Simplified Speech #248 – Life lately

Hello and welcome to Simplified Speech, the Q-Lip series which features clear, natural, and easy to understand English conversations between native speakers. Joining me today as my co-host is Cassie. Hey Cassie, what's up? Hey Andrew, I'm doing great. How about you? I'm doing good as well. And Cassie, we're gonna do just one of our classic

classic episode styles, a catch-up episode. It's been probably a month or so since we got together to record Cassie and I'm curious what you've been up to in that time and I'm sure our listeners are as well.

And maybe I don't wanna put words in your mouth or thoughts in your head, but maybe you're curious about me as well. So I'll go-

I'm cold. I'm cold. We'll go back and forth and share some stories about what we've been up to over the last little while.

And yeah, that will be the foundation for our conversation here today. But before we get started, I wanna talk to our listeners for a second.

So guys, I hope you're doing well and I want you to get the most out of this episode today. So to help you with that, to help you build your English fluency with this episode,

we have prepared fantastic study tools for you. We have an interactive transcript that is totally clickable. You can click on any word in the transcript and hear the audio from that point.

It works great on your smartphone. It works great on your tablet computer. It works great on your computer, whatever device you wanna use, it works for that.

And I think it's really great if there's a part of the conversation that's maybe difficult for you and you wanna hear it again and again and again.

You can just tap or click on the word hear the audio from that point. It's also great if you want to practice your pronunciation by shadowing or listening and repeating with the episode. So definitely the interactive transcript is very, very helpful. But there's also a study guide where we'll explain and

break down and give examples of the vocabulary that you need to know to hit the next level with your English. So in this conversation, Cassie and I are just speaking naturally and certain expressions and idioms and phrasal verbs are going to flow out during our English speaking and we'll choose some of the best ones that we want you to learn and we'll explain them

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So thank you so much. Okay, and with that announcement out of the way, we're going to get started with our catch up episode here. So Cassie, I think, yeah, let's let you do the honors and start.

What's what's new with you? Thanks. I need a speaking break. I've been speaking for a long time.

I need to listen now. What's new with you? Um, well, in the past month, uh, our school's spring break happened. And during that time, my aunt and her partner and my sister came to visit and we had a super fun time.

Yeah. I remember in our last catch up conversation, you told us that they were going to come and visit, but I guess their visit has happened and they've come and gone. And so it's great to hear that you had a good time. What are some of the activities that you got up to? So I was trying to decide if we wanted to do like city stuff

like in Seoul or if we wanted to do other mainland stuff but my aunt and my sister are really into the outdoors and nature and It was like springy. So I thought Jeju would be a really cool place to be for the time that they were here. It was my aunt and their uncles

first time in Asia as well. Yeah so so we spent the the week and some change like week and a few days that they were here on Jeju and we had a really great time the weather was not as beautiful as I thought it would be. I guess Jeju takes a little longer to warm up than the mainland so it was still kind of

cold and rainy while they were here. But we made the most of it. We got these like orange Jeju ponchos that we wore all the time. And we did all of our outdoor activities, even though we got a little wet. And it was so cool. What are some highlights? Just while you're thinking about that, I'll just explain quickly to our listeners that

maybe don't know that Jeju is this island off the southern part of South Korea. It's this beautiful island. It's amazing. It's about like an hour flight from Seoul. So it's really close and it's nicknamed the Hawaii of Korea and it's actually very, very different than mainland South Korea. So yeah, it's this beautiful tropical almost tropical island. Maybe semi semi tropical is

the best way to say it, but yeah. It's famous for oranges, so maybe that's why your rain jackets or your ponchos were the orange color. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I should have prefaced that before I... That's all right. That's all right. So what'd you get up to? Yeah, so we did a whole bunch of stuff. We went to one place called Jeju Stone Park,

which I had not heard of before we went with them. It's like this giant, like super big park that's just full of, yeah, rocks, stones. But they're just like, because Jeju Island is a,

an inactive volcano. So most of the island is just lava rock, lava rocks. rocks. So this stone park is all of the giant rocks that they must have dug up, dug up when they were developing the island. And they took the coolest looking ones and put them in this

park. And maybe they even sculpted some of them. And there was a bunch of Harubangs which are these stone Jeju like statues that I think of like as the guardians of Jeju. And, um, yeah, we walked all around that park and we saw it felt like we were kind of in a Jurassic Park almost because there were tons of lava rocks.