Fall in KTown

Here in Korea, they are very proud of the fact that they have 4 distinct seasons. They constantly ask if the weather back home is hotter, colder, more or less rainy, and if the leaves change color like they do here. We (Americans/Canadians) have to break it to them gently that we also have four very distinct seasons.

Fall has brought lots of fun things to do here! First, it's the official hiking season, and Koreans LOVE hiking. Many of my co-teachers go every weekend plus sometimes during the week. One day I went with some teachers to a valley of Jirisan mountain to "look at the leaves". I didn't understand this at first, but turns out it just means the maple leaves are changing colors, and everyone in Korea has to get their butt to some sort of mountain to witness it (again, the 4 seasons pride). It actually was quite beautiful though.

I am a white giant, I know.

Of course, like most things here, the outing turned out to be more about eating and drinking than actually about hiking. The tradition hiking alcoholic beverage of choice is makgeolli, Korean rice wine. Pretty delicious.

I also took a nice trip with friends one Sunday to Suncheon Bay, a very famous ecological wetland only about half an hour from home. When people around Korea hear we're from Suncheon, they usually remark how lucky we are to be near Suncheon bay. It was quite crowded and touristy, but there are some great views:

The bay

Cath, Jenna, Glenn, Mike and Pete taking a photo break

Another great thing about fall: festivals! There seems to be a different festival in one city or another every weekend, even in my rural province. Unfortunately I can't get to most of them, but some examples are the chrysanthemum festival in Hampyeong, the lantern festival in Jinju, the reeds festival at Suncheon bay, and a great one that I attended: the fireworks festival in Busan. Busan is one of the biggest cities in Korea; it's not actually in my province but only a few hours away. Going into this festival, I had heard that last year they spent over 5,000,000,000 won ($5 million) and more than a million people attended. And this year was supposed to be even wilder. Well, it was wild for sure. I was lucky enough to have a friend of a friend with an 18th floor apartment overlooking the beach where the fireworks were, so I didn't have to battle it out with the crowd to get a good spot.

The show lasted for over an hour, and it was divided into sections by "continents": Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and "America". The Canadians were NOT pleased. Each section had its own theme music: the most memorable of which being "New York, New York" and "Under the Sea" for America, "Jai Ho" for Asia, and K'naan's World Cup masterpiece "Wavin' Flag" for Africa. Popular culture much?

The fireworks were shot mainly off of a bunch of boats in the water, which was cool cause you couldn't tell where they were coming from. It also incorporated a laser beam show off the bridge in the background, and some firework waterfalls. No big deal.

Here's a quick video from the Africa section. Try to ignore my friends talking in the background...

Some other great fall moments, summed up in pictures and videos:

One night Glenn and I encountered a couple of high school girls hamming it up, laughing and playing on the street. The fact that one of them was in a hospital gown and hooked up to an IV didn't seem to bring them down.

Two of my friends dressed up as Julie and Zeeto, the infamous characters from the elementary school curriculum CD-ROM.

Jenna demonstrating the parking situation at Shidae apartments, which she describes as "grim". There is not nearly enough space for everyone's cars, so they simply double park all over the place, and leave their cars in neutral. If you come out early enough in the morning, you can spot the businessmen pushing these cars out of the way to get their own cars out!

My friend Milly and I hit up a private noraebang room at an arcade one night, which was a huge excitement for these middle school boys. They promptly invaded our room and started shouting requests ("Michael Jackson!" "Kelly Clarkson!" "Justin Bieber!").

3rd grade mullet kid is back, and this time wearing my winter coat and pretending to be the teacher. I love this kid.

My principal and me exchanging a smile at my most recent post-volleyball teacher dinner. The man on the left kept filling my glass with a beer-soju mixture ("so-mek") and yelling, "Mill-uh! One shot!!"

Teaching

I can't believe I've been here almost 2 months and I still haven't made a post about teaching, which is in fact the whole reason that I'm here. I'm at school 40 hours a week and yet there are so many other exciting things to talk about!

Basically, the way it works is I'm at my main school, called Buyeong Elementary, 4 days a week, and on Thursdays I go to my "country school," which is WAY out there in the country. Buyeong is one of the biggest elementary schools in Suncheon from what I can tell. There are over 1300 students, grades Kindergarden to 6. I only teach grades 5 and 6, but it still adds up to about 20 different classes (of 35 kids each) per week.

The curriculum is pretty set for elementary schools in Korea, so I don't have much freedom with the topics I can teach, but I do get to choose the games and other activities, which is great because that's the fun part. The course book's CD-ROM has a song that the students learn for each lesson, so my friends who are also elementary teachers and I always get them stuck in our heads and we find ourselves walking around humming the same dumb little chants (e.g. "Let's play badminton....sorry I can't!" to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic).

