Read From the Beginning
This week we had a little change of pace with our English camp. We worked with the 60 best English speaking fifth graders of Gunsan. The kids' English was quite spectacular, they were well behaved and younger than we are used to working with, so it was a fun experience. There were twenty kids to a class with two native English speakers and one Korean teacher, so even if they had wanted to misbehave, they wouldn't have gotten far. Jordan and I were able to work together, and since the Korean teacher we worked with was uber-prepared, We didn't have to do much but read sentences for the kids to practice their pronunciation and listening skills. We did have some time to teach them Heads Up, Seven Up, which was a huge hit, depsite Jordan's doubt that it was a fun game. In fact once we taught them the game, they never wanted to do anything else. Heads Up, Seven Up is apparently a universally loved game by fifth graders. I've never played with my middle schoolers because I figured they would cheat, but the fifth graders are young enough to do what they're told. And they never ceased to be surprised by who put their thumb down. Jordan and I even played a few games, and I must admit that it's still as fun now as when I was in fifth grade.
We also got to have some good bonding time with the other native English speakers since they were also working at the camp. Jordan now has a virtual golf date with some of the guys who apparently play every week and I met a woman who scrapbooks. So we are planning to have a scrapbook party soon, probably when the men are out golfing.
There were two highlights of the camp. The first was when we discovered that the school was right across the street from our apartment. The first day we got into a taxi and showed him the name of the place we wanted to go, and after much gesturing we discovered that the school was back around the corner. So we had a pleasant 5 minute walk to school each morning which was extra nice because there was lots of snow and the roads were icy. The second highlight was that we got free lunch everyday at the nearby Italian restaurant. If only everyday could be a pleasant half day with the smart students and free lunch...
Heads Up, Seven Up from Chasing Donguri on Vimeo.
When the weather's cold, and the heat can only make you so warm, it's time to hibernate cocoon style.
Jordan Adds: When Marisa says that the "weather's cold" she means that our apartment temperature has dropped below 70 degrees F. The coldest our apartment ever gets--and this is without heating, mind you--is 65 degrees.
We were invited Saturday, along with others from the Haven (our church), to a party at the Air Base, which turned out to be a day full of fun. We got a bit of a tour to start off, and learned some fun facts: the airbase is approximately 2000 acres in size, is home to around 2500 air force personnel (approx. one tenth of those being pilots), and maintains two squadrons of F-16 fighter jets (do the math and you discover that it takes approximately 40-50 people to support one fighter). The base was originally built in 1938 by the occupying Japanese forces; it was used by the United States from 1945 onwards.
The various amenities available on the base include a very large gym facility, a golf course, various fast-food restaurants (including Taco Bell and Burger King, which don't exist anywhere else in Gunsan), and the expected commissary, etc. The base is not considered to be "full fledged" because it lacks things like its own hospital, schools, etc. and so families are not allowed to accompany personell asigned here; consequently most (all, as far as I can tell) people are in and out in a year.
Anyway, after the tour we had lunch in the "Chief's Den" and played some Pit (with a WOW music video playing the background). Marisa and I were also tied together with rope and made to figure out how to untangle ourselves... we were uncessuful, but managed to amuse everyone nontheless (or perhaps consequently).
After our lunch settled we headed over to the very nice gym, and played wallyball (essentially volleyball in a squash court where you're allowed to hit the ball off the walls). We had enough people for four three-on-three teams, and had a real blast playing (it felt great to be physically exhausted for perhaps the first time since coming to Korea). One guy on my team named Tony (a police officer in Miami who chose to take a year off duty to teach in Korea) had been a volleyball setter for several years in college and grad school.
After everyone was spent we got to go up in the air base control tower before heading home on the 6:20 bus (which stops directly outside of the air base). We're hoping to have more wallyball action soon.
