Korean Recycling

One of the great things about Korea is that it is very clean. The subways are immaculate. There is no garbage on them nor is there anyone eating while riding. The streets barely have any garbage; nothing noticable at least. And the recycling system - for all you environmentalists - is as rigorous as algebra. There are five different containers for us to drop our recycling in (all of which we have to sort out ourselves, three additional boxes on the side for papers and cardboard, a garbagebox a few steps away, and a compost a few steps away from that. The best part about it is the man at the end of the arrow in the picture above; he’s watching you as you sort, and if you get anything wrong he flags you down and tells you where to put your recyclables, so you can’t just dump your stuff in one container and run. Not that we’d ever do that. We’re good, honest people, after all. Click the picture above to see the video of us recycling (super exciting!) or just learn how to recycle here if you would prefer to have it that way.

Snorting Spudgy

Dogs usually wag their tails or shake their back legs when they’re happy. Spudgy does all of that, but he also does something special. What Spudgy does, ladies and gentlemen, is honk/snort. We don’t know why he does it, but it sounds like he’s asleep and snoring whenever he’s happy. Rub his ears for a bit, and he'll forget how to breathe properly, and start purring like a kitten. We made a video to prove it. Click the picture above or watch Spudgy’s Snorts here to see the video. And, yes, this isn't a very informative video, we know, but we just got a new dog and we're really happy about it, and want to show him off as much as we can.

Korean Couple Shirts

Oh, you thought we were cheesy before. You would make fun of us for our pet names and public displays of affection. Well, you wouldn’t be saying that in Korea. Here, public displays of affection have taken on an all new level. Indeed, people don’t kiss each other or give piggy backs as much in Korea as we did in Canada. Instead, they display their affection with matching shirts, also known as Korean Couple Shirts. We saw these shirts on other people and began hunting for similar shirts instantly. Check out what we found. Click the picture above for the video, or just click here for our video on Korean Couple Shirts.

Martina's Summer School

So you’ve seen a lot from Simon’s school and his students. But what are Martina’s students like, you’re sure to ask. How much different are they from Simon’s students? Well, for starters, Martina’s students are cool, and can talk to Martina about fashion and music, while Simon's students are not all too interested in talking about anything at all. You’ll be surprised to find out what they listen to - stuff that’s even older than the two of us. Anyhow, they’re a lot of fun, and a real pleasure to teach - even though there’s only four of them in the class. Click on the picture above to see what Martina's Summer School is like, or just click here for our video on Martina's Summer School Classes

Newest Member of the Stawski Family

Ladies and gentlemen, there’s someone new in our lives that we’d like to introduce to you. His name is Spudgy, and he is pictured here, above. He is our Pekingnese dog that we just adopted from a shelter. He doesn’t look Pekingese, we know, because his hair is so short, but it turns out that shaving your Pekingese dog is the Korean way. It's very hot in Summer, and Pekingese dogs grow absurdly long hair, so to prevent them from passing out from heat stroke, it's best to shave them down to cool them off. Unfortunately, Pekingese dogs aren't very cute when they're shaved. Anyhow, we made a couple of videos on him so far: the one in the left image below is on our getting Spudgy from the adoption shelter. The second on the right is on an intro to spudgy.

We arrived at Samsong station at around 12:20 this Sunday and met Ryan there. Ryan is a volunteer for the Korean shelters, and he’s the one who we spoke with on the phone and in email and who guided us to the shelter. He’s an American who has been living in Korea for around two years now, and he has done extensive work to help find homes for many, many animals. Bless his soul.

He told the taxi where to take us while he rode his motorcycle alongside us. In a few minutes we were at the shelter, which was in a very rural area. Ryan is also raising money to relocate the shelter into a better area, where the dogs will have more room and the neighbours will not be so pissy (after all, you’d be grumpy too if you had 220 dogs barking all the time). At the shelter we met the lady who was running it, and for the life of us we can’t remember her name. She takes really good care of the dogs, especially considering the huge amount of them she has, and also considering how severely understaffed she was. It was a surprise that the dogs were in any presentable condition whatsoever. She must never get a drop of rest.

