...Compaired with the late nights and excitement of last weekend when we went to Global Gathering this weekend was rather tame, but an enjoyable one all the same.
A relaxing and restful weekend will be followed by the arrival of one of my friends from England tomorrow which I am looking forward to and also a four day working schedule as the South Korean harvest festival is on Saturday but the country basically closes down down for a day before so no work in Friday.
Plenty of reasons to smile on a sunday evening!
As usual the week speeded by with it being Thursday before I'd even realised. I spent most of my time in class last week teaching my young kids about seasons and was amazed on friday when we did some re-cap work and a few of them even remembered what they had actually been taught!
On Thursday I had an adventure around Yeongtong on my way to the weekly session of football training with Inter Suwon. I used to have a piece of paper written down in Korean which explained to cab drivers when I got in where I needed to be. Somehow I have managed to lose that piece of paper in my very small room and now have to direct taxi's to a central point in Yeongtong where I can walk from.
This is usually no problem and even my Yorkshire accent doesnt stump the drivers and they take me to the correct place.
This week, I had a bit of a nightmare though as I got in the cab as usual and directed the guy towards where I needed to be. About three quarters of the way there, the cab driver turned to me and said something to me in Korean. I dropped the 'I don't speak Korean' line on him which has become common place in most conversations over the last month and he repeated the destination which I had initially told him to drop me off at. I was like 'Yeah, that's still where I want to go'. I was a little puzzled by the driver questioning me, I'm pretty sure I could drive to Yeongtong if I owned a car but I know for a fact I certainly wouldn't have driven the way he went.
The guy started to make a few suspicious turns and at one point I think we actually retraced our steps but the opposite way. It usually costs me about 9000 won (£4.50) to get to Yeongtong and when the meter suspciously crept over the 11,000 mark I told the driver to pull over in a vaguely familar part of Yeongtong and decided to walk from there. I was pretty annoyed that the guy hadn't been able to take me to the right place as if cab drivers don't know where we are going they usually just won't let us in the car to begin with.
My frustration started to subside when in Korean said 'sorry' (A word which I can understand) and only charged me 7,000 for the ride. That was probably about the point where he started to get lost and make completely wrong turns. I've walked to GSIS school where I play football a few times from Yeongtong but after following what I thought was the correct route, I found myself in completely the wrong place. By this point it was almost an hour after I'd left home, considering it usually takes 30 mins to get to the school I was contemplating giving up. Luckily I managed to find a signpost with the schools name on and after about a mile and a half of walking I finally made it there!
I think next time I'll have to double check that the person driving knows where they are going as I'm pretty sure the last thing my busted ankle needed before a training session was a half marathon length hike! When I finally got to football though it was good fun. Despite getting pummeled last week we had a very relaxed session, and as I'll go onto explain later it seemed to do the trick.
After friday at work I spent most of the evening playing around on the computer before it was time for dinner, when the usual crowd headed to the galbi restaurant that we had visited a couple of weeks ago to replace Mapo-gui that closed down. The service isn't quite what it used to be at the previous resturant and we have to sit on the floor but the food itself is absolutely delicious! We decided to call our friend Hans as we haven't seen him for a long time and when he agreeed to meet us we went up to Now Bar which incase you need reminding is the main foreigner bar in Suwon, and the place that sponsors the football team I play for.
It's been almost two months since we were last in there, before our Thailand vacation even. I guess the novelty had begun to wear off and it was kind of a hassle to get up there every friday. Most of the time on a friday I'm about ready to watch a film and go to bed, but I agreed to go as it has been such a long time. As it turned out Now bar had 'stepped up it's game' in many ways. They had done some refurbishments to make some more space and I think there may have been more people than I have ever seen in there before. We spent the evening in the usual way playing darts, pool and chatting to people. I actually met a couple of members from my football team in there which was cool.
Once we'd all started to get tired we headed back to Hwaseo in a cab. Hans went to go and see one of his friends who lived by the bar but he'll be pretty disappointed he missed the ride home as it might just be the most entertaining one I've had, which is saying alot in the five months that I have been here. Sometimes when you get in a cab in Korea you can tell that the driver doesn't really want to drive us 'foreigners' anywhere but this guy had a big smile on his face when he picked us up and even tried speaking a few words of English to us.
A few minutes into the ride he was like 'ahhh, music' and proceeded to turn on his MP3 player which was attached to his GPS. The three of us were expecting some horrible Korean pop music of some elevator tunes but to our surprise our driver had a good selection of music. The first song he had on which just cracked us up and started off the ride on a good not was 'Hot Chocolate - You Sexy Thing'! Me and Charlie were losing it in the back whilst the driver sang along and by the time he'd played 'Tom Jones - She's a Lady', 'The Nolan's - Sexy Music' and 'Sugar, Sugar' we thought that all the fun was over.
He skipped through a few tracks and was like 'OK, this one is for you' and all of a sudden Queen's Bohemian Raphsody started playing! Having sung our hearts out at the Norebang to one of the best kareoke songs there has to be we were obviously pretty excited and I'm sure that we rocked this drivers world by signing every word to it and getting out of the cab just as the song finished! Not sure there could have been a more fun end to the night.
