Korean Selfies

Living in the small town of Gyeongju, most people here are very natural and laid back. Average outfits are hiking gear and sneakers. When I go to big cities like Ulsan I am always taken aback by the extremely done up ladies (and when I go to bigger cities, like Seoul, I am taken aback even more by the done up men!). They honestly look sort of like aliens. Shoes of impossible heights under wobbling ankles, and shorts of impossible shortness. They wear massively thick black eyeliner, and about 2cm of foundation that is a shade or two away from 'pure as the driven snow'. It's very amusing and odd. I imagine that if I spent that much time on my makeup I would want it immortalized in a selfie too. So these girls take photos of themselves on their massive Galaxy phones and it's hilarious to watch.

Selfies - photographs a person takes of him or herself while outstretching their hand - are considered somewhat embarrassing back home. At least they are for those who aren't teenage girls on MySpace. It's a little vain and silly to take photo upon photo of yourself, right? No so here. On any given day in any given populated place from trendy cafe to intercity bus, a young Korean woman will be taking a photo of herself.

The thing to do here is to be cute. How is one cute? Apparently by holding the camera slightly above your head, bulging your eyes, and (most surprisingly to me) puffing out your cheeks. I really can't understand it. I guess babies have fat cheeks? After taking maybe ten shots of themselves, they will put the photos in editing apps and add all the effects and hearts you can imagine.

Here is an example of the classic pose (although they often look at the camera too):

Note the terrifying eye makeup and impossibly large irises. This is actually a celebrity and this article  describes how adorable she is when puffing out her cheeks. Her eyes aren't nearly as bulgy as many selfies I've seen taken.

So there you have it. A little bit of amusing Korean culture for you guys. To wrap it up, here I am looking absolutely adorable (by Korean standards)...

PS Oddly, when adults take selfies (cause they totally do, too) their facial position of choice is completely emotionless stoicism. When co-teachers show me pictures, I always think they absolutely furious in them. Who would have know simply smiling was not the international norm!

Pleasant weekend in Ulsan

Nothing overly exciting has been happening other than planning VACATIONS which always gets me super excited. I have a pretty magical time coming up. This weekend, I am going to Jeju Island for the long weekend, which will be amazing. Initially planning to go alone, I will actually be joined by my friend Tina for a part of the trip. Lovely!

Next up, there is my school's Sports Day next week. Apparently having one in October was an anomaly and normally they are in May. Because our field has been under construction, it was pushed to June. Anyways, I am not only going to be a spectator this time, I am going to race! The finale of the day is a big relay race between the white and blue teams. Each grade selects one or two top racers of each gender. The race begins with adorable little grade 1's, and last time culminated with grade 6's. Apparently this time there will also be a teacher race of which I was asked to join. That'll teach me for talking about my rugby days - big things are expected of me! I can't wait. I also imagine I will be the only adult sweating and beet red while my Korean colleagues will be cool as cucumbers under massively brimmed hats.

Many more awesome vacations to come, but I don't want to spoil the surprise for my readers.

Spent the weekend in Ulsan planning said awesome vacations. Nice and relaxing. We went to Old Downtown and had AMAZING burgers. Not amazing-for-Korea (like many "Italian" places here) but actually amazing. I can't wait to go back. It's called Toolbox for anyone wondering. Then we discovered a hidden little park/ancient fortress thingy. Korea is so neat. Here are some pictures!

Rice paddy view from the train.

Cool stone thingies in the park.

Lots of cute old people were chilling
at the park. Under this ornate gazebo
some old men were playing board
games.

Very serene little pocket amidst the concrete jungle.

Terrifying man with a teacup spine.

Whereas Gyeongju's mascots are
the Shilla King and Queen, Ulsan's
thing is whales. This park bench
had dolphin sides!

Amazing bear hats. Sadly, child sized.

Very amusing tag on a pear of underwear I purchased.

And finally a little bit of Annie's mailbox. Business is slow, but still active!

