Christmas in Korea ~year 4

 If I could have imagined my life a month on from that last post I made, I sure would NOT have pictured it as it has unfolded in the last four weeks.  At some point we must all take a leap of faith and unfortunately my leap didn't work out but instead fell.  Ryno and I broke up in the first week of December.  What can I say, at some point in a relationship you either have to jump in with both feet or run away as quickly as possible, and unfortunately, my man felt that he had not seen enough, hooked enough fish or had enough faith that we were meant to be to jump in, and so he cut and ran.  I can't say that I am happy about his decision, but i do have to respect it and therefore December has been a month of re-invention or rather re-discovery for me.  Re-discovering what it means to be a single, professional young woman living abroad in Seouth Korea.  In many ways, I know how to be this person better than how to be 'the girlfriend', so although it hurts to be told that you are 'Not the ONE', I still know how to be myself.

 In some ways, the first week of December was the best possible time to end something because I was more than able to throw myself into the chaos of the end of a teaching semester at University.  The last weeks of classes, finals prep, watching final presentations, marking over 100 students on a curve and imputting marks...  It all added up to be a good distraction, but not quite enough. 

Obviously, the end of a relationship leaves you questioning the what and how of it all as well as the who.  Who can you hang out with now?  What can you do now that your regular habits and routines have been blow to smitherines?  What did you do BEFORE all of this happened?  What did you used to like to do as a single before words like compromise and regular sex were part of your vocabulary?  It's been a month of stopping, thinking hard and pushing myself to get back to my passions without any regard to anyone else.  In this respect, breakups are not wholly a bad thing.  If only it were so easy to maintain the same amount of autonomy and drive IN a relationship, maybe this whole mess could have been avoided.  It would appear that the very reasons I was writing about in my last blog are resonsible for the ending of my relationship.  Forget the WE, keep the ME strong and clear and focused.  So here I AM on the last day of 2012 ready to re-invest in MYSELF not the girlfriend.

 With holiday plans somewhat disrupted, Christmas was a very small affair this year.  I did my best to do the things that make me feel great like get out and see music (rock gigs and Christmas productions like Handel's Messiah).  I shopped for Christmas decorations and wrapped presents.  I went to a printing workshop and made homemade Christmas cards for my family and friends.  I invested in being creative in my daily life in as many ways as I could think of.

 I even gave Christmas baking a try and spent the day of Christmas eve in my tiny student sized kitchen making chocolate chip and oatmeal raisin cookies.  It was quite a chore as I had to do everything by and and my toaster over will only bake 4-6 cookies at a time!!!  But it was a great success and I was able to give my friends some great Christmas treats and heat my appatment with the smells of baking cookies at the smae time :P 

 I have spent the last several Christmases with my Irish friends Dara and Jesse and this year was no exception.  The only difference was that instead of buying in to a Christmas meal at a foreign bar, we decided to make out own!!  And what a feat we DID make!!!  On Christmas day, I went over to their apartment bearing gifts of cookies and wine.  THen we spent the entire afternoon cooking up the most delicious vegetarian feast ever!!!!!  Roasted veg, scalloped cheese potatos, stuffing, mashed sweet potatos, gravy, mixes steamed veg....  and last but not leastl Dara made an amazing red wine and tomato chicken dish which turned out amazingly well!!!!!!!

 We feasted, and drank then spent several hours in a blissful food coma drinking Baileys Irish Cream, delicious wine, nibbling on cookies and watching hilarious Brittish Crhistmas TV specials.  What a great way to spend Christmas away from the family!  Having delightful, sympathetic friends must be one of the greatest joys of life.  I have been lucky enough to make several good friends this past year including the lovely South African couple Nicola and Jaco.

 A couple days after Christmas, I got on a bus to Anseong (a city an hour south of Seoul) to go and visit Nicola and Jaco.  My intention was to stay for one afternoon, but I ended up staying for 2 and a half days instead!!!!!!  What a great time we had, talking, bringing good wine into local pizza joints, walking around the beautiful university campus, making snow men, getting supremely drunk on free shots and then eating the best hangover burger in the WORLD!!! 

