Jordan's blog
Last Friday was my last day teaching at Napo Middle School until March 5th, 2009, when we will start a new year. The Korean school year starts in the Winter (usually February, but delayed this year by holidays), rather than the fall, so the winter break here is equivalent to the summer break in American schools, and lasts two months (with a mystifying brief week in the middle to celebrate graduation); the summer break is only a month long.
My classes on the last day consisted of watching Transformers and playing Soccer (I proved to be quite out of shape, but was still able to make an amazing goal which won the hearts of the graduating third-year's forever). Anyway, in honor of the last day I have decided to finally post some pictures and a video of the school which I took about a month ago. See the flickr album for the full set of photos.
I really enjoyed teaching at Napo (the small class sizes and laid-back atmosphere are wonderful), and am looking forward to going back.
My family has a long standing tradition of reading Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol aloud every year, sometime in December. It's quite a good tradition, so we decided to continue it... with Mathew, by fishlight. We ordered pizza, made some fresh-out-of-the-juicer apple cider, lit our fake fire (and some real candles), and had a very good time.
Last weekend: 10-12 inches of snow fall during a 24 hour period, temperature drops as low as 10 degrees F.
Yesterday: No snow anywhere, the temperature gets to a balmy 57 degrees F.
We're quite enjoying the contrast to Minnesota here: A good snowfall is really so much more enjoyable when you know it's going to be back up over 50 degrees in a couple of days, rather than six months down the road.
I have to leave in a few minutes to find out how much "vacation school" I'm going to be teaching during the upcoming winter break, but just wanted to share a hosik experience I had last week, which included:
- Making a quick stop with Mr. Song at his Secret Garden. He owns a couple acres of land in Gunsan (close to our apartment) that he has turned into a wildflower extravaganza... he is apparently one of the leading wildflower experts in Korea (he's the head of a sizable internet group), and grows over 300 varieties throughout his garden. Of course everything is pretty much dormant now, but the garden still offers a nice retreat, and I can't wait to see it in Spring.
- Hiking straight up a mountain for 3 hours (yes, don't ask me how, but the mountain was uphill both ways--more like up-cliff, actually).
- Feasting at a raw seafood restaurant.
Now the raw seafood restaurant works like this: you walk in, take your shoes off, and look at the fish and eel and octopus and squid and jellyfish you are about to eat, swimming around in a tank. Then you think "nice fishtank." Then you realize that those are actually the fish you are about to eat. And then you eat them.
And yes, when I say fish I do mean octopus and squid and jellyfish and eel and oysters, and eveyr other kind of seafood you can imagine. All raw.
My basic rule of thumb is if a Korean eats it, I eat it. I kept my rule, but not easily. I mean, the raw fish was nothing, and the raw squid was actually pretty tasty. But when it came time to eat a thing they called "young octopus," I had to hold my stomach down. "Young octopus" is a whole octopus that is very slimy, and looks half-formed, and has large eyeballs that stare up at you and say "Why? WHY? WHY?"
On a different note entirely, some of you may have noticed that we've switched over to Flickr for our photo hosting... not quite as integrated with our website, but our lousy hosting plan just wasn't handling the images very well. Anyway, the "Photos" link at the top of the blog will now take you to our flickr "photostream."
So today I played Constantinople with my 1st graders (i.e. 7th graders) at Napo using Matthew's suggested word: antidisestablishmentarianism. We had a short and decidedly un-profound discussion on the topic... the students seemed oddly uninterested in either the disestablishment of a state church, or being opposed to such disestablishment, despite the historical significance of the word. The middle schoolers were not at all against using the word for the forth round of the game, however, and it led to an intense, epic, race-the-bell finish, where team Puma just barely beat out team Nike (can you believe those creative names?).
In fact, the ending was a bit loud... how to control such noisy outburts? Well, Matthew had found the answer to that as well at Dave's ESL Cafe:
I teach 4th graders in a Danish school (10-11-year-olds) and as kids are everywhere, the noise level tends to rise. We don't believe in mindless discipline acts, which tend to degrade students, create unhealthy competition and, worse, damage their self esteem. Instead, we bought and placed a big ear-shaped electronic device, which measures decibel. A green light means the noise level is acceptable, yellow means it's getting up there and red is of course unacceptable. By talking with the children about how noise can be disrupting for everyone, not just the teachers, we have now reached a noise agreement. Of course, in the beginning it was fun to see how quickly the ear became red, but gradually, the children turned to respect the ear on the wall and administer the noise level themselves. Try it out and see for yourselves!
I'm sure they're common in Denmark, but in Korea I'm just not quite sure where to start looking for a large decibel-sensing ear...
Yesterday we went to the Haven Baptist Church, a small church started in the late 1960's to minister to the Gunsan Air Base personnel (currently numbering around 5000, though the number has shrunk continuously since the war); somewhere along the line English Teachers found out about the church, and the congregation seems to be dominated by them now.
The church has no website, but they've got "hit men," so they don't really need one: one day while Marisa was standing at her bus stop waiting for the bus home a Korean man stepped up and gave her a business card for the Church. We called the number, spoke to pastor Stewart (who has been in Korea for over 30 years), and bam! on Sunday a van came by and picked us up.
The church seemed surprisingly small considering the size of the base (somewhere around 50 people I would estimate), but a nice size considering that everyone was quite friendly. We met the air base chief, as well as a number of English teachers around our age (most of them teaching at private hagwans, rather than public schools), and were invited to an English teacher Christmas party this Friday.
One of the best things about our visit was the food: aparently the congregation eats together every Sunday, and they eat stuff besides Kimchi! Don't get me wrong: I like Korean food quite a bit, but considering that it's all we eat at school, and all we can make at home due to what's available at the supermarkets, a little change is nice. This Sunday we ate "left overs" from their Thanksgiving diner; I'm not sure how much food they had originally at the diner, but if they hadn't told us we were eating left overs I never would have guessed: turkey, ham, stuffing, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes with brown sugar... the works. After a month of kimchi, it was a bit like heaven.
So you all know that Marisa goes to school and works hard and has lots of fun with her crazy students. But what do I do during that time? Do I really go to school at all? Or do I secretly head off to the singing rooms and karaoke all day? All shall be revealed in this thrilling new blog entry!
Let's see... I get up at 6:40am the same as Marisa (I originally tried sleeping a bit longer, but found that this didn't really work out so well), make toast (I am the official toast maker of our family, and make no mistake about the ease of making toast in a Korean mini-oven: it is difficult--but I am skilled, and swift with a timer and oven mit), we eat, I do a bit of reading, yada yada...
I get to Jayang (previously "Chayan," but Jayang is the preffered romanization) about 8:30, and currently teach two classes a day there Monday through Wednesday; there's some other stuff on my schedule which I think will kick into effect once the new year starts in March (the first schoolastic semester fall in the Spring, rather than the Fall in Korea), but for the moment I have it quite light. In the last couple of weeks all three of my classes at Jayang (grades 1, 2 and 3 as they say, which are equivalent to the 7th, 8th, and 9th grades in America) have completed their textbooks, so we now play games every day (which is nice, because the textbooks were pretty boring, despite my attempts to link in relevant videos, music, historical and cultural information, StarCraft, etc.).
There are some great TESL forums out there (specifically Dave's ESL Cafe) where I've found all kinds of ideas for games and such. Some popular choices so far have been Team Hangman, Constantinople, and various variations on 20 Questions, Charades, bracket tournaments and Bingo that place an emphasis on language aquisition. I decided to bring some candy for prizes one day but as I was going in to class I had second thoughts... the candies were pretty small, and how much of an incentive could a small piece of candy really be for a 14-year-old?
The answer is: Korean middle schoolers will grovel at your feet for a piece of candy. They will hop up and down and spin in circles while pocking themselves in the eyes for a piece of candy. They will abandon their families and crawl on their hands and knees up Mt. Everest for a piece of candy, content to freeze to death at the top as long as they can suck on a sweet ball of sugar. They will even be almost quiet for a piece of candy!
