Getting ready to turn 30

Good news- well good news for me. I am staying on in Gangneung for at least another six months. The bitch- sorry, boss- finally agreed on Thursday afternoon to extend my contract. I am sure that all the drawn out worrying was to stop me asking for a pay rise or any of the other things that teachers tend to ask for on their second year. But I saw what happened when a mate signed on for another year and asked for more money- the school said yes and then three days later told her that she had to move from her lovely apartment into a shoebox.

The economic climate is not good in Korea at the moment. Schools and universities are all seeing student numbers decrease and are letting teachers go all over the place and not replacing those that are leaving. Some parents are having financial problems too which has led them to put English lessons for their kids at the bottom of the shopping list. Hopefully it will all pick up again soon. But until then I am holding onto the job that I have now! Yes, I have had a lot of problems with the school over the last eleven months but they seem to have stopped now. I actually have a good working relationship with the other Korean teachers and since the boss lost my degree certificate (and denied it) there is not a lot else for her to muck up really! My house is lovely and I am well settled here (as are the remaining goldfish). I have been seduced by the idea of spending more than a year with the same group of friends too and am pleased to say that all those here now are staying on for at least another six months too- not to say that I don’t miss those that aren’t here anymore as I miss the company of all those I have met in various countries at one time or another.

So, other than worrying about the job situation, life here has been pretty much the same. Three weeks ago I was returning from Hong Kong. The next weekend I went to Seoul to meet up with Eddie, one of my colleagues from Selfridges, who was in Seoul for a couple of weeks on business. It was good to see Ed though I was embarrassingly hungover it has to be said. Another 'all you can drink for very little money' at all night at Bumpin the night before saw me getting home about four hours before I was due on a bus to Seoul. I did my best to show him some of the sights of Seoul but the motion sickness from the revolving restaurant up Namsan Tower almost got the better of me. Since I worked with Eddie for a couple of years before I went to Australia I don’t think that he was surprised to see me in that kind of state and was ready to reassure me that I hadn’t changed a bit- though my face was a little greener that usual!

But did I learn my lesson from all this? Did I hell! The next weekend I was due to have a quiet weekend in Gangneung until Rory rang me from the rest stop to let me know that he was on his way to Seoul for the weekend. 12 or so hours later so was I, accompanied by Mona, Heimi and Katie (Canadian, Korean and American respectively). Rory took us to a couple of great bars until he ‘had’ to go home and we hit the Hongdae university district for a bit of dancing and all round merriment. Got back to the motel around 6.30 after a brief stop in a gamza tang restaurant. The next day all we could manage was a trip to Itaewon for subway sandwiches and a shopping sesh in the western supermarket up the road- time for more tomato soup for me!

Quiet weekend nothing! Got home and straight into bed. Didn’t move. Not a muscle. Great!
Monday, I met Mona for dinner and then we went to a DVD room where I finally achieved my aim of watching a Korean movie (with English subtitles, my language skills haven’t really increased much over two years). We saw ‘Joint Security Area’, a movie about the relationship between the North and South Korean soldiers based in the Demilitarized Zone which is four miles wide and splits the country into two. The movie was due to be my first Korean movie when my friends Alan and Eun-Kyong invited me to watch it with them in Dublin. However when we got there it had sold out and we went to see ‘The others’ instead as I was too embarrassed to admit that I hated scary movies! Having lived for nearly two years in Korea now I have to say that had I seen JSA in Dublin I would have missed so much of what it was trying to say due to my complete ignorance of Korean history back then. It was very moving, sad and frustrating.

At this point I think that I should also add that DVD rooms are the best invention ever- a room you can hire out to watch a movie of your choice with a large and comfy sofa in it. I guess that they have been made a necessity for all young couples since most people still live with their parents until they get married and for a lot of young people it is still a shameful secret to admit that they actually have a sex life. My Korean co-worker blushed when she told me that she does actually sleep with her boyfriend, while reassuring her mother that she is still as pure as the day that she was born. But she was keen to let me know that he is the only guy that she has been intimate with. Thank goodness she didn’t ask me about my experience!!! Hee hee! But whether you can openly spend the night with your partner or not, I think that DVD rooms are a great idea and should become part of the social landscape of every civilised country- and Australia too!!!

