Ha! Man blogging turns into a mountain when each time you don't do it it feels like you have more and more things to go over. I'll give a brief update to catch you up. Life is going pretty well, I have been ziplining, gone to Everland which is a themepark here in Korea, played basketball one weekend, and started a language exchange with a friend I made on the subway.
Ziplining was really neat, it was a town a couple of hours outside of Seoul. One of my favorite parts of the ziplining was driving through Korea. It always amazes me how some places just look the exact same. Forests are forests no matter where you are. There were some really pretty rivers that cut through the landscape and the ziplining was near a creek on a hillside.
Everland was really fun. I spent a lot of time with my friends from work and enjoyed being with them. The best ride was the T express which was a really big wooden roller coaster. I was surprised that is was not rickety and altogether dangerous sounding like other wooden roller coasters. The best part of the day was the camel ride though! So there were these camels, that were clearly for kids. Most of the kids say ages 4-12 would ride by themselves, and the younger ones would go with their parents. Now being 25 and not having children, I was definitely outside of the economic niche of these camels. But I really wanted to go on one! So I talked my buddy into going with me. Now bear in mind, I am larger than the average korean adult, and my friend is about my size. I can guarantee that we were going to be the heaviest load this poor camel would have to deal with all day. Anywho, we made it to the front, and they of course gave the obvious denial to our request. I did not acquiese and continued to hammer them with repeated questions of why not and I want to's. They could see that I was not to be swayed on this matter and relented, but made us wait for the larger of the camels. Lets just say we got our money's worth on the 40 meter track or so, and I can definitely check that one off the list!
Basketball was real fun, and so I will move on to the language exchange. So I talked to this girl on the subway and traded emails, and now we have language exchange. I am Korean slowly, but I enjoy it. The girl is really a nice girl. She is half korean and half chinese, and she goes by Cozy as her English name. That's right Cozy. It is funny to me how easy it is to call someone something that is just silly, and have it become fairly natural after a few times. I mentioned my efforts to learn Korean to a few of the students at school, and they were very excited. They told me they would make phrases for me to know called DOE's. For the kids DOE stands for daily oral expression, and is something from their reading, the kids are required to memorize the sentences and repeat them in class. So the next day I went to class, they had given me the keys to the korean language by teaching me such phrases as, "I sharpen my pencil", "I love myself", and most importantly, "Are you crazy?" I feel more fully equipped to deal with my Korean shortcomings than ever before with these cure-alls at my disposal. If I get lost? I just pull out I love myself to a passer-by. I want to impress a girl and show off my Korean, "I sharpen my pencil" will knock her off her feet! Ha, I love my kids they are great.
Alright a quick food for you today. EEL!!! There is a restaurant that has an eel tank with maybe thirty eels in it and I walk by it everyday. I really like Eel in sushi and wanted to try it out. Eel is so good! I would give it a 9 out of ten and only not a ten because it is expenisve relative to other things. They have a couple of different ways that you can cook it, one is in a soy sauce and teriyaki kind of mix that is my favorite, one with hot sauce, and then one way where it is a pretty basic kind of salty rub almost. The eel is super tender with no bones or fishy taste and is just fantastic. It is also considered an aphrodisiac, so I got that going for me to now.
Alright! Feels great to blog and write down things hopefully I will carry my motivation into some more entries!
