I talk too much my mouth hurts

The flight to Rotorua from Auckland for the beautiful wedding meant going on Air NZ's smallest craft of their fleet.
An 18-person plane with a tiny corridor between each seat to the either side, where there are no stewards to take care of you but the two pilots at the front.
A tight squeeze, lucky that on the way there were hardly anyone flying with me, but the way back was a different story, with people flying into NZ's largest city for business.

Seoul is a big city with so many places to go and things to do and see and eat! Since my Seoul experiences are not wholly representative of all that is on offer here, I've asked a few friends about their Seoul. Here are three random things Seoul means to them, be it everyday or on special outings. Let's check them out!

Shinchon - the area where the young people hang out! - is JY's school area, so the most familiar to her, especially the Hyundai department store area connecting from the Shinchon station. It's a good meeting place to wait for friends. Of course the pitfall is the sales that are often going on here, so she is bound to go on impulse shopping sprees every once in a while.

There's a place called 2nd floor where they specialise in cocktails and beer. This is the hangout place for JY and her 4 uni friends when they meet. Favourite accompaniment to the drinks (her go-to drink is Edelweiss, an Austrian brand) is donkasu, with the cheese and sauce squeezed on top of the crunchy fried beef. The downside? No sojus or spicy stews/soups here.

For sojus in the Shinchon area, JY goes to Honga. It's a franchise, where you get unlimited mussel pots. Unlimited. She took MS and I to the Gangnam branch after work once, and I must say, it was satisfying. I especially liked the spicy seafood/mussel ddokbokki here. Yum.

Because JY is from Guri, an area just outside of Seoul, she would also like to suggest Cafe Arista. As a Gurienne, she spent a lot of time here to procrastinate and has a lot of memories since her high school years. Good atmosphere, though not the cheapest of the places. Thumbs up for being a stone's throw away from home - always a good reason ;)

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Thank you JY for contributing to the blog. With JY, I am terminating the Seoul 3 series. It's been two weeks since I have returned to Auckland, NZ. The weather is fantastic this weekend, and I am still busy settling into my new apartment for the next six months. Hence the sporadic blog posts, I am so very sorry! Hopefully I will be back on track soon-ish :)

I guess that's what drives the success of Ballerina who loved a Bboy. The story is quite simple. It's just like the many dance stories out there, like Step Up, or, the classic, Save the Last Dance. Except maybe it's the girl liking the boy, not the boy liking the girl first.
Dancers range from fit breakdancers with six-packs to almost gymnast-like acrobatic dancers, to funny comic dancers.
The audience was encouraged to take heaps of photos and to make heaps of noise.
So, there's this cool dude who's the top dancer in the crew.
Then the others are pretty much his mates.
But these classic ballet dancing girls come into the scene.
Guess which one's the main girl, who likes the bboy?! Haha.

It's already been a week since I landed back in Aotearoa. Going from 20 cm deep snow to 20 plus Celcius degrees in heat, was an inexpressible joy to say the least. I wish it was a bit hotter, actually!

The first weekend was spent in an echanting forest celebrating a marriage of one of my oldest friends, then a family barbecue at the dream retirement spot with a paddock, a decent sized vege patch, a cool wooden house, a lake... I want!!

Recipe to try out: Beetroot, carrot & mint salad. This red red sald is so so nice!!!

from SimplyRecipes

Back in Auckland, I was set to move in as soon as possible. Well, that hasn't quite happened yet, but at least we got an apartment sorted out quickly. We are moving into a decent sized two-bedroomed place in the CBD area today. We, S and I, had been flatmates back in 2010, the year before I went over to Paris. We have also been friends since high school, and had come up to Auckland together to start our uni lices. It will be good to live with her again, this time as young professionals... Once I get a full time job, that is!

I would love to work with you (full-time), please!
I am looking for a job in Communications, PR & Events, backed by my experience in Seoul. Also in HR, because I love meeting new people and keeping in contact with them, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds - I am a culture collector!
Please check out my LinkedIn profile, as well as this blog to get to know me better.


No Internet set up at home, and no more smartphone either, so sorry for those who have been trying to get in contact with me without success. I will let you know when I am better connected, again :)

I'm doing well in Korea still. To give you an update:
My internship has been pretty intense so far. The PR & Events team I work for is really busy with more than three events each month, ranging from seminars to luncheon meetings, informal networking evenings and, on the 1st Dec recently past, we had our biggest of the year. For each event I help organise the press release, the booking forms, the emails to members, invitations, sponsorship materials... Lots of writing and phoning and invoices and following ups! The Gala just past was an 800 person event for which we worked our asses off. No going home before 9pm and no going home at all on the last week because home is too far and the workload is too much. The event went well but its been a sleepless month for us all, still recovering!

