The problem with keeping a blog like this is that exciting things don't happen every day…well ok you make observations every day and mentally log them and then within 5 mins forget them and suddenly you have nothing to write about again. I've done that so many time over the last few days…
Those who know Mr Jonathon Stretch may be under the impression that he has changed…dramatically. I believe that's what he'd have you suckers back home think (I was one of those suckers till recently!). Well I can reliably report that he hasn't changed a dot – he is still the same northern monkey that he always was. He's just now a northern monkey in another country (hi Stretch!). Seeing Stretch was my first trip so far outside of Busan..and amazingly it came off with minimal glitches…Emily and I managed to negotiate bus, subway, coach and taxi to arrive at Ulsan, a city about 2 hrs north of us.
It was a good night…with the exception of my camera breaking half way through it, in which we went to two bars almost entirely dominated by westerners (which if I'm honest was actually quite disconcerting). Fortunately when you go to westerner dominated places here you're still surrounded by yanks, aussies, kiwis, Canadians etc and so you're never quite speaking the same language…it's always a challenge (though I must say the person I have found most difficult to understand so far was a Scot…). I must say a dampner was put on the end of the night, by the ordering of my second macdonalds in as many days. I wanted to stay away from these things but when you're pissed, and they're open 24 hrs (24 Maccy D's – how could they do that?!) it's bloody hard to resist…
Anyway at the beginning of this week 40 native English speaking 'teachers' woke up at a silly time in the morning (cursing the fact that they weren't just going to school like normal, whilst in equal measure praising the fact that they weren't going to school, like normal) and traipsed to some out of the way training institute to learn…well to learn how to be teachers. In three days. I'm not going to go into it in great detail as, to be frank, it wasn't very exciting…it was great to be back in student mode – and to be fair, Dave, Lucas, Hannah and I did that with quite a vengeance (I probably ended up regressing about 10 yrs whilst there – Hannah about 17. We both ended up at the same age [sorry Hannah, couldn't resist – that's for the nose comment!!])
I must say the highlight of the week was the four of us going out for dinner and getting royally drunk on Soju (remember out friend Soju? I think you'll be seeing a lot of him over the next year…). This stuff hits you like a train and we ended up dancing in the middle of the street with no music (as the restauranters kept steely eyes on us as we hadn't paid our bills) Lucas and Dave had many car-related high-jinx and Hannah spent most of the night laying in the street. Needless to say we all felt shit the next day.
There's plenty more I could write but I'm about to leave to go pay my first Korean gas bill…Tomorrow (well tonight, if I'm honest) is the start of Chuseok, a 5 day Korean holiday which means that I have no school until next Thursday. I'll update then with whatever I'm about to do….exciting! (well ok, maybe not for you but try and get involved!
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