Korvia Autumn Party 2015

Basically, I'm so bad at blogging that I decided to combine two draft posts into one thing.
I'm also so bad at remembering to document these things, that I've just stolen all the nice photos of me from Korvia's facebook page. Why bother taking photos when you've got paparazzi documenting everything? ;D

Also, I blog so infrequently that I wrote half a blog post about the summer AND autumn parties, before realising I'd already written about the summer party half a year ago. Oops.

SO. Here is is, the Korvia Autumn Party.

I retract my former statement, hahaha.
Nick and I decided to combine our trip to Hongdae for the party with one of our Once in a Blue Moon trips to the hairdresser, so naturally we looked awesome. I re-installed my full fringe out of nostalgia for the good ol' days when hair was thick and plentiful.

However, nostalgia is one of the worst inventions ever and rose-tints everything, cutting out all the bad stuff. My greasy forehead and lots of running around excitedly nattering to people at 100 miles an hour in the hopes they'll not notice I'm secretly bricking it means I ended up with a clumpy, hairy mess stuck to my forehead before it was even dark.

Turns out, that's exactly the reason I grew out my last full fringe. Sigh.

Anyway, we needed to arrive early since Nick had signed up to help take photos. I hadn't signed up to do anything, because I'm a poor excuse for a citizen, so I tried to take the edge off of my guilt by pretending to be staff. To be fair, I usually help out at the parties and all my friends were there as volunteers, so it felt weird to just sit around like some kind of dictator while everyone else works.

Vadering

I decided my skills as an anxious, introverted human shell would be most well-suited to meeting and greeting hundreds of strangers and helping them make their way to the party. Hence the sweaty face.

I mean, that mostly involved just standing at a table with some of my friends, saying "hello" to anyone that walked up to us or looked lost and not-Korean, and providing them with pens and stickers for making a name tag.

Also, since we were outside and upstairs (the party was at Mike's Cabin in Hongdae, which is a roomy, comfy bar in a building's basement. It's nicer than I've made it sound.) we decided to bring the party to us, by messing around with the photo wall next to us.

Once the stream of arrivals had died down, we called it a day and went in to grab food (pizza and crisps, courtesy of Korvia, thank you!) and find everyone else. There were some funny games, some presentations, some dancing, standard party fare.

I'm not very good at talking about parties, and I've talked enough about how great I think Korvia are at every stage of the application and transition process to Korea, so there's not really much else I can say other than it's always a lot of fun and I'm glad these parties exist. I'd never have met a lot of my friends here without them. </cheese>

This is the best photo because it looks like I broke my leg or something.

The COEX Aquarium

I love aquariums.

I mean, they terrify me, especially in any part with enormous tanks or underwater tunnels. I've seen one too many "mild peril" scenes in films where the glass cracks and all the fish escape to reclaim their domain from the tyrannical grip of humans.

But I also love them, in the way that I can just see thousands of different fish, going about their business being all colourful and...swishy. Fish are also disgusting and sometimes I freak myself out if I look too closely at them. Scales are weird, fins are weird...have you ever looked inside a fish's mouth or eye? Those are weird too.

I'm not really selling the idea that I love aquariums, am I?

I do. In the same way I love bugs but also simultaneously want them all to die. I find bugs and fish fascinating and could watch them all day, but at the same time I never want one less than 5 inches away from me without there being some kind of protective barrier between us. If I could exist in a bubble where nothing would ever touch me, that'd be ideal, yeah.

And no, I can't walk in the sea or on grass barefoot, thanks for asking.

Anyway, before we get any further into my weird, contradictory likes and dislikes I'm going to tell you about the time I went to the aquarium with my friend Kiegan.

Seoul Food | Budae Jjigae 부대찌개

Our fridge looked so Korean I couldn't not take a photo (ignore the spilled yoghurt, oops)

This is just a very brief post to share one of my favourite things to cook. Budae Jjigae, or "Army Base Stew" is one of these beautiful inventions made by people who miss their home's food, but can't quite get the right ingredients. So, during the war there was a lot of "American" food, like Spam and sausages, as well as filling, convenient foods like instant ramen and rice cakes.

I love budae jjigae because it's one of these "one-pot" recipes where you kind of just throw everything in and hope for the best. It's hearty, filling, and (when I make it at least. I've had some pretty volcanic jjigae before) just spicy enough to warm you up and give you some energy.

I'm pretty proud of this one, because it was the first time making a Korean-style stock rather than just using water or a stock cube, and also because I had to touch those dried anchovies. I'm notoriously squeamish about touching things, so when I saw that the recipe called for me to rip off their heads and scrape out the guts I was a little bit horrified. But I did it.

