Rouyn

Man it's been a long time.

It's almost sad that the last time I've written was when I saw the worst movie of 2014. The should totally not have been worth writing about cuz eh? Writing a review, even bad, is still publicity. Might entice people to actually go watch it to defy my warnings.

Did you go see it after reading that entry?

Yes?

Yah. Sorry man gotta believe me next time.

A lot has been going on lately. And then not that much. 

I have been busier and still had managed to blog about randies (randomness + goodies) meanwhile. But this time I just feel crazy tired by so much stuff.

By the way. The Pope is in Korea. Hi Pope :)

♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥♡♥

So I went to Canada for a trip that lasted as long as hi I'm there. Bye see you next time.

I did get to get a glimpse of lots of people I hadn't met in a long time and saw my new born niece ♥ and my 5 years old princess when I visited my brother at the summer house they rented.

Me in my amazing backyard, chilling with a cucumber that my mom grew. And no it was not meant to sound dirty. :) I just love the food my parents grow in their gardens.

So on the 8th of September last year, I became a good friend's baby's godmother <3 and it was the first time I got to see her. It was brief but they had dressed her up in the Hanbok I sent her as a baby shower gift. She is sooooooo cute! But she is not going to be a girly girl if I'm ever right about gut feelings. She will be driving a F1 car. I have rarely seen a baby enjoy speedy baby cart racing and being turned upside down as she did. Doesn't she look like she's 2 years old? She's only 10 months old. I was so surprised when I saw her.

I mean it was not hard to be flabbergasted by the size of her after seeing my brother's 2nd daughter (guess who is the fairy godmother?) who was only 14 days out.

My flight took some 30 hours back and forth, plus 12 hours ride back and forth by car to my hometown. Thats more or less 45 hours if I include the flights layovers and delays.  So two full days of transportation.  And 4 days home. Not much. But enough for lots of hugs and love.

The only positive point about such a short trip is that I got to enjoy only the best of everything, and didn't do it long enough so I'd be unwilling to come back to work in Korea. My best friend came back from Montreal with me so I got to spend a lot of time with her. I had missed her a lot.

Me, rocking up the Nexen jersey in a French-Speaking 45,000 inhabitant town in Quebec.

Since it was not my first time in Asia, when I came to Korea I was not expecting such a big culture shock, and I was right. However, I was really surprised by the amount of small coffee shops, all looking tiny and neat, with each their own cuteness to them. 

All with free wifi.

I love Korea.

I was thinking how boring it would be when I'd get back to Quebec eventually, and get to have to restrict myself to a single coffee shop per town I visited...

But then again, life is never so stable as to never change, so back in Quebec for my quick vacation, we went through a city called Mont-Laurier, that is a city that basically lives off people taking the high way between region towns like mine and the metropolis, as it is situated right by it, and there it was, a coffee shop. A flower by the trash. A coffee shop by a dirty noisy highway. 

And not just a coffee shop. 

A nice one, that can probably make Korean coffee shops jealous. Wooden structures everywhere, coffee roasting machines in sight, chocolate covered coffee bean jars. And to add to the special, a place where you can paint on ceramic wares and figurines. In Korea, it'd be the perfect spot for couples to make couple samezies of cups and the like, in Quebec, I think it's more of a family thing. 

Still.

I was positively surprised. I should not look down on Quebec. It can do nice things out of nowhere :)

Naengmyeon and Saturday time Wasters....

So on Thursday afternoon I am told that I'll need to attend a seminar on the coming Saturday from 9am to 1am. I was sort of annoyed to get the information on such short notice, especially since the place was set to be about an hour from my place by metro. That implied I would need to wake up at 7am to get there on time. I was not happy. But what can I do. It's apparently a mandatory seminar for all teacher in Korea, and they - F them - make US pay for the books and material used - WTF.

Anyways. I went to sleep early on a Saturday but I didn't set my alarm. Hell with being on time. I was not being paid for that - I was actually expected to pay -so I did not feel happy about it. Man it's easy to get all pissed up when you think too much about things. 

So I head out with a coworker and we head out.  

I have always had a very good eye for useless stuff. I'd find the smallest piece of trash on the floor in a second, and be able to find the exact one yet an hour later in seconds had it not been removed.

