영국여행 | England (Day 1)

For our 2015 summer vacation, we decided to blow all our money on a trip back to England. We don't get many holidays, and the summer holiday is the longest one we get, so it's the best for travelling a long distance. Considering we'd been away from home for over a year, we thought it'd be a good opportunity to go home.

I kind of really enjoy long-haul flights and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I always associate them with being really excited or big adventures. Maybe it's the free movies and food.

On the plane we were sat next to a boy from Busan who was going to study in England. We had to help him with a few things, as we were flying with BA so most things were in not-so-simple English. The most horrifying thing was realising just how weird the English used in the boarding and immigration documents is. There's no simple language like most forms. In place of "address" it's something like "location of residence" and instead of "reason for travelling" it's like "intention of sejour". Why would you do that? Especially on flights where it's likely people wouldn't necessarily be fluent in the weird words British formal public language likes to use.

We watched The Royal Tailor during the flight, because we'd seen it over a few shoulders and it looked quite funny. What we weren't expecting was that halfway through it would suddenly become very tragic and we'd cry a lot. (It was a great movie though, you should watch it)

Everything's in English!

So, half a day later, we arrived in England about 4 hours after we'd left Korea (ah, time zones), grabbed our luggage (after the usual drawn-out fear that it didn't make it over) and got into a car with our friend Tom who'd graciously agreed to spare us the pain of getting the Tube from Heathrow.

Weekday Clubbing

Everyone always seems quite surprised when they find out we haven't been clubbing in Korea yet. There's quite a simple explanation for it though. We hate clubbing.
I can't dance, I don't like dancing (unless it's a choreographed performance), and I don't like sweaty crowds of people with no concept of personal space. I don't like people in general. I've spent a long time crafting an online persona of being very outgoing and sociable, but this is the glass-shattering moment I reveal to you that I'm a massive introvert (and possible misanthropist) and anytime I meet up with people I'm in a constant effort to force myself out of my warm, soft, fluffy pokeball of safety and into a slightly more sociable world that doesn't involve cookies and snacks in bed at 7pm on a Saturday. Even if I really like you. Sorry about that.

ANYWAY. One of the things I really try to embrace while I'm here in Korea is meeting up with Korean friends and hanging out with them and generally making the most of the fact I'm in a super cool new country and I know plenty of people from said country that are happy and excited to share their culture with me. So we met up with our friend Nathan again, in one of our once-in-a-blue-moon meetups.

Except this time he also invited his girlfriend! ... and his girlfriend's friend. And his girlfriend's friend's boyfriend. And his girlfriend's friend's boyfriend's friend. I think. You get the picture, haha.

We met up and finally ate 족발 (pigs' feet) which was DELICIOUS, and drank a lot of beer and soju. We then went to look for a second round and happened to see what was labelled as a "British Makgeolli House", so we were ushered in by our friends to celebrate our home country.

Turns out, the establishment was British by name...and name only. Nothing on the menu was in any way British other than the potato pancake we ordered, that was tenuously similar to ham, egg and chips. It was hilarious and confusing. But we drank a lot of makgeolli.

One member of our party had clearly been hit with the alcohol stick a little harder than the rest of us, and she excitedly asked me a question. In English. I couldn't understand anything other than she was asking a question with two options (because it was quite slurred), so she said it again to Nick, who also couldn't understand. She turned in desperation to her boyfriend, repeated it in both English and Korean, at which point he announced he couldn't even understand her, so there was no hope. We ended up all just taking the nod and smile and she happily led us to another building.

It turned out she'd been asking where we want to go next. I don't know what the other option was, but the one we apparently chose was "go to a nightclub". On a Wednesday. At around 9pm. Not exactly peak service hours.

The hilarious thing is that it was a club that only played K-Pop hits, sort of like a Now That's What I Call Music nightclub. (I've just found out that these albums also sell in South Korea under the title "Now That's What I Call K-Pop!", which should totally be the name of the club)

The second, possibly MORE hilarious thing, is that, understandably, it was totally empty. Other than the staff members (including one girl that I assumed was a uni student, who knew the dance routine to EVERY. SINGLE. SONG.) we were the only people in there, which was great because we had the dance floor to ourselves, but also terrible...because we had the dance floor to ourselves.

In the end, they did manage to get me to dance a little (only a little) and we did, admittedly, have fun, until we realised we all had work the next day and should probably head home.

My First Baseball Game

I'll say this now: as an English person, I've never seen a baseball game. Not on TV, not in real life, not even kids playing terribly in the park or during PE. I have no idea of the rules of this game, other than the fact someone throws a small white ball at you very quickly, and you somehow have to have enough coordination to hit the thing.

I dunno about other schools in the UK but the closest I ever got to baseball was dreading a game of rounders during spring or summer PE lessons in school.

In contrast, Korea seems to love baseball. I've seen it on TV, I've walked past packed batting cages, I've seen people of all ages wearing baseball jerseys, and I've even seen kids playing T-Ball early in the mornings before school. I felt a little left out, I'm not gonna lie.

So, when my co-teacher told me that one of my 4th grade classes had won some free tickets to a baseball game in a local stadium, and would I like to join them, of course I said yes!

The common image I'm sold regarding watching a baseball game in Korea, is that you accompany it with beer and fried chicken, no matter what. It's tradition, right? So who am I to break tradition. We wandered off after a few minutes of cluelessly watching men in white wander around the pitch (field?), in the hopes of finding some chicken. (The beer we weren't so fussed about)

Shakespeare Lessons

I'm sad I didn't think to take more photos of these lessons. Over the course of about 2 months (7ish lessons) I read A Midsummer Night's Dream with my six 5th grade classes. It was an idea from my co-teacher, who'd heard of a competition being run by the British Council to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday (or death-day, depending on how you want to look at it.)

Every lesson, we'd review the previous part of the story from the lesson before (except for the first lesson, where we learnt all of the weird and wonderful names we'd see) and then read the next "chapter". Now obviously, I can't get a mixed level class of 10-11 year old Korean kids to just read the original Shakespearean English, so I made a sort of animated Powerpoint storybook for each Act (although to save time a lot of them were of merged).

I figured that, since Shakespeare's plays are all intended to be seen as performative art, it would probably make it a lot easier on my students if they had more visuals than text to get the meaning across.

What really helped me with this is my awesome co-teacher. Even though I'd simplified the script to within an inch of its life, to have it make any sense to most of the class it still ended up a little complex. So once I'd read out each page or sentence, she'd ask questions to check their understanding, or just directly translate if it was still too hard. We'd fill in any cultural gaps together and answer questions after each slide.

망원한강공원 | Mangwon Han River Park

This is a story of how location scouting often just turns into an excuse for a daytrip (or what feels like it, anyway). We were looking for some open, pretty spaces, that also showed off Seoul's beauty spots.

Our friend Jaceon suggested some places in and around Hapjeong, on the edge of the sprawling University district/s of Seoul (a huge area where something like 3 or 4 of the main universities collide and blur. It's a great place.)

We met up at his place for pizza first and it was enormous.

I think the fatal flaw in our plan was bringing the skateboard.

Anyone want to make a superhero movie about a guy on a skateboard?

It was quite a nice day for a walk, since this was back before summer fully hit. It was warm, but not sticky, and although these grey clouds threatened us all day, we never had more than a tiny drizzle towards the end of the day.