Jeju in a day and a half

Jeju Air ad campaign: "Look! Whiteys fly us too!"

This summer in Korea has been, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. The two week spring rainy season that usually marks the beginning of summer came, and was still going three months later. It rained almost constantly, with tragic consequences for some of the country. On my side of the country it didn’t rain quite so hard, but it did rain persistently, destroying many of the local farm crops and much more importantly (ok, not really) my football season.

Korea is a very outdoorsy country. The fact that it’s almost entirely mountainous and a small country surrounded by the sea on three-sides means that a lot of the summer is spent hiking, going to the beach and picnicking. This means that if it rains all summer, life gets very boring. After finally getting a weekend of some promise a couple of weeks ago, the forecast returned to rainy. A certain someone declared that if she spent another weekend in the rain, she was going to go “literally insane”. As Mr. Rochester well knew, it’s not becoming of an Englishman to have a mental significant other and as my apartment has no attic space, drastic action became necessary.

Jeju is often called “the Hawaii of Korea”, mostly due to the fact that it’s an enormous volcano and the weather’s hot. Not surprisingly it makes for a popular holiday destination for Koreans and foreigners alike. It also happened to be the only place blinking out from underneath a swathe of cloud over Korea on the weather forecast. A look at the Jeju air website (Korea’s answer to Easyjet, right down to the colour scheme) showed two tickets left for the weekend, which we decided to snap up. A note to Korean residents, it’s well worth checking out Jeju Air; even last minute tickets were about KRW90,000 all-in (one way) and if you’re flexible with your times you can get about a third off that. It felt a little louche flying somewhere for just one night, as well as wracking me with guilt about my carbon footprint having got back from Bangkok just a week ago, but I also really wanted to see Jeju.

Flying domestic in Korea was a beautiful experience. Even arriving an hour before take-off, we had plenty of time for a coffee and a snack, and I think realistically we could have got from check-in to seated on the plane in about 15 minutes if we had wanted. I’m trying to figure out how I can fly domestic back to England next time I want to come home. We pitched up in Jeju with the noble intention of climbing Halla-san, at 1950m Korea’s highest peak, but the combination of it being stinking hot even at 8am, a blackberry wine nightcap the previous evening and feeling lazy led to us taking a two hour nap at the hotel instead.

A hastily put together new plan saw us heading out to explore the north-east coast of Jeju. First stop was Gin-nyeom beach, one of what I imagine is one of Jeju’s less famous beaches, owing to its small size, preponderance of rocks and over-craning wind turbines. I thought all of that made it more charming actually, and definitely less crowded. When we got bored of paddling there were rock-pools containing hermit crabs, shrimp and small fish to explore.

Linda "wading".

Sunshine home day out.

Looking for crabs (snicker)

The wind turbines

After that it was a short taxi-ride to Mangjanggeul – apparently the world’s largest lava tube, where once molten rock from the volcano cone burrowed its way through the island to the sea. In all honesty, you should prepare yourself for a fairly cold, damp walk with only a couple of interesting rock formations to maintain interest. It is just about worth it for the petrified lava flow at the end though, which descends from the ceiling a bit like an elephant’s leg (and by extension, I reckon, like a doner kebab stick).

Just down the road from the lava tube is a rather wonderful maze park, though curiously you are given a map of the maze so you can figure out the route, which seems a bit self-defeating to me. Perhaps Koreans don’t like getting lost (the preponderance of sat-navs in this country would seem to bear this out too). Anyway, apparently about 10% of people complete the maze in 5 minutes. I’m guessing that’s with the map; it took us nearer half an hour, and that was with following a couple with a map who rushed past us at a key decision point. Still, the maze is great fun and a very entertaining diversion for a few minutes.

"I'll descend into your lava tube"

Thanks Japanese man who took our photo. Thanks for NOTHING!

The big spinning stick?

Asian maiden

The sign says "No kissing" - any excuse for a snog.

