Japan Next Day

Well, this has got to be a short post, since I'm busier than I've ever been in my life, practically.

So day broke in Japan, and I think I was the only one in the group who got up early enough to take advantage of free breakfast. It was good--combination of Japanese and Western breakfast.

Later in the morning, the boys went out to do touristy things, and the girls went shopping. My goal was to get some sharp boots and a smart jacket, and some souvenirs or something.




Apparently there was some music festival going on that weekend, so everywhere we went there were bands playing. It was cool. Here's the nearby park where they had a lineup of bands all afternoon. We stayed and saw one band, but then there was a break for a while, and we needed lunch, so we left.

For lunch we had coffee and Italian. It was pretty good.

Next we went across the canal nearby to the little downtown area, where this tourist-helping police robot was patrolling. I also spent quite a bit of time in the Pokemon store, but I couldn't bring myself to buy anything. I probably could have spent all day in there.

We saw this band in the mall courtyard, which was decorated for Halloween. I spilled coffee on my leg.

After several hours of wandering around this mall and hitting a number of other stores along the street, I ended up with a smart jacket, but no boots. I have calves way too massive to buy boots in Asia. Le sigh...

Japan Night 1

So let's flash back a few weeks to the first weekend in October, when I went to Fukuoka, Japan with some friends. We got there in the early evening and after a brief rest, went out to find some supper and drinking.

These are the sounds I picture coming out of us in this picture: Grrrrr! YEAH! Teeee! Hmmmm. Hyuk!


I'm not sure who these chicks are. They might have worked at the restaurant we went to, but they might also be prostitutes.


This is the restaurant we ended up at, after walking around for a while. We chose it because it seemed reasonably priced, at about $5-7 for a lot of the dishes. It ended up being not so great, because that kind of money only got us a plate with only five or six bites on it. We should have known better in Japan. We ended up going to a chicken place later in the night, because we got hungry again.



After we walked around trying to find a decent bar, we ended up at this reggae place, which was pretty cool. The drinks were priced okay, and the music was good, of course.

Next we got to a nice jazz bar with lots of old records. Unfortunately, we didn't notice on the outside menu that there was a 700 yen cover charge, so the one beer I had while we were there cost me about 15 bucks. We learned to read more carefully before entering a bar.

There don't seem to be any pictures of me at that jazz bar, so here are the others:

After the jazz bar it was the chicken place I mentioned, and then back home. The next day in Japan was a bit more interesting than the first.

Vacation Plans

I have been meaning to go to Bali ever since I came to Korea, but for one reason or another, it hasn't happened yet. I had planned to go this winter vacation, but again, it fell through. It took too long for my boss to get back to me about our vacation time, and by then the flights from Busan had been booked, and it would be nearly a million won to fly from Seoul, plus the cost and time of a bus ride to and from. Not worth it. Maybe in July for summer vacation. It might be cheaper then, anyway, since Decemberish is peak season, I believe.

I asked the travel agency I use to look into flights to the Philippines, Malaysia, other parts of Indonesia, or any other place in Southeast Asia that would give me a nice beach vacation for between 7 and 800,000 won for a ticket. The agent got back to me with three choices: Saipan, Guam, and Cambodia, all of which use the American dollar, I think. I was surprised that Cambodia does, actually. I looked at hotels and things to do in all three options, and found Cambodia far superior in terms of price and entertainment, so there I will go.

I've booked and paid for my flight already. At 785,000 won, it's the priciest flight I've taken for vacation so far, but not by much, and I may be able to make up some money while I'm there, since things are supposedly wildly cheap.

My first night I'm staying right in Phnom Penh, since I won't arrive at the airport until 7:20pm, and the coast is a few hours away. It seems like there's a lot to do in the city, anyway, so I'll probably wish I had an extra day there. But I prefer the beach. I decided to stay in hostels for most of my trip to save some money, and because they seem almost as good as a budget hotel in many cases, sometimes better. The place I'm staying at in the city is called Hostel Nomads. I booked it online through Lonely Planet, and I chose to stay in the seven-bed dormitory for a whopping $4 a night (plus $2 Lonely Planet charged me for booking online--but I got a free 47-page guidebook chapter emailed to me as a special they're doing this month). I could have gotten my own room for $10, but I figured the money I save could go a long way there, and it's just one night, anyway. I might meet some interesting people.

Here's the website for the hostel:

www.becambodia.com/nomadshome.htm

Let me know if that doesn't work, because this thing isn't letting me paste a copy of the URL in for some reason.

