We got a new teacher last week, from Canada, who seems pretty cool and so we went out to celebrate. This is what the table setting looked like, from a good sashimi restaurant in Dongnae. Sashimi is called hue in Korean. Moving down to coastal Busan, I thought I'd be eating a lot more fish in meals but it's been pretty much the same as in Seoul.
I first thought this was some sort of pork from Jeju. It's actually whale meat and I only found out after eating it. I'm guessing it was from a pilot whale or something because the skin was so dark. It tasted fairly average, kind of like fishy beef. Not something worth going out of your way for.
These are some weird fish with big heads that you can eat. They're always curled up like cats and I have no idea what their English name is.
On the weekend we went to Kadok Island, the third biggest island in Korea. It's really close to Busan and you can get to the ferry terminal by bus. The bus will take you about half an hour and the ferry less than 10 minutes to the island.
Oh and here's some other food that I ate that same day. This is gulgukbab, an oyster rice soup that is easy to find in Busan, but less common elsewhere. For about $4 you can get a bowl of it, steaming hot with seaweed and fresh oysters. Good breakfast food.
Back to the ferry now. The ride only cost us about $3 and was fairly pleasant. The ferries constantly travel around the island during the day because there isn't a bus service. When you're tired of one part of the island, you just wait at the ferry-stop and hop on. These little kids were fighting over a bag of chips.
The island is about fifteen square kilometres and has small settlements around the place. It has it's own police station and high school, but there weren't many people out and about. We decided to have a walk up the mountain and see what was on the other side.
There seemed to be a well-established farming community, with a lot of these rice steps built into the mountain. Farming on mountains is a little bit strange coming from Australia because everything back home is very flat.
Here's a dilapidated house that looked like it had been more recently used for a soju party. I find abandoned places like these to be pretty interesting because I always wonder what makes someone pack up and leave a house behind. Would they lock the doors?
A nice artificial lake built into the mountain and unfit for swimming. Come to think about it, I haven't been swimming since I came to Korea.
We wound our way up a mountain path that turned out to be a few kilometres long. It was a pleasant walk and we had plenty of time. Those tarpaulins in the distance are covering firewood that people have chopped and left around the place.
So we got over one small mountain and the view was picturesque. Well worth the effort. There are islands in many of the harbour areas around southern Korea and most of them are heavily forested and uninhabited.
An eunheng namu, or 'bank tree'. These trees are golden yellow and seem to shed all of their leaves very suddenly, over the space of a few days.
The fallout is a little more appreciable up close. I wish my bank balance looked like this.
In the second small town we reached, we boarded the ferry again. We were actually running down the mountain to get on it and it took off, but then an island ajumma yelled and waved her hands and it pulled back in for us. Nice people. The boat stopped at another town before heading back to Busan.
It doesn't look like it, but that day was freezing cold. I had a really thick jacket on and my hands in my pockets were still frozen. I was also surprised to see ice on the roads of the island, at 3pm in the afternoon. There's never ice on the roads back home, so my Korean friend had difficulty understanding my excitement. I guess my Aussie temperament is a little too mild for these arctic outposts.
Now we're back in Busan, ferreting down a tunnel at high speeds. Koreans like to build lots of tunnels because there are lots of mountains.
This is what a DVD bang, or DVD room looks like on the inside. You can find these all over Korea. There are twenty or so rooms on average and you just pick a movie and watch it in private on a projection screen. The couches are pretty comfortable and so these are popular places for young couples to get snuggly.
This is from a Japanese restaurant in the Kyungsan area. I tend to prefer the Japanese style sushi over Korean kimbap because the rice is flavoured with vinegar. Also on the table is some seafood soup, udon noodles and off the photo on the left is some eel rice. Eel tastes a bit fatty and is an interesting alternative to fish.
It appears that some people love eye. I really like the ambiguity in this message. There's all sorts of interesting Konglish around the place, especially on people's shirts. But much of that passes by in the heat of the moment and I can't photograph it. Best to come over and see it for yourself.
See you all again after christmas! I'm working christmas and new years day (it isn't regarded as anything particularly special here), but still having a celebration or two. Should be good. Cyas!