The shelter was divided into two parts: most of the small dogs were in the house, while the big dogs were in the tented area. We first walked into the house to see the smaller dogs. We came to this shelter specifically because Martina saw a picture of a pug that we wanted. Unfortunately, by the time we got there he was gone; he was at the hospital that day because he was sick and very old. We were sad when we heard the news, but continued to walk around and look for a dog because there were so many sweet dogs there. Granted, it might not look that way when you see the video, as you’ll hear deafening dog barks, but that was just because the dogs are not used to having visitors. As well, the problem with having so many dogs together is that as soon as one starts barking the others follow suit, even if they don’t know what they’re barking at.

Martina saw one that especially caught her attention amid the many barking dogs. This was a sweet little shaved Pekingese dog who wasn’t barking at all. He just waddled up to Martina and stood up for her. Martina picked him up and he snuggled up to her. He was very still and quiet and sweet, and Martina instantly fell in love with him. When we asked about him we heard a couple of sad things; one - he’s blind in his left eye. It’s clouded over, and he can’t see objects but he can feel light. Secondly, he had hip surgery (you can see the scars from the incisions on his hip), and he doesn’t walk all too solidly. When Martina heard this she started to cry, and fell in love with him even more.

We walked around the tented part of the shelter afterwards to see the other dogs. There was one spunky dog that Simon happened to like, who climbed up his fence for you to pet him. We considered him or Spudgy, but after taking the spunky dog for a walk we realized that he might be too demanding for us, and Spudgy was so frail and sweet that we had to take him: the spunky dog could easily be adopted by someone else, while some people might be turned off by Spudgy’s eye and hips. So we adopted Spudgy, who was nothing but affectionate with us. We were waiting for a ride to the vet, and so we were sitting outside and eating watermelon. Spudgy sat on our legs the whole time.

We took him to the vet in Sinshon, and - from what Ryan told us - he’s the best vet in Korea. He gave Spudgy a quick look over to see if he was alright (and this was all while Spudgy was shaking and quivering in fear. So sad!). It turns out Spudgy needs some dental work, which isn’t surprising for a dog in a shelter. The woman running the shelter had 220 animals to take care of; she couldn’t be thorough in brushing everyone’s teeth. Anyhow, we’re going back to the vet next week to get Spudgy’s teeth cleaned, and to get some blood work and X-Rays to make sure everything’s alright. By then Spudgy should be more comfortable around us and not so scared that he’s shivering.

If you’re in Korea and reading this, please consider helping out with the shelter. If you can’t adopt a dog or take it into foster care, you could still volunteer to help. Dogs aren’t treated all too kindly around here, as many are run through the puppy mills to be genetically engineered like Paris Hiltons’ teacup dogs, or they’re abused otherwise. You always wanted a puppy when you were a kid. Now you’re old enough to get one.

Our Canadian Friend Chris

This is our new friend Chris. We met him at that GEPIK Native English teacher weeklong conference. Turns out he is as much of a video game geek as we are...and he lives in Bucheon! On top of that, he’s Canadian! Woot! A normal get together with Chris includes a full evening of Nintendo Wii, delicious Korean chicken, and beer or soju. Good times all around. In this video he lets us know where he’s from, what he thinks about the Korean education system, and his sole purpose of being in Korea: the KFC (Korean Fried Chicken - much better than that Kentucky kind). By the way, let us apologize in advance for the background music. It was from the Marble Mania video game (you Sazunics know exactly the one we’re talking about, with the marble rolling around).

Monsoon Season in Bucheon

It is monsoon season here in Bucheon, Korea, and so when the sun isn't scalding then the rain is torrential. It's big and relentless, and nothing like Canada's PG version of Rain. Stand outside in normal clothes with nothing shielding you from the clouds and you’ll be soaked down to your underwears faster than you could eat an apple. It’s intimidating stepping outside in the hard rain, and its better just to watch it from your window.

