Waegook Ski Trip to High1 Ski Resort and Casino

This last weekend me and 44 other people from around where I live went to High1 Ski Resort to go skiing. The trip was organized by the Waegook Cook bar in Gumi. This trip had more Koreans and Military guys than it did English teachers which was a little disappointing but it was still a great time. It seems that lately the Waegook Cook has had a lot more military guys from Waegwon, a ton thats next to Gumi. This isn't the worst thing in the world but these guys tend to be a little young and some are not the most mature people in the world but many of them are great guys. It also needs to be noted that as more military guys show up this usually means that more English teachers wont want to.

Anyway the Ski trip was great we left around 6:40am, we were suppossed to leave at 6 but as usual someone or several people were late, we ended up leaving 2 people behind, but they caught a bus there later in the day and met up with us. The bus ride took about 5 hours, it should have taken less than 4 but as usual on a Waegook trip we stopped every 40 minutes for drunk people to pee. We went to a ski rental shop first and got our equipment and then headed off to the condos. We arrived at the condo area around 12:50am and the afternoon session started at 1pm so it was good timing, it would have been nice to be there at noon but it was better than I expected. After getting suited up and buying our 30% lift tickets my friend Mike and I headed for the gondola. We should have taken the lift but we didn't have a map until after we had been in the gondola line for 1/2 an hour so we decided to stick with it at that point. After this we always took the lift and this saves you 20 minutes to get to the top, live and learn.

We took 2 gondolas to the summit and then started our first run down. I believe this resort is the largest in Korea. It's very new and has 18 runs. One combination run is over 5000 meters long or around 3 miles long. There is a individual run that is 2,328 meters in length or almost 1 1/2 miles long. These are some serious slopes, I lived in Denver Colorado and have Skied the Rockies and this is comparable but not as good. The runs were well maintained but the beginner runs were very crowded and the intermediate and advanced runs were empty. I think this is because many Koreans do not ski often so most of them are beginners. When I was skiing the beginner hills they were very difficult because you had to constantly make last second turns to avoid falling skiers and snowboarders, at slow speeds this isn't a problem but I was going faster than everyone else by a good margin. Most of the intermediate hills emptied out into the beginner hills for the last parts of the runs,this area was also quite dangerous as most of these skiers didn't seem to have a proper understanding of slope safety and etiquette.

I skied a 4 hours session on the first day and a 4 hour morning session on Sunday. The conditions on Sunday morning were perfect until 11am when a snow storm came in on the top half of the mountain, it was a white out and led to some icy conditions on my last run, but all the rest of my morning runs were powdery perfection. The slopes ha a lot of restaurants and shops on them too, at the top their was a fancy Chinese restaurant with a 360 degree all glass view of the mountains, it was very nice.

After skiing I changed and went to the casino. The Kangwon Land Casino, this is the only casino in South Korea where Koreans are allowed to gamble, the rest of the casino are for foreigners only. I prefer the other ones. This casino was to small and crowded and it only had 6 types of table games and no poker. When I first arrived I asked about poker and due to a language mistake I was taken to the VIP floor where I thought there was poker. It turned out there wasn't but I had to buy $300 in chips to gain entry so I figured I would gamble there for a bit, I played a bit of blackjack and broke even after about 1/2 an hour. The minimum bet up there was $10, so I decided to go down to the main floor and gamble with my friends. The min bet there is only $1, not that I would bet that low anyway. The problem was that it was too crowded and I couldn't get a seat on a blackjack table after waiting an hour. So my friends Mike, Sung He and I decided to play roulette. We played the wheel for over an hour and when I was finished I was $60 up. Sung he decided she would bet some of Mike's money and lost it so he wasn't to happy but it was only like $20.

After this we got on the bus and went home, the trip back was the usual drunken rowdiness I have come to expect on these trips. I did manage to meet some new people on this trip and had a great time. I would highly recommend this experience to anyone in the Gumi area or just the High1 ski resort experience to anyone in Korea. Theres a link for the Waegook Cook website on the links section of my blog, contact Derrick for details bout this or any other Waegook trip. Theres also a link for High1 ski resort below in English,the Korean site has a really cool flash map.

