Gyeongju cont...
Dinner for two?
We found the bus back to the town of Gyeongju (just outside the National Park) and went to a restaurant recommended by Lonely Planet. We ordered rice with barley since the book suggested it. We not only got the rice but as you can see, an array of assorted vegies and strange things including a little whole fish. They bring out so many sides in this country when you order something...it's unbelievable!
-Heather

Gyeongju cont...

Then we found this neat courtyard with a big Buddah for Jennifer to practice her Zen ways at and then just when we thought we'd never find our way......we found the pond we were looking for! It's called Seochulji pond (it dates back to the Silla era) and there is an interesting legend behind it. A face once appeared in the pond and warned the king against a terrible omen which later came true.

Gyeongju cont...
There were barley fields and Korean style homes (unlike the modern buildings of Pusan) that were beautiful. It didn't matter we were lost because it was amazing here! We strolled through the village and saw locals drying out red chili peppers and harvesting cabbage. There were men pulling carts of vegetables down the roads. We even picked a persimon off a tree and ate it. (There were persimon trees growning everywhere).

Gyeongju National Park
We made it to the top of Namsan and the views were breathtaking. This photo doesn't do a justice. It was a bit difficult making it to the top since the map they gave us didn't have all the trails that off shooted the main one. We kept coming to forks in the trail with signs in Korean (we were able to read but didn't understand) From the top we could see down to the east side of the mountain (our destination) but we couldn't find a trail to get down there. In a confused state we wondered the top of Mount Namsan. We found a Korean man and asked him in broken Korean how to get down to the fortress and pond we needed to get to. He looked around and pointed to a small, hardly visible, trail signaling to us that this was indeed the trail down the mountain. We took it and it kept spliting into other trails. "Oh no... now we're really lost", we thought. It was steep, rocky, and parts didn't even look like a trail. Finally we made it to the bottom and ended up in a small farming village.

Gyeongju National Park
We decided to climb Mt Namsan (meaning South mountain) from the west side...up and over to the east side of the mountain. The height of Namsan is about 1574 feet or 480 m. The hike was amazing with several ancient relics, pagodas and tombs from the Silla Dynasty. Gyeongju is considered a national treasure because it is one of the only places not destroyed by the Korean war. We saw 3 Buddah's carved into a rock from about 570 AD. We also saw many of the tombs (pictured above and look like a grassy hill) from ancient kings. The tomb is contructed by piling rocks over a stone casket (with the body and treasures inside) then covering the stones with dirt and planting grass on top. Some of the temples and relics here are on the Unesco World Heritage list.
-Heather

10/30/06 Gyeongju National Park
We took a nice bus with reclyning chairs to the city of Gyeongju today. The bus was only $10 roundtrip! There is a national park there and several ancient relics and tombs to see in the various parks and museums the city has to offer.

This is a picture of some of the teachers we will be working with. From the left is Theresa from New Zealand, Melissa from Canada, Katie from Pusan, Jen and Me, Mina from Pusan, and Ali from New Zealand. We also work with Hugh from Australia and Bob from USA. Next week we have a 2 day retreat in the mountains with all the KJC teachers (there are 7 KJC schools) so it should be fun.

October 31, 2006

Well... Heather and I are officially starting our jobs tomorrow! I am excited to start working and to get out of our LOVE motel! It hasn't been that bad, but I'm ready to have my own place so we can at least cook our own food! Last night we resorted to cup 0-noodles because that was the only thing we could make in our motel! It at least tasted good and there were no live creatures floating around in it!

Korea has been a bit of a culture shock for me. We can walk around for hours without seeing a single white person and very few people speak English. The subways are great though and there are signs written in English. As you read, the food is pretty disgusting, but we are finding edible places to eat every day. This turkish restaurant is so far my favorite! Technology here is amazing. They have these money cards that you just scan and can use for everything, restaurants, taxis, buses, and subways! We won't be getting cell phones until we get our alien resident cards November 9th, but we will have a land line in our new apartments, that are the size of a shoe box!

Today we had our second Korean class. We are improving on our reading and we are learning new vocabulary everyday. Money is our newest challenge and they have 2 different counting systems!



Now, we are off to our favorite store Home Plus, kinda like a nice grocery store/walmart with lots of food samples, to buy a giant white board for our classes. They only give you paint pens which ends up ruining everyone's nice clothes, so we decided to invest instead of ruining our clothes!

