There’s a 100% free transcript for this episode that comes in an interactive format that’s best for studying with your phone, or your computer, or your tablet. Also, there’s a PDF file that’s great for printing out if you prefer to study that way.

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As a member, you’ll get unlimited access to all of our best learning materials. So, this includes hundreds of lessons with full transcripts and study guides created by our expert English teachers to guide you through all of the lessons.

On top of that, you’ll get some bonuses like ad-free audio, invitations to our monthly live streams, access to our members-only series, The Fluency Files, and much more. Plus, of course, you’ll also help support the work that we do at Culips and allow us to keep making new lessons each and every week.

So, if that sounds interesting to you and you’d like to learn more, visit our website, Culips.com. And with that said, let’s get started with this episode. So, the plan for today is that I’m going to tell you a couple of stories from my life and let you know what I’ve been up to over the last week.

Then, towards the end of the episode, I’m going to break down and teach you about a useful English expression that I recommend adding to your vocabulary. So, let’s jump in and get started by listening to the first story now. Here we go.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I celebrated our second wedding anniversary. And if you’re new to Culips and you haven’t heard the story about my wedding, well, we talked all about it in a previous Simplified Speech episode. Actually, it was episode number 122.

I’ll put a link to it in the show description in case you want to check it out. But, essentially, my wife and I had an outdoor wedding celebration at a beautiful park here in Seoul called Yongsan Family Park.

The wedding was lovely, but unfortunately, we didn’t have the greatest weather that day, and it turned out to be a rainy wedding. When we celebrated our first wedding anniversary last year, we decided to go back to the park to mark the occasion.

And by the way, ‘mark the occasion’ is a great expression to know. It means to celebrate or remember an important event or milestone. So last year, we went back to the park to mark the occasion of our first wedding anniversary. And, when we went back to the park last year, the weather was absolutely perfect.

It was a beautiful spring day, clear blue skies, warm temperatures, and just this fresh, lovely breeze. And we enjoyed being at the park so much last year that we decided we should try to visit the park every year on our anniversary and have a picnic just as a way to celebrate.

So I guess every couple probably celebrates their anniversaries in a different way, but we decided that for us, a picnic in the park to mark the occasion of our anniversary would be just a great way to celebrate. So, when this year’s anniversary rolled around, that’s exactly what we did.

My wife has a little outdoor picnic set. I think she was given it as a present, either that or she won it. I actually can’t remember, but it’s a pretty cool little picnic set. And it comes with plates, and cutlery, and cups, which are all stored in this plastic case.

But the cool thing about the picnic set is that the plastic case can unfold and transform into a little table. Neat, right?

I think I’m actually going to put a picture of this picnic set on our Instagram or in the PDF file of the transcript for this episode because recently a few Culips members have messaged me to ask if I could upload more pictures to accompany our content.

And I think that’s a great idea. I’m going to try and do that more often. I think many of our long-time listeners know that I’m not the greatest photographer, and I’m not very consistent at uploading pictures, but I’m going to try and do that more often going forward for you guys.

So, make sure you follow us on Instagram or check out the PDF file of the transcript to see those pictures. Anyways, so we went to the park, we had our picnic set, and in terms of food, we didn’t go all out or anything for the picnic. In fact, we didn’t even do our own cooking.

We just went to a cafe near our house and ordered a couple of sandwiches and a salad. Plus, we prepared some fruit, and some cheese, crackers, and a couple of beverages, and we were all set. So, we got to the park in the early afternoon to have our picnic.

And again, the weather was absolutely perfect. Beautiful sunny day, clear blue skies, a gentle breeze blowing, it was just amazing. So, we did have to roll our eyes at our luck.

For two years in a row now, the weather has been fantastic on our anniversary, but of course, on the wedding day itself, we had a super rainy day. But I guess, you know, that’s just the way life goes sometimes and we have wonderful memories of our wedding day.

One kind of funny thing, an unexpected side effect of a rainy wedding, by the way, is that our friends and family who attended the wedding really remember it clearly. Just the other day, in fact, I got a random message from one of my friends who was passing through my neighborhood.

And so she messaged me and just asked if I could come out and meet her for a quick cup of coffee while she was in my hood. Unfortunately, I was in the middle of doing something and couldn’t spare the time to have coffee with her.

But since she was in my neighborhood and she lives way across town, on the other side of the city, I ran out quickly just to say hello and chat with her.

