Quelle le date de don anniversaire? JANVIER! (Not really)

So, the one blog a day challenge came to a fairly abrupt end with the arrival of friends. So here are all numbers missed out, not taken on the right days and often with only a tenuous link to the title... I only had so many photos from January to work with.

Someone you love

Here are three of my Kindergarten students, Hee-Gyeong, Dong-Hyeon and Seung-Hui. Very adorable. Maybe love is a little strong. I think they're really cute and enjoy their company. On the side there is Mike (Hi Mike), a friend who came to visit with another friend of mine and wife of Mike, Sasha. They joined me in school on the day that we made paper dinosaurs, an almost entirely improvised class after my brownie making class wasn't possible due to too few students. They had fun but I didn't finish mine and ending up making a turtle partly in it's shell still... at least that's what I said it was.

Reflection

The purpose of this building I cannot remember, yet what I do know is that this is a rebuild of an earlier building that was destroyed many years ago. In the frozen lake surrounding it, the reflections of the pillars seemed to cast the illusion of dragons in the water to the Koreans of the past. Before its destruction, this will have been very grand, but when it was rebuilt it was urged by the people to be more humble. Because of this new humbleness, the man tasked with the contruction buried two giant bronze dragons nearby, which were only rediscovered in the 1990s. They were buried over 400 years ago. 

We giggled at the thought of him, after being told to make it humble, being asked 'Well, it's not like you had them giant bronze dragons made yet is it!?' and he was like 'LOL NO DON'T BE SILLY' and then had to rush out in the night with his spade to bury them.

Your shoes

A couple of weeks ago, me and some friends went to 'Coffee and Cat' in Gwangju, a cat cafe. They had around 15 cats according the website and came in many different shapes and sizes... some highlights were:

• Shocked face cat
• Grumpy face fluffy white cat
• Grumpy face ginger cat (Sasha tried to pick him up... he went 'MAWWRRRAAAEEEIIIIIOOOUU'
• Fluffy head and tail, shaved body cat
• Sleepy face cat
• Sleepy cat, as shown above resting on my slippers (this is where the shoes bit comes in)

Something old

This is an old and unusual bracelet of my Grandma's.

Guilty pleasure

Karaoke + Spice Girls: Double guilty pleasure.

Something you made

I needed a little help with this one, as it was very late in the day, so Anna suggested I took a photo of her. The reasoning behind it is that I made her happy by being there.

Colour

During our tour of one of Seoul's five palaces, Gyeongbukgong Palace, we were able to see the daily changing of the guard for the main gate. Lots of colourful outfits, lots of loud music and surprisingly a lack of people guarding the gate while the guard was being changed.

Lunch

A brunch feast prepared for me by a friend, including bulgogi (beef), rice, kimchi, beansprouts, broccoli and seaweed soup. All delicious.

Light

Light fingers were needed for this one. We played Jenga in the Dice cafe, a board game cafe in Gwangju. The first time I went there, I didn't realise it was a board game cafe... and I was on my own. They asked me when my friends would arrive. I had to tell them they weren't coming and that I didn't need a game to play.

A while later, while sobbing and shrieking to myself due to loneliness, they came and told me that they had jigsaws and I could play one. Just a small one please. The smallest one they had was Winnie the Pooh.

The second time around I'd managed to pay enough people/escorts to act as my friends. We played many games, including giant Jenga as shown above (we won), a dice game called bluff which was baffling, monkeys and a card game called sequence.

Inside your fridge

Here we have two boxes of paste, an almost off cabbage, some gochujang red pepper sauce, some radish and mysterious stuff that came with the radish, tomatoes, rice cakes, lemongrass, a giant box of kimchi, beansprouts and butter. There's some milk on the side too but it is probably cheese as I went away for a few days.

Nature

Or rather, the opposite. This was a strange lady/machine we encountered in the Seoul coex mall (a big shopping centre). She was eager to help us, yet a bit... robotic.

You, again.

This is me dragging along a stubborn pig at the trick eye museum in Seoul, there were plenty of photos for me to jump in on, and this is but one of them.

I hope you enjoyed reading about my January (kind-of) and if you didn't it's over now so you can say 'oh well' and carry on reading other stuff.

Gamsahapnida for reading,

Couldn't shift that piggy.



P.S. I went to see BIG BANG live in Seoul. During a solo song by Daesung, he grew wings and flew above the crowd. It was impressive. Here is a different performance of the same song.