Monday morning we left bright and early for the "2009 Winter Guest English Teacher Teaching Improvement Workshop." This means that all the foreign teachers in our province met at a youth hostel for a two day workshop about teaching English in Korean public schools. It was, to say the least, intense. A more accurate description would involve me pulling out my hair and the hair of the person next to me out of boredom that led to madness. The schedule went something like this: We woke up at 7:30 and left for the local bus station to catch a bus to Jeonju (the capital, about an hour away). Despite the fact that we have gone to this bus station many times, it's always a bit of a miracle when we convince the taxi drivers to take us their because despite the fact that the word 'bus' is the same in English and Korean, they can never understand where we want to go. However, we persevered and arrived in time to catch the bus to Jeonju. After the hour long bus ride and a short taxi ride to the Department of Education we got on another bus for an hour and a half ride to the beach and youth hostel where the group was staying. We later found out that this trip was rather redundant since we drove most of the way back to Gunsan and then further south down the coast.
We arrived at the hostel around 12:30 and received our room assignments. I stayed with Carol, a woman from Gunsan who we met through Winter Camp, and another woman from somewhere else who is originally from England. Carol is from New Zealand, so our room had a good representation of the English speaking countries of the world. The hostel was very nice, I would hardly consider it to be a hostel, although it was Korean style, so we slept on the floor with blankets. We were surprised that they didn't even have mats (I believe most Koreans who do sleep on the floor normally have mats of some sort), just thick blankets. It was still pretty comfortable, although at one point in the night I got rather hot since they had the floor heat turned up pretty high.
After we got settled, we had an exciting lunch of fish soup (when you're on the coast, you eat seafood, for dinner we had octopus) and then the excitement began. We started with a two hour lecture by a man from a Korean University and continued for the rest of the day (until 10:30pm) with two hour, or slightly shorter lectures. By the end of the first lecture I was ready to go to bed, by the end of the evening I was ready to pull out my hair. The next morning when we had another three hours of lectures I almost slipped into the realm of craziness from which there is no return. There were some good moments, but they were few and far between and could have filled maybe about two hours, instead of the 12 hours that we had to sit through. By the time we left the hostel everyone was in a sleep-deprived, zombie-like haze.
After the lectures they bused us to a nearby temple for some sightseeing. It was nice to get out and have a walk in the pine trees and remind yourself that there is life beyond the lecture room. We left early since our friend Matt drove to the workshop and offered to give us a ride home. The trip home took about an hour, as opposed to the three hour trip we had getting there.
Today we are still recovering from the two day madness, and we have to keep reminding ourselves that we were only gone for one night, as it feels like we were gone for years. Tonight we are looking forward to some social time. Jordan was invited to go golfing, and since apparently girls aren't allowed in this club, I invited Carol over for a little scrapbooking. Tomorrow we are very excited to leave for a longish trip to Seoul, to shop, eat food not from Korea (do I see hamburgers? is that Mexican food over there?!!!!) and do some sightseeing. The Lunar New Year (a big holiday in Korea) starts on Sunday and lasts for three days, the year of the Ox is upon us, so perhaps we will witness some festivities. Apparently you should start the new year with new clothes, so that will be our first stop. Our hostel has internet, so you can expect to hear from us while we're there.
For more pictures see our album.
Here is video proof of the madness we experienced.
Our first minutes in Seoul started propitiously. After dropping our bags at the hostel and making our way out to the corner of the street to begin our exploring, we ran into a neighbor from Gunsan. She works at the BBQ chicken restaurant that's around the corner from our house, which we frequent often, much to the enjoyment of the family who owns the place. She was out looking for apartments with her younger sister who will soon be attending university in Seoul. The probability of us running into her on a street corner in Seoul is quite enormous so we looked on it as a good luck charm for our trip.
Our trip revolved mostly around eating food. And I won't lie and tell you that we were sampling the many varieties of Korean food that line the streets of Seoul. Nope. We ate as much American food as we could find and savored every minute. We went to Subway, and TGIFridays, and Outback Steakhouse and found some Mexican food. It was all incredibly tasty, and the hamburger I had at TGIFridays was probably the best I had every had. It was also about the size of my head, but I ate it all. I will dream about it in my kimchi filled days to come. It is incredibly nice to be able to have a quick trip to Seoul to enjoy all this. I remember when we lived in Bolivia and used to spend months dreaming about the food we would eat when we got back to the States.