Since I'm not teaching 9-5 every day, I have a fair amount of time off to be productive, which usually includes a little bit of lesson planning and a lot of hanging out in my office:

Which, as you can see, is a beautifully lit half-classroom divided by tall desks to be shared with the 3rd grade teachers lounge.

That stud in the orange polo is my "roommate" (thats what he calls me), the gym teacher! He really is a stud, too. I definitely underestimated him at first, but I came to discover that he's the most popular teacher in school, with both the students and the other teachers. On a typical day he comes back every 45 minutes or so much sweatier than he was when he left, and when I ask him what they did in gym class today he performs some random hand motion that I don't understand. He doesn't speak a whole lot of English, but he's had some great one-liners so far...

He's decided that his English name is Jack, and that our room is an English-only zone. So even when other teachers come in to talk to him or call him on his cell phone, he goes, "only English! I am Jack! Who are you?" Priceless.

Jack: do you like Korean food?

me: yes

Jack: is it different from American food?

me: yes

Jack: you have a good personality.

...I guess it doesn't take much to impress here. This is what he (and every Korean, for that matter) sounds like on the phone:

Uh?

Uh.

Uh.

Uh.

Uhh....

Uh!

(hang up)

My favorite fact that I've learned about Jack is when my co-teacher was trying to explain to me how funny he was in Korean, and chose the example of how he always talks into the mic on the bus during school field trips, and makes "dirty jokes, and then he is embarrassed the next day." I'm not sure if something got lost in translation there though. He also is in charge of Wednesday afternoon teacher VOLLEYBALL, which deserves a later post of its own.

Anyways, this is the view of the front of the school from my office:

School here is generally similar to school back home: 40 minute classes, mostly with your homeroom teacher for all your subjects, recess (although here it's literally a 20-minute period allotted to letting the children run around uncontrollably), cafeteria lunch, clubs, etc. Buyeoung is only a short taxi ride away--we take taxis everywhere here--and it's in the middle of new downtown, so there's tons going on around it in the afternoons.

Most importantly, the kids are great. Almost all the time. They can all be a little difficult to control, but if the homeroom teacher stays in the room while you're teaching (which they are supposed to do but actually do only 70% of the time), they're in charge of discipline, so I don't have to worry about it too much. Grade 5s are really into the songs and activities, so it's easy to keep them motivated. Grade 6s can be a little more difficult to entertain since they're entering that awesome angst-filled phase, but since they're more proficient they can actually have interesting things to say.

Thursdays are for sure the most interesting day--I take a 25 minute car ride packed with 6 people speaking rapid Korean to Woldeung, a tiny town famous for peaches! This elementary school is quite the opposite of Buyeong: one class per grade, each with 6-10 students! I teach 7 classes on this day, which is way more than usual, but it's so relaxing just being able to talk to students rather than having to scream to get their attention. The level of English is noticeably lower, but the degree of personal interaction makes up for it. And I teach all grades here, excluding 1 and 2 but including Kindergarden!!!

Basically, I love them. And these are some of my favorite grade 3s, who come and hang out around my computer all the time. I gave them altoids one morning, and by the end of that day almost every student had come to my desk asking for more "fire candy."

Well, that's all for now. More updates to come!

Japan

This is a long one...but if you can't read the whole thing please check out the pictures!

I know it seems early for me to have already had a one-week vacation, but it's all thanks to Chuseok! Also known as Korean Thanksgiving. It conveniently arrived 3 weeks into my teaching career, so I'm now accustomed to a "work 3 weeks, one week off" schedule. The purpose of Chuseok is to give thanks for one's ancestors, so everyone usually gets together with their families around the whole country. It was therefore the perfect time for 4 of my friends and I to head to Japan!

We travelled to Japan by ferry, which was surprisingly only 3 hours! Despite my expertise in geography, I definitely hadn't realized just how close the two countries are. The journey started with a bus ride to Busan (a big city on the east coast), where we spent the night, 5 of us in one Love Motel room (I'll get into Love Motels in a later post).

The high speed ferry was great. Airplane-style seating, mandatory buckled seat belt the entire time, food carts and as I said only 3 hours!

We landed in Fukuoka, a pretty big city in southwest Japan, but we wanted to start our trip up north and work our way back down in order to catch the ferry back to Korea 5 days later.

We tok the famous Shinkansen Nozomi, fastest train in Japan and called the BULLET train. 300 km/hour! We got halfway across Japan in less than 2 1/2 hours.

We arrived in Osaka late on Day 1 and checked into our awesome hostel, which was owned by a great Japanese couple and their 9-month old baby! We headed downtown called Dotonbori to grab some dinner and scope out the scene...

Downtown Osaka is really cool--even on a Tuesday night it was bustling with people, many of whom were drinking in the street, and full of restaurants, shops, and bars!