And one of the things that she told me while we were chatting was just how memorable our wedding was because of the pink umbrellas that we provided to our guests to try and keep them dry and protected from the rain on our wedding day.

My wife also recently mentioned to me that one of her friends told her that she has been to dozens of weddings in the last few years. I guess she’s at that age where many of her friends and acquaintances are getting married, so she’s been going to lots of weddings.

And my wife’s friend mentioned how all of these weddings have just kind of blurred into one and she can’t remember any of them very clearly except for ours. And again, one of the things that she mentioned was the pink umbrellas and how pretty they looked.

So, I guess in the end, we made the best out of a bad situation. And although we rolled our eyes at the weather, we just laugh about it now and it’s a good memory for us. So, there we were in the park, and we found a nice place, very close to where we actually got married, in the same vicinity.

We had a picnic mat and we spread it out under a willow tree, and we had a lovely picnic together. After we ate, we were just lying down enjoying the sunshine and the nice weather, and actually, we both fell asleep.

And I think there’s nothing quite like a little cat nap outside in the park in the sunshine. In my opinion, it’s one of the best places you can take a nap.

And I only woke up because I could feel the sun starting to burn my skin, so I had to wake up and move into a shadier spot, but it was just a really relaxing way to spend the afternoon.

Once my wife woke up as well, then we had a photo session, we took some photos to remember our special day and I’ll share some of those photos as well with you all. And then, we packed up all of our stuff and we went for a walk around the park.

The park is quite large, and in one area of the park, there is a pond, and we went to the pond, and we checked it out, and it was really cool to see. There were a bunch of big koi fish in the pond. In Korean, these fish are called ingeo.

And there were also a bunch of lily pads and lotus flowers in the pond that were in full bloom. They looked really pretty, you know, that dark, vibrant pink color of a lotus flower.

So, we just hung around on the walkway beside the pond and we took in the beautiful view of the fish swimming and the lotus flowers in full bloom for a few moments. And it was just really calm and peaceful and a nice moment.

As the day started to wind down and the sun started to set, we decided that we should probably head home. So, we walked towards the subway station and as we were walking, we talked about how, without any really special planning, we had created just this nice anniversary tradition that is unique to us.

One that’s filled with laughter and love and, in a way, rain and sunshine. And we’ve already started talking about our picnic menu and how we’ll celebrate our third wedding anniversary next year for round three.

The moment my wife and I have been waiting for, for over three years, is finally here, because in early June we’ll be moving into our new home. Finally, finally, finally.

It’s a long story, and I won’t go into all of the details here because I’ve probably talked about it on Culips a lot before, but about three years ago, in fact before we were even married or engaged, we decided to buy a home together here in Seoul.

The house is small and it’s old and it needed a lot of work and renovations, but we worked with a great designer who helped us come up with a plan to breathe some new life into the house and make it into the home of our dreams.

Well, you know, it’s our first home and it is pretty small, so maybe it’s not exactly our dream home, but it’s as close to that as possible that we could do within our small budget.

So, after tons of work, lots of meetings to talk about the design of the house, plus a really long construction process that essentially totally demolished and rebuilt the house, it is finally finished and will be moving in in just a couple of weeks.

I think the only thing that is original now about the house are the exterior outdoor walls. Everything else, from the roof of the house to the floor of the house to the interior walls to the layout is completely different and brand new.

So, as you can imagine probably just from hearing the tone of my voice, I’m very excited about moving into the new place and so is my wife, but before we can live in that house, we have to move out of our current apartment.

And moving, it’s one of my least favorite things in the world to do and there is just a lot of work that has to be done when you move.

And since our new house is small, we’re going to take this opportunity to do some spring cleaning and get rid of a lot of our possessions that we don’t use very often or really just don’t need anymore. I talked about that a few weeks ago in one of our bonus episodes.

Did you listen to that one? Do you remember that story? And I talked about how it’s my job, my responsibility, to sell the furniture and the appliances and the things that we don’t need any more and I talked about how I was planning to use an app to do that.

Well, I’ve got some updates for you, and I was able to sell our things very easily with that app. I don’t know, maybe I was too generous, and I set the prices too low. Maybe that was the case, but everything that I uploaded sold right away, essentially.

