My first real visitor!!

Well, another week has flown by in Happy Suwon.  I'm beginning to think that time actually moves faster in Korea than it does back home... well that's the most logical reasoning I can come up with that explains how it's nearly April. Hours speed by like minutes and weeks like days... and Hey-Presto I've been here over 2 months!  I feel really settled now and think (hope) I've learnt a lot more about how to teach the little-uns some valuable things.  I'm realising that the teaching English part is only the tip of the iceberg... the kinders are at our school 5 days a week, so it's their full-time kinder, which means it's not just the place they go to brush up their English skills, but it's the place that they go to learn about important life things like sharing and not hitting and listening and being nice to your friends, etc etc . Realising that I am partly responsible for teaching them these things was a little daunting at first, but not such a scary thought now that I'm used to it... in fact, I really like that side of my job now - probably more than the teaching English part!

Outside of work things are awesome as well.  I've got a bunch of good buddies to hang out with and am meeting new people all the time.  There are lots of laughs and lots of good times had here!  And as I recently discovered, sharing those good times with an old friend is great fun too.  Last weekend my old buddy Gary came to stay with me for a few days.  Gary and I lived and worked together in hostel in London back in 2001 (the Museum for those of you playing at home) and have kept in sporadic contact over the years... If someone told us then that we'd catch up in South Korea 6 years later I think we'd have tried to have them certified (actually, we probably wouldn't have heard them because we would've been too busy trying to rustle up a few quid to do our washing... then used the money to buy beer instead... but still). Anyway, Gary has been teaching English in Japan for the last few years and it just so happened that he had planned a holiday to Korea that coincided with me being here.  So on my lunch break last Friday, I met up with Gary in Youngtong and was able to take him back to my school to sit in on my afternoon classes.  The kids were so excited to have someone new in the school (he actually got mobbed by a hoard of 10 year old girls - literally, they were hanging off him) and I have to say that it was really nice to have an extra hand in the classroom!  After school, it was deemed appropriate that Gary experience a Youngtong ESL teacher's typical weekend... and so it began... 

Who could go past a giant ale at Garten Bier? Of course, followed by an obligatory Now Bar session...

Then off to a club called Crazy Duck (why?)... How many foreigners can you pack into a taxi before the driver gets pissed off??? (there were many more than the photo is letting on)

Apparently quite a few... this driver was awesome (as many taxi drivers in Korea seem to be)

And it seems that the later into the night it gets, the more people they'll let you squeeze into a cab... and the worse my camera and/or photography skills get.

We had planned to visit the Suwon fortress on Saturday, but around 6am on Saturday morning it was discussed (over a plate of end-of-the-night-dumplings), that perhaps we would go on Sunday instead.  So on Saturday afternoon we headed over to a friends place for a roof-top BBQ... had it not started pouring with rain, it is my firm belief that we would've sat up there eating hamburgers and drinking beer all night long.

The view from the roof-top barbie... so Korean

As the rain so rudely forced us off the roof, we did what any other self respecting foreigner in Youngtong would do on a Saturday night... we went back to the now bar and backed it up with a stint in the Noraebang (purely a social comparison between the Japanese Karaoke and Korean Noraebang styles, of course). 

The photos are bad enough... I'll spare you from the video footage (Gary, you should do the same... please).

As it goes with Noraebang and the speedy Korean clock, we again, did not make it home much before sunrise.... we didn't make it to the fortress either.  Ooops.  Instead we only managed to venture into Suwon city for an hour or so before the rain and the weekend took their toll and we turned for home - not before Gary got drenched by a bus speeding through a rather large puddle on the road though (I'm still cracking up at that).  Great weekends like this don't come without their price though... my enthusiastic efforts at the noraebang left me without much of a voice for most of the week - which made trying to talk over 12 screaming children somewhat difficult.  The husky voice has developed into a cold, which required another trip to the doctor today (I'm constantly warned that colds in Korea don't go away by themselves so decided to err on the side of caution).  Again, the doc used the sucker thing on my nose (then laughed at how much my eyes watered), made me breathe the funny air (this time through my nose) and quizzed me on my knowledge of Korean drama shows (i know nothing about them except that they all seem to involve people dressed in traditional costumes, sitting around a palace having stern words with each other)... In Australia, if I went to my local GP with a similar ailment, I probably would've been prescribed a simple antibiotic to take after meals. Done. Over. That's it.  This is what I got here....

 You'd think I was suffering from pneumonia with this vast array of medicine.... maybe I'll open my own pharmacy...

As far as I understand it, the little sachets of pills are for me to take after meals - but I have to take certain pills after lunch in particular.  The pharmacist stressed this several times, yet couldn't explain what would happen to me if I took the wrong ones at the wrong time.  The bottle of liquid is essentially cough syrup which I have to take 2 spoonfuls of exactly 10 minutes after the tablets... but 15 minutes after the lunch time tablets.  Tablets and cough syrup - fairly standard medication (despite the odd packaging)... It's the smaller sachets at the front that got me.  They're patches that I have to put on my back.  I have to wear each one for 24 hours and they can't be anywhere but the middle section of my back... I can only guess at why (oh, the story of my life here!), but the picture on them looks a little like lungs (or maybe a u-turn sign,  I can't be sure), so I think the stringent positioning requirements may have something to do with the patch being near my lungs.  I don't know... all I do know is that I feel like I'm walking around with a little square of rice paper stuck to my back and that's kinda weird.