And so it is as master Lao-Tzu once said: at all times look as though you may have candies in your pocket, and your students will respect you; for such is the way of wisdom.
At Napo middle school I have a similarly rough schedule of two playtimes a day. The students at Napo are generally much better behaved, however, and with the exceptionally small class sizes things are more pleasant all around (I have less of the "I'm standing in a zoo and I think I'm the odd one out" sort of feeling). We've made name cards and I'm starting to get everyone down... especially "Monkey," "Chicken," and "Adidas" (nick names are really big in Korea -- everyone has a name that their friends call them, and some people, like Monkey and Chicken, go by their nicknames all the time. When I told my principal that I don't really have a nickname he looked shocked and horiffied, but then regained composure and said, "No worry no worry! I call you... Tall Joe!" Me: "Tall Joe?" Him: "Okay." Koreans use "okay" to mean many things, including "yes.").
Yesterday I taught about Thanksgiving; some of the students knew "turkey!" (or at least "chicken!") but not much else. I showed some video clips, and was surprised to find that everyone really liked the NFL highlights clip--wow, it's 3:55 and I have to head for the bus. Anyway, hopefully that gives you a bit of a taste of (and for) the craziness.
This last weekend we decided to go visit Matthew Fisher in Chungju, instead of cleaning our apartment, or buying bookshelves for our apartment... or setting up picture frames in our apartment. Or crafting floral arrangements for our apartment. The trip started out a bit, well, painfully, as the stomach issues which I had been dealing with the night before (I'm not sure my system agrees with any amount of Soju, as both times I've had it I've felt ill the next day) cropped up as soon as we got on the bus, but all things ended well.
As you can see on the map we traveled northeast, traversing about half of the width of Korea, and roughly a third of the length. The bus trip took about 5 hours total, which included many stops and a short layover; a straight shot by car would probably be under two hours if you didn't hit traffic in the cities. We returned by train in about 4 hours, with two layovers. Both trips were about 18,000 Won a person, which, with the currency doing so poorly at the moment, translates into $12.50 USD.
Photos from our trip can be seen in the slide show below, or by visiting our flickr album.
We got in Saturday afternoon and spent the night at Matthew's, on our camping mats. Chungju is beautiful (nestled by mountains on all sides), so we had a nice walk around the place. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to play board games and drink gingerale with a couple of Matthew's expatriot friends (one of whom is of course named Matt); I had been on boardgame withdrawal for several weeks.
Anyway, here's a little video from our walk. The free exercise equipment appears to be a standard Korea lakeside feature.
An email we got today from Matthew:
Forgot to say this before... I guess that this is mostly for Marisa, since I couldn't dissuade Jordan, but here goes anyway:
Don't eat jellyfish.
(In my case, I had no idea what it was---it was whitish, translucent, stringy, and sort of viscous-looking, but that description applied to half of the things on the table, and I assumed that like the others it was some kind of plant starch or obscure vegetable or fruit or even ginseng with something funny done to it. But it was actually jellyfish.)
Um. In Korea it's only considered good if it still stings.
It STINGS.
So don't eat it.
(Intentionally burning yourself with spicy foods is odd enough to me, but intentionally stinging yourself with jellyfish poison? No matter how mild the poison is, this seems weird.)
---Matthew
PS: The Koreans told me that it was a Japanese dish. That's true, but I have never ever heard of the Japanese leaving bits of the tentacles in so that it stings you... they just spice it with miso and stuff.
I'm not kidding here. In Korea, don't eat jellyfish.
It's back over 50 degrees and sunny: not an ounce of snow to be seen anywhere. You'd think those pictures we took were a joke. In Gunsan, on the sea, this is apparently how it goes: cold air will blow through, followed by warm air, etc., and though it snows a lot here (apparently more than anywhere else in Korea), the locals say it usually melts within a day.