But don't ask me to find my needle when I drop it on the floor of a coffee shop when I work on a doll......

Anyways, this theory was proven right again Saturday, I looked at a kid park in the distance as we walked and went oooooohhh look it's shaped like a cute whale! Remind me to take a picture with it when we get back. 

How the hell did I find the time to notice that whale from between the trees....

So.

When I said I wanted to take a picture, I didn't expect to get to take it so quickly. 

Apparently we were told the wrong dates for the seminar, and it was next week.

FML.

One of those things that piss you off. Like wasting 2 hours of your life on a rare day off in Korea when you could be doing ANYTHING else and it'd be better.

Still.

I refused to be angry.

It was too early morning to be angry.

There had to be something good about having gone there for nothing...

And I was right. Yes. Positivism you little cutie pie how I love you. So hungry we were, morning it was, Naengmyeon (cold buckwheat noodle) restaurant there was beside us. I felt like in this choking hot weather that was the best we could hope to eat. I had a pancake appointment with a friend later on so breakfasting on waffle was not appealing to me. Naengmyeon it was.

Those were the best naengmyeon I have had in Korea. 

Man it was good. 

Usually, you need to add vinegar and a sort of mustard to you liking to add some taste to the pretty blend broth of the meal. However, this place was incredible. I didn't add anything. The broth was a bliss for my tastebuds. I had never finished a bowl on naengmyeon in Korea; it's good cool and refreshing, but you usually get bored of the taste before the end, and let's face it, it's a lot of noodles.

I didn't leave anything.

Coffee Shops are not just places for Couples and the Lonely...

... they are places for the unexpected.

Who said that hanging out in coffee shops keeps lonely people lonely?

...hm.


....


Probably me.


Well I was wrong and now I am pretty smug about it.

I met this amazing girl at a coffee shop I like to go to during weekdays. It was a day where I had been expecting to get lots of work done cuz my foot didn't allow me to go to the pool outing with my kindies. I had planned on using the time to prepare my final exams, but in the end I came to school and bumped my nose on a locked door: no one had told me that there would be no one until 2h30pm that day. Had I known I'd have planned something else to do. But there I was, already around the school, slightly annoyed and with lots of time on my hands.

I went to buy lettersets and sat at a coffee shop I like around my school. I will need to blog about that place, it's really nice and I always end up there at least once a week...

I started doing my things and the girls working there, a cute girl with a short brown hairdo, always smiling, that looked 22 years old. We exchanged a few sentences and I thought that would just be the usual as when I get to coffee shops in general.

- Long time no see! I was just wondering where you had been!

- Ah, yes, I was in a car accident so I couldn't come around...

- Oh my, are you okay now? 

- Yes, I was very lucky!

- That's a relief!

- It's really fascinating how you can speak Korean so well!

- Thank you, I worked really hard for it.

...

That is usually it. Korean curiosity usually ends with the usual gossip they will be able to tell their later customers: you know, we have this beautiful *cough* foreigner who comes to this coffee shop and she speaks Korean! Maybe next time you come you will see her.

So after the usual exchange I went back to my letter writing. 

But she didn't stop.

We ended up talking about really random things. No one else was in the coffee shop, and the boss had not yet come so she didn't mind talking as she was prepping the coffee shop. I only got two short letters done but it didn't matter: I had a new friend. On an unexpected long weekday morning. 

On the following weekend, we went to  eat at my Pancake place in Mokdong...

 I say my pancake place because apparently, even for people who have always lived in Mokdong, no one seems to know about the place I discovered while looking for a coffee shop to chill at.

... hang out in Hongdae walked around and shopped a bit, but I tried more random stuff than I ended  up buying. 

Yes.

The loser cap really completes my style. I have always known I have talent for fashion...

It is that day that I finally got to understand why Korean love to drink so much that alcoholism is only seen as a bad drinking habit. Apparently "THE LIVER IS EVIL IT MUST BE PUNISHED". So that is their very efficient way to get at it. 

Never knew Korean were so thorough in applying rules...

Me totally stealing my unni's ice cream cone for the picture. I don't like the messiness of ice cream cones, while they are much prettier to use in pictures, so I had opted for the other style (you can see my ice cream on the side). Those were ... man what's the word. It's not ice cream. It's.... damn it. I forgot the word.