Day 2: We got an early start in the morning as this would be our only full day in Osaka. We started out at what many consider the main tourist attraction, Osaka Castle, which is surrounded by a huge and beautiful park.

I really liked this old man and little boy on a bike..

This isn't the castle! Just a shrine that we could see from across one of the two moats surrounding the castle.

There it is!

This castle, like many of the things we saw in Osaka, was actually a replica of the original from the 16th century. Built in the mid-1900s, this one now serves as a museum giving info on the history of the castle and its inhabitants. It wasn't especially cool, but there was a great view from the top!

We next headed to the Japan National Mint Museum, where we learned the history of how Japanese money came to be. We followed it up with some tradition Japanese udon noodles!

After that we went to the Osaka Human Rights Museum, which was one of the coolest museums I've ever been to. And if it hadn't been in almost all Japanese, I'm sure it would have been even cooler. It had a bunch of different sections that each focused on one minority group in Japan, including women, Korean immigrants, homosexuals, mentally disabled and many more. Quite progressive for Japan.

After the museum we went over to the bay area district, where the highlight was clearly the "World's Largest Giant Ferris Wheel!" Actually the world's largest? Who knows. But we did ride it, and got a great view of Osaka!

One thing we discovered about Japan: SUSHI is not as common as you would think. We spent all day searching for it, and finally asked some old ladies on the street who pointed one out to us that had 3 choices of sushi: cucumber roll, tuna roll, and the craziest assortment of sashimi for 5 times the price.

I ate it all except for the scary-looking octopus tentacle.

Day 3 (yes that was all from Day 2): Exhausted from the day before, and awaking at 8am only to be met with a huge thunderstorm, we decided to sleep in for about half the day...then headed to Kyoto in the afternoon! Kyoto is only about 30 minutes away by train, and known as the "cultural capital" of Japan.

Our first stop was the Kinkaku-ji temple, knows as the Temple of the Golden Pavilion.

Very beautiful, albeit touristy. I believe it's still used as a Zen Buddhist Temple, and is now one of the 17 World Heritage Sights in Kyoto! And they reminded us of that fact often.

We also saw the Kyoto Imperial Palace that afternoon. And for dinner, I got to meet up with Kate, my good friend Anna Pitoniak's mom!

She was nice enough to treat my friends and me to dinner, and it was great to see a connection with my home world for the first time in a while.

Day 4: We took the Shinkansen train to Hiroshima, which was definitely my favorite city of all that we saw in Japan. Most of it is dedicated to a peace movement focused on ridding the world of nuclear weapons. The Peace Memorial Museum was one of the best I've ever been too--it had everything: history, science, culture, politics, philanthropy... This was one of my favorites: a recreation of exactly where the A-bomb went off and of the destruction of the city right after.

The museum also contained a ton of images and artifacts from the time around the bombing that were really moving, like a little girl's tricycle, accompanied by the story of how she died:

However the whole point of the museum as well as the surrounding Peace Memorial Park is to remember the past while giving hope for the future. It was definitely one of the more beautiful places I've been in my life.

I'll wrap this up...we had a great dinner and night out in Hiroshima that night. We met up with some of our new friends and of course made some new ever-friendly Japanese friends!

But oh! I have to include a photo of the Hiroshima speciality, Okinomoyaki. Don't ask me what's in it, but it was delicious.

Day 5: We jumped on the train back to Fukuoka, where we rested for the afternoon, ate some delicious ramen, then hit up an Onsen, or hot spring. It was basically a giant spa: massages, mandatory nudity in the hot pools (separated men and women, of course), saunas, and more! An unfamiliar yet worthwhile experience, for sure.

On Day 6, we grabbed the ferry back to Fukuoka, and then got immediately back into the daily grind of teaching!

Overall observations on Japan:

-more expensive than Korea...than ANYWHERE

-everyone is willing to help you. If you pull out a map, someone will shout from their bike "are you lost!?" as they ride by

-food is delicious

-much more tourist-friendly than Korea (which is good and bad)

-Lawson Station = (lesser) equivalent of MiniStop

-overall, awesome!

My New Home

Hello! I wanted to wait until I had cleaned/decorated enough to show everyone pictures of my apartment, and I think it's looking pretty decent these days.

Here is my little entranceway, with as you can see trash bags neatly arranged, ready to be taken outside..

Here's the view of my whole apartment--note the yellow linoleum floors and attractive wallpaper:

First, my kitchen: quite small, and perhaps not full of the 21st century equipment that I'm used to, but sufficient.

My little extra closet room:

Bathroom:

My "bedroom," which is more like a bed nook for my rather large bed:

Haha, and Phil Miller himself making an appearance on my computer screen! (Video chatting)

And my living room! I knew when I purchased this baller zebra-print rug today that my apartment was ready to show the world:

The balcony is through to the outside there, and has my washing machine and drying racks.

So there's my new home! Come visit me if you'd like to see for yourself.