C:\Marlow\

My iPod battery just died on me again. At least it was kind enough to wait for me to get home today, last time it waited until 20 seconds into my 1st song to kick it. I’m extremely grateful that it lasted my entire trip in the park, it was a much needed chance to relax.

The past couple of days have been a bit trying on me. On Sunday, what I thought was a pretty butal hangover turned out to last 4 days and was in fact the flu. I went to the doctor’s with a Korean friend and got a shot in my rear. I then went to the pharmacy and got a nice long strip of meds.

My portable hard drive died a little while ago so I went to Yongsan, the electronics market, to found out what could be done about it. I found out the other day that the recovery might not even be possible and also how much it would cost for them to attempt to recover the data. To let them try to get the data back it’d cost me 550,000 Korean won, which is approximately CAD$680.

I died a little inside.

That’s all my music I ever bought downloaded, about 100GB of bboying videos, a lot which I’ll never get again, and ALL MY PHOTOS EVER. The loss of the photos is what will hit me the hardest and will somewhat explain the subject of my next blog post (don’t worry, it’ll have photos).

So going to the park to listen to some relaxing music really helped me to calm down and feel a bit better. Usually I just either mope around or try and go out and do something to ignore the feeling.
What do you do when you’re in one of those sad or depressed moods?

technorati tags:korea, harddrive, music, emo, sad

I figured it’s been long enough that a post was required to keep the people I’m not in regular contact with up to date on what I’m doing.

So you may or may not know that my contract teaching little Korean devils English has finished. Nara has gone home and yet here I remain. I decided that I needed a vacation because believe it or not managing a room full of little kids that don’t understand you can be quite stressful. So I’m staying in Korea in a small one room apartment with a shared kitchen to relax, practice my bboying, and quite possibly see more of South Korea that I didn’t before.

I realize that my blog has fallen into disrepair and that I had promised to update more often and to add the pictures to my previous Thailand post but now I have an excuse… My beloved hard drive died. Pictures, music, bboy videos and all But there is hope and I will try and fix it myself and then my friends this blog will no longer be a rarely updated cesspool of text but a glorious oasis of shining media in the desert of shitty blogs.

Anyways last night it was my friend Han SangTae’s birthday so we all went to his house to celebrate. Now, one thing about Korean culture that’s different to Canada is that on your birthday it’s YOU that pay for everything. So the economically logical place to celebrate would then be at your house instead of a crazy expensive bar. So we all chipped in for pizza and Han broke out the soju which is cause for merriment.

So this brief post has been a while in the making due to a few blogging software updates but I promise photos and/or videos on the next post, so please be patient

I don’t know why I’m blogging more now that I’m in Thailand. My guess is either the warmer weather makes me more creative or that now that I’m outside of my Korean everyday routine I actually have some interesting things to write about. I think I’m going to go with the latter.

So we just got back to Bangkok, which is like our pseudo home in Thailand. We landed here from Korea, we then left on the tour of Kanchanaburi and then came back here again.

The tour in Kanchanaburi was fantastic! It started off on a rather low note in my opinion as the river Kwai museum was a large finely aged piece of ass. Everything had cobwebs on it and was falling apart. There seemed to be no effort at all to preserve any of the items that they were displaying and the translations were pretty poorly done. Then Nara and I got to walk on the old (what was left of it) and new bridges over the river Kwai. Which was cool and luckily Nara and I got off the bridge before the tourist train plowed across it without warning. Others weren’t so lucky and had to wait on these tiny over-hangings.

After the river Kwai we went to the river camp that would be our base camp for the next 2 days. We met some friendly Aussies at the camp and these awesome Italians. The Italians we’re really fun to talk to and had been all over but there was an odd language barrier. They both spoke a little English but Fabio spoke perfect French and Ivan spoke pretty much only Italian but with Nara and I talking French and Fabio translating there was little trouble

After a decent Dinner Nara and I decided to go the extra couple of yards and do the optional “bathe the elephants” item on the menu and got driven out to an elephant riding camp. Here we got thrown on the back of a slightly disturbed Asian elephant which then preceeded to constantly walk off the path to grab food despite the yelling and frantic grunting of our 8 year old elephant driver. This wasn’t too bad until the elephant almost went down a hill sideways at a 45 degree incline. We almost fell off this bastard about 5 times and I’m sure it would’ve hurt plenty. Once in the river the elephant began blowing water/snot all over Nara and making noises akin to that of a slightly broken lawnmower at another elephant, which the guide tried to convince us was because they were friends. Everyone one of us got chucked off the elephant at least once and we all had a great time washing these crazy dudes. Well worth the couple extra bucks and I’d highly recommend you accept the next time someone offers to let you wash their semi-crazed elephant.