High1 Ski Resort and Kongwon Land Casino

New Years in Seoul

I spent 3 days in Seoul for the New Years celebration. I arrived the Sunday before New Years and left around 3pm on New Years Day. There were about 20 of my friends that were in Seoul for the weekend. 12 of us stayed in the same hotel. Its called the Motel Ritz, its a love motel which means that most of its clients are business men who meet there mistresses or paid acquaintances there. It's a really nice place and only costs $40 a night on weekdays and $50 on the weekends of course it was $90 on New Years Eve, but thats to be expected. We had 4-5 rooms depending on the night, the rooms have King Size beds so 3 to a room was the max. They are also very 70's chic with retro furniture and shag rugs, etc. All of the rooms also have 50 inch Plasma TV's with a ton of channels, a small refrigerator and a computer with free internet. It's a great place to stay in Seoul,its very clean and safe. Its in Insadong, the phone number is 764-0353. It's within a 3 minute walk of the main shopping street in Insadong.

It was very cold the whole time we where there. On Sunday we went shopping and then went to walk down the Chong e Chong(thats how it sounds to me) river in the middle of Seoul, it was lit up with lights and huge light displays, it was really nice. Then we went to Itaewon to go to Pancho's a great Mexican restaurant located next to hooker hill. Itaewon is the place in Seoul where there are more foreigners than Koreans. This is where you can actually buy western size clothes and other goods. It's also where all the best non Korean restaurants are and a ton of foreign bars. It's not the cleanest area and I wouldn't recommend staying there unless you want to shell out $100 or more a night for one of the major chain hotels there, the cheaper places are very seedy. However it's the best place to eat and meat other foreigners in Seoul and is only 20 minute subway ride or 10 minute Taxi(in non rush hour times) from Insadong or Seoul Station.

After Pancho's we went to Gecko's, which is probably the most famous Foreigner Bar in Seoul, we got a big table there which was no easy task(Thank you Yubi) and closed the place down, they kicked us out around 1:30am. This is early for a bar to close in Korea but the place was dead because it was Sunday and everyone also probably wanted to go home early to get well rested for New Years Eve the next day. Everyone besides us that is! Usually bars here stay open until the sun comes up, which the next bar that we went to did. After Gecko's we went to the UN Bar, its a foreigner dance club in Itaewon below Pancho's. I think it also doubles as a Filipino brothel. Itaewon is where most of the American Soldiers hang out and because of this there is a large amount of prostitution on the area, the main street Itaewono has it main cross section at a street called Hooker Hill(It is exactly what it sounds like) which is directly across the street from the Hamilton Hotel a nice chain hotel that costs $100-$150 a night and has a famous rooftop pool that you can pay $7 to swim in during the day. We then called it a night and the 5 of us still out grabbed 2 cabs and went back to Insadong and crashed around 4am.

The next day we all woke up by noon and checked out of our rooms, it was cheaper to just keep one room and keep our bags there all day and then check back in to the hotel after 8pm, this saved us $20 a room, this way the hotel can rent the rooms out during the day, this is a win, win situation. Please keep in mind this is Asia and things are different here. We all separated and recovered in different ways. Some people shopped, a lot of us saw a movie. It was too cold to be outside for very long. I saw the Golden Compass(all movies are in English in Korea with Korean subtitles,well some Korean films are in Korean, but most of there movies are from hollywood just like the States), it was a good movie but a bit confusing at first. We all met back up around 6pm and were able to check in to all of our rooms again.

We got ready for the night and went out around 9:30pm and got some Chinese food in Insadong. After that we went to The Bar(its called The Bar) and had a drink or two to stay warm inside. Around 11pm we went outside and joined the rest of the people on the street near city hall for a time square style New Years celebration.(I would guess there were easily 100,000 people there, but who knows) They blocked off a large 7 lane street and everyone poured in at 11pm on the dot. There were more police than I had ever seen before, they formed a human barricade around the street 7 cops deep and 1/2 a mile long on both sides of the road to control the mass flow off people to the main intersection. There was a stage set up there and lights to count down a a large building(no ball =( dropping ) The cops let people through to the street one at time in 50 different locations by opening up small holes in there human barricade, they also had columns of men in the streets 5 rows deep forming a sort of maze to slow the flow of people down to stop mad rush that would have killed people for sure.

