Chai tea latte

In Shinsegae, Busan, I purchased a chai tea latte.
It tastes remarkably like hot apple cider. (Delicious in other words)

  

Also note how I only challenge myself with intensely difficult high brow literature.

.................

Weekly Trivia

The area is simply teeming with foreigners like myself so it's not surprising we eventually congregate in some shape or form.

To lure these elusive creatures alcohol is essential to the baiting of traps. Free entry and booze for the winners, losers and in-betweeners

Every Thursday (Well, almost) we head to Liquor Burger for miniburgers and to do epic battle in Trivia.

It's tradition to change our team name every single week and get ridiculously competitive.

Since it is a table quiz it goes with many of the usual affairs such as when the answers are read out and you either go:

Or

Despite our fluctuating membership we have an excellent track record - better than anyone else actually - for ranking high and winning a prize.

It seems I did not inherit the Finn gene for table quizzes but I'm not too bad. The week the picture round was girlbands is embarrassing though. I was writing and Steph turned to me and goes "Okay Aoife, Number X is....Oh, I guess you got them all."
I did, I am ashamed (This is the education my parents paid for), we were the only team to do that but it's irrelevant because we didn't win anyway. (Got the minibeers though!)

Helen and Karen are just a tad too awesome so I was thrilled this week that although we were obliged to split our team of eight in two I so got the best deal out of anyone.

First place baby!

In the front from left to right Eugene, myself, Helen and Karen. Behind  with the mock(?) fury Stephanie, Seth (Goddamn he looks chipper) and Katherine. Lucy was bathroom-bound.
The bounty was Jaegerbombs (which Eugene and I promptly gave away)

Not the only photo of our team on facebook but I don't have my eyes shut here.

As for this weeks name? Well, we had been to Noraebang beforehand....

All I do is eat

Today Stephanie and I went to make our hair sufficiently fabulous.

We then went for some vietnamese style food. (Naturally, it starts raining as soon as we exit the salon.)

We just had soup. I had a small bowl of hot chicken noodle soup (Pho ga). If that was a small soup I'm terrified to contemplate what a full meal consists of - far more than I could handle, that's for sure.

The meal comes with various garnishes to add to soup. You simply bung (Such an evocative word) them into the soup which is normally not completely cooked. The heat of the broth cooks the meat the rest of the way.

It's very tasty and just the thing for a chilly day like today.

What really had me all giddy though was the fact that the first thing they do when you walk in is plonk a fancy pot of tea in front of you.

Thank you, I will have all of that and more.

The Black Watch

Helen has a sense for when things are going on so she was able to clue me in to Black Watch being at the National Theatre here.

I was asked if was interested. Naturally I said yes. (Me, turn down a trip to the theatre? Not very likely.)

 

Looking at the picture (that weirdly keeps unrotating itself) you can see the complimentary program we got that would have cost at the very least €12 at home.

 

 

The play is designed as an immersive experience so all the action take place on a space with the seats facing down on two opposite sides. It's a little rough (Every sentence has a fuck in it)  so not one for Granny I fear.

 

It was good, the acting was good, the settings atmospheric and it was very interesting. (The slow motion wire death was hella' surprising though.) There was lots of bangs and flashes to simulate gunfire and mortars and it worked quite well. They turned up the sound a little too loud at the end though.

 

 

On the other hand they didn't speak in a Scottish accent or dialect having cut out the 'dinnae' and other similar phrases but they kept them in the broadcast subtitles which we were a bit confused by. The non-English speakers would have been far more troubled by this. We wondered why it wasn't the other way round. It was still very good but the characters didn't really sound Scottish with the script so carefully excised. They sounded a bit too English.

 

The theatre had a shuttle but it was within walking distance of our subway station so we decided to walk. It was quite steep but the area was beautiful.

 



On the way home, Helen and I went to Insa-dong where we stopped for a euhm...random jam session.

We sat on the stools and picked up instruments and banged away. Helen has actually played drums but she was nice enough to let me try this big drum thing that I don't the name of but it was a lot like a bodhran.

An unexpected diversion.

No Pictures Darling, No Pictures

It's no secret as to how I feel about having my photo taken.

A very public part of me wants to simply avoid it altogether, make them more flattering or at least make it more bearable on my large yet terribly fragile vanity...somehow.

Nevertheless, it happens and thankfully not all the photos are used.
(Although there is one of me sweating horribly in a wool jumper in a newsletter somewhere for the children to go: 'That's Aoife-teacher! She's always shouting.')
At least Helen and Seth got the benefit of airbrushing on their brochure shots. (Not that I am in any way implying that they are anything less than perfect.)

I hesitate to post pictures of the children on the internet, naturally enough, although other TEFL teachers have no problems but I just don't feel comfortable putting them on my facebook.
Maybe it's partially cultural where there is an element in current training where they tell you never to be completely alone with a kid, never so much as touch their shoulder and don't give too much eye-contact etc etc etc.

But these photos come from the website so they're already on the internet - ahahahahaha!

This is me with my 6 year old homeroom - Brown class. This was Science where 'the kids' had to make a rubber band powered school bus.
It's one of the classes otherwise known as 'Aoife-teacher makes eight school buses.'