Saturday was a pretty laid back one after not getting home till about 3am, I went on a trip go Zero Mart just down the road from where I live to get some food and I also went to he stationary shop in the market to get myself a pencilcase. My bag is so full of pencils, erasers and pens that I have found around the school that I needed somewhere to put them as it's a common thing that someone in my class forgets to bring at least one thing. Answer's on a postcard how you could turn up to school without something to write with?!
At about 4pm Charlie, Kevin and I decided to pay E-Mart a visit. I didn't need anything in paticular but felt like getting out of the house and it's always good to go up to E-Mart and take a look around. We did the usual tour of the food floor which basically involves filling up on the free samples that the people in the show are more than willing to give away to us.
Up a floor Charlie decided that my hands were a good place to try out the fragrance of some shower gel he was considering purchasing. I obviously appreciated my hands getting moisturised but wasn't too sure that he needed to spray a handful on me to find out what it smelled like. Especially when I then rubbed it in and had soapy hands! Thanks for that Charlie. For the rest of the trip I was wary about picking things up incase I dropped them as my hands were greasy!
We walked around the sporting good section of the shop, causing chaos by throwing and kicking things around. It's really funny when you walk round E-Mart of any shop for that matter because people usually follow you around to see if you need any assistance but with the way people follow us around it's like we're going to steal something. I'm not sure if they are just interested in what we are doing or whether they are just checking that we're paying for anything we pick up and put in our trolley!
In the electronics section of the shop Charlie decided that he was going to spend fifteen minutes trying out a massage chair whilst me and Kevin perused the ridiculously sized TV's that they sell for a pretty reasonable price. Not too sure I need a 62" LCD HD TV but it would be a pretty good purchase. I think I'd go blind if I watched a TV that was that big.
As usual when I am in E-Mart I took along around the pet shop section, everytime I do I am still intregued by the fact that they sell hedgehogs in the shop and it also makes me really want a fish tank in my room. I seriously think I could spend a few hours just watching the fish in some of them swim around.
Kevin suggested that as dwarf hamsters were only 3,000 a piece that we should by a couple and then let them loose before the end of the day. Charlie wasn't too keen as he said it would encourage the cats which used to live in his wall to come back. Personally I think it would be pretty funny but I'm sure it would probably end up running and hiding in a tiny corner of my room and I'd never know where it was.
Following the entertainment of E-Mart the three of us headed back at home and spent a couple of hours playing on Charlie's PS3 after we'd got some dinner. I spent the rest of the night on the computer watching Premiership football which provided some entertainment and some good preperation for my adventure into the unknown the following day.
Waking up early this morning (earlier than I usually have to get up for work) I had some breakfast and got myself ready to play football. I had been umming and ahhring about playing this weekend as for some reason our game had been re-arranged from a place in Seoul and the only place this team could organise us a game was at a field in Incheon which is close to the airport and about 90 minutes from where I live.
I decided to head out of the house at about 9.30am this morning to catch the subway presuming that it would be pretty quiet but to my surprise it was actually very busy despite the time in the morning. Someone needs to tell me where Korean's are going at that time on a sunday morning!
The journey to Incheon City Hall where the field was involved travelling on the line which Hwaseo Station is on (the closest to my house) then changing three times in the space of the journey and eventually getting to where I needed to be. Most of the team had been travelling seperately to the game as a central meeting point wasn't set, but I kept an eye out for the any other members of my team. It wasn't until I got to my destination that I actually saw anybody else which was pretty strange!
We walked out of the station together following the directions which had been emailed to us all and after about two minutes down the road we caught sight of a couple of our players by the side of the pitch realising that was probably where the field was. A couple of weeks ago when we played against a team called Butlers, we played in a relatively small pitch but I think the one which faced us this afternoon was a quite a bit smaller.
Once everyone got there and after the usual two minute warm up because people were playing on the pitch before us meaning we couldn't get on it, the game got underway and we shot out to a quick fire 4-0 lead. The team we were playing had been unbeaten all season but had played all the teams below us so they were certainly there for the taking. We decided it would be fun to let them back in the game (nobody said anything but I kind find any other explination for our sloppy play) and despite it being 4-3 at one point we stretched the lead to 6-3 a half time.
Highlights of the first half included one of our players scoring from a cross which he had aimed towards the back post and me almost getting my shins taking off by one of their team desperate to clear the ball. Thankfully I had managed to pass the ball to a team mate before that happened.
The second half was more one way traffic with us piling on the pressure and being able to find the net one four more occasions. The opposition scored three more times making the score a ridiculous 10-6. I'm not too sure how our opposition found the pitch but the guy who owned it was referring and he was incredibly bias to our opposition. At one point their goalkeeper practically caught the ball whilst trying to stop one of our players scoring from twenty yards out but he decided he didn't see it.
Two minutes later down at the other end, he gave a penalty against one of our players when the ball hit him on the shoulder!
Despite the poor officiating it was nice to stuff a team who probably turned up thinking they were going to steamroller us after our awful display last week. Sadly they were mistaken!
We made the long journey back to our respective homes and when I got in and had a bath and stuff Charlie asked if I wanted to go play basketball with him and Kevin just down the road. After the rain started to fall we headed to get some dinner and then I came back to my room to write the latest entry in my blog and Skype call with my mum.
It's time for me to sign off now and hopefully during the week I will be able to write about the adventures that I have been having with my friend when she arrives tomorrow.
Chow for now
Ben x
원숭이도 나무에서 떨어진다.
"Even monkeys may fall from trees." Korean Proverb
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