Gyeongbok Palace

Today was a homesick day, not helped by the fact no one thought it would be a good idea to inform me that the school would be closed for a holiday. Which in turn wasn't helped by my forgetting my phone and so waiting for an hour and half for my principal to randomly turn up and look confused at me. So yes not an entirely happy day but not a terrible one either. The wasting of about 2 hours mid way through the day meant I could not do anything as interesting as I did on Sunday.

On sunday I braved the rains and humidity and took a trip to Gyeongbok Palace in seoul. Seoul is big, very big and so finding Gyeongbok palace became almost an adventure in itself. I discovered odd alleyways and streets full of beautiful shops, too crowded for me to feel comfortable taking pictures however. Maybe next time I go i'll try a less busy day. The Palace and it's grounds where beautiful, and reminded me why I was really doing this. To see the world. I manage to enter the park through a side entrance rather than the massive front gates and so came upon all the side pavilions and park areas before I found the palace. As always walking anywhere near trees means you are accompanied by the Korean Cicada making the loudest insect noise I have ever heard, which sounds something like an engine starting on a motorboat but never quite getting there. I walked around the park for hours, avoiding stepping on the many children running about the place, and saw many westerners doing the same thing. While Incheon is near Seoul it doesn't have nearly the same amount of westerners in it as Seoul does.

The park like all other parks I have seen so far (that's 3 so not exactly a standard yet) is surrounded by the city, which is a shame when on one side you can look up past the rooftops of Korean pavilions and see mountains and then you turn around and are reminded of where you really are. But for many a moment you can forget you are surrounded by a giant kinda dirty city and enjoy the park for all it's beauty.

By the end of the day the humidity had really got to me, that and forgetting to eat, so I decided to head home. So far I haven't yet witnessed a normal or at lest what I would consider normal subway journey. Almost every time someone is singing in the middle of the carriageway and then awaiting people's money. This time was no different only it was literally just a man with long greasy hair in a pink shirt singing and then holding out a plastic bag to take the money in. Money that wasn't forthcoming from anyone. This was then followed by a different guy appearing right next to me moments later trying to sell raincoats, having had my earphones in at the time I did not notice him for a while until I noticed people were staring in my direction more than usual. I get the normal looks as do most westerners, maybe a little more because I'm the only person I've seen so far with tattoo's, but this time I could tell there was something else at play here.

To be honest it's probably the music that's making me homesick, for the first 2 weeks I didn't listen to any, I didn't want to close myself off to any experiences that might occur during my journeying, until I realised that it was like any other commute when you do the same journey day after day. Never a boring journey however, because it doesn't matter how many time it happens, feeling your bus suddenly tilt at an almost 90degree angle because the road is for some reason at 2 different levels at various points on the journey, never gets old. Neither does your bus drivers inability to recognise other road users as anything but things to bounce off. But yes listening to music again has lead me to drift off and think about home more. So I need new music, music that I have nothing from home connected to it. Maybe it's time to start listening to kpop.

Kpop aside, whilst I have the days like these and the days when the kids are just impossible to teach, I'm still glad I'm here. I have plans and this has started them off, so let's hope that tomorrows medical check results yield the news I can stay and not that I have too high a cholesterol level and have to go home. This is something I am worried about, not STD's or anything like that but I have heard people failing their medical checks on that basis and cholesterol levels is an issue in my family. But at the same time on a day like today I have been thinking of contingency plans if I have to come home. So we'll see how it goes tomorrow.

Sometimes queueing is just too much to ask of people

It's hard not to feel a bit helpless when reading about the riots/looting going on in England, were I back home I would still feel the same however. It's not a distance thing, it's a what the fuck can I actually do to stop these inbred fucks from being assholes thing. This display of utter stupidity is just another example of things that are wrong with humanity. But then you get people organising a clean up the next day and once again a glimmer of hope returns for our race.

Of course this sort of thing and worse happens across the world everyday and I'm only thinking about this one because it's kind of close to home. It's been put into a context I can relate to and so I can comment on it. That's all I can do really.

I'm not going to make judgments as to what we should do with them and I can't think of any solutions that would work. I will instead make jokes about the 80's and social networking helping fuel this taking advantage of a reaction to loot.

Twitter has been most present during these looters gatherings, and due to it being easily accessible to absolute fucktards it has also been the host to the largest presence of misinformation out there. This isn't like the live updates of revolutions, there were fewer twats with a phone in those countries, which is possibly something they hoped to resolve with their uprisings. I'm not saying it was the first thing on their mind, just that at some point they may have thought you know what screw this shit why can this guy tweet about his new missile launcher and not me, we need to change this shit. In our country, our revolutionaries are fighting against the time they have to wait to get their free money, the queues in poundland and the extortionate cost of tesco value rice. Something twitter would tag under #firstworldproblems. To call them revolutionaries is a joke and to give them real political meaning is a farce.

So whilst the looting happens in England I will sit in Korea making jokes about how long it will be before the next city accepts the London's Google+ invite and joins the Looters circle. Whilst the peaceful protest group bleeds to death on facebook because no one cares about those cocks.

Aw shit I forgot to make an 80's joke.

Reasons & First Observations

It wasn't until the day before my flight that the enormity of what I was doing dawned on me. Apart from a school trip I have no real recollection of I had never left the UK before. The biggest move I had done previously was 2 hours away from my parents to University, where I had made some of the most amazing friends i'd ever had and now I was leaving everyone behind. In the original stages of this plan I hadn't really given much thought to the distance, feeling that in todays world you can get on a plane and go most places anytime you wanted really, but the day before I left the expanse between me and everyone I know became real. Nervous was an understatement but this is what I wanted, a kick start, not a goodbye to my old life, but more a goodbye to my old habits, this was my plan to do something drastic that would shake me out of this slump I had let myself crawl into. Whilst enjoying myself most of the time, I still felt like I wasn't really going anywhere. When I arrived at uni it was a start to realise my dreams of becoming a writer to hone my skills to train my mind, when I left uni 3 years of drinking and revelling in debauchery had somewhat veered me from my original path. This was all my own doing of course and the 4 years that followed uni were also a continuing pattern of my lazyness and approaching the world at a steady pace of it'll all work out no need to exert yourself. This is what I want to change, I don't want to find myself, I just want to kick start my aspirations. I want to see the world and this is my way of doing it.

