My brother was planning to come to Korea in July - which is when we have our first week of vacation - but he would have had to fly through Japan (he lives in Medellin, Columbia) so he is no longer coming to Asia at all. We will probably not get a chance to see Japan ourselves, anymore.
On a lighter note, I am taking advantage of one of the most traditional and cultural things in Asia - Taekwondo! Learning one of the martial arts was always something I wanted to do. Now I can cross that off of my bucket list. I couldn't believe how easy it was to join up. 4 of the teachers at our school were going to Taekwondo and I said, "Can I check it out?" And that it was as easy as that.
The place is called World Leaders Taekwondo (here's the Facebook link) We train with Master Chang. He is Korean, a 5th degree black belt, and he went to school in Canada so he also speaks English. He is young (30s) and very easy to be around. He has a laid back personality and has fun, but pushes you hard and doesn't make it easy to earn your different levels of belts (starting with white, then yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, brown, red, black and red, and finally black) which puts more 'weight' behind your belt when you earn them. Each month or so you test for a belt promotion. The next test is in April which is my first test and I hope I'm good enough to earn the next belt. It takes 2 years to earn a black belt so I'm not expecting that. Hopefully I can earn a brown belt??? He teaches us sparring and technique. There's also Poomsae. Ijust learned Poomsae basic #1 but this video shows a variation of it.
The one I learned is a bit easier. Lastly, this week I learned pretend sparring, but there's a better word for it. I just forgot what it was. Basically, there are two people. One person gets ready to punch you and says "Tae!". Then you get ready to defend yourself and say "Kwon!". After that they step forward with their fist towards your chest and they say "Do!" so you take your arm and shove it out of the way while saying "Tae-Kwon-Do!". On "Tae" you push their arm, on "Kwon" you punch (pretend) at their chest and on "Do!" you punch near their mouth. No one ever actuallly gets punched. We use pads too, but most of our movement is kicking. I have front kicks down, and now I'm getting the hang of roundhouses. It feels great to learn a martial art in Asia with a 5th degree black belt. Not only that, Master Chang picks us up from downtown Suji (a 15 min walk from home or a 10 min bus ride from school) and drops us off after class at our home! We all live in the same area fortunately. The dojang or place where we practice is in Jukejong which is right next to Suji. We don't ever leave the cityscape. He drives a huge black van and drops of his previous class of little kids and picks us up at the same time. Our class is mainly made up of foreigners and since some of the teachers left, there's only about 3 or 4 of us in class at one time. Class is only 50 minutes long, but it goes Mon-Fri from 8-9pm.
At first, I was completely exhausted after class. You should have seen me my first day! Jim was there too, but has since opted out of TKD. It's hard to work-out that hard after using so much energy with kids all day, but you get used to it. On Mon, Wed, and Fri I work until 7pm and go straight to TKD. On Tues and Thurs I get a good 3 hour break (time to make dinner too!) so that helps. My feet and legs were killing me for a while too. In fact, I'm still not over the soreness of walking everywhere and working out barefoot in TKD, but it's getting better.
Another great thing about TKD is I am getting fit! It feels wonderful to get back into shape. A word of advice - if you work in an office, do WHATEVER you can to get out and exercise every day. If you haven't been doing this, then start now! After about 6 years of working in an office, you really feel how out of shape you can get.
Ok, back to the food - did I mention this other food we tried? This was a while ago, but I forgot to post pics. It's called Budejigae and it's origin comes from the Korean war when the American soldiers would leave behind food such as sausages and spam and the starving Koreans would find it and take it home to make in a soup since there was nothing else. This is how Budejigae (buddah-ji-gay) was born. It has everything in it, including ramen noodles, which you put in yourself once the broth starts to boil. Delicious!
More later!