Please note how there's always one kid taking the time to throw up gangsigns.

This is an hour later doing another Science class with my 7 year old homeroom - U.C. Berkeley.
I...can't really remember what it is that we were doing. I think it was an optical illusion and not a very good one IMHO.

 That's both classes with Alex and I at Everland. Note how high I apparantly look. Mostly, I'm just exhausted.

This is the entire group in Everland. It was after I was pulling several kids away from the fountain and a certain dip. At least it wasn't raining. This is also the day before I flew out to Kyoto and I hadn't packed at this point.

 Finally, Halloween. Lots of princesses, ninjas and plenty of Batman. We felt very safe there. As you see I did not dress up. How dare you accuse me of being a killjoy! I don't need ridiculously difficult to obtain Halloween props! I'm terrifying enough on my own!!
(Besides I had plenty of crying children hanging out of me all day.)

Kyoto - Summary

So, in the aftermath I had a good time overall. It was interesting and I got to see so many significant historical sites.

I had fun but it was a little lonely travelling on my own for a whole week. I don't think I'll do that again. My phone bore the brunt of angsty loneliness. (and my boredom after X time at night.)

I would say go. Go, by all means. It's an experience not to be missed.

In the style of my favourite blogs please allow me to summarize because a picture says a thousand words and I'm too lazy to type anymore.


BEFORE:

TRAVELLING:

THERE:

AFTERMATH:

Kyoto - Airplane food

The food on the flight back was horrible. (No, not because it was japanese style! It was just really, really bad)

When they came around with Green Tea I was all "YES" with an edge of desperation

On the upside I successful split the chopsticks without breaking them. Go dexterity!

Kyoto - airport snacks

I thought I was getting ice-cream and mixed nuts but apparantly not.

The bottom was full of what tasted like frosties and raisins and the top was these strange dumplings. They turned out to be vanilla ice-cream covered in chewy, stretchy dough.

It was delicious and now I suddenly want another one.

Kyoto Tour - Manga Museum

Go to Kyoto and not see the Manga Museum?! NEVER!

This was a lot of fun. It shed a single crystal tear of regret for the fantasttic library I could not read and strutted off to explore the museum.

They had an enormous collection of bound graphic novels and the upper walls were shelved with issues of manga magazines from all sorts of decades.

You are encouraged to take titles off the shelf and read them as you please. The collection is impressively extensive.

The manga are seperated by Shojo, Shonen, Seinen and International. They are arranged by author.
On the ground floor, they keep a collection of foreign language manga. (Which is where I enscounced myself for a while with some Osama Tezuka.) The floors above are for strictly japanese language. (Engrish aside)

There are signs and guides in several languages to help understand the displays. It's interesting to see the fashions in manga change throughout the decades.

They break down, production, technique, character goods and (most importantly) where the money goes!
In short, the more you sell, the more money reaches the artist/writer after the publishers/editors/magazine etc have siphoned off their share.

I rather enjoyed the handy-dandy guide to target audiences above. It was interesting to see exactly who certain series are written for. (And yes, there are magazines for people over the age of 25.)


I wasn't actually meant to take pictures (Oops!) but in fairness they really should have posted clearly visible signs.

There are also casts from the hands of visiting manga-ka, a gallery of maiko illustrations and various other things.

Here, have some images of the illustrious Lord Canti

And Some Gurren Lagann.

Can't forget Diebuster now can we?



In all seriousness, they were showing a Gainax film special there but seeing as I have no real japanese I couldn't go see it. Hence the specific statues shown here. (Not that epic is ever a bad thing.)

I do think they need to expand their shop but that is a thought for another day. I did get a few pieces of Studio Ghibli but most of that was gifts.

Kyoto - Kyoto Tower

Outside the station you can see Kyoto Tower. It's a pretty useful landmark and a lot of your directions are going to start with "From Kyoto Tower...."

I went shopping in the base - bought cats.

Kyoto - Tea time

It was unbelievably hard to find somewhere reasonable to eat in Kyoto. (-especially as I was dining by my lonesome) Eveything seemed to have really long queues, enormous portions of horrific prices.

I lived on air and convenience mart for the better part of five days.

When I finally found a cafe that wouldn't bankrupt me, all I could get was tea and cake. :C
Granted it was nice tea but I could have done with something a bit hearthier.

the strainer was hooked inside the spout of the teapot which was interesting to see but my problem was how god-damn heavy the thing was. It was certainly built of durable stuff.

The cake had some sort of fruit in it, it was delicious.

Kyoto Tour - Kasuga Shrine

The Kasuga Shrine is a shinto shrine. All of the stone lanterns are donated by families. Originally they were stone, in later years they donated bronze but that is no longer the custom.

They decided that they no longer had space so when the festivals roll round, for a nominal fee, families have paper lanterns of their dedication put into the stone lanterns.

Depsite the torrential rain it was quite a striking sight. We ended up not going up to the temple. In fact, only four of us even went this far.

What ticked me off really was that we ended up not having time for hot wine at the souvenir shop before heading back to Kyoto. A day like that we could have used some!