Wow, It Rained

So today was a relatively fun day.  I took a rugby ball into school, and the kids were suddenly transported into an alien world they'd never seen before.  It was fun, but also tinged with some regret that they'll never get to play properly.  I hear that there is a team here, but one team on an island this size, means that exposure is awfully low.

I broke a new personal record for squats at the gym today, and subsequently fell over a plug socket in the floor, prompting everyone to laugh; behind their hands or towels, obviously.  Koreans are generally not as polite as some other countries, but they still stifle a laugh when it's at someone else's expense.  The ways they're rude include barging you out of the way when walking, although this usually results in them on their backside, and shouting at you for no real reason.  They don't shout at each other, so this is presumably an anti-foreigner defence mechanism.

Talking of foreigners, this area is teeming with them.  The shipyards have bought in people from all around the world, and it often feels like there are more foreigners  in this particular part of Goeje, than Koreans.  When you step outside this little bubble however, it's normal (in that it's abnormal, if you catch my drift).

Every time we head past the docks in the morning, my brain explodes as to the size of the lifting machinery they use here.  They don't make the super tankers you see on these 'how do they make something so freakin' huge,' programmes, but the things they do make are pretty big in my world.

You occasionally hear them drop something colossal in the yards, and (bearing in mind they're ten minutes away) you think to yourself someone has crashed their car into a lampost.

In a similar vein, I saw construction workers outside, clambering around scaffolding (with no flooring, just great big squares, created in two dimensions) with no safety harnesses.  They were moving round ala ninja warrior, on the obstacle with two walls but no ceiling and floor - for those who don't know, you have your left hand and left foot pressed against one wall, right hand and foot pressed against another wall.  It was pretty awesome, especially considering they were high enough that a fall would be fatal, no questions asked.  And one was using an electric saw of some kind, while balancing on a single scaffolding pole.

The flip side is that they're hellishly efficient.  The road outside was dug up, down to the underlay (hardcore?  Hardcourt?  I don't know  how you spell it) and resurfaced in two days.  It's roughly 250m long, including all the odd pieces of side-street they've done.

The building outside that's being built gains a storey every week.

I recently got the opportunity to use a Nikon D90, which was tons of fun.  I'm waiting on the owner to send me the pictures, and hopefully I'll be able to upload some on here.  It was pretty handy, and the pictures looked to be of high quality (at least on the viewfinder) so maybe a couple came out  okay.  I was forced to primarily use the automatic modes, which essentially make it like a (frickin' expensive) point and shoot, but I did also manage to take a few snaps with the aperture priority mode, (to make the backgrounds all cool and blurry) only time will tell if they worked out or not.  It also had a pretty cool zoom lense, ranging from quite a strong wide-angle to a low powered telephoto.  I don't know the exact specifications, but it allowed for a varied range of shots without switching lenses, which is cool.

Anyway, we'll see if any came out.

In the meantime; bye.