On Thursday I got the news that I would be staying on. I celebrated with a group of mates that night. We were also celebrating the return of all the travellers- mainly the university teachers as they get lovely long vacations during the winter which some of them manage to fill with winter camp work while others bugger off to the nearest sunny country. I managed to scrape a mere five day vacation in Hong Kong but still had more photos than the rest of them put together! No surprise there really. Got home around 4.30. Slept until work which was a mercifully short day. After which I got back into bed again before starting the night with Nanette for dinner. Sam came over from Seoul for the night so we could baffle people with a mixture of British slang, private jokes and generally talking too fast for others to understand. The night finished around 5.30am.

Yesterday we went to Rory’s for coffee then I saw Sam off home and went and bought a web cam! And stayed in. Just plain stayed in. Was asleep before midnight. Woke up this morning to find that one of my goldfish had died- not necessarily linked to having to share the room with one of Sam’s stinky socks which she left behind my beanbag but until the post mortem results come in I am not ruling out a link either.

One of the benefits of being in Korea is that Valentine’s Day has a different meaning here. It is not a day for lovers per se. Or a day for secret admirers to send badly written cards to the objects of their admiration. In Korea it is quite simply a day for girls to give boys chocolate. At last, a day where I don’t have to get sad about the fact that my life does not impact on the sales figures of hallmark one bit. Some of the kids gave me chocolate on Friday which I ‘recycled’ into a Valentine’s gift for Rory yesterday! And I did get a call from the guy that I met last week in Seoul so overall probably my most successful Valentines Day ever!

And today is 15th February which must mean that it is a year to the day that I joined the Stop the War demonstration in London. How much the world can change in a year!

And how fast time flies! Distressingly so in some cases as every day brings me another twenty four hours closer to the big 3-0. I am pretty philosophical about the whole thing- all of my mates in their 30s seem to have survived somehow and have reported back that the world doesn’t change (that much). I guess that I have got used to ten years of saying my age starting with ‘twenty-’. But since I have been in Korea I have been Korean age 30 since January (I think). It doesn’t help that Donga TV keeps showing the Friends episode about turning 30. But I think that I am reasonably happy with what I have achieved thus far. However, I will save the real panicking until the beginning of May!

But I am getting off topic now so it must be time to stop this missive. Enjoy :)
Helen
xxx

Five static-free days in Hong Kong

We have just celebrated the changing of the year here in Korea. I say 'we' but since I was in Hong Kong at the time it doesn't really count. Yep, me and Sam headed south for the winter in the hope of finding a place warmer than here with some proper honest to goodness celebrating to see in the year of the Monkey. Five whole days out of Korea, well, three whole days and two halves. This is something that we have been planning since the sumo trip in November.
I have to admit to being extremely excited about going away (not just because it took my passport well past the halfway stage stampwise) last week. I could hardly control myself at work on Tuesday and actually told a couple of the students what my plans were. I zoomed out of school so fast I was only a blur on the stairway. And promptly arrived at the bus terminal over an hour early- now that's what I call keen(!) I gulped down some rice, changed my ticket to an earlier time and headed off on a mostly empty bus. Sam woke me halfway through the journey with a phone call and when I looked out of the window I saw that it was snowing.

But that didn’t slow the bus fortunately and we made it in a very respectable three hours. Sam was there to meet me at the bus terminal in Seoul and it seemed only right on such a cold night (it was FREEEEEZING) that we head to the bar for a few before doing anything else. Two pitchers later and time to try our luck at getting a taxi out to the airport village where we intended to stay the night to miss the bulk of the new year traffic. Everyone else had the same idea and we slipped along a very crowded road out to the airport. We found a hotel, ignored the funny smell and bedded down for the night. The next morning we got up and ventured out to get some food- snow everywhere and the ice made things hazardous. As we turned a corner to the shop an artic gale took my breath away and we headed back to the hotel to thaw out and await the arrival of the shuttle bus.

The bus was waiting for us when we ventured downstairs. We clambered aboard and off we went- into the biggest skid that I have ever had the misfortune to experience. 360 degrees of skidding later and we were again facing the airport and we continued on our journey. It took about ten minutes before we could talk again though.