Finishee!

The maze from above.

After that we headed back to Jeju City to what was undoubtedly the highlight of the weekend – Loveland. Describing this is tricky. You’d have to describe it as an erotic sculpture park I think, but that gets nowhere near to capturing quite how much sheer fun you have there. Everything there seems to be about sex, from the giant penis and labia that form the centre-piece (lol) of the park, to the cute mating pigs which ornament the ponds. It’s not so much the statues though, as the wandering around in the dark with a bunch of half-drunk Koreans giggling at things. At one stage I joined the back of a three man queue to simulate sex with a statue. One man's heavily pregnant wife took the photo; I couldn’t really tell whether she was having a good time or not, nor strangely, whether he was. It’s a weird place, Loveland, never more so than when we get the sex-gift-shop sales pitch: “This is bestseller!” shrieks a lady at us holding a fiercely vibrating pair of beads. We blush, and leave hurriedly. Where on earth did Korea’s repressed sexuality disappear to all of a sudden? Anyway, we leave the park still giggling – Loveland comes highly recommended.

Enter!

"Wait your turn son."

Boob grab

I thought we were on Jeju, not lesbos.

Something about Linda mounting a massive cock.

"..."

Linda enjoying herself

Then it’s back into town for a pint of Jeju’s own micro-brewed ale from the Modern Time brewery. Disappointingly, anything that looks interesting on the list of beers is unavailable, so we go for a pint of stout and a pint of the regular, neither of which were anything special, sadly. I’m still waiting to have a really good pint on the peninsula, though Alley Kat deserves an honourable mention. We also end up trying a bottle of Hallsan Soju, the taste of which now makes me feel like a bit of a wuss when I drink Chamiseul.

In the morning we actually manage to get up in time for breakfast at the hotel, and then head off for the beach. A bit of a false start at I-ho beach (not that nice, but good for plane spotters) we end up at Hallim beach, which turns out to be a great tip from our taxi driver, and as you can see from the photos, is stunning. We spend the morning swimming and relaxing under a parasol (I’m going to change my last name to Kim pretty soon, but at least I avoided nuclear sunburn this time) and generally having a great time.

Well Korean

The beachee

The banana boat stand wasn't doing so well

So yeah, turns out you can do Jeju in just one night, and it’s very worth it. Only problem is, you really want to go back…

A

Goodness

Has it really been more than a month? It honestly doesn't feel like it, but it must be. As ever, I've been really busy, and I'm already back to the night before my first class of this semester. The masters project is in (all 98 pages of it) and I have a few weeks off from studying, which will be a welcome break.

The day after I handed the project in I headed off for a week's break in Bangkok. It's nice being on this side of the world and having some fairly exotic destinations close at hand, and in a time zone similar enough to negate jetlag. Thus, without really knowing much about what I was doing or where I was going, I headed off to see Adam and Kathryn.

The first thing that struck me about Bangkok is what an international city it is. Having come from Seoul it was pleasing to see so many different people and hear so many different accents. It’s been a while since I was able to play guess where someone is from (except with Americans and Canadians), especially based on what language they are speaking. Weirdly though, it was also fun to play spot the Korean. Any girls with their shoulders, and almost everything else covered with a very flashy pair of shoes poking out from the bottom almost certainly were. Men were a bit harder to spot, and I did get fooled once by a couple in couple wear. Seems like the Thais lack a sense of dignity too.

Probably my favourite way that the international nature of Bangkok manifests itself is through the food. Restaurants there seem to be owned by nationals of that country, whereas in Korea they often seem to be Koreanized. This means you can get pizza without potato wedges (actually not bad) and curry that hasn’t had half a dairy poured in it. Even better, you can get a proper breakfast with real black pudding, and rather disappointing steak and ale pie. It also gave me a chance to revisit the all you can eat Japanese meat fest (ooh-err) that is shabu-shabu. When the waitress brought out our 17th tray of meat, I was finally able to put aside the disappointment of Tokyo 2006, when I made a foolish decision not to order more meat with 10 minutes of our all-you-can-eat time remaining.

