greetings from the new house!

Well, last week the mould really hit the fan so to speak. I got home from the Ty-poon party to find a dead cockroach on the floor next to the toaster. This was not usual in itself- happens a lot in my gaff. The difference was that this little fella was over an inch long. Tim made me take it to work with me on Monday to show Mr Kim. It was time to take the kid gloves off and get down to serious battles about moving. So I tried not to think too hard about what I had in the bag in my hand and went in to see Mr Kim. When the dead bug seemed not to register on his radar I pulled out the final trick in my bag of female ammunition and promptly burst into tears. Seemed to work as five days later I was moving house.

The new place is mercifully mould free (so far) and the only living creatures that I have seen (apart from my reflection in the mirror) so far are the goldfish that I brought with me. So everything seems a lot better right now. The new place is tricky to find though. The old place was near the MBC TV studio so a great landmark for taxi drivers and well wishers. This new place seems to be near nowhere of any consequence. I walked downtown on Saturday- having very carefully written the address down off an envelope I borrowed out of one of the mailboxes- which was easy enough (there is a mountain just behind the downtown area is pretty tricky to ignore really) but getting back was where all the fun lay. Fortunately for me it turned out that the taxi driver who picked me up had been the guy to shuttle us between bars the night before and he had enjoyed our repetitive but sincere rendition of all the Korean soccer chants we could remember. And he was determined to find my house and get me home. He stopped people all over the place and CBed control to find it and even turned the meter off. When I finally saw it in the distance we were both very excited and when I got out he refused to take any money! What a nice man. He also wrote down how to get there for me to show to other taxi drivers and so far it seems to have worked!

There was another party last weekend to mark the birthday of our favourite Kiwi bloke in town- he of the famous bug in his ear story from the World Cup days. We moved down to the soju tent after the building caretaker had come up to complain for the third time (one up on the week before when the girls took care of the police by offering them birthday cake which they were only too pleased to accept!). Though we then got thrown out of the tent for singing too loudly in the rain. Which was a shame as I really wanted to drink in that soju tent as it is called Hiddink after the new Korean folk hero of the World Cup.

And that is all I have to say I think. Ceramic festival the other week has left me with more soju cups and kimchi pots than I know what to do with but apart from that I was gratified to find that I could fit most of my stuff into the two bags that I had brought with me- weight off my mind for the return journey at some stage.
farewell for now,
yours a mould-free Hels
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Typhoons, humidity and mould....

No, I haven't died or disappeared into the depths of a Korean rice paddy never to be seen again. I am still alive and well in Mokpo- just a little on the lazy side which is why I haven't mailed sooner. Fungus update is this- it is now various shades of red, blue, green and yellow with big patches of black dotted about. The mould on the wall next to my bed is now level with the head board, closely followed by the mould on the wall that has my bed against it where it is just popping over the top of my mattress. The ceiling is where the action really is- a small spot when the boss came to see it three weeks ago is now a circle 18 inches across with a perfectly round patch of black mould in the centre of it. I am almost obsessively photographing it because I want to see how much it grows (and my camera has a date function now so I know exactly when the photos were taken as it is displayed in red in the corner of the photo) and I can't think of another way to show the boss how bad it is. Unfortunately, after two weeks of reassuring me that he is 'researching' a new house yesterday I was greeted with laughter when I asked him about it. I am trying my best to develop some kind of a cough as I think that will help me case but I can't seem to get sick. Any ideas on how to escape the house of mould would be greatly appreciated(!)
Obviously my clothes and everything in the place are still regularly covered in the stuff but I have been told that other people are suffering from the same problem (though not the creeping wall adornments- that is just me- lucky me!). This is not too much of a problem, just need to make sure that anything I want to wear has been washed sometime in the last week. When I first discovered the new patterns on my clothes I washed EVERYTHING but it has since grown back so I am letting it fester and trying to stop such thoughts as 'oh, I haven't worn my black t-shirt for a while I think that I will wear it today' as it inevitably leads to 'oh no, it is covered in mould, what a surprise'.

The main culprit in this new fashion design has to be the humidity which is incredible at the moment. You can see it hanging cloudy in the air, blurring views of the moon or sun and generally soaking everything in sight. I was in a phone box the yesterday (to phone the English speaking tourist info line to be told that the one person who speaks English wasn’t there for the day- handy, the number is 1330 if you care to take your chance. But I found a better free phone number 080 757 2000 which was very helpful) and the sweat was just streaming off my body. And bear in mind that this is a phone box without a door- just a few kids saying 'hi miguk' over and over but I don't think that they contributed to the heat at all.