That doesn’t stop a lot of people, though. We were cooped up in our apartment for far too long and Simon was become obnoxious with his whining and complaining. And so Martina dragged him out of the house and they went for a walk through the rain, which had softened by then. She took a lot of pictures of the rain, the clouds, the umbrellas, and the rainboots, and the puddles, and it makes for fun pictures. Click the picture above to see them, or just click on this link here right away.

Huge Glasses

See, I grew up in a generation where big glasses were a bad thing. If you had big glasses you were a nerd. Pepsi can lenses were not cool. They made you wimpy and dorky, and would make you lose out on any potential friendships. Here in Korea, though, big and ugly glasses make you cool. So here’s a video of a student in Simon’s class who wears glasses unlike any we’ve seen before. They’re distractingly gaudy. And her wearing them is not a mistake; she’s one of the cool kids in the school, so it’s not like her grandmother bought them for her and she has to wear them. If that is the case, then she’s done a great job of pulling them off - you’ll just never catch Martina wearing glasses like these. Click the picture above to see the video of them, or just click here to see our video on Huge Student Glasses if you’d rather.

Forgotten Pictures

Remember when we climbed up that ridiclously huge mountain? That was on a Saturday. What we didn’t tell you about is what we did on that Sunday. We didn’t mention it before because it was pretty boring: we went to another temple with Martina’s teachers. We’re getting the feeling now that once you’ve seen one temple you’ve seen them all, and unless we go to one that is ridiculously lavish or beautiful they all seem the same. Perhaps the better explanation to this phenomenon is that, in the summer, you don’t want to walk around temples. We’re sure they’re probably far more beautiful when you’re not sweating profusely. As well, we seemed to have got lost. The caretaker of the school stuck with us even though we fell ridiculously far behind (mostly because Martina took a lot of pictures and nobody wanted to wait for her) and made sure we didn’t get lost. He spoke with us in Korean - he didn’t know any English - and we nodded as if we knew what he was saying. Eventually we did get lost, though, and we had to backtrack in order to refind our way. By then we were half an hour late, and the bus was waiting for us.

That much being said, Martina did take some pretty awesome pictures, and Simon made an HDR picture of the temple, and so we decided to post them up on the site. Click the picture above to see them all, or click here to go to the gallery.

Korean Music Awards

We noticed through our window that something was being built in the park. It was a massive stage, with hundreds of lawn chairs in front of it, a huge tv behind it, and smaller (but still huge) TVs on its sides. We thought that this was being made in preparation for the Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (check it out at www.pifan.com), which is around ten days of awesome movies being shown in various locations around Bucheon, akin to the Toronto International Film Festival (only the Bucheon one is “Fantastic”). Martina took some really cool pictures of it at night that you have to have to have to see (some of which you can see in the thumbnails below) and we didn’t think much else of it. We just expected some movies to be played in Korean and that was all.

That was until Thursday, when Martina was taking a nap after school and was woken up by the blaring speakers of the stage. We ran to our window to see what it was, and what we saw

- instead of a Fantastic Film Festival - was a live performance by a huge Korean Pop Music band called “Battles.” They’re quite ridiculous by North American pop standards, and their hit song sounds extremely familiar to any of us alive and cognizant during the early nineties. Check their video out here, and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about when you hear the chorus.

And so we left our apartment and went to the park to see what else was going on. Right when we got there MC Mong, Martina’s favorite Korean Rapper, got on stage and began singing his new song. Afterwards, a rapper by the name of Mighty Mouth sang his super chipper song, “Energy” while his backup dancers jumped around. It was very...energetic. Anyhow, what’s most interesting about all of this music is how much of it is in English. Why are all of these songs with English titles? Much of the songs are in English, and - after being here for a month and surveying the state of English in South Korea - we’re not sure how many people understand what’s being sung. That much being said, it was still a really interesting experience to wake up to a huge Korean concert in your backyard with Korea’s biggest artists on stage. It’s a shame that it had such little meaning to us. If these were English artists of bands that we actually cared about this would have been absolutely amazing. Instead, it was just cool, and it was kind of funny to see how everyone was absolutely in love with the artists on stage. So click on the picture above to see the video, or just click here to see it instead.