Hello and welcome to bonus episode number 172 of the Q-Lips English podcast.
How's it going?
I am your host and your study buddy, Andrew.
It's wonderful to be back here with you for another edition of our bonus episode series which, if you don't know, if you're new to the series and you don't know what it's about, let me explain.
I'm a Canadian, but I live abroad in Seoul, South Korea.
And what I do here each and every bonus episode is just tell you some stories from my everyday life.
We hang out together.
It's just like hanging out with a friend.
And the reason why I do this is to help you build your English fluency.
We know that when you're learning English, you got to get a lot of the language into your mind, into your brain.
And this will help you to build your fluency.
So that's why I'm here hanging out with you.
Now, in this week's episode, I have two stories for you, I guess, to tell you about, which are just some things that I've been up to this spring.
So we'll call this episode spring stories.
How about that?
Spring stories.
So we'll get to those stories in just a sec.
But before we do, I want to let you know that there is a free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary available for this episode for everyone.
And you can get those just by visiting our website, QLips.com.
Check them out.
They're pretty good study resources, if I do say so myself.
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Let's get started with this week's stories.
So as I said, I've got two stories for you.
And the first story I'm going to call hike to see the flowers because, well, that's what I did.
My wife and I went on a hike last weekend here in Seoul to a mountain called Inwangsan Mountain.
And that's a mountain very close to the downtown area of Seoul.
And, in fact, when you get to the top of the mountain, you get this beautiful view of downtown Seoul and even sometimes, the Han River and some of the mountains that are in the background.
Usually when we went hiking, it was a little bit smoggy that day, so we didn't have a great city view.
But if you go on a clear, sunny day, then you would get a great view.
In fact, today is a clear sunny day, so probably if we had saved our hike For this weekend, then we would have had a much better city view.
But hey, that's the way things go sometimes.
So I guess we could call this almost an annual pilgrimage.
It's something that my wife and I have done several times.
Maybe there was like one year that I think my wife did this hike with her friends instead of me.
One time since getting married, but all of the other times we've always done it together.
And we like to do this hike in the spring because there are some beautiful spring flowers that you can see when hiking the mountain.
Two in particular, these two yellow flowers.
So one flower is called...
In English, we call it forsythia.
And I'm just checking my notes because I'm not a flower expert.
But forsythia, this beautiful yellow bush, it's like a shrub.
A shrub is another name for a bush, I suppose like a lower plant, not necessarily as tall as a tree, but bigger than a flower.
A shrub.
So it's this beautiful shrub that's got this yellow flower.
Amazing.
And another one of the flowers that you can see is called the Cornelian Cherry.
In the Korean language, they call that sansuyu, I believe.
And so...
Yeah, these two yellow flowers are just all over the place on the side of the mountain.
And it's super beautiful.
You can see the whole mountainside lit up in this bright yellow.
Just gorgeous.
And...
Usually we like to do this hike in the early part of March.
However, we were busy and we couldn't go hiking in the early part of March.
So we had to wait until yeah last weekend, which unfortunately meant that the Forsythia had mostly finished.
So that was mostly dead.
However, the other one, the Cornelian Cherry, that was still quite alive.
And yeah, even though the Forsythia was mostly finished, there were still parts of it.
So it was still like a really nice yellow scene.
However, one thing that was great about going last weekend was that there were still a lot of pink cherry blossoms in full bloom as well.
So it was absolutely gorgeous.
The whole mountainside lit up in these pastel pink and yellow colors.
Just a beautiful scene.
As I mentioned, there was a bit of air smog that day.
So that was one of the things that was a little bit unfortunate, but the weather was still good.
It wasn't like cloudy or anything, just a little smoggy.
And I could deal with that.
It was still a beautiful spring scene.
Of course, spring brings not just flowers, but also lots of other critters and animals come to life.
So there were lots of birds and we saw this beautiful bird.
And I don't actually know the name of the bird in English.
My wife called it a, If I recall correctly, and I hope I'm right with that.