 I'll be heading back to Anseong again soon with any luck!  THis time we will have to build a snowman family!  With good experiences such as these, I can't say that my life has been anything less than good over this holiday season.  For sure, it has been more lonely and sad than I anticipated, but I remain strong and optimistic that 2013 will be a good year for me.  A year of re-focusing my energy towards the things that I want to do and accomplish in my life.  In many ways, i have been handed an opportunity to be as selfish, focused and determined as I can be without any regards to pleasing anyone else.  Although a large part of me loved being the 'girlfriend' I accept that in the end I can only ever really be 'myself' and now I leave 2012 with the sattisfaction of knowing that it was an increadibly good year for me and that 2013 is a blank canvas full of possibilities just waiting for me to pick up my brush and go for it.

Ready to FALL in love

 It's the end of November.  Fall has come and gone in Korea.  The leaves are off the trees and I have to wear boots, a scarf and a coat to work every day.  I realize that I have been increadibly remiss about writing my blog the past couple of months.  I blame the weather.  When in doubt it's always a good call.  But the fact is, that i have been plenty busy this Fall being in love and that too sounds like a fairly good excuse.

 Seoul is a very large city, but over the last year it appears to have shrunk in size or possibly I have just not made as many efforts to spend my weekends scouring various tourists sites.  Rather, I have spent nearly every day off with my sweety; biking, watching movies, hanging out with friends, making coffee, drinking coffee, and then making more coffee just because we both love it soooo much.

 This Fall has been great!  Being in a relationship with a South African has given me the chance to learn more about SA culture and traditions.  Mind you, I don't think I've found out anything I didn't already know in the last couple of months, but I've sure had my suspicions confirmed.  South Africans like to Braii!  Heck yes they like their meat and they like a lot of it!!!!!!!  Meat and booze and rugby and dancing and lots of potato salad (but only with lots of mayonnaise.) 

 Being part of a couple is like joining a secret club that you never really knew that you weren't a part of but that you always kind of suspected was there.  It's strange but pretty awesome to think that you don't plan things without consulting another person first after so many years of doing things on your own for yourself.  All of a sudden you realize that you are at a party and not the only single person there any more.  You seem to get invited out by other couples to do couply things like double dinner and movie nights out on the town and weekends away where you rent your respective couple rooms. 

 It's like switching teams and never realising that you would have previously totally gaged at your curent self for daring to be so publicly and dispicably mushy and romantic.  I think that I would have made myself increadibly jealous if I were out as a single with my curent coupled up self.  In a way that's a good thing, because it means that what I have going on right now is enviable.  And in the words of Martha Stewart "That's a good thing!"

                           Nothing says Halloween like 'the Rocky Horror Picture Show',
            and I think our Brad and Jannet costumes were pretty kick butt is I do say so myself!

 This Fall in Korea has given me the perspective to realize that when you have a good thing and supportive love in your life, everything else becomes by comparison less difficult and slightly less of a big deal.  I think of all the time I spent unhappy and depressed about my life in Korea when I first got here and how EVERYTHING just seemed to be such a huge deal. 

It's not that nothing ever goes wrong here these days.  Believe me, plenty still gets on my nerves on a regular basis, but somehow it all seems easier to brush off, move past and look on the bright side of things because after all, at the end of the day even if someone has pushed past you on the subway, called you a waygooken (foreigner) and talked about you while you were standing right there or completely disturbed and discombobulated your cultural understanding of what is right and normal, you know that there is someone at home who is thinking of you and giving your hand that little squeeze of encouragement to shrug off the resentment and carry on with the rest of your day.

So thanks to my hun, who has made this last year a revalation in more ways than one.  I guess in the end, we were both just ready to FALL in love.
<3 p="p">

September- like summer, only with less humidity and bugs

One thing that I have learned to appreciate about Korea after having lived here for the last couple of years is that they have some absolutely GREAT weather in September.  Another thing I have learnt after being in Korea for the last four years is to NEVER EVER EVER try to plan a nice vacation away from the city on Chuseok weekend.  Chuseok is the traditional Korean version of a Canadian and American Thanksgiving where everyone makes the trip back to their hometown to pay respects to their ancestors.  Much traditional food is consumed, traditional costumes are worn, and families are visited.  It's a joyous aoccation which mostly entails a long weekend and tons of traffic jams.  That's why Ryno, myself and our friends Brian and Wian decided to plan a getaway to the East coast the week BEFORE Chuseok.

Korea during mid-September, unlike Korea during most of June, July and August is really nice!  The sun is hot, the air is mostly humidity and mosquito free and best of all no Korean natives have ANY vacation time after about August 20th, so all of the beaches, camp sites and motels are fairly uncrowded!  It's funny to think that Korea in the thirs week of September was roughly the same temperature as Barrie on the 3rd week of August, but there you go.  I've been wanting to wear my new Fall clothing anyway.

