But Martin, What about your shelves...?

So what does the almighty "Head Teacher" Andrew get up to at school? I wouldn't be surprised if you guessed correctly....he builds shelves with lego and power tools. There were no adults present so he wasn't allowed to use screws or nails, naturally. The drill wasn't plugged in either but he didn't notice.

Hard(ly) at work, as usual.

(Update)

Drill was too plugged in. What a silly post.

Christmas fairies!

To all our families and friends who we can't be with this Christmas, please download and cut out these tree toppers!

For the Jamieson Family:

For the Boyle family:

Power Corrupts

Stephen and his friends Meg, Andrew, Dan (recently deceased) and Dans' replacements were in a bar. Get over it.
Everyone went home after the GAA match because it's the responsible thing to do. Only an eejit would stay in a bar after 2AM, 20 minutes from his home when he has to work the next morning at 9:30.
Andrew thought about leaving one time but the owner of the bar wanted to give Dan and him more whiskey...probably on account of their wit and swank.

The next day Andrew gimps in late to find his classes have been given to a new teacher. 'Hmm?' he thinks and says aloud.
The director comes in, Andrew holds his breath.
'I need to talk with you, come in'
He goes in.
He sits.
He wonders.
He waits to hear that he smells like alcohol and is an hour late.
He waits...
'I want to give you a promotion, you will be head teacher, I will give you more money!' she says smiling.
'Sweet, okay' He says '...Wait! What do I have to do?'
She stops smiling and says ''Control the foreign teachers' 

Sold.

Tomorrow he will go to work and say 'Good morning subordinates' , Next month he will buy a megaphone...

How did it happen? His first job, his first 6 months and his teaching inability!

 Working so hard his eyes are literally popping out of his head.

 

Gambling in the staff room. He took around 20 sterling from this kid.

 

Here he is trying on the school uniform as Head Teacher.

 

Ground Zero

So Andrew wakes up September 12^th with a wet plastic bag stuck to his foot and a half bag of water soaking into his bed. He feels quite good knowing that he has fixed his dislocated toe only a few hours ago. He calls on Stephen and they head to work. Andrew limps into the staff room and tells the story. The co-teachers all say that he should go to the hospital. Nonsense Andrew thinks. So he leaves the school to work at a new school that the director has opened. This school has awkward staircases, half floors and mazes between classrooms. 

After the 1^st class he is guided to the next and on the staircase he bumps his toe on a step (in his socks). 

Andrew teacher:              ‘OOOOOOWWWWWWE!!!!’ 

He sits down as the Korean teacher looks at him in amazement. He eventually makes it to the classroom sucking wind through his teeth. Then as he throws himself on the floor of the classroom grabbing his foot:

Chorus of kids:                  ‘Hello teacher! How are you today?’

Andrew teacher:              ‘I HAVE A SORE TOE! AAAAHHHH!’

The kids don’t understand. Andrew takes his sock off to see what’s going on. The Korean teacher and the kids are baffled. Eventually he falters through the lesson and forgets about the toe.

He makes it to the next class on his own; it’s a joint class with Sunny teacher and Andrew teacher is late. He opens the door without a sound. Sunny doesn’t suspect a thing. He presses his finger to his lips - the children know what this means. The trap is set. He steps close behind her and before he gets to frighten her she takes a step back onto his toe...

Andrew teacher:              ‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!’

Sunny teacher:                 ‘ AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!’

Andrew teacher:              ‘Will you take me to hospital?

...Sunny calls the director and gives Andrew the phone. The director is in true form.

Director:                              ‘My Andrew! What happened? Are you okay?’

Andrew teacher:              ‘I dislocated my toe last night and put it back in place myself; it’s been

                                            getting worse and worse throughout the day. I think I need to go to

                                            hospital.’

Director:                              ‘mmm...I think it's better if you finish your class...because big 

                                               problem...you know? Jennifer will take you after you finish classes, 

                                               okay?’

She hung up before he agrees. Later Jennifer teacher picked him up and headed to the hospital. He had and X-Ray. The bottom right of the top section of the big toe.

 

Jennifer tells the doctor what happened, the good doctor smirks then nods in approval when he sees the picture of the sideways toe.

The good doctor:                             ‘Blahblahblahblahblayeo’

Jennifer teacher:                             ‘He says if you didn’t straighten your toe he would have had to 

                                                           do it anyway.’

Andrew teacher:                              ‘So I did a good job?’

Jennifer teacher:                             ‘Umm not really but not bad’

 Andrew is led to a backroom where he gets injected with something in the ass. Then they put him on a bed and start to put a half cast on his foot

1 day later

He found out today that he has to go back to the doctors tomorrow to get a full cast  and keep it on for a month.

헐

9/11! 9/11!

So it's pay day and as tradition dictates we need to spend at least a quarter of our salary. So we head to VIPS not V.I.P.S. now, 'vips'. We have some expensive steak and an all you can eat buffet and wash it down with few frosty ales. Normal enough as you can see;

 

Phase two: Get back to a local bar and have ourselves a Guinness which the Korean bar serves with chocolate, chocolate in the broadest sense of the word...tasted like ass truffles.

Phase three: Drink more

Phase four: Swing by the baseball batting range/amusement place. 

Phase four took a while because the amusements section was open for the first time ever and they have a shooting range so we obviously had to take time to give that a whack. Total success needless to say, we won 3 dartboards besides the mathmatic handicap of the attendee keeping score.

 

After the shooting range we hit the batting range. Dan was intentionally hitting foul balls so they would drop by his feet and he managed to get one to take home. Everyone was feeling in fighting form and on the way out we noticed a punching machine called the "Girl Punch".  No sir, we weren't going to pass up this challenge. Dan lucks out first with a flukey 801, Andy takes the torch and hits a feeble 762. "Fuck this!" he says, "I'm gonna kick it." The machine rises in defiance as though it knows what's coming. There's a child's horse ride right beside us that whinnies in excitement. There's an unimaginable tension in the air. This horse may have been a little too excited...

 

Wooden Andy doesn't fail to disappoint, his leg cocks back in a maneuver that can only be described as stiff and completely unorthadox. (Unorthodox - contrary to what is usual, traditional or accepted.)

He hoofs his foot forward: SMASH!!!.......650

Andy goes down at the same time the punching mitt goes down. Something's gone horribly wrong or terribly funny, it's hard to tell at this point. Stephen and Dan can't stop laughing as Andy hobbles the agonizing 500 meters home. Andy's rambling nonsense, the only coherent words coming from him is, "I think I've broken my toe.....I need whiskey". Dan goes on home laughing, Andy is still flailing around waving money about demanding whiskey. Stephen obliges. Gets back to Andy's apartment and finds this:

"I've dislocated my toe Stephen, it's all tight and I can't move it." Stephen comments, "It's completely sideways!"

They're both pretty ugly and deformed toes but it's the big one on the left that's banjaxed.

Stephen's sister happens to be a nurse so he sends her a picture and asks what should be done.

Whilst waiting for the reply, Stephen and Andy both look up videos on youtube on how to relocate a toe. Stephen's sister gets back saying he should go to a hospital and get pain relief as it's too dangerous to do yourself. Whilst reading this message Stephen hears a disgusting popping/crunching sound accompanied by harrowing yelp. "Fuck yes!!! I did it!!!" Andy the mavarick had taken it upon himself to yank his own toe back into place. "I can move it again Stephen, I can move it!" This was followed by three consecutive high fives and countless, "Fuck yeahs". 

Stephen promptly calls Dan and tells him the story much to Dan's amusement. Stephen begins to make his exit when Andrew says in the most pitiful voice, "Would you like to drink this whiskey with me?" Stephen doesn't turn down the whiskey, Andrew sits by the bed nursing his toe.

"This would make a good post for 'The Sushi Situation'!" .... BOOM!!!

 

Crime Watch

It was just a regular Saturday night in Itaewon, Seoul. We had our usual fill of beer and whiskey throughout the day, got hungry and decided to go to a Brazilian all you can eat meat and steak restaurant called Cocobananas or something to that effect. 

On our way out of the restaurant after an impressive feed of steak feeling reasonably respectable, we were stopped by a cameraman who says he's doing a piece on the nightlife in Itaewon and would like to interview us. We agreed that it would be a good idea to interview us, he seemed friendly and genuine enough. He starts off asking general questions like, How do you like Korea? How long have you been here blah blah.. Then he asked what the main differences are between Ireland and Korea. After giving fairly insightful answers to his previous questions, Andrew jokes that the only difference is that in Korea you can get alcohol 24 hours a day. The guy wrapped up the interview with some more general questions, and we were psyched that we were going to be on tv the next week.

So it's the following week and we're all gathered around the tv waiting for the show to come on. The news starts then they cut to a bulletin on foreigners in Korea. It was like an episode of crime watch except darker and more seedy. They had clips of foreigners vomiting and fighting in the streets. Then one clip of a guy throwing a young Korean girl over his shoulder whilst dragging another girl down an alley .... cut to us two eejits with big smiles, and of the almost 15 minute interview, they only show about a 7 second clip of Andrew saying, "The only difference is that in Korea you can get alcohol 24 hours a day, Stephen then begins a sentence with, "ha ha, yeah and als.." CUT to some guy lying in the street trying to stand up and failing miserably. 

