Bonus episode #174 – Out-of-town Trip

Hello and welcome to bonus episode number 174 of the Q-Lips English podcast. How's it going? Thank you for clicking play and joining me today. If you're new to our bonus episode series and you don't know what it's all about, let

me quickly explain. My name's Andrew and I am from Canada but I live abroad in Seoul, South Korea. And in our bonus episodes, I just tell you some stories from my everyday life that are designed to help you build your English fluency.

know that when you're learning English, you need to spend a lot of time listening to the language. And that's what I'm here to help you with today. To accompany each and every episode, there's a 100% free interactive transcript and vocabulary glossary. Plus, if you are a Qlips member, then you'll also get a comprehension quiz. And if you'd

like to learn about Qlips membership and what that's all about, just visit our website, Qlips.com. There are lots of details there about that. And one of The cool benefits that you get as a Q-Lips member is that you can join our weekly speaking classes. We have three to four speaking classes each and every week.

And as a member, you're able to join as many as you would like and you can just drop in. So it's not like a commitment thing. You don't have to RSVP or anything like that. If you have some time in your schedule to join a class, then come on in and join us. And if you're busy one week and you can't join, that's okay too.

just drop in whenever you're available to. Usually what we do in our classes is we talk about a recent Q-loops episode. So the idea is that first you listen to the podcast

and then after you talk about it with our awesome community and with our teachers as well. And so we've got all of your bases covered here at Q-loops. We've got your listening and your speaking,

your input and your output, and also just a great community of like-minded people who are also serious about learning English to do it with. So that is so important as well,

having a good community around you when you're learning English. But recently we just added some new styles of classes to our schedule.

And this week was the first week that we trialed them. So guys, we're having a different style class each week and we're going to repeat the same schedule each and every month.

So the first week of every month, we're going to have a games class. The second week will be a grammar class where we'll learn about a grammar topic and then practice that in detail.

The third will be a video or article discussion class. And then the final week, we're going to do a throwback classic Q-Lips episode discussion class. So really excited about that.

And we just had the games class here for the first time happened this week. And I have to say the feedback has been really great that we've gotten so far from our Q-Lips members. In fact, on the Discord this morning when I woke up there were a few cool comments about

the games classes that I thought I would share here with you. So Edithka, one of our awesome members from Hungary, and I think one of the top three funniest members of our community as well. She always makes me laugh.

Aditya wrote a great comment today on our discord. She wrote, hello, my dear Q-Lips hosts, Alina, Andrew and Indiana. I would like to thank you for this new kind of lesson

with the games class. We had fun and at the same time, I felt like we could practice a lot. They're very great compliments for the other classes.

Thanks again. So Aditya really enjoyed them. And then we had some other comments here too. I'm just going through our discord.

May wrote that the games class was really fun and it made her day and Gita wrote that it was a great idea for the new class. It was fun and instructive and Jesse as well another really active member on our discord wrote that she really loved the new class and loved the games. So thanks for all that great feedback to everyone who left a comment on our discord and guys if you're not a

Q-Lips member yet and you'd like to join in on the fun join these new classes as well as our other small group conversation classes as well. Just visit our website, kulips.com, sign up and become a member. You can do that for an affordable price. And yeah, we'll see you in the classes.

So my story for you this week is about what I got up to last weekend. Last weekend I went on a little trip out of town, an out of town trip. So maybe I'll call this episode out of town trip. That sounds like a nice title here now that I've said it.

So let me tell you about that trip. It was a fun one. I had a great weekend last weekend. I went to a place in the southern part of South Korea

called Kwangju. And I have a couple of buddies down there who have been my friends for a while since I've lived in South Korea.

One of them's from Canada and one of them is from the States. And they're like my two foreign buddies, my back home buddies that I love to hang out with

And often we go running. One of the friends, his name's Jimmy, and I've talked about him a lot here on the podcast because we always run marathons together. And so he's my running buddy.

And yeah, I went and saw those two friends in Guangzhou. And of course I would love to say that I went there just to hang out with them and spend some time with them, but that would be a lie. I went there because we had to run a marathon together.

So Jimmy and I, we ran a full marathon together, our second one for 2026, and our other buddy, he ran the 10K. So we all participated in the same event and we ran together, which was really fun. So I went down to Guangzhou on, I guess it was Friday evening and from Seoul to Guangzhou

takes maybe just a little bit over two hours on the high speed rail. So yeah, I just love it. It's such a blessing in South Korea and some of these other countries in Asia and maybe in Europe as well to have this fast high speed rail.

It's just so convenient. And one of my favorite things about living in South Korea is that we have this awesome public transportation infrastructure.