Anyhoo...on Friday...on Friday my heart was broken yet again. It happens every time I fall in love! You guys remember that bike I told you about that was a screaming deal? Yeah, well, it's not a good deal, but the shopkeep's English is bad haha. Turns out the bike is not 500,000 won ($450) but 5 MILLION won ($4,500...which, like every other decent bike I've seen in Korea, is ridiculously overpriced). Plus, I don't have $4,500 to drop on a bike, regardless of how beautiful it is. So, I think I'll just buy some crappy used basic bike for 60k won and be happy with that :)
On Saturday morning I headed to Jinju to hang out with Laura, a wicked teacher from Florida (and thus begin my couch-surfing days in Korea!). My train was 40 minutes late, and while waiting started chatting with a friendly Korean...he lives really close to me and ended up giving me his number, so we might go hiking later. Pretty stoked about that. Talked to him the whole train ride (1hr 20 min long for the equivalent of $3.30!) and took a taxi (the first one I've EVER taken alone haha) to Laura's Place...5km away, $3.80. Pretty sweet. Then Laura took me around her neighbourhood, which was beautiful! Don't get me wrong, I like Changwon/Masan/Hogye/Jung-ri (where I live), but I'd move to Jinju in a heartbeat. Unlike my surroundings, it's not a city that was planned 40 years ago...there is tons of history (including a fort, parts of which are 1,000 years old!). There are palm trees lining both sides of every major road (there must be thousands of palm trees!) and it's bright, clean, modern and thoroughly positive. There are wide sidewalks and little greenspaces everywhere.
Then Laura's coteacher took us to a fort that the people of Jinju used 500 years ago to fight back the Japanese invaders. Way cool. There is a story of a beautiful Korean woman who seduced a Japanese general, then when they were on the riverbank, she wrapped her arms around him to hug him. She was wearing rings that locked together when her fingers were clasped and she jumped into the river with him, killing the both, but saving her people. In her honour, the modern-day bridge that was built close to the place where she jumped has golden rings decorating it. Pretty cool stuff.
Then we walked along the Nam river (there are parks everywhere along its bank) and found some cool stuff...for one thing, they have public exercise equipment all over the place: This is in a little green space between some apartments and the river:
Along our walk, we bumped into a bamboo forest and some beautiful buildings like the Jinju Arts Centre (pics of those later). I also had my first kimbap, which is like sushi. Most Koreans I've talked to swear that it's nothing like sushi and it's all their own, but you be the judge haha...rice, veggies, cheese and eggs wrapped in seaweed...it was delicious, filling and dirt cheap (a roughly 10" roll was the equivalent of $1.70).
Then we went home and chilled out and had some coffee/juice with Laura's coteacher, who is a super nice girl in her mid-20s.
On Sunday we bussed into downtown (awesome fact: my bus pass from Changwon works in Jinju...I'm guessing it's at least a provincial, if not national system...pretty sweet). Downtown we bumped into a crazy huge market. It was outside in all the small streets in between big blocks...put together, it was a few kilometres of people selling everything from live fish (we saw a huge one jump out of the barrel and flop around on the ground...pretty weird haha) to candy and shoes. Our favourite guy was a middle-aged Korean dude selling candy. He was super nice, encouraged us to sample everything. When he weighed in a decently big bag of my candy, it came to 2,800 won ($2.50), he held up three fingers, that it'll be 3,000 won (guessing he didn't want to mess around with change) and then shoveled a bunch more sweets into the bag, making it weigh about 3,200 won's worth. THEN, as he did with everyone, he scooped some random candy as his gift into the bag.
One of the candies I bought from him was what we knew in Hungary as "Danube pebbles" when I was a kid...it's candy-coated chocolate made to look like pebbles :) Nostalgic AND delicious!
As for the randomness of the market...not far away we saw a motorized skateboard for sale...scary stuff haha
After the market we headed to the always awesome E-Mart (which has THE coolest song EVER!)
Where I found a few awesome soy meat replacements! Cocktail sausages, wieners and sausage-in-a-tube (which I can slice and fry up for my egg sandwiches!). These are super healthy and add a bit of variety to my dinners. Also, they're pretty cheap...all that stuff in the pictures cost me less than $9.
On the train ride home a drunken Korean businessman sat next to me and he was super nice, but just loaded haha. He was trying to talk to me in English (didn't know much) and was so excited to meet a real-life Canadian that he kept calling his wife/son to talk to me. I talked to the son, who was nice and apologized for his dad's advanced state of intoxication haha), but the wife kept hanging up on him, which was pretty funny. Still, nice guy...I've found Koreans to be very friendly, they'll go out of their way to help me find places and generally make me feel good about being here. We had a couple of people yell at us on the weekend that didn't seem too friendly, but meh...in Mark's words...bound to happen :) Oh yeah, and if you tell them ANYTHING in Korean or about Korea, they REALLY appreciate it and take it as a compliment, so I'm trying to pick up as much as possible.
Including...HANGUL! I started randomly reading stuff and cross-referencing letters with my little pocket dictionary and I'm starting to be able to read very, very simple stuff, then translate it with my phonetic dictionary. AND...on the weekend, I read my first word in Korean and understood it without having to refer to any dictionaries...I was pretty proud. The word was water haha.
Anyway, I'll have more later (have tons of pics and stories)...but gotta go teach! I have 5 more classes today (after the first one didn't show)...
Cheers, everyone!
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