Read From the Beginning
While we were up in Seoul last weekend to get our certificates of residency from the American embassy, we decided to stop in for a service at Yoido Full Gospel Church. Yoido has the largest congregation of any church in the world, with over 850,000 members--it will probably be the first true "Gigachurch." They have around eight services on Sunday (we went to the 3pm one), and have live translation into 8 languages via headsets. For those of you who are interested, here's a look inside the church:
At least for me, May has been the month of incredible relaxedness (see I even have time to make up words). It started with preparation for midterms, which meant that I didn't have to teach. Then we had midterms, which meant I still didn't have to teach. Then we went on a somewhat wild goose chase in Seoul to get a document from the American Embassy and I missed two days of school. Then we had a day off for Children's Day. This week, my first graders were gone for "training," then my second graders left for a trip. So by Wedensday I had no students to teach. Today was rough, I had to teach four classes. But tomorrow is Teacher's Day, so we have no school, and I don't have school on Monday either. Then my country school is having Sports Day next Friday and Thursday is practice day, so I don't have to teach again. Then the last week of May is the festival for foreigners, for which I get to miss another two days of school.
I will now count all the classes I've taught this month...In the last three weeks I have taught 19 classes. Normally I teach 21 every week. And May isn't even over.
Other small May benefits have been cropping up too, like getting grape soda for Sports Day and a pile of rice cakes for Teacher's Day. I have also started digital scrapbooking since I spend hours sitting at my desk staring at my screen. This, it turns out, is quite fun, so I'm hoping that May turns into a never ending month of happiness. In fact, I've been having such a good time being a slacker at school I haven't started celebrating the month of my birthday, which I could start celebrating anytime, but I've just been busy celebrating May Slacker Days.
To celebrate Teacher's Day tomorrow we are going "camping" with some friends. We're going to barbeque and hope it doesn't rain. We're going to bring the Wii in case. This is camping Korean style.
Friday was Teacher's Day here in Korea, so to celebrate we went camping with our friends--Matt and Mihye (England, Korea), Jim and Carol (New Zealand), Edwin and Laura (Canada), and Vicky (England). Actually, to say "camping" is probably a bit of a stretch, since we slept in cabins complete with toilets, showers, TV's and, um, our Wii, and had an ice cream (and beer) man located conveniently down the road; but hey, let's not split semantics ;). We had two cabins, with guys in one and girls in the other, and spent two nights.
Anyway, the weekend was a lot of fun. It rained the whole time, but that didn't stop us (slash Edwin) from playing around with making fires and roasting hot dogs under the nearby gazebo, or playing scrabble and bickering over the validity of "ick," or being slaughtered by the girls in Pictionary, or learning how to really play Charades from masters Matt and Marisa, or trading every bit of trivia (slash "what do you call a man with X on his head" jokes) we knew as we fell asleep in the Manly cabin.
Marisa, our grill, and our cabins:
At Edwin's campfire. Left to right: Me, Marisa, Carol (being blocked by Marisa), Mihye, Matt, Vicky, Laura, and Edwin (the next couple of photos are courtesy of Jim):
Learning the intricacies of "water, log, fire" from Matt. He doesn't realize that his log's about to be washed away by my double river action:
Getting demolished in a girls-vs-guys game of pictionary. Our mistake started at "how about best 2 out of 3" and ended with "best 5 out of 9?"
The setting, half an hour outside of Gunsan:
More pictures here.
There are a few people amongst our readership who use us as their technology advisors. If you are such a person, this entry might be of interest to you. If you are interested in our goings and comings, then this may not be so thrilling.
I recently uploaded all our digital pictures to Flickr.com. You may have noticed that we use Flickr to host our Korea pictures, and you may be wondering why we have put them all there, as if you really wanted to look at that many pictures.
The truth is we did not upload them so you could look at them, but as a means of storage for ourselves. Unlike sites like Facebook, which compress your photos when you upload them, Flickr saves the actual photo, giant size and all. For $25 a year, Flickr gives us as much space as we can use (if you were to ask Jordan about this he would say, "it's a good deal"). So we no longer have to backup our photos on our external harddrive. They are in fact safer on Flickr, since they are about triple backed up on Flickr's servers (and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!) and you can't drop the internet or spill water on it.
The other main reason we put them on Flickr was to organize them. Think about how many pictures you have. Now think about how many pictures you'll have in 20 years. How will you find that one picture of me eating ice cream in San Francisco? The answer is: Flickr. Flickr gives you the best options for organizing and searching your pictures. There are a few offline programs that give similar options, but these can be frustrating to use because they utilize so much memory that they slow your computer down. And if your computer crashes, or you get a new one, you might lose all the organization you've done, if not the actual pictures.
So that's why we use Flickr. If you want to know how we use Flickr, you can watch this movie. I made it, and apparently I had a lot to say because it's really long. I found Flickr tricky to use when I was starting out, and so perhaps explain more than you need to know. I have made friends with it though, and once you go through the initial work of loading your old pictures, it will take very little work to maintain as long as you add your pictures as you take them.
Needless to say, we highly recommend this solution if you take more than 100 pictures a year. Because 100 pictures times 20 years is 2000 pictures. And who only takes 100 pictures a year?
This last week we went up to the far north-eastern province of Gangwon-do to take party in the largest and longest-held Korean cultural festival, Danoje. We spent the night and were taken on tour as part of the special week-long foreigner program (the festival itself is a month-long afair).
Here's a little video of the experience (pictures will be up shortly):
So last week we got to skip two days of school to go to Korea's largest festival. The festival, as I understand it, centers around an ancient shamanistic tradition of celebrating 3 deities. We took part in welcoming the deity to the festival. It comes in the form of a tree, where it lives, which the people cut down and parade through the city. We were behind the tree, with out lanterns, dressed in our Korean hanboks. And unlike most places I have been, the Koreans really love when foreigners take part in their culture (ie: wear their clothes, eat their food, celebrate their festivals) and everyone was very happy to see us and wanted to take our picture. I posed for several during the parade. It is nice to know that I will be in some random person's scrapbook of the festival. Please enjoy these pictures of random people that we took:
Jordan working on his wishes.
This lady wanted to take a picture with me, even though she didn't have a camera.
Jordan and Matt enjoying the time off from school, perhaps a little too much?
A few weeks ago, my country school had its Sports Day. It was very thrilling and I got to go home early.
Thank you to everyone who bought me a scoop of ice cream! I am still enjoying them!
So this weekend we celebrated my birthday by taking a trip to Jeonju, the capital city of our province which is about an hour bus ride away. The main attraction was the TGIFriday's, but they also have some nice neighborhoods to walk around in.
For more pictures, click here.
So here's a little quiz: if Carmen Sandiego were to hide out by world's longest man-made dike, where would you find her? I'll give you a hint: she wouldn't be in the IJsselmeer, the Netherlands. Because the dike located there, the Afsluitdijk, is 500 meters short of the title.
The answer of course, is that Carmen would be sipping ice-cold Nesquik at our apartment in Gunsan. The Saemangeum Seawall, located just south of the city, was opened in 2006 and measures 33 kilometers in length. It's still under heavy construction at the moment, part of a government project to increase the arable land around Gunsan that is costing Korea nearly 7 trillion won (or $5.5 billion USD).
Anyway, Matthew came down for a visit this last weekend, and we determined that it was time to visit the landmark. You can see the pictures here.