An uneventful flight later and we were in Hong Kong. Almost too quickly- it took around four hours to get there. A short flight but a lifetime away from Korea. It took us some time to pull ourselves away from the chocolate counter in the airport (Maltesers, mars bars, milky ways and other such long missed items) but we made it out to the bus station. Where a double decker bus was waiting for us! Another taste of home. We sat on the top deck at the front of the bus so we could ‘drive’ it to Causeway Bay and our hostel. The hostel was fine and so centrally located that we got off the bus and straight into the crowds heading to the park for the New year late night flower market. It would have been churlish to ignore them so we dumped our bags and joined them. The flower market was incredibly crowded and very exciting. So many people! And so many hot men!!!!!!!!! But I digress. We didn’t buy flowers and just indulged in a little cuddly toy monkey buying- year of the Monkey after all!

The next day we headed to The Peak- a mountain offering amazing views of the city and incredible looking apartment blocks. Dreaming of living there we got off the bus at the Peak and luxuriated in the view of the famous Hong Kong skyline. Skyscrapers lined the river and we could see out to sea a short way. It was breathtaking. We also did some shopping there too- we are girls after all! We got the funicular back down to earth and headed to Kowloon Park ready for the New Year parade. The parade was disappointing in that we couldn’t see anything over the crowds but exciting in as much as we had spent the previous three hours indulging in some Happy Hour binge drinking (UK government ain’t here anymore and can’t stop us) at a great Irish bar. That night we went off to a nightclub but had misjudged the day and walked into something resembling a badly organised school disco. We beat a hasty retreat.

Friday morning saw us up early and on a ferry heading to Lantau Island and the Po Lin monastery. It was cold on the ferry journey which lasted much longer than we had anticipated. The day before we had spent a very exciting five minutes on a ferry and hadn’t really considered that this day would see us on a forty five minute journey on a cold and shitty day. Getting off the ferry (and buying some more Cadbury snacks and maltesers) we got on the bus to the monastery. The clouds were really beginning to descend but we still had amazing views from the bus and all of the passengers let off an excited eeppp when we saw the Buddha at the monastery perched on a hill in the distance. However when we got off the bus we dashed to the loo and then to the veggie restaurant there. By the time we had taken care of our needs the clouds had engulfed the Buddha almost entirely. We climbed up the hill anyway and got some great atmospheric photos of Buddha in the swirling mists.

After such a spiritual day it seemed only fair that we reward ourselves with a couple of pints in the bar at the ferry jetty- such a joy to order actual real pints!! Back to Causeway Bay and some stunning fireworks then onto the nightclub which proved to be all that we had asked for and more. Saturday was a quiet day. I spent most of it in the park reading my book. Great to be in an actual park- there really aren’t that many in Korea. Also I had got up that morning and gone to a coffee shop and read the newspaper- again something that we really miss in Korea. Saturday night we had our last dinner in Hong Kong.

On Sunday we got a bus to Stanley- via the bottom of the Peak. The weather was the best that it had been for our last morning. Stanley was amazing. There is a great market there where I indulged in some heavy duty purchasing of hippy clothes. We sat by the ocean for a while. Then we sat outside a bar by the ocean and ate pizza and drank pints of Stella. Happy? Couldn’t have been more so to be honest! But all too soon it was time to go back to the airport. Which proved to be exciting enough since we were able to got to WHSmiths and buy some books. Two and three quarter hours later we were back in Seoul and four hours after that I was at home in Gangneung looking at my photos on my computer.

We had an incredible time and some of you will appreciate that a trip to the Marks and Spencers sale was more exciting that it would have been if we were both back home. The joy of standing in a clothes store knowing that there were loads of clothes to fit me- that I actually had a CHOICE was quite a heady feeling. Both Sam and I had to work hard to control the tears of joy as we skipped between the clothes rails. We also had a look around Ikea and HMV and did a whole host of other retail things that can’t be found in Korea. The static was gone from my hair for the whole trip and I wasn’t stared at once in whole time I was in Hong Kong. Overall I would have to say that what little we saw of Hong Kong led us to want to stay there forever, it seemed (at surface level at least) to be the perfect mix of the Asia that we so love living in and the UK which we miss so much.

Now I am back at work and only four weeks away from the one year mark. What happens next? Well, that is up to my boss and I am waiting to hear if she wants me to stay on. Everyone cross your fingers for that one. Miss Kim has certain bitch like tendencies so I need all the help I can get! I’ll let you know the outcome when I know. Can’t say fairer than that,

Love
H
xx