Bonzo The Weiguk

How It Is and How It Should Be...

2007-05-27T21:20:00.000+09:00

My dog In the creek

A place where we didn't eat
I think I want to go into advertising
But they are just so happy,

How could I use these images for profit?
I'm hairier than I used to be ...
Booky The Wise
Parky The Piss Tank
How it should be ...
Both, how it should be ... and how it is.
Congratulations my good friends

Funny

2007-05-01T19:46:00.000+09:00

I have been surfing youtube all for a while, it started with the Colbert Report and ended up here. These are as funny as a fit.

Post Anniversary Celebration

2007-04-22T20:07:00.000+09:00

Here we are travelling around Goje as per our anniversary celebrations. 2 people, a dog and a magna. It was grouse! Booky loved the ferry. Actually he didn't love the ferry so much as the massive amount of wind rushing up his arse when he stood in a particular direction. He loved that. We are thinking of re-naming him "Tunnel".
People look at us wierd when we travel by motorcycle with a dog. They remark that "how strange" or "the dog cannot be enjoying that" or "that's cruel". If they own (or have ever owned) a dog, there is a fairly good likelyhood that they are the same Koreans who keep their small dogs locked in an apartment all day, or their big dogs on a 2 foot leash tied to the kennel. They are probably not the owners of dogs who have taken to sleeping on the "Booky Sack". There is not a snowflakes chance in hell that either Parky or I are ever leaving the house with the bag, without the dog. He's had 4 days in the bag now, he's made the connection, he seems to have made his own decision.

Booky and Parky at the start of the trip.

Parky and Booky during the trip.

Parky and Booky after the trip.

The town we want to buy land in.

A series of pictures that I probably find much funnier than you. But if I didn't find blogging funny, I wouldn't do it.

April Ride and Anniversary

2007-04-18T23:13:00.000+09:00

I'm too lazy to write at the moment. Will write soon. In the meantime here are some photies. Check out the two new links on the right.

Parky and I celebrated our 3rd anniversary yesterday. It feels nice. Nobody ever said it wouldn't happen, at least not within earshot. Gets me to thinking, every birthday everyone says you don't look a day older than you did 5 or 10 years back. But we do. And we feel older too. Every anniversary I feel (not younger) but rejuvenated. Why do you suppose the passing of a year with one title makes us feel like crap, but given another title it makes us feel grouse? I have my own ideas on the matter, what are yours ...

New Rubber

2007-03-31T20:01:00.000+09:00

I have new rubber. I'm very pleased with it. I have gone with an Avon Venom 170/80/15. I spent about 6 days researching tyres, until Parky and I had an afternoon kip (as we are wont to do) and I spent 90 minutes dreaming about tyres. I awoke feeling not the slightest refreshed and decided it was time to make a decision and get it over with. I must say that it was an all consuming task. I have now had 5 different tyres on this bike and 3 have been abject failures, one was okay and now I have one that is byooooootiful. Each of the rear tyres have led to fishtails away from traffic lights in rainy weather and underpant-change-necessitating rear wheel drift when wending ones way downhill, on dry road, through the twisties (even up to a week after the last rain) and encountering a stream of runoff. This has lead to rear wheel drift through the runoff and semi-religious instances of near hi-side on a 538 pound machine on a 12% decline.

For the clan of 'motorcycle-jargon-differently-abled-persons' (of which i am, for the most part, a member) a high-side consists of sliding (usually around a bend) in a rear wheel drift over a patch of something unexpectedly slippery (in a straight line, or due to excessive speed on the entrance to a bend) with the result of your two wheels becoming rather more perpendicular to the direction in which you are travelling you would like.

This does not yet constitute a 'high-side'. One has only now begun the 'pant wetting' or given previous experience at high-siding the 'pant filling' portion of the 'high-side' experience.

Allow me to recap. You are wending your way down a mountainside on dry road. Given that it is Korea, the upcoming corner might be anywhere betwixt a 90 and a 180 degree curve. All of a sudden you encounter runoff from a long distant shower which is still making its way out of the granite. Your front tyre makes it smoothly though the curve, but your rear is in danger of overtaking it. The feeling is kinda funky before the clincher; your rear wheel regaining grip.

We have all seen the video footage of people taking a stack a 100 miles an hour, bike slips out from underneath, person (with full protective gear) slides 100 metres before getting up and walking away seemingly unencumbered by the goings on. This person was a) sliding and b) didn't get much air~time.

A high-side is what happens next, your rear wheel regains grip but the angle of your dangle means that there is no way in hell your bike is going to right itself. Physics dictates that the path of least resistance is flopping your clockwise (for example) travelling bike onto the left side of the tank. Remember that you are not travelling very quickly because of the sharp curve of the corner that you have entered. The rider is shot, like from a shanghai, directly into the air, with almost no forward propulsion. The rider rises, balletic, into the air and proceeds to fall (at 90 degrees to the ground) and lands with an almighty thud, shattering whichever bone happens to hit the ground first.

The high-side happens to people who are inexperienced, overly eager, and who skimp on their tyre spending. This is the only way i can explain spending $300 (Australian) on a rear tyre. But if you have ever experienced a high-side, you will agree that it is money well spent.

2007-03-24T14:43:00.000+09:00

New Website

2007-03-17T16:39:00.000+09:00

The motorcycle page of the new website is up and running.

www.wombatcorea.com

have a gander ...

Happy Saint Patty's

2007-03-17T15:26:00.000+09:00

What the heck is up with this weather? What the heck is up with March? I love the weather in Korea 9 months a year, July is a bit damp, January is a touch cool, but what the heck is up with March? I’ll tell you what; Mother Nature takes LSD in March, I have proof. Here it is:
1) March 2005, 60cm of snow in a single day.
2) March 2006, rode my motorcycle from Gangneung to Gimhae (8 hours) in relative comfort.
3) March 2007, look out the window.

We have had 15º, 5º and everything in between. Wind storms, bright sunshine, 5 straight days of overcast. Don’t give me shit about looking at www.weather.com, www.wunderground.com, www.kweather.co.kr, the weather channel, yahoo weather, CNN weather or any of that crap because they could not predict the end colour of a ripening orange. I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, apart from to say “Try organising a motorcycle tour when you can’t predict what the weather is doing 10 minutes from now, let alone on the weekend.”

It is an unmitigated disaster. Everyone is crook. It is bucketing down in Busan, raining in Jangyu and overcast but otherwise fine in Gimhae (7 kilometres away as the crow flies).

Anyway, Bill and I went for a ride to Dadaepo today. It was quite nice. We saw a new suburb under construction, a FERKING BIG mollusc farm, a very lonely, very odd and very big new house, an ostrich and a great big arsed beach that I didn’t even know existed.

I realise this blog is lacking a central theme just as was the collection of items that took our interest today. In an effort to keep with the theme of not having one, here is a photo of our dog in one of a thousand unusual sleeping positions he employs, usually but not always, on our pimped out couch and a wacky pair of signs.

2007-03-11T19:29:00.000+09:00

It’s been another good couple of weeks here in sunny South Korea. Parky and I went to Sancheong last weekend, up near the Jiri Mountain range. We saw some sweet land up there and may have even changed our prospective address of our prospective farm, which is years down the track but nonetheless something we are dead set on. We had always thought that Goje (on the sea) would be our residence of choice, but Sancheong (on 2 rivers and a few big lakes) look very nice and less cluttered. Sancheong is quite pretty, it has good water (even in winter), it is much more sparsely populated and hence more to my liking. Parky also found a hog she likes and wants one for herself.

I started work for Parky last week and am loving it. I am trying to find a way to make 4 hours per day, 4 days a week for a full wage sound funny, but it just beggars belief anyway you put it, so I will just leave it at that.

We became card carrying Costco members today. Costco rocks! So much crap that I haven’t ever been able to find here in Korea for 4 years, all there in one store. We got:
1) 16 tins of crushed tomatoes.
2) Asahi beer (half the price of normal)
3) Aussie beef. (less than $40 a kilo)
4) Affordable chicken breast fillets
5) Chicken stock (8 litres)
6) Dill
7) Thai sweet chilli sauce
8) Great coffee ($13 a kilo)
9) Tortillas
10) Lasagne
11) Avocado
12) Asparagus
13) Spanish salad onion
14) Coriander
15) Fajita seasoning
16) Tortellini
17) Ravioli
18) Camembert
19) Blue vein cheese
20) Salami (3 kinds)
21) Ementaler cheese
22) Tortillas
23) Croissants
24) AND … SOUR CREAM!!!!!!!!!

Not being readily available in South Korea, it was as pricey as you might think it would be and a little more. I you want to work out how much we spent in Costco today, Aus$1=750won.

1-3-07

2007-03-01T21:12:00.000+09:00

Parky and I have been riding all day with yet another group of guys and gals. It was a cracking ride up to the ancient Shilla capital of Gyeongju. Highway up and mountain roads back. We have met some really interesting dudes in the last week.

On Sunday we went cruising with some old Korean guys, mostly riding gold wing Hondas. That was a fantastic day. We just cornered some old dude in a bike shop and he invited us riding with his club. They have an average of about 50 people out twice a month. The youngest is 40 and the second is 45. There was one dude at the clubhouse wearing the colours, he didn’t come with us, but he must have been 85 if he was a day. What a fantastic group of lads. I’m sure I’ve already said that but it was just so true. I was treated so normally. Nothing special about being a foreigner, about being half the average age of the guys, just one of the guys. As a weiguk one is rarely treated like that in korea. It was so refreshing. I had no intention to ride with the crew often, but now I’m not so sure. I had one of the better days riding I’ve had in this country, and that is a big statement in a land where everyday is motorcycle heaven. What’s more, those old farts can ride. Those old farts might drive cars like my grannie on crystal meth, but they could throw those fat arsed gold wings around like they were postie bikes. What a spin out, eh!

Today’s ride was a freaker too. Met some new weiguk dudes who are well into the bike scene here. You will notice the custom job in the photies. It’s an original custom job, in the truest sense of the word. Louie (the owner) is some kind of freaky engineer here in Yangsan and imported the bits and pieces as he saw fit. Built the entire thing from the ground up just for kicks. Better to look at than to wend around the twisties here in the Land of the Morning Calm (no disrespect intended), but what a fucking monster of a machine!

Kudos to Trey, who has purchased himself a schmick 1100cc virago and made it out today as well, hope to see much more of that in the coming year. And great to finally meet Paul, with whom I’ve been conversing on the phone for the last 9 months and failed to catch up with. Great to see everyone again after a short winter’s break. Be ready in 10 days for Wombat season to begin again in earnest.

Last Day of School

2007-02-15T17:39:00.000+09:00

Not much to say really. School is over. I have 2 weeks off and then I start work for Parky. Looking forward to it. Sick to death of computers and I am going to sign off now.

01-01-07

2007-01-01T20:42:00.000+09:00

January 1st 2007

Christmas has come and gone. New Year with it too. Parky and I have been just too busy to scratch ourselves and the camp is now only 7 days away. Our first ever joint commercial enterprise, it seems that everything is now in order and we hope it to be a resounding success. And although it is past the point of even wishing it to be a financial windfall, it has been an experience and we are determined to do it again in 2008, better armed and better prepared.

We had a wonderful new year’s eve at Magna Sean’s house. With him and his lovely wife Woo-jeong and a selection of about 20 of his best mates. They made us feel welcome with their warmth, at ease with their joviality (and eggnog) and also mightily jealous of their super-fine ocean view equipped pad.

(Parky has just interrupted me by singing her favourite song (to our puppy, as she is often wont to do) and subcontiously transposing the regular words with the words “Booky (our dog) looks delicious”. That was funny, she was singing in Corean and quickly shot me a glance to see if I had heard. When she registered that I had heard and understood, the “don’t say a f**king word” look she gave me was enough to crack us both up for a while.

After all, this wasn’t the first piece of wisdom imparted to me today from my lovely wife. After staying up to see the sun rise at Sean and Woo-jeong’s new apartment we were both rather tired. (We discovered today that their apartment does not, in fact, face east but rather north east and due to that we were awake well into the day waiting to see the sun, but did not even catch a glimpse before collapsing).

We slept a few hours before waking up and wending our way through a McDonalds drive through and moving on home. Parky used the opportunity to catch up on some zeds while I drove back to Jangyu. I am not used to seeing Parky sleeping because of my punishing work schedule, ability to sleep through pretty much anything and love of red wine. But during her slumber she did quite a few cute things which I had almost forgotten she does, having been so long since I was awake while she slept. She reminded me today that I am not the only one who talks in their sleep. We were driving through Mandeok Tunnel when she woke with a start and said/dribbled “Wow! Pink Boats!” I casually informed her that there weren’t and still aren’t pink boats in Mandeok Tunnel and were unlikely to be in the future which brought forth the retort that I am “not taking her observations sincereioulsy”.

After all was done and dusted and we were entering Jangyu she was still asleep when my mobile telephone rang. Parky reached over and grabbed my cigarette lighter, put it to her ear and yelled “Hello!” It was nothing less than hilarious, even more so when she woke up with a cigarette lighter to her ear.

Parky and I have had a wonderful first day of the New Year which I truly believe is going to be the best on record. I don’t know what it is, but I’ve just had this feeling all day that this is where and when it all starts. I’m feeling enthusiastic, happy, awake, alive, entrepreneurial and eager. Just a feeling, but nonetheless a nice one.

Happy New Year Each And Every One Of You!!!!!!!

Ice Breakers

2006-12-10T20:03:00.001+09:00

Ride of the year (in its own special way)

Yesterday was the scene of many happenings Gyeongsangnamdo ‘wards. It was bollocking cold (+3°) and raining when Rick rang me at 6:42am discussing whether the inaugural Ice Breaker’s Run should go ahead. It was decided that it will, and at 8:20am we were gathered in from of the new Jangyu apartment in the spitting rain in a more modest +9° awaiting one of the most diverse motorcycle rides in history. With two Swiss pussies reneging on account of the cold and rain (sorry guys, but why the fuck do you think it is called the Ice Breaker’s Run) and Dear Leader Sean away on a Turkey Eating And Tequila Swilling emergency (hereafter referred to as TEATS) it was up to The Alabama Iceman, Bonzo the Aussie, Mustachioed Pat and Jose the Canadian/Mexican (Pronounced Hose-eh) to undertake the Run on their own scoots, respectively a 1400cc Intruder, 750cc Magna, 125cc Magma and a Hyosung Scooter. A more diverse bunch of bikers in such crap weather in such a weird land has, I am sure, never a forehand been assembled.