< Elephant photos to arrive here once hard drive roblem is resolved>

After all that jazz, we went to see a beautiful waterfall but there were no psychotic pachiderms so i’ll just leave some photos to look at

< waterfall Elephant photos to arrive here once hard drive roblem is resolved>

The next day we got to ride the elephants at the same camp on a seat but it wasn’t quite the same as riding them bareback down a steep hill so it was unfortunately a little of a let down but fun all the same (note: next time ride the elephant and THEN clean it). Then we went back to the camp and relaxed for a bit before heading off to the Tiger Temple which was FANtastic.

UPDATES TO FOLLOW BECAUSE I THINK THIS THAI LADY WANTS US OUT OF HERE.

Well Nara and finally arrived in Thailand at midnight on our Saturday. We went straight from the airport to Khao San Road, which is the backpackers haven in Bangkok. We jumped in a cab for 40 minutes racking up the huge bill of 291 Baht (about $9 or so).

We weren’t on this road for even 5 minutes before I came across some Thai bboys dancing in the road. Nodded a greeting and then we grabbed a hostel room and went back to see the bboys. They had already stopped dancing so I was a little downed by that as I wanted to join in. One of them, however, spoke perfect English and we chatted for a bit. There are no competitions coming up this week while I’m here (I think I saw Nara smile when he said this) but he gave me his proffessional bboy card so I could give him a call to go and practice with him and his crew. I think I like this country.

We walked around Khao San for a bit and I grabbed a Pad Thai for 20 Baht which is approxiamately $0.64. Not a bad deal at all. Anyways, we didn’t ask to see the room at the Hostel because it seemed pretty bare in the photo anyways so we didn’t think there’d be a problem. We didn’t however expect there to be no bed sheets. Oddly enough Thailand nights aren’t as warm as the days and it was an uncomfortable sleep to be sure. Not staying there again, to say the least.

Anyways, I’m sorry I don’t have any photos to update with but in a day or two I hope I’ll have some nice shots to show off on here and keep you all entertained. Tomorrow Nara and I should be going to a tiger sanctuary among other things so stay tuned

Where else do you think I should go and what should I eat? I hope you guys have some recommendations for me

Well, today at work we had a winter party for the kids mainly because we weren’t allowed to have a hallowe’en party (I know, bunk eh?). So today was the short day so there weren’t too many kids and it was pretty fun. So I thought a few people would get a kick out of some photos cause that’s what makes the blog post, right?

So without further ado….

This game involved sucking up “snowflakes” to get them to the other side of the class room and drop them in a bowl. This was an awesome game and only two kids cried cause they didn’t have the lung power to suck the cotton thing up (that’ll teach ‘em for smoking)

This is a game of stickball and Susan (seen here) was hillariously bad at it. They had to hit a syrofoam snowball in a straight line, around a chair and in a straight line back. Some kids almost friggin died somehow. I kept cringing anytime a kid went off sprinting towards the white board which has a jagged marker tray at exactly eye level for these uncoordinated balls of hyper.

This is just Ross being sexy. Nothing unusual here.

I hate this thing, whatever the hell it’s called. I think Nara said his name was Hank but someone changed it to Eric. They should have called him Kragnell the Irritating or something equally goblinesque.

Believe it or not this was a pose. I thought he was depressed or something but when the camera went down he smiled and wanted to see how damn pouty-sexy he looked. Oh right, PS: this is a boy.

Never yell “Sexy pose!” at students. This disaster is what happens.

For winning games the kids got play money to buy treats with. Nick (on the right) bought me a chocolate bar. He is going to be getting a very nice report card. You know what? I think he deserves a haiku, Jon-style.

Happy finger sign

Chiseled good looks of a god

Chris can be bought cheap.

Back to back girly poses. Top girl was cute but annoying. Amber is just plain cute.

Ron and Calvin, these two bad-asses are telling me how much time I have to live. I’m actually posting this from the hospital because they beat me up so bad.

And if any of you sick freaks make messed up comments about these students being hot…

Just tell me which ones and I’ll give you their number.

Oh! If you want to check out any of my others photos I’ve been taking feel free to check out my Flickr account and tell me your favourite photo in a comment!

technorati tags:Korea, teaching, students, party, winter, kids, cute

This is a sample of the confusion in the aftermath of yet another bomb siren drill. They would not let us cross the damn street until the second siren went off signifying not that this time there is a REAL bomb threat but that in fact the drill was over.

This second siren went off 15 minutes after Nara and I got to the intersection. This was especially annoying because our workplace is the second building on the other side of the road. You can see two of our damn students on the other side of the street and when the kid with the soccer ball tries to cross the street he gets his ass yelled at.