Missing you all! -Jennifer

Welcome Dinner
Our bosses took everyone out to dinner tonight to welcome Jennifer and I and say farewell to the teachers we will be replacing. The dinner was very interesting and they kept pouring us shots of Soju (Korean Alcohol). The waiters brought these large pots to our tables and placed them on the burners. Inside the pot was an array of seafood (lobster, shrimp, crab...everything whole and with heads). On top of the seafood was an octopus which appeared to be dead. When the soup started boiling the octopus came to life and started squirming around the pot in a desperate attempt to escape. It was so sad I almost cried. Each pot one by one heated up and had a moving octopus on top. All the Koreans thought it was funny. We've noticed that most seafood restaurants keep their fish, crabs, octopus, squid, etc alive in tanks. Even at the grocery stores they have tanks and someone catches a fish and puts it into a bag for you. I guess they love their seafood really fresh here.
-Heather

10/28/06 Samgwangsa Temple

There are several temples within the city of Pusan where we live. We went to this one today and it was beautiful. It was quite a hike to get up to it since the temple is on top of a mountain. I got in trouble from a little old lady for taking this picture.
-Heather

Halloween Bash 2006!
There was a huge party for Halloween Sat. night. There were 5 bars hosting the party one of them had live music. The band Mojo was really great. We bought passes for 5 dollars and that got us into each bar plus a free drink at every bar. If you ordered beer you got two for free! Everyone was dressed up in crazy costumes. One guy was dressed as the Chiquita banana lady with fruit on his head. We met a cute gay couple (one from Spain) who were very nice. We'll probably keep in touch with them.The bars were packed and we met tons of people. We met a guy who's from Vancouver and works in the aquarium here in Busan (Busan Aquarium shark tank photos). He said he could get us in for free. They have a shark tank there you pay $50 and put scuba gear, go into the tank, and feed the sharks! One of the sharks is 12 feet long. So far nobody has been bit. I can't wait to try it! Above is Jennifer and I with our co worker Katie (she's from Busan) who is tons of fun. The other picture is with our friend Andrew who we met last week. We found a good restaurant to eat at too. It's a Turkish restaurant and the food was delicious. Finally something normal to eat.

Chicken Parts and Kimchi
Yesterday Jennifer and I had our first day of training at our school. It's a great school and the kids are adorable. We have a full curriculum to follow with plenty of materials. Today we had our first Korean lesson and we did quite well. On our way to Korean we tried to find something to eat and ended up in a Chinese restaurant unknowingly. We pointed to the only picture on the menu that looked appetizing (chicken with vegetables) and instead recieved the most disgusting meal yet. There was fried chicken parts in a sauce with a few vegies for good measure. What I mean by parts is necks, feet, hearts, mystery parts, yuck. It was disguised by the breading so I took a bite and munched down on bones and strange textured things that were not chicken by my standards. Oh well....another lesson learned. Chinese food in Korea is horrible. Oh yeah I forgot to mention that everything you order in this country comes with kimchi (fermented spicy cabbage). It's quite disgusting but apparently it's rude to ask the waiters not to bring it. I feel bad just wasting it each time. Yesterday Jennifer and I ordered some soup that had peanuts and random sealife floating in it. I think we've already both lost weight as a result of the unavailable tasty food.
-Heather

10/24/06
The Bathroom Mishap
Today we attempted to use a bathroom inside a Burger King (no we did not eat there). The toilet had a digital screen and several buttons with Korean writing and pictures (look above at the pic). Well what happened was that we couldn’t tell which picture meant flush. When I heard Jennifer shriek “oh my god I’m getting squirted with water…don’t push the pink button!” I thought I was safe pushing the blue one but instead I was hit with double streams of water that would not stop. I ended up with a wet tee shirt and completely flooding the bathroom floor while Jennifer laughed her ass off. We tried to play it cool as we exited the Burger King but it was hard not to notice our wet clothes and the fact we are foreigners. We’ll just take this as another lesson learned.

