All over the shop!

At the moment, I'm in Korea's hottest city - Daegu.
I stayed in Jeonju for two weeks, and then headed off one fateful day.
I got literally about 28kms or so, when a family spotted me and pulled over because the mom wanted to meet the yellow haired person on a bike. Ha. So they took a photo with me and then invited me to stay the night at their house, so of COURSE i said yes!
So they drove ahead and waited for me to bike to the street where their shop is - where we hung out, went for a walk in their beautiful park, played guitar (the mom is a teacher and AWESOME at guitar!), and ate dinner (dad is a chef! ha), and the kids rushed home from school to meet the forienger! The best part was, the next day was exam day, but they were exempt from studying since I was there.
I should offer myself for hire.
Kids all over Korea would love me!
So anyways, back in Gimje where reality exists, we went for a bike ride to the local stadium where what seemed like the whole female population of the town was out doing K-Pop (Korean Pop, duh) dance aerobics. The remainder of the town was walking, running, biking around the track and the kids playing soccer in the centre. It was such a freakin blast!! I was a little swarmed by the kids, but still hasn't beaten the time my friend and I were swarmed in Turkey earlier this year. Koreans are just plagued by shyness when it comes to English. My friend has told me conversations she's overheard about Koreans saying 'go, talk to her in english! say ' something! Ive even had questions handed to me on paper such as 'What's your name?' because they've never talked to a forienger before.

My friend (Jenny) has a brother who is in the military at the moment (males are required to do an obligatory 2 years between the age of 18-28), and came home for a few days break for a holiday (Chosok, I believe), and he was too shy to talk to me or mostly even hang out in the same room because he'd never spoken English to anyone but Koreans in school. So he has this bag...that I've been using since I've been staying in his room - and I showed him to make sure it was ok, and he said it was a present for me! So I naturally hugged him. He kind of shot back and first and then hugged me SUPER awkwardly. Later, my friend told me hugging isn't normal here to the extent that he'd never hugged anyone before! Not a girlfriend, not his sister. Ha, just me.

Awesome.

Yesterday another friend of Jenny's took us on a 'tour of Daegu', which means he picked us up in his car and drove us into the freaking breathtaking mountains of Daegu, to this mountain-top resturant where we ate, played guitar, and jumped around and had a blast breathing in the fresh air and being on top of the world!

Then I came home to study a bit...turns out Jenny's dad is a teacher and totally went all teacher on me. Ha. We studied for what felt like forever (I think over an hour), and I was drilled, told to think, and asked questions at such rapid fire pace ... now keep in mind he doesn't speak english, and my korean is decidedly beginner. It was so funny, I felt like a cross-eyed cartoon half the time, trying to sort out what was happening, but I definitely got the gist of where it was going, and got the answers in the text book right in the end! Woo!

It's a grand adventure!