It’s also well worth mentioning the Thai food we ate. Bangkok is one of those wonderful cities with a proper street culture, and the food to match. Wherever you go in the city, you pass food stands selling a variety of meats on sticks, fried chicken or for a more substantial meal, noodle soup or rice with duck or pork belly – you choose (we chose both). The curries and coconut based soups are also spectacular – I’ve returned armed with some packs of pastes determined to recreate some. The only thing I didn’t manage to eat was Pad Thai, which loses me 100 tourist points apparently.

Being exhausted from a month of hard MA work, and several months of teaching without a break, we wisely decided not to spend all of our time whizzing around Bangkok in a tuc-tuc trying to see everything the city has to offer, figuring that drinking lots of beer in the evenings was a better way to relax than tourism. We managed to stick to the more legitimate bars in Bangkok. I don’t think I even saw a ladyboy, and disappointingly the midgets on motorbikes sex show I was promised by the guidebook never really materialized.

We did do some touristy stuff, checking out the Grand Palace (proving that the Thais are a little more decorative in their buddhing than the Koreans), Khao San Road (surprisingly only one set of dreadlocks) and a large market which sold almost everything, as long as it was what I’d classify as “ethnic sh*t”. By far the best thing we did was visit the “Ancient City”, a huge park in the shape of Thailand, with models of buildings both standing and destroyed in the position they hold/held in the country. It’s an awesome way to see a lot of Thai architecture in one place, as well as to spend your time zipping about between monuments using either a bike, golf cart or car as you choose. The only downside being that when we went it was full of obnoxious children all on bicycles, a recipe for disaster wherever you are.

On my last day I sampled a last little bit of Thai culture before getting on the plane, the Thai massage. I don’t know about you, but when I think of a massage in an exotic land, I imagine nubile young girls, candles and lots of oil. Thai massage, be forewarned, is a little different. It starts with a rather nice footbath, where the guy washing my feet does well to hide his horror at the nuclear sunburn on my legs I managed to pick up on the only day of this Korean summer. Then I get led to a darkened room, where he proceeds to sit on top of me, crack every joint in my body and dig his fingers into my muscles. Not really what I’d imagined beforehand I must say.

As an Englishman, my natural territory is not a darkened room being manhandled by a male masseur, thus I tense up. At one point he has to actually tell me to relax. My problems are compounded by the fact that having just put away a lot of thinly sliced meat swished in broth, I now need to pass gas quite urgently. This doesn’t help with the relaxation, particularly when he pumps my thing up towards my torso, almost receiving a face full of fetid air in the process. The massage ends with him sitting on my calves with me lying on my front, and grabbing my arms and pulling them back so I’m bent completely the wrong way in the middle. Twice. “Don’t worry Grev,” says Kathryn, “You might feel a bit sore now but in the morning you’ll be able to move everything and it will feel great.” Some hours later, I awake after an hours sleep crunched into an economy airline seat. I can’t move anything, and I feel rubbish. So much for Thai massage.

So lots of whinging, but I did actually have a great time. I’d definitely go back to Bangkok, there seems to be a lot to explore there and it would definitely be an interesting place to live. It’s probably where I’ll end up when I’m 40, balding and lonely, as that seems to be the type who does well with the ladies there. Thanks loads to Adam and Kathryn who put me up, showed me around and annoyingly refused to let me pay for anything. I took your advice guys and bought myself a trendy new wallet at duty free.

There’s a Flickr album of my photos here.

I’ll try to put a few more adventure photos up soon. Until then, it’s back to the kids.

Alex

How are you, Grev?

In which I make one of those general posts about my life. If you're not interested, feel free to stop reading here. I won't be hurt. I wouldn't want to read about me either. For those of you still with me...

