I hope that by tuning in and listening to these stories, you will be able to B.I.G.B. That is our motto for the series. B stands for build your fluency. I stands for increase your cultural knowledge. G stands for grow your vocabulary. And the final B stands for become a better English communicator, a better English speaker. So those are our goals here.

If those goals are interesting to you, then you’re in the right place. For each and every episode of our bonus series, there is a 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary that is available for everyone to download. You’re never going to find a better way to study English for a better cost than free. So, I hope you’ll take advantage of these tools, check them out.

You can find them by just following the link that’s in the description for this episode. Also, there is a comprehension quiz if you are a Culips member. It’s kind of fun to listen to the stories and then do the comprehension quiz to see how much you understood from listening.

The quiz that we make is like 10-ish questions, usually about 10 questions, and it’s a nice way to check and see how much you understood. If you get a really high score, that means your listening is on track. Maybe if you get a lower score, it means you want to go back and spend some more time with it, but it gives you a nice idea and a nice sense of how much you are able to understand from listening to this episode today.

But if you want to get it, you do need to be a Culips member. The link to sign up and become a Culips member and to learn about all the details and bonuses and extras that you get if you’re a member, because we do give you a lot of extra bonuses, well, then you can just visit the website, Culips.com or follow the link in the description for this episode.

Now, speaking of Culips members, I have a huge announcement, a big announcement that I think all Culips members are going to be happy about. At least if I were a Culips member, I would be happy about this. I think I’ve said on Culips before that really the things that guide me in making content and making lessons and making everything for Culips really is all informed by my own language learning.

Of course, if you’re a longtime Culips listener, you’ll know that I am a Korean learner. I spend a lot of time, and a lot of energy, and a lot of effort, and a lot of money, learning Korean. All of these lessons that I’ve learned from learning Korean, I put towards teaching English as well, because I think a lot of the things that I’ve learned through my experience can be helpful for English learners as well.

One of the things that I would love to have if there were a Korean version of Culips, for example, is the ability to connect with other listeners of the podcast and also to be able to practice my speaking with them and to make new friends and to feel like I’m a part of a community.

So, to take care of all of those things, to check all of those boxes, what we are going to be doing starting June of 2024 is that we are going to be having weekly small group conversation practice sessions for all Culips members. Each session, I think that’s maybe the best word to use, “session,” because it’s not really a class. It’s more like a practice session.

Each session will be hosted by one of our Culips instructors. So, I’m going to be hosting a session each week. Alina and Indiana, our study guide writers, are also going to be hosting a session each week. You’ll have a really high-quality English teacher who will be there in the call with you. And it’s open to all Culips members.

So, if you’re a Culips member, you can join for free. We’re going to be having three each week. The nice thing is each of the Culips staff, we all live in a different time zone. Indiana is based in the eastern time zone of the USA. So, she’s going to be hosting her sessions in the evening for all of the people who live in North and South America.

I think that will be a convenient time for you to join and practice. Alina is based in Ireland. She’s focused in the Europe zone and all of our European listeners, maybe even from some other time zones as well, depends on what time of the day works best for you. Well, you guys can join Alina’s session. And then of course, I’m based in Asia.

So, for all of our Asian listeners from Korea and Japan and China and all of the other countries in Asia, maybe even into Australia and to some other places like that, you can join with me. I will be hosting my sessions in the evening. This is awesome. Three sessions a week that you can potentially join to meet with other Culips members, to practice English conversation.

And of course, it will be moderated and led by one of our Culips staff as well. Each session will be linked to a recent Culips episode. The idea here is what we’re thinking is that you can listen to the Culips episode and then, you know how in each study guide, we have some discussion questions and practice questions and prompts?

Well, you know, it’s nice to think about those in your head or to write a journal entry or to make a speaking blog or vlog or something like that. That’s really cool. Those are fantastic study techniques, but wouldn’t it be nice to actually share your opinion and communicate with other speakers as well? And maybe in the process, make some new friends or learn some new vocabulary, practice your English listening as well because you’re hearing other people’s opinions.