It was very impressive, I have never sen such a well organized way of dealing with that amount of people before. I was very impressed and baffled until I figured out what they were doing, then it all made sense. The cops where all in full riot gear although I never saw even one altercation although I'm sure that had to be at least 1 with all those people in such a small place, it was shoulder to shoulder for 1 mile! We got to the main intersection almost first(I'm sure 1000 people beat us, but we were in the top 1%).

We eventually decided to move off the street to the sidewalk across the street from the stage for safety reasons. It was like the mosh pit at a Green Day concert I went to in 1995, only the pushing was unintentional and due to the fact that the crowd moved with its own force. So we stood on the sidewalk and watched the countdown above and saw a jumbo-tron with the stage acts(they were all in Korean anyway). We drank and had a blast, it was freezing! After midnight we stayed around for 1/2 an hour and watched the place clear out, it was amazing to see so many people appear and disappear in a 1 hour period, by 12:10 the street was mostly empty. Everyone light off Roman candles and it looks like a GI Joe verse Cobra firefight for about half an hour from 11:40pm to 12:10am.

At some point after midnight we went to a local bar and had some drinks and food and we called it a night around 2am, it was a long day and we were out to late the night before. I also managed to lose Yubi in the post midnight crowd, but she found us about 40 minutes later after she charged her dead phone, she ended up 2 bars away randomly, she was drunk and scared I think from being alone, but once we found her it was okay. I also found a bar that has a Belgium Trappist Ale in Korea, this is my favorite type of beer and it's impossible to get in Korea!!

The next day we woke up at noon, checked out went to Bennigan's at Seoul Station and got on trains and headed back to Gumi, it was a great trip and an amazing thing to see! I had a great New Years in Seoul, South Korea!!!!

Here is a link to some video I took
New Years Eve Seoul 2007/2008 Video on YouTube

Christmas Day

Christmas is a celebrated holiday here in Korea, the most popular religion is Christianity here. It's not as big of a deal as it is in the States though. No one gets Christmas Eve off here and most of the shops and restaurants are open on Christmas day here. Since I just had 1 day off I decided to celebrate it with a couple dozen of my fellow English teachers. I called my family during their celebration and sent a few emails to friends too. At noon I went over to a couples apartment and we had a Christmas potluck party about 15 people attended. We all brought a dish, I brought Kraft Mac n Cheese and we had a random $5 gift exchange. This lasted until about 7 or 8pm.

I left around 6 pm though to meet another 15 friends at a Microbrewery/Buffet Restaurant called the Tomato Brau. It's a great place it costs $18 and it has all the Micro brewed beer you can drink, theres a stout(dark beer), a wiezen(brown beer) and a pilsner(yellow beer) the beer is delicious! The buffet is really good too, they have lots of Seafood,even good sushi and sashimi. There is steak,pasta, fries,nachos,salad bar,deserts and much more. We stayed there until 10pm and then I went home and went to bed since I had to go to work the next day. We go to the Tomato Brau a lot and usually we stay until midnight and drink all the free beer we can but it was Christmas. It was a good Christmas but I missed my family.

Unexpected Inappropriate Moments

Unexpected Inappropriate Moments are something that happen no matter where you teach, when there isn't a language barrier these moments can become teaching moments. A teaching moment is an unplanned moment where you can use a situation in your classroom to teach your students a life's lesson. These can happen a few times each semester if you are on the lookout for them. When I was teaching Special Education in the States they were even more common because the students would often do and say inappropriate things. In Korea the students are generally very well behaved and respectful at least they are to me, but it needs to be said that I spend time making sure my students know that I will not accept certain behaviors, mostly disrespect and not following my directions. Some teachers seem to have problems with their kids, but I rarely do, I think my Special Education background has helped me to excel in classroom management.

Anyway back to my original point, when you can easily communicate with your students you can turn Unexpected Inappropriate Moments into teaching moments because they can fully understand what you are saying and they can get the meaning, when your students don't speak the same language as you do this becomes more difficult. Their is also the cultural differences that make this even harder, how do I know what is appropriate and inappropriate? There have been many times where I thought the students where doing things they shouldn't be and have been told its normal in Korea. Things like touching each other in non violent ways, ways that might be considered somewhat sexually inappropriate in the states are common place here. Teachers are even encouraged to hug and touch students. Even tickling is used with younger students in some situations, these things all seem a bit odd to foreigners but many of them make the students feel more comfortable around you, I still can't and won't touch and female students but I have found that tickling my younger male students when they are talking or misbehaving gets them back on track quickly. I'm still not sure why, but it works. Also when you talk to students they will often put there hand on your arm, this is still awkward for me but I have learned to not jerk my arm back and to just roll with it. When I first started I would pull my arm back and they found this to be insulting.

