영국여행 | England (Day 9)

I'll give you one guess at where we went.

Day 9 saw me meeting up with Ann-Marie again to go on a day-trip somewhere neither of us had been before, once again checking off something on our "explore more of England" list.

We met at King's Cross, which is always fun to say, and we might actually have left from platform 9 or 10 (sadly not 9¾).

Breakfast! Once again making the most of cured meats and real cheese.

Due to our lackadaisical approach to planning a day out, we ended up just typing various place names into the ticket machine and choosing the cheapest one that was also less than a 2 hour train ride away, and ended up with Cambridge.

Flat English countryside from the train window.

What we didn't realise is that the train station is actually quite a long walk from the actual university buildings. What I also didn't know is that Cambridge apparently has a large Asian expat community, because we walked down a whole street of shops catering to Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Japanese tastes, as well as many more. We popped into a bubble tea shop with post-it notes covered in cute doodles and messages not written in English, and generally caused a hassle, as we usually do (they didn't have a working card machine and I never carry cash, but they'd already started my order, oops)

It's kind of weird, just wandering around and then choosing a random university building to just walk into and look around. Especially as most of the buildings are probably halls of residence, it feels a lot like you're just walking into someone's garden and having a nose around, even though the area has the look of a stately home, which actually IS just walking into someone's garden (and house) and having a nose around.

덕수궁 | Deoksugung

Creepy, cold and deserted school rooms. My life for about a month.

After our return from Tokyo, it was straight back into school. School terms run at a different schedule to home, with the new school year coinciding more with the Lunar New Year (March) rather than harvest seasons (September). This meant that, although my contract required me to be in school, I didn't actually have any classes, especially as I'd already done all of my winter 'camps' (optional extra English classes that run for a week or so during the holiday period) before our trip to Japan.

This meant I was doing the dreaded "deskwarming" that you hear a lot of native English teachers here talking about, if not complaining. Most other teachers don't have to come in, as they run on a different contract, so usually the school is almost completely empty. A lot of schools used to let their teachers take the day off during this time, to save electricity and heating that's kind of wasteful for one person (if they have the central heating turned on at all, sometimes it's not. Hellish!). Unfortunately at orientation we were told that a few people had complained that their friend got time off and not them...so the rules were changed and generally you now have to stay as deemed by your contract. Sigh. This is why we can't have nice things.

Anyway. It's not as mind-numbingly boring as people make it out to be. I wrapped myself in pyjama bottoms and blankets and caught up on some TV shows, drew some pictures, read books and comics, wrote blog posts, and studied my Korean in a nice, quiet room. As an introvert it wasn't really much different to how I spend my time at home, except the chair was a little bit less comfortable.

This was a little frustrating though, partly because I was thinking of all the travelling I could be doing in that time, but also because we'd brought a guest back from Japan that I felt like we should have been entertaining. Not that they were unable to explore on their own, but South Korea can be a bit intimidating for a first-timer, especially as we don't live that close to the main tourist attractions in Seoul, so the journey can be a little more difficult.

We ended up searching for things that can be done in the evening other than eating and drinking, because usually by the time we get to Seoul if we leave school bang on the ring of the bell, it's still about 6pm. One of the things we found was Deoksugung, a palace near Seoul City Hall.

월미도3 | Wolmido Again Again

As a slightly more relaxing comedown for Nick's parents (having just come off a long haul flight, then up early for a pretty intense tour), we thought we'd visit Wolmido one more time. We'd been told to expect bad weather as the beginnings of a hurricane, or possibly the tail end of one from further afield, so we didn't want to go too far and risk getting stranded.

Wolmido's actually big enough and varied enough that this was our third visit and we still managed to find new things to do. We decided to go to the mini hanok recreation and potter around.

We were pulled in by some of the staff there, and encouraged to take part in a little arts and crafts session. Nick made a little spinning top while we made...some kind of cute decorated stick? I didn't really understand what the lady helping us was telling me. I thought my ears were failing me but I do believe we ended up making bejazzled...ear cleaning sticks?

I think I'll just wear them as hair decorations. They're cute and pink with bells on.

Anyway, this place is great for a little concentrated dose of South Korea's architectural history. They've recreated buildings from the northern and southern areas, for both the rich and the poor. They're fairly similar in style but there are subtle differences in layout and size, and there's some really great examples of how they were carefully designed to ensure coolness in the hot summer, but warmth in the freezing winters.

One thing I find interesting is that the living room almost always has only 3 walls, and is open to the outdoors on one side. With the exception of the palaces, where they could afford a screen that could fold down from the ceiling in the winter to offer some extra protection.

There's also a great cutaway example of how the ondol, traditional underfloor heating, worked in the days before gas and electricity. It's similar to the way the Greeks and Romans did it, with pipes working their way under the house (another reason for the raised structure). The pipes connect to the house fireplace on one end, usually in the kitchen for cooking with. Rather than waste all that heat straight up and out, the chimney basically extends under the entire house before emerging out of the opposite side. Mm. Nice warm floors to lie on!

We played tuho, a traditional game like a cross between darts and hoopla, where you have a handful of arrow-like sticks, stand behind a line, then throw them into a narrow container (think of an umbrella stand). I was terrible at it, haha.