You know, the first hundred episodes we could consider season one, and now that we’ve crossed the hundred-episode barrier, now we’re on to season two. I like that, it’s nice to like separate a little bit, season one, season two. So, let’s think of it that way. Now we’re on season two, and once we hit episode 200 and cross that milestone, well then, we’ll be on to season three, et cetera, et cetera.

But for now, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves and yeah, it’s bonus episode 101. So, it’s awesome to be back here with you after a little break. I took just a one-week mini vacation, if you could call it that. Last week, it wasn’t really a vacation, I didn’t go anywhere or anything like that, but I did just take one week off.

I felt like I was getting just a little bit burnt out and I needed some time just to take a little break and to recharge my batteries, but I’m back, I’m better than ever, and it’s great to be here with you again, as always. And before we get started with this week’s story, I should quickly just explain what the bonus episode series is all about for any listeners who may be new to the show.

So, if you are new here, welcome. And what I do in the bonus episode series is I just tell you some stories from my everyday life as a Canadian guy living abroad in Seoul, South Korea, and I hope by listening to these stories, you will be able to improve your English skills. Specifically, we try to B.I.G.B.

This is our acronym for the bonus episode series, and it stands for build your fluency, increase your knowledge, grow your vocabulary, and become a better communicator. So that’s what we’re here for. That’s why we spend some time each and every week studying English, and I hope that I can play a little part in helping you achieve these goals.

And to accompany every episode, there is a 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary. Plus, if you are a Culips member, well, then I also make a comprehension quiz, which I share on our Culips member Discord.

If you’re interested in becoming a Culips member and getting the quiz and joining the member-only Discord, plus so many more bonuses and benefits, then you can just sign up and become a member on our website, Culips.com. In our last bonus episode, we celebrated reaching the 100-episode milestone by listening to some stories that were sent in by Culips listeners from around the world.

Did you hear that episode? Wasn’t it awesome? I just loved it, and I really enjoyed hearing from everyone who participated. Well, unfortunately, I kind of goofed up when I was preparing the episode, and I misplaced some files and accidentally forgot to include two stories that were sent in to me by two of our wonderful Culips community members, Mary from Colombia and Hanka from the Czech Republic.

So, to make up for my mistake, I promised to include those two stories in this episode. So, we’ll take a listen to them now, and then after, we’ll get to my main story for this week. So here we go. Please enjoy these two stories, and thanks again to everyone who sent in a story to help make bonus episode 100 such a success.

Mary: Hello, everyone. My name is Mary. I’m 45 years old. I am a designer of women’s shoes. I’m from Colombia, South America. Today, I talk about how Culips has had an impact on my learning a second language. I have known this podcast since 2015, but I don’t give the importance that is required to improve my learning.

However, during the lockdown in 2020, I become more aware of why my second language was a priority for my life. Now, I enjoy each episode during the week. Also, my budget is low, mainly because the exchange in my currency is bad in front of the dollar. I start as a member with effort and commitment. It is awesome for the support the Culips team brought us.

The best part is the quizzes that challenge my knowledge. Likewise, each topic that Andrew and his co-hosts discover in a new adventure engage me more and encourage me to commitment the lifelong learning. For example, I love it when the topic is about other countries like Australia, Canada, the U.S., any country in Europe, any country in Asia, and of course, Korea.

This allows me to deepen my knowledge of other cultures and know their food, places, and behavior. I have been a runner for 20 years. For this reason, when Andrew explain step-by-step this wonderful experience, I can feel empathy with his teaching. Last year, I participated in three races, 5K, 10K, and half marathon.

It was the first time that I ran a half marathon, it’s 21 kilometers, because Andrew inspires me. This year, I improve my record in each race, I hope. On the whole, I’m expecting new challenge. How new course, I miss Indiana Brown, I love this course. Livestream and more information. I’m continuing to grow of this wonderful community, the learners.

Finally, I’m grateful for this experience and congratulation on this achievement milestone and for allowing us to be part of this. Thank you so much. See you soon.

Hanka: Hello, my friends. My name is Hanka, and my nickname is Halupinka. I’m from a small country, from the Czech Republic, in the middle of Europe. I would like to tell you about my journey to learn English. I started learning English at a later age because I studied German and Russian at school.

That was many years ago, but my dream was speaking English because this language sounds very nice and interesting, and you can communicate almost all over the world. One day, I discovered an English online club, and I was very curious about it. That was in 2020, so I joined this course, and I was very surprised. I have never met so happy and optimistic teacher which lead this course.

