Korvia Summer Barbecue

Hello from your friendly neighbourhood BBQ assistants~

Another incredibly late pre-summer catchup, this time it's the Korvia BBQ!

For anyone that doesn't know, the wonderful Korvia is the company that helped myself, Nick, and hundreds of other people from around the world make the move to South Korea.

The barbecues and parties that Korvia throw for their recruits are there to let people meet the people that helped them share the bureaucratic deadweight that is trying to get work abroad, as well as other native English speakers that might also be in or near your placement area. It's a great idea to help you feel a little bit less of a tiny fish in a huge ocean, and is actually one of the things that really drew me to Korvia over other recruitment agencies when I first started my research.

I actually met a lot of my really good friends over here via last year's (and our first) barbecue. My idea was that if I volunteered to man the grill, I'd HAVE to crawl out of my comfort zone and actually talk to new people. And hey, it worked! Since then, it's always been fun to help out with setting up the venues, because it's basically an easy excuse to doss about with my friends before everyone else arrives. ;p

One of our main tasks was to set up the photo wall in the picture at the top, which was surprisingly difficult considering there were so many people trying to set it up. (And it all ended in disaster, RIP photo wall. I say that, I think we fixed it, but it DID fall on me, and I valiantly tried to leap out of the way like an action hero. Expectations vs Reality, I probably looked more like a kid faceplanting than Indy with the giant rock, but don't crush my dreams, okay?)

Ignore my sweaty mess and focus on Kiegan's dazzlingly adorable smile.

Our other task was to set up the food tables ready for the masses, and get the coals burning and ready for meat, glorious meat. Also: ASPARAGUS!!

I think we were just about ready when the first few loads of people started to arrive, at which point you make a name tag and get stuck in ~socialising~. I think I am actually a bit better at this now, and I've definitely come a long way since 6th Form.

I like the laid-back feel of the barbecues. You just lounge around on the grass, eat food, drink whatever you want and talk about silly things with people from far-flung reaches of the galaxy. Mainly Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, USA, Canada and the UK. And Korea. But that's still pretty exotic to me.

No safety from the paparazzi tyranny.

We're always really happy to see our life-saving recruiter Daisy. And she loves IT Crowd! Yesss~

I distinctly remember throwing cheese balls at someone with several others all aiming for one person's mouth. And trying to jump over the water feature. I also remember asking Stephen to edit out all evidence of my sweatiness in the photos he took, but that didn't happen... ;p

I can't complain really. I forgot to take any photos so I've stolen a lot of these from Korvia's facebook page. The bonus of this, I suppose, it that I usually end up with a load of candid pics of myself because it's often a struggle to get me into a group photo.

Not sure what's happening here.

A group of us ended up going to Hongdae afterwards and grabbing some drinks which resulted in one of my favourite polaroids so far: