Japan just stole my heart

My first day in Japan was huge. Insane even. I was literally F.O.B.; fresh off the boat, when i hopped on my first train at 9am, and then proceeded to play communication charades with these two adorable Japanese girls. I had to email my friend what time I'd arrive in Osaka so we could meet up, and after a bunch of gesturing, outbursts of laughter and a whole bunch of wrong guesses, we finally connected the dots enough for me to send a quick one liner to my buddy.

So a bullet train and two and a half hours later and I'm in Osaka, waiting for my friend in the designated McDonalds, and already people and clothes watching like mad. Then Ralph shows up with two other girls who are friends of his New Zealand neighbour, and immediately packed us into their van for some adventures. After dropping our bags off at their place we went to an ancient castle surrounded by a moat,Eeent downtown and ate some Yaki soba (octopus balls -sooo yum!), and went to see a band play! I already want to go shopping even though the Yen is at a crazy high at the moment and makingt me so cautious of spending money that I actually only ate crackers on the ship on the way over, and crackers again until after meeting everyone.

Next was a wander on the busy streets, where eveyone is dressed to really impress, whether it be clubwear, harajuku-style or even a bit Tim Burton-esque. I loved it! Afterwards, we headed to the sushi train with their mom (who speaks Korean, so we were able to talk a lot!) and other sister - holy yum. Vancouver, Canada where I was previously living is mad about Sushi and I in that sense was 100% a Vancouverite, so after non-stop Korean food for the last few months, it was totally a welcome reprieve and ridiculously delicious. Plus, there were these toy dispenser things above every table - when you were done with five plates and dropped them into the tables slot, something like a Vegas poker machine would spin and if you won, the dispenser would roll a little vending machine style present your way.

So after all this, the night still wasnt over. We stopped back home for their dad and some supplies, and headed over to the traditional Japanese baths. Its quite similar to Korea, where women and men are separated for the nude bathing part, but they don't gather clothed in a communal part, and there's also no swimming section.

After getting back to the house, Ralph and I decided to go get our wander on the local side streets, which were just too cute to resist, so after grabbing a few beers we settled onto some random tins on the road to drink, but before we even got half way, somehow the dad managed to find us an took us into his local watering hole and bought us another drink. Home at 2am, and an AMAZING first day in Japan. I'm totally smitten.

The excitement before the adventure

Today

I'm catching a boat to Japan.

I have to catch a bus to Busan, then be at my boat, ticket in hand by 6pm.

I'm stocking up on film, and already have an arsenal of cheap food, and soju (korean alcohol) to share.

I can't freakin wait.

My friend and I are meeting up in Osaka, so I have a 3 hr train ride as soon as I get there tomorrow morning. 

BOOYAH.

August

 The cafeteria ladies that fed us all month

So far August has been a complete vortex or whirlwind that I got sucked into. I ended up taking a month of work at an English camp for kids, so I taught 4 weeks non-stop (and I mean non-stop .. i had two Saturdays off in the whole month and that was IT.) We lived in the same building as the kids, and were locked in at 11.30pm on the dot every night, so we ended up spending a lot of our time together in the corner lounge hanging out. The crazy thing was, our Korean counterparts were told strictly no hanging out with the foreginers, and since they attend the school where the camp was held, there really could be serious ramifications for them down the line, so they kept their distance outside of work hours. Two of them would sometimes brave hanging out in the lounge with that, and for that they became most of our favourites; we got a chance to know them without feeling like we had some kind of rampantly infectious disease after hours.

 Louie - My assistant for the month and the raddest dude there. He was the only Korean guy to brave
hanging with us after hours, and even then, it was only on school grounds.

We all had our own T.A's - teachers assistants - but the degree to which they helped varied greatly between teachers. I lucked out getting this guy - I totally made a friend, but also had someone who didn't care if i taught barefoot, goofed around with the kids more than taught some classes, or helped them out with their homework a little too much. These kids were up at 7.30am doing exercises, meaning they had sometimes even worken up before 6am (they all had English camp diaries that I would read and grammatically correct, so I knew a lot about what they liked and didn't like!). They also kept going after we foreign teacher would knock off after dinner at 6.30pm - the TA's would walk the kinds back to the classrooms, and they had a full schedule of more study, homework time, and a little bit of indoor play time before their bed time of 10pm. A lot of them would stay up later anyways, just to have some play time with their friends. It was so insane. I cannot imagine being a kid in Korea.

One time in class when we had some free time, I decided a good use of the time would be to watch the Simpsons - in English with Korean subtitles. So I'm up the back of the class working or drawing or something; kinda of just half-listening to what was going on. It turns out it's an episode where Bart hasn't done his homework in a month, so Marge and Homer are sent a letter and called into Principle Skinners office, where he makes a huge pile of all the homework Bart hasn't done. Then Homer gets all on a kick and tells him to give him MORE homework, that he wants Bart to have so much homework that he turns into a Korean. 

I completely lost it.

I laughed so much up the back at the complete irony of this, and the kids were just like, "what teacher, what?!". So I went up and rewound it a little so they could see again, but their reaction was completely deadpan, and one kid pipes up, "Not funny, teacher.".

Ha. whoops. My bad.

Student names

Johnny

i have the best students names!
here are some for your reading pleasure. i hope you laugh out loud. i do all the time.

Obama
Jesus
C.E.O
Bear
Sparrow
Ghost
Bomb
Clint Eastwood
Glue pop
Pablo (a KOREAN kid!)

I laugh everyday at mostly Obama (he's cute and smart and pretty sneaky!), C.E.O (he's a kind brainiac), and Jesus (he kind of just wanders around and doesn't pay attention to much, but has the CUTEST little face).
My favourite kid is this kind of hyperactive / attention getting kid that most everyone else wants to kill. His name is johnny and it's his birthday tomorrow, so I bought him a cool race car present tonight. I'll miss him loads.
i forgot the funny names from last week already. Bummer. I'm gunna have to look them up again.
the funniest one ...I have to think hard .. OH! his name was Symptom. Most of the teachers tried to tell him to change it, but I like to encourage these fun names. It's not like it's their real names anyway; might as well have one you think is awesome.

Good mistake

Yesterday after finally waking up (my friends and I hit the social circuit of Daegu until 5am), made my "early start" to get back to the city of Daechon to get back to the mud festival to take photos. Seems

I partied to hard and my 5 hours of sleep didn't quite cut it for the brain waves to be in action, and after hoppin on my bus and zoning out to a movie on my iPod, I disembarked 2 hours layer to find myself in

Daejon, not Daechon. I actualy had no idea where in korea I was for about 15minutes; I ASSUMED this must be Daejon, but as I'd never been there I wasn't so sure. Luckily I've got a few friends that I met thru skateboarding in Seoul that live here. Turns out my luck is impeccable some days, as they had just gotten back from a month and a half trip overseas to Canada and Japan, my friends dad had lent him the car for the day (which is apparently a rare occurrence), and he was picking up his girlfriend at the time, who lives right by the bus station I showed up at. So they swung by 10mins later and we were on our way to the best Su-jae-be (like.. Soup with yummy morsels of black compressed rice in it) in town!

Sorry for crashing the date, by the way.

After that we got Strawberry bak-bing-su (strawberries, shaved ice,  ice cream and milk...mmm), and two other buddies showed up so we could share a drink and just have a fun night all hanging out, and my friends girlfriend was awesome and put me up for the night and even took the hour Lon bus ride with me the following day to get to where I needed to catch the intercity bus from! SUCH an awesome girl!

So all this went down; a little to my embarassment but good all the same; and I got to the the festival for it's final day, bursting with blue skies and oversized puffy white clouds. (I also made some of the best mud-based soap you may have ever seen) 

Tonight, I head for Jeonju, another friends house, another two hour bus ride, but a great weekend behind me.

just me and a few hundred others

I'm currently living in a dorm on a university campus, where I am living in the same building as the other teachers and the other kids. three floors of them. It's kind of like mayhem, with the kids not able to go outside and play, they end up playing indoors all night long (mind you, they're kept pretty busy with study until about 9-10pm). Yesterday, the kids figured out the code to my door, and one of them just punched it in and let him self in while i was sitting inside. He then thought he could just come in and hang out, as if he'd figured out the secret code word to the clubhouse. 

It's been a bit tought at times, seeing this many people everyday and not really having any alone time, aside from just escaping to my room and shutting my paper thin door momentairily to all the noise and chaos that is just beyond, but I really will miss these kids when they go at the end of the week.

Of course.

The f@!&ing bus broke down.

The one time in Korea I've actually had somewhere to be.

I am literally going to be skating in by the skin of my teeth. I had an hour to spare before to bike back to the camp, but now I'll have to throw my bike into a taxi and just straight up hustle. Thank God

another bus came by that we flagged down to take the desperate stragglers of my bus in, and I whipped my bike into the only hatch that opened, since the side of this bus had obviously been making out

with a car.

Here's hoping I make it on time.

Late night lock down

At the moment, I'm on my way back to the town I'm living in for the next month on a bus. I went a few hours back to my friends house in Daegu to pick up my bike so that I could ride it around in my free time, since I'm currently working at a summer camp for kids. It's a little insane, a lot of work, bit also a lot of fun. I'm really quite lucky I found this, since my food and accomodation is free! The down side is, since we are staying in the same building as the kids, the whole building goes on an automated lock down at 11:30at night. No one told me this however, so I literally found out the hard way one night at 11:46pm when I ambles back to the building.

There was a suspicious yellow chain now strung across the grounds, which I happily jumped to get to the door. My fears were confirmed when I tugged on the door and it didn't budge at all. So I ran over to another door that I saw someone passing by, but they said try couldn't open it or the alarm would sound. Good job, Ariana. Those few hundred of soundly sleeping children will never forget you now.

I tried climbing in a window, but it was securely fixed as well.. So I had the sheepishly head back to the main security guards booth to try and explain myself. He ended up calling someone else who was back by our area,an when I got back there, he wasn't pleased with me to say the least. Our broken conversation went something along these lines (I was again back over the yellow line since I wasn't quite clear on how or where I'd be let in).
"Yellow. Warning line. NO. (guestures over the line)"
"Oh. My bad." and I step gingerly back over
"Close time, 11 half! Time now?"
"Uhh.. 12:06"
"Why?"
"...No one told me about the close time, no one told me about the curfew. ... I had no idea"
He kind of glared at me, opened the door, and then stood in half the doorway to watch me squirm past and glare at me a little more, ad then went back to his post. His post which is directly next to my building no more than 20 paces away from this door, where he was wide awake anyways. I really don't see what the huge inconvenience was, but either way, I was happy to get in.

Of course, everyone at the camp heard about this by the next morning, and some of them had gotten the Chinese whispers version of things and thought I had slept outside. Awesome.

So the curfew is a little limiting for sure, but at least most of the other camp teachers are staying in the same dorms, so we have each other to hang out with.

Only 3 more weeks to go, and then the plan is to catch a boat to Japan!