Leaving my family at the airport was harder than I thought it would be, whilst I had not returned to where my family lived after uni they had still only been 2 hours away and that was something I had obviously taken for granted. Now they were going to be over 11 hours away along with everyone else important to me.

My first plane to Moscow was delayed which led to series of increasingly frustrated and snappy retorts to Russian passport control people who every step of the way would stop me and then tell me I was late. I was late because their bloody airline could not get me there on time. Luckily I arrived just in time, not like in the movies, because in the movies you don't arrive late onboard a plane of koreans all staring at the white guy holding them up. My mood was briefly lifted when the don't leave electronics on when taking of video started, because only on a Russian airline would one of the examples of an electronic device be a remote controlled tank. Stereotypes exist for a reason. Mood lifting however was short lived as we pulled away and I realised that if I didn't get to the plane on time my luggage most definitely didn't. This was confirmed 8 hours, 2 in flight meals, 3 in flight movies, 4 in flight toilet breaks, and 5 in flight dozes later when I arrived at Korea to find that my luggage had not arrived and they didn't know where it was.

The first thing to hit when you get to Korea is the humidity, even in an airconned airport the humidity is stifling. Then the smells hit you, not bad smells as such just different smells, but strong. These smells continue with you for at least a week before you get used to some of them and then some more new ones arrive.

My recruiter and her partner met me at the airport and drove me to the school I was to be teaching at, it was a quick but dangerous experience. Korean driving is not like ours, we have rules for one. They seem to have guidelines. If you ever visit Korea I suggest you cross the roads at your own risk even if the little man is green. However as dangerous as it felt to me the Koreans seem to have adapted to this stream of chaos that is their roads. They do like to beep their horns though never before have I heard horns going off this frequently, it's not an act of aggression, it's more a hello than anything. Making the whole roadway system seem more like a giant mass of ants all going different places and calling to each other just to say hey somethings changed move around it.

The school is not at all how I imagined it, it's on the 3^rd floor of a building with a shopfront at ground floor and a karaoke bar underneath it, yet this is quite normal here. One of the things i'm finding myself having to adapt to is shops, bars and restaurants don't exist just on the ground floor of streets like in england but instead exist upwards also. Making the amount of retail and service outlets in this place more immense than you could imagine. But with Incheon being one of the most densely populated areas in Asia it works. My co workers consist of 3 Korean teachers, 2 who can speak some English conversationally and 1 who lived in New Zealand for 10 years so he is pretty much my translator for the principal who speaks very little English. Now this may seem odd for a school that specialises in teaching English to children but at the level the kids are learning it's fine. Also that's why i'm here, so they have someone they can hear proper pronunciation from. My first 2 days consisted of me following the leaving Foreign Teacher around before he left to return to New Zealand. Then it was all or nothing I was teaching these kids on my own whether I liked it or not. It's pretty straight forward though and I pretty much have to just follow the books completely whilst making sure they actually understand what they are saying and not just repeating. It's just a little tough keeping their interest and maintaining behaviour as I can't tell them to sit down and be quite in Korean yet. There are a lot of last minute changes that happen but that is part of Korean culture from what i've been told and whilst annoying at times easily adaptable to. Everyone is really friendly at the school and outside, with the Korean teachers at first getting slightly worried about my eating habits as I wasn't eating a lot at first which I had to explain wasn't anything to do with the food but more nerves than anything. The food itself is really good, most of the time it's spicy and full of vegetables but they have noticed my penchant for meat and have started providing more meat based meals for me. I told them not to change the meals for me but they just seem to want to make sure i'm happy all the time.

Outside of school i'm pretty much still settling in, though now i'm looking for other English speakers os I can have conversations and eat more foods. You can't really go out here on your own as eating is massively social here and there aren't really single dishes you can order it's mostly platter based. Usually the oldest person in the group will pay for everything and there isn't really any splitting the bill situations here as much as i've tried paying for meals i've been bought. The area I live in is one of the nicest go to areas of Incheon, it mostly being just a normal urban city, but in Guwol-dong which is where I'm situated it has parks and department stores and bars, including as I discovered today a western bar that serves ale. It was closed when I got there so I have yet to see what it tastes like. My apartment is what we would call a studio apartment not too small not too big really. Suits me for the purposes of sleeping, eating, and cleaning. I've put pictures of it online for anyone curious enough to want to see it. My favourite feature of it is it's air con, I may have mentioned it earlier but humidity is a thing here. It's unbelievably hot all the time with barely any breeze. Even when it rains, and it has rained a fair few times since I got here, there is no cooling down it's just warm rain. But it's all part of the experience and whilst at first I was homesick more often than not I have now started feeling ok about being here and a year doesn't look as daunting as it first seemed.

So now i'm sort of fizzling out with what to say about my first two weeks, more has happened but nothing really interesting on an everyone wants to know scale more of a me noticing small differences in things here and back home. Anyway I will be off now, to the stairwell of interweb stealing where I will post this in some sort of blog function to which I will be keeping up a regular weekly update or depending on internet access fortnightly or monthly. Either ways I will be updating my life as much as I can if only to reassure people back home I am alive. For now I say Good Day Sir.