So, I think this is what the goal is. We hope that what you’ll do is pre-listen to the Culips episode that the session is about, and then you’ll have that topic fresh in your head. You’ll have lots of things to say in reaction to that episode, then we’ll meet together in the session, and we’ll practice speaking in small groups.

And then maybe at the end of the session, we’ll all come together and have a full class discussion as well. So that’s the idea. We’re going to launch it in June. If you want to join, like I said, all of these sessions are free to Culips members. You can go to one a week, you can go to three a week. It doesn’t matter to us.

We’re having them open to all members, at least to start. If we have an overwhelming turnout, maybe we’ll have to make some other rules or something, but that’s the idea for now. Yes, the link to join the sessions we’re going to put on the Culips member dashboard. So, we’ll post that very, very soon and you’ll be able to see the monthly schedule and find what time the sessions start in your time zone.

Like I mentioned, we’re going to be starting those in early June. I’m looking forward to it. I know that as a host of some of the sessions, my sessions will be happening Thursday nights at 8 p.m. in my local time zone, Korea time. It’ll be fun for me to connect with a lot of you out there as well. I hope we’ll have great participation, and we’ll all have fun practicing speaking English together and talking in a little bit more detail about different Culips topics.

So that’s the big announcement here for all Culips members. And of course, if you’re not a Culips member yet, but you’d like to join these sessions, you want to partake in the fun and practice speaking English with our amazing member community, then just visit our website Culips.com and you can sign up and you can do that. All right let’s get into this episode for today in earnest.

Bonus episode 103. I have to start with an apology. Not the greatest way to start, but I do have to start with an apology. I have to apologize to Lucas, one of our fantastic community members, because he sent in an audio message for bonus episode 100.

You know, a few weeks ago, we had our special bonus episode number 100 celebration, where I played audio messages from different Culips listeners from around the world who shared a story with us.

We focused on your stories, not on my story for that week, just to celebrate our 100-episode milestone. But I lost Lucas’s email. It got somehow lost in my inbox and I forgot to include his story. So, I want to right that wrong. “To right a wrong,” that’s kind of a nice expression to add to your vocabulary if you don’t use that one already.

It just means to make amends or to make up for some bad thing that you did in the past. So, I did a bad thing. I forgot to include Lucas’s message in bonus episode 100. So, I want to right that wrong right now. And we’re going to do that by listening to his message. So, Lucas, I’m sorry that I forgot to include you in bonus episode 100, but better late than never.

Let’s listen to your story right now. Here we go.

Lucas: Hi Andrew and the Culips team. My name is Lucas. My story with Culips began during the pandemic. I’m a Portuguese teacher here in Brazil, and I decided that English would be my second language. In 2020, I started looking for a podcast to improve my listening ability. That’s when I found Culips by chance. Honestly, in the first episodes, I didn’t understand almost anything.

But four years later, here I am. I understand everything. Since then, I haven’t missed any episode. I want to thank you for helping me a lot on my journey. And of course, I have my favorite episodes. One of them is about Nintendo. Man, this episode was amazing. And also, about your wedding and the trip to Canada. So, thank you, Culips team, for all the episodes. Thank you, Andrew.

Andrew: OK, thank you to Lucas. And thank you again to everyone who celebrated bonus episode 100 with me. It was so nice to hear all of your stories. I hope for bonus episode number 200, I will be more organized, and I’ll make sure to not leave anyone out of that episode.

OK, now let’s get into our main content for today. I have a lot to talk about. So many things have been happening in my life recently. And what I’m going to try and do is keep things very brief and just go through some of the interesting highlights that have been happening here in May. I think I’m going to call this episode “Wild May.”

Wild May because May seems to be one of the busiest months in my life. I don’t know about you, but just for me in my life, there are so many things happening in May, so many holidays and special days and events. And it’s just a really wild month, wild and busy, and to be honest, a little bit overwhelming as well.

