GUNS

After all that worry about getting beaten by Tibetan monks we naturally went and inquired about getting some home defense. This came in the form of a .357 Magnum. It was a very strange feeling firing a gun, almost impossible to describe, but certainly gets the heart pumping.

Not quite as impressive as the hide of a bear or narcotics dealer, but not bad. 83% success rate, and who ever said Die Hard Trilogy on Playstation never helped anyone in real life. If I am ever in Nakatomi Plaza I firstly will not be in barefoot, and secondly have around an 83% chance of exploding an East-German terrorist skull. I like those odds. 

Oh yeah look at that grouping of shots, happy trails Hans.

Penny went for the slightly more sophisticated Glock17, preference of the Euroterrorist, or at least Die Hard tells us so. If it ever came down to a duel our accuracy unfortunately is both exactly the same, although I'm not sure if the Glock has the power to take me. 

However, Penny does has the distinct advantage of being able to DUEL WIELD. 

These photos are taken off the tvnz website under heading: Gang violence in Hamilton South reaches all time high.

Rioting.. finally!!

NEW ZEALAND ROCKS!!
Here are some rocks from New Zealand, mainly graywacke, but a little of pumice and some ponamu. They were bought to Korea for the Olympics in 1988, and were put in this little area of other countries rocks. They are at the olympic stadium, where we went on Sunday, because being out of Dunedin for such a long time, we needed to get our riot fix.

The New Zealand flag actually has a mechanism in it, that works in reverse to the American flag on the moon and causes it never to wave, while all the other flags wave about. It just shows how humble New Zealanders are I guess, or something about kiwi ingenuity maybe, whatever the case our flag sure dominated the Australian flag, in some cruel mistake by the Korean government, or perhaps on Australian himself raised the Cook Island flag in its place.  This is all for the '88 games.

Here's some rude Korean lady who was just flipping the bird furiously at passers-by. It just happens everyday.

At Seoul national park. Good day for a pro China rally. 

They were so happy to have foreigners support China that they give you flags, in exchange for all of your information, so if you ever speak harm of China they can hunt you down and make you return the flags I suppose. After we got these babies (flags) we were like celebrities, everyone was getting photos with us and talking about how great China is. 

The Olympic gate, where the eternal flame burns, is where the torch relay started in Seoul. Wasn't too much violence going on here, and if there was, I think we chose the right side, numbers wise at least, to be on.

The guy with the torch. Probably some one famous. Maybe Helen Clarke. 

Bear Farm?..

On Thursday we had our kindy field trip - we have one once a month. April's trip was to a bear farm. We were originally concerned as to what exactly we'd be seeing there, but it turned out to be pretty much just a big playground.

This was probably the coolest part, a sled ride down the side of a hill. The kids loved it, and so did Cam. He wasn't very good, though, one of my kindy kids Brian is totally outstripping him.




There were 3 bears at this bear farm. They were in a pretty small concrete enclosure, probably about the size of our apartment but a lot deeper. Though I doubt the depth helped them much because there wasn't really anything for them to climb. We stood over them and threw biscuits to them.

Apparently the biscuits were fit for human consumption too, or at least the kids in Cam's class thought so.


This is my kindy class and my Korean partner Chris. I take one half of the class and she takes the second half. This outfit they're wearing is their SLP tracksuit and they look so amazing in it.

They also have a school uniform they wear sometimes, and on other days they all dress in mufti. I have no idea how they know which day is which because there doesn't seem to be a pattern but my class are always dressed the same.


One of the toys was a giant ball pit with slides and stuff coming into it. This is Cam, again being dominated by a student. His own this time, Julia. She seems pretty sweet, she spent most of the bus ride challenging Cam to Gawi Bawi Bo (Rock Paper Scissors).

Almost blossoms

On Sunday we went to some park somewhere to look at the cherry blossoms, which of course were finished blossoming. Penny made me take some shots for mum's, in the blossoms.

Very beautiful.

This is Penny with a statue of the guy who invented the Korean writing system. He is on the money too, Korea's own Apirana Ngata, except people actually know what this guy did.

The Korean road workers union came up with an 

elaborate scheme to maximize their smoko breaks, by dressing a mannequin up in workers uniform and have him stand there looking busy, or at least as busy as workmen normally appear to be. This was all right under the noses of the government and police buildings. The government officials were sitting there discussing the best communist jokes they had, meanwhile  a gang of workers were screwing the system eating all the green tea and biscuits they wanted, laughing their blue collar asses off about their ingenious plan. They were probably doing overtime too, suckers.

On a park bench somewhere in Seoul, I slowly but surely make my move.

Pay Day

Getting paid during the week was lovely. We once again could blow money on awesome clothes that say slam dunk on them more than is normal. We went to Seoul and because it is really trendy to wear caps (every Korean guy our age does it + most americans) we got in on the action. The idea is you get a baseball cap or some american team you know nothing about. So I was a Padres man.

This is us just standing around fitting into main stream society. Caps at night time?? I would have thought that this is defying social conventions, but evidently not as everyone's doing it.