As far as the picture goes I was taking pictures of some of my students and one of the more rambunctious ones flipped me the bird, I was so stunned by this I started to laugh and quickly changed my face and pretended to be upset,even though I thought it was hilarious. I didnt send him to the principal but I did make him stand with his hands over his head for the remainder of the class (about 4 minutes), this is also an acceptable form of punishment here that would likely get you fired in the States. I thought about sending him to my director but I feared he would have been treated to harshly if I did. At the very least he would have received a demoralizing lecture were he would be screamed at for 5-10 minutes and quite possibly he would have been beaten with a stick for this. Either way I didn't want to be responsible for these actions, so I handled it myself.

I realize this is a picture I probably shouldn't be posting but I can't help it, its just so adorable.

The Great Santa Scooter Ride

I had a Santa suit at my school and I received a large package from my family for Christmas so I decided it would be fun to dress up as Santa and ride my scooter home with my presents in my sack. I tied my sack to my handle bars and mounted my red scooter or as I called it this night, Santa's Sleigh. I only live about 2 minutes scooter ride from my school but this night it took me 20 minutes to get home.

I drove around my entire neighborhood yelling Merry Christmas and Ho Ho Ho at the top of my lungs to every person that I passed. Since I was dressed up as Santa Clause and sporting a real beard(which is odd in Korea) I got many strange looks. I had people stop me for cel phone pics. The Koreans in my neighborhood all seemed to enjoy my prank, some thought it was hilarious while others just thought it was very odd, but either way they were enthralled by me. It was the most fun I have had in Korea all year!

Hamburger Clause

At my School we had Christmas parties on Christmas Eve, this was easy since we had classes scheduled until 9:30pm on Christmas Eve...

Anyway I dressed up as Santa Clause and Handed out Hamburgers to the kids. I named myself Hamburger Clause and it seemed to get a good reception from the kids. We got the hamburgers delivered from Lotteria(the Korean Mc Donald's). The kids didn't seem to think it was strange that there Christmas presents were hamburgers, I guess kids always want hamburgers! Every class I grabbed my red sack full of Hamburgers(it needs to be mentioned that I am a vegetarian!!) and handed one out to each regardless if they had been naughty or nice. I handed out around 250 hamburgers that day!

I also had parties in my classes this day and I bought the kids Coke to go with the burgers and they brought in chips and other snacks. We just played games all class long. I bought fries for my older kids and we played scrabble, the kids played in teams of 2-3 and got 10 letters and I get 6, they usually beat me so this seems to be a fair handicap for me. I also got to pass out candy canes with little presents attached to them that my mom shipped me from the states. The kids loved them,thanks Mom!

It was a lot of fun to dress up as Santa Clause and the kids got a kick out of it,it was also a good use of my beard.

Kimchi

Kimchi is the most popular food in Korea. It's also a huge source of national pride for Koreans. Kimchi (or Gimchi or Kimchee) comes in many forms, it is a fermented vegetable. It is usually fermented in a spicy red chili sauce, but can also be in a white sauce which is not spicy. It is believed by some doctors that the red sauce is the reason why Korea has one of the highest stomach cancer rates in the world. The white sauce is said to be healthier by these doctors. Koreans, however love their red kimchi and I don't think they would give it up even if it was proven to cause cancer beyond any doubt!

The most common form of Kimchi and my favorite food in Korea is the cabbage kind. Baechu (chinese cabbage) Kimchi is made with cabbage and fermented in a spicy red sauce for several days with spices and other ingredients that vary by recipe. This is the most common type of Kimchi found in Korea, but I have also found the cucumber and radish Kimchis to be delicious. Kimchi is also used to make a very popular soup called Kimchi Jjigae (Pronounced Kim chee / chee gay) The process and recipe for making Kimchi is passed down in families and is a well kept secret for some. The women in families take their Kimchi making very seriously. I received a gift of Kimchi from a friend of mine for christmas. She is a foregin teacher from America that I work with, her name is Liz, here is a link to a video she made of her making my Kimchi present. She made it with a Korean family that she attends church with,here is the link

Liz Kimchi Video on YouTube

Many Koreans believe Kimchi is very healthy and some even believe it will prevent disease, I just think it is delicious and my favorite food in Korea.

The Korea Times

Yesterday a coworker and good friend of mine had an article published in the Korea Times, Korea's oldest independent English Newspaper, he wrote about a trip to China that the two of us took together. I thought it would be good to put it in my blog, here is a link to the web posting of the article
Michael Braun Korea Times Article
I wrote a blog about this trip already but this is a professional assessment.


Travel to China
By Michael Elliot Braun in The Korea Times on 1/11/08

It was September in 2007. And thanks to Korea's traditional Chuseok (Full Moon) holiday, I received many vacation days from my Korean ESL (English as a second language) academy.

Many foreign ESL teachers, including myself, took full advantage of this time off work. We had an amazing opportunity to explore a communist country recently opened up to the world for international tourism ― China.

Due to its sheer land mass, its law regulations, and its language barriers, many ESL teachers choose to experience China through a guided tour. And this five-day tour made efficient use of my seven-day holiday.

Approximately, 20 teachers left on a tour collaboration between a Korean company, Happy Tour Agency, and local Chinese tour guides. Our group met one tour guide in Beijing and the other in Xian. The flight, Air China, flew out of Daegu International Airport and landed in Beijing International Airport.

Upon arrival in Beijing, Wally, our Beijing tour guide, quickly blew our group away with local sites and food. And our group maintained a maddening pace to experience China's best features. Since we only had five days, a tightly budgeting schedule managed to provide us many exotic foods, spectacular shows, and tours of breathtaking attractions.

Indulging in China's food was a tough job; we worked our stomachs very hard. Since every meal resembled one seen at a Chinese buffet, I would not recommend a visit to China on a diet. However, as opposed to a normal buffet, each dish was laid out on our moment of arrival.

Each dish certainly tasted fresh, and the style of cuisine varied with each restaurant. Possibly, the king of all our meals was Peking Duck; a mouth watering dinner prepared with a great imagination. The restaurant created and served food for politicians, businessmen, and exclusive families. And it did so for a good reason.

Each elegant duck dish was prepared with great detail. And the restaurant created and served so many that they were stacked one on top of each other on our spacious table. This site seemed a little intimidating at first glance. But, nevertheless, our group managed to devour a dinner fit for a king.

In addition to stuffing ourselves with authentic Chinese food, Hannah Tour visited sights hard to believe exist. On our tour, we saw two of China's most cherished treasures: the Great Wall outside Beijing, and the Terra-Cotta Warriors in Xian.

They represent two manmade wonders of the world. Honestly, after first-hand views of these structures, it seems as if people should admire the engineers that designed these awe aspiring creations. Likewise, people should take pity on those poor laborers who made the massive works of art possible.

China, not only offers masterful statues, it also features masterpiece performances. I watched one show that triggered personal memories as a childhood performer. As a five year old child, while I walked casually between two adults, I often locked our hands together, sprung off my feet, and flipped myself completely upside down. I rotated like a man suspended in air by a bungee cord.

But my childhood stunt was certainly mere child's play in comparison to China's Acrobatic Show. Without a doubt, China's kids performed feats of amazement only reproduced by superheroes.

For instance, I watched one teenage girl who resembled Wonder Women. Just like a superhero, she rode a bike and supported three other girls on her arms and shoulders. Additional girls joined this human pyramid.

More and more girls piled onto her bicycle until the rider simultaneously supported 11 girls. Wonder Women's surreal performance complimented another actor's performance.

I gave him the pseudo name: Spiderman. Spiderman, a teenager, swung 180 degrees, back and forth, on his own webbing: a tight rope. At the end of his act, he flung himself from side to side while he balanced himself upside down, in a handstand, on a stepladder.

Recently, China has generously opened its borders to one more trade: tourism. And since these dinners, attractions, and acts seem incredibly difficult to believe, you should research them yourself; the experience will be priceless.

Michael Elliot Braun is an ESL teacher in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province. He can be reached at mebrauns@gmail.com.