Of the entire segment, we were the only people whose faces weren't blurred out!

What We Eat

Whether you're an unstoppable eating machine that will eat anything from a boiled egg to human stomach lining, or a fussy eater who spends more time picking through their food than actually eating it you're bound to find something to eat in Korea.

Here's some things we've eaten so far...

Silkworm - A fried delicacy that tastes as bad as it looks. It has a strange gritty texture and just tastes like eating dirt. It also has a horrible irony after taste that lingers for ages. Stephen stopped after one, Andrew ate an entire bowl.

Dried squid - A common snack in bars here. It's not actually that bad. First time we tried this was in a bar in Ochang. Andrew and Stephen were sitting chatting when out of nowhere a sexy barmaid walks up behind them and shoves dried squid in their mouths mid sentence. It was salty and fishy but that may have been her fingers..

Did you know squid have beaks? We didn't.

Cow's Head Soup -  Yep soup made from a cow's head. Stephen was eating this when Lucy began to tell him exactly what was in it, Stephen stopped her and said to tell him after he'd finished although he had a pretty good idea what makes up a cows head. Slices of ears, slices of nose, slices of tongue and slices of head! It was surprisingly tasty.

Hae Jang Gook (aka Pig Spine Soup) - The perfect meal to have at 3 or 4 in the morning drunk or the next day as a hangover cure. It's soup made with a pig's spine. It can be very spicy and although it doesn't sound too appealing it is delicious. There's some amount of meat on a pig's spine. It's normally served with rice.

Chicken's assholes - Yes you read that right. Squishy, squeaky, chewy chicken's assholes. Here's a big steamy bowl of assholes.

Sam Gap Sal - Pork bbq in the restaurants. They give you big strips of pork and there's a barbeque grill on the table, you cook the pork and cut it up. Eat it on it's own, wrap it up in lettuce... whatever.

 Barbeque - sausages, burgers, pork, mushrooms, pineapple, chicken skewers .. you know what a barbeque is.

Shellfish - We went on a midnight trip to Boryeong which is famous for it's shellfish. We got this feast and it was awesome. Clams, scallops, muscles and oysters among other things.

Lamb - There's an awesome restaurant down the road from where we live that serves lamb. Lamb skewers and ribs and it's amazingly delicious. And again, ye cook it yourself at your table which is always pretty cool.

Sushi - We took both our directors for meal to a Japanese restaurant recently and had a load of sushi. For starters they brought out a load of side dishes and finely cut sushi slices, we had poisonous blow fish which was delicious. Although it may have tasted the exact same as the rest of it and the novelty of impending death may have added to the flavor. Then they brought out a main plate of different types of sushi. The chef was a bit eccentric and took a liking to us, he came out with a big wooden boat with tuna on it. He wrote "Ireland" in Korean on the flag. He proceeded to communicate via body language and was pretend pissing all over the table and the 2 directors which they didn't like but we couldn't stop laughing. 

This was followed by king crab which was off the hook and 2 big steaks of tuna and possibly plaice. It was delicious but a bit expensive.

We've also had chickens feet, pigs feet and intestines which was alright too. Here's some hangover breakfasts, rice, eggs, corn, corned beef and spam! Lovely.

They also serve rather suspect foods, I don't want to know what this is but I have an idea. Adam and Meg enjoyed it though, I think Adam more so than Meg.

Andy's trademark double "double" burger - order 2 double burgers from Lotteria, and here's the genius part... place one on  top of the other, assume the claw position and tuck in. This is how it's done.

Sometimes though you just want some regular normal food from back home. So Stephen made his first ever pot (2 pots) of Irish stew which was a complete success. Andrew made some crazy dessert with bananas, rum and ice cream and lemons in a frying pan which people strangely liked!

Stephen has been going crazy with gravy since he got a food parcel from Ireland! Spuds, steak, cabbage, bacon and carrots, oh yes.

Stephen also ate live octopuss. You pick the guy you want from the tank, they scoop him out, chop him up and serve it to you right there with the bits of tentacles still dripping wet and wriggling about on your plate. It was a less than desirable sensation having your food wriggle about inside your mouth. You get a side bowl with olive oil or some type of oil which you dip the tentacles into first, this prevents the suckers sticking to the inside of your mouth (that ain't no Mr. T ism fool, I'm talking about the suckers on the tentacles). Stephen wished someone had shared this invaluable information with him before he tried his first piece! It didn't agree with him and almost immediately prompted some pretty impressive projectile vomitting after many a dry heaves. Andy played the allergy card again, claiming he might die if he tried some.... pussy!
And here we all are out for a meal.