We got completely everything what we needed. Every month, a new topic, mini lessons for every week, listening about topics we learned, conversations between our teacher and native speaker. First, we learned simple topics and later, more challenging ones. For example, about education, sea life, hobbies, traveling. It’s marvelous.

I think on the cake are online conversation between other students because our teacher, Petya, is preparing for us questions for speaking. It’s absolutely great. I started conversation with a woman who lives 300 kilometers away. Her name is Kačka. In the beginning, we talked twice a week. Later, almost every day, we became girlfriends.

We were really looking forward to each other and one day, one year after our first meeting online, we met face-to-face. It was a beautiful feeling of joy and happiness. Since that time, we go for a long weekend to Prague every year. We visit the theater, interesting events, and enjoy this time together. When I was at level A2, I started talking to a native speaker from South Africa.

My goal is to read books in English and watch movies and series so that I never forget English. I wish you a lot of joy and fun learning English because learning a foreign language can be a lot of fun. Thank you for listening. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.

Andrew: So, for this week’s story, I wanna talk about picnics. Picnics, yes. I love a picnic. Do you enjoy picnics? I love them. I don’t know why they’re so fun. I was thinking about this today. Like, what is it about a picnic that’s so enjoyable? All it is is simply eating outside. But what’s so good about eating outside? I mean, in a lot of ways, it’s worse than eating inside, right?

Like, I don’t know. You’re sitting on the grass. Usually when you have a picnic, you sit on the grass, sitting on the lawn in a park, perhaps. And of course, living in the grass are lots of bugs, mainly ants. Many, many ants. And eventually the ants will start crawling on you if you’re sitting on the grass for long enough, and that’s pretty unpleasant.

I’ve never really enjoyed ants crawling on me before. There’s also the sun. The sun is damaging to our skin, can cause us wrinkles, can give us lots of freckles, at least for me. If I’m sitting in the sun, I get lots and lots of freckles, and I also burn easily, so I have to be careful that I don’t sit in the sun for too long. So, there’s the sun. There are also other bugs and insects, wasps.

Ugh, aren’t wasps the worst? It’s a little hard to say, wasps the worst, but they are the worst, aren’t they? I hate wasps. And yeah, I don’t know, just being outside in general sometimes can be annoying, but at the same time, a picnic is fantastic. A picnic is great, and maybe it’s just because I don’t get to go on picnics so often that when I do, it’s really special and unique, and that’s why it’s so fun.

I’m not sure. But I did go on a fantastic picnic just a couple of weeks ago, and I thought I’d tell you about that story today because it was really, really fun, and I think will be a great memory for me for a long time to come, probably as long as I live. It’s gonna be a lifelong memory, I hope. So, let’s start at the start, picnic food. Before you go on a picnic, you always need to prepare some food, right?

Well, not always. Maybe in Canada, my home country, if you go on a picnic, you might need to prepare some food, especially in my hometown. Like, my hometown is a place called Kelowna. It’s a medium-sized city in Canada. It sits on the shore of this huge lake called Okanagan Lake that runs through the middle of the Okanagan Valley.

The lake is over 100 kilometers long, and there are many beautiful parks beside the lake, so you have nice beaches and park access and many, many different locations. But one thing that you can’t really find very easily in the parks in my hometown or in many places in Canada is a place to buy food.

If you wanna have a picnic in one of these parks, you pretty much have to prepare and bring your own food before you go. Now, occasionally, you’ll run into a canteen or a snack shop. Do you know what a canteen is? I think this is an old word that probably comes from the military, to be honest with you. In its literal sense of the word, a canteen is a kind of water bottle.

Think of the kind of water bottle that a soldier would have carried on them back in the earlier parts of the 20th century, like around World War II. That kind of water bottle, we would call a canteen. But you can also use this word to talk about a place where food is served.

So sometimes on an army base, the place where the food is served is referred to as a canteen, or maybe even on a battlefield, the place where the food is served is called the canteen. But you can also use “canteen” to refer to places where snacks are sold, especially at like a campground or a park, some place like that.

When I was a youngster growing up in elementary school, every summer, my parents would send me to summer camp, and honestly, I kind of have mixed memories about the summer camps. Some parts were fun, and some parts weren’t so good, but one thing that I do remember liking is that I had a little allowance, and every evening, I would get to go to the canteen and buy a snack, and that was always awesome because what kind of kid doesn’t like snacks, right?

