korea

There are three Korean men that I would love to have a chat with some day; the guy masturbating in his car outside homeplus while staring at Rachel; The guy whose hand I had to physically remove from Rachel’s arm as he was attempting to pull her, against her will, to the corner of a bar he and his friends were dwelling in; and the fella who snatched her phone off her, called his phone, saved her number, and then proceeded to call and text her regularly after that. When I noted to my Korean friends that Korean men literally couldn’t take their eyes off Rachel, they brushed it off and said it was because she’s a Westerner. I’m a Westerner, and I didn’t get stared at half as much as she did. What’s interesting about this is that,...

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been in a very sentimentally reflective mood. It’s impossible to explain how I feel about Korea. The truth is, my opinion about Korea changed almost weekly. Looking back, I can see what a truly exceptional time we’ve had. We thank our lucky stars for making the decision to come here. As ineffective as the EPIK program is for students, for many of us who chose to work in it, it has given us more than we ever expected. Aside from the heavier bank balance, my job has introduced to me a wealth of people whom I’d never have met otherwise. I bumped into one of my students the other day. When I told her I was leaving she quickly grabbed me and gave me a big hug – it was heart warming. You couldn’t buy...

Rachel’s tears were making me more upset than I was used to being. I was emotional as well, I just didn’t show it as freely. Onlookers must have thought someone had died. Thankfully that wasn’t the case. We were saying goodbye to the people who had mattered most to us in Korea – our friends. Somehow the term ‘friends’ doesn’t seem to do justice to how we truly feel about them. They’re our family away from home, our support, laughter, inspiration, and comfort. Some people reading this may think I’m over exaggerating. In fact, if I’d read this 2 years I would have been one of those people. The truth is, travelling doesn’t change people, it’s the people you meet who have the biggest impact on...

Carrying on my interest in burnt out or abandoned buildings, Mike, a friend of mine in Iksan, offered to take me to an abandoned church in an extremely rural place just outside of the city. On the way back the plan was to stop off at a bar in town that had recently burned down. I realise that neither of these scenes are what the average travel blog reader generally reads, but I can’t help myself. The bike ride would have been easier had I not drank so much the night before. We spotted the church perched on top of a hill about half a mile away. Grey, ragged, windowless – even from here we could see it had never been finished.  We parked our bikes at the foot of a windy path leading to the church. The dry grass,, dead trees, absence of other people, and...

The ceiling supports felt weak. They would have supported my weight before the fire. Now, with burnt timber and ash covering the floor, I wasn’t confident. It was a strange feeling, standing in the loft of a roof-less house looking at a mountain. The residents were long-gone – possibly dead according to a Korean friend. That morning, on the promise of finding an old unused amusement park somewhere in Mudeung mountain, I braved the cold weather with a couple of others, armed with my camera. We soon realised that the amusement park was no more. There were, however, a row of old houses built into the hills that were completely abandoned years ago. Two of them had suffered some serious damage during a fire at some point. Apparently these houses were built...

Maybe this title is a little bit misleading. I’m sure Korean dentists are excellent at their job. There seems, however, to be a trend emerging amongst our friends who’ve visited the dentist in Korea. Last winter Rachel and I went to our local dentist. We were livid when she said we needed a few million won’s worth of work on our teeth (a couple of thousand English pounds). Both of us take quite good care of our teeth. We brush three times a day, and apart from one filling each in the past couple of years, we haven’t needed anything done for a seriously long time. This time, the dentist claimed Rachel needed a root canal. Three of our friends have also had root canals since they’ve been here. All of them were shocked to find out they...