Rain

Not particular reason as to why I haven't written a blog in a while. I guess in the same fashion as when I do write blogs, I wrote them for no reason other than I wanted to. Recently, I haven't wanted to write anything.
Today, I suddenly feel like writing a blog. As I'm writing I have no idea what I'm going to write about, how much I'm going to write, but I do know what images I'll be including. Yesterday was a typical day of rain in Seoul. One of those days when it just doesn't stop raining. On some of those days the rain will be torrential and the whole city is a wash. This Saturday was a drizzly day. One would be ok walking from their house to the station without an umbrella, if they didn't mind a light dampening on their knitwear. I decided to put my 70-300mm lens on my camera and take some shots. I had a umbrella in one hand and the camera in the other. Manual focus whilst holding the umbrella did prove challenging, but it actually made me slow down my shots and take a little more care when composing. I'm quite happy with the results. I went out knowing that I'd be mono-chroming the images once I got back to base. I played around with the levels on photoshop and have managed to create some fairly professional looking shots. Not bad for a hungover amateur photographer with a questionable umbrella above his head.





We had teachers day last week. I got some decent gifts.
In order of my likeness, worst first.
A handkerchief,
3 oranges,
3 sachets of instant coffee,
A diary with many pictures of coffee from around the world,
50,000 won restaurant voucher (about £27)
50,000 Coffee Bean coffee shop points card.

The coffee points card is an amazing present. I was so overjoyed at receiving this gift that I had to tell as many people as I possibly could (You know that feeling when something good happens). My new kids have started to call me coffee teacher. They have presented this to me as my official nickname. The chants of Toby Teacher have been replaced. Even the mothers make reference to my new nickname in their monthly student files. This was the basis for the coffee related presents. The reason they call me coffee teacher is because I drink a cup of coffee every morning. I guess that justifies.

Nothing extraordinarily exciting has happened to me in the past few weeks, months. JOKE, Rick did come to Korea, and at the same time he did enjoy his 10 day holiday here in Seoul. He loved the food, the nightlife and the general tick that Seoul has. It's pretty good place to visit it seems. Shame Korea doesn't sell itself to the world more so, but having recently read a lot in to their history it's no wonder they aren't forthcoming with open arms. Rick and I, hired a car (I got my Korean driving license a couple of months ago) so we drove to an island just off Incheon, the airport area. The weather in Seoul was high 20's, with it possibly touching 30 during the peak hours. On the island, I would estimate it was about 8 degrees. A rather large, and moist cloud had parked itself on, yes on, not above, the island. We were in a cloud for our 24 hours on the island. But we had underfloor heating in our beach-hut, which was 20 metres to the sea, which we couldn't see because of the cloud, so all was good. Happy memories.

Think I'm going to wrap this up. I did have a few more ideas for this blog, but a friend just called and they've sidetracked my thinking and I've completely forgotten what it was. Here is another rainy pic.....

See you soon.