So anyways, sometimes you’ll see a canteen or a little snack shack in a park in Canada or in my hometown, but it’s not so common. So, if you wanna have a picnic, you have to prepare first. You have to prep some food at home and then bring it with you when you go on the picnic.

Well, here in Seoul, South Korea, where my current home base is, it’s way different. In fact, in Seoul, some of the most popular parks are also alongside a body of water. Just like Okanagan Lake runs through my hometown. Well, here in Seoul, we have a river called the Han River, and that runs through the middle of the city, and some of the city’s best parks are on the shores of the Han River.

In fact, that’s where my wife and I went for our picnic a couple of weeks ago. And in the Han River Park, you can find convenience stores, very, very convenient. So, if you need to buy some snacks or drinks, boom, just go to the convenience store. You can also order food through your phone, and have it delivered to you, and this is kind of an ingenious system.

What they’ve done in the park is set up these different zones where you can go to to pick up your food delivery. As you could imagine, like these parks on a nice weekend are just filled with tons and tons of people. So, if you just ordered some food to the park, the delivery driver would have a really hard time finding you if you just said, “Yeah, just bring it to the Han River Park.”

It would be a disaster. The delivery driver would be on the phone being like, “Who are you, where are you? I can’t find you!” Right? So, I guess to solve this problem, what the park has done, or maybe even the restaurants who benefit the most from this kind of service have done, I’m not sure who set it up.

But what they’ve done is they’ve created these different zones in the park where you can go to to meet your delivery driver. So, you can say like, “I’m in the park, deliver my food to the delivery area number two, and I’ll meet you there.”

And then, yeah, after, I don’t know, 20, 30 minutes or whatever it is, then you just go to the delivery zone and you can meet your driver there, pick up your food and go back to the area in the park where your friends or family are waiting for you. And then you can have your picnic. So here in Korea, it’s not really necessary that you prepare for your picnic in advance.

You could just go to the park and hit up the convenience store or hit up the delivery service and get some food that way. In fact, it’s not even necessary to prepare anything at all for a picnic in Korea, because right around the entrance to the park, you can rent picnic kits.

So, there are businesses there that will rent you all of the supplies and all of the things that you need for a picnic in the park. It comes in a little wagon, and in the wagon, you’ll find a little table and a picnic mat. And I don’t know exactly what’s inside of them.

I haven’t used this service myself, but I did notice that many, many people were using these picnic kits that you could rent and seems like a really, really easy way to have a picnic and a kind of cool business idea. I like it when little new ideas and little new services like that pop up. Like some guy just had that idea. “I’m gonna start a picnic supply rental company!” and then just ran with it.

And yeah, I don’t know about their financials or anything like that, but just by looking at how many people were using it in the park, it seems like they’re doing pretty well, and business is booming. So yeah, I thought, huh, that’s cool. I’m glad that somebody had that idea and then followed through, made it into a business.

Really, really cool, love seeing that. So anyways, to rewind a little bit and go back to the start, prepping for the picnic. Now, the reason we decided to go on this picnic in the first place is that we just bought two brand-new camping chairs. You know, the kind of outdoor chairs that you can fold up and unfold and use for a picnic or for camping or that kind of thing.

Actually, we’re not really campers. I mean, I do enjoy camping, but I don’t really do it very often. Instead, the reason that we bought these chairs is so that we can put them in our yard, and we can just hang out in our yard, have a place to sit, drink a coffee, you know, that kind of thing.

But we also thought that since these chairs fold up into a nice compact package, that we could bring them to the Han River Park and have a picnic as well. And I think we just bought those chairs like a couple of days before we went on the picnic. So really, it was our opportunity to break in these chairs, to test them out and to see how well they worked.

So, that was the impetus for going on this picnic. And that’s a cool word, kind of high-level word. Maybe you don’t use it in everyday conversation too, too much, but it will pop up from time to time. “The impetus” means something that was the push or the motivation for something to happen.

So, buying those chairs and wanting to test them out, that was the impetus for us going on this picnic. Now, you couldn’t have asked for a better day to go on the picnic. The weather was absolutely gorgeous. And for food options, my wife and I kind of butted heads a little bit because I’m wondering, like this is a question I wanted to ask you, dear Culips listeners.

I wanted to ask you, in your country, what kind of food is the go-to picnic food? Because where I’m from in Canada, it is a sandwich. A sandwich is the go-to picnic food. If you go on a picnic, you gotta eat a sandwich. That’s like the main thing.

Now, of course you can bring some fruit, maybe some potato chips and a beverage, something like that to accompany it, but it all focuses around the sandwich, at least in my opinion. Well, my wife, on the other hand, of course, she’s Korean. And she said, “No, here in Korea, the main go-to picnic food is kimbap.”

