Nic Trips

Here's the video I made for the 2015 EPIK Life Video Contest! It's a contest for all of the EPIK English teachers in Korea to make a 5 minute video about their lives here. Last year I got 4th place... This year, I won grand prize! The reward was 500,000 won (about $480). So have a watch and learn all about what teaching in Korea is really like.

Korean food has become my favorite food in the world since my first month of living here! Many of the tastes that were very different and new to me I was unsure about at first, but have since grown on me to the point of craving them! Even the cold, spiciness of kimchi (김치), a taste that I thought I would never grow accustomed to, has become sometime I reach for willingly for every meal. I find myself wanting the taste in between bites of other foods just as the native Koreans do. I have know for sure for a long time now that the things I will miss about Korea the most when I leave is the food. The typical Korean meal always consists of a main dish of some type of meat (most commonly pork or beef, but also fish or chicken), soup, rice, and a plethora of side dishes called banchan (반찬) that will always include kimchi. Let me point out the parts of the meal pictured of above... First, you can see the soup in the large, hot stone pot at the center. Inside is a type of stew ...

For those of you who have never been to or heard of a Korean jimjjilbang (public bath / sauna), I came across this funny video that actually does a GREAT job of explaining it (while still making it comical of course). Enjoy!

Christmas in Korea is a very different kind of experience. They don't celebrate it the way we do in the states. Although it is just as commercialized, it is in a different way. To them, Christmas is a couples' holiday. You usually get together with your significant other to get dinner or something on Christmas Eve and then go to do some kind of activity together on Christmas day. For our gang of 8 in Ulsan, we still wanted to treat it like a family holiday, so in between Skyping with all our families back home, we did all sorts of things together. First on the list was getting a "family" Christmas picture taken. I brought my camera and dragged everyone along to see the lights they had put up at Ulsan and got everyone to sit still long enough to take a nice photo... Top row, left to right: Andrew, Jaryt, Tuba, and Shane. Bottom row, left to right: Nicole(me), Lauren, Jarah, and Ashley. Also known as "Ulsan's Great Eight". =) C...

As part of a documentation of my life in Korea, I decided to take pictures of my school lunches everyday for about 2 and a half weeks. I can't tell you what each thing is or is called, but I will try to get my co-teacher to help me label them sometime next week. For now, enjoy the pictures! And, know that there is a typical (and expected) order of food on your tray. First, on the bottom left is always the rice. On the bottom right is always the soup. Then from left to right on the top row goes: kimchi, "vegetables", meat.

EPIK holds many different contests over the course of the year. In November, they announced their annual, EPIK Life Video Contest. In this competition, contestants must make a 5 minute video about their average life in Korea as a guest English teacher. The winners were announced on December 11th, and I discovered I won a bronze prize which includes a certificate of the award and $200 deposited in my bank account. It was totally worth the effort for me to make and it was a good thing to document anyways.

This is my wonderful town of Hogye-dong, in the Buk-gu district of the city of Ulsan in South Korea. This is where I live and work, about a 35 minute bus ride north of the main downtown area of the city (at least on a good day when the traffic isn't bad). One of these days, I'll hike up onto the mountains in the background and get some better, more elevated pictures, so you can understand just how beautiful it is in this valley I live in. This is the side road that all the buses have to take to get into Hogye, or "Speed Bumb Road" as I've designated it. There's at least 15 speed bumps from start to finish. It was really annoying at first, but I've learned to appreciate it because now I can fall asleep on the bus on my way home without worrying about missing my stop because the bumps will always wake me up just as we're getting to Hogye. This is Hogye from afar, viewed from the crossing of the train tracks and "Speed Bump Ro...