"Dear Anne techer,

Hello! I'm Bak Ga yeon. Today I introduce my family. My family. My family is Father, Mother and me! I don't have sister or brother. My father job is train driver! My mother is nothing of job. My favorit food is spagetti & ice cream. And best one is chicken!!! I love chicken. It's really delicious <3 I dont like vegetables. And best one is onion. Onion is very very very taste bad. Do you like onion? My favorit animal is Panda. Panda is ve~~~ry cute <3 but I never saw panda because Panda is on China. In zoo I never saw Panda too. What your favorite animal? Don't you like Panda? I always thanks for you. Your teaching is very fun and I like your teaching. Bye~"

Firstly, it's really exciting her Hello was not followed by a question mark like 95% of my letters. Secondly, adorable. 

After school English camp

Success! Last week there was an afterschool English. Four English teachers were involved and we all made our own classes. I made a volcano lesson, and also co-taught a soap making lesson. I also made questions for the "golden bell" quiz. (Questions like "I keep you dry when it is raining. What am I? Dry means NOT WET"). When there were too many winners, I had to make a hard question to find the grand winner. Spelling "squirrel" turned out to be TOO difficult, oops! The final question ended up being "I am an animal. I live in the ocean. I have ten legs. What am I?" We gave it to the girl who wrote Squeid.

Anyways the class was a lot of fun. The kids seemed surprised by the hands-on aspect of it. I told them to remove rings and bracelets, and they were so apprehensive at first. Once they starting playing with the dough, however, they really enjoyed it. I think they don't get to play with ucky mucky stuff that often. Another teacher had a sandwich making class which was the most popular and I mean, duh. Sandwiches are awesome.

Anyway here is photographic proof that I teach these cuties. Cuter photos where their faces are visible are on facebook!

Golden Bell quiz game. They oddly loved it.

Volcano lesson

Soap lesson

My masterful worksheet. Was nice that they all seemed
to get the vocab fairly quickly.

Running low on my tea stash

Despite being a major exporter of green tea (ok I just made that up I have no idea), Korea hasn't really wowed me with tea. I am able to buy my favourite black tea, Twinnings Early Grey, online. However, sometimes I long for a delicious caffeine free option that isn't a super mild flower.

Friends and family of Canada - if you're feeling generous these days, I would LOVE a shipment of DavidsTea!

My favourites are
Goji Pop
Coco chai rooibos
Jessie's Tea
and
The Glow


I love you anyways, but if you were thinking of sending a package ANYWAYS.. you get the point ;)

Here are some beautiful roses. They're all over my neighbourhood these days and really brighten things up.

Boseong Green Tea Fields

Alright and on to the main event! Boseong Green Tea Fields!! We woke up early, left Yulpo, and made out way (via and amusing bus ride) back to Boseong. There is currently a festival going on at the fields. We have come to realize that most festivals include similar things: a cropping up of tents of various people telling things. Some things will be specific to the festival, for example many here were selling tea or tea holding pottery, but then also just stand festival tents like food, weird toys, carnival type games, etc, will always pop up. We enjoyed some free tea tastings, and admire the beautiful pottery before going up to the actual tea fields.

The fields were very interesting! I had always imagined tea to be a plant with huge, lush leaves, and not very woody. Actually, they were extremely woody and hard, with only little leaves. Surely the leaves will get bigger, but it was still a surprise! The air smelled unebelievably fresh, and there were huge pine trees all around us. Jeolla province was definitely a lush and beauiful area. The main city, Gwangju, was also incredibly beautiful and had Western type luxuries.. like trees and benches and sidewalks in the city!  But I digress, the tea! It was very cool. We also got to eat a lot of green tea products, my favourite being the green tea frozen yogurt. Yummy.We also got lucky with a day that wasn't too hot, since a lot of the day was spent hiking up the fields. It kind of blows my mind that so many tourists are allowed into the actual green tea fields. I was amused that the bush I had accidentally fallen into may be the same bush that flavoured my frozen yogurt!