Japan Railways sell passenger tickets at discounted prices if you buy a few thousand of them at once. This has spawned a small industry of special retailers who buy large quantities and resell them to the public at a small profit. We bought our tickets from this shop and they turned out to be about 2 dollars cheaper per ticket than buying them from the vending machines.
When we got back we were feeling a little tired, so Jimmy invited us back to his place to chill out for a while. We drank some coffee and played a pretty cool game with dice on the coffee table. I didn't think any sort of dice game could be entertaining, but this one was addictive. The object of the game was to make decisions and reach a certain score. I know what you're thinking, but seriously, it was good.
What would a trip to Japan be without sashimi? After some initial confusion about where to meet, we found my sister and she took us to a local sushi bar. The menu items were written all over the walls and the place was nice and cozy.
Well all I can say is that you haven't eaten sashimi until you've eaten it in Japan. The flavours of the meat are more complex and refreshing than anything I've tried overseas. The portions are cut much thicker than I expected and the wasabi is freshly ground. 
The next day we went to Hep 5, a landmark shopping centre with a ferris wheel. Upon entering the building you're greeted by this rather confronting whale sculpture hanging from the ceiling.
This is the outdoor ferris wheel they have at Hep 5. It's base is on the seventh floor of the shopping centre and has great views of the city.
The wheel is always continuously in motion, unlike the wheels in Australia that stop to let passengers on and off. It turns slowly enough, but if you leave something in one of the carriages, you have to wait until it comes around again.
Here is the amazing insect-woman that accompanied me on my journey. In this photo we were walking in the streets between Hep 5 and the Umeda Sky Building.
And here's the Umeda Sky Building. We saw it from the ferris wheel and just kept walking along the streets towards it until it got bigger. At the top it has a 'floating garden observatory' where you can see panoramic views of the city. Those two ramps leading into the centre circle are escalators up to it.
Luckily for us it was a nice clear day. Heights have always freaked me out a little.
Osaka is a picturesque, low-lying metropolis with a lot of bridges. Unlike Busan, the mountains are far off in the distance. We stayed here for a good hour or two before moving on. In the cafeteria we ate ice-cream sandwiches.
After that we went to Osaka Castle, a big historical site in the middle of the city. The area is surrounded by a moat and used to protect a small citadel. Now it's a popular tourist attraction and has good examples of Japanese architecture.
Inside the castle grounds is a lot of good landscaping and the trees are well kept. I noticed around the streets that the trees are all neatly pruned in general.
There were a few restaurants and souvenir shops in the castle grounds, so we bought some more 
Here's the main building in Osaka castle. The palace was built in 1585 by Toyotomi Hideyoshi as a fortified residence, but has been knocked down several times in history. The most recent restoration was in 1997 and the results are quite stunning.
The building is now a multi-level museum with interactive displays about the area's history. This is the view from the top floor over the castle grounds. The golden fish tails on the roof are plated with 7 coats of gold leaf. They'd make a nice souvenir. There were more gold decorations on the hand rails, but they were shielded with acrylic.
After that we couldn't resist stopping off for some more sashimi. Here you can see eel on the left and 
Then we went out to dinner with my sister again. On the right is Emiko, a sociable Japanese English teacher who likes to play and talk about tennis. Apparently, her tennis coach is very good and Emiko feels somewhat inferior to his lofty abilities.
That night we ate at Izakaya, a popular type of Japanese drinking establishment. They served us a lot of fried foods with dipping sauce that were done very well. Normally a lot of deep fried food gets sickening pretty quickly, but the batter style was very light. In this picture you can see some deep fried eggplant 
Here we are on the final night in Japan. I really liked the sake here, it tasted a little floral or something. The waitress took this photo of us.
After going to a small bar and having some drinks, Heather and I went back to the hotel to pack up for Korea. The hotel was called Il Cuore and was in the middle of Namba, which was a great location. I'd recommend this place if you're planning on staying in Osaka for a few nights.
We missed our first flight back to Korea because we misjudged the subway timetable. Luckily the helpful airport workers booked us onto the next flight a couple of hours later, so we weren't late for work. What a tragedy that would have been.