We also had an adventure buying our Wii at the electronics market. The Yongsan Electronics Market is the largest electronics market in the world. You can find anything you might possibly want. We wanted a Korean Wii (Korean Wiis are cheaper than American ones) that had been modified so that we could play American games. This is of course illegal, and would have been a lot of work to make if we were living elsewhere. But this is no problem here. There was a huge row of guys selling Wiis, all of which could come modified if you so desired. We ended up with a modified Japanese Wii, which was considerably cheaper than any of the other Wiis we looked at. Jordan can tell you all about the good deal we got, all I know is that now we are the proud owners of a really cool Wii.
We toured various Museums around the city, including the National Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Prison Museum. The latter tells the story of prison life during the Japanese Occupation. It was very grim and disturbing with the scenes of torture that were modeled and tours of the actual jail cells. The Museum of Contemporary Art was more amusing, mostly because we had a slightly crazy time trying to find it. We ended up riding an Elephant Cart in freezing snowy weather around in circles for a while before we managed to find the place.
We also took a trip up to Seoul Tower, which is the tallest point in Seoul and from which you can gaze on the beauty of the huge city. We rode the cable car up about an hour before sunset so that we could experience Seoul by day and by night. The day was a little cloudy, so it didn't make for the best view, but we were trying to sieze the moment as the weather forecast was pretty grim about sunlight.
We spent most of our time inside at Museums and shopping malls because the weather was absolutely frigid, perhaps the coldest weekend we have had in Korea so far. We tried to see one of the large palaces in the city, but the freezing wind ended our trip short.
We our glad to be back in our "Sweet Home" (as it is called by Jordan's co-teacher). Our Wii is hooked up, and I'm just waiting for Jordan to get out of the shower so we can give it a spin.
We have more photos in our album.
Today marks the first sandal wearing day of the year. It's currently 54 degrees. Toasty!
If you want more of our experience in Seoul, check out this video. It's long, but has many exciting parts, like when I film in the electronics market which is apparently illegal and when we get stuck on the elephant cart in the snow. Special memories.
I say purgatory since we are having a week of school in the middle of vacation, but despite the incredible pointlessness of the week, for me at least, the week has been a bit more like heaven than some other stage of the afterlife. At least this is as close as my school gets to resembling heaven.
But first a note on the ridiculousness of the situation. The students have been on vacation since Christmas; that was the end of the last semester. They took their tests and depending on if they passed or failed got confirmation to move into the next grade. This happened a month ago. We said goodbye, we'll see you in March when the new school year begins. However, for unknown reasons we have this random week of school in the middle of our vacation. Not knowing what to expect I showed up bright and early on Monday morning and sat at my desk to try and figure out what was going on. Everyone was bustling around as usual, in fact it looked like we hadn't been gone for a month. So I sit around and try and determine what is going on, when finally the bell rings. Since no one has told me what is going on, I grab my textbook and head to class as if this really is a normal Monday. I meet Miss Doo in that hall and ask if we do indeed have class. She confirms this, but points at the textbook and says, "the students don't have books." The students don't have books? What exactly are we doing here? "We will play a game," Miss Doo tells me. Play a game? No books? What is this, I ask myself. It has not become clear to me. I have been playing games in class and plan to spend the rest of the week watching Sponge Bob with my classes.
The complete absurdity of the situation has made me question this culture we are living in. What kind of people, since this a country-wide mandated by the government sort of thing, sit back and act like this is perfectly reasonable and not some insane, pointless waste of time. No one is learning anything, no one is teaching anything, why are we here? I have consoled myself with the thought that there must be things that are just as insane and pointless. But here there is no outcry. No one seems to complain. They just accept that this is the way it is.