Standard festival tent: big ol pot of something

Weird horse toys

Terrifying baby mannequins

This was cool! You could
buy lotus plant leaves
and grow them in a big
bowl of water!

Green tea selling booth. The picture of the woman farming
really makes me sad. It must be so awful manually
harvesting leaves!!! 

Traditional Korean paper, or fabirc?
I think it might be Hanji.

Pretty pottery

It is common practice in Korea for fast food places to have
plastic imitations of their dishes. I don't know if this is
supposed to whet the appetite of patrons, but it has
been extremely useful for us. Anyways here is a plastic
representation of a tasty plate-o-whale.

Cute little gazebo.

We avoided the crowded festival food tents, and instead
ate at the little restaurant that served green tea noodles!

Ice cream!

|Funny tree

And finally, the actual green tea fields! So lush, so lovely.

As Adri took this photo, some Korean ladies behind her
kept saying how cute it was in Korean. Cute is one
of the few words I know, so I laughed and thanked them.
Gave them a shock I bet!

The majority of tourists were Korean. It's nice to see how
they love to visit their own country.

Yulpo Beach

Happy Buddha's Birthday! This weekend was a long weekend in Korea celebrating, you guessed it, the birth of Buddha. It was for this holiday that there have been lanterns decorated the streets. While we were told that temples did give out free portion of bibimbap this weekend, my friends and I decided to use the long weekend to journey across Korea. I traveled with Adri and our friend Samantha. 

Gyeongju is located on the South Eastern side of Korea (Fig. 1). Boseong, the green tea fields, are down in the South Western tip in South Jeolla Province. Because it is so far, we decided to stay overnight. Boseong, the actual Green Field town, doesn't have much going on in it and we had trouble finding a room, so we ended up staying about 20 minutes out in a seaside village called Yulpo. Finding a room was an adventure in itself, and I had to ask my lovely coteacher to call and make reservations for us. Many places were booked up, but luckily we finally found a room. I couldn't understand most of the conversation on the phone, but I heard her use the word for "foreigners" a lot, so I was glad the pension owner was warned of our arrival. The place we stayed at is called a "minbak" which is a small place offering simple rooms. It was just what we needed. The owner tried in vain to talk to us a lot, but of course we never got very far. Anyway,  we had to take 3 buses to get there and got caught up in major traffic, causing our journey to take a very very long time. Despite an early start in the day , we arrived around 7pm and  were extremely happy to have a room and kind woman waiting for us.

Yulpo was an absolutely tiny town, I can't even find it on Wikipedia. It reminded me a lot of little tiny maritime towns I had done some Oceanography field work in.. not much around but a few boats and a lot of fishing. It was amazing to breathe such fresh clean air. We ate at a seafood restaurant where the specialty was raw fish.. but the steep price of that made us wary. We ended up getting as mystery soup chosen by our patient waitress.  We didn't do much other than eat dinner and go to bed to rest up for our next day's adventure.

(Although we did entertain the local children. We were even more rare there than in Gyeongju, and one boy in particular loved screaming HELLO at us and I AM CRAZY. Good times)

The following morning, using a ton of broken information, we managed to catch a bus from Yulpo up to Boseong. On the bus was only us and three older ladies who were travelling together. We were only able to communicate very slightly, saying where we were from, where we lived in Korea, and that we were English teachers. This tiny interaction impressed them a lot, and they nodded in great approval of us.

Figure 1. Map of Korea highlighting the locations
of Gyeongju and Boseong/Yulpo.

Crazy looking guy with a metal detector.

If you look carefully you can see tunicates!

Dried anchovies is one of my favourite side dishes here.
Not only are they delicious, but I can pretend
I am a giant crunching down on bones.

Mystery soup. Was quite mild, almost bland even.
Involved a lot of molluscs and radishes.

Mystery ingredient we weren't brave enough to try.
Adri did and said incredibly chewy.

Outside of seafood restaurants are tanks so you can
become acquainted with dinner beforehand.
Most are full of fish, but some have mysterious animals.
This floating things have a remarkable resemblance
to a certain part of human anatomy.