I wrote down four things here in my notebook that I’m going to go through. We’ll start at the beginning of the month. Earlier in May, we had two special days, Children’s Day and Parents’ Day, Children’s Day, and Parents’ Day. These are holidays here in South Korea. Children’s Day is an official statutory holiday. That’s a big expression, a mouthful, “statutory holiday.”

Essentially, it just means it’s an official holiday. So, for Children’s Day, all of government offices are closed, schools are closed, businesses are closed. You get a day off of work. Here in Korea, we call it a red day because when you look on the calendar, the number for this holiday will be printed in red. So, Children’s Day is a red day. It’s a statutory, official holiday.

It means that most people, of course you know, if you work at a cafe or a restaurant or something like that, you probably don’t get the day off. But if you work in an office or a government institution or something, it’s a holiday for you. So, I got Children’s Day off. Thank you to all of the kids in Korea here who gave me this day of rest. It’s very nice. Thank you, guys.

I’m glad that we have a Children’s Day in Korea because we don’t have that holiday in Canada where I’m originally from. I think I’ve said this on Culips before, probably in the past, but I remember growing up in Canada, we have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in Canada. So, I always would ask my parents every Mother’s and Father’s Day, “Why isn’t there a Children’s Day?

Why do you guys have a special day, and we don’t get a special day?” And of course, the response my parents would always tell me is, “Every day is Children’s Day. You guys are spoiled every day. You get to eat what you want. You get to do what you want. You get to play. You don’t have to work. Every day is Children’s Day.” So, I thought, yeah, that’s a very fitting response.

Probably in retrospect, they’re correct. Life as a child is, for most children at least, hopefully for most children, and it was for me, life as a child was easier than it is as an adult. So, I agree with them in retrospect. Every day is Children’s Day. But here in South Korea, actually there is a Children’s Day. So, it’s a nice day to celebrate all of the kids around the country.

My wife and I, we don’t have children. So, I’m not exactly sure what Children’s Day looks like in the average Korean house or the average Korean household, but we do have a couple of nephews who are elementary school aged. And so, because of Children’s Day, and also because of Parents’ Day, interestingly enough here in South Korea, there’s no Mother’s Day or Father’s Day like we have in North America. Instead, there’s just one day to celebrate them.

But Children’s Day and Parents’ Day, there’s actually a Teacher’s Day around this time as well. All of these days happen in the beginning of May. To celebrate them, we had a family dinner, a family get together. Actually, it wasn’t dinner, it was lunch. We had a family lunch. So, we met with my in-laws and my brother-in-law and his family and our nephews.

We got together and we had a big lunch, a nice lunch. We ate grilled eel, which is one of my father-in-law’s favorites. The rest of the family always enjoys it too. Seems like over the last few years, every time we got together for a big family gathering, we’ve gone to the same grilled eel restaurant. It’s always delicious.

I know it sounds a little random and maybe a little gross to some listeners from around the world, but grilled eel is really delicious, and I love it. It’s also supposed to be really healthy for you. So, when we have a family get together and my father-in-law suggests, “Hey, let’s go to our favorite grilled eel restaurant,” I’m always like, “Yes, let’s do it, I’m down!”

And to be honest with you, it’s also a little bit expensive. So, it’s a nice way to do it when we have this kind of family get together. It’s probably not something that I would go and eat on my own with just my wife for us together, it’s a little pricey. But for a special occasion to celebrate Children’s Day, to celebrate Parents’ Day, then it’s OK.

So, we did that a few weeks ago, had a great time, enjoyed some delicious food, and we were able to celebrate that day, that holiday, Parents’ Day and Children’s Day, kind of a two-for-one celebration. So, that was a nice way to start the month. The next thing I wanted to talk about is some other celebrations.

Like I said, May is just a crazy busy month for me and lots of things on the calendar. So, the second week in May is a special week for me. It’s kind of like, yeah, my week. I could say out of all of the weeks in a year, probably the second week in May is my week because it’s my birthday and also my anniversary happens. Well, I guess my anniversary is on the 15th of May.

