Posts are like buses...

Yes, here is yet another post to make up for my lack of posts recently. So aaaggeeesss ago I went to Seoul to see  (drum roll) WICKED!!!! That's right how amazing!




The night before we stayed over and ended up going to a pub that was so much like being in England it was unbelievable! They had the English pub smell, carpet and I'm pretty sure they hired typically English people to sit in there for authenticity!

Me, Hannah and the witches!!!

The scary dragon!!!

There's no place like home!

Galinda- with a Ga!

Elphie

Needless to say it was absolutely amazing - especially Defying Gravity!!! It was the Australian cast and they were epic!!! In a couple of weeks I'm going back to the Seoul to see Chicago with a Korean cast which will be great!!!!









The weekend after my Seoul trip I was off to Boryong to experience the Mud Festival!!!!It is such a strange concept- get a load of mud and people will come!!! And go we did! there were inflatables to run on, a place where people just painted each other, a place to get painted with colored mud, a jail where you could get mud thrown at you and a mud-wrestling pit! There was drinks free flowing and no personal boundaries! You get mus everywhere (places you don't even know you have), but luckily they do it right next to the beach so you can just go in the sea to wash off or the big swimming pool that is provided.

Clean

Dirty

Painting each other

Mud wrestling!

I have also been experiencing some typically Korean activities, for example I went for acupuncture where they use suction cups and needles with an electric current! I thought I dealt with it quite well but it wasn't exactly relaxing but my back did feel a bit better after. When I got home I had six large red circles on my back where the suction cups had been- I looked like a number six on a die! I have also been to a K-POP (Korean pop) dance class to get some exercise! It was so funny, and yes before anyone asks we did dance to Gangnam style! This year has been one for the records as we have had the hottest day, coldest day and the other day had the biggest typhoon. I was expecting a terrifying few days with the typhoon but it turned out to be little more than a spot of rain and a gust of wind. I thought it was a bit of an over-reaction until I was told that the typhoon had luckily avoided Daegu -phew!

There has also been a couple of changes in the last few months. Hannah, one of my close friends has moved away from Daegu to a more rural area which is cool because I get to go visit her and hear some of the funny stories she has to tell, but I also miss our weekday coffees! Also two of my close friends Lauren and Rami have moved back to the US and so they are sorely missed!!!One thing that has stayed the same is that I have been going to my friend from work's (Devon's) gigs as he is in 3 bands which has resulted in some great nights out and brilliant music.


The other week there was an amazing body-painting festival where you could watch the models being painted before and then watch the cat-walk. Then on the night there were some great fireworks! Here is just some of the amazing body-painting:

There were so many I couldn't put them all on, but you can see how beautiful they were! There was even a Madagascar themed design but I unfortunately don't have a picture of it, but I imagine my nephew would have loved it!!!!

I hope you have enjoyed catching up with my recent goings-on :)! Love to England and all its inhabitants!!!!

I got Seoul but I saw some soldiers!

So my birthday was on the 12th which was a Wednesday and we went out for the regular Tuesday party and at 12 my lovely friends from work presented me with various cakes and sang happy birthday!

Surprise!

The Wednesday I opened my presents on the morning (thanks to everyone who sent things and gave me things, it made my day : D) and got a round of applause from my students for being alive this long which, because it's me, is quite an achievement. The absolute best news I had was that my brother was coming to Seoul with his friends in celebration of our joint birthday!!!

So on the Friday night straight after work I headed to the train station to catch the KTX to Seoul! I got there and on seeing Chris did the dramatic slow motion run toward him. I met his two mates, Dan and Graham (aka Widge). We headed back to the hotel and had a Cass (one of the few beers that is widely available alongside Hite and Max), no not a regular Cass but a lemon Cass (classy I know)! We sat outside the hotel and had a chat about what we were going to do and decided on going to Everland (an amusement park just outside of Seoul) the next day. The hotel was amazing and it was one of the comfiest best I have ever slept in.

