English Contests

This year Yeongcheon had two English contests for the students: a skit contest and a speech contest. Each school in Yeongcheon sends one entry to each contest, the students must perform on a stage in front of an audience of their peers and then answer an "interview" question to test actual English comprehension, since the skit and speech largely show off memorization.

Since my school is one of the largest middle schools in Yeongcheon, and considered an English leader and example school, the principal had high expectations, and for each contest most of the English staff had to stay after school for hours practicing. But the real admiration should be saved for the kids who participated, who practiced endlessly in all their free time. We shared cheap dinners crowded around a table in the English office, flashlight-lit trips to the bathroom in the dark, deserted school, hours of practice interview questions, and even a few occasions of stress-induced silliness. Although I got pretty tired of, say, drilling the same questions over and over and hearing the same speech dozens of times a day, I really enjoyed the chance to get close to a few special students, all of whom are funny, sweet, hard-working and energetic.

This was probably one of the more memorable experiences I had here and definitely an interesting time. While there are things I could complain about regarding the actual contests (some schools' lack of appropriate preparation, an atmosphere too heavily focused on winning, memorization without comprehension, technical difficulties, etc.), I think it was a good experience for the students too and helped form some friendships that probably wouldn't have occured otherwise, as between the mix of 1st and 2nd graders shown above (A-hyun, Je-Gyung, Yoo-jin, Jenny, and Bo-ram).

More photos after the cut.

Around Yeongcheon

Today was the first actually cold day by my standards, so in honor of the beginning of winter, I'll post the pictures I took around Yeongcheon during the summer and fall. One of the things I'll miss the most about Korea is its beauty, especially the greenness of Yeongcheon. It's sad to know that my remaining months won't be able to give me that. But at least we'll always have Paris. Or rather, these pictures.

Dong-Yun's Wedding / Halloween

My friend Dong-Yun was married on Halloween weekend, and since she got married near Seoul, it provided me with the opportunity to go up to Seoul for the weekend before Halloween and then down to the wedding before school started again on Monday.

Here is Dong-Yun and her husband posing with me. After the wedding, the bridal couple change into fancy hanboks and go around the buffet hall greeting and thanking people. We only got a moment together, since they were busy, but at least I got this picture!
More after the jump.

Hanbok

So, since my hobby is sewing and I have a passion for pretty dresses, I knew as soon as I came to Korea that getting a hanbok, preferably made by me, was a goal of mine. And now that goal has been accomplished! Actually, it's been done for awhile, but I'm just getting a chance to post the pictures.

Actually, I stole this photo off of Facebook. It's one Hye-Jin took of me at Parents' Day at school, where I was convinced to greet parents while wearing it. I think most of the parents just wondered what the heck a crazy foreigner in a hanbok was doing there, but it was ok.
More photos after the cut.

Pottery Making