Water and Its Magnetic Effect

Hey - has been a while since I blogged, which I blame on test making and report card writing, a monthly affair that calls on your most diplomatic phrases (When (insert bland child's name) puts in a satisfactory amount of effort, he/she can absorb all the necessary grammatical points. However....) and so forth. This is a canny code for 'Your child sucks, has the concentration levels of a recently deceased badger and can't tell his pencils from his body parts'. For the most part, though, I can say positive things about my children and mean them. I have come a long way.

I had the most enjoyable weekend which involved water, Chilean red wine, memories of the death of Kirsty MacColl and the shadowy advent of the beginning of my Tae-Kwon Do lessons. Firstly, on Friday night, Mike, Shaun, Annabelle, her boyfriend Song-Hyeon and I visited this fantastic bar in Hongdae which had an outdoor patio area and it's own little swimming pool! There were also sun loungers, swinging chairs (which induced a feeling of seasickness in Shaun a few glasses of wine later) and hammocks to create a gorgeous haven in the middle of Seoul. Many hammered Koreans climbed into the pool, fully clothed and the water came up to their inebriated waists, as they waved frantically to their reluctant fellow drinkers to join them. This was all well and good to watch until I, in all my wisdom, decided that it would be a great idea to get in myself. I dragged the unfortunate Mike with me and we splashed each other (and some irate drinkers nearby who one of our fellow partiers had to placate). It was immense fun.

We followed this up with a trip to the beach on Sunday. Koreans like to frequent the beach fully clothed (and I don't just mean shorts and a t-shirt - I'm talking jeans, wedge-heeled sandals, jackets, parasols, matching expressions of bewilderment) whilst we were wearing - gasp!- swimsuits. And large Baywatch style motorboats filled with overexcited women squealing (it's a boat! And it's going fast!) came decapitatingly close to the shore. Mike, Karen and I had an entertaining game of frisbee in the water where I learned that like most things in life, diving for the frisbee practically before it's even thrown leads to inevitable disappointment.

I would just like to inform you that Tae-Kwon Do is painful. Don't be fooled by the pansy 'we are going to get you to practice your running from wall-to-wall skills for six weeks' that the
black belted instructors in Queens were trying to propagate. Our instructor (who is hilarious in his mercilessness) already has us kicking each other after two days (although we are padded up Michelin Man style). We all have bruised feet, strained hamstrings and a fantastic outfit which make us all look like we're trying to emulate the female Karate Kid. It's hard to be this cool.

Blast My Cueing Ineptitude!

I have just been beaten in pool by Mike (albeit, it was by de-fault, the two most beautiful words in the English Language.) I have now been ostracised as the left handed, poor eye-sighted, shoddily clothed amateur that I am and am now taking advantage of the free internet. It pays to be able to take advantage of even the darkest of situations.

I have recovered nicely from my fall, but perhaps not nicely enough for what I have just ill-advisedly signed myself up for - intense Tae-kwon Do lessons. I remember doing TKD for a few months as a gymnasium challenged freshman but I was surrounded by others quite as imbecilic as myself. Now, however, it will be for five nights a week, with four vicious Irish women who have spent the day being mentally stymied by reams of ungrateful children (and there is one who claims that she likes to hit the people that she knows the most, and shies from strangers). Intense, to say the least. I envision situations like this -

Walking down the corridor in school. Fellow teacher / tae-kwon-doer accidentally bumps into person but victim is convinced of the deliberateness of the move and later batters the crap out of her whilst protesting that this is the nature of the sport.

Nothing shall ever be innocent again. I look forward to the bruises and the blood clots.

I spent an extremely interesting weekend in Gunsan with Cara. We were on an air base having a barbeque (with real cheese!) and playing rugby (a real game!) albeit with an American football. Then we had a drunken night out in a place called, in a fit of inspiration and probably for the cerebrally challenged that frequent it, America Town. This is a place that consists of the following - juicys, plastic beakers, faux champagne, sleazy military men devoid of qualms and some interesting cocktails that are eminently drinkable and horrifyingly inxicating. It all ended, messily, with someone belting out Paradise City and some creative tambourining in a noribang.

I shall return to the pool table now steeled against humiliation (a lesson well learned in university, methinks, through discovering the things that you're really crap at.)