The next day the journey to Everland was EPIC! We not only got the subway and a taxi (which I tried to tell the driver that we wanted to go to Neverland)but then two buses (one of which was 40 minutes long with only standing room available)! We actually ended up in waiting a while for a bus in Gangnam which has given us some negative feelings towards it despite the awesome song (if you haven't heard it, check it out - Gangnam Style)When we got there it was great, they were celebrating  Halloween (random) but enjoyable as they had creepy but funny music on. We went on a wooden roller-coaster which held the record for being wooden and having the steepest drop - it was AWESOME! There was also a wildlife area with beautiful tigers, bears and sea-lions among other animals.

 

 Me and Dan waited do long for the steepest drop we died and came back as zombies.

This water ride was made by the park attendants doing an awesome camp KPOP dance!!! We were mesmerized!













Some brotherly love being displayed there!

                                                                                     




The record-breaker! The steepest drop on a wooden roller-coaster in the world!

Everland offered a good display of, in my opinion, Korea's best fashion phenomenon - matching couples!!!! There were so many at the theme park that we nick-named them MCs. The winner of the day though, was the great effort here that Chris is discreetly trying to get in the background of this photo - notice the matching bow-ties!

My future pet !!!!

 We were absolutely cream-crackered when we ready to come away and so we got a taxi ride home -much easier than the way there!

There was time for a quick nap and then we were out hitting the town in Itaewon (the foreigner are in Seoul)! We ate at an Outback Steakhouse (very Korean eh?) and hit a few bars. Then we ended up in a club called Circus where a waiter could juggle like there was no tomorrow! They also had steps leading up to the bar for people to dance on and they poured drink into people's mouths! At one point they set the whole bar on fire!!!

A birthday shot!!

Amazement at Newcastle Brown Ale in Korea!!!

Chris doing his male modelling bit!

The next day, feeling a little bit fragile but not too bad, we headed off on a trip to the DMZ! We got in a little mini-van with our Korean guide who spoke excellent English and her English name was Eugene. On the way there we learnt that some mini-arches that were over the roads are called tank traps and are there in order to be blown up if any North Korean tanks try to get through. There are also barriers in the Han river to stop submarines. When we got to the outskirts of the tour area we changed to the official bus that was to take to the main DMZ. In this are it was quite strange because it is so close to danger area but they had a full on fair with rides and entertainers. We got on the bus and it took us across a bridge where we could see another bridge called The Cow Bridge, because to help North Korea the head of Hyundai (who is North Korean) sent hundreds of cows across this bridge to aid the hunger there. Our first port of call was a train station only just inside of South Korea that is completely empty!!! It  was like a post-apocalyptic scene; a station fully built and ready to go but completely deserted because of the severed connection between the North and South. 

North Korea

Us pushing the North and South together!

We then went to our next stop where you can see into North Korea, but you cannot take pictures to close to the barrier, there was a line you had to stand behind to take a picture. Eugene told us that the North Korean flag is a little bit higher than the South Korean flag because they each kept trying to get their flag that tiny bit higher than the other, but South Korea stopped this petty feud. We next went to a tunnel that connected to the tunnel that the North Koreans had tried to dig right into Seoul until they were caught. The South Koreans caught them because they had intelligence that they were digging a tunnel and so they drilled holes and put water in them so when the North Koreans set dynamite off, the water would shoot out. On being caught the North Koreans claimed they weren't trying to invade, but dig for coal...despite it not being a coal mine and it not being in North Korea but South Korea!

Just casually stood near a mine

 It was  a great and interesting trip that bizarrely ended up in an amethyst jewelers  (we think Eugene must have known the lady who owned it as it had nothing to do with the North/South divide).





On the Sunday evening we went to an amazing show called Nanta. It's primarily a drumming show but it is cookery themed and it is also a kind of comedy! The combination of being the only westerners and being on the front row resulted in two of us being picked to participate. Graham was chosen to take part in the competition between the left and right side of the audience (and obviously won- wooo blues!!!). I was picked for a more embarrassing role however, one of the characters got 'stuck' in a bin and asked me to help him get out which I obviously couldn't do! Just when I was getting desperate and calling for Chris (what else are big brothers for if not to help their sisters pull strange men out of bins), the main guy waved me away and was miraculously able to stand up quite easily - what a fool I was eh?!