Work

This is more or less my entire life these days, at least Monday to Friday. As I've griped about previously, I get up, start working, stop and go to bed. Actually it's not that bad, but I would think by the time 2011 finishes I'll have put as many hours into professional activities as I did in two when I worked in England. This isn't a bad thing - a lot of those extra hours are put in voluntarily and are aimed at making me a better teacher, which is often a very engaging and enjoyable process, which doesn't really fell like work.

At school I am two days away from being finished for the semester. Realistically, I am already done, as I'm spending this week doing listening discovery exercises with episodes of The Simpsons. Not a very tricky way to spend a week. However, teaching never really stops here, as the following two weeks I have summer camps to work. Korean education tends to view quantity of education as more important than quality, so there's never much of a chance to rest for student or teacher. I shouldn't complain too much though, some of my Korean colleagues get no summer vacation at all this year.

Similarly my studies are winding down. I say winding down, they're more winding up, as I have a little under 4 weeks to produce my final project for this module. For once I have made a decent start already, and I'm already 3,000 out of 6,000 words in. This weekend I have to listen to and transcribe 28 student interviews though, which is not going to be a lot of fun. Still, I'm confident of coming out of it with a decent grade.

Life

I am still finding time to have a little fun outside of work. It's been raining on and off here for the past three weeks which has dampened things a little, and completely wiped out football. One of the times it rained on was Monday evening and I was 8 miles away from home on my bike. I don't think I have ever been out in heavier rain. I could barely see 50 yards in front of me.

This weekend I was out and about in Itaewon. That's the district of Seoul where foreigners are almost in the majority, and where many of the embassies are based. It's actually a pretty nasty place a lot of the time as it's where all the American army members go out, but it's sometimes necessary to go there as it's possible to get essentials like lime pickle and mango chutney that just aren't available anywhere else in Korea. It also has a surfeit of not-shit (I'm not giving the American fruity muck they serve any better than that) beer on tap. I stayed there drinking until the baseball hats indoors crew turned up, then I cleared off to Hongdae instead.

What is pleasing me these days is Korean. I'm still not much good, but I can converse pretty easily with my friends as long as the topic is simple, and get along fine in everyday life. My MA is seriously limiting study time, but I've reached that wonderful stage in language learning where you start to pick up things just through exposure, rather than having to study them. I still want to get much better though.

Staying in Touch

I know I haven't been particularly good at keeping up with this blog, or with people who I should write to. I'm afraid that isn't that likely to change any time soon either, though if anyone is moved to send me a message of any kind I promise I will get back to you. These days I seem to be tumbling into a maelstrom of social media, but it's part of the job. Thus, if you want to contact me, or just read about me, there are a number of ways to do it:

- Email is the same as always.

- I still spend too much time on Facebook, so you can always get me through there.

- I now have a Google+, and invites to give away. Add me if you like.

- I will endeavour to write a blog post here every couple of weeks. You can always subscribe and leave me comments.

- My teaching blog is at http://breathyvowel.wordpress.com -this is mostly stuff I've been up to in the classroom, but may have the occasional interesting / funny piece.

- There is also an accompanying Twitter: @breathyvowel - I'm planning to use this as a general one from now on, but there will be quite a few ESL related tweets.

I think that's more or less it. Visitors are still welcome here if you fancy an exotic Asian getaway.

Was this post a bit needy? Oh well.

Until next time,

A

Jeokdeokdo

A couple of weekends ago we set off to do some offshore exploring among the islands in the West Sea, off the (air)port city of Incheon, where Linda lives. The most famous of these is probably Yeonpyeong-do, up in the north, which was the scene of a North Korean attack last year when we all got a little nervous. We eschewed this option in favour of the more southerly Jeokdeokdo, safely out of North Korean artillery range, but more importantly with nicer beaches.

We took an early ferry out of Incheon port, which at 44,000 won seemed rather expensive, but given that it worked out to 30 pounds return for an hour trip, probably just points to the fact that transport here is usually ridiculously cheap. This gave us the chance to have a look at the new Incheon airport bridge, which really is impressive. As you can see below, it's pretty long and must have been incredibly expensive. No wonder the Korean Highways Agency is tricking people into using it.

We get off the ferry and hang around in the port town for an hour or so, getting a coffee while we waited for a bus. This duly arrived, and we set off for the beach with about 30 other people. At the beach, everyone gets off the bus, and disappears. Linda and I are the only people on a 1km long stretch of beach. We're not really that sure where everyone went, but we assume it was to the pensions (houses you can rent for the weekend) up in the village. Wherever they went, it seems that these Korean people were not big beach goers.

The beach itself was really nice, a long stretch of sand, which turned into mud flats before the sea. There were many of the shells below around, which proved surprisingly mobile. The flats were also inhabited by lots of small fish, and huge crabs like the one below.

OK, so maybe not so huge, but interesting to look at at least. We also went for a paddle, and then just hung out on the beach. I wrote lovey messages to "Rinda" in Korean, and then we went off to get some Kalguksu for lunch. This turned out to be incredibly tasty, so much so that I forgot to photograph it.

After that, it was almost time to go home again, after having a quick beer in the park. There was time while waiting for the ferry to take a photo that shows what a nice day Linda had, and how much I hate photos.

I've just realised that this is a quite horrifically boring blog post. If you get this far I apologise. I will try to write something a little more exciting.

A

성원 아파트 (Seongwon Apartments)

In the kids' playground

he plays the harmonica.

A child wails above.

Attacked!

A couple of Sundays ago I was sitting in bed, talking to my parents on Skype when I felt like something was wrong on my stomach. A slight pain, but more of an irritant than anything else. I lifted up my T-shirt to find a tick stuffing it's face in to me in the hope of a three day blood meal. This caused ripples of excitement especially in my mother and girlfriend, who were very keen on burning the little bugger until it jumped off, with little concern for my safety. A look on the internet suggested that fire was not in fact the best way to extract it, and that it was better simply pulled off with a pair of tweezers. This was far more difficult than the internet made it sound - and it took me a couple of attempts at pulling, and then the tick snapped in half, exactly as it's not supposed to. Anyway, I don't seem to have caught Lyme's disease, or any other horrible tick based infection, so I think I'm OK.

Anyway, one of the things I love about my little town is that it's right on the edge of Odaesan national park, one of the most beautiful in Korea. With summer here I've been able to take a bit more advantage of it. Here's what I've been up to:

The above photos were taken when Linda and I went for a stroll in the park just before Buddha's birthday, hence the lanterns, which appear all over Korea at this time of year.





This set in from the Pyeongchang teachers' annual hike. Everyone in our county set off one afternoon to climb this peak. While it may look impressive scaling 1,300 odd metres, we actually set off from just 1,000, which makes it less of an achievement. The chap in the green is my high school principal, with whom I walked part of the way - he's a really great guy, and even speaks a little English which makes communication easier.

I did manage to commit a small faux pas on this trip though. My elementary school principal gave me her packed lunch to carry, and thinking she was in front of me, I proceeded to climb the mountain. Unfortunately she was behind me and so was left lunchless. I have no doubt that she was amply fed on the selection of chicken, pork, kimbap, snacks and goodness knows what else was being hauled up the mountain to aid flagging hikers. She was fine about it anyway, and a gift selection of roll cakes the next week made sure everything was fine.



These few are from our 'camping' trip to Odaesan last weekend. However, on arrival at the campsite we found it closed, possibly due to shamanism (yeah, me neither). Instead we decamped to a minbak (a kind of holiday home) near the park entrance, explored a cool abandoned building and then proceeded to eat 3.5 kilos of pork and drink an awful lot of beer. All in all, an ideal weekend.

That's all from me for now. I'll write again soon, especially as I might be off to dodge North Korean shelling on the West Sea islands next weekend. Until then,

A