Winter Vacation 2005

Today is the 29th of december 2005. yesterday I finally got my blog site up and running. It is actually really easy, unless you are a computer dunce like me. Actually the first problem I encountered was that blogspot.com somehow gets into your computer and checks out what language your windows operating system runs in and then provides you with all of the information you need in that language. This is really handy, unless your wife is Corean and you are using her computer. Anyhoo, being the computer dunce that I am I was pretty pleased with myself that I made the connection between windows operating system and internet explorer, decided to download “Opera Web Browser” and I seem to have cut off that link. My computing life has changed for the better. Blogspot, google, gmail, every search engine available, yahoo, bablefish, have all been coming up in corean all year. Now if I use opera, problem solvered.

I was less pleased with my first ever blog, which was the top right hand letters of the keyboard “plop”. But by the time I figured out how to remove it, I decided not to. I think it is a pretty good summation of the first few hours of my blogger’s life. I was also pretty pleased with the fact that my blog had had 3 viewers already by this morning. Then I realized that I had logged in and out three times last night while pissing about trying to get rid of “plop”. All in all I think it is going well though.

Parky and I have just come back from tongyeong, where we spent Christmas. We also visited Gimhae, where we will be moving in march, just to check it out. We have been very excited about moving down south, and the thought of the new job has been exciting also. But we have been less thrilled by the thought of moving to Gimhae. We have both been to gimhae before, years ago, and it wasn’t a very fun town. So we were rather surprised to learn that it has since doubled in size and is actually really cool. We went out on the town, drank some beers, ate marinated beef barbeque for a combined total of 11 Australian dollars, stayed in a rather nice hotel pretty cheap. Basically had a good night. The new city center is super modern and is pretty large, as the city now has a population of 415 000. the old city center (about 20kms from the new one) is much cleaner and has heaps more charm than a few years ago. I guess the competition is serving it well.

Gimhae is shaped like a number “8” from an aerial view. With the old city on the east and the new city in the west, with a couple of big mountains in the middle forcing the narrow waistline. I will post views of both sides from the aforementioned mountains. The difference is quite remarkable. And as much as we love gangneung, which is really a lot, we are keener than ever to get going now. This feeling is being reinforced by the daily maximum of zero up here and it is still hitting 8-10 degrees in the south quite regularly.

Tongers was just excellent as always. I will post some photos of where we would dream to buy some land one day. Parky’s mum and dad are well and full of beans as always too.

On the day we left gangneung we went out to look at and price 2nd hand motorcycles, as we are wont from time to time, even with a broken collarbone from a motorcycle accident. Two amazing things happened, the first being the surprise introduction of a 1200gs bmw to the ranks of “bikes for sale”. That got us all excited, the second was the surprise opening of a webber shop directly across the road. At least we can afford a webber, so in that respect it was perhaps even more exciting.

We are having a week off from the hogwan (English school) life, and after a few days on the road are just settling down to a few more days of pissing about and doing nothing. After getting the results back from my first graders spelling tests I was pretty glad to not have to teach them for a week. They were being tested on “G” words last week. Good, glue, great, gum and green was the task set for them. I have a first grader who has quite serious learning difficulties; she is a few years older than the others and struggling to keep up. She’s a really nice kid, outgoing, loves English class and is quite a little cutie. She has the letters g.f.k.r.e and t down pat. In fact all of the words set for her to spell came back in various combinations of various lengths of those exact letters. Very purposefully written they were, and I remember the look of satisfaction on her face when she was doing the test. She really thought she was nailing it. She really thought ‘gum’ was spelled ‘gfkeekrt’ and so on. In fact she was so happy with herself that I couldn’t bring myself to hand the marked tests back to the students. I just told everyone that they had done a great job and gave them all a little candy for doing so well. Sometimes it’s just too hard to tell someone that they have in fact done a shit job when they have tried so hard.

Also keeping me busy on this most joyous of vacations is having discovered winmx. I am currently in the process of downloading some movies that are simply not available here in corea. I have successfully completed only one film so far, that was “Bottom 5: Weapons Grade Y-Fronts tour”. On the boil at the moment are “Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” which never made it to corean cinemas and “Bottom 4: 2001; An Arse Oddity, Live on Stage”. I also plan to get into blackadder, men behaving badly, the young ones, monty python and all of that other pommy stuff that isn’t available.

I really must go now for I have only 2 minutes left to download on hitchhikers and I am busting to see it. Keep in touch. Bonzo.