Myanmar

So here I am in Chiang Mai, Thailand sitting on a big bean bag chair gazing adoringly at a couple of black puppies playing at my feet while Jamie is in our hostel bathroom vomiting up a storm. This is her second bout of food poisoning since we've left Korea and the poor thing has probably lost about 10 to 15 pounds from it. It has definitely put a lot of dampers on our traveling having to postpone treks and trips out of town but I guess we are on vacation so I could afford to chill out a bit.
Anyways, Myanmar was nuts. It was relatively untouched by a lot of tourism unlike the rest of SE Asia. We landed in Yangon after 2 too many long layovers in China and were hot, tired, and flustered. We got to our hostel and the streets reeked of latrines and they were covered in red spit from the Tabacco stuff the locals chew. It's truly nasty stuff, it stains their mouths and you constantly hear someone horking loudly somewhere.
Anyway, we were advised to take out all our cash we'd need for our trip prior to arriving because ATMs are not good with international cards in Myanmar. Also, theft against tourists results in the death penalty so we figured we were safe. Well, low and behold- within 1 hour of being in Myanmar, I was skillfully pickpocketed of 450$ US. Awesome. We decided to leave Yangon after one night.
We took an overnight bus to Bagan which had people sitting in the aisles for "cheaper seats". It wasn't a great ride and we arrived at 5am with a bombardment of taxi drivers clamouring over each other trying to take foreigner customers since they could charge them more than the locals. Jamie was kind of hilariously mean to them and grumpy. So many of the hostels were full or way over our pice limit. After an hour of searching we, with teary eyes, explained to a hostel owner that we were robbed and had half the money we budgeted. He kindly drove us to another hotel where we stayed in the staff quarters of the hotel for $7.50 each. Next we spent the next few days renting bicycles and bopping around the stupas and climbing the amazing structures. I can't begin to describe how beautiful this place was. Every direction you looked there were hundreds of old stupas, most red brick but some were white or gold painted. We definitely got lost a few times in farm fields and joked around saying "I think we turn left at the stupa" (since there were about a thousand).
After a few days we took a bus to Mandalay which was cleaner and less hectic than yangon but we still had a sour taste in our mouths from our first city experience and decided to only stay for two days and one night. Again, our overnight bus to Mandalay had dropped us off somewhere at 2am. Flustered, tired and a bit scared again we asked a nice hotel to sit in their Lobby to drink coffee until the sun rose. We walked around the city all day which was good and tried some cheap street food.
The next morning, we took a mini bus to the small mountain town of Kalaw. By supper time, Jamie got her first bout of food poisoning. She was up all night getting sick so we decided to hang around for an extra night. I wandered around the small sleepy town by myself and set up our 3 day trek to Inle lake for the next morning.
With Jamie strong enough to go on the trek we headed out with our guide, a young French couple, and an older French woman. We soon found out the solo French woman was one of the most difficult people to deal with- very slow at walking and a very picky eater. We would have to stop every 20 minutes for her to catch up to us. When it's hot and sunny, you kind of want to get to the nearest rest station as soon as you can. We were also doing about 22km a day up small mountains and crossing over rivers by way of a tree trunk. We made it to our first village stay though. We stayed in a barn where our guide and the family cooked us a big Burmese meal of fried vegetables and rice. During the night one of the highlights was when a baby Buffalo escaped from its pen beside our barn in the night which led to the family running around chasing the thing in the middle of the night. The next morning we started out again at the crack of dawn and made our way to the next village. Halfway though the day Jamie and I had to trade shoes- she was wearing converses and I had nice comfy shoes that my korean co teachers bought me as a going away present. Jamie's poor toes were all bloody and blistered so we were lucky we wear the same size.
The second night stay was somehow more eventful than the first. We all wanted to have a shower and our guide showed us a little hut with a terrifying black pool of water completely open to the yard. We took turns holding a rattan mat over the doorway for privacy while about 20 Burmese villagers gathered to watch us and talked to each other. Apparently it was either very strange that we all had a bucket shower or that we were using their cooking water.
It was hilarious and stressful to say the least. We hen decided that we all deserved a beer before dinner so we met some other Trekkers ( a German man and an English man) who were middle aged and doing the shorter two day trek. The German was an international businessman who had been living in Asia for over a decade and he shared amazing stories of when he went to North Korea ten years ago for business.
After a very cold night in a bamboo built barn with thin enough floors that we could see the hogs sleeping under us, we ate breakfast and started out on our last 20km of the trek. When we arrived at inle lake we were exhausted, covered in red dirt, and so proud of ourselves. We ate lunch with our guide for the last time and took an hour long boat ride to the town of inle lake. That night we ate dinner and had drinks with other Trekkers. We spent te whole next day recuperating and wandering around the town lazily. The next day we took a boat with the French couple on the lake for sunrise, then to see the fisherman, the floating market, the floating villages, and the floating gardens. With a lot of persuasion, we managed to avoid the majority of ploys that the people do by bringing tourists to their friend's shops and workshops. That night we rode up to a winery for wine tasting which were a surprising mixture of decent to revolting wines. The sunset over the vineyard was worth the trip.
The next day was my turn to suffer (mine was a hangover of epic proportions).
We then decided to take the 30 hour train from inle lake to Yangon. The other option was a 20 hour bus which we decided we hated the buses in Myanmar. Also, the train was only $9.40 each. The old wooden thing crawled through the countryside, the mountains, and jungles. Every small village would have people waiting to trade bags of produce with someone on the train or have snacks to sell to the people on the train. Every child gaped at us when they saw us on the train or platform. In more affluent towns the teenagers would ask to take pictures with us. By 9pm, we stopped to have dinner at a train station. The burmans all crowded around us smiling as we ate a 50 cent dinner under fluorescent green lights and giggled furiously when a kitten sized rat scurried over my foot and I jolted in fear.
The rest of the train was comically bouncy. Monks were watching and laughing with me as we were jostled so hard that it felt like an amusement park ride. Jamie didn't find the bouncing as hilarious as the monks and I did.
Back in Yangon, we wandered around a bit more than the first time in the parks and markets. We took a restaurant recommendation from my friend, Grace, who had spent the summer there. We had some cheap 2 for 1 mojitos and packed it in early. The next day, we flew to Chiang Mai through Bangkok which is where we are now!
More to come but my thumbs are cramping up.