 In anticipation of the fact that we wouldn't be going anywhere special for Korean Thanksgiving we tried to find something interesting to do the week before.  After having been in here for 3 years, the pull of museums, temples and mountains has really begun to wane, but something that I've never grown tired of is the beach.  My South African boyfriend and his buddies agreed, so we started looking for cool events to check out involving as much sand and booze as possible.

What I found one day while flipping through a Korean fashion magazine in the 'Tom and Toms' cafe, was an adventure of a completely different nature.  A Billabong sponsored surf event on the East coast of the country near Yangyang at Gisimun beach!  'What's this?' I said 'surfing in Korea?  I have GOT to check this out, for the free swag if nothing else.'  And so, I convinced first, my boyfriend and then he, some of his friends, to all make our way out to the beach and see if we could catch some waves, or at the very least swim in some.

What followed was one of the most hilariously disasterous (yet not in a terrible way) weekends!  Although we look happy enough in these photos, it was a bit of a treck to get there and there were several short comings along the way.  First of all, coordinating 4 different people who do NOT live near each other to get on buses to the same place at relatively the same time is no easy feat.  By the time Ryno and I had managed to get on a bus, we wouldn't be arriving at our final destination till mid afternoon.  ...which would have been fine in retrospect.  However, when we got there, we found out that Yangyang is more of a general region that a town and that out hotel was near the next beach, Naksan Beach, which while appearing dead close on a map, was actually about 13 km away! 

We also discovered that Ryno had unfortunately left his phone ON THE BUS!!!!  Oh no!  So in fact, we spent most of the afternoon trying to track down our friend Wian who was still in transit and having HIM track down the phone; which was aparently at the bus terminal.  After several calls and texts and translated conversations by the bell man, Wian finally arrived sans phone!  Oh no!  Eventually we DID make it to the beach, which was a 20,000Won cab ride away! OH no!  But this is where the story gets better.  We arrived at the beach, found that the water was COMPLETELY flat and then met up with Brian.  In an effort to not have the day be a complete failure, we bought our event tickets and gratefully began to drink the free beers and gin and tonics which were involved in the cost of the wristband.
 

By dinner time, we were feeling GREATTTT!  Although it may have had something to do with the numerous gin and juices that were consumed along the way.  A BBQ dinner of roast pig and standard Korean side dishes were served and afterwards a bonfire was lit.  Ryno, being a total pyromaniac, kept the fire big and burning all evening while we drank our gin, talked with friendly strangers and eventually had a dance party on the beach!  Finally, something was going right! 

So right in fact that we stayed until 2am and then discovered that no cabs ran after midnight.  (ARE you kidding countryside???)  With the help of some very awesome locals we were able to get our cab to order a special taxi to come and pick us up.  Wian and Brian stayed behind and somehow we didn't think we would see them again.  However, Wian surprised us by stumbling back to the hotel some time around 6am. 

We were even more surprised the next day when he was able to wake up and verbalize that his wallet was missing and that he must have lost it the night before!  Oh no!  So then we spent another while making a valliant effort to track down both the lost phone and the lost wallet before finally checking out and getting some lunch.

Unfortunately for Wian, the wallet was gone, but fortunately for Ryno, the cellphone WAS at the bus terminal.  It was just that when Wian went to the terminal they didn't bother asking ANYONE else (because admiting that you don't know the answer to something or checking something out further is aginst the law in Korea).  We managed to all get on buses to the appropriate places and make our way back to Seoul without ANY traffic jams.  So there you go, our dramatic Chuseok weekend adventure done one week earlier so as to avoid traffic jams and desperate crowds.  As Ryno would say, "WORTH IT!".

Back to the Great White North for a very nice summer vacation

 

 Homesick and ready for a nice break, I headed back to my parents home in Barrie, Ontario at the beginning of July for what was the longest single amount of time I had been back since I left home for university when I was 19 years old! 

My 6 weeks at home were filled with several smaller trips to favorite destinations such as South Hampton, Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, Hamilton and North Bay, where I was able to visit both with long time friends and family alike! 

A rewarding and rejuvinating time spent eating local produce, admiring the Canadian landscape and countless afternoons lounging in the backyard and on the beach reading to my hearts content. 

Here is an album which includes moments from some of my favorite events of this past summer.  To use a very well know and somewhat cheesy quote:  'There's no place like home.' 