I may be remembering it incorrectly or misheard her, but I guess that would translate in English to water magpie.
You know what?
I got my computer right here.
Let's let's Google it.
So it doesn't make sense to guess when we can just Google, right?
Yes.
OK, I was right about the Korean name.
I did remember it correctly, which is astonishing, really.
So Mukachi in Korean is also known as the azure winged magpie in English.
So not the water magpie. the azure winged magpie, which is this beautiful bird.
It's one of my favorites here in Seoul.
To be perfectly honest, there aren't a ton of birds that you can see in the city that really stand out as being colorful and beautiful.
There are a lot of like sparrows and pigeons.
These kinds of city birds, but not as many birds that are really beautiful and stand out with nice colors.
There are some, and the Azure winged magpie is one of these examples.
I'll put a picture of it. online so that you guys can see it on our discord community.
Or if you're watching the YouTube edition of this episode, then I'll also put it on YouTube so you can see it's a very beautiful bird.
It has a black head, it has a white chest, some gray on its body and then its wings.
Are this beautiful blue color?
Now you see these birds flying around Seoul from time to time, but they're super timid and it's actually hard to see them pretty close because as soon as you approach them, they get scared and they fly away.
So they're big scaredy cats.
They're really like one of the most timid birds in the city, I think.
Completely the opposite of a pigeon.
You know, a pigeon you can just walk right up to and they don't move at all.
And they're just super stubborn in that way.
Well, this magpie is totally the opposite.
As soon as it sees you even look in its direction, it usually takes off.
So my wife and I were really surprised to see a huge flock of these azure-winged magpies during our hike.
There must have been like 20 or 30 of them in this one tree, which is really surprising to me, because I only see them usually on their own.
However, there were a lot of them.
And so my wife and I were taking the nice opportunity to see them all in this tree, because they also weren't flying away, which was pretty surprising as well because, as I mentioned, they're so timid.
So that was lovely to see them in the tree.
I think it was.
Yeah, the cherry tree, I guess you call it, with all the cherry blossoms and just a beautiful spring scene.
Now, as we were doing our little bird watching here, then there was a cat on the mountain that was sneaking up and stalking one of these birds.
And usually I don't like to intervene in nature.
You know, you don't want to see a cat go hungry.
You also don't want to see one of these beautiful birds get killed.
And I know the cats are not really natural.
Like they're almost an invasive species to the mountain, right?
However, It's not my place to scare away a cat, or it's not my place to scare the bird so that it would fly away and not be hunted.
I suppose like it's just nature, right?
It's like the animal kingdom.
I don't want to be involved.
So.
I saw this cat, which was a house cat but obviously had been living wild outside, I guess like a feral cat.
And it was stalking and sneaking up on one of these birds And it made a lunge and jumped to try and catch the bird but the bird flew away.
And then it was incredible, guys.
It was like this bird sounded the alarm to all of the other birds.
Like they must have a language.
Obviously they have a language.
And it started squawking like this really loud kind of warning squawk.
And then all of the other birds were immediately alert.
Like must have been an emergency signal, like somebody is trying to hunt us.
And so they all started doing that squawk and flew away.
And so it was just really cool to see that animal communication, that animal language.
As a person who's interested in language, I thought that was really cool to see that they could communicate in that way.
So that was one of the highlights of the hike.
Also, the flowers were beautiful.
We found a kind of hidden basketball court on the side of the mountain, which I haven't seen.
All of the basketball courts in South Korea.
However, I'd be willing to wager that this was one of the most beautiful basketball courts.
It was built right into the side of the mountain.
Beautiful, surrounded by trees and flowers and just a lovely basketball court, totally private.
And it was gorgeous.
The only thing was it had a dirt floor instead of like a concrete or asphalt floor. floor.
So that's a little bit strange.
I imagine it would be a little bit difficult to play basketball on that kind of flooring.
However, my wife and I, we did find a hidden basketball and we played for a little bit.
So that was really fun to shoot the basketball around.
In fact, it wasn't a basketball.
It was a Had some fun playing basketball on the court as we were hiking up the hill.