It was a marvelous trip to a very small island Gadeok-do (가덕도) in which the following events took place:

Magna never got out of third gear.
Intruder never got into third gear.
Car (Carrying Parky and Stacey) was endowed with brand new racing stripes whilst being driven on a walled and cliff-ed goat track.
Clouds and rain left after 11:00am followed by amazing sunshine.
Small Island was given a (warmly welcomed) lesson on Weiguks On Motorcycles.
The destruction of 1 extremely large and extremely delicious chicken along with a few beers.
My wife was refused entry onto the ferry on the grounds of being too sexy.
A FANTASTIC day was had by all.

It really was a magnificent day. But when you break it down into points it sounds a bit crap. And if you are in the extremely large section of the population that weren’t on the ride and simultaneously belong to the only slightly smaller part of the population that have never been on a WOMBAT ride you will never understand how much fun it was. We had a great day.

We topped it off with a massive house warming. Not a massive house warming by Australian standards (hardly an average dinner party by Aussie thought process) but 20-odd people in a Corean house at the same time was new, at least for us, (we had had 16 people in our house warming in Gangneung) a record. We drank wine, ate smoked duck and generally rolled through the magnificent night after a magnificent day.

(I am aware that no-one likes to read a super-positive blog, but the day was great, so to those that are wishing for something more negativeslashreadworthy; Sorry to disappoint you)

Booky! he's So Cute!!

2006-11-19T20:07:00.000+09:00

ENOUGH SAID!

Boring Blog

2006-11-17T21:21:00.000+09:00

Nothing much has been going on. Life is good and steadily flowing. We had a festival day at our school yesterday. i was really pleasantly surprised with the quality of the performances and all. here are some excerpts from our elementary school concert (I know that doesn't sound exciting, but at least click on the drumming one).

This is the school's girl's choir.

These girls are playing the "Gayageum", a traditional Corean 12 stringed lap-top harp.

Hope you enjoyed them. I did.

Automotive Stories Abundant

2006-11-09T22:21:00.000+09:00

It's been a while since the last blog, but we are as busy as all hell at the mo'. With trying to get the winter/summer camp up and running and moving house and all it has been quite a month. Nothing much to report. I guess the fact that we bought a car is one thing. We have been looking for a while and we decide with the bollocks of moving that it wasn't financially the right time, but as one of the old sayings must surely go 'When it's not the right time to buy a car because moving house has cost you too much, that's when work will insist that you need one'. If that isn't an old saying I’m sure there must be one similar to it. I have exaggerated a little though, work didn't insist we get one but it did put across that it would be worth my while to drive myself. I immediately took this to mean that the taxi they pay to drive me from Gimhae to Changwon and back every day was going to stop and I was going to have to fork out the $0.75X per day from the $X they pay me to pay for it myself. This thought occurred to me for perfectly logical reasons. Those being that the taxi that takes me used to take 3 teachers and drive all over the shop on a 120km round trip journey to get them (us) to this remarkably (by Corean standards) out-of-the-way-place where we teach. I was the last teacher to be picked up on the journey, but even I required a 60 km round trip. The silly thing was that the taxi driver was contracted and therefore even when the other 2 teachers fell by the way side the driver was still doing a 120km round trip just to take me there. (The wankers in Seoul were amazed when I told them that it is so far. Amazed because it “looks so close on the map”. It is only about 15kms each way (from our new house) as the crow flies, with 2 FUCKING HUGE MOUNTAINS in the middle that the crows fly straight over.)

Parky and I talked it over and decide that even with a 60km round trip it is still well worth my while to drive, teach and get paid there because X is a pretty reasonable figure. As we have been looking at either (9 seat) diesel Kia Carnivals or (7 seat) LPG Hyundai santamos as our cars of choice (we want something to carry students in, in anticipation of Parky’s business going mad dog style next February, after camp) we figure it would cost 0.05X in juice to make the 60km round trip, two toll gates of 0.005X each. By any standards, it’s still worth doing. What we had never considered was having the purchase of a car thrust upon us. YOU MUST BUY A CAR TO KEEP THE JOB AND YOU MUST BUY IT NOW! I asked for leeway of 2 weeks and got it straight up (although he did ask why I don’t just use my motorcycle until I get a car. 5 degrees at night and 1 hours travel seemed to convince him that taking a motorcycle is different from taking the subway, (fucking Seoulites)). We started looking for cars in a hurry, jobs (cash) like this don’t (doesn’t) come along super often and I was reminded of an anecdote from a while back. Another sage piece of dad’s work, of which there are so many.

We were hunting for a Subaru forester in 1997. I love Subaru, but I was trying to talk dad into looking at other deals like the then new Honda CRV, which I thought was a classy looking car. We did this and then I asked him if he wanted to look at the new Suzuki or Kia offering in the same class. He refused to even look at them, his rationale ‘I know what I want, why confuse myself with all the other shit I know I don’t want. I’ll may end up buying a Toyota Camry because it is an excellent deal and them be disappointed with it (good deal or not) because it’s not what I wanted’.

I thought he was being a bit of a pussy at the time, why not have a look? It can’t hurt. But now having been in the business of buying a car (having already explained what we had wanted in the best of worlds) we got all frazzled I am starting to understand what he was on about. Panicked about the time pressure put on us, we found ourselves looking at prices and then seeing what kind of car it was being offered at the price we were willing to pay.

Upshot was that we rang about a Daewoo Nubira (Frosty L’Hood’s “No Root, No Toot” 24 hour guarantee got to me) and something similar in size to a Holden Barina. We were in the process of going to look at a Retona (2 seater jeep-wrangler style thing) when I looked at Parky and she looked at me and for all intents and purposes we simultaneously asked, “What the fuck are we doing?”

The story ends well. We pulled our heads in and fingers out and sucked up the week of taxi fares that were almost equal to the wage I made to pay them and stumbled across a cracking deal on a 1997, LPG, manual, 7 seats, air con, central locking, blah blah blah …. …. ….. (crescendo) HYUNDAI SANTAMO. Now we are happy as clams and thanking dad’s sage words of 9 years (and seems like many centuries) ago.

The whole car buying mission aside, when I finally responded to my employer (in Seoul) that I would keep the job and drive myself there and back I asked for at least something to cover the fuel and tollgates and so on, we to-ed and fro-ed a little, but finally he got conformation from head office that they are willing to pay me 1.5X now that I am driving myself (now that they realise how far it REALLY is). I hope they are not reading this when I write; I planned to and would have done it for X.

This is a 1997 hyundai santamo but it is not ours. Ours is green, has no snow under it and is as of yet unphotographed.

For the mathematically inclined, my fuel and tollgates combined come to AUD$9 per day and the car will pay for itself in 4 months. I leave you with that and an oddly perverse kind of feeling that everything is right with the world.

Booky Love: 29-10-06

2006-10-29T20:48:00.000+09:00

I have always said that my ability to write (anything interesting) is inversely proportional to the adversity I face at that time. Here is my life at the moment:

We have moved into a new apartment, double as big as the one we were in.
Our new stuff is as cool as one could reasonable fathom.
Our bedroom is pimped out to the max.
Our kitchen is bigger than our old apartment.
Booky the mutt house-trained himself.
Parky's business is going great guns.
My work brings in double my wage from 12 months ago.
Our Magna sets off car alarms when I drive it out of the underground parking in the morning. That is not a lie, it is loud, and the garage echoes like a bastard, and well may it be that having a big loud bike that sets off car alarms may sound like a sonic penis extension; it is. Pure and simple. I don't apologise for it.
I like my life. In fact I love it.
The one and only thing I must apologise for is that I have nothing interesting to write. Here are the photies.

Book The Dog (4 Months Old)

2006-10-01T11:40:00.000+09:00

Here is Booky attacking the teddy and the video camera. Cuuuuute!

New addition To The Weiguk Family

2006-09-26T17:14:00.000+09:00

Not much to say really. Work lots. Ride Lots. Got the cutest dog in the whole world. His name is Book, Corean for "Drum". He is a shitsu - terrier - and other stuff - mutt. We put some newspaper down on the balcony, readying ourselves for the long arduous task of housetraining a 3 month old dog with a very small brain. Nah! He made a beeline for it, laid a cable and hasn't looked back since. He is the first dog in history to housetrain himself. What a champion! And he's just so damnably cuuuuuute!

Make Of This What You Will??

2006-09-10T19:11:00.000+09:00

A Week In Japan

2006-09-02T18:08:00.000+09:00

This summer we have been to the beach only twice, I have taken on 2 extra jobs teaching up to 10 hours a day, Parky has rented an office for her ever expanding business, Parky, myself and a mate named Sean have started a motorcycle club, Parky and I have ridden 3000 kilometres and have arse calluses to prove it and last of all we spent a week in Japan. We are both back to work today and this is the story of our summer holiday.

Everybody who knows me knows how much I love visiting Japan. It is such an orderly, clean, safe and fun place to be. For two countries so geographically near, with such a mixed (if largely unpleasant) history, who rose to be Asian economic powerhouses (Japan is the 2nd largest economy on earth, Corea the 11th), Corea and Japan are amazingly different. Japan is like Switzerland in Asia. It is rich, orderly, (ostensibly) pacifist, clean, the trains run on time and you have to re-mortgage your house to buy a ticket on them. Corea, on the other hand is more like Spain. It is simultaneously fast paced and laid back, depending on which facets of life you are talking about. It is messy, chaotic, loud, relatively inexpensive and fun. People drive like mad dogs, parking is just so random that there isn’t a proper word for it. Eating and drinking far too much are not only done, but they qualify as national pastimes. People are loud, never on time and obsessed with cultural identity. Where is a better place to live or holiday? They are apples and oranges, but I’ll do my best to give you enough information to make your own mind up.

Let’s start with verbatim reproductions of the first entries from the personals (respectively) from both the Korea Herald and Fukuoka Now publications.

50’s man living in Seoul. Wants to meet native English speaker (male) to help reading ‘Newsweek’ magazine. Korean lessons avail. Must be American or Canadian. email me at …

Pretty bisexual Japanese girl. 24. Looking for no strings attached romance. Age, race, gender irrelevant. Email me at …

Okay, that has slanted the discussion right from the start, but this is not meant to be a pros and cons discussion, it is meant to be entertaining and that qualifies in my book.

Actually that was from August last year but I still get a kick that you must be a North American male to qualify to read a magazine with him and … enough said.

My first restaurant meal in Corea (2001) consisted of Dried squid and a cup of squid broth and the second consisted entirely of frozen raw squid with chilli sauce on it. I didn’t take language lessons after that, but I did stop going to restaurants with pictures of squid on the menu. That was of course before the 2002 World Cup, things have changed a lot since then. Most menus in Corea are now written in English and well as Corean and people are a lot more used to foreigners and consequently better at explaining the menu in broken English. They also don’t tend to pretend to be closed when they see a white face as much any more. The waitresses don’t tend to hide in or behind the fridge as much. all of these things have made dining in Corea a much more pleasant experience in comparison to the pre-World Cup days.

Comparing this to our Japanese restaurant experiences, Japanese menus tend to have very little English on them at all, but they usually have colour pictures or huge plastic displays of what the food should look like in the shop windows. That is fine if it is a picture of sushi or some immediately visually-obvious meal. The problem starts with the enormous amount of wrapping involved in Japanese cuisine. “Here you can see a huge meal quite obviously wrapped in an omelette, what’s inside the omelette is where the surprise starts” or “here is a picture of a nice bowl of soup, you can see that it is either cream or broth in style, but I’m afraid we are not going to tell you what’s in it.” We only went to one restaurant that didn’t have pictures or displays, not by design but because 95% of restaurants have them. It was an interesting experience, quite reminiscent of the old days in Corea. Of the 8 or 9 staff not a single one wanted to serve us, we soon found out why. Somebody got roped into serving us after about 5 minutes, we were right in presuming that she must have been the newbie. Her English was average at best and Parky and I commented that she also seemed to be having trouble with the menu. To compound the problems it was one of those restaurants where every meal is tiny and about $3-$6. The idea is that you order a half dozen of them and share. There must have been 40 or more things to chose from and we were getting nowhere fast when we decided on combining the random point and shoot technique with the Crocodile Dundee technique “Ill have what that fat broad over there is eating”. The result was an amazing success in many different ways. We had some delicious prawns (which the hostess insisted were not prawns but sweet potatoes, the dickhead) got some baked eggplant stuffed with mince and some great sushi. We also ended up with a plate of raw red meat, we waited a little for a burner to appear but the waitress was motioning for us to squeeze a lemon on it and eat it raw so we did. it wasn’t too bad I must say. There were struggles and bumps on the way but all in all it worked, right up to when we were about to leave and our unlucky waitress sheepishly asked Parky “Are you Korean?” Parky replied in the affirmative and she responded with “So am I”. It was around this time when we began to learn about the food we had already consumed. We learned that she still thought that the prawns were sweet potatoes even in her own language and the meat we ate was, in fact, raw horsemeat. It must have been ‘Makybe Diva’ going on how much it cost.

We found our way around Japan with surprising ease considering the lack of English to help you and the lack of tourist information facilities. Corea has it over Japan hands down for tourist information, maps, signs in English and all of that stuff. Where Japan makes up for its lack of facilities is in its lack of a need for them. It is so well organised that you can quite easily just nut stuff out given a few minutes to think about it, and your average dude on the street has better English if you do need a fallback position.

We did a lot more walking in Japan than we normally do as a result of the taxis costing about $6 just to get in the door compared to $2.10 in Corea and also we didn’t have the bike. Figuring we couldn’t do much about the taxi prices, late on the second day we set about rectifying the second impediment to our non-pedestrian ambulation agenda. We hooked up with a 250cc Yamaha Majesty scooter. It was a tripper, really comfortable and super fun to ride, it also had enough storage space in it to allow us to go touring for a few days without being confined to one change of clothes.

