Winter in Korea

Wow. Who knew winters in Korea were so cold? Not me. I suppose the main redeeming feature about the weather here is that the endless drizzle and dull grey skies of good old Britannia is gone. Every day is one of those lovely winters days, the only problem being that its about -5C.

January was a ridiculously busy time for us. English winter camps took over our lives for about 3 weeks. I've been teaching full days (the horror!) from 9am until just after 3pm. Still, the class sizes have been good - maybe a max of about 15 kids, some days plummeting down to a lowly 3. This made my job a hell of a lot easier. I've been pretty proud of myself too. I actually formulated a working schedule lasting 17 days around the same topic of 'Around the World'. For once I felt like I was ACTUALLY doing my job well. Below is a picture of a HUGE class of five making some Brazilian carnival masks. Note my excellent scribblings on the board...

For a final project I had them create their own countries. They made flags, passports and maps. My god, some of them were adorable. Country names included 'Tony', 'No Die Land' and the beautifully titled 'Butterfly Cubic Land'. Bless.

Obviously with being so busy recently we've barely travelled. A quick trip to Busan a couple weeks ago was nice. We took in Yonggungsa Temple, which is apparently a rarity in Korea, being by the sea. This made it pretty damn photogenic, although the weather was, as always, painfully cold. We did get shown around by an ex-Buddhist monk though, who explained the paintings and the teachings of Buddhism to us. Funnily enough, he was working a big MIS project in Busan, something I studied (or slept through) during Uni.

Nice place anyway. Apart from that, we've just been mulling around Ulsan for the past few weeks. We're taking ourselves up to Gangwon province this weekend for a little treat though. The place has a bath and everything. Oh, how I've missed one of them. Temperatures of -13C sounds pretty appalling though.

The other day I took this as well. It's one of the sexy love motels in Ulsan, apparently part of a chain. You've got to love the slogans on the side...

100% love, baby.

Getting remote for Christmas: The Philippines

In these desperately freezing times, what we really need is a dose of sun and the chance to feel like a big shot. Cue The Philippines!

Christmas in Korea was going to be a washout by regular standards. We accepted that. With that in mind we’d arranged for a flight out on the 23^rd, returning 30^th.

December had been a total drag with prep for winter English camp, which began on the 2^nd, with mine running for an epic four weeks. This meant nearly 5 hours of teaching a day for this entire period. Absolutely golden.

Our plan was to fly to the remote island of Palawan – a place where electricity was sparse and roads were even more so. The whole place is pretty much 1000 square miles of jungle with an airport stuck in the middle. Once we got to the city, we would move up north to as remote a place as possible and, you know, just get our Crusoe on.

The first obstacle was getting there. An 8-hour layover in Manila was far from ideal. Sleeping on the floor of the terminal was even less so. I’ll tell you just what I needed right then… a man with a cockerel waiting to check in beside me. Ah, thank heavens. Come 3am that future fighting champion was the most unwelcome early wake-up call I ever knew

When we finally got to Puerto Princesa, Palawan, we took a walk to our hotel. Nice little place, only booked the executive suite. You know, it’s just how we do things over here. The Philippines is awesome, it’s beautiful and amazing, with opportunities everywhere, but one thing was just awful – the word ‘sir’, or in Michelle’s case ‘mam’. No matter how old the person was, we got it everywhere. I felt like a dick. The archetypal snobby tourist. I never got used to it. Why should a 50-year old boatman have to call me ‘sir’?! It’s just crazy, especially coming from a place where the more years you have the more of a dick you’re allowed to openly be and get away with it. All these damn multi-national etiquette contradictions!

So, Christmas Eve – we certainly weren’t roasting chestnuts on an open fire. We rented ourselves a boat, cue ‘Where are we going today Sir?’ (eugh!) We sat drinking from fresh coconuts on a perfect beach, then went snorkelling over coral in waters teaming with fish, then took a walk along an island no wider than the boat that brought us there. Absolute perfection of a day. Cost: £20

Christmas Day brought with it a ‘city tour’, mainly because we slept in too late to do anything else and I didn’t want to let our taxi man down. Less than impressive, I have to say. A dangerously overflowing crocodile farm, followed by a jungle walk that brought with an array of insect bites, finished with a butterfly house (not a patch of tropical world, of course). Still, it prepared us for some serious travelling the day after.

We were heading away from the motorcabs and the dirt of the ‘city’ (it’s really just a group of shacks spread across a few miles; ‘city’ is certainly a touch overzealous on behalf of Palawan’s citizens). A jeepney would take us up north to Port Barton, a place that could only be reached via a waterlogged bog of a track. Some serious Colin McCrae action went on in that driving seat to get us there.

Port Barton was the quintessential remote paradise. A beautiful wide bay with a white beach to snake around it. Fishing and scuba diving were the two main incomes. It was slow, that’s for sure. Coming from Korea, it was very slow. There was no hot water in the village, with the only electricity being available from 6pm until midnight. This meant any food during the day took a very healthy amount of time to prepare. Still, we were in no rush there.

We also had our first official scuba dives. A frankly insane wiry German lady with bad teeth took us to a place called Exotic Island to go down to about 12m. There were clams bigger than my head, starfish two feet across and so many colours that I kept filling my mask with water from sharply looking around so much. An amazing experience. I will definitely be getting my PADI certification by the time we leave Korea.

For our last full day we decided to check out Palawan’s Underground River. This has been voted as one of the new seven wonders of the natural world, so it must be special. To get there was tough. Wake up at 5:30am, miss the boat at 6am. Arrange another boat at 6:30am and leave to arrive in Sabang (the nearest town) at 9am. The only thing people had regretted to inform us was that we needed a permit to go see the damn thing. Registered tours only. To make things better, by 9:15am, all the boats were apparently full and all tours weren’t letting anyone on. Amazing. Luckily an awesome young guy called Mario just nailed it for us. He got us on his tour; the only catch was that we’d be walking back through jungle after for 2 hours – in flip-flops. Less than ideal. Somehow when we got to the river I manage to sneak us on a boat back though. How, I don’t know. I really don’t. Maybe it was the snobby ‘sir’ tourist opening gates for me, who knows. Was the underground river worth the five hours of hassle and travel? Well, it was a river underground really. Caves and stuff.

The next day we were due to leave, but not before being upgraded to an executive suite once again in the same hotel! Hiyoooo! Love that place.

Anyway, we sauntered into the airport the next morning with forty minutes before our flight left only for them to tell us that we were going nowhere. They took our passports and started reading through big dusty books for some reason. We were told that our Korea visas only allowed us to enter the country ONCE. Since we had done so in September, there was no way we were going back without additional documentation. Absolute heartbreak, well for about 15 minutes. Cue a lot of ‘sir’ and snobby-ness once again. They basically had no idea what to do with being such a tiny little airport. They had never had visa issues of Brits coming to The Philippines whilst living in Korea. It was a total minefield. They did let us on with a few minutes to go, telling us we had to go see someone in Manila (I never did).

One last bit of ridiculousness though. We never checked in our bags because of this whole visa drama, so we walked through with all out liquids, including a litre bottle of water. It went through the airport scanners in Manila and got beeped.

The security guy looked unimpressed, ‘Who’s bag is this? Mam, is this yours?!’

Michelle nodded.

He pulled out something for one of the bags, ‘Mam, you can’t take an umbrella on board, you’ll have to leave it here.’

WHAT?! So the humble umbrella is now a deadly weapon. Obviously playing its part in the war on terror. I mean, what if the litre bottle of water was actually full of lighter fluid?! Just plain ridiculous.