10/24/06 Haeundae Beach
We went to Haeundae Beach today which we read about before we came to Korea. It was a nice sunny, warm day and the beach was quite beautiful. Jennifer said it reminded her of Tel Aviv, Israel with the sky scraper hotels right on the beach. We hung out and studied Korean in the Westin Hotel bar until we got kicked out for not buying anything.
-Heather and Jennifer

10/23/06 We live amongst the whores
In order to get over the jetlag, we decided to stay up as long as possible. We forced ourselves to go out to some of the bars at 9pm (a dead hour for Pusan, especially on Mon. night) and we met a guy from Canada (annoying and cocky) He asked where we were staying and when we told him Yeonseon-dong he said “oh that’s where all the whore houses are”. He informed us that strip bars are illegal in Korea so all those bars with pics of half naked ladies were really brothels. Great I thought….we live in whore central. Apparently it's some sort of indescreet redlight district. When we arrived home that night at about 11pm we saw a hooker coming out of the room at the end of the hall with a man buttoning up his suit. Disgusting!
-Heather

10/23/06 Beomeosa Temple
Today we went to Beomasa Temple. It was a beautiful day and the temple is only about 15 minutes from our motel. It was a gorgeous temple and there were hiking trails up to other temples that we did. The temple is at the top of a mountain so the view was spectacular. And then there was lunch… Jennifer and I have not had much luck finding non repulsive food to eat. Everything has been either too spicy or it has pieces of hotdog floating in it. Nothing on the menus is in English and NOBODY speaks English so we really have no idea what we’ve eaten. I hope we haven’t eaten any dog! Hopefully through process of elimination, we’ll finally find something tasty.
We met today with our school manager and she took us to the school we will be teaching at. It’s very nice and on the 10th floor so has an amazing view. The students were so curious about us. They crowded around the doorway to peek at us and say hello in English.

10/21/06
We arrived in Busan tonight at 9pm. At the airport we were greeted by our recruiter, Monica, and she took us to our motel. We wanted a cheap motel since we’re paying for the first nine days and yes the hotel she took us to is reasonably priced. We live in a 9 story building in which the first 7 floors are strip joints or bars. Tonight we went out to the PNU(Pusan National University) area to some bars we read about in Lonely Planet and met some Canadians who invited us back to a party on the rooftop of their apt. building. It was a great time but we decided to head back home to our motel above the bars. Heather had the brilliant idea of going to one of the bars in our building for a beer and it turned out….well…a disaster. We went to the 6th floor (thinking it was a typical Korean bar) and asked for 2 beers (in Korean). Instead….two guys told us to go into a room with microphones and forced us to pay 20,000 won. They wouldn’t let us leave until we drank the beers and sang “I can’t get no Satisfaction". After singing a disgraceful version of the song we somehow managed to escape. Wow! What a first night in Korea.

We leave tomorrow for Korea!
This is a picture from our going away party at Candlelight in Simi Valley last week. Thanks to everyone who came...we had a blast! To update everyone, we leave Friday, Oct. 20th at 12:55 pm. We fly to Narita, Japan and connect on a flight to Pusan from there. We arrive Korea at 9pm on Saturday. Korea is 17 hours ahead of Pacific time. It's the middle of Typhoon season now and Pusan, the city we're moving to, is the most Typhoon stricken city in Korea. Niether of us have ever been in a typhoon so we're excited to try something new. It's also an interesting political time to be moving to Korea with North Korea's nuclear weapons testing and Kim Jong-il's egotistical threats. (more on N. Korea's nuclear testing to come).
Just to let everyone know, we are actually moving to Korea 10 days before we start work so we can explore the city and get our bearings. The school we are teaching for however thinks it's perfectly fine for us to move into our apartment the day we start work. Since we have no place to live we're going to ruff it for 10 days in a youth hostel before moving to our apartments, which by the way are 10 pyongs big. (We're scared to find out how small a pyong really is!) We'll keep you posted.
-Heather and Jennifer

We're really moving to Korea!
Last week Jennifer and I spent hours on the phone to Korea with recruiters, directors, and occasional assholes. It seemed likeeveryone wanted to convince you to work at their school because they got some sort of commission out of it. They tell you it's the best school in Korea and they lie about the conditions of your contract. Since I'm no fool, I read each one thoroughly only to discover the deceitfulness of these people. One school offered us a great job and assured us we worked Monday through Friday. I noticed in small print on the contract that we had to work 6 days a week for 6 months. After a long and stressful process of finding an honest job...we finally settled with one school and signed the contract. We will be working at a private English language institute in Pusan. They have provided each of us with a studio apartment in the same building (at least that's what they say). The apt is a 15 min. walk from the school and in a great part of town from what we hear. We leave on Oct. 17th. We are both extremely excited for this new chapter to begin in our lives.
-Heather