Snowfight anyone?

I love snow...in fact i'm thinking of relocating to Kangwon-Do....until then I will have to put up with the meagre amounts that fall in Seoul...

By gum, it's a bit parky...
Nothin's gonna stop me getting to school...

Happy New Year...

Yes, I know I'm a little late...think of it as a Julian/Gregorian difference. Anyhow, we had some friends over. The men wanted to go out onto the streets and see what was happening, the ladies didn't want to brave the cold.
We headed up to the crush and chaos that is Chonggak. Here is a photo taken in the last couple of minutes of 2007. And here is my view of the last 10 seconds or so of 2007 and the first 90 seconds of 2008. I would be extremely surprised if nobody got their eyebrows singed there that night.

More skiing....

We managed to get a free condo at Oak Valley for the weekend before New Year and so I was able to go skiing again. Oak Valley is no match for my superior skiing and so I was bored after about 90 minutes but luckily I spent most of my time teaching the children.

Here's Emily all wrapped up and ready to hit the slopes. She's probably a bit too young to start skiing but she had a good go being pulled around and then sliding down the gentlest slope ever.

Alex, on the other hand did pretty damn well. Here is his first attempt.
A couple more runs and he seems to have gotten better.
I look forward to the day in the future when we can have some fun tearing up the slopes....unless he converts to snowboarding, in which case I shall disown him...

Christmas Lunch...

I had a stab at cooking a traditional english Christmas dinner...alas no Brussels Sprouts...and may I just say that Korean ovens suck

Christmas Lights in Chonggyechon...

I really like these lights that they've put up at Cheonggyechon. Sometimes I wish I had an expensive camera and the patience to learn how to use it properly...
Avenue of lights Close-up Even closer It's like Blackpool

Hana Bank sucked into oblivion...

I really must go back and take another photo of this from a better angle before they take it down...

Blurred vision...

too many Krispy Kreme donuts...

Christmas Eve at the Hilton...

If you didn't know, they have an absolutely huge Christmas tree at the Seoul Hilton and also a pretty extensive model train set and so I took the kids to see it on Christmas Eve. Nowadays they're at the perfect age for Christmas whereby they are old enough to appreciate it but still young enough to fully believe in it.
And then on to Lotte...

Carving up Korea...

On Election Day I dragged some of my colleagues off to Daemyung Vivaldi for a day of skiing. It wasn't too bad, but I'm afraid I'm just too a good a skier for what Korea has to offer and so I get bored after a couple of hours...

At the end of a long day... See accountants do know how to have fun... Here's a video so you can more of an idea what skiing in Korea is like.
And here I am skiing down. Sorry if you feel queasy watching it, but I'm not quite Graham Bell on Ski Sunday.

Mmm...cake...

First snow in Seoul...

One day you wake up in the morning and the view outside your window looks like this... The next morning it looks like this... I' m not quite sure why the apartment block opposite has turned yellow though!

Pancakes for Breakfast...

In early November I went to LA for the week on business. For a change I actually had the chance to escape from the office for a while. Of course the boss gets to decide what we do in that free time and so we spent our time hanging out in various malls plus a day at Universal Studios. (Remind me never to go on the Revenge of the Mummy ride ever again! I can live without being catapulted forward through the darkness, screeching to a complete stop, and waiting a few seconds before being yanked back through the darkness.) Mind you the flight there was through a very long thunderstorm so it wasn't that different!

Damn you Korean Air with your earlier departure time! There's the plane that brought me safely back to Korea. Back over Korea, sunset while flying over Kangwon-Do.

Weekend in Anmyeon-do (안면도에 보냈던 그주말...)

The first weekend of November saw us head down to Anmyeon-do for the weekend along with some of Sunme's elementary school friends. I think they were planning a night of hard drinking and reliving old times but the fact of the matter is that we're all the wrong side of 30 and most of us have children so it was rather sedate.

Nothing in my life is ever simple and so it proved as we set off for the weekend. We were supposed to be going down in two cars, meeting at our house in Bangbae with a start time of 10am but a phone check at 9:30am showed car number one just leaving Bundang and the occupants of car number 2 still in bed in Paju. The Bundang bunch arrived around 10:30am but my brother-in-law who had been out drinking the night before was now in the middle of a row with his wife about how irresponsible he is (I'm on her side in this case). In order to save time, I sent car number one on its way and told my b-i-l to meet me in Kasan from where we could drop straight down to the highway to the West Sea. I got to Kasan at the arranged time but guess what, my b-i-l still hadn't left Paju 'cos his wife was now refusing to go. To cut a long story short, I sat drinking coffee for another 2.5 hours before they turned up but even when he did turn up, he was so hungover that I drove...

