A Marathon Effort

Last week I completed the Seoul Marathon in a, I suppose, respectable time of 3 hours 16 minutes. However, despite that time being my around about aim before starting, at around the 32k mark I was smashing out a solid pace and was on for under 3 hours. I was feeling good, energy a plenty and full of confidence. And then ‘the wall’ happened. I had heard tales of this legendary wall, but wasn’t absolutely entirely convinced of its existence. However as my legs decided they weren't going to function properly (contrary to orders given by my brain) and began to realise the foolishness of my ignorant doubting, I resigned myself to 10k of, well, agony. 2 Japanese course mates decided to cheer me on, and met me at the end with a bag of nutritional energy snacks (chocolate) and congealed vomit (bananas) that they had bought for me. What babes. My American friend later at church told me that I had even ‘inspired her to walk for maybe 30 minutes’ that day. Just doing my part.

Decided for the final 2 months to move out of the family home, and somewhere closer to friends and university (I was having an hours commute every day). Money is somewhat of an issue, and so when I stumbled across a place offering rent half as cheap as anywhere else I had to check it out (and be incredibly suspicious). I arrived and was greeted by a man with post-asparagus-eaten- urine coloured dyed hair, who showed me a room which makes Harry Potter’s stair cupboard holiday home laugh at its petite-ness. There was also a bit of (a strong) funky (disgusting) smell lingering about but it seemed to have not made its way into the room so it’s all good. I only plan to sleep there anyway, the rest of my time will be spent chilling out in the finally-decided-to-reappear sun! I didn’t quite understand everything the guy was telling me, and filling out a mini contract was also interesting as it was completely in Korean. Not as interesting as him giving me the keys and saying to just ‘pay whenever’. I think that’s what he said anyway… I couldn’t turn down the price too, but have a strange suspicion that it may be low not only because it’s a little bit (very) rank, but also because it is situated slap bang in the middle of the student area’s party town. It could get a bit rowdy at night, but if you can’t beat them join them.

Winter is pretty much officially over! Apart from the other day when the weather decided it’d be nice (it wasn’t) to go back to negative temperatures for a day. But when the Sun comes out, that’s not the only thing that comes out and so the female president has acknowledged this and has put a ban on outrageously short skirts. Oh and North Korea keeps making these threats to bomb stuff and some other stuff. That’s not comforting.