And kimbap, for those of you who are not familiar with this Korean food, is rice that is rolled in a kind of dried seaweed. And inside the roll, you could stuff it with other various ingredients. The most common basic one has some ham and some vegetables, like carrots and celery and some other kinds of roots, maybe, I’m not actually sure, all of the things that go inside.

And there’s also egg. So, you kind of roll this up into a roll, and then you slice it with your knife into giant coins that you eat. And kimbap is delicious. There are many different variations of this dish. My favorite happens to be the tuna mayonnaise one. It’s a classic, and it’s really good. And I love kimbap. So don’t get me wrong. When my wife was like, “We need to have kimbap.”

I was like, “Oh yeah, OK, sure. Like, we can do that too, but we also need to have a sandwich.” So, we prepared both. That’s like our nice compromise. We prepared some sandwiches and got some kimbap. We didn’t make the kimbap. It’s rather labor intensive. So, we just went to a local restaurant to pick some up. It’s nice and cheap too, which is another bonus.

So, it’s like, yeah, the perfect picnic food, easy to pack, cheap to buy, and filling as well. So, we packed our bags. We got all of our picnic supplies ready. We got our chairs ready. We got our picnic mat ready. I got geared up for the sun with my sunglasses and my sun hat and my sunscreen. And it was time to hit the road.

And I was so happy that I was able to convince my wife to ride bikes to the Han River Park with me. I think when we first started dating, maybe she would have been on the fence about doing this, but these days she’s more game, which means she’s more willing to do these kinds of things. So that was awesome.

I just pitched the idea out there, like, “Hey, how about we try out these new chairs? You know, we could pack a picnic. We could hop on some Ddareungi bicycles.” Ddareungi, for those of you who don’t know, is the name of the public bike share system here in Korea. And it’s kind of funny. I have two bikes, but my wife has no bike. Before we got married, she had a bike. It wasn’t the greatest bike.

It wasn’t in the greatest condition. And after we got married and we moved in together, she decided just to not take that bike with her. So, I’ve got two bikes, but she has zero bikes. And my bikes are a little difficult for her to ride. So Ddareungi it was. So, we rented some Ddareungis, and it’s not too far to the Han River from our house.

I think it took us around an hour, but we were kind of going slow, taking our time, just enjoying the nice weather. And I took lots of pictures while we were riding as well, and even some video clips. So, I’ll try and share some of those with you. There’s this amazing system of paths in Seoul where you can ride your bike away from cars, and it’s segregated from all the rest of the traffic.

And it’s really, really nice. So, it’s a safe ride. In fact, I think from our house all the way to the Han River Park, we didn’t have to ride on the street at all. We were 100% exclusively on the bike paths. And that also means that there were no red lights. So, you can just go, go, go. You don’t have to stop at traffic lights or anything like that. It’s just wonderful. But we did take our time.

And also, the Ddareungi aren’t really the fastest bicycles. You know, they’re just like built for all different sorts of people, kind of one size fits all bicycle. So, they’re not the fastest bikes. So, we took our time getting there. But finally, we arrived at the Han River Park. We found the perfect location for our picnic in the shade of a tree.

We probably got to the park in the early afternoon around 1 p.m. or so. And at that time there were many people at the park, but it wasn’t too, too crowded. You could find a place to unfold your picnic mat, set up your chairs and hang out pretty easily. But by the time we left, which was around 5 p.m., I think we stuck around for several hours just hanging out in the park, it was packed.

There were tons and tons and tons of people there. So, we were happy that we arrived before the rush and before the huge crowds arrived. On a nice day in the spring, summer or fall, man, there are just so many people that love to hang out at the Han River Park. So, I think, yeah, we got there at the best time possible, got a good spot, good location, kind of in the shade, kind of in the sun.

We had the option of whichever one we wanted. And yeah, we set up our chairs, very easy to install and to sit on and very comfortable as well. And also, kind of stylish, I have to say. I was looking around at other people’s camping chairs and I said to my wife, as she picked them out, they were her choice. So, I said to her like, “Good job, I think you picked the coolest chairs in the park.”

We got the coolest chairs in the park. So, I was happy about that. And, you know, more than looking cool, the function and the comfort of the chair is a priority. So, they were very comfortable, very easy to transport on our bikes. So, I was just happy all around with our new chairs. So, after we got everything set up, it was time to eat, and we enjoyed our sandwiches and our kimbap.