After 3 years of living abroad, this statement rings true for me on a very personal level and has enabled me to admire and enjoy that which I may have once taken for granted.  Things like flat wide open spaces, big blue skies and lakes and food like wild strawberries and butter-tarts. 

I can't see a future for myself in any other country than Canada in the long run.  Where I will eventually end up, I can't say with any degree of certainty.  But for the time being, I certainly enjoyed the opportunities and experiences that came my way back home this summer.

 Hanging out at the beach with mom

 The wide open blue skies and hay field of the Ontario landscape

 

 A short but special visit with the lovely Miss Del Vecchio at her adorable place in Toronto

 

 My adorable grandparents ~Ron & Jean Fortune~ who after 50 years are still madly in love <3 p="p">

 

 A scerene moment on the lake at the cottage in North Bay

 

 The magnificence and beauty of Montreal can be captured in it's many churches

 

 A rocking weekend was had at the OSHEAGA Music Festival on Jean Drapeau Island in Montreal

 

 I brought back some Eastern trends including protecting myself from the sun with an umbrella, lol!

 

 My cousin Lyndsays' wedding finally brought all of the Beneteau cousins back together in style!

 

 Despite not having a large social network in Barrie, I was still able to enjoy it for it's quiet beauty

 

 One of the most influential people in my life is my grandma Mary.  I love her to bits!! <3 p="p">

 

 My dad and I rocking out the giant summer hats!  Geek chique!

 

There are a lot of things I miss about Canada, but I think that this picture encapsulates a lot of them; the quiet, the open empty spaces, the access to nature and sports and a more relaxed pace of life.

 

 

 

 

At the end of the summer I came back to korea after re-signing a new 2 year contract with Soongsil University.  I am pleased to say that my life in Korea has normalized and stabalized to a point where I am very happy with my professional and my personal life here.  I look forward to all of the new adventures that I will undoubtedly expereince over the next couple of years with my friends and from where i am sitting, it all looks fairly optimistic at this point.  To use another overly popular quote: 'Home is where the heart is,' and at this point, I have enough of my heart in Korea to make it worth while and enjoyable to live here right now.  can't wait to see how it continues to unfold!

Another Canada Day Abroad

A job, well, done.

The end of June in Korea means two things.  First, that the teaching year is wrapping up, or in my case ending, and second that by extension, everyone is gearing up to leave the city/ country for their vacations or in some cases for good.

 For me, the end of June signifies that I have made it through my first year as a Freshman prof without too many disasters or dissappointments and for me, that is something worth celebrating. 

As sad as I am that many people will be leaving shortly (or have already left) it is a fact of life as a foreign contracted worker in South Korea and for those of us remaining, life will go on.

I am especially excited that although I have decided to renew for another contract, I will still have the chance to go home back to Ontario, Canada for a good part of the summer.  Although this means that I will be leaving my wonderful boyfriend behind for 6 weeks, it also means that I will have the chance to see friends, family and places that I have not see in over a year and a half!!

It will be my first summer in Canada since my departure in August 2009 and I am as excited about having a REAL summer vacation back home and not having to work a summer job as anything else I could think of!!  Swimming, sun bathing, long luxurious evenings on the patio and at the cottage....

The only thing missing will be my boy, who will be teaching in Korea till the end of July and then heading back to Durben, SA for a family visit of his own!  It's funny because we're both at that point where we would actually really love to introduce each other to our friends and families back home, but the reality of time, money and distance makes it quite impossible to do so.

This brings forward one of the harder parts of bing in a relationship with someone from another country in another country than either of your own!  It's fairly convaluted when you think about it, but maybe some day we'll make the trip to Durban, SA and Toronto, CAN respectively?!

         

                        Students chilling outside in the main courtyard outside of our faculty building.  

Looking back on this past academic year, I'm pretty happy with what I have accomplished both as an educator and as a worker in a new environment.  I feel happy with the progress and the connections that I have made and I look forward to becoming an even better teacher next year... that is, if they hire me....

Now comes the slightly annoying waiting game to see if the university will offer me a second contract and if I will infact have the chance to continue the life that I have created for myself with hard work and determination here in Seoul, SK?

The fact that I have been given a schedule for next semester already and asked to even take on an overtime class really does bode well for my future in the academy, but you never know.  I have learned to never expect a logical, rational conclusion when it comes to working in Korea, but all that I can hope for is that in fact it DOES work out for the best.

So here's to a job well done and the reward of having a summer free to do whaever I please with.