As ever, I used Maangchi's recipe, which worked a charm and it tasted just as good as the budae jjigae I've had as part of our school dinners (which are delicious). I usually make a huge pot with enough for maybe 6 people, so that there's enough for the two of us to have a second helping and I don't have to cook the next day...but usually we end up pigging out and there's only enough to eat a much smaller portion the day after, hahaha. It's too delicious ㅠㅠ

SM Tour and Rookies Concert

Memorise these tiny, adolescent faces.

Because in a few years' time, if EXO are anything to go by, and the fact they already have a lot of hardcore fans before they've even debuted, they'll be all you hear about for a long time.

We went to the COEX mall again, because SM were holding a few concerts for their "Rookies". If you're not particularly down with your kpop info, most of the big record labels still live in the 90s golden era of manufactured pop stars. And, despite all the jokes we made (and still make) about it, I think in the case of a lot of these artists, they're a lot better off for it.

They hold auditions to pluck willing and highly-talented (and beautiful) tributes barely out of nappies (okay, slight exaggeration, but they're usually primary school age when they get taken in) from the public sphere and basically put them into Pop Music Hogwarts. Or maybe Fame Academy. Whatever. They live in dormitories, usually with their future group members-to-be, and get trained daily by the best vocal coaches, choreographers, public speakers, models, personal trainers, drama teachers, musicians, etc, to be the perfect pop star.

And to be honest, it pays off. I'll get more into that later, but basically they school these kids until they're "ready" and then pop out a group of ready-made celebrities every few years or so. One of the things that's impressive is how prepared they are for hoards of screaming fans. I suppose it's because they gradually expose them to this most terrifying part of fame throughout their training. We'd seen some of the older Rookies during the SM Town concert as backing dancers and occasionally given a brief set to sing or dance. Presumably, this series of shows was also to get them used to a concert environment as well as gauge popularity, what works, what doesn't, and to generate hype.

SO. Being rather into kpop (in case you couldn't tell), we fought our way to some tickets and headed over to the COEX. We popped into the merchandise shop just to see if there was anything interesting or new, but mostly I was amused by the fact they'll brand ANYTHING. Here's a multipack of snack nuts (called Super Nuts, presumably linked to Super Foods) and someone presumably went "omg, you know what else starts with Super? Super Junior. Slap some faces on it. Boom. Done."

Seoul Food | Cheese Otaku

Been a while since I did a post like this, eh

Now this is a story all about how... we went and ate an absolutely enormous meal back in June. Hongdae is a great place for food of all kinds, so it's hard to get bored considering the amount of choice they've packed into one area.

We went to Cheese Otaku (치즈오타쿠), a Japanese-themed restaurant along the "barbecue street" where the star of the show is a gigantic platter (with different sizes starting at, I think, a 2 person serving) that sits in a custom slot in the table to keep the food warm, sauces at the right consistency, and to melt cheese. CHEESE!

I guess it should be obvious from the name that you get a lot of cheese.

Depending on the portion you buy, you also get a sizeable chunk of a whole chicken. Goodness me.

There's also fried rice, fried chicken, corn, and a million other things all on this sizzling platter. I can't remember if it came with fries or if we ordered extra. But they were there and they were rapidly consumed.

영국여행 | England (Day 8)

What a terrible day we're having. Ugh. Sunny.

Day 8! Day 8 was a bit of a whim because we found out a bit last-minute that there was going to be a Korean Culture festival in London, and it would be a good chance to share our current home with people. The weather was really great! So hot and sunny and, unlike Korea, not humid at all, haha.

We went with Ann-Marie and Chris, with the promise of meeting up with a few more friends throughout the day depending on their schedules, including Yasmin and a very brief, fleeting hello with Jerlen and a few of the other Filipino kids from home. If we met anyone else, I'm sorry, my memory is bad and it was 3 months ago, haha.

I also took the opportunity to be a massive tourist a) for the sake of showing my students later, and b) because I haven't been touristy in London since I was about 17, so I needed an update. Plus, look at all the sun I have to document! Sun? In England?!

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.

Korvia Summer Barbecue

Hello from your friendly neighbourhood BBQ assistants~

Another incredibly late pre-summer catchup, this time it's the Korvia BBQ!

For anyone that doesn't know, the wonderful Korvia is the company that helped myself, Nick, and hundreds of other people from around the world make the move to South Korea.