It was magic. Kyushu (The Japanese island on which we were staying) is supremely beautiful, if not just a little wet. (I am not continuing in a comparative style, Corea is equally beautiful and given that the distance between the two is about Waikerie to Wentworth, you can imagine that they are very similar in countryside appearance.) We drove down the beach road, or as Parky named it ‘The Sunset Road” as the beach was on our west, for a day. I cannot begin to describe how great it was. The seafood was amazing and “Natty Dread” was just out of this world. The lady at Natty Dread organised us a room just a few hundred metres up the road from there. We were out in the donga a long way and the room was $50. We were paying $110 a night in Fukuoka, for a sardine can 13 floors up, a truly pathetic room at an outstanding price in such a cool city that you just don’t care. Given that, we agreed to $50 without having seen the room and we were quite surprised at its magnificence. It was just like an Aussie B&B (without the &B). It was a great room, bigger than our whole apartment in Gimhae. It had a luxurious queen size bed, 3 couches, it was pine panelled and it had an outside bathroom (not an outback dunny). The bathroom had two showerheads and a big spa just out there in the donga. Two showerheads is a great thing, I don’t mean to be too rude but this was the first shared shower I’ve ever really enjoyed in my whole life. I like to shower in basically piss warm water. When Parky showers the steam in the room burns my skin. One time while I was innocently standing in the bathroom doorway she sprayed me with her showerhead just for shits and giggles, I was like the Wicked Witch of the West, I’M MELTING I’M MELTING. I suffered burns, no shit, how can women do that to themselves. Enough of that. It was great. The next day we wanted to stay there again but they were nowhere to been seen. We went to Natty’s and the ever faithful friend rang them and they said that we could stay there again. That in itself is not very interesting, the interesting part was that when we went back a few hours later the place was open with the key in the door, the lights and air conditioner were on and the spa was hot. Nonetheless there were no people to be found. We woke up the next morning and it was (again) pissing down with rain. We sat around for three hours, waiting for the rain to stop and reading. I was reading The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Guevara, Parky; The Chronicles Of Narnia by C.S. Lewis (in English). At 10am, during a pause in the rain we left. We had still not seen a soul the whole time we were there. We left $50 on the three legged chestnut table in the middle of the room, left the key in the door and the door open as we had found it and proceeded to fuck off, getting only slightly wet but still feeling like thieves even though we had done the right thing.

Before arriving at the pine room the second time we had scooted to Karatsu and Saga. We went to a public bath that was not between the two but between them enough, in a triangular fashion. The public bath was actually a natural hot spring that expelled from the ground high up in the mountains. Disappointingly, the men’s and the women’s were separated on different sides of the peak but it was just amazingly refreshing to be outside totally naked in a pool of hot water looking out over the valley. I have always had the feeling that being outside in the water in the nud is pretty liberating and groovy, but never has it been condoned in this fashion and toboot overlooking a rainy valley of the Kyushu it was unbeatable.

What is more, driving the tiny road (about 9 feet across) up and down the mountain chain to find the elusive hot spring we heard a BHWA-FUCKING-BWHA-WHAM. You may ask, as we did, “What the hell was that?” We soon found out as within 7 seconds it was raining so hard that I couldn’t see the road below the front wheel. Remember that we were riding a scooter and the front wheel to eyeball distance was approximately an inch or two less than 4 cubits. It was bloody pissing down. We entered a tunnel within 40 seconds of the start of the downpour and didn’t exit. We couldn’t see out of the bloody thing. We stayed in the tunnel for about 30 minutes or so. Upon leaving it started again no less than 3 minutes later and we pulled up in some farmer’s garage. This particular farmer had left his garage door open and we wailed in soaking wet. We lingered around an hour in the garage of the farmer, more than once considering stealing his family sized collection of wet weather gear. But we didn’t. We arrived at the afore mentioned outdoor spring sodding wet and in need of care. The people there were so lovely and washed and dried our clothes for free while we nuddy bathed out on the mountain. What an experience.

I love Japan, that much is obvious. Parky now insists that she had a brilliant holiday and loves Japan and its people, even though she never thought she would. (Her parents were raised in the pre-1945, brutal brutal brutal occupation of Corea by the Emperors forces. Check out your history books for the facts if you don’t really like sleeping that much anyway, because it will impede your ability to sleep, maybe forever). That much is cool. Parky isn’t one to judge one on their history, rather she takes people on a one on one basis. Her parents also don’t harbour too much ill feeling toward the Japanese, amazing considering that people of their generation were enslaved by them for 2 generations. Even the Aussies love them, maybe because they have lots of money, maybe because they are just so damn cute, maybe because we don’t hold them any more responsible for the actions of their forefathers than we do the Germans, and we all know where I stand on that issue. Either way it makes no difference, we had a great holiday. We loved the country, the people, the food, the atmosphere, the views, the traffic, the music, the everything. It was great.

Back to the comparison angle: I have always stated that I love Japan. I love being there, I love everything about it. Also I have always visited Japan at a time when I really needed a break from the craziness of Corea. For the first time I think I have a more impartial view of the two countries. I love order, cleanliness and slightly bland food. But I also love taking a taxi 120 kilometres and not really feeling a dent in the monthly paycheck. I love the reliability of a train that arrives when it say it will, I love the idea of being able to take a train simply because they exist, but I also love being able to eat three meals a day in a restaurant for less than one hours wages in total. I hate driving daily in the most dangerous traffic on the face of the earth, but I like taking a bus across the entire country for $23.

I love the anonymity that Japan offers a western tourist, we are all but ignored as one of the many, but I also like feeling special some of the time. I like being served first, I like people going out of their way to make sure you are comfortable and everything is okay with the world. I’m not super fond of hoards of schoolchildren yelling ‘hello’ at your back and following you for 5 minutes repeatedly and relentlessly yelling ‘hello’ until their throats are sore.

I passionately hate not being served a drink until the food arrives in Corea. If you order a stew you can sit dry for 30 minutes waiting to receive them together and I cannot drink a beer after I start to eat. But I love the fact that I can ingeniously get around this by helping myself to the drinks fridge which amazingly, in Corea, is almost inevitably on the customers side of the bar. I cannot figure out if Coreans are really trustworthy or if Corean bar staff are incredibly lazy. In Japan they do not and could not do this. Not because Japanese aren’t trustworthy or that they are more diligent, but because one bottle of beer cost you more than your entire meal would in Corea, quite seriously.

They both have their good points and their average points, but the one thing that this trip to Japan has really taught me is how much I really do like Corea. In the past I have viewed the peace and tranquillity of Japan as a kind of paradise haven from the madness of this country, but I am now thinking the madness is just another of its many charms.

More Piccies From Japan

2006-09-02T18:06:00.000+09:00

Even More Piccies From Japan

2006-09-02T17:10:00.000+09:00

For video of the motorcyle riding in Japan go to www.wombatcorea.blogspot.com

Country Folk Go To the Big City

2006-08-20T18:47:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. Life is good. We have just gotten back from a ride, just a quickie following the Nakdong River for a couple of hours, ‘twas nice indeed.

We did something quite unusual yesterday and that was going into Busan. We had been saying, before moving to Gimhae, “How nice to be back near Busan, all of that weiguk stuff on tap, books, wines, cheeses and other groovy stuff”. We have been to Busan now twice in 6 months. One time we were forced to go to immigration to pay a fine for overstaying my visa (on a marriage visa, go figure that one out) and yesterday we went by choice, FINALLY! Not that I have been wanting to go of course, prick of a busy joint it is. There is one thing you must say about Busan. It is tonnes better in theory than in practice. In theory it has wines and cheeses and books and shit. In practice it has lots of people and wines and lots of traffic and cheeses and lots of jammed full subway cars and books and a lot of ignorant whack-jobs and shit.

Aaah! Now I’m just being a hard case. BUSAN IS A NICE PLACE (if you like that kind of shit) IT REALLY IS. You can walk home alone and pissed at 3 in the morning with a thousand bucks in your pocket and you know you will all get there in one piece (maybe not through Texas Street though) and there is plenty of gear going on for whatever scene you are into. It has a world class beach, world class restaurants, a world class ‘art house’ film festival “PIFF” (headed up by Wim Wenders “Paris Texas, Himmel Ueber Berlin, Buena Vista Social Club etc” a couple of years ago), a world class sports stadium (2002 world cup), and a world class rock festival Headed up by Slipnot in the recent past. It has big temples, mountains, good pubs and lots of universities. It is a groovy place for sure.

How do I get so sidetracked? We went to Busan and went mad on the credit card. It was fun. We spent $170 in the bookstore. I haven’t bought books for soooooooooooo long, I was like a kid in a candy store, I just couldn’t stop. We must have been there for 2 hours. We went to big fatty arsed supermarket and bought some Gorgonzola. We had some for lunch today. Parky thinks I am nuts. “It’s frikin’ mouldy you wingnut” is a more polite version of her summary of Gorgonzola. That of course didn’t stop her from consuming the half of it. For people familiar with Parky’s gourmand nature, this will not surprise you. Olives, salmon in dill, all sorts of goodies were purchased. We went to a western restaurant and had prawn fettuccine alfredo and a wasabi with lime seafood salad. On the way home we got the taxi to pull into a little corner store and I found XXXX. What a gas. We live only about 30kms out of Busan, but you would think we had been in southern Libya for a year for the amount of western gear we come home with.

Thanks to Matt and Rachel I have gained a couch and made a little comfy-schmumpfy area for me to sit on the balcony, smoke ciggies, drink wine, read my new books and munch down on Gorgonzola and Spanish green olives.

That is it for us at the moment. It may sound a little dull, but it isn’t. we are working our little bums off this summer and it was a nice weekend out with a couple of little luxury thrown in. It was groovy and as I have said so many times before, If You Have Ever Lived Here, You Will Know What I Mean.

Watch out two weeks from today, some really groovy stuff is coming up.

How Things Work In Corea

2006-06-16T19:37:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. It’s warm here now. Summer is on. It’s not killing us yet but it is a bloody warm june that is for certain. I haven’t worked for the last two Thursdays or Fridays its’ quite amazing really. I guess they are trying to squeeze in the school excursions before the rain comes. Whatever they are doing, I’m loving it. I have been working on a business plan for the last 48 solid hours (that’s true ‘cause I am also dreaming it) but it feels like 48 bloody hours staring at a computer. I am sooooooooo play-faced I keep seeing cursor blips when I close my eyes. I have had so many numbers run through my head in the last two days whenever I try to have a normal conversation I sound drunk, whenever I try to discuss the numbers I sound worse. I fear I am not making the best first impressions with some of the people I am contacting. As for right now I am actually having a beer and I feel like I am having my first straight thoughts since last week, but I fear that I still sound the same, but have a more socially acceptable excuse for it.

I am staring to understand what makes being self employed so attractive. I am not self employed, that is years away if ever, but I am contacting people under the pretence of being self employed. So for the purposes of those conversations, I am self employed and I really like it. The ringing, bartering, saying “look, no, I’m sorry but that’s just too high. I really want to do business with you because I love your product but I just can’t come at that.” People want to sell, the purchaser is being polite and complementary, they are eager to please and glad it’s not some arse telling them to piss off and drop their price 43% just to get you to agree to it. But as much fun as that is, it still leaves me with a bitter aftertaste because if someone can sell you a product at nearly half of the off-the-shelf price and still make enough profit to be happy with the transaction, then they were taking you for a HUGE ride form the get-go and you can’t loose the feeling that they still might be.

Another fun one is: “Well if you can’t do THAT for me, then please tell me why it is that I should be using your product when you know that your competitors can and will”. That is a “wiggly-squirmy-I’m-being an arse” fun one. But it was also fun today when one dude was unflappable and reeled about 6 reasons off the top of his head as to the “why?” and I think I will be going with him.

The other really amusing one was a “This could only happen in Corea” moment. I rang a Corea-based major international firm, with a worldwide staff of about 20 000 employees, and I will relay our conversation for you verbatim (I want to emphasise that I am not making this up, not one single word):

Intro: I am looking at their internet site for a contact email address for about 15 minutes and am unable to find one. That’s when I ring their “Contact Number for Foreigners Living in Corea”

Phone person 1: Yobuseo! (Standard Coean telephone greeting)
Me: Hello, do you speak English?
PP1: Just a moment
PP2: Yobuseo!
Me: Hello, do you speak English?
PP2: A little………………
Me: I’m looking at your website and I can’t find a contact email address. Could you give me one, please?
PP2: Just go to “contact us” and click on it.
Me: I did that. That’s where I got your phone number.
PP2: Well, click on the email address.
Me: There isn’t one. That’s why I rang you.
PP2: Yes, there is.
Me: No, there isn’t.
PP2: Yes, there is.
Me: Please look at it and tell me where it is.
PP2: There isn’t one. What you have to do is log in with your membership number and you can find a contact address in there.
Me: I’m not a member, I am trying to contact you about becoming a member.
PP2: That’s okay. Just use your membership number anyway.
Me: But I don’t have one.
PP2: Well you have to have one to log in.
Me: I know that that’s why I rang you. Can you please give me a contact email address.
PP2: We don’t use email.
Me: What do you mean?
PP2: We don’t use email.
Me: Are you telling me that, at ‘bollockscompany’ with 20 000 employees, that nobody has an email address.
PP2: Yes. We don’t use email.
Me: I don’t believe you. I think you are lying.
PP2: No, it’s true. We don’t use email.
Me: Please connect me to another person.
PP2: Why, I told you we don’t use email.
Me: Yes, I heard you. And I told you that I think you are lying. I also think you are unhelpful and a bit stupid. You must also think that I’m a bit stupid. So please tell me you name, and transfer me to another operator.
PP2: Hold the line please……………..
7 minutes on hold she didn’t tell me her name.
PP3: Hello, I am another person.
Me: (light chuckle at stupid introduction) Yes, I am looking for a contact email address at ‘bollockscompany’. Can you help me?
10 minutes surfing the website together looking for an email address. (At this stage I wasn’t giving up, or even angry, I was simply curious to see how this would get resolved)
PP3: Looks like there isn’t an email address for customer service at ‘bollockscompany’. But I know the customer service rep for our office, so here’s my email address. Send it to me and I’ll print it out and give it to him.
Me: Thank you.