Despite the underlying craziness of the week, the two days I've had so far have been pretty great. Yesterday was perhaps the best day ever. It started with lunch, not normally my favorite part of the day, and yesterday looked to be more of the same weird stuff, until I got to the end of the food line and saw strawberriers and, to my complete astonishment, cheesecake! I don't know where it came from, but it was tasty and everyone seemed to be enjoying it. Since I was in such a good mood from the cake I then went to see Ms Park about a new computer which she said I could have since my old one was so slow a slug moves faster. When we went to find the new one, we took a detour to see the new English room. I knew they were remodling one of the classrooms to be extra fancy, Ms Park had shown me the plans to get my opinion, but I was completely shocked by the fanciness of the room. Especially compared with the rest of the school which has a sort of run down sort of feel. It even has an electronic whiteboard which I have to take a class for on Friday to learn how it works. I've never even seen an electronic whiteboard before. I'm not excactly sure what classes will be held in this new room, all I know is that it is for me and Ms Park to use. But the best part was the small office at the back. When she had shown me the plans, Ms Park had mentioned that there would be an office for the two of us. Not wanting to get my hopes up about something so exciting I didn't think much of it, but when I saw it yesterday I was completely elated. I can't wait to move out of the giant common office I'm in right now, where everyone walks right by my desk and stares at me or my computer screen. Right now I'm just excited about having more space to myself, but it looks like I will have a classroom of my own where I will be able to do more exciting things with various groups of students come the start of school in March.
So now I sit happily typing on my new, fast computer, having come from a lunch where they served curry (the first time I walked into the cafeteria and thought it smelled good) and spaghetti (which we ate with our chopsticks). Of course there were shells with some sort of animal in them (clams, mussels, oysters...) in the soup. I guess I'm not quite out of purgatory yet.
Today I had the pleasure of attending the ninth grade graduation ceremony. This ceremony is the reason we are all in school this week. For some reason they can't graduate at the actual end of the semester and have to come back in the middle of vacation to do it.
After talking to Miss Kim yesterday I thought we had four classes, and then the ceremony would be around 12. However, this morning it turned out that we had no classes (in fact the other grades didn't even come to school) and the ceremony was at 10:30.
So at the proper time we traipsed over to the gym/auditorium for the excitement. I believe ninth grade graduation here is a bigger deal than in the States because school is only mandatory in Korea up through ninth grade. After this the students will go to various high schools, or perhaps none. Some will go to a regular high school to prepare for college, while some will attend trade schools to prepare for life in the real world. This is why there is so much studying even in middle school, because your grades here determine what high school you get accepted to which determines where you go to college which determines how successful you'll be later in life. So unlike in America, where the rumor that a girl once told me that colleges looked at grades from middle school is false, here in Korea it couldn't be more true.
The ceremony didn't have all the pomp or ceremony of the high school graduations we're used to. Some students came in their uniforms, some came in regular street clothes, one boy wore a suit, but that's because he got a special award and gave a speech. There were seats for the students (all 316 of them) while the rest of us (parents, teachers, friends, relatives) milled around in the back. No one listened to the ceremony, there was various chit chat and poses for pictures. The best was the fantastic bouquets of flowers that everyone brought for the graduates. I've never seen anything over the top. They were mostly comprised of a few flowers (or sometimes none at all), voluminous amounts of netted fabric in various bright colors, and various doodads sticking out like candy, little people in witches hats, or giant feathery hearts. I amused myself for most of the ceremony by taking pictures of the best ones as sneakily as I could.
Other highlights included the music teacher conducting a recording whose music was set to a picture slide show of photographs of nature and at the end happy Korean kids (I realized later that he was conducting the audience, we were supposed to sing along, but since no one did, I thought he was just crazy. He came out again later and this time the music was projected onto the screen and I realized we were supposed the sing along. Finally, on the third song, some people joined in.) And outside the auditorium there was a man selling cotton candy.
The Koreans really are the best when it comes to making things fancy and over the top. Why have a bouquet of flowers unless it is wrapped in what looks like a balloon animal? In fact, who even needs the flowers when we have all this other great stuff? I make a jest about the bouquets, but in fact I'm a big fan and wouldn't mind taking home several for myself.