Gymming in Songchon

So while the majority of this blog is to keep people at home up to date with our lives, I realise that it could also be of some use to people who may come to the area to teach and want to find out about the place.

Now since our teaching schedules leaves us with every morning free, Ally and I decided we had better do something other than freeze in our 13 - 18 oC flat. Since we both got into the gym at home we decided to try to find a good one out here in Songchon, Daejeon. One of my students was a great help with this and took us to a new, small, but very nice gym on the 5th floor above Dunkin' Donuts (yes, tempting). Anyone already in Songchon will have no trouble finding the place.

It's a really good gym, loads of weights and all the right machines for men and women. And there are even two squash courts with classes running all the time.

You can see the two squash courts at the back of the picture, and around the wall on the right are around 10 different machines.

Now paying for this was very strange. So the options were 60,000 W (£34) for one month. Not too bad, similar to England maybe. 260,000 W (£150) for six months, good deal. Or 200,000 W (£115) for the whole year.

This confused both us and my student translator greatly. I decided that we had better grab the year deal before the numbers changed, so that is what we agreed to. The guys there are very nice and enjoy walking around helping you out with machines and proper form, so we have no regrets and go most mornings at about 10am.

Weekend in Seoul, Lantern Festival

As the other half said, the reason for our silence has been a result of being cut off. Without wanting to sound too reliant on the Internet, all is well again now.

So now that we are into our fifth week of teaching, we are feeling pretty relaxed about the lessons. Unfortunately the kids seem to have taken the same attitude and are no longer in awe of my height and our accents. However, there are no big problems. Only a few rowdy classes who demand to play hangman all of the time. The rowdy classes are at least better than the older ones who don't like to speak at all!

Anyway let's not turn this post into a rant. All is well.

We have been having a pretty busy time over the past few weeks. Last weekend we went to Seoul for the lantern festival which was great fun.

After a comfortable and pretty cheap (£6) 2 hour bus journey we arrived at the main bus terminal of the capital. This induced flashbacks of travelling in China; waking up pretty disorientated in a bus not really knowing where we were. All we had to go on was the subway station near the main branch of our institute, where we would be meeting our friends. Luckily as we were looking very confused in the middle of the subway station a university student with very good English came and gave us directions.

We had a great time catching up with friends, unfortunately we have now become those kind of adults who get together and talk about work but hey it's still fun. And the lantern festival was a great opportunity to mess around with settings on my incredibly complicated camera.

So the lantern festival was basically a load of these coloured paper models depicting traditional Korean culture, illuminated by lanterns, and set in the middle of a small river. Below is a pretty cool on of Tae Kwon Do (Korea's national sport).

I don't quite understand why, but people were getting these little lanterns and writing things on them, then putting a candle in them and sending them down the river. So, when in Korea...

Apparently you are supposed to write your hopes and dreams, but we just wrote silly in-jokes that are hard to explain... for example; "4 more years!", and "T-Money!" Anyway, most of us wrote upside down and the lantern got stuck in a bush after about 15 meters. So much for our hopes and dreams, but it was still a pretty good bonding exercise.