The barbecues and parties that Korvia throw for their recruits are there to let people meet the people that helped them share the bureaucratic deadweight that is trying to get work abroad, as well as other native English speakers that might also be in or near your placement area. It's a great idea to help you feel a little bit less of a tiny fish in a huge ocean, and is actually one of the things that really drew me to Korvia over other recruitment agencies when I first started my research.

I actually met a lot of my really good friends over here via last year's (and our first) barbecue. My idea was that if I volunteered to man the grill, I'd HAVE to crawl out of my comfort zone and actually talk to new people. And hey, it worked! Since then, it's always been fun to help out with setting up the venues, because it's basically an easy excuse to doss about with my friends before everyone else arrives. ;p

One of our main tasks was to set up the photo wall in the picture at the top, which was surprisingly difficult considering there were so many people trying to set it up. (And it all ended in disaster, RIP photo wall. I say that, I think we fixed it, but it DID fall on me, and I valiantly tried to leap out of the way like an action hero. Expectations vs Reality, I probably looked more like a kid faceplanting than Indy with the giant rock, but don't crush my dreams, okay?)

Ignore my sweaty mess and focus on Kiegan's dazzlingly adorable smile.

Our other task was to set up the food tables ready for the masses, and get the coals burning and ready for meat, glorious meat. Also: ASPARAGUS!!

Danny Elfman's Music From the Films of Tim Burton

Hello, hello, long time no see etc etc I'm bad at blogging, as usual.
A long time ago (maybe July?), in a city far, far away (from England) Nick and I went to a concert in Seoul.

It was a celebration of Danny Elfman's music from all of Tim Burton's films, played live by an orchestra! A little bit different from our usual musical fare.

As far as I can remember, I'd never been to an orchestral concert, so this was quite exciting. We weren't sat particularly close to the stage, so although the usual ban on photos didn't seem to be present, there wasn't really anything to photograph, so excuse the lack of images. But I suppose you don't go to something like this to take pictures, so what were we expecting?

I'm not totally sure if there was any particular order to the movies that they played, but each section would begin with the movie title displayed on the projector screens. The orchestra would begin playing, and the screens would play some appropriate footage, occasionally broken up with concept art images.

It was really great to see and hear all of the music live, and in particular Danny Elfman himself came out for The Nightmare Before Christmas to perform some of Jack's songs.

I'm a little confused as to why it wasn't in one of Seoul's actual concert halls, as the sound wasn't as great as I was expecting. The orchestra were obviously performing very well, you could hear that. But I wanted to feel the musical vibrations in my chest and have the sound really all around me, rather than just amplified through speakers somewhere in front of me.

Having said that, I still had a great time and it was very cute seeing people leaving afterwards, humming their favourite songs. I'd definitely go to see another concert like this...but maybe not at this venue.

Super Junior Super Show 6: Encore

K-pop concert time again! This time, it's Super Junior on more time, but with Cherie and Nicolette.

And, of course, treat yo self part 3, because Cherie had to miss out on TVXQ last time.

We went to Butterfingers in Gangnam again, because it's ridiculous, and what is treating yourself if not putting your arteries in grave danger via sugar and cholesterol?

2 things about Butterfingers:

1. The menus are bigger than your head. That's a lot of choice, and I'm a very indecisive person, so this place might on second thought be an awful place for me to go.
2. The lighting, however, was great for selfies.

We're all antisocial together, it's fine

While Nick and I did the unspeakable and got a breakfast EACH, Nico and Chezza (lol) decided to be a bit wiser and share one. Like the menus, the portions are bigger than my head. How is all of that supposed to fit in my stomach?

Seoul Food | Cooking Mate

This is a super-old post from last year that I totally forgot I'd started. Oops! I remember it was from somewhere around last Christmas, because the restaurant was playing some very dubious Korean covers of classic Christmas pop hits.

I'll keep it short and sweet, mainly because I can't remember anything except that I enjoyed the food. Heh.

Passionfruit Lemonade

Cooking Mate is a little restaurant in Hongdae, right on the corner of  the road leading from Parking Street up to Artbox (addresses? What is addresses?), next to where the man with the huge, adorable dog usually sets up camp.

There's usually a person stationed outside to let you in or sort out something if there's a wait. Since it's upstairs, I guess it saves you some time rather than going all the way up to find out there's a 2hr wait.

They also have little walkie-talkies, so when we went in we were announced FBI-style to someone upstairs. By the time our unhealthy selves had carried us up, they were all prepared and ushered us over to a specific table. It was fairly quiet when we went, because it was late, but I can imagine this place is pretty organised when it comes to seating customers.