There were movies showing at various locations around the city, with people passing through the various displays and buying tickets. Many of the movies sold out on the first day the tickets were available, so it was difficult for us to get our hands on some. Next year I'll book in early through the internet, which seems to be the best way.
Jef and I went early one morning to try and get tickets for a movie, but they sold out before we got there. So we bought the last two tickets to another movie that we didn't have a clue about. It was a Singaporean animation called "Zodiac - The Race Begins". What did we think of the it? Well it was a kind of fusion of some really bad Disney and Bollywood, but sterilised beyond recognition. I don't think it will be getting a public release, so you have all been spared.
We ended up back in the Jagalchi fish markets another day. I've stared at the live seafood shops for hours. It's not just the seafood itself that's interesting, it's the way the shop ladies hand it out to customers. There's a lot of skill involved in getting a large writhing octopus into a shopping bag.
These dried tentacles are from giant squid and were over a metre long. The suckers on the ends are lined with little spikey teeth. The lady behind the stand was a bit disappointed that we didn't purchase any and displayed her dissatisfaction by baring her gold teeth at us. I'm not really sure how you're supposed to eat them.
In this photo you can see flounder, salmon and some stripey fish that I don't know the name of. This is at the front of a restaurant and if you stand still for more than 15 seconds, one of the ajummas will come out and start pulling your arm. A couple of lines of English will get them to stop, after which they'll usually give you a startled look and then have a fit of hysteric laughter. Well, that's if you look Korean.
Here's Amanda and Meaghan inspecting some king crabs. I've eaten these back in Australia and they're not bad. I think the blue swimmer crabs are a bit tastier though. These aquariums don't have lids on them because the crabs are too heavy to lift themselves out. Sometimes you'll see legs half dangling out and from a long way away it looks like an alien hand.
This is one of our favourite local bbq places. Around 50% of restaurants in the area are like this, but we like the lady at this one because she cuts up our meat for us and teaches us Korean.
One of our newer discoveries have been micro-breweries. There are a couple of them around Seomyeon and they usually have a couple of their own light ales available. The atmosphere at these places is a little more relaxed and the food is a little better than at the average watering hole.
Plastic surgery is pretty big in Korea and there are some humourous advertisements in the subway. Here's Meaghan posing next to one.
Here are my students talking with Ji-Hae during break. Elementary school students can be a little noisy sometimes, but in general they study a lot harder than I ever did at that age. Last weekend I gave an English presentation to their parents about the lessons we teach. That was interesting.
A while back, we went for a walk in the mountains near us. From our area it's only a ten minute walk and there are some picnic areas and nice views along the way. This is an exercise circuit set up for the general public about halfway up one of the trails. You can often see old ladies doing exercises to varying degrees of intensity. A lot of them like to walk and clap their hands at the same time.
You can see these little grassy mounds in all sorts of nooks and crannies around the mountains. They're burial mounds, marking the graves of the deceased. You'd think it would get a little creepy, but actually they're quite pleasant to look at.
This is a flower I took a photo of. I'm not much of a botanist but I appreciate plants. And I like salad.
And this is my macro shot of a praying mantis. I nearly stepped on it when we were coming back down. In Australia, they're usually green.
Dong-eui University is also close to us and built into the mountains. The whole campus is on a steep slope and it's challenging to walk from one end to the other. I heard it was built like that because slopey space is cheaper. This is a water garden they have in the middle.
There were large carp swimming in the water too. It had a really peaceful atmosphere to it. The guy whose head you can see on the bottom was filming a video.
This is the view of Busan from halfway up the Dong-eui University campus. There's more Busan on the other side of those mountains.
I think our school branch is going pretty well. On Thursday Donna, the boss in the white shirt, took all the staff out for a pork party. The only thing I like more than a pork party is free alcohol to go with it.
A lot of small eateries in Busan are attached to the house of the owners. Often you'll see them lying down inside and watching tv or something. Sometimes they're fast asleep, but jump to their feet when you make some noise. This is a place just around the corner from the school that's really small and feels cosy like a dining room. You can get noodles for $2. 
And here are my kalguksu noodles, cheap, fast and delicious. I eat a lot of dishes like this for lunch. A humble meal for a humble man.