Thank goodness for the air con at work. Though this often gets switched off between classes which I can understand since there is a whole FIVE minute break then and I can see why they wouldn't want to waste ALL that money keeping the rooms cold for FIVE minutes. So often the first couple of minutes of the class is spent running to the counter to find the remote to turn the air con on, getting back to the room to discover that it has been turned off at the switch, running back to the counter to switch the switch, coming back to the room only to find that I have turned the fan on by accident instead (all labelled in Korean you understand) and back to the counter to hit the right switch, back to the counter again to return the remote. All fun and games and shaves valuable minutes off the teaching time. I like the kids that do it for me! But last week something new was added to the air con routine when I spotted something fall out of the unit on the wall behind the kids' heads. I set the kids a task and went over to investigate- figuring that it was probably a candy wrapper or something. And imagine my shock when it turned out that the 'candy wrapper' had legs and wings and fur- it was a small but perfectly formed bat! I thought that I could handle a dead bat until it twitched its wings thereby indicating that it was in no way a dead bat. The girls came over and saw it and went crazy. They ran out of the room looking for help and told the woman at the counter the problem and she looked horrified at the thought that she might have to deal with it. But we found a passing man who picked it up by the wing and took I know not where. So I got to teach the girls lots of new English 'bat', 'the bat is IN the air conditioning', 'the bat is ON the floor', 'the bat is UNDER the table' etc.

But we were afforded some respite from the humidity at the weekend when we were hit with a typhoon (or typoon as it comes out with a Korean accent, there is no F sound in Korean so they make do with the next best thing. But it confuses them when I go to the copy machine and don’t bring any coffee with me- think about it!). I think that it was called Typhoon Rusa- love getting hit with weather conditions so bad that they name them! We were lucky in Mokpo really, it was VERY windy and VERY wet but it only lasted about 24 hours and then was gone and we returned to the humidity. Other parts of the country were not so lucky as I heard that around 200 people died that weekend. BBC World was predicting 12 inches of rainfall each over the weekend. I saw the photos- the tradition houses were hit worst as they are only one floor high and the water came up to the roofs. And there was a lot of photos of cars sitting up to the roof in water too. Really put into perspective me complaining that I couldn't wear the dress I had planned to wear that weekend. Or whinging about having to climb 12 storeys to get to my mate's apartment as the lift was out.

And I had planned to wear a dress as it was one of the teacher's 60th birthdays and so a surprise dinner had been planned at the Santa Maria restaurant near the water. The Santa Maria is a building in the shape of a large sailing ship (we have two of them here) and I got a bit of a shock when I went in to find that the floor was made of a glass and about six feet below the floor was a koi carp pool. Quite unnerving on arrival and throughout the meal I had to keep looking down. They turned the fountains on and the large fish seemed to love it. Though we all had the same thought- what if the floor collapses? I thought that the koi could nudge us to safety in the manner of dolphins but my mate reckoned that they might well be highly trained attack koi in which case we were doomed! Fun night though and interesting experience.
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Seoul and stuff...

And I have forgotten to say that last week I went to Seoul to meet up with a friend on his way back from New Zealand after a one year drinking (I mean Working) holiday. I just had the one day off work but we managed to see more than I have seen on any of my other trips to Seoul. We went to Gyeongbokgung Palace which was really pretty (and only about 700 won to get into- about 50p) and even had an air conditioned museum to hide in for a while to cool down. We stayed at the Exciting Korea hostel (www.excitingkorea.co.kr) which was near the palace and nice and clean. Usually I have been to Seoul before to drink and we have always stayed in Itaewon- the foreigners part of Seoul- so it was nice to be somewhere else. We also went up the Seoul Tower (after a seeming endless hunt for a taxi followed by a ten minute cab ride in the opposite direction- sneaking up from behind to catch the tower unaware or something like that) which was cool and you get to see a great view of Seoul from there. The tower is located on a hill and you can get a cab most of the way up or go by cable car- which we did to get back down again. We also went to a bookshop that had a large English language book collection which was great for me though I was short of cash so I just bought a Korea phrasebook (the Lonely Planet one. I had another one but it wasn't as interesting. The LP one has such useful phrases as 'Can I join in?', 'I have watched but never participated before' and 'I smoke marijuana occasionally') and an Amy Tan novel. Enough to keep me busy on the midnight bus home anyway.
And so it is now Thursday September 5th, mother arrives in around three weeks and then it is only another three months until I am free to explore new countries. Better make the most of this one first!
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