OH gelato! That's it.

They were amazing. I don't like ice cream because it just tastes like an overdose of cold milk that is overly sweet. Gelato feel more like a bite of cold amazingness of the actual fruit/flavor you chose. If you get a strawberry gelato, it feels like there is only that one ingredient in it, no other taste, no overwhelming sweetness. Doesn't taste artificial. 

Now I have no clue whether gelato actually have artificial flavour or not. I'm just talking about taste here.

Regardless, we had amazing stuff at the store. I had grapefruit and yogurt gelato, she had blueberry and milk tea. I wouldn't be able to tell which combination was best, both were amazing. I just have a soft spot for grapefruit.

Just beside the Pancake place there is the impressive SBS building and a nice park, both of which I walk around during my lunch hour at work every week, or on my way to Mokdong stadium. I never dared going inside, thinking that outsiders were not allowed, but I was wrong. The first floor has a small coffee shop and anyone can go in when they want. 

The building has an impressive structure in an out. Majestic bit bright empty spaces with lots of light (and probably lots of work to keep clean...). God it would be amazing to work there.

Ending this entry with a picture of the HI I'M IN YOUR FACE building of the Hello Kitty coffee in Hongdae.

WTF Transformers...

I am pretty stubborn. I have this idea that even when you make a bad choice, you should be responsible enough to carry it through. It's not the case for everything, mind you, but still I believe that unless you are physically hurting yourself or others, you should finish what you started. Like ordering something nasty at a restaurant, you should finish it. You paid for it anyways. My ex boyfriend had this belief that if you paid for something, the money is already wasted if you don't like it, so better just throw it away or stop using it if you hate it, cuz then it'd make you lose twice: the money, and the displeasure of keeping at it. I understand the idea, but usually disagree with it. I feel like when we make bad choices, especially for food, for example, it's bad to waste it. 

Anyways. 

So a few years back, I was getting over this one guy and two friends of mine told me, well let's go see the new James Bond, to change your mind. What, afterall, can be better to stop thinking about guys, than seeing Russian bad guys getting their faces beaten off by a famous womanizer...

Well the tickets were sold out so we ended up choosing another movie. It was the most popular on the chart. If you know about when the first blond James Bond movie got out and know what the movie on top of the charts at the time was well I suppose you already saw the tragedy coming.

We went to see the first Twilight.

Bad. Really bad. Really bad bad acting... everything about that movie was bad. The camera angles, the random complete silences when people should be having a conversation, the face of the main actress. EVERY SINGLE THING about that movie was bad.

But.

Because everything was bad, it was consistent. It was funny. It did take my mind off things. And I laughed a lot. Maybe not when I should have laughed, but that's another story...

I watched the movie til the end, keeping up with my principles, but it was not hard, because as bad as the movie was, it was entertaining and it did not last long enough that it got boring.

Transformer, however, is another story. I liked the first one. It was cheesy, cliché full of bad acting, but refreshing in its whole. I liked the story, as simple as the plot was, and I liked the characters, both humans and machines. 

I think the one right now is the fourth one.

The movie was a 2 hours and half that were stolen away from me. Minutes that I will never get back. The first time I really have felt that I have been robbed of my time, way more than robbed of my money. I say 2h30 when the movie was 2h40... but that is to say how much I have put up efforts to stay in the room. 

I watched it. 

The main actress looks hot. 

And her dad has nice arms.

And... yah. That's it.

Trying to be positive about it.

It was a painful long boring puke of random action with bad acting from EVERY SINGLE ACTOR in the movie. I love action movies in general because they are stimulating even when they are ridiculously non-realistic. They take your mind off things. But Transformer sis not do that. It kept getting deeper in nonsense. There are no characters that make you feel sympathetic to their cause, the bad guys are all over the place, not credible and there is no real central plot. I liked Optimus in the first movie. But the Optimus in this one had lost all its majesty, and his charisma it was sad. It felt like watching the movie of a bad fanfic. 

And I paid 10 bucks for it.

What is sad is that I ended up leaving before the end, meaning that even with 10$ spent, I still valued the 10 minutes I saved more than the end of the movie. There was NOTHING dragging me to want to see the end. God helps me I think I like watching League of Legends better than the movie.

So here we are. Rating of the day : 2 millions rotten tomatoes.