I Feel Like A Dalek....

Have you ever wondered why humans and stairs are fundamentally incompatible? I have never really pondered this question (even when I tumbled arse over face down the stairs in a bar in Cavan and I was wearing a skirt of risque proportions) until this weekend had passed, and left me bruised, baffled and more than a little mortified.

I was in the aforementioned Bar Under, a place when Koreans and foreigners mingle unobtrusively in Sinchon, and had consumed a few cocktails and a lethal drink known as a soju kettle (six shots of soju and the most of a 2 litre bottle of soda, served in the bottle with the top hacked off). I remember very clearly turning on my ankle, falling down the first few stairs sideways before loosening my limbs in defeat and tumbling down the rest backwards. It hurt. Not that night, of course, but I woke up the next day questioning the merit of my actions. It was hilarious, though, and I'm sure that none of you would have any real trouble picturing me doing something clumsy and inept.

Anyway, like a Dalek, the machine with the stupidest fatal flaw ever, I now view stairs with trepidation. One of my fellow workmates fell up the stairs of our apartment block recently which she claims was more mentally damaging, though the physical repercussions were slight. Seoul is a true modern city in that you need stairs to access the other side of the road, often, as well as for simple things like using the bathroom, utilizing the internet. All such journeys are stair based. I now ascend and descend, planning my next fall and wondering whether or not the fetal position would be of any real use.

Hmmm, a whole blog about stairs. I am hoping that I will hear stories of solidarity and sympathy so I won't feel quite so stupid but judging by the reaction I have already received from my mother, such sympathy is likely to be in short supply. Incidentally, I am going to Thailand for a week at the end of July, where I will be sticking to uno-leveled architectural structures.

I Hath Returneth

Yooooooo!

Believe it or not, I have made it back from Hong Kong relatively unscathed, apart from an intense desire to still be there, as opposed to sitting in an office considering how to teach action verbs to my classes. HK was an incredible city, full of clueless foreigners like ourselves and interesting reminders of its recently concluded British colonial rule (the female voiceover on the subway had a plummy posh English accent and the No Parking road signs brought a mist of homesickness to my eye.) I was also relieved to have not killed Mike, or to have been murdered. We were alarmingly civil to each other - one might even say adult! - and this was maintained nicely for four days, even when I had to win my own panda at an amusement park. He claimed to have been irreparably emasculated by the incident. I say that such a process happened long before I (skilfully) knocked those three tins over.

We followed the tourist trail in 30 degree heat, not to mention a nice lashing of humidity. We had been expecting monsoonal rain so were pleasantly surprised when the only rain that we experienced was when we were getting the shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport. We saw, in no apparent order - Victoria Peak, Tsim Sha Shui, Lantau Island, a giant Buddha, some pink harbour dolphins, Ocean Park, The Symphony of Lights, several markets, a Danish couple who thought that Mike, who was wearing a Danish football shirt, was perhaps one of their own. It was quite a shock to meet Danish tourists. Do Danish people ever leave Denmark? Why would they want to? Has anyone ever happened across a Danish person before?

We saw pink dolphins, described optimistically by the travel brochure as being 'bubblegum pink'. I would have had them as a patchy shell pink myself. They were also rather cheeky and elusive, allowing no one but those with razor sharp reactions to get a picture. I will have lots of shots of choppy, fin-less ocean. I also discovered a piece of chocolate-y goodness, in the shape of a Milo energy bar. For those that don't know, Milo is a uniquely Aussie chocolate malty drink and it is so good. The chocolate bar was nearly enough to make me pass out. I cannot enunciate enough what a loser I am to have visited HK and only have a story about a chocolate bar.

We were also hoodwinked by a massive Buddha in the mountains of Lantau Island. He was 36/37 metres high and covered in solid bronze. We were flabbergasted by how impressive he was, particularly when you could see him from the ocean, sitting grandly on a mountain top, but this was undone slightly by the fact that he was built in....1993. He was 12 years old. I was nearly twice his age. I could be his mother. Do I hear the whisper of 'tourist trap' in the semi-tropical trees?

I had such a blindingly good time, though. I only hope that I can teach the children today without a bitter glint of deprivation in my eyes...