What else did we do?
We stopped and ate kimbap at the top.
This is the classic go-to Korean hiking slash picnic snack.
I think kimbap.
So we had some of that and just enjoyed our hike.
Just a really nice.
It's not very long, probably like an hour, hour and a half hike to the top and down the other side.
Once we arrived at the top then we took some photos and then hiked down and we went to one of our favorite neighborhoods in Seoul, which is called the West Village in English.
And in the West Village there are lots of beautiful restaurants and cafes and my favorite bakery in the city is there.
We had to stop in at the bakery.
And since it was Easter, this bakery was selling hot cross buns, which is kind of like an Easter specialty bread.
And it has a cross a cross across the top of the bread.
So yeah, this beautiful bun.
And I guess that cross is symbolic of Easter.
And so I had to buy one of those because it's not often that you see a hot cross bun in Seoul.
The bread itself is pretty plain.
It's like a bun shape and there are some raisins, maybe some honey to make it a little bit sweet.
Overall, it was very delicious.
So I enjoyed a hot cross bun.
And we went to this cafe that I've been meaning to go to for a very long time.
But every time I walk by...
It's a rather small cafe.
And every time I walk by, it's always completely full.
There are no seats.
However, this time when we walked by, there was an empty table.
So we jumped in, we went and grabbed that table quickly.
And then...
I think I had one of the top three cups of coffee I've ever had in Seoul here at this cafe.
It was an absolutely terrific cup of coffee.
And as my co-host here at Q-Lips, Anna often says, life is too short to drink bad coffee.
And I agree with her on this one.
The cafe was wonderful.
And if you live in Seoul or are visiting Seoul sometime in the near future and you are a coffee lover and you want to know the name of this cafe, then just send me a DM or hit me up on Discord and I'll be happy to share the information with you.
Because just a fantastic cup of coffee.
And that pretty much summed up our afternoon hiking last weekend.
And I'll share some photos on our Discord and on our Instagram with you so you can see those photos as well.
See the beautiful flowers because it was a really great time.
For this week's second story, I'm going to talk to you about spring cleaning.
One of those things that's never really that fun to do, but is a necessity.
It is a must.
And I spent all day yesterday, not just me, my wife as well.
And I wish our dog Owa would help us out with the spring cleaning, but she gets a pass.
She doesn't do any help at all.
So she just lied on the sofa the whole time.
But...
We were busy.
My wife and I were busy and we did a ton of spring cleaning yesterday which yeah, it's just one of those things that you need to do.
Over the winter, house tends to get a little bit dusty and those nooks and crannies don't get cleaned as much as they probably should.
So it was time to clean those nooks and crannies and nooks and crannies describes like those very small little places in your home that you don't probably clean as often as you should like. you know, under the baseboards or behind some shelves or maybe behind the sofa, those kinds of places we could call the nooks and crannies.
And so what did we do?
Let's see.
Well, first of all, my wife is an avid gardener and she has a lot of houseplants like cacti and succulents, these kinds of more tropical plants or hot weather plants.
And in the summer and in the spring, they can live outside.
No problem.
They thrive in these outdoor conditions. in Korea here during the spring and summer.
However, the winter is a bit too cold for them and they'll die if they're outside during the winter.
So during the winter, they all come inside and they occupy a big chunk of our living room.
And my wife has grow lights for them.
And yeah, they just sort of stay inside with us during the winter.
However, in the spring they go back outside to get that natural rain and sunshine and yeah, just thrive outside.
So that's a bit of a big job is putting all of those plants outside.
So we had to move them all outside and then clean all around behind them in the nooks and crannies and everything.
Yeah, as you're moving them, there are a lot of dead leaves that fall off, dirt and soil that falls out as well.
And so we had to clean all that up and then we changed our clothes.
So we took our winter clothes and we put them into our storage.
And then we did the opposite.
We took our summer clothes and put them into our closet.
So we had to reverse and exchange our winter clothes for our summer clothes.