And what was her email address. hername@bollockscompany.com

So far I have been imaginarily self employed for the purposes of purchasing, I am sure when you have to be the suckers who are doing the selling (it comes later) it will suck a great deal.

Hospitality In Corea

2006-06-14T01:00:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. Life is great. Australia decimated japan yesterday evening, corea did their worst on togo tonight and I’m on the top of the points ladder for our picks. I realise this cant go on forever, but corean hospitality does. Corea vs. Togo 2:1 and the red devils were out in force. Everyone was in party mood, streets are full of cars and pedestrians but not a taxi in sight. What do you do? Just pull up a random car at a random traffic light and ask for a lift. The very first car, late teens or early twenties boys, one seat available, what do they say but “Yeah! Jump In”. What a top way to top off a great couple of days. I love this country, it’s people and the fact that ANYONE AT ALL will give a lift to a complete stranger because they are wearing a “FIGHTING COREA” t-shirt and bandana. 대한민국!!!!

This Is How I Made My WORLD CUP Picks

2006-06-11T08:42:00.000+09:00

Things That Make You Go Hmmmmm!

2006-05-20T18:42:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. The last 24 hours has been a day of firsts. ‘Twas quite exciting really. For a start, I am in our apartment. I haven’t been here since the 5th of May. It’s quite exciting. I’m listening to Roy and H.G. for the first time in 3 weeks. I had my first beer in 2 weeks last night (and loved it) and just 2 hours ago I had my first shower in 16 days. Why, they do cry, has he been so uncivilised for such an extended period. Well the answer is simple really. On the 5th of may, at 8:10am, I locked up both wheels of the motorcycle, left 6 metres of rubber on the ground, smacked into the back of a tray top ute and tried wearing my tibia and fibula on the outside of my leg for a change. I was confined to the bed for 10 days while the very expensive pins that now hold my leg together set themselves in place. Ten days of shitting in a pot, pissing in a bottle and creating enormous bedsores on my tailbone was just enough. Thank god for Parky being there to clean me and wash me and empty my pan. The bloody nurses were useless. Don’t get me wrong, the Corean medical system is bloody good. It’s not Tajikistan. The doctors are well trained, the operation was a success, everything is very modern but the bloody nurses couldn’t stop giggling every time they looked at me. They would come into the room anywhere between 2 and 6 at a time (never alone) and just stare. One day, about 5 days into my stay, six nurses came in and one of them talked to me, 5 stared. The talking nurse was struggling for conversation because she obviously had no purpose being there other than to create a diversion while the other 5 stared (this is bloody true, 6 at a time for no reason at all). During one of the periods of prolonged silence I enquired (in English) “Why are there 6 nurses in the room?” They must have understood the word 6, and 5 of them fled leaving the talky one feeling decidedly lonely and she also fled after a break of about 4 seconds (longer than it sounds). Later that day, and may I remind you that this is nearly a week into my stay, two nurses came in and just stood there, 3 feet away from the bed and ogled. I thought this is something unusual, they usually pretend to have a reason, these girls are just staring and making no pretence at having business in my room, just going the ogle. I thought I might just see how long they look if I don’t say anything.
So I just stared at them in return. They didn’t care. I think they didn’t even notice. Just freakin’ staring at me. This went on for about 2 minutes (again, longer than it sounds. Much, much longer). This ended abruptly when I just couldn’t take it anymore and said “Hello”. You should have seen the looks on their faces, sheer horror. I think it had gone on for so long that they had forgotten that I was awake or even alive. They picked up their skirts and ran flat knacker, straight out the door, slamming it behind them and I never saw them again for the duration of my stay. This repeated itself over and over. The point I’m trying to make is, if this is the reaction I get just from lying fully covered in bed, imagine if they had to wipe my arse. It doesn’t bear thinking about. Anyway, after 10 days and bedsores the size of Tasmania, I transferred hospitals. I was in a wheelchair within an hour of being there and it looks like I will be out of hospital before the first one was going to let me out of bed. I’m happy. Healing is good. Life is good. Bike is good. Everything is good.

Things That Are Happening Here

2006-04-29T14:29:00.001+09:00

We have been in Gimhae 2 months now. Life is good but I’m a bit worried about the crowd that Parky has started hanging with, dubious looking characters at best I reckon.

Please forgive me for this blog. It is haphazard, but it all comes together (I think).
Gimhae impresses me a lot. Regardless of how much I miss Gangneung and living by the sea, it is a nice city. One thing people comment on upon coming to Corea is the absence of disabled people. It isn’t that there aren’t any, you just never see them. There is also an absence of footpaths, access ramps, beeping walk signals and any and all facilities that enable people with various disabilities to live an independent life in most of the cities. Gimhae seems to have these things and there is an enormous amount of blind people and people in wheelchairs and such here. I guess that makes sense. There also seems to be an absence of the staring and pointing that usually follow people who are different in Corea. I guess that makes sense too. That rule doesn’t apply to foreigners though, I get as much or more ‘Hello-ing’ here as anywhere else. In fact I would say more than any similar sized city. I think the absence of heavy industry in Gimhae means that there are less engineers and less of the East European workers that are so prevalent in big industry. Also not being on the sea there are no foreign ships docking and the accompanying foreigners that come with them. Now I think about it, my Hello-Muscle has been working overtime since the moment I arrived. Anyhoo, the point was that even though Corea has gone from decimation, through 50 years of dictatorship and into the ‘first’ world at such a rapid pace that the absence of some of the things that developed over the last century in more modern countries are markedly missing. Gimhae seems to be a leader in a lot of these things. It doesn’t make up for the absence of beach in front of your house, but it makes me feel good regardless. Parky and I went to our normal badminton playing park today. We have decided that we need not only to be a little fitter, but all of the sporting ability which I has a little proud of a few years ago is leaving me. Our school teachers play volleyball every Wednesday, and the first time I tried to play I was just mental. No timing, no hand eye coordination, no nothing, just a mental case randomly swiping the air every time the ball came over the net. It was embarrassing. In my defence, volleyball is played by all of the teachers in every school in Corea (as far as I know) every Wednesday afternoon and has been played for quite some time. The teachers are very good at it and very, very competitive. Playing like a mental case didn’t exactly endear me to my new co-workers, especially the ones on my team (but being a weiguk gets you through a lot of these situations (IYHELY,YWKWIM)). The upshot was that Parky and I have taken to playing badminton in the park down the road every now and then. Today however there was a bit of a fair going on there. It was a fair for everyone to go and have fun interacting with intellectually handicapped people. There were loads of drumming bands, clay making, huge bubble thingys, throw water balloons at a guy’s head and things like ‘put on a blindfold grab a cane and try to get around’ ‘jump in a wheelchair and see how long your arms last’. Everything was free, including tucker, tea and coffee but people carried donation boxes about the place, so you could donate if you chose. It was really groovy. I know it doesn’t sound really groovy, but it was. I said to Parky that I should have opened a stand saying ‘Hello’ to people for a dollar. They could have earned a fortune. People were pretty excited about saying hello to us. It’s also amazing how many people speak English to Parky and get freaked out when she responds in Corean. I don’t know if it’s because she is tall, or with a foreigner or what it is, but one guy even commented ‘Wow, your Corean is really good!’ She didn’t bother to explain. It was a great day had by all and just a groovy atmosphere all round. And I like the banner most “being prepared for dealing with disabled people”. That’s Corean for “learn not to point and stare, you ignorant wanker”. It was fun and it was extremely worthwhile. As I miss Gangneung more and more, things like this make me quite happy to be living in city with a first world economy that is starting to realise that there is more to it than just being wealthy.

On the school front, I have been given 4 (from my 25) hours a week to use at my discretion (~ish, they don’t let me go to the pub). The only catch is that I must enter three students from grades 3,4,5 and 6 in a state-wide English speech competition in November. All previous teachers have used those 4 hours to prepare the 12 students with the best grades from the previous year for the prestigious competition. I have, over the past 2 months, convinced my school to allow me to take 2 hours per week and begin free lessons for underprivileged students from the 5th and 6th grades. This involves setting up an entire new curriculum, applying for and getting approval for a budget for it. We got approval on Wednesday, course starts on Monday! YAY! I have also tossed the 12 best students, who achieved the best results on a written, multiple choice test at the end of last year (easy to grade I guess) who should be entering the speech contest in November and orally interviewed any 5th or 6th grade students who were interested in applying for the 'Special Curriculum' class (70 students over 2 afternoons). I have broadened the class to accommodate 25 of the best speakers (in my opinion). Apparently I have chosen half a dozen 'c' grade students and about 10 'b' graders. I am still trying to convince the admin staff that 'a' grade students are not necessarily the best speakers (think of maxi for one example, best English and worst grades on the planet). I am loving work at this school, and I am really lucky to be working with such trusting and flexible people here. I shouldn’t write blogs on Saturday afternoon, I have warbled on for quite a while here, but I'm pretty proud of what’s going on. So there you are, I have put myself out on a limb, I'm out of my depth and I might end up with egg on my face. (I apologise for that sentence, I have been teaching idioms, metaphors and similes all week).

Things That Make Me Happy

2006-04-25T21:53:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. We had the most fantastic Friday in a very long time. I have met a couple of doctor dudes who are interested in learning English and we meet a couple times a week for that purpose. Straight to the good gear, one of them owns a micro-brewery. We went there on Friday and it was fantastic. It has a restaurant where they make all of their own food and condiments (obviously including beer). It is the most fantastic food I have eaten in Corea, and the most fantastic beer I have drank in Corea also. We had a sausage platter. Homemade sausages, you can’t do them justice with words, but I will try to describe them anyway. Big fat barstards three quarters of an inch thick, stacked full of pork or beef, jammed with herbs and spices which I didn’t even know existed in Corea, generously peppered. We had enchiladas and fajitas, with homemade sour cream. It has to be homemade because it doesn’t exist in any other form. Cajun chicken salad, it just keeps going, going and going. It was magnificent. Best of all for me was what I consider to be the quality of the character of the doctor blokes. Usually men in Corea have a very bad habit of indulging in ‘boys nights’ every time they go out. These guys asked my wife to come as well. I must admit (even though they seem like really nice blokes) that it occurred to me that they might have had the ulterior motive of bringing a free interpreter with. But not only was I wrong, I was very wrong. This is the first time I have been invited out by men in Corea and they have invited my wife with, also brought their wives and their children came with the package, two little girls aged 7 and 3. It was such a great night. We had a blast. It was so refreshing to go out with guys that want their families to go out with them. This makes me happy.

Things That Piss Me Off

2006-04-25T21:44:00.000+09:00

I hate Home Plus, I hate E-Mart, I hate department stores, I hate shopping centres, I hate crowds, I hate stupid old women in department stores and crowds and I hate stupid young people that park in disabled parking spaces. I went to home plus yesterday to buy bacon and there was a selection of two. A 100g package for $5 and a 400g package for $8, both with a used by date 6 days hence. I can’t believe that I am writing this but I stood there for about 5 minutes swapping packages. I don’t want 400g and I won’t eat it in 6 days, but I can’t justify buying 100g because of the comparative expense. But I should just buy the 100g because I will throw it out anyway, so save the $3. But I could buy the 400g and give some to my mates so it didn’t get thrown out. (Here’s where I get paranoid). But that’s what they want me to do, they want me to buy the bigger package and they price up the smaller one to make it unjustifiable. At the risk of sounding like a whacko conspiracy theorist I will attempt to justify that comment. I used to work for woolworths (major supermarket chain in Australia) and as obvious as it sounds, getting people to leave more money behind in the store is the aim of the game. That is to say, for example when I worked for shell oil we would sell petrol at a loss of half or even 1 cent per litre just to get them in the store. Hopefully when they were there they would buy a can of coke, which is marked up 150% and if they bought less than 300 litres of petrol the station would make a profit. Convenience stores and petrol stations work on the principal that one product is (very) profitable, another is there to get customers in the door, even at a (minor) loss. Normally (certainly the ones I have worked for) big supermarket and department store chains work on a different system, they mark up as a percentage of the dollar spent. Regardless of what you buy, in general terms, if you spend $5 they make X profit. If you spend $25 they make 5X profit. If you spend $50 they make 10X and so on. Two things shit me off. One is that supermarkets are very good at what they do. If I walk into a petrol station of any type I can buy the petrol and a newspaper, see that coke is $2.20 for a 375ml can and not buy it. I cannot walk into a supermarket and walk out without spending $50. I can’t do it. This is my own fault. The other is thing that pisses me off is that having worked in both environments I am aware of the way they work, and I still can’t do it in the supermarkets. I spend, on average, a days wages every time I enter one of the fecking things, and it fucks me off. I have made a decision and I am sticking to it. I am not going into a supermarket or department store ever again. I am going to shop for food at the markets, buy wine from a wine store, buy my clothes in a clothing store and so on and so on. This fits in very well with my “support the ‘mom and pop’ store” theory that I have been putting into practice for the better part of 6 or 7 years. The difference is now it is a firm rule.And please allow me to reitterate, i fucking hate able young people who park in disabled car parks to save themselves a 20 metre walk and i doubly hate them when they do it because it is raining and only the disabled parks are undercover. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU THINKING!!!! IT WOULD TAKE YOU 10 SECONDS TO RUN THAT. NOW SOME DODGEY OLD GRANDMA WILL BE SOAKING WET IN THE MINUTE OR SO IT WILL TAKE HER!!!aaaarrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhhhhh! (yes, it was also the very last disabled park available)
this is me not in a department store