End of Spring Acquisitions...

So I fell in love again.

For what is love, if not a amazing-looking good quality clutch and wallet?

I like to buy stuff made in Korea because it's generally cheaper, and while a lot of stuff is cheap and breaks easily, I find that Korean stuff is generally well-made. The two-tone blue clutch is the size of a 13 inch laptop (sadly a little too tight for my laptop to fit into, but that was not the purpose I bought that clutch for so it's all good) and has got good quality zippers and well spaced compartments inside, as well as a 3 card holder at the front under the flip. It closes with two quite strong magnets at the front (another reason I'm not using this near a computer...) that makes it super practical to flip open and close when looking for stuff as you are walking. There are no external pockets for say a phone, but it wouldn't have looked as neat if it had. However, inside the clutch, there are the usual two small-sized pockets, one for random stuff we regularly use, and the other for a phone. 

Now I like that it's a Korean brand because it also was assumed that people might have a Galaxy-note, which are bigger and usually don't fit in any of the standard pockets. So my phone fits perfectly in it. This is really blissful. Yes, I get excited easily. 

MCM is a pretty common Korean brand. While being pricey (a bit more pricey than GUESS stuff, if you want an idea, but the quality of the material and the space is much more well-thought than GUESS as well) it's super balanced. I don't like the classic MCM monogram pattern of the bags everyone carries around, so I usually don't look much into that brand, but this collection caught my eye because it's not blatantly yelling I AM A BAG FROM XXX BRAND, BUY ONE AND LOOK COOL LIKE ME! I like the subtle brand tag and the refreshing look.

The two shades of blue also make it much more pretty. Depending on the light, one might not even realize it's two-tones as the top part usually appears lighter in general on those types of clutches.

 I also bought a long slim wallet from COURONNE, another brand I am taking a liking to (the computer bag I have bought from them I LOVE. They have neat simplistic designs and the quality of their leather is really good. I chose the hot pink. Because eh, that's just as flashy as I love those things to be. 

Funny how I used to like baby shades so much (I still do, mind you) but since I notice

d that hot colors look much nicer on me I just LOVE those shades that I used to dislike so dearly.

Let's finish with me new pair of sandals. I was looking for a pair of shoes I could wear to go out that I would be able to wear when I have my bandage on on my ankle. I did have one pair of flops til last fall

but now all the shoes I owned were running shoes and heels so nothing I could actually wear out apart from the huge ugly adidas flops I wear when I have to go out to throw trash out and the like...

So I joined the necessity to pleasure by buying a pair I really liked in a store near my school: NAMU. Everything they have there is just simply beautiful.

Outings with Fortis

My feet, in the miniature of the Roman Colosseum at Aiins World, looking if it was worth going into.
Was not. But at least we got one picture out of it so I guess that was a winning adventure...

One thing I really like with teaching kindies is that, since you need to care so much for many other details than teaching - like bathroom, putting clothes on and off in the winter, changing indoor for outdoor shoes, lunchtime etc.- you get much closer with the kids than when teaching older kids. But the best part is when you get to hang out with the kids in a context out of teaching: the monthly outings. I like those kids because they are adorable, they are adorable because they love life and like to play. Of course, when you teach kids, it's precisely those things that make them cute that are the hardest to deal with (the kid needs to behave, but that exact rule-breaking attitude is endearing....).

When you go out with the kids you only get the best parts. You eat yummy foods with them, you keep speaking English, but they are used to the idea and playing in English, is still playing for them so we are all good.

Alexis, the most fluent of our 5 years old... but the most capricious as well.

Here are a few pictures of the outings we did before, taken with the school camera, that I got last week. There are two different places, as you can tell with the difference of clothing: Strawberry picking, and Aiins World.

 Me, derping near the (?) Buckingham Palace... in one of the hottest days of spring we have had. We had an early taste of summer at that time. Which was all good, really, taken that I was really looking forward to hang out in the sun. Yes, even if I was fully covered and wore a hat, that DOES NOT mean I don't like the sun.

There's Yvonne, who got extra brownie points by coming to the school
wearing Nexen colors instead of her usual princess dresses and headbands.

Pretty Ellie, our tomboy princess...

Aiden, alias Kim Minsung (yup, same as the Nexen baseball player...) the womanizer