And honestly, that feels really great because during the winter my closet, which is actually quite small thankfully I don't own a lot of clothes because otherwise I'd probably be quite uncomfortable, but because my wardrobe is small, it's not so bad.
But you know, winter clothes are big and bulky and sweaters take up a lot of space in your closet.
However, summer clothes like lighter shirts and t-shirts, these kinds of things don't take up much space.
So i feel like i've got all of this extra closet space.
Now Maybe I got to go clothes shopping and fill it up.
I don't know.
But yeah, that felt great to get all of those winter clothes out of the way and bring out my spring and summer clothes.
And yeah, it's nice.
Like.
I think everybody probably enjoys the changing of the seasons.
If you live in a place where you have these seasonal changes, because I know some of our listeners don't have them, but everyone who lives in one of these four season climates probably enjoys the change from winter to spring.
Like it just feels nice to have the sun back and a bit of warmer temperatures.
And although I'm dreading the upcoming summer, I hate the summer.
I'm worried about it.
I have to live in the moment and enjoy the spring, because it is really just so nice to have more sunshine and warmer temperatures, and the flowers and the birds, all of these things.
It's wonderful.
So yeah, felt good to clean out the closet and get rid of all of my winter clothes, at least for the season, at least until next fall.
And also to get rid of some old clothes that I don't wear anymore.
My wife and I put some older clothes away to donate and we'll get rid of those.
So cleaning out the closet a little bit and then just doing other deep clean kinds of things, you know like the bathroom deep clean all of the nooks and crannies in the bathroom.
I did that.
The floors deep clean, like a solid wipe and swipe and vacuum and mop of all the floors.
The kitchen deep clean.
And then my other organizational project which I hinted at a little bit In the latest Q-Lips episode, the latest Simplified Speech episode, where I chatted with Cassie I mentioned just quickly at the end of that episode about making an app to organize my record collection.
And actually on our Discord community.
This week one of our listeners who lives in Tokyo, Liam.
He asked me to talk about using AI for software development and app development.
And I thought that was just great timing because I've been doing this a lot, just making some very simple basic apps using AI to help me with some tasks in my life.
So I've been fooling around and making a lot of these in my spare time.
It's really fun.
I'm not really a programmer or a software engineer at all.
I used to make some basic websites way back in the day.
So I do have a little bit of familiarity with it, but I'm by no means like a trained software engineer or anything like that.
So AI helps me a lot, but I've been able to use the amazing technology and these amazing developments of AI just to build some simple, like web apps to use for myself.
Uh, as I mentioned in the latest simplified speech episode, I made this fantasy investing app for myself.
I made an app. to check the weather to see if it's okay to dry my clothes outside.
So, based on where I live and my location and the humidity and the sunshine and the air quality all of these factors this app will check and see if it's okay to dry my clothes outside or not.
So that's a pretty cool app that I made.
Yeah, just for myself, right?
I'm not going to try and sell this or share this with anybody.
It's just for my own personal use.
And I also developed this app for organizing my record collection.
So this was a big job because, combined my wife and I, we have somewhere between 200 and 250 records, which is Not a huge collection, but it's pretty big and it's not organized at all.
We've just like been putting the records anywhere on the shelves and it's a little bit frustrating for me sometimes.
Because I want to listen to a particular record and it takes me like five minutes to find it.
I don't know where it is and I have to go through all of our records trying to find where did I put that record before I can listen to it.
So as our record collection has been growing then I've noticed that I'm gonna have to take some action to make sure that the records are organized really well.
And so I finally got around to doing it.
And yeah, the first step in this process was actually cataloging all of the records.
So I needed to make a digital record of all of the records that I own.
So I did that using a website called Discogs, which is this great database of lots of recorded music.
It's not just records, cds and tapes and and everything, almost everything that's been recorded, like it's crazy, even the small little indie bands that i used to play in in canada when i was like a university student they're all on discogs.
So somebody has gone through and even uploaded those small little releases, like When I was in bands in Canada, we used to record a tape of some of our songs and sell them at our concerts.