Married Life

2006-04-19T00:52:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. Parky and I have been married for 2 years and 1 day as of this morning. And they said it would never last! Actually nobody said that (at least to our faces) but it sounds more dramatic to say “And they said it would never last!” we are in love more than ever. I mean that in all sincerity. We nearly killed each other in our first year of marriage. With Parky’s study, and living in a strange country, my making such little money (even though I loved my job, TSW guys) and all of the other hassles I’m surprised we got married at all let alone lived through the first year. Second year, moving back to Corea starting a new job in a new city had it’s ‘special’ moments, but life was great, working together was great, living by the beach was great, Gangneung was just superb, second year of marriage was pretty good by my slide rule. Now we are entering the third year, in our third city, in our second country and life has never been better. It reminds me of sage words of advice, given to us be our good mate Stacey. More a realistic appraisal of life as we know it. She stated that even though her and Steven had been dating more than 5 years before they were married, their first year of marriage was hell. (Parky and I were dating for 2 years before marriage). She further stated that everybody she knew, regardless of how long they had known each other had had a rough first married year. The only way around it apparently was to get married as soon as you meet and then your rough year might be postponed for a year or two. These were welcome words that immediately struck a chord with us, as we had been going in leaps and bounds from our first anniversary onwards (after having not killed each other after all within the first year). They were welcome and comforting, and amongst other things like the fact that Parky and I loved Steve and Stacey from day dot, brought us very close together.
I have now had a chance to relay those exact words to a mate of mine who has been married exactly 5 weeks, saying that his wife was going mad at the slightest provocation, threatening to throw him out on his arse, he was resisting temptation to replace her chocolate biscuits with hash cookies just to make her mellow out somewhat, all the while admitting that he was not entirely blameless for the current circumstances, but just couldn’t help himself but to be a bit of an arse sometimes. “we loved each other 5 weeks ago”
I can’t forget the look of passivity overcome his face when we related our story to him. It was exactly the same look that we must have had on ours when Stacey was relating her story to us. He was so relieved to realise that he wasn’t the first person to have a major crisis in his first year, or month even, of marriage I didn’t know if he was going to cry or kiss me. I felt the same one year ago, so did Parky, and I reckon if I asked around I would find a lot of people who didn’t disagree.
(If a certain person is reading, who was married 364 days after us, and runs a gleeb titled “Being Korean” @ www.calmlyhungover.blogspot.com please opine away, as you have been married 2 days longer than your paper anniversary and may be in a position to comment).
Okay, now I’m going to talk about stereotypes and your first year of marriage should be the most romantic, most sexual, most exciting year, when you learn about each other and encounter each other in ways previously unimaginable. That might have been true 30 years ago when people married within months (or even weeks) of knowing each other. (not my parents though, they dated 5 years before marriage IN THE 60’S. five long wonderful years. I’ll leave it to them as to whether they post a comment and tell about their first year or so of marriage.) But it’s not true today. Marriage is wonderful, amazing, it’s a whole new world of whiz-bang. In essence it has a completely different feel about it to anything else I have ever experienced in life. But in today’s world it (the first year of marriage) isn’t what you are told it is going to be. It doesn’t carry the same connotation for people who have lived together for years as it did for people who moved out of their parent’s homes and into married life. It is a pain in the arse (somewhat). It interrupts an otherwise stable life of co-habitation. It puts pressure on both of you, and your families, to conform to the “first year of marriage” bullshit. It costs you (and your parents) an awful lot of money, time and stress. It makes you feel as if, after being really very, very happy for the preceding period, you should now feel some kind of fake ecstasy in order to conform to what is expected of you in your “first year of marriage” phase.
I love being married. I would do the first year again and again and again to have what I have now. But after it having been passed to me, and the relief I felt, and having passed it forward, and seeing the relief it brought, I have decided that it is time to get it out there. The wedding, the ceremony, the crying, the kisses, the presents, they are wonderful! But if you have lived together for a while and you decide to marry, just understand that in this day and age it will put you in debt, it will put expectations of conformity on you, it imposes on your time and your sanity. In the long run it may change what you feel for each other, but I doubt it somehow. I am sure that I would love Parky as much today whether we were married or not.
After all of this ranting and raving, I encourage marriage if you feel it is right for you. It gives me a sense of fulfilment everyday to wake up everyday and ask my WIFE what she would like for breakfast. I get the same from her coming home at night and greeting my WIFE at the door with something I have cooked on the table. Personally I wouldn’t change a thing, I would do it over and over again with my beautiful wife of 2 years and 1 day. I am more in love today than I was even yesterday or the day before.
But know what is coming, know what you are in for, and know that which is coming is expected of you by all around you, except Parky and I, Stacey and Steve, and with some luck the couple we have shared our experience with. Know that the pressure of the ‘first year of marriage’ is only there if you choose to take it on board. Know also that it is all worth it, but be prepared, if the ceremony and the ensuing debt and the societal pressure and the pressure you place upon each other and the pressure you place upon yourselves becomes a little too much, STICK WITH IT! It’s an enormous deal! The after effects hang on for a while!
I would not change anything given the opportunity, neither would Steve and Stacey, and with a little patience, neither will our mates, given time.
I dedicate this blog to my wife. I dedicate it to her fun nature, to her forgiving nature, to her hard working nature, her compassionate nature, to her love of life, to the love I feel from her everyday, to the love I feel for her everyday, (and to her boobies, ha ha).
My wife gave me a cocktail cooler for our 2nd anniversary, to remind me of tudari in gangneung. I gave her a haircut (i.e. had a haircut for her), to remind her how much i love her. (and how much i hate having my hair cut)

Saturday Night Blogging

2006-04-09T16:42:00.000+09:00

Hobo wife, spending my hard earned money in 'Home Plus'(actually buying me some wine)if you click the photo it looks much better
hej all and sundry
it is Saturday night. We ended up in a singing room last night for the first time since moving to Gimhae. It was great. We relived the old classics, it’s been months now. We got home AFTER MIDNIGHT, also for the first time since moving to Gimhae.
On the motorcycle front, nothing much is going on, apart from me wanting to make unnatural romantic situations with my magna come true, but that is also not new.
Parky is doing really well. She has been a 백조 for a month now. That roughly translates into English as ‘chick hobo’. She has been relaxing herself, chillin' with her homies and basically busy as all hell (if you know Parky it won’t surprise you at all) all at the same time.
This is what I don’t understand. If an Australian takes a month off, they go fishing, camping, laze about the place and rest and recuperate. If Parky takes a month off she starts learning yoga, going to the gym, studying, decorating the apartment and more…………….
One of the things she did was setting up her new business venture. I’m quite proud. She is now earning 60% of what I make for teaching only 9 hours per week. (I work 40 and teach 20ish hours per week) I don’t mind admitting that I’m a little jealous, but good luck to her.
This is wifey-o being a hobo cuuuuuuuuuuuute
Parky had business cards made up for “English with Ellen” (Ellen is the name she has always used as an English teacher). We found out, before they were printed, that it was nothing extra to have the back printed as well. She showed me the template and I had my own little spiel printed on the back. I’m quite happy with the result. More than happy in fact, I’m extremely happy, ecstatic to have my first ever business card.

Almost as happy as I would have been if she had told me that they were to be “printed on pink business cards” and I had said “F*#^ that, us bikers don’t have pink business cards, let’s have them printed on something much more manly, like pastel blue, or puce or mauve or something”. And if we had decided to print them on non-pink business cards then imagine how happy I would have been. I’m nearly that happy, but that conversation never happened, so…………………well fuck it…….lets be honest………now I have my first ever business card AND a story to go with it, so maybe I’m even happier with a pink business card than without. Alas I will never know, because not only will I never have another first business card, but we have 500 of the fecking things so it will be some considerable time before I have a second business card. I promise to update you on my feelings in this regard if and when we ever get another lot of business cards made.

I have put Mr Phweep on the card. Some might say it’s not professional. I say “neither am I for the most part, so bollocks to you". And as muck as I would like to ride bikes for money, it's not a business.
The thing that I am most disappointed with though is that I have proven myself correct. I have often said that when one is happy and all is going well, one has bugger all to write about. I am most disappointed about this, from a blogging perspective, because I am, and it’s true.

latest post

2006-04-08T20:52:00.000+09:00

check out www.wombatcorea.blogspot.com for the lastest postings.

First Week At Shool

2006-03-12T23:09:00.000+09:00

Hej all and sundry. First week of the new job is behind me now and I liked it. The school is great and my co-teachers are also really nice. Having 40 kids in a class isn’t as daunting as I first thought it may be. Spring is here, the weather has been in the high ‘teens throughout the week, and although we had a max of +4°c today for some reason, it will be better again tomorrow.

Everyone has their own stories to tell, which got told over a couple of dozen jugs of beer on Friday night. About 25 of the new teachers got together for lager and chitchat in a pub called O.B. CAMP and it was really interesting to hear all of these stories as we all work at different schools and under slightly different rules. Some teachers have been busy signing autographs, some have been offered half their wages again to do 10 extra classes per week, most have had run-ins with some students, literally running into them while they play chasy or soccer in the hallways between classes. One teacher finishes his classes at midday everyday but is contracted until 5 so sits around for 5 hours daily. He was told to make lesson plans during this time but his pleas for a desk, computer or any other equipment didn’t gain him much headway, nor did his statement of the bleeding obvious that 5 hours per day isn’t necessary for planning 3 hours and 20 minutes of lessons (by the way, that is one 40 minute lesson repeated 5 times at 40 minute intervals). But that’s one aspect of Corea in a nutshell. (I can’t put a name to which aspect at the moment, but as I so often say, if you’ve ever lived here you’ll know what I mean).

I say that so often that I think I will shorten it to “IYHELH,YWKWIM” Yes, that’s much better.

My story of the first week was attending the 2006 welcoming assembly. Part of the assembly was that the new teachers were introduced to the 1500 students assembled. We didn’t have to make a speech, I had checked this beforehand. If we did have to, I wanted to be prepared. I knew I wouldn’t be told if I didn’t ask, regardless of how obvious it would be to us that if you are making a speech to one and a half thousand people you should be warned (IYHELH,YWKWIM). I was fourth in the line of new teachers and broke into a little sweat when the first, upon hearing his name called walked forward toward the mike, I quickly turned to the person in charge of settling me in (not a new teacher, but standing behind me, even on stage, never being more than 4 feet away from me all the first day) and whispered “No speeches, really?” She replied, “No, it’s o.k.” Sure enough he didn’t make a speech, neither did the next two. My intro was a bit longer, but I thought “That’s o.k. It is the first foreign teacher this school has ever had, it takes a little more intro.” I was readying myself for the walk to the front of the stage, to take a bow and walk back (that’s where the first dude was heading when I thought he was going to the mike, when his name was called. The principal finished his last sentence in my introduction and my relatively poor Corean skills picked up on something that I wasn’t happy with, but I let it go and took my first step forward just as the looker-afterer-me-person grabbed me by the shirtsleeve and said “Oops, I’m sorry, he does want you to make a speech after all”.

It was obvious from the beginning of this story that that was going to be the final line. I couldn’t be angry, she didn’t know, I even think the principal didn’t plan it, he was just so jolly about having a weiguk working for him that he lost his compass for a few seconds and seeing the agitation of the students, blurted it out and then it was up to me to do it. I am lucky I have enough Corean to make a small speech and enough confidence to do it in front of 1500 students. But I just couldn’t help thinking if it had happened to one of the many that have been here for only 4 days before starting work………………. It could have happened (IYHELH,YWKWIM)

But thinking about making a speech, unprepared, in front of 1500 students is just rosy compared with thinking of either of the following two thoughts 1) sending my children (which I don’t have) to a private English learning school (which I would never do anyway) or 2) eating a breakfast anything even remotely similar to that which I ate this morning.

I don’t know which one I should go on with first. I guess I have said enough about my old boss Mr lee, an un-evil dipshit. Not a terrible guy, just a dipshit, really harmless. He invested all of his money into starting an English school. He thought that his English was really great. He really thought that big banners and newspaper commercials were the way to make parents send their children to the school. He had this huge banner made, it was about 1 metre wide and 4 stories long. It hung from our 4th floor school almost down to the ground and read “DAVID ENGLISH HOSE”. I never had the heart to tell him that it was (only) missing a “U”. He never noticed, it probably cost a thousand bucks, I never told him. I did however tell him that the stuck on letters, which he himself had stuck on, above the desk at the school read “ENGLISH SHOOL”. He decided that it wasn’t a big enough deal to be bothered changing it. However he didn’t hang a flyer that said this………………

The other part of my day that made me scared was Parky’s breakfast this very morning. It’s been a while, but she has gotten so freaked out about being in a big city and having so many new products at her disposal that she decided to cook them all at once. A very few of you will remember my group mail from 2002 when I introduced her to continental breakfast, and she put all of the ingredients on a single piece of baguette, I can remember what they were, but I won’t go into it. Today I had cooked for me (now I am a workingman and she is a hobo, she has been doing the cook bit, and she really is a great cook, with the exception of today’s breakfast) a dish that I wish I had photographed. We had buttered toast with brown rice upon, topped with sliced fresh strawberries and peanut butter, sweet potato, egg, carrot, oregano, baked beans, vermicelli noodles AND BLOOD SAUSAGE. This concoction was covered with mozzarella cheese and served up with hot chocolate. I ate three quarters of one piece. I think it was the third meal in my life I simply just couldn’t finish. But I do love the enthusiasm for trying new things, that floats my boat. I married her and I am blessed. Varying degrees of blessedness, but I figure as long as I’m doing the cooking from now on, I am truly blessed.

Before I sign off, something just occurred to me. I have never said how much I love my wife on this blog. It makes no difference to her, as she never reads it anyway (she lives it with me). I LOVE YOU WIFEY-O. I’m not a huge fan of your breakfasts, but I surely love you.

and what the hell are these copters doing flying aroung the city?

Welcome to Gimhae

2006-03-07T22:11:00.000+09:00

hej all and sundry. Life is great in Gimhae. I have started work in earnest now. I have my own desk and computer with high-speed internet and c.d. burner, and best of all I have a lot of time to study, as my university course has also started in earnest. Tomorrow I have 3x40 minute lessons and a staff game of volleyball. That is my entire schedule for Wednesdays. I have absolutely nothing amusing to say at all. Sorry about that.

Unfortunately Parky has been a little unwell and spent last Friday until Sunday in the hospital, but she’s good now, possibly better than she has been for 12 months. Everybody is happy and there isn’t anything amusing there either. The new motorcycle is going like a trooper. I’m loving driving around South Gyeongsang. I left Parky at the hospital Sunday morning and rang her just over an hour later to check up on how she was doing and I was just as surprised as she was to learn that I was nearly in North Gyeongsang. If it goes any harder I might have to trade it in for one of these.