And it was definitely a relief to get all of that taken care of. I was especially worried about my desk because it was this big, heavy, motion desk that could be used either in a sitting down or standing up position.

But someone bought the desk right away and they even arranged for a mover to come and pick it up and everything. So, in the end, I got stressed out about the desk for no reason at all because it was just super easy to sell and move out of my apartment.

Anyway, I’m kind of regretting selling the desk right now. I think I sold it a little too early because I’ve been without a proper place to work now for over a week, and I still have a couple of more weeks to go before I’ll be set up and established in my new house.

For the time being, it’s OK because I’m just using our kitchen table as my desk. But a little later this week, someone’s coming to buy a shelf that we use in our kitchen to store our rice cooker and I’ve got my coffee machine and coffee grinder on there as well.

And then after that goes, my wife said, “Hey, we’re going to need the kitchen table back because we need to put our rice cooker and coffee machine and other things somewhere and we’re going to have to store them on the table.”

So, I guess when that happens then I’m going to be moved to the floor. So maybe next week when you hear me here on Culips, I’ll be recording from the floor. I’m not quite sure how things will work out, but I’ll be in a flux for a little while until we get settled in the new home.

One thing that I am extremely excited about for this move is that this will be the first move where I’ll be hiring a moving company to do the moving and the heavy lifting for me.

For every other move in my life, and I’ve moved and lived in countless apartments and countless places, for every other move I’ve ever done, I’ve always done it myself. Well, with the help of friends, of course. In our most recent Simplified Speech episode, Suzanne and I talked about what our homes are like.

Did you happen to catch that episode? If you haven’t heard it yet, I recommend it because it’s a pretty fun conversation. I’ll put the link in the show description in case you do want to check that out.

But one of the things that we talked about in that episode was how I moved around from place to place to place when I used to live in Canada.

In fact, in the five or so years that I lived in Montreal, which was the last place I lived in Canada before moving to Korea, I think I ended up living in about five different places. And each time I moved to a new apartment, I would just do the move myself.

I would rent a truck, I’d call up some of my good buddies who I knew would do me a solid, and we’d do the move ourselves. By the way, doing someone a solid is a slang phrase that’s great to know and it just means doing someone a significant favor or being very helpful.

So, my friends always did me a solid, they were very helpful by helping me move and of course, in return, I’d always compensate them by buying pizza and beer and of course promising to return the favor if they ever needed it.

When I moved into the apartment that I’m currently living in right now, I didn’t even need a moving truck because my previous apartment is actually on the exact same street that I’m currently living on.

So, at that time, I just had to carry my things down the road from my old apartment to my current place. And because where I live now is the first apartment that my wife and I have lived in after getting married, I didn’t really need to take very much furniture with me.

For example, we bought a new bed and a new kitchen table and some other furniture as well so actually the last move was less like a move and more like a throwing out where I just got rid of a lot of things from my bachelor days that I wouldn’t really need anymore.

So, all of this is to say that in my life, I’ve moved countless times, but this will be the first move where a mover and a moving company does the moving for me. And to be honest with you, I couldn’t be more relieved about it.

Moving is always stressful, but doing the packing, the driving, the unpacking, and all of the other things yourself as well just makes the task even more stressful and difficult. Now, one of the cool things about movers here in Korea is that they’ll pack and unpack all of your stuff for you. Isn’t that cool?

I’m not sure if they do that in your country as well, but I know in my home country, in Canada, you could get this service. You could ask a moving company to pack your stuff and unpack your stuff, but it wouldn’t be a default service. You’d definitely have to pay extra for it, and it would be very expensive.

But here in Korea, this seems to be the default. It’s like the expected service that you get from a moving company. So, the movers will show up to your door on the morning of your move. They’ll pack all your things for you, they’ll move them, and then they’ll do the opposite at the other end.

And they’ll set up and unpack everything for you in your new home. And from what I’ve heard, the end result is a really pleasant moving experience, much less stressful than doing it yourself. So, I’m looking forward to the moving company being in control and taking charge of this move.

Something that’s kind of wild and is another difference between life in Canada and life in Korea is that because our current apartment is on the fourth floor and we don’t have an elevator in our building, it’s an older building without an elevator, the movers will use a ladder truck to take things in and out of our apartment.

And we definitely don’t have ladder trucks like this in Canada. So, let me try to paint a picture for you and explain what a ladder truck is. So, essentially, it’s like a special truck, kind of similar to a fire truck. It’s got this ladder on the back, and it is remote controlled.

