Anne in Korea: February 2014

February in Korean Elementary schools is an awkward time. Kids are on winter vacation from Christmas until February. Because of this big gap, teachers do their best to finish textbooks and curriculums before Christmas. During winter break, many students continue to go to Hagwans (private schools) or winter camps, though a lucky few go on trips. Either way, none have been in school for about a month when it resumed in February. For the first two weeks of Feb we have class, but then spring break occurs for the last two. Finally, in March, they begin a new semester in a new grade.

SO basically after a month of vacation, and before two more weeks of vacation, the kids have this awkward two week period of semi school. It's very odd, and they are understandably not in the mood to work. Most classes show movies. I decided to play the classic rainy day game M.A.S.H. It was a big hit with most kids.. but some were too rambunctious even for a game! It's a game to determine your future and has a lot more English vocab than I realized, so it was pretty win win!

This week Gyeongju has been hit with a sudden and rather intense snowstorm! It's been snowing heavily for over 24 hours! We've gone from no snow whatsoever to about 2-3 feet. It's very intense and unusual for the area. Lack of snow infrastructure has made driving a nightmare. I am extremely grateful to be located so close to my school, and to have my handy dandy winter gear. (I take way too much pleasure trudging through slush puddles in my insulated rainboots) Despite icy roads, it's absolutely gorgeous out, and actually rather warm. So I (and everyone else in my town) had to go on a little photo shoot! Snow really is beautiful when freshly fallen!

The twisty trees in Hwangseong park made
excellent photo subjects.

View overlooking the park.

My buddy atop the hill.
He looks very cold.

This is a tomb downtown. (The mound itself is the tomb. It's an ancient Korean thing). You may recognize it from previous posts. It's one of my favourite parts of Gyeongju due to that wacky tree. Anyways, I was super happy to be able to grab a shot of it in the snow!

This weekend was Lunar New Year! So firstly, happy new year! I can actually even say that in Korean, which is a handy tool for getting smiles out of strangers.

Anyways, this means it was a holiday weekend with no school on Thursday and Friday soooo I took a quick trip to Hong Kong for the weekend! I was joined by friends Samantha and Tina and despite the trip being short (Wednesday night till Saturday morning) we had a lovely lovely time.

Hong Kong is a very cool city. It's considered a world city, like London and New York, and there was definitely a very exciting vibe. It's massive, and so much more tropical than I expected!! Some fool on the internet warned that it would be cold so I brought clothing that was completely inappropriate. It was summer time weather! Well .. summer in Canada. It was absolutely gorgeous.

Also it was interesting to meet expats there. Here in Korea we are all dorks teaching English. Same job, same pay, same experiences. In Hong Kong the expats work at a variety of places from marketing to engineering, and are much more impressive! Of course I'm sure if I were to live there I would see a whole other side to everything.

The alphabet (well, lack thereof) completely baffles me. I don't understand how it's possible to know and write so many characters. Are Chinese people secretly all geniuses? It really blows my mind. Also strange: I was looking over a Chinese man's shoulder while he was reading. There were no spaces between characters. Also I noticed commas and quotation marks, but periods were replaced with little circles. Basically Chinese blows my mind. I was proud of myself though for being able to distinguish (kind of) Mandarin vs Cantonese on the PA systems of the plane.

Another amusing thing about HK was the mix of British and Chinese names. I found it funny that King's Road, Victoria Park, (Victoria everything really) were mixed with named like Tsing sha Tsui.

Ok picture time!

Boarding plane from Shanghai (layover) to Hong Kong!

Our first adventure Thursday morning was to go to a New Year market in Victoria Park. There was a bunch of stalls selling trinkity stuff for the new year. A lot of little pinwheels. Everyone was pretty jolly, and it looked like they were just getting started for the day.

App pillows!

It's the year of the horse!

Kimchi in HK!

Pinwheels and giraffes, cause you know.

Chinese kids proved to be contenders
in the world competition of cuteness.
I would have LOVED one of these
pet balloons as a kid.

A big mart of the market was a flower market. You were right, mom: orchids galore! I took pictures of ones you don't have specifically! Also lots of daffodils and citrus plants! Oh and lucky bamboo of course.

Fishy terrarium!

Keeping watch of her park,the
ever cranky looking Queen Victoria.

After Victoria Park we headed to Victoria Peak! (someone was full of herself..)
To get up to the Peak it turns out you can take a city bus, but tourist internet said to take the tram. While the tram ride itself is much shorter than the bus ride, we had to wait over an hour to get on! It was probably worth it though as a classic tourism thing to do. The view up top was GORGEOUS. Luckily, we found the bus for the way back down which was a longer ride, but who cares when you can sit in a comfy double decker instead of a million lineups?

Note that crazy haze. That's smog, there wasn't
a cloud in sight!

On top of tram fees, you can ALSO pay extra to
get up to this rooftop. Luckily we decided to get up
before deciding. Totally unnecessary as you can walk
around beautiful streets instead.

Next we walked downtown to Man Mo Temple. It had SO many incense hanging I found it hard to breathe! A lot of people were sneezing from it. But it was neat and very conveniently located. There were even fortune tellers! They didn't have prices listed so I didn't bother, but I would totally have loved to hear their amusing lies of my future success.

Did I mention tropical?

We spent our next day on the island of Kowloon. Kowloon has all the markets, but sadly they were mostly all closed for lunar new year! We waited around enjoying food (biggest discovery: Chinese egg tart. DELICIOUS dessert that weirdly is eggy yet still good) and the harbour until the evening when we would see the new year parade.

There was quite a crowd around Jackie Chan's star.
Probably because he's the best.
Snuck a shot of this cutie as my model.

According to the internet the parade is amazing. We were, to say the least, unimpressed. After all this walking, and queuing, standing at the parade proved extremely difficult. The parade started at 8, but when we arrived at 6 45 the crowd was already massive. We managed to position ourselves behind a family with two little children, which was excellent because otherwise I wouldn't have seen anything. We waited. And waited.

Eventually my extreme foot pain and boredom caused me to begin goofing around with the two kids. They were so cute. There was a little boy who looked maybe 4 years old whose eyes actually did ^^ when he smiled, and his older sister who was maybe 6? Both were incredibly cute (and wonderfully short). At first I just made silly faces which they enjoyed, rolling my tongue and winking and such. When I ran out of moves, I tested their English by saying "one, two, three"and they LOVED it. They started just saying all the English words they knew and would laugh at my reaction (such as mooing for a cow, making an imaginary turtle sound for turtle, etc). Basically they were my main entertainment. When the parade actually started around 8 30, it proved to be way less entertaining than Micky and Jason (oh yeah they had English names apparently!) So we left. Ah well. I now realize why I've never been to parades!

Big crowd hours before the parade.

While the kid dancers are cute, we
saw this stupid octopus about 5 times
while our feet melted in agony.

This dragon was the most chinese float I saw.

Wooo dragon. Asian.

My photography skills at their finest.

We decided to stay for one more float, and if it didn't
impress us, we would leave. Sadly Minnie just
didn't have that wow factor.

Despite the parade being a let down, we did have a beautiful day. The weather couldn't have been nicer and the harbour was gorgeous. Victoria Harbour of course, she had to name another thing after herself. While the visit was brief, it was super fun. I would love to visit HK again, especially for longer!

Here are a few more pictures I took at random spots throughout the city.