Sunme and the kids had arrived mid-afternoon and had fun playing on the beach (which I suppose is probably covered in oil these days). I got there just in time to bundle out of the car and take some photos of the sunset... Then it was time to bbq us some dinner...charred meat, yummy! The next day dawned bright and sunny, the kind of say that makes you glad to make the effort to get out of Seoul... There was just enough time to have a walk round the headland... and play a round of putting golf... before we went off to eat some prawns.

No Alex, I am your father...

On November 1st, my company held a mini-marathon of 6.5kms. In our practice runs I had timed quite well and would have been in the top ten in the actual thing but for one thing; our boss had the bright idea of making us run in costume. We were directed to a website and allowed to choose what we wanted. I chose Darth Vader cos it looked cool on the website. Of course, I hadn't considered the practicalities of running in a mask...

Certain people didn't bother choosing a costume and therefore I was able to choose for them and get myself an Obi-Wan, a Yoda and also my very own Storm Trooper.
Here I am trying on my costume. It was clearly not designed for someone as tall as me as it was not long enough between shoulder and crotch and therefore risked me sounding less like the vocally impressive James Earl Jones and more like one of the Chipmunks...Here I am all masked up, it was certainly fun to play Darth Vader for the day.

So much cooler than Notre Dame...

Right next to the Olympic Park, you can find a rather cool-looking methodist church. It's cool because architecturally the design is very traditionally gothic with lots of mini-steeples but instead of the stone-cladding which might be expected for such a design, it's been totally done in skyscraper glass...I had always thought Methodists were quite austere and avoided anything fun and so this doesn't fit in with my perception but anyway... Here you can see the church on the right and the bell tower on the left.Close up of the bell towerand a close up of the main church hall Close-up of the tower on the Church hall.

The Seoul Olympics...

I'm going to show my age here and talk about the Seoul Olympics. I was in my first year of Senior School (Middle School in most of the world?) in 1988 in Sale in Australia.

We were assigned an Olympics-related project at school (and I suppose a lot of other people my age were as well). The project must have been for geography because we were required to get some Olympics newspaper cuttings, find out which countries were mentioned and mark them on a map. It must have been a project set over the Spring holidays because I remember that we were in Fiji when the Olympics were actually on and didn't see any of it at all. We had to get our neighbours to save all their newspapers so that I could actually do the project.

Anyhow, I was able to get a clipping which mentioned each participating country. My teacher was astounded as although she hadn't given any guidelines, she assumed people would stop around 20-25 countries. I think this project was the first time I realised just how many countries there are in the world (of course there are a hell of a lot more now.) Anyhow, wondering around the Olympic Park in Seoul suddenly made me think of that project.

Somewhere in Mum's attic there is a bunch of newspaper clippings listing countries to match to each of these flags...A special prize to anyone who can name the countries these flags represent... Of course while I was doing an outstanding job on my Olympic project, someone else was doing a splendid job of screwing up his experience of the Olympics. He was caught pretty much immediately so his name was presumably never recorded on the wall of Champions but I wonder if someone in Sydney has had to go and chip Marion Jones' name off the equivalent monument in Sydney.Alex will be around 10 when the Olympics hit London in 2012, I wonder if he will have a similar project.

Autumn leaves at Olympic Park...

After we had run ourselves into the ground playing football, we grabbed some drinks and wondered around looking at the autumn leaves (단풍)... Some of them had already fallen... But most of them were a glorious shade of red... Of course there are always late developers... The weather was lovely and the wind was still and so I was able to take some pictures of reflections... and then the sun affected and I got pretentious and taking photos from unusual angles...

Football at Olympic Park...

One weekend in October Alex's football class was cancelled but he really wanted to play so we grabbed our ball and headed down to Olympic Park for a kick-about.

Some head shots for the Panini album...
And a spot the ball shot...
By my reckoning, he should be just ready for the 2022 World Cup as talented 19 year old...