So yeah, it’s a little bit outside of that week, but close enough. Who’s counting days, right? So yeah, mid-May, I have my birthday and I also have my anniversary. I was able to celebrate, well, me and my wife celebrated our third anniversary. Time flies. I can’t believe we’ve already been married for three years.

That’s insane to me. It feels like we just got married the other day, but already three years have passed. We had a wonderful anniversary celebration and also my birthday. If you listen to a recent Simplified Speech episode that we released probably a month or six weeks ago, Kassy and I, in that Simplified Speech episode, we talked about both having milestone birthdays this year.

Kassy is a baby. She just turned 30 years old. Can you believe it? Wow, Kassy is so young. I’m very, very jealous. She turned 30 years old a little earlier in the spring and I turned 40 years old. So, I just celebrated my 40th birthday. It’s a tough pill to swallow, turning 40, I think.

For those of you who have gone through this experience, probably you’ll be able to sympathize with me a little bit that going from 30 to 40 feels a little bit different than turning 30.

You know, going from your 20s to 30s or your teens to your 20s. Those all feel, like, pretty smooth, but there’s something about turning 40 that is just a little bit more intense and it kind of feels like your youth is finally completely, totally finished and now you are legitimately an adult.

Actually, a middle-aged adult and there’s no turning back, right? Time only moves forward. So yeah, I had that milestone birthday and also my anniversary in the same week and my birthday was first. We had just a nice little celebration at home for my birthday. My wife always goes all out for my birthday to make me feel really special.

If you listened to that Culips episode where I talked about how I celebrate my birthday and talked in more detail about my 40th birthday. So, I won’t repeat all of those details. I’ll link that episode in the description if you’d like to check it out, if you haven’t already. In that episode, I did talk about a funny story about 40 pink flamingos that appeared randomly at my house when I was a child when my dad turned 40 years old.

Well, my wife knew about that story and so she wanted to present me with 40 pink flamingos for my 40th birthday as well. What she did is she went online, and she found these… like almost like Christmas lights. If you’re familiar with what Christmas lights look like, the string of lights, except they weren’t Christmas lights. They had little pink flamingos on the end of the lights.

There were these strings of lights and I think each string, she said, had eight pink flamingos on it. So, she had to buy five strings to hit 40 pink flamingos and she set them up in our yard and we had a little barbecue party out in my yard, just my wife and I on the evening of my birthday.

So, it was a really nice way just to have a chill, cozy feeling barbecue party, mini barbecue party on my birthday in our yard to celebrate my 40th birthday. My wife asked me, what do I wanna do for my birthday? Do I wanna go to a restaurant and have a fancy dinner? Do I wanna eat some kind of fancy special food at a restaurant? I said, no, I just wanna chill at home.

I wanna have just a low-key birthday celebration in my own yard with my wife and that’s exactly what I did. And it was awesome, couldn’t ask for more, just had a fun time chilling in the yard with my wife, sitting on our lawn chairs, having a little barbecue party, and enjoying the ambience of the lights from the pink flamingos.

So that was an awesome way to ring in turning 40 and now that I am 40. Yeah, I have to say things haven’t changed too much in terms of like how I feel physically, but it’s just like a mental thing, a mental block turning 40 is like, wow, time flies. Anyways, can’t do anything about it so I’m gonna enjoy my 40s. I think if I go back and look at my life, every decade has been pretty good.

I’ve been blessed with this awesome life, great friends, great family, exciting adventures, all of these things. But I think each decade of my life has gotten better and better and better and more exciting and more exciting and more exciting and each decade is better than the last decade.

So, I’m hoping that this trend continues and my 40s will be even better than my 30s and by the time I turn 50, I’ll look back and I’ll say, “Wow, the 40s were an amazing time of my life!” I believe that’s going to be true and I hope that’s going to be true and yes, it will be true. So, I’m 40 now and I’m going to enjoy it. OK, what else? What else did I write in my notebook?