Since the Gala and the recovering 2013 came along, and it's been hard out membership campaign ever since at work. New interns have come to keep me company, and it's been a different kind of experience passing on the teaching and advises I've been learning and taking in for the first few months. 

Now here's another message I wrote the same friend a month later:

I only have three weeks until I leave Korea now (I'm kinda counting down, haha), and so my days are packed with last dates with friends and family. 

Before coming here, I thought I knew enough Korean but I knew that I didn't know the country well enough, because I have never travelled outside of Seoul. Turns out business Korean is not the same as everyday casual Korean, as in English. When I started work here it was really hard to find the right Korean equivalents for English words, for formal emails and documents and such. It was easier for writings, actually, because I had some time to search and think, but most of my works were done in English.

So when I had to phone people for sponsorships, of course most of them are Korean and that was really difficult. I literally read off a piece of paper that my colleague wrote for me!! Since then I've learnt a great deal and now can hold a good enough business conversation. They can still sometimes tell I'm not fully Korean because I have a slight accent, and I still have to guess the meaning of one out of every 5 or 6 words in each sentence, but all good!

I'm glad I got to travel to two very different cities from Seoul while here. One is Busan, the second city in Korea in the South where it's quieter and have several beaches. They have a strong dialect that I kept mistaking for Japanese (Japan is really close by, an hour's boat ride away), but I really liked the place. The second place was Jeju Island, even further South. Jeju is a favourite honeymoon destination of Koreans and it's beautiful. They have a pilgrimage route similar to Compostela de Santiago around the island, and the scenery reminded me a bit of NZ. I've been wanting to visit these two places for about five years, and now that I've finally been, I'm happy to leave Korea and not come back for about ten years.

Seoul is a big city with so many places to go and things to do and see and eat! Since my Seoul experiences are not wholly representative of all that is on offer here, I've asked a few friends about their Seoul. Here are three random things Seoul means to them, be it everyday or on special outings. Let's check them out!

F and I were colleagues at the Chamber in Seoul. She hails from Lyon, France, where she owns a lovely apartment with a fuchsia pink kitchen. When H, her decade-long friend, invited her on a year's adventure in Asia, F was brave enough to accept and fly half way across the world on a working holiday visa.

Turns out, Korean working holiday visas for Frenchies are free, lucky things. Wish it were that easy for other countries!

Anyway, as qualified web designers and IT experts, there are no shortage of jobs for these two, by the sounds of it. Why didn't I think of becoming a computer geek, too? Goodness knows I love the Internet. From F I have learnt a lot about website designing and she has encouraged me with many tips on typography (dafont.com), photography and video editing tools, plus many more.

Thanks to F, I have been able to see a lot more of Seoul this time round. It's always awesome to meet a group of friends who get along well, and I guess F and her friends have been my French mates to hang around with these past six months.

My most memorable trips with F are: the Secret Garden in one of the palaces off Anguk Station (as well as all the other places we walked to - was a loooong day), the trek up Bukhansan one fine autumn day (beautiful panorama of Seoul and beyond, stunning foliage), and the Les Miserables movie date last month after the Anish Kapoor exhibition at Leeum.

And guess what? When I asked F of her favourite places in Seoul, she also said the Secret Garden and Bukhansan! So I'm guessing she's enjoyed spending time with me as well?! Whew, haha, thanks F!

If there's another place F visited frequently in Seoul, it'll definitely be Bunker in Apgujeong. It's a bar with a club feel where foreigners like to hang out. They only have a half-hour happy hour, but their cocktails come in bucket sizes, so you better line up. As well as loud music there's a pool table and a dart board. Fun times.

Seoul is a big city with so many places to go and things to do and see and eat! Since my Seoul experiences are not wholly representative of all that is on offer here, I've asked a few friends about their Seoul. Here are three random things Seoul means to them, be it everyday or on special outings. Let's check them out!

I like N's neighbourhood, Nowon-gu, because I used to live in the area as well when I was young in Seoul. It's located in the upper eastern part of Seoul, off in it's own corner, but it's a fairly nice middle class district to grow up in.

N likes to visit Insa-dong, like so many of the tourists and Seoulites. Though some feel that the area has become too commercial of late.

N's special eating place would be 'I Have a Dream' in Gangnam. The pasta and pizza place is popular even amongst the celebrities, and is famous for its strawberry pizzas. I hear that you definitely have to book, and that the long lines form, without fail, every night.

N says, for her, 'I Have a Dream' has the best cream pasta in Seoul. Perhaps it's also because the restaurant holds a special souvenir for N. This is where she and her boyfriend went for their first date! Cute! :)

Mum and Dad are like children. Mum bought Dad a train set this year. He set it up on the dining table and watched it going round and round. Things he did not get to have as a child. Mum makes dolls and then gleefully shows me her finished work through the webcam. Proud smiles. Things she did not get to have time to do before.