Shredin update!

So life in Korea has been good lately.  I started doing some private English lessons for a woman, Hee-Jeong, who owns a bar near my apartment.  That has been going well.  My classes are all going well at the school too.  A couple weekends ago, there was a big Liverpool game vs. Manchester United.  My friend Jason is a huge Man U fan, so we were going to have a good rivalry going watching the game. Before we went Jason lost a couple bets to me and ended up having to wear a Liverpool shirt to watch the game. That was hilarious... Liverpool won the game too!

This weekend Josh and I went snowboarding and skiing up in Gangwon-do.  It was one hell of a trip to make it happen.  The cool thing about Korea is that there is a really good transportation system going on over here.  So we were able to book seats on a bus which takes you to a resort and back home.  It is a good 4 hour drive to get there so it was nice to be able to get on a bus and relax.  The only thing about it was the bus left Ulsan at 3:50AM and left from a place that is a good distance from where we live in Ulsan.  So we had to take the last bus from out area (kkotbawi) over to Shinnea around 10:30PM.  So we had quite a few hours to burn over there.  We went to a bar called Golden Anchor and played a few games of pool and just hung out until they closed around 2AM.  As they were closing and kicking everyone out, a group of three foreigners were kind of upset about it closing and we were talking to them before we left and ended up hanging out with them until we had to take our bus.  They were also some English teachers around the same age as Josh and me.  One was from Scotland, one from Ireland and one was from Austin Texas. They ended up being really cool. Anywho.... we took our bus up to the resort and arrived at about 8AM at the resort which is called, Hiwon.  When we got there we had to get our rentals sorted out, which were apart of a package deal we had set up.  So we had vouchers to get our rental gear.  Naturally we went to the rental area, but got turned away and told to go to the ticketing area.  We were really confused...  The ticketing area also turned us away and told us to go back to the bus we came on. At this point we were extremely confused... Eventually we just go to the information desk and the man there helps us and calls a phone number on our voucher.  Turns out we were getting our rental gear from a van in the parking lot. HAH!  It was very strange, but worked out just fine.  We had an amazing time on the slopes.  Although I have to say Koreans have some strange mountain etiquette.  The snowboarders take their board off completely for the chairlifts.  I could not be bothered with that business at all.  And for some reason on the runs people will be going a decent speed then out of no where carve all the way across the run without looking and I was almost crashed into 4 times.. Other than that it was a good time, I was one of the fastest people on the hill and was pretty much never passed at all on the runs. That was really fun.  I guess it helps that I have been able to snowboard on some real mountains in Tahoe.  The expert runs on this mountain felt like the intermediate blue squares at home.  Here are a few pictures from our mountain excursion...

That last one is ridiculous I know..but at the top of the mountain they had all these giant hearts and all the Koreans were taking pictures in front of it making heart shapes with their hands... So we thought we would one up them and make the most ridiculous picture.


Oh yeah here are a couple older pictures that I just got from some friends.  They are from the Andong mask and dance festival I went to in late September.. Awesome times...

This massive group just assembled out of no where for this picture.  We saw a couple of the girls in their traditional clothes and we asked them to take a picture with us. They were really excited since we were pretty much the only foreigners at this festival. So all day people wanted to take pictures with us.  When we asked them all these people just came out of the wood-works to get into this picture. Turned out to be one of the best pictures of my trip to Korea so far.