So Domino's is an international chain, right? Well, courtesy of Matthew Fisher you can see what they call "pizza" on his side of Korea (don't forget to look up Coq au vin, if you don't know what it is); of course, perhaps that's what one should expect from a website that's titled "Creative Domino's Pizza" (www.dominos.co.kr). The image is the motto and mission statement of Jeonju National University, which we see on buses all the time; personally, I think Bethel should maybe steal both the motto and mission statement outright.
Here is our address in Hangul and English, should anyone want to mail us anything, or locate us if you happen to stop by SK 
. The Hangul address is an image: I would advise printing it out and taping it to an envelope, rather than using our English address. To save the image to your computer, just right click on it, and select "save picture as" (or "save image as").We've included our phone number for good measure.
Here it is in English (note that they put everything in reverse order from the US):
SOUTH KOREA
Gunsan, Jeollabuk-do Province
Milyong Joogong Samdanzi
A-pa-t 318, room 207
(Phone number 010-9479-1207)
I mentioned a website earlier that would allow you to get email updates from our blog, but I am not sure if that site is working correctly... if you have not been getting our blog posts by email, but would like to, you can sign up for email updates now using this form (or at any time with the new form in the sidebar):
Note: you will be able to unsubscribe at any time should you desire to.
Last night our landlords took us out to eat; a very nice family with two boys aged five and seven. They took us to Mr. Pizza in the new downtown area of Gunsan. The food was delicious: we had Kimchi and Seafood spaghetti, all-you-can-eat salad bar (which included crab), and a deluxe seafood pizza with crab and other goodies overflowing the crust.. All the waiters at Mr. Pizza wore headbands with crabs bouncing around on little springs, and the place's motto was interestingly "Love For Women"... we never figured out why. After the dinner we took a walk down Gunsan's beautifully-lit pedestrian bridge (crosses over the lake that is near our house). Check out the pictures of the bridge in our photo album.
PS: One of the interesting things in Korea is that you are expected to share, even at restaurants, which means that they've got no problem with two people sharing one all-you-can-eat salad bar dish, or a free-refills glass of Cola (they'll bring you two straws!). I'm sure my dad would think this was great; if he were here I could see him ordering one dish and one glass of Coke for our family of six to share.
So I was teaching about modes of transportation in class today at Napo, and we had all kinds of fun. At the end of the class I decided to have a showdown between all the types of transport we'd discussed; we lined all of the modes up in brackets, and for each bracket the students had to vote on their preferred way to get around. It was a basic bracket style tournament, where you'd have, say, walking vs. train, and if trains wins, then it goes on to meet the winner of car vs. rowboat.
Now what you have to realize here is that we had brainstormed up basically every kind of transportation imaginable, from jet ski to hot air balloon to hand glider--so there were a lot of choices, and a number of rounds. Well, needless to say the tournament was tense to the very end, with emotions soaring in all directions, some wild thrashing, a couple of students who had to be physically restrained, and no end of close and unexpected upsets. The long and the short of it is that Canoe--yes, you read that right, Canoe--emerged victorious, soundly defeating the previously unbeatable Jet. I tried for the life of me to understand why Canoe was so popular, but all I really got in the end was that it had something to do with "human power." I'm sure there's a valuable bit of insight into the Korean middle school psyche here, but I'm not sure what it is. Cast your own vote via the poll in the sidebar.
We've created a guestbook for our site, which you can access here (or by clicking the link up at the top). Everyone should post an entry, letting us know who you are, and where you're from!
A couple of weeks ago we video-taped a little tour of our neighborhood here in Gunsan. It kind of went on the backburner, but here it is in all of its low-resolution glory (I appologize for the video quality: I didn't really know what I was doing with the camera settings at the time). I hope you enjoy the K-Pop.
Part 1:
Part 2:
For any of you who believed all of Matthew's rhetoric about how ugly Gunsan is, here is proof to the contrary: this photo was taken a ten minute walk from our front door. Click on the image to see more pictures.