The music teacher at our school gave me 2 tickets to a concert of a traditional Corean musical instrument today. It is called “ga-ya-gum”. It is both a 12 or 25 string traditional guitar-like-thingy. It looks more like an Indian zither. I have an example of it here on the blog, but if you would like a much better version click on the link that i will place over on the right with the other links and choose either 56k or 200k depending on what you have available to you.

I must say that I really enjoyed the performance this evening. I am not being facetious, it was very enjoyable. There were six songs in all, a Mozart piece, a tango number, a traditional Corean number with 25 Ga-ya-geum players alongside a big bamboo flute and Corean bongo drum (that is in the photo, it was nothing short of excellent, to be sure) as well as a version of AHA’s ‘take on me’ (also a gas) one other something-or-other and the finale, which was meant to be the highlight of the evening. Corea’s most celebrated Ga-ya-geum player, flown in from Seoul just for the performance. She only played for about 15 minutes, thank god. She looked like a Corean Amanda Vanstone. She played the ga-ya-geum like Amanda Vanstone with Parkinson’s Disease. I don’t mean to be stupid here, actually there is no way to justify that statement and not appearing stupid without playing you the video. Here it is.

I must also say that this bike gave me a good old fashioned giggle. Who chooses the names for these Corean made products. I love it and I want one.

Welcome To Dongmak Gol!

2006-02-28T18:39:00.000+09:00

(here is a lovely photo of my lovely wife enjoying her lovely new life in gimhae).been a while all and sundry, but we are now back with pc even though we are not online yet. We have moved to gimhae, almost trouble free, well almost almost trouble free. I have been here since Wednesday night working my bollocks off, and parky got here this morning, tired and shagged from the overnight bus ride. She left gangneung at 11:00 pm and arrived in busan at 4:30 am, went to a hot spring (fantastic natural hot water from underground, that has been turned into one of the coolest public bathhouses in Corea) arrived in gimhae and we went shopping together. We bought an oven, an oven mitt and some wine. Parky bought some jeans and a “round the house, comfy shirt” that says “team Gmbh 20** suzu tiggerty bayron yu k5 parker play modern ph grv BNP Mt Kukai spray yams i.u.M.A fish WW accur Lw moto yamoto Over Cunningham jacko?” on the back. Apparently she bought it only for its comfort value, not to use in grammar class. (no, it is not corean, or any other language that I’m aware of)

(just another photie for the roadsign inspectors tour of Corea)
The amazing thing is that parky’s new shirt is not the most amazing thing that has happened this week. The inaugural WOMBAT tour happened on Monday, it started at 4am, it lasted only 75kms, there was only one rider and he didn’t pay, but it was great. At 3:30am Monday I got up and decided it was time to head to Gimhae. The reason for the early start was, there is a 100km or so section of freeway on the road down the east coast of Corea, on which motorcycles are not allowed.

[Motorcycles are not allowed on any freeways in Corea. All freeways, except for this one, are toll ways. Thence they begin with boomgates, where you pick up your ticket, and end with manned booths, where you pay you fare. Said freeway is, as stated, not a tollway, also as stated, the only one in the country. The alternative route involves travelling up into the mountains in a bendy-wendy semicircle that is at least twice as long and a 60kmph zone the whole way. Not to mention that it is much colder in the mountains, there is a possibility of snow on the road (the aforementioned freeway runs within 2kms of the coast the whole way) and I morally object to not being allowed onto the freeway. There is also the thing that I had at least 6 hours of riding in from of me, possibly 8, and without taking that freeway I had at least 8 hours of riding in front of me possibly 10.]

For all these reasons and more I was determined to ride this freeway. This freeway begins about 100kms from Gangneung. I wanted to start at 3:30 to get to the beginning of this freeway at around 5:00am and enter it whilst the policeman stationed at the start of the freeway (in a little booth in the middle, for observing both entering and exiting traffic) might be still asleep. So off I went and it was bitterly cold, my visor was scratched and rooted and the bloody bike which I had just had serviced wouldn’t idle. I actually thought when I started “bloody hell, this bike is loud since the last service”. Then I thought it’s 3:30am and there is no background noise, maybe it’s always this loud, I had never ridden during such a quiet time of day before. So off I went, pissed off at the no idle business, but outside of the city it ceased to matter.

(this is the guy, if you see him be afraid, be very afraid)
The background story is that I had just the previous week taken the bike in for a service. I said to Bike Guy (for that is his name) do everything, change the oil, filter, airfilter, back brakes, chain, grease and oil every moving joint, put winter gloves on the handlebars, check out this entire bike, we bought the bike from you and we have been coming to you since we got to Gangneung for everything we need, you have always done a great job and your prices have always been ridiculously low, just do everything you can for the upcoming 600km trip, money is not an issue, just do it. We are moving to Gimhae and I want to get there knowing I will have at least a few months to find a good mechanic such as yourself before my bike needs more work. (this is not a summary, this is exactly what I said to him, verbatim, apart from when I said it to him it was said in Corean)

I was underway about 50 kms outside of Gangneung when I stopped for a coffee, all was well and I started up again. About 74kms out from Gangbusters it was 5:30 and I was still about 20 minutes from the freeway. It was colder than when I left but it was nice nonetheless. The moon was high in the sky, I was bashing along at about 100kmph, behind schedule because of an unexpected mountain range with tricky, slinky, sexy, off camber corners, but still happy with my progress. It wasn’t until about 1km later that I heard a really loud BBBBBBANG!!!!! After that I heard just chrink crlang crlunk, chrink crlang crlunk, chrink crlang crlunk. Not a great sound anywhere, really not a great sound where I was. There weren’t any towns in from of me for 40kms and Sokcho was 20kms behind me. I got to thinking that this was probably the furthest you could get from a town in Corea. Admitting to myself that I was not going to make it forwards or back I took the first available east-west road and headed east knowing that the sea was only 2-3kms away, hoping against hope that there was a village between me and the sea (and full well knowing that if I started uphill (west) the engine would shit itself in 20 seconds flat and the nearest village might be up to 50 kms anyway. I was never to find out if there was a village there or not, the bike shat itself 20 seconds later, even though I was travelling downhill. Where I ended up was not even a village, just 5 or 6 houses, obviously farmers as they all (excluding one) had their lights on already. I stopped there not through choice, the Hyosung Mirage plain and simple shat its last nappy. First some background knowledge on the geography of Corea:

South Corea is one-third the size of Victoria. South Corea has a population twice that of Australia. South Corea is inhabited on only 45% of its total land mass. South Corea, per square kilometre of inhabited land, is the most densely populated country on earth. That said, where it isn’t inhabited it really, really isn’t inhabited. Gangwondo is the most sparsely populated state of Corea. Gangwondo is completely made up of mountains. Really, really steep rock face, cliff like mountains. The most remote town on all of South Corea is a town called Dongmak Gol.

(rodsign inspectors II)
A brief background of South Corean pop culture:

It’s not great.

A brief background of the South Corean motion picture industry:

The South Corean government has imposed a quota on all films screened here. That is, 40% of all films screened in South Corea must be South Corean made. That means that in 1991 40% of films screened in South Corea were South Corean made, but the most of them were screened between 1:00am and 5:00am and they accounted for about 0.05% of ticket sales. Today the 40% quota still exists but the films are better and better all the time. About 75% of ticket sales last year were for Corean made films. And with the exception of the last 2 Harry Potter films, Lord of the Rings 2 and 3, Star Wars: Revenge of the Syth and very few others, the biggest selling films in Corea have all been Corean since I arrived in 2001. In fact only 3 films in the history of Corean cinema have broken the 10 000 000 ticket mark, only 3, and all three were Corean. 10 000 000, not bad for a country of 44 000 000. The last one to do it was just 1 month ago, it revolved around 2 gay jesters who were trying to save their life by making the un-humorous king laugh. Hilarious!
One of many films last year didn’t break the 10 000 000, mark but went to about 8 or 9 000 000. Still, nearly 1 in 4 people saw it in the cinema alone! Regardless of video and dvd, regardless of babies and grandmothers, regardless of people illegally downloading it off of the internet. Not bloody bad if you ask me! It was a popular film. It was well made and it was called “Welcome To Dongmak Gol” It was about a town that was so isolated that it was the only town in Greater Corea that didn’t realise that the Corean war had broken out. It was based in 1952 when the Corean war was almost over and some of the soldiers on opposing sides of the war ended up there and soon realised that they weren’t enemies within that town, because the people there didn’t know of polotics, let alone the war. Many people in Ganeung and Gangwondo debated whether Dongmak Gol even exists. It was obvious that if a town like that had existed (even in the 1950’s) it would have to have existed in Gangwondo, the only place in Corea where such remoteness would be geographically possible. Was it a made up town for the purpose of cinema alone?

It is reminiscent of the Australian Black Stump. We use it as a figure of speech, sure plenty of people say that they have been to Black Stump, or that there is a town in outback N.S.W. with a gigantic black stump and that’s where it comes from, but basically regardless of whether it exists or not, as a figure of speech for describing remoteness it exists in our minds. That brings me to the point. Does Dongmak Gol exist? Could there possibly be a town in Corea that is so isolated that even people who live only 75kms from it debate its existence? Yes, there bloody could be! That is not only my theory; I have photographic evidence of that fact. I am sure, from the hints given, that all and sundry know where my Mirage decided to shag itself. Welcome to Dongmak Gol!

(this is the video cover for Welcome To Dongmak Gol)

Well, it was 5:30am (remember it is winter here) and I wasn’t even on the highway anymore, I was in the mythical town of fucking Dongmak Gol. It must be said at this point that I wasn’t unhappy, at the bike, at the time of day nor at the location in which I found myself. I actually found it all rather surreal. It was actually quite amusing. I just kept thinking to myself “What an interesting situation to be in”.

I have always known that I have a plan in every situation. Somewhere within my head there is a plan, a secret plan, so secret that I often don’t even tell myself about it. This was one such time. There is no other explanation for being in the situation I was in and being so happy with the way things were turning out. My plan, that I chose to reveal to myself at that time, was to walk back to the army barracks, for which I had earlier seen a sign, hitchhike back to Sokcho and go to the public bath, wait for a decent time to ring Parky, get her to ring Bike Guy, get him to come and pick me and the bike up, take it back to his shop and confirm that it has blown a bottom end bearing because he has drained the oil, changed the filter, put the plugs back in and sent me on my way without any oil at all in the sump……..and then I had no plan.

this is parky being silly with the new video doorbell. for my sillyness please check out www.wombatcorea.blogspot.com
This plan went swimmingly, even the bit about having no oil in the sump whatsoever. (as shitty as that is, it was kind of nice to have such a wigged-out theory proven correct. He has also admitted responsibility and agreed to purchase the bike from us for about two thirds of its pre-bang-chring-crlang-crlunk status value) About 7 hours later when I was leaving Bike Guy’s shop I got in a taxi, only to realise that my plan had come to an end. At least the bit I had told myself about, but I knew there was more that I wasn’t telling myself, because I was still so relaxed and happy, considering how the day was panning out, on what should have been a pretty rat-shit day. So there I was in the taxi, the driver asking me where I wanted to go, me quite honestly without a clue and the words “Asa Motors, Gyo-dong” flew out without a thought. All of a sudden I knew what I was had been secretly planning for myself, and I went out and bought the 750cc Honda magna that I have been looking at since November.

I am a happy little chappy now I must tell you. Broom broom vroom. Wow! What a bike! It is a big comfy cruiser, low to the ground with a thumping engine, but it is sporty, very responsive to the throttle, corners well, brakes well and goes like a shower of shit. I’m so very very happy. That was nearly a week ago now and I still haven’t gotten over it. Parky and I went out for a 100kms today. Through the mountains, down to the sea and back up to Gimhae. Vroom!

On Wednesday though I did eventually I did ride the freeway down south. I thought to myself “shag it! I’ll take my chances” I left at about 7:30 from Gangneung on Wednesday, got to the freeway entrance at 9:00 and the sentry there was still asleep and I drove straight past him. I must have woken him up though, the decibels this bike puts out are unreal. A big thumping 4 cylinder, quad exhaust engine gliding up to him at about 4000 revs, slowing down, preparing to be stopped and told to piss off, seeing he was asleep and gunning it down the freeway, it must have shaken the walls of his little cubicle.

(please click on this photo to see the magna in all of its glory)

Parky and I rode the freeway for a second time today. There is a huge mountain in-between Gimhae and where we were and a freeway tunnel going under it. There is also a long, windy, enormous detour around the mountain that would bring us to Gimhae in about one and a half hours. The tunnel takes about 15 minutes. We pulled up to the tollgate, hoping to bluff our way through and the nazi bitch wouldn’t let us past the boomgates, so we started to take the detour. Within about 2 minutes we made a wrong turn, drove past two coppers washing their police car and ended back up at the boomgates. We did this once more with the express intention of asking the coppers which would be the best way back to Gimhae. One of the very nice Corean policemen (which they usually tend to be, outside of Imgae) spent about 3 minutes explaining to us how to get back to back to Gimhae. When he had finished we tried to confirm the route and stuffed up at the first junction to which he replied “Just go through the bloody tunnel, you will come out the other side in Gimhae”. Parky asked him if that wasn’t illegal. He replied “Of course it’s illegal, but who cares really, and plus I know that there isn’t anyone watching the tunnel freeway today, we are all here washing our cars.” So, laughing our tits off, we went back to the boomgates and tried to explain that the copper had told us to go through. Nazi Tunnel Bitch (for that is her name) just started screaming at us and pointing out the big signs with the motorcycles with big red “X”’s through them. When she started getting red in the face I realised we weren’t getting through to her and gunned it.

Now we are home. I have worked so much at our little apartment here in Gimhae. It is so small, but it has all come together quite nicely. Parky was really happy when she arrived yesterday, (it is now Sunday). It was such a brothel when we first arrived last Saturday. We moved out boxes in and they filled the entire apartment. You, quite literally could not walk about the place once we had put all of our stuff in here. But over the last three days I have concentrated on building upwards and saving as much floor space as we can. The result was a resounding, and surprising, success.