Secret Agent Summer Camp

My mission was to make a kickass camp that kids wouldn't notice they were learning English. Here's some stuff we did!

Sorry it's so blurry- I got them to make paper airplane and try to hit the target for a review game.

Bo Eun in her disguise

Moustache cookies

Fingerprints

Dusting for fingerprints

This guy is such a jokester. Great disguise though right?

Boryeong Mud Festival

The beach at night

Jamie sporting her mud

 Last weekend a large group of forwigners made their way to Boryeong, a teeny rural town for what is called "Mud Fest". We joined a Jeollanamdo tour group where a Korean dude named Pedro sets everything up for you. 2 full buses left in the pouring rain on Saturday morning and in 3 hours we were at the festival. It was a small area but complete with mud basins, a mud prison (you go in a cage and they chuck buckets of mud at you), a slide, and various pools for mud wrestling. I wasn't into the length of the lines so we mostly just threw mud at each other for an hour or so and got into the mud prison. The event was pretty insane- about half of the attendees were foreigners but that didn't stop Koreans from stopping us to take pictures of the crazy muddy white people. Afterwards, swarms of people went into the ocean to wash off some of the mud. We found out a few days later that the water is infested with hammerheads and great whites... FUUUUN. Any way, it was a short but worthwhile trip and quite the whirlwind.

It was really foggy but the firework show must go on

James and James

Post mud shorts

Happy Canada Day

Extra Class Program

Hello all!

With the coming of summer came a far busier schedule both during the weeks and on weekends. After many a weeks of baking hundreds... ok, more like thousands of mini donuts and scrambling to create exciting after school lessons, I got a planning day so I thought I'd finally make some posts on this.
School became far more intense. We found ourselves biting off a bit more than we could chew with a new tailor-made curriculum sans-textbook. Our first month we taught World Travel where each week focused on a different continent and learning about a country they otherwise would not have know about like Bolivia, Malta, Malawi, Nepal, Papua New Guinea etc. The second month was a Comics unit. Pairs made a comic and then we had a fair.

This was my favourite comic strip

ANY WHOO! We've been making puppets with our extra class for a puppet show performance. Aren't they too cute?

Migyeong with her chicken puppet

My zebra puppet, Kristy (my co-worker) and her gentleman and lady

The puppet making class. 

Video of our trip

Two of our friends that we traveled with in Cambodia and Thailand made this video. It's pretty awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJTLAQTTdls

Amazing Article about the Sewol

lhttp://askakorean.blogspot.kr/2014/05/the-sewol-tragedy-part-ii-causes-and.html

Deskwarming Doodles

Cambodi-YA! (Phnom Penh)

A "quiet" day in Phnom Penh

View of Phnom Penh from a rooftop

 

Chinese New Year Wishes

We ran out of money- this was our last meal in Cambodia

 

Cambodi-YA! (Siem Reap and Angkor World Heritage)

Ta Prohm

Some ladies doing... Something at Angkor Wat

 

Angkor Tom

Angkor Wat at Sunrise

First Night in Cambodia- so cozy.