This is about 9am, having just left a chicken restaurant. I was feeling rather gangsta at the time.

This candy floss guy had a huge dog that I wanted to pat, but he started telling me I couldn't pat his dog unless I bought some candy floss, which I didn't really want. But the dog was pretty cool so I said "how much?". It was seriously overpriced, so I said "yeah" and then when he was getting me my floss I got in some free patting and ran off. Let me tell you, once you have had illegal patting you won't go back to that regular way. No way man. I have started my life of patting crime!

Hwaseong

On Sunday we went to the Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon. The fortress itself is 5.8km long, and the city inside is called Hwaseong. This picture is of the south gate Paldalmum. This is a bad picture of it, it's actually really amazing looking but I should have taken a photo from another angle.

Where I'm standing is the start of the Namun market, it's quite popular in Suwon.

From there we walked about 10minutes with no real idea where we should go until we found a sign pointing us towards a Buddist temple. There we found this huge golden Budda. I'm not sure if you click on the picture if it gets bigger, down near the bottom at the top of the stairs are Nick and Cam. That might give you a sense of the size.

The Budda wasn't a part of the fortress, just a temple of the city. From here we could see where we (probably) wanted to go.

We walked up a bank (a steep bank!) and found this. It's called Seojangdae (I think?) and is the western command post. They've got a guard who stands there, but I'm pretty sure he's just there for tourists because he let some kids play with his sword and when he wasn't posing in photos he was mainly texting.

We're up this little viewing tower to take this photo. You called see all of Suwon - and it all looked the same. Buildings.

From here we walked along the fortress wall for about 1/2 a kilometre. It was pretty cool, mainly because we were heading down hill. There were a lot of very sweaty Americans coming the other way.

We got off the fortress wall to go see King Jeongjo's Bronze Statue. I'm pretty sure the King is the one who built the fortress, and he had this built in honour of either his father or son.. I'm pretty sure.. It's pretty sweet anyway. Didn't look real bronze though.

From here we could hear noises of like, some kind of event. So we walked towards the sound and found Hwaseong Haenggung which is the Palace of Hweaseong. It's pretty cool, it's set up as the Queen's birthday party. You pay 1500w to get in and you just look around and play with some stuff.

This is the boys trying to throw arrows into little pots. It's pretty weird. We thought this was the Korean archery the lonely planet guide promised us, but to our delight, we were mistaken.

This is some kind of ancient sea-saw. It was pretty sweet, and the ladies you can see in the background were real awesome at it. Pretty much what you had to do was bounce the other person real high, then when they came down they had to bounce you real high. It was way harder than it sounds. And pretty hard on the knees too.

In the palace we found these guys. The boys quickly made friends, Nick took a special liking to the lovely lady. We thing she probably liked him too.

After this we walked about a kilometre through the middle of the town, seeing no more of the fortress, to Yeonmudae in order to find Korean archery. We found it, paid another 1500W and got 5 arrows to shoot at some pig targets. We didn't get a chance to take photos because we all had to shoot at the same time, but Nick got told off for shooting at the kids target. He hit it though.


So all in all we estimate that we saw less than a kilometre of fortress. But we'll go again, probably without Nick, who's not real big on sight seeing.

Chicken Hof

Due to still not having been paid, we took it easy in the weekend and spent it in Suwon.  Nick came round and stayed on Saturday night and took us out for Buldalk (literal translation: fire chicken) and beer at the local Hof, only 30seconds down the road.

This was the owner.  He was so friendly and kind to us.  People seem genuinely really happy to meet foreigners in Korea, which makes going out a lot better.  

He showed me where the toilet was because each food place doesn't have their own, just the building toilets.  I was impressed he knew the english words "left" and "right".  He was unimpressed I didn't even know the word for bathroom.

This is Cam and Nick and some Korean english teacher we met at our Hof.  He was there with a class of about 8 korean girls he had taken out for chicken at around 10.30 on a Saturday night.  Sound weird?  We thought so too.

He was friendly though, and seemed real bashful so we forgave him.

This is Nick pouring Cam beer from a HUGE jug.  It's 3 litres and they put it inside a protective jug due to the quantity.

What you have to do is ask for a pitcher of beer, and we they show you one say "bigger" and make international hand gesture for bigger, and then when they show you the next size up repeat again until you get the monster.

On Sunday we went to the Suwon Fortress (a minimal amount of it, however).  We'll post another blog of that when we can work out how to rotate our photos on Cam's mac (stupid things).

Tuesday nights

There was plenty of debate in the best order to do it in. On account I wanted to get as pumped up as humanly possibly; the pepsi warm up, followed by the mountain dew pump up, and the gatorade chase to keep your pumpedupness at a high level for several days, was decided to be the best. Once you find yourself in a bad come down a smooth pepsi robo for a finish to a great few days is a great idea or maybe another dew to hump the feeling for another couple of hours. Backing up on gatorade isn't recommended, even by seasoned robo-ers.