The next thing I wrote in my notebook, ah! Espresso machine, espresso machine. So, to celebrate our anniversary, which I didn’t even mention by the way, I just kind of flipped through it quickly, but what did we do to celebrate our anniversary? Well, our anniversary day itself was super, super rainy. It was also a public holiday. Our anniversary coincided with a public holiday.

There’s a lot of them here in May in South Korea. I guess we could say it was Buddha’s Birthday, I think is the English way that we say this holiday. So, it was Buddha’s birthday, the same day as our wedding anniversary, but it just poured rain all day that day. What we like to do on our wedding anniversary is a kind of pilgrimage. We like to go back to our wedding location.

We got married in this park, we had an outdoor wedding. So, on our anniversary, we like to go back to the wedding location and just have a nice little picnic in that park, take some photos and just remember the day. We were planning to do that.

We thought, wow, it’s great timing. It’s Buddha’s Birthday, it’s the public holiday, the same day as our wedding anniversary, but it just poured rain that day. So of course, we didn’t wanna go to the park and sit in the rain and have a picnic in the rain. That’s terrible. So, we waited until the next weekend, and then we went back to that park in Central Seoul. The weather was wonderful that day.

We had a little picnic, we took some photos, and we just reminisced about our wedding that was three years ago. We’ve done that pilgrimage to the park every year on our anniversary. So, I think probably going forward, we’ll continue to do that. It’s kind of fun to go back and to relive some memories and to remember the day and just spend some quality time together as well.

So that’s how we celebrated our anniversary. But espresso machine, this is connected, connected to the anniversary because my wife and I don’t buy each other an anniversary present. But this year we decided that we would go in together to buy an espresso machine for our anniversary. I’ve been wanting an espresso machine for a long, long, long, long time.

I used to have one before I was married. I had an espresso machine that was a hand-me-down from one of my friends. He was moving and he had this old espresso machine. He didn’t really use it. So, he asked me if I would like to have it. And I said, “Sure, yeah, give it to me!” I’m a coffee lover. I love coffee. So yes, I got my friend’s old espresso machine and I used that until I got married.

By that point, the espresso machine was on its last legs. If a machine is on its last legs, well, if you’re a Culips listener, hardcore Culips listener, you’ll know that we’ve covered this expression on Culips before. But if a machine or a device or something is on its last legs, it means it’s in terrible condition and it’s probably time to throw it out.

So that old espresso machine was on its last legs. It wasn’t pumping water very well anymore. So, I had to get rid of it. Since that time, I’ve been espresso machine-less. In fact, they’re pretty expensive. They’re like kind of a luxury. So ever since I threw that old espresso machine out, I’ve wanted to buy a new one, but we just haven’t been able financially to buy a new espresso machine yet.

But we’ve been saving a little bit, saving for a rainy day. One of the espresso machines that I wanted to buy went on sale and it was also our wedding anniversary. So, we’re like, “OK, let’s pull the trigger.” Let’s make the decision. Let’s buy the espresso machine. So that’s what we did. And so, it’s been awesome having the espresso machine here at home, I gotta say.

As a coffee enthusiast, a coffee lover, I have just been loving it. It’s been great. It’s been a nice addition to my daily morning routine. Because it’s new and because I don’t know too much about making espresso, I have been experimenting a lot with all of the different ways that you can dial in your machine. Have you heard this expression before? “To dial something in.”

To dial something in, this is a phrasal verb that just means to make something work perfectly. I’m trying to make the espresso as perfect as I can. I’m trying to dial my machine in, which means adjusting all of the settings and making sure that everything is perfect. So, the amount of coffee that I grind to put in the machine is perfect.

The amount of pressure that I put on the espresso when I’m tampering it down with the tamper, these are all like really geeky espresso expressions, but the tamper is the tool that you use to push the coffee down so that you can get some pressure in the basket that you attach to the coffee machine. My tampering is perfect. My grind settings are perfect.

The time that I run the espresso machine for to extract the coffee, that is also perfect. So, trying to adjust all of these things so that they are perfect, that is called dialing it in. I’ve been experimenting a lot with dialing in the espresso machine and trying to find the perfect combination of grind, of extraction time, and all of these things, all of these different variables.