It's kind of laughable the difference between the first place I'm going to stay and the second. After Phnom Penh, I'm going to travel a few hours to the coast in Koh Kong province, and go out to Koh Andet Island. There, I will stay at the newly-opened posh 4 Rivers Floating Ecolodge, for about a hundred dollars a night. This is my splurge item. It looks really awesome. I get my own big room (40 sqm) this time, a floating pool--not my own, of course--and lots of places in nature to see nearby. It's on a river, with the Cardamom Mountains right outside, plus jungles, mangrove forests, etc. The pictures of all the animals on the website are cool.

www.ecolodges.asia/

After three days there, I'll continue on to Sihanoukville, one of the most popular areas in Cambodia, I've read, for some nice beach time. There, I'll be at Orchidee Guesthouse in the midrange, at $22 a night. This place gives me my own room right by the pool, which I'll be glad to have. The place isn't right on the beach, of course, but the little map on the website puts it pretty close, so I'm sure it'll be fine. The beaches are supposed to be really nice, with white sand and all that, so I'm looking forward to that.

www.orchidee-guesthouse.com/engels.htm

This will be my first major vacation without a traveling companion, so I'm a little nervous about that. I usually prefer to have a lot of time alone, but when traveling, it's a lot more fun to share the experiences (and the costs). I'm hoping I'll meet some other tourists along the way, since it's peak season, to go on excursions with and whatnot.

Halloween 2009

I was slightly worried about whether we'd have a Halloween party at school this year, since the holiday was actually on a Saturday and the school is going through rough times, financially and regarding its reputation. I asked Heather last month if we would have a party the Friday before Halloween, and she said, yes, she'd be "buying candy." I was afraid, even had a stress dream about it, that she really meant she would just buy some candy, and it would be given to the kids at the counter or in class, and classes would go on as usual. Luckily, she probably either wanted to have a real party, or figured the backlash from the kids would be too much of a hassle, so we got a day of playing instead of teaching. Here are some pictures and video:

This is Albert under the hood.


That's Danny and Melanie in the "ghost house," except the lights had been turned on to fix some of the plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling.


Andrew in a pensive moment.



I see this chick every day, but I don't know her name. Nice picture, though.

I don't know who this guy is, but he has teeth.

A bunch of kids from my class and other classes watching the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror.

Not the best picture of me, but me as "Queen of the Nile" with some kids I don't even know.

My third-grade class playing some game. Plus an extra kid one of them brought along--the plaid one.

Lucille (formerly Kitty) and Jane (Mingyu's daughter)

Good ol' Kevin. I'm so glad I don't have his class anymore. It's nice to just talk to him in the hall.

More Simpsons

This is one of my fourth-grade classes. They came as terrorists. I think it's funny that Alex, as a terrorist, is still thinking about germs, and has a mask that looks like a cute little bear.

The same class attacking Leon (and Tom defending him, I guess). They love him.

Not the best picture of me, either, but you can at least see what the costume looks like. It was a rental.

This video is reasonably self-explanatory.

The first boy to come up to me for a treat is Johnes. Isn't he precious?

I think it's funny how at least half the kids have no idea what they're really supposed to say when they want candy on Halloween. Most of them were saying "trick or trick," and others were mixing up either word with "trip" or other words that sound similar to "trick" and "treat" (which, by the way, sound very similar to each other for them, due to the inability to pronounce the short i properly).

Actually, having the Halloween party is quite a draw on the energy, and most of the teachers were exhausted at best, and kind of pissed off at worst. Because the kids are so excited, and want to go get candy, see the ghost house, watch a movie, watch the Simpsons, or just play in the halls, it's hard to actually organize anything. But we all still feel responsible for our own kids, so with half of them in the class, and the other half wandering around, we feel torn and stressed all day.

Additionally, there was this riddle activity that I had to emcee, which I was technically told about, but the Korean teacher who told me about it did such a poor job that I wasn't even aware I was involved, until someone came and got me and they handed me a microphone. All I had to do was read off clues from the projector and call on kids to guess the answers for candy. Then they found that they needed more riddles so all fifty or so kids who were there got some candy, so I had to come up with a bunch of riddles on the spot. It was no big deal, but kind of stressful. I'd like to think I was pretty funny up there, but most people watching probably didn't get my comedic genius.

Finally, to add a little salt to the ol' stress wound, none of the foreign teachers were told that the middle school students were to continue with their regular classes, and we only found out about this when we saw one of the Korean teachers doing a class, and I asked Heather about it. She always manages to forget these details. So Leon and Emily had to teach a class at the end of the day, with no time to actually plan the lesson. I was lucky enough to have no middle school classes, so I kept watching the Simpsons with my kids and some other random ones.

On Saturday I went to Seoul with Leon and we met a friend of his from England there, as well as Emily and her boyfriend (now our new part time teacher) Michael (I call him Miker, because the kids do). We went to three areas of Seoul.

This is at the Ice Bar in Apkujeong. It was supposed to be a superheroes theme, but a lot of people already had different costumes:

This dude won the costume contest.

I went as a zombie schoolgirl, because I figured it'd be warmer than the Egyptian gear, what with the knee-high socks and long sleeved shirt. I was still freezing for the latter half of the night, though. It got cold in Korea wicked fast just now.

There was a little show at the bar:

We also hit up Hongdae and watched some people dancing on a balcony at the bar next door (everyone in our bar was thinking, we should have gone to THAT bar), then back to Itaewon for some kebab, which took forever to get, but was quite good.