So for me that concluded the activities and I left on the Monday morning and the lads stayed on until the early hours of Tuesday! It was such a great weekend! Thanks to Dan, Graham and of course my Big Bro!!!!
The celebrations don't end there as some awesome friends have been organizing a night out for this weekend :D! Thanks to everyone who has made this birthday so special!!!

Temple stay

I have been doing quite a lot of different stuff that I have forgotten to document (a lot of it before England, but I got so excited, I had to write about England first) So these next few posts will be very random.

Temple stay:

For those who don't know what one is (like I didn't), this is where you can go and live with the monks for a weekend! Me and a few went and stayed at Haeinsa temple. We got there a bit early and we were able to have a good look around. It is beautiful!!! There is a pond there called 'The Pond of Reflection' (Yeongji), and it is said that the Royal Queen of the Gaya Kingdom had seven sons, but could not climb the mountain to where they were practising Buddhism. So, she prayed to Buddha to let her see her seven sons through the pond of reflection, to watch over them.

There is also this statue made so you can be at one with Buddha, and I thought I fit right in:

So we go to sign in for the temple stay and we are put in our monk clothes which could be even more comfortable than pyjamas!!!

Me and Jason camouflaged

We then had a group talk where we were taught how to meditate; you sit on your cushion in a lotus or half lotus position and place one hand inside the other (palms facing up) and then connect thumbs. We also had to do this hand position when we walked anywhere. Later we walked to the main temple and had a service with the monks. Here we had to do three bows which was nothing compare to the 108 bows we had to do later! You do 108 bows to purify yourself daily (needless to say I only did it this one time). The math is that there are 6 sense organs in Buddhism: eyes, ears, tongue, nose, body and the sixth being the mind. These organs then create reactions which turn into emotions: likes turn to joy, dislikes turn to sorrow and neutral feelings turn to indifference. This then multiplied  by three for past, present and future; so there you have it 6 (sense organs) X 6 (reactions and emotions) X 3 (past, present, future) = 108!!! They played a CD so you know why you prostrate (not to be confused prostate) each time.

My favorite part of the temple stay had to be getting up at 3:00 am (no I'm not being sarcastic) because it was so quiet and beautiful and we went to watch 4 monks play this MASSIVE drum. One monk would bow to the drum and start playing and then move to one side of the drum while another monk would come and they would play together until the first monk left. I cannot possible convey the skill of these monks and how majestic they looked when they throw out their arms, robes billowing, to strike the edges of the drum.

In the eating hall you had to bow to Buddha and you weren't allowed to talk. You were also only supposed to take the amount of food that you can eat and no more which was a problem for me as people know my eyes are bigger than my belly and I tend to stuff food into my pouches and chew really slowly through my food; this occasion was no exception! Luckily at this temple stay they did not wash all the unclean plates and then make us drink the dirty dishwater because of not clearing our plates!

We also had an amazing tour and talk with the head monk, he was adorable! He told us all about the Buddhist way of thinking and also some funny anecdotes about Hae-In-Sa. The mountain used to have many fires and the temple was always in danger but to counteract the fire they started filling the rock with salt and they haven't had a fire since. This has resulted in a ritual of the monks traveling round the mountains and filling rocks with salt, which is then stolen by the old ladies who follow them and take the salt home to use in their cooking! He also told us that some of the new monks have tasks such as not talking for a year or some of them are not allowed to look at the sky for over a year! Later we got to meditate with this head monk and I accidentally fell asleep but managed to keep my posture in place (the only time I think my posture has been in place)!

We also went on a beautiful hike up to what they call a monastery which is just a little version of the temple we stayed at and it was beautiful. Hae-In-Sa is also the home to the Tripitaka Koreana which is the Buddhist teachings on the slates that they used for printing books. There were sssooo many of them and it took one monk 16 years to finish one as he had to bow in between making each character!

It was an amazing weekend! I have to say sorry because I think I have left things out and also due to the tone of the weekend, I didn't feel right taking photos.