Angkor Tom

 

 

 

We packed up and began to head off to Cambodia. We were sad to leave our little paradise of islands but also ready for a change of pace from laying on a different beach each day and partying at night. I had to admit that I was happy to get some historical value to our trip. We traveled all day long- a ferry, a bus, 2 airplanes, and a taxi to get to Siem Reap. We finally arrived at about 9pm at night and were sad to find out that the 2 triple rooms we had reserved for 2 nights had been given away. With broken English, the man at the desk struggled to find us each a bed for the night in the "dorms". The dorms were, in fact, a bunch of mattresses on the ground, two by two of a converted barn. Makeshift clotheslines at about neck height zigzagged across the room to have mosquito netting around each mattress. Sadly, there were 5 beds for 6 people. The man ran off to find another bed in a different dorm for me. I volunteered to be the one to split up from the group as I was in the highest spirit at that time. He came back and had me follow him around the massive hostel looking for a bed. Finally, we found one... outside. Suffice to say, I slept on a nice double bed, beside a family of Cambodians with a bug net on a broken bamboo porch. I didn't mind especially because I knew we would be waking up at 4:30am to watch the sunrise at Angkor Wat. Also, I only had to pay $1US for my bed that night! Success!

So, we woke up very very early. We had hired a taxi driver for the whole day for $45. He was going to take us around to all the temples and sites from 5am to 7pm- pretty sweet deal if you ask me! We got to Angkor Wat and all shuffled down the dark path with our cellphones as flashlights. We were really surprised to see how many people were coming to do the same thing... I mean it was SO early! And yet, the sun rose behind the temple and it was fantastic. We snapped a few pictures and took the opportunity to wander about the temple before everyone was finished taking their sunrise pictures- the temple was pratically empty. We then ate some food at a really, really terrible restaurant and went to the next stop- Angkor Tom and the Elephant Wall. Jenny and I started feeling pretty ill at this point so we found some rocks and slept on them for about half an hour to be awoken to a little kid standing over us asking to buy postcards. I was starting to feel a bit better and were brought to the last stop- Ta Prohm which is the tree temple that you probably know from Tomb Raider. Jenny at that point got violently ill and we had to cut our day short and go back to the hostel. She had a pretty serious bout of food poisoning and the rest of us were pretty queezy from the food too. We had been in the temples for about 7 hours at that point anyway. We then relaxed until supper time when we met up with two of our friends from Gwangju. We had a meal at one of Angelina Jolie's favourite local restaurants and went to a live music bar. 3 of us started feeling a bit queezy again so we went home marginally early (midnight). The next day we took an 8 hour bus to Phnom Penh. I slept most of the way, took gravol and ate a baguette in fear of upsetting my stomach. By the time we arrived in Phnom Penh though I was quite healed.

Thai Islands (Koh Phi Phi)

Koh Phi Phi

Panoramic on the beach

The islands had little kittens running around everywhere or sleeping on stairs- you actually had to look where you were stepping. Here's one lil' guy that hung out by our room the whoel 3 days.

We took a lot of boats

An island off of Koh Phi Phi

Not a bad view. This was comng up to the beach that was filmed in "The Beach" with Leo DiCaprio.

Koh Phi Phi was like an island version of Bangkok. It was cramped, lively, and full of fun things to do. The price of accomodations was significantly higher here and we found ourselves pushing together 3 twin beds and the 6 of us sharing them to save on cash. We made some new friends here and by this time were happy and comfortable to split up when we wanted to. One day, Tristan and I braved the mountain and hiked up to a view point in our flip flops at sunset. The food waws phenomenal and I finally got a chance to do some snorkeling off a private beach. Jamie scoped out a good spot for me and left me to roam for about an hour longer than anyone else wanted to stay swimming around.

 

Thai Islands (Krabi, Aonang, Railei)

Krabi/ Aonang Beach

Aonang Beach

After a few days in Koh Tao, we felt it was time to wind down a little bit... give our livers a rest and all. We took about 3 ferrys and 2 buses to get to Krabi. It was still a tourist destination but with an older crowd. We had some excellent food there, in particular, the Indian food was phenomenal. On the second day we hired a boat for the day where he took us to Railei beach. Railei may have been the most beautiful beach we saw. We then were brought to some cliffs where most of us scrambled up a rope from the water, climbed about 10 feet and jumped off. Tristan made it about 15 or 20 feet but being in a bikini and being scared and weak and all I didn't make it very high up. We were then brought to a tiny little islands where a Swedish couple had built a makeshift home and had lived there for the last 10 years. This is when I realized how burnt Jamie and I had gotten and soon enough we went back to our hostel at Aonang beach. We spent about 3 days in total in Aonang before leaving again to Koh Phi Phi.

View from our balcony in Aonang

 

 



Boat ride to Railei