And guys, I also forgot to say this, but this is really cool. I think this is a nice part of the story and it just highlights and underscores how much of an all-star my wife is. Earlier in the morning, we went on a Saturday and these days, early on Saturday mornings, my wife goes swimming. She’s been learning swimming for the last several months.

And these days, I mean, I don’t go with her to the pool to check out and see how good of a swimmer she is or anything, but I have the feeling she’s getting pretty good because she’s going to the pool very regularly and practicing regularly. And even early on Saturday morning, she’s going to the swimming pool. I gotta say, my wife’s not really too much of a morning person.

So, this is pretty impressive to me. So that day, she had already been to the swimming pool for a couple of hours before we left for our picnic. And as I just said, she’s not really too much of a morning person. So, she was a little bit late waking up on the Saturday to go to the free-swimming time that the pool offers.

And so, she told me that she almost missed her bus that morning and she ended up having to run about like a kilometer or two to her bus stop to catch the bus to the swimming pool on time. So, I thought, wow, that’s awesome. My wife did a mini triathlon that day. First, she ran to the bus stop, then she did a swim, and then finally she rode bikes with me to the Han River Park.

So, we were laughing about that. And I said, “Wow, you’re a real triathlete now.” It was really cool. It’s something that I couldn’t do. I don’t think I can run, ride, and swim on one day without being totally exhausted. So, that was kind of funny. And I was proud of my wife for putting in all of that effort so that we could have a great picnic.

As you could imagine, maybe then, that after we finished our food, my wife was like, “I’m a little bit tired.” And honestly, I was a little bit tired as well. And one thing I love, and I think I’ve mentioned this on Culips before.

I don’t know if you’re a long-time listener, maybe you’ll have heard me say this before, but one thing that I really love is taking a nap outside on a nice, sunny, warm day. Just a little power nap, lying outside. There’s something really just amazing about it.

So, after we ate, we both kind of lied down on our picnic mat and I put on my sunglasses and put my hat over my head so that the sun wasn’t shining too much on my face.

And I think my wife did the same thing. I don’t know. I couldn’t see because my hat was over my eyes. But then I passed out and I’m one of those people, I don’t know about you, but like a power nap just does it for me. I can just fall asleep for 10, 15 minutes and boom, I feel recharged and energetic again. And yeah, I love that.

That’s like, I’m really lucky that that happens for me because I know some people don’t have that feeling where if they fall asleep for 15 minutes and then wake up and they feel groggy or tired. But I’m one of those people that just gets recharged instantly. So, I had just a nice little power nap, slept for 15 minutes, woke up and felt great again. My wife continued to sleep for a little while.

So, I did some reading on my phone. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring my book with me, but I did have a copy of an e-book on my phone. So not the best kind of reading material, but I did do some reading while she continued to take a little nap.

And also, people watching, and dog watching was really fun as the park started to fill up and more and more people came to hang out and enjoy the park. We decided not to ride our bikes back home. The first ride was enough. And in fact, that is one of the ways that I convinced my wife that we could go on this bike ride to the High River Park.

It’s like, we’ll ride there, but we don’t have to ride back. And that’s one of the beautiful things about Ddareungi is that you can just drop them off anywhere and you don’t have to be responsible for taking them home. So, once we were ready to go home, we just jumped on the subway to come back and that pretty much wrapped up our perfect picnic day.

If you made it this far, well, congratulations because you completed the entire episode. Thanks so much for spending some time with me here today and great job on finishing this English study session with me. Since you made it all the way to the end, I’m gonna share this week’s completion code with you.

Now, the completion code is a special keyword that I’d like you to use to make a comment on our Instagram, Discord, or YouTube page. And by leaving your comment, you will signal to me and signal to all of the other Culips listeners from our amazing community who have made it to the end that you finished this episode. If you only wanna leave the completion code, that’s fine.

But if you’d like to challenge yourself a little bit more, I recommend that you make an example sentence with the word or even tell us a little story with this word. OK, this week’s completion code is: picnic. Nothing too special. It’s like the main theme for this episode, right? So, let’s go with this week’s completion code as being: picnic. Boom!

So now you know what you gotta do. You’ve got a little homework assignment. Go, go, go to our Discord community, our Instagram page, or our YouTube channel, and leave a comment with this completion code and let me know that you finished this episode. All right, everyone. So that pretty much brings us to the end of today’s episode.

Thank you again for listening. Please take care. Have an awesome week of English studying up ahead, and I’ll catch you in the next Culips episode. Bye-bye.