As a result, it means that, well, for the last week or two, I’ve been drinking too much espresso. I’ve been drinking too much because, you know, you’re experimenting. You make a cup, you drink it, you taste it. You’re like, “OK, I need to fix that a little bit. I need to adjust this a little bit.” Then you make another cup and then another cup.

So, I guess like two weeks ago, I was drinking maybe two or three double espressos every day and it just got me feeling crazy. You know, I’m a big coffee drinker. I drink a lot of coffee. I really enjoy it, but I was starting to feel like I was going crazy. It was caffeine overload. I almost felt like I was high on a drug or something.

I was like, “Whoa, this is really affecting me in ways that I’ve never been affected by coffee before.” Maybe it’s because I’m 40 now, who knows? But for the first time in my life, I really felt like I can’t drink this much coffee. I need to dial it back. Wow, there’s another phrasal verb with “dial.”

“To dial in” means to make adjustments so that something is perfect. “To dial back,” think of like in this situation, you can think of like a dial on a machine. You know, like if you have a stereo, you have a volume dial. A volume dial is the knob that you can twist to turn up the volume or to turn down the volume.

So, I need to dial back my coffee consumption, means I needed to drink less coffee. I need to turn that knob from like 10, drinking three double espressos in a short amount of time. That’s probably dialed up to 10, right? So, I need to dial back to like one. So ever since then, I’ve just been having one coffee a day, one espresso in the morning, and then that’s it.

And that’s a big adjustment for me because I would usually drink coffee in the morning and then in the afternoon for sure after lunch, I would always, always, always have a coffee. But I thought, “Wow, caffeine is affecting me too much recently.” So, I’ve decided to cut back and it’s tough to break this habit. I really feel like I’m kind of addicted to coffee.

So, in the afternoon when I don’t have a coffee after lunch, that’s when I feel like, oh, I really kind of want a coffee, but I’ve just been trying to drink water instead. I think it’s had a positive effect on me. I haven’t been doing this for too long, only for like a week but this week I’ve been having really good sleeps every night, better than I’ve had in a long time.

I think maybe that only having one double espresso, one cup of coffee in the morning and then not having any more coffee after that has been a nice change, a nice adjustment for me. So, it’s been a lot of dialing over here in my household, dialing in the coffee machine and dialing back my coffee consumption.

There you go. Two awesome phrasal verb expressions, really natural ones to add to your vocabulary that you can use for this kind of situation when you’re perfecting something or when you’re reducing something. Well guys, I do have more things that I wrote down here in my notebook that I wanna talk with you about, but I’m afraid that it will take too long to do so.

So how about we save my notebook notes for next week and I’ll continue with what I’ve written down here next week in bonus episode 104. Well, then I think that will bring us to the end of today’s episode. Thank you all for tuning in, for listening. I hope I see a lot of you in the next episode.

I hope I see a lot of you in our upcoming Culips small group conversation sessions that I mentioned at the start of the show. I’m really excited about that. I think it’s gonna be awesome. Like I said, we’ll be posting and making announcements to that for all of our members very, very soon. Check the member dashboard on Culips.com.

Check the member-only area of our Discord server as well. And you will find all of the news about that. Guys, also don’t forget that there is an interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary available for this episode and a comprehension quiz if you are a Culips member. If you enjoyed this episode, please support what we do here. Your support is everything.

Without your support, we really can’t continue to make English lessons each and every week for learners from around the world. The best way to support Culips is to sign up and become a Culips member on our website. But there are other ways that you can show your support. And of course, we really, really appreciate that as well.

You can support us by following us on social media, Instagram, Discord, YouTube, you name it, we’re there. You could also tell your friends who are learning English to check Culips out, or you could leave us a five-star rating and a nice review on your favorite podcast platform. Thank you to everyone who’s been supporting us and please keep it up.

All right, so that’s it for me for now. Take care and I’ll talk to you in the next episode. Have a great week ahead. Happy English studying. Bye-bye.