So, there’s a platform that can go up the ladder to move items between the moving truck and an apartment, that’s like mine, that is multiple stories up in the air. And it just makes things much, much easier for the movers.

You know they could just, for example, they could load your mattress onto the platform of the ladder truck, and then just go down to the ground with the platform.

Making it much easier than having several movers shimmy around in a narrow staircase trying to get your mattress from the fourth floor to the ground floor while taking the stairs.

So, this is just a really cool and seemingly easy way to move, and that’s what the movers will be using to get our things out of our apartment when we make the move. And when they do come and do the moving, I’ll try to take a video so I can show you what a ladder truck looks like when it’s in action.

Anyway, so, yeah, the long wait is nearly over and finally, after a tremendous amount of work, we’ll be moving into our new place in under two weeks.

And my wife and I, and I’d like to say our dog, Pinky, as well, but in reality, he’s oblivious to all of this, but the three of us, we couldn’t be more happy and excited about it.

And now, it’s time for this week’s vocabulary lesson.

Before I let you go, I want to teach you about one of the English expressions that you heard me use a little earlier in this episode when I was telling you about my upcoming move. The expression is ‘to be in flux.’ ‘Be in flux’ and flux is spelled F-L-U-X.

It’s a really common English phrase, and I highly recommend adding it to your vocabulary because knowing it will help you improve both your listening and speaking.

We’ll talk about the meaning of ‘in flux’ in just a second, but before we do that, let’s take another listen to the part of the episode where I used this expression. It’ll help give us a little bit more context and maybe even help you to be able to guess the meaning from hearing it again.

So, let’s do that now, let’s rewind, go back, and we’ll listen to where I used this expression just a couple more times. Here we go.

Can you guess the meaning of ‘to be in flux’ now that you’ve heard it again? If you guessed that ‘in flux’ means in a state of change or uncertainty, then congratulations, awesome job because that is exactly what it means.

So, this word ‘flux’ is originally from the Latin language, and it means ‘flow.’ So, when something is ‘in flux,’ it means like it’s constantly changing or in a state of transition. And we use this expression to describe situations that are in change or that are evolving and are unsettled or instable or unclear.

Now, English speakers usually use ‘in flux’ when we want to emphasize the uncertainty of a situation. And we can use this expression when we’re talking about many different areas of life, such as plans, politics, business, personal life – you name it, we can use this expression in many different situations.

So, now that we know what ‘in flux’ means, let’s listen to some example sentences so we can get an idea of how to use it in a natural way. I’ve prepared three example sentences for you. Let’s listen to the first now. Here we go.

Let’s break this example sentence down. In this example, the speaker is complaining about fashion trends, saying that they’re always in flux, they’re always changing.

And because fashion is always changing, you know, it’s different from one season to the next season, from one year to the next year, it means that it’s hard to keep up with. So, if you want to be a fashionable dresser, you have to pay attention because the trends are always changing. They’re always in flux.

Let’s break this example down.

In this example, the speaker was talking about his school cafeteria, and he said that the lunch menu is always in flux, which means that it changes from one day to the next day, so you can never predict what will be on the menu at the cafeteria, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess, depending on your perspective.

Let’s break this final example down. In this example sentence, we hear the speaker talking about his plans for the next year and he said his plans were in flux, meaning he’s not really sure what’s going to happen next year. The future is uncertain for this guy.

So, he’s debating whether he should renew his lease on his current apartment and keep living in the same place or if he should move and find a new place to live.

So, because he’s in this state of uncertainty, he doesn’t know what to do, he doesn’t know what the future will hold for him, he says that his plans are in flux. So, that brings us to the end of this week’s bonus episode and congratulations on making it all the way to the end. I have to say, I’m proud of you.

You invested in yourself here today and you took some steps towards not only improving your English but improving your life.

So, keep up the awesome job and let’s carry this good momentum through the rest of the week ahead too. And of course, if you need help with that, we’re here for you. We’re here to help you with your English and we have hundreds of lessons on our website, Culips.com, that are designed to do just that.

Plus, we have transcripts, study guides, and helpful learning resources for all of them. So, I’m going to go now but take care, have a great week and we’ll be back soon with another brand-new Culips episode and I’ll talk to you then. Goodbye!