I’ll leave you there. Only to say that I start my new job tomorrow and it will be quite a challenge, I’m sure. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Cheers, Bonzo.

(check out www.wombatcorea.blogspot.com :the link is on the top-right of screen)

Sexiness On Wheels, Gangwon Style!

2006-02-12T18:33:00.000+09:00

Hidey-Ho neighbours. I am a new man. I’ve received a package of music from Pookey and Mal, wolfmother, system of a down, go team, tv on the radio and so much more. I am now the happiest little camper this side of Mount Baek-du. It’s a pretty desolate musical landscape here in Corea unless you are into bubble gum pop, “rock ballads”, or some other utter, utter drivel. If such unadulterated rubbish were in fact your cup of green tea, you would be in your element, you gormless wanker!

This is me listening to Corean poop music and trying to hide my genuine feelings of hatred and loathing. Personally I think I'm doing a pretty good job!

I’m not a fan of Corean pop to be honest. It’s sung by people around the age of ‘Hanson’, with M.C. Hammer type catchy-ness and stage gymnastics, add the cutesy-ness of “ice cream kids” dolls and the sweetness of honey covered cotton candy on fairy bread, with all of the sincerity of “Milli Vanilli”. You’re getting there now, and it’s all the goddamned same, the whole pestilential lot of it! Of course you must add the ubiquitous English phrase “Come on everybody!” or “Throw your hand up!” or “Wabe your hand in the air rike you just don’t care!” between verses. (Plurals are not super common here in Corea. And amongst many other idiosyncrasies of the Corean language, you cannot end words with “S” nor can you start a word with the letter “L”, even though you can both start a word with “S” and finish it with the letter “L”. The letter “V” doesn’t exist full stop.) I’m glad I’m writing this down, because without being able to re-read it I’m quite sure I wouldn’t know what I had started on about.
Now I have read again from the top I realise I wasn’t far off track, I was talking about music and how much I am enjoying the new cds in my possession. Whilst listening to them today I have also discovered many wondrous things. Roy and hg are back on the radio, I have changed my blog site language from Corean back into English (something I have been struggling with ever since I started this thing) and I have figured out how to post videos on the blog site. The grand total of the videos I have taken though is actually 1, Parky has taken 2, and none of them were intended for public display or even seriously considered before shooting. The 2 that Parky has taken were both taken before I realised that she knew how to take video (with our super new digital camera. Cheers mum and dad!!) and I am the focus of them, being totally unaware that they were taken. I must admit to wondering why she was pointing the camera at me and not taking photos, but being married to someone who is prone to doing fairly random things, I never gave it much thought. I am sure Parky knows how I feel, she is also married to such a person, the videos are testament to that. The two guys in my video are also completely unaware that they are being filmed.

That said, I am going to post them anyway just to prove that I can. I do however solemnly promise from here on in to put much more forethought into the making of the videos before I make and/or post them.

What I was originally intending to write about was our tour we did yesterday. It is my last week in Gangneung and Parky’s second last and we decided to hire a Kia Carnival and take a tour up in the mountains with a few mates. First a few notes on Kia Carnivals (or should that be Kias Carnival).
1) They are quite nice to drive.
2) It is said that they seat 9, and they do. If of course you don’t come equipped with an oriental sized bottom, they seat only 6 really comfortably. But the ride and the seats themselves are very comfortable.
3) The (auto) gearbox is made by Kia and is therefore by definition crap.
4) For those of you who have driven or even been in dad’s boat will get a distinct feeling of déjà vu when you are turning a Kia Carnival at full lock.
5) It’s fuel consumption (diesel) is quite excellent, and it’s power (although they would never make a race car) isn’t super terrible at all.
6) You will never pull chicks in a Kia Carnival. Single mums, maybe. Chicks, no.

7) When driving a Kia Carnival (or any other form of transport at all) with Phillip and Dave, don’t leave the beers near Philip. First he will drink the half of them, then he will cede ‘Power Of The Beer’ to a higher authority. That will usually result in Dave creating some kind of commotion that invariably prolongs each and every rest (read: piss) stop.
8) Whenever hiring a Kia Carnival (or any other form of transport at all) for a road trip, always do your utmost to make sure that both Phillip and Dave are amidships. This is the best insurance you could ever make toward never forgetting your road trip.

The drive was a gas. We started out with no idea where we were going. 30 minutes into the trip we attempted a frozen, snow covered hill climb, we got about 500 yards up the barstard before having to reverse down it. It was going to be about 15 kilometres up before we went down again. 500 yards was a bit pathetic I must admit, but I reversed the first 20 or so yards in ‘D for drive’ and about 2 yards every time I put the brakes on, giving you an idea of the gradient of the slope and the condition of the road (about 4cm of solid ice, no snow). Much later we discovered snow chains in the back and that the tyres were as bald as a fireman’s helmet but we didn’t mind, for had we made it up the slope the “Road Sign Inspector’s Tour Of Gangwondo” would never have taken place.

We took an alternative route through Im Gae, a piss ant village most fondly remembered for being host to not only the toothless hobo that asked me for and was given a cigarette, but also the copper that grabbed him by the neck, spun him around kicked him full pelt, right up the arse and reminded him that he had previously been asked not to bother the weiguks, and sent merrily on his way. (Although I can’t, for the life of me work out which, if any, weiguks had ever been to Im Gae or why)

We ended up in Jongseon and had a lavish feast of goat, chicken, ginseng and dog. It was lovely. The drive was beautiful. The lakes and reservoirs were frozen over, the mountains were covered in snow and the beers were frosty cold. I will post photies but the feeling of driving around the Gangwon mountain ranges in winter cannot be captured on film, it must simply be done, and done in a rental with 6 of your best mates.

Top Start To The Lunar New Year

2006-02-07T11:20:00.000+09:00

Well I just re-read my last blog from the 28th of January. I did say that part two would come when I am sober. It has been just over a week now and finally I am sober again, so here it is. The one problem I am having is that I can’t remember what part two was about. I should really learn to take notes when I am planning a later blog whilst under the influence. I think I should also learn to ‘save as draft’ at these times and post my blog the next day. This would spare an awful lot of bollocks appearing on this site.

Now, I have made a couple of changes to the links column, you will see on the right of screen as you scroll down. First of all is the dilbert blog, this you must read. It is as silly as a wheel. Enough said. Second is “Calmly Hungover”. It is my mate Dave’s blog. It is an interesting perspective on life in Corea and on the planet in general. It is distinctly Dave and not recommended for anyone who dislikes being out of his or her comfort zone. Thirdly is a link to a site called “Stupid Videos”. One can whittle away hours at this site if one chooses. If you do chose to visit it, Parky’s favourite is “Happy Doughboy”. Just plonk that in the search bar and you should find it. Nathan, my yankee mate from down the road, highly recommends “Why men don’t ask for directions”. They both display a taste for refined, intellectual humour and I think this is reflected in their choices. (every fifth video is automatically a commercial for something not related to the video, so if you find that you haven’t wet your nappy after viewing either of these two, press play again.)

Well Al (egg) has been here to visit for the last week. We had a great time. He arrived in Gangneung on Thursday. It has been a very mild winter with temperatures hovering between –3° and 3° with clear blue skies. On Thursday the weather continued as normal, in fact it was rather nice. We had a top of about 6° and it was very nice until eventide when it became bitterly cold. We awoke in the morning on Friday to find that it was the coldest in Gangneung that it had been for 12 months. We had our first below zero maximum since last march. The official temperature was -3° max for the day, if it made that I’ll eat my hat. It was bitter, bitter, bitter cold with quite a wind whipping up off of the freezing ocean and perfect weather Al and I decided to go for a bit of a ride on the bike. Of course we were still inside the heated apartment when we made this decision, but we didn’t back out. When we got outside and our frozen bollocks broke clear away from our bodies we figured we had nothing left to lose and rode straight to the beach of all places. Al’s hands had gone a peculiar shade of pink and had grown ridges the size of the zugspitz by the time we got there, and after a quick cuppa we decided to ride back into town and buy gloves for the poor fella. About a third of the way back into town we spotted a store that may have had gloves so we pulled up there, bought gloves and proceeded down to Gyeongpo, the other beach in town. One might have thought that we would have learned our lesson by then and not ridden to the beach, but we did. I guess the highlight was pulling up at one of the public dunnies at Gyeongpo at Al’s request. I stayed outside and smoked a ciggie while Al ventured forth. After about 10 minutes I see Al leaning out of the dunny door and beckoning me inside, I followed and realised what he had been doing in there all this time, there was not only a hand dryer blasting gusts of hot hot hot air but also a radiator about the size of a computer screen mounted on one of the walls, radiating, as they are wont to do. This was the happiest I had seen Al for an hour or so now, we stayed in there for about 10 more minutes laughing at how ridiculous the situation was and ventured straight home upon exit.

We had a cracking time over the weekend while Al was here, it was freezing cold so we hired a car as opposed to venturing out on the bike again and went up into the mountains and stuffed about. I will write more later when I get the pics to go with the story. One thing that does stand out in the memory though was that after dinner on Saturday Al was coming down with a cold so I gave him my keys and he went home and Parky and I went out for a couple of drinks with our mates. Upon getting home at about 11:00pm, Al had locked the door to the apartment and Parky realised that she had forgotten her keys. My first thought was “we are never going to wake him” and I was right. We stood there for About 15 minutes, me ringing the doorbell and ringing the house phone from my mobile, Parky knocking on the door and yelling “AL!” (and giggling like a schoolgirl). After that we went upstairs and woke the landlord and got the spare key to the house. I put my ear to the door to make sure Al was still in fact alive to hear the dulcet tone of his light snoring. Satisfied, but bewildered as to how he had slept through that, Parky and I went to bed.

Many things that had puzzled me the previous night were explained to me in the morning. One was when Al woke up he was feeling much better but insisted it was beyond him how we could ever sleep with the heating turned up so high. He said that he had awoken at about 3ish covered in sweat and the whole room was so hot that he could hardly handle it. We figured that he must have had a hell of a fever because we had run out of heating oil and the apartment was actually quite cold. So that explained the dead sleep, but what about Parky’s giggling. She explained that after yelling “AL!” at the door a few times she realised what it must sound like to the neighbours. “Al” in Corean means “Egg”. So she had this vision of somebody hearing from another apartment, her at the door yelling “Egg! Egg!” and had broken into a giggle fit, one of those giggly moments when you can’t even explain yourself without breaking out again. I must admit, the image is quite amusing.

That is about the end of it for the moment. I have now remembered what part two was about but that must be saved for later. It is a whole new level of silly.

Benjamin

HAPPY LUNAR NEW YEAR!

2006-01-28T21:18:00.000+09:00

To blog or not to blog, that is the question before me now. Nothing much has really happened here but by the same token I need the release. I am sitting here now with my arm in a sling, once more, one week and 2 days after I was liberated from the last one. Not to worry, my right collarbone is fine. It’s the left shoulder this time, again. Obviously this is due to a lack of circumspection on my part, but the less said of my own lack of common sense the better. So I have decided to dedicate this blog to the lack of sagacity of the inhabitants and participants of the culture within which I dwell.

The first of which, not actually my story but the story of my great mate Pat, is the story of him crossing cheongyecheon. Cheongyecheon is a newly reupholstered dump-cum-cesspit-cum-toxic effluent receptacle of a stream, which back in the day used to be a prominent feature and tourist attraction of Seoul. The Seoul city council has spent, literally, billions of won cleaning the water and paving the banks, floodlighting the area, and making it wend and wind at totally unnatural angles along approximately its old course. It is now finished and really is a sight to behold, so I am told. But the amount of people visiting it is absurd. Seoul has a population of 12 million, and apparently each and every one of them go down to cheongyecheon at least once per day. Furthermore there is a unidirectional two-lane-highway on each side of the recently re-beautified stream, and they have been blocked off to motorised traffic with gigantic concrete bollards to allow the sheer number of pedestrians to pass unencumbered. (please forgive me if I giggle, that sentence re-reads to me as if they are allowed to pass the bollards only under the proviso that they are not carrying any number of cucumbers. But I am on my second bottle of wine.)

Be that as it may, me old mucker Patski was crossing the afore mentioned vehicle-less highway the other day, up from cheongyecheon to an ATM and back again, as a matter of necessity rather than choice. (foreign card accepting ATM’s in Corea are a catch-what-catch-can scenario). When he got to the (vehicle-less-concrete-bollard-blocked) highway he noticed a strange phenomenon. The redundant traffic lights were still in operation. Not so surprising perhaps, given meagre the two months that the stream has been open to pedestrian traffic. More surprising maybe that the “walk” and/or “don’t walk” signals were also in operation. Most surprising of course was, on a 4 mile stream, that only 15 metres from the bollards themselves there was a mob of 30 to 40 people who were waiting at the signal for the “don’t walk” light to change to “walk”. Pat, feeling a bit strange, proceeded across the intersection only to look behind to see that nobody had yet realised that for two bloody months there had not been a single bloody car down that road and the bloody concrete bollards, only 15 metres away, were testament to the fact. They were all standing there looking expectantly at the light.

Now I’ll admit “most” does not have a greater superlative. A superlative by definition presumes the greatest amount. I will also admit, that in it’s more functional days this was a very busy road. And following that line of thought, a simple zebra crossing wouldn’t have held much currency in the grand scheme of traffic flow over such a grand thoroughfare. Hence, it would be a while between the lowly crossings of the pedestrial set, given the automotive activity of the higher tax bracket that used to zip past it in it’s days of glory. But upon returning from the ATM (around a minute, over the footpath and back) I would bet my hat, that if there were a most-er-est superlative for ‘most surprised’, that that would be the one that Pat would have used to describe how he felt to see the exact same proselytised posse of do-gooders, waiting at the exact same traffic light, on the exact same 15-metres-hence balustraded street, only to cross it again and look behind him too see their glare of “OH YOU BELLIGERENT ANTI-RULE-OF-LAW WEIGUK, YOU JUST WAIT UNTIL THIS LIGHT CHANGES! WE’LL BE OVER THERE TO GIVE YOU A PIECE OF OUR MINDS!” and they may well have acted upon their instincts had the light not remained red for a further 15-20 seconds and by the time they crossed, he had disappeared into the crowd of locals that so frequently frequent the chongyecheon.

