Buh, buh, buh, Bowling!

As I have mentioned before... I live in a small town in South Korea.  It's not the smallest town in South Korea, but it sure is small.  It's the smallest place I have ever lived.  It's small enough that I can't even find population stats about the town on the internet.  The county in which Boeun the town is, is also called Boeun (confusing?  Yep... that's why my address includes the words Boeun-eup and Boeun-gun), and the whole county has a population of 43,000 people.  So the town is smaller than that.  It's the kind of town that has one Paris Baguette and one Tous Les Jours and the most exciting news to me is that a Baskin Robbins is opening.  We don't even have a McDonalds.

Now, please know, I do not hate living in Boeun.  I don't!  I have made good friends here, I'm really liking my school, and it's nice to be able to walk or bike to literally every corner of the town in no time.  But I seriously am a city girl and I go a little stir crazy in the tiny town of Boeun...

So when I tell you that we went bowling last Friday night... you know this was definitely one of the most awesome things one can do in Boeun!  There is one bowling alley from what I can understand (also one pool hall, or pocketball hall!), so we hit it up this past Friday night.  Chris and Betty (from the States), Julie (also US), Laura (the UK), Jane (from Boeun, a student in my adult class), Suzy (also from Boeun and my adult class), and I loudly took over two lanes at the Boeun bowling alley.

One thing you must know about Korea is that they take their sports very seriously.  In Canada a bowling alley serves snacks, has loud music blaring, sometimes does things like neon or bumper bowling, and probably an arcade in the building.  But in Korea, bowling is a sport.  So every other person at the bowling alley came equipped with their own ball, their bowling uniforms, and some kind of hand brace.  It was quite intense!  And you cannot bowl at the same time as the person in the next lane or you might mess up their streak of strikes.  And if you yell loudly you might mess them up.  Like I said... quite the serious sport that I just did not take seriously enough...

Luckily we had a good time...

 Bowling shoes... not cool in any country...

 Chris going for a strike

 Julie, Betty and Jane

 You can see the guy closest to the camera in the yellow shirt is wearing his brace... see... very serious...

 I actually have the exact same hand towel in my house.  But at the bowling lane we polish the balls real nice... apparently it helps.  I totally noticed a difference...

 Laura literally bowled in such a unique (albeit it hilarious) way that she drew a crowd that watched and enjoyed the show.  It was awesome!  She ran full tilt toward the lane and proceeded to kick her leg up in the air somehow.  It was quite impressive.

 Some of the observers...

 Me going for a strike

 Sometimes I try to yell at the ball to encourage it toward the pins that still need to go down... Koreans don't do that so much...

 I can't tell if something good or bad here happened for Suzy

 Go Julie!  (my camera is not smooth on the action shots...)

Jane, Suzy and Betty

One thing that has wonderfully come into my life recently is the discovery of this hilarious blog that a guy from the states started when he and his wife lived in Korea.  He draws comics of some of his experiences and what a foreigner might find different about Korea.  Here are two of my favourite ones...

This one makes complete sense if you live in Boeun.  Very early in the mornings or during Saturdays there will be this truck that drives up and down the streets blaring some kind of announcement.  At first I thought North Korea was attacking, but I'm pretty sure there was a sale at the Samsung store.  Anyway... every once and awhile it starts up again (and early too!!!!) and kind of freaks me out!

And this is what it was like when all the things in my apartment were breaking and I had no idea what was really going on.  There would be a long long long conversation back and forth in Korean and then they would tell me that "the boiler is broken"... hmmmm.... ok...

Anyway... I've been having a great stretch of time in Korea since coming back from Thailand.  This week is the first week of the new semester and I'm excited to start teaching starting next week.  Hopefully the goodness keeps on going.