week, and reconsider their opinion. Anyway, I was feeling better on Friday, so headed to Chuncheon for Shannon's birthday meal. We went to Santorini's, which turned out to be pretty good. The food was good, though not outstanding, but the setting and the service was top notch and we had a great time. I should have left it at that, but ended up drinking makoli until the small hours, which pretty much put me back to square one. By Saturday afternoon I was back on the toilet, and suffering jagging pains in the back of my head whenever I stood up. These, you'll be relieved to hear, have now receded, but they didn't in time to play on Sunday. Shame, as I'd just bought some new football boots.

These boots, for the third time in a row, were white. I really don't wear coloured boots. I like black boots. They look normal, sensible, unflashy. A bit like the sort of player I try to be. I try not to draw attention to my feet, as I'm usually using them to fall over the ball. Anyway, through problems with size availability and language barrier, my last three pairs of football boots have all been white. I'm starting to feel like a tart. Still, I could put my white boots and a tutu on, and run out on to the pitch trilling "Climb Every Mountain" and still not be as much of a tart as most Korean footballers. Exhibit A: On Saturday, while shopping for football boots, a shop assistant directed my attention to a pair of boots in lilac and orange. Being a nice person, I politely declined, and didn't try to put on in his nostril, like I probably should have done. Lilac and orange? You deserve to have every single one of your metatarsals smashed into tiny little fragments if you're wearing those. Exhibit B: Ringtones. Sitting on the side at training I was subjected to a perpetual playlist of K-pop tunes from the phones of my team mates, all of whom are men and most of whom are older than I am. Allow me to put this in context: it's the equivalent of hearing Miley Cyrus, B*Withched, Ace of Base and the Jonas Brothers from your team mates' phones. Apart from the Ace of Base guy, you're going to want to have a serious word, right? Exhibit C: The weather. I've already blogged about this, but Koreans: skin is waterproof. It's OK if it rains. Exhibit D: Tactical discipline. Could you just, for a minute, hold your position, or at least put in a little shift to get back? No? OK. We'll just continue to play 3-1-6 then. Cool. Exhibit E: Get up. Someone clipped you. You're not Ronaldo. You're just being a girl. Seriously Korean footballers. Sort. It. Out.

OK, I think that's most of my spleen vented for now. I'm feeling much better today. Nick arrives from England for 9 days tomorrow, and I get my summer vacation. I can't wait, and while there may be a short-term blog post shortage, it will be followed by lots of juicy titbits as soon as I'm back.

Toodle-oo,

A

PS Ooooh, Exhibit F: everyone still picks a footballer to be. You go on the pitch and they say "I'm Villa", "I'm Torres". Course you are son. I'm Alex. Please don't be a berk.

Little and often, right?

At least that's what I said two weeks ago, and then didn't really do. Anyway...

The Weather

English people get accused of talking about the weather a lot, and rightly so. It's my theory that we're not naturally predisposed to talk about the weather, it's just that the weather in England merits a bit more talking about than other countries. For example, in February 2008 I stared out of my office window at the cloudless blue sky over London. The thermometer read 18C. I mentioned to my boss that we should commence the cricket season now, as it would doubtless chuck it down all summer (it did). In February 2009 I taught an English class based on a newspaper article describing the two feet of snow that had fallen on England. Guatemalans, on the other hand, don't talk so much about the weather. It's difficult to raise much of a comment (unless you're a taxi driver) when the weather is hot and dry for 8 months of the year, then hot with two hours of rain in the afternoon for the other 4. So you see, we talk about it more because more happens.

I don't know if people talk about the weather much in my town. I bet they do though, as it's definitely pretty interesting here. This morning I believe I may have discovered a whole new kind of weather. Small chunks of ice blown horizontally were hitting me in the face as I walked across the bridge to school. What was this strange phenomenon? Light sideways hail? I'd like a Met Office team to come out and have a look at this, especially as the sun was out when it happened. The weather here is entirely unpredictable. We had sun and warmth all last week; tonight while I ate dinner at a friend's a light dusting of snow fell. One day it's raining, the next beautiful sunshine. I carry my umbrella every day just in case. The one constant seems to be wind. There's always at least a stiff breeze blowing through the valley, if not a full on gale. One day it was blowing in the front of our building so hard that the lift (elevator, international readers) doors wouldn't shut and I had to climb the ten flights of stairs to my apartment. This wasn't cool. What will be worse than cool is next winter, where temperatures will drop to around -20C. There's also Monsoon season to look forward to in a couple of months time. Not brilliant, but certainly not boring.

The weather also varies drastically town to town. I don't think we've had more than three or four inches of snow at a time here. In the ski town 15 minutes away they had about 24 inches overnight. This had two consequences that I am aware of. One, the English teacher there had to dig himself out of his house, and two, I was able to take this photo:

OK, I have now rambled for so long about the weather that I don't have time to tell you about anything else. So not only have I reinforced a negative stereotype of Brit's being weather obsessed nerds, I also don't have time to tell you about how I mistook a girl for a boy in class today. Maybe tomorrow...

A