I may have embellished here upon a point or two, but I swear the story, in essence, is true. And may I sign off with a familiar “anyone who has lived here will know what I mean”.

Part 2 will come when I am sober.

"When Are You Going To America?"

2006-01-20T11:44:00.000+09:00

I was accosted at 7:40am this very day, downstairs in our local basement supermarket. The 50ish year old man serving me was leaning over the counter, he had hold of my right arm, just yesterday released from it’s sling, tugging on my elbow, and for some obscure reason asking “When? When?”
“when?when?” He is getting more anxious by the moment. I can see his level of excitement rise as his face becomes more and more red. I feel that I should respond before his head explodes or even worse he starts drooling and spitting, as old men can do when they are talking to a captive audience on a subject about which they feel passionate. “when, what?” I ask him politely, sensing I don’t want to be part of this conversation already. “When are you going to America?”
I always get nervous when Coreans start a conversation obviously believing that because I am not Corean, I must be American. It tells you a lot about both them and where the conversation is heading. It tells you that they are not particularly bright for a start. It tells you that even though they may be aware of the existence of other countries they haven’t got around to exploring the possibility that people might live in them. It tells you that regardless of what you say they are going to continue believing that you are American for the duration of the conversation anyway, and that the conversation is going to be long, dull and mono-directional.
“Excuse me?” I respond, immediately regretting that I had said anything at all. This conversation is happening in Corean and my experience tells me that the only way out of this jam is to pretend you don’t understand. Sometimes it doesn’t work. Sometimes the accoster starts up in English. That can be worse, but it’s usually worth a try. You may think that the accostee pretending to be German or French or Moroccan might be a devious tactic to employ at this juncture, but that means you have forgotten that this man has already convinced himself you are American and nothing you can do will change his mind. But I had slipped and the cat was out of the bag. You could try howling at the moon at this stage and the accoster would still think you were trying to communicate with him.
“When are you going to America?” “I’m Australian” “But when are you going to America?” “But I come from Australia” I insisted underneath the dull repetition of his question. I realised I had to employ another tactic otherwise this man was going to pull my arm out of it’s socket. “aahhh, I don’t know when I will go to America”. It worked. He let go of my arm, laughed a little and exclaimed “Ah, you’re Australian!” I used this opportunity to pick up my groceries and attempt to exit the store but quick as a flash he has hold of my arm again and announces “My younger brother lives in America!”
I was, I think quite understandably, lost for a response to this. But I think he mistook my look of bewilderment for one of awe, for he kept on becoming more and more excited by the second “Yes, he’s a TALENT you know?” employing the English word ‘talent’. (note he doesn’t necessarily have talent, apparently he is one.) I left him thinking that I was also in awe of this with my best ‘I wish I knew how to stop you from talking at me’ look. He’s on a roll now, he’s really excited and I just know any second now he’s going to start spitting “Yes, he’s a talent. And he lives in America, you know?” he let go of my arm to do an imaginary drum roll with his index fingers, building up to the grand finale “Hamburgers, you know? Yes, Hamburgers! He’s a talent”.
By the size of the drum roll, I thought he was going to be a drumming talent, but without bothering to ponder this any longer I seized the moment and picked up my bags and left the store. As I am walking up the stairs I can hear him calling to me, in these exact words, “He moved to America to become a talent”.
That left me thinking, that must be what Corean parents say to their children when their pets die. Maybe there aren’t enough farms here for our old lie to work on the kiddies, or maybe going to a farm to live out your remaining years isn’t exciting enough for the new generation. Or, I’m only guessing but I think I might be close here, that that level of logic just isn’t required in a country where you are trained from day dot to accept everything you are told by old people at face value.
“I know Fido was old dear, but he moved to America to become a talent. That’s what’s best for old dogs”. Anyone who has lived here will know what I mean.

pictoral representation of my grocery store conversation

2006-01-20T11:23:00.000+09:00

This is my conversation with the grocery store guy, in visual format.
And for no reason at all
this is my mate Dave's ear.

My really real birthday (I)

2006-01-09T11:04:00.000+09:00

my dears, for what a week it has been. The very next day after my last blog my wife was acting very queer indeed. It was my birthday of course, and although she had never done anything like it before I had begun to suspect that she might be organizing a surprise party. The upshot of it all was that by the time work had finished on the Wednesday I was certain that there was a surprise party and I was going to it now, and lordy had all of this figuring-out, guessing-about and assuming-the-best given me a thirst. What a difference fifteen minutes makes. By five past 8 I was walking home from work with a mate of mine and slowly coming to the realization that it wasn’t to be. By ten past 8 I was telling him, in elaborate detail, about how I had been expecting a surprise party and had built myself up so much that I was now rather disappointed, the suggestion came about that we should have a birthday beer then anyways, and by 8:15 we had walked in on the surprise party that I had convinced myself wasn’t going to happen. I had run the full gamut of beer-centric, beer-loving emotions, from the loftiest brewed-malt-beverage anticipation to the usually-much-much-much-later-in-the-evening ‘trying to make oneself understood’ explanation of ‘what I really meant’, back up to the upswept, unalloyed hedonism that only free flowing frosty-draught-beverage, a table of fruit platters, cheese, crackers, olives, prawns, crab, calamari, cuttlefish (no, that’s not a type-o), pizza, chicken and all of your best mates, and all on somebody else’s bill, can bring about. even if your wife is the person picking up the bill (or so I thought at the time).As it turned out, it was the best night out for a seriously long time. Friends, food and drink in abundance, followed by singing room and soju. And upon checking the digital camera the following early afternoon, when I awoke in seven distinctly different shades of hungover (oh! Blessed mercy, sacred and wonderful 2pm starts), I discovered that we had also been to a ‘soju and fishbread’ tent and it had snowed for the first time since last march. I left the house at about half past midday and went to a public bathhouse on the way discovering that it had in fact snowed last night just as the photos of me and a few mates being snowed on had suggested.

My really real birthday (II)

2006-01-09T11:03:00.000+09:00

I realized on Saturday, that it was in fact me who had paid for the party, in a round about way. We were on the way to a city called yang yang by bus, as I cannot ride the bike now. My wife had lured me there under false pretences, of which I had no idea at all. Underway she told me that my real birthday present (as I had received from her on my birthday only 1 party and otherwise only 2 pairs of socks) was a joy flight over the seorak mountain range. One of the very few things that my wife doesn’t know about me is my second great fear in life. The first is chickens. she knows that, she would never have given me a chicken for my birthday for the way I just hate and fear their beady little chicken eyes and beaky little beaks, their whole chickeny little heads, barely disguising their malevolent ideals. Nasty, vicious little creatures bent on chickening me to death. You can just feel it from them. Eagh! God I hate chickens and always have. The only other things on this earth that truly frighten me are light aircraft. If it was a chicken I would have cried and admitted defeat right then and there, but as she had put so much effort into organizing it and keeping it from me for it to be a surprise, and she was sooooooooooo keen and had no idea of my fear of light aircraft, I chose to say nothing apart from ‘bubba, I love you and thank you’. I would come to regret that.The whole journey to yang yang she was happy and gay, but just as we arrived she asked of me “what’s wrong?” I told her that I had been in light aircraft but twice before and both of those experiences had impressed upon me a perfectly rational fear of flying. I don’t suffer from it in the bigger aircraft, or at least the large amount of room to move and the cuties serving free gin and tonic, and the gin and tonics themselves go a ways to assuaging that perfectly rational fear. this fear is not like (don’t make me say it again) chickens. Fear of chickens is irrational, fear of flying is not. I know this.

My really real birthday (III)

2006-01-09T11:01:00.000+09:00

Long and the short of it is that I agreed to go up in the plane (4 seater Cessna). There we were, me and parky and the pilot, and this other dude in his early thirties. This dude had a leather flying jacket, flying glasses and all the other things you would expect someone to have if they believed themselves to be a pilot but really were still in the wishing stage. After one and a half hours wait, we were to go. But so was the strange ‘biggles’ looking dude. Unbeknownst to us at that moment (although we very quickly figured it out), at the same time as we were to be having a joy flight, he was to be having just another lesson on the way to gaining his pilots license (which, by the way, I hope he never gets).

My really real birthday (IV)

2006-01-09T10:58:00.000+09:00

I don’t want to go too far into detail because without having been there it would be as boring as bat shit. suffice it to say that novice boy took off, banked right, flew five minutes, banked right again, landed, took of again, banked right, flew five minutes again, landed again, took off again, banked right again and flew another couple of minutes…….we were just doing circles with noddy and big ears at the wheel. We were jumping up and down, to-ing and fro-ing, being blasted by the wind. It’s already as boring as bat shit to tell, but believe you me this was no normal flight. After the third take off, I could hear over the headphones “take it to 3000,,,,,,,,,,,,,now to 4000,,,,,,,now bank……..” it was at this point I started telling parky that “ I want them to land this fucking plane right now, and if we go round in one more fucking circle I’m not sure what I will do”. She conveyed my message to the captain who immediately took the wheel and banked about and later landed the plane. Mind you, the whole time that he was flying the ride was smother, the aircraft was stable and we had both regained our composure. By the time we realized this change in flying conditions though, we were so happy to be on the ground that the idea of saying “you take us for our flight” never occurred to us. Be very bloody sure it never occurred to me.I know this sounds like a chicken shit story, but it was really bumpy. I mean really bumpy. Not like “a blast of wind blowing at your car as you drive over a bridge” bumpy, more like “when you land, your wife informs the captain that he is the lowest form of fuckwit, and he offers you a full refund” bumpy, That kind of bumpy. Oh, yes sireeee Bob! That kinda bumpy.

My really real birthday (V)

2006-01-09T10:55:00.000+09:00

As it happened he had offered me a full refund, without me, at the time, or him ever knowing it. For the final act of birthday surprise was that my wife has been squirreling away 20 or 30 bucks a week since we came here last February, and that has now amounted to about $1000 Australian. That was my final birthday present, but the cost of the party and the flight were deducted from it. As were my birthday dinner on saturday, some clothes for parky that I (unbeknownst to me) had bought along with some make-up, the return bus tickets for two to yangyang and sending quite a few winter clothes to the dry cleaners. Also we had a couple of bills that needed to be paid. Then there were the 2 years of films that we never got round to developing (before we went digital) that cost $130 along with a few physiotherapy appointments for my collarbone. Actually when I get the AUD$170 refund from the flight, this coming Monday, I will be a full AUD$220 in front on the deal.

2006-01-09T00:20:00.000+09:00

(Parky, if you are reading this, know that I love you, and know that now you have given me a joy flight (with the exception of presenting me with a fully grown chicken) that is the first, last and only time you will ever see me behaving like a BIG GIRLS BLOUSE! I promise.)

Our Christmas (almost)

2006-01-04T11:03:00.000+09:00

Now that i come to think about it. this wasn't Christmas when we were sitting down in our jammies and toasting Christmas after having exchanged gifts and had christmas breaky, it was actually the morning of the 24th. this was because the next day we were going to spend 7 hours or more driving to Tongers. We were celebrating a day early, a story that is becoming all too familiar...........

My Birthday (almost)

2006-01-04T11:00:00.000+09:00

it is 11:20, third of january 2006, by central daylight savings time it is my birthday. 12:50am on the fourth in Adelaide. It is for many reasons also my birthday here.

The first reason is that all of parky’s family have rung me today to wish me a happy birthday. I figured that parky had told them the wrong day and therefore they all got it wrong together.

Then my mum gives me a ring, with my father and elder brother in tow, and wishes me a happy birthday.

They say that if everyone tells you exactly the same thing, regardless of how sure you are about it (even your own bloody birthday for example) you start to doubt yourself. And proof of the validity of that claim is that parky and I went out for a combined birthday dinner thinking “why the hell not?” After 5 phone calls and two text messages congratulating me on my birthday and about an hour at the pub discussing how weird it is and following birthday related topics, it just begun to feel like my birthday. We figured that it isn’t going to get more birthdayish that this, and nobody is going to ring me tomorrow as they’ve all done it today, so bugger it, let’s go crazy and have a birthday bash tonight. And we did.

We have a combined birthday because we chose to celebrate our birthdays on the same day every year. This is because her birthday changes every year with the Buddhist calendar, but for the year that we were married, the 4th of January (by the Christian calendar) and the 13th of December (by the Buddhist calendar) both fell on the 4th of January. This year, for the uninitiated, 13th of December by the buddhist calendar falls on the 12th of January by ours. That gives you a few days to get an international dialing card and give parky a quick ring for her birthday.

As it turned out mum and dad had rung during class and we spoke for less than a minute but during the course of the next phone call an hour and a half later i explained to mum and dad that I really had always though that my birthday was that 4th of jan. My mum says “really, isn’t it your birthday?” I said “no, I don’t think so”. This was followed by my dad and brother (from either of whom I haven’t received a solo birthday card or call since my teens) giving her a two minute “Oh Yeah That’s What We Said”. Full of “I knew it wasn’t today” or “I knew all along”. What I didn’t hear however was “I knew it was tomorrow”, or “it’s the 4th, you dolt”. No such thing, no putting oneself out on a limb. No siree bob. So minus a couple of hundred for bravery and memory for you boys anyway.

All in all it was a pretty weird birthday and the weirdest of it all is that it isn’t.
Caio
benjamin

2005-12-29T14:29:00.001+09:00

Us with Parky's Mum and Dad

Winter Vacation 2005

2005-12-29T14:29:00.000+09:00

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.

2005-12-29T14:11:00.000+09:00

Sea off the coast of Tongers

2005-12-29T14:10:00.000+09:00

Gimhae New City Centre

2005-12-29T14:09:00.000+09:00

Gimhae Old City Centre

2005-12-29T14:08:00.000+09:00

2005-12-29T14:07:00.000+09:00

2005-12-28T17:40:00.000+09:00

this is my wife and i walking on a winters day in gangneung. i am just trying to get this to work and i have no idea what i am doing. it is pissing me off no end!

2005-12-28T16:11:00.000+09:00

plop