And we would make maybe like 25 or 50 copies of these tapes and sell them.
And those are on Discogs.
So these small, small, small little minor releases are all on there.
So I was pretty shocked to see those on Discogs and also kind of proud.
Like it's cool that that exists, that those tapes that I would make, those albums that I would make exist on Discogs.
But That's besides the point.
So I had to go through and search or scan.
If you use the Discogs app on your phone, there's a barcode scanner.
So for newer records with a barcode, you can just scan and really quickly add it to your database.
But older records, you need to search by the number.
There's a number on each record.
And so I went through and added all of the records onto my Discogs, which yeah, took a little while.
I didn't do it all yesterday.
I've been slowly doing that over the last couple of weeks.
And then once I had them all onto my Discogs app, then I was able to export it as a spreadsheet.
And I guess originally, this is probably what I would have done if I didn't have AI.
I just would have used the spreadsheet to organize everything.
However, because I have AI, I can make AI do all the work for me and organized the spreadsheet for me.
So I got it to organize all of the records based on a lot of different factors like genre and country, because I have a lot of records from Korea, from Japan, from Canada, from different countries.
And so it organized it by genre and by country.
And I have eight shelves that I can put my records on.
We have eight record shelves.
So I asked the AI to assign a record shelf to each record.
So it will tell me if it's shelf one, shelf two, shelf three, shelf four, etc.
And then I had the AI make its own basic app that I can have on my phone.
So if I want to search for a record and find out where it is, then I can just type in the name and it will tell me oh, that record is on shelf four, for example, and I'll know where to find it.
Yeah, the app is built, the records are categorized, and that is mostly what I spent yesterday doing.
And now I actually just have to physically move the records to their correct shelf.
So they're all out of order now, but their place has been set.
I just need to put them in their place.
And then yeah, I think it will be really cool to use this app.
I'm not sure how well I'll use it or how long I'll use it.
I guess it's kind of an experiment.
I'm not sure if every time I want to listen to a record, I also want to open.
An app like that might be a little bit inconvenient.
So we'll see if I use it every time or not.
However, I did build in the functionality of being able to record some statistics.
So there's a big button on the app where I can press play and it will record on the app that I listened to that record at that time.
So I think this will be cool.
Maybe two years, three years, 10 years in the future I'll be able to see some nice statistics of my listening history and what albums I listened to while listening to music.
And I do have to say lately guys, that listening to music in this way has been one of my favorite hobbies.
I actually really look forward to the weekends these days because I have been trying to spend like maybe an hour or hour and a half on either Friday evening or Saturday evening or Sunday morning just sitting and listening to music, just putting the music on and enjoying it.
Maybe sometimes reading a book or looking at my phone at the same time, but mostly just listening and trying to disconnect from the world, trying to disconnect from my phone and And just spending some time enjoying the beautiful music that I have in my collection.
And yeah, I think it's one of the most rewarding experiences.
I feel like as I listen to music, I can just feel my brain moving, lighting up.
It's almost like fireworks going off in my brain, it's like a big dopamine rush and it just feels great to listen to the music and and enjoy time that way.
So Yeah, since I've been investing some time into this hobby and trying to do it with purpose and intention, then I thought I really need to make this organizational system.
So thanks to AI, I got it done.
And now I just need to move the records and I can sit down and listen in my freshly cleaned and organized house.
All right.
Well, I'm rambling on and on here, and I think I got to wrap this episode up.
Those are my spring stories.
The things I've been up to that are a little bit out of the usual and new and unique over the last couple of weeks.
So I hope you enjoyed listening to them.
Thank you for making it all the way to the end of this episode.
If you did so, you can pat yourself on the back.
You did a great job.
You got the language into your head, which we know you need to do to build your fluency.
If you need some more content for building your fluency, don't worry.
We've got you covered.
We've got hundreds of other lessons over on our website QLipscom, which you can check out and listen to.
And I certainly hope you will do so.
All right, everybody, please take care.
We'll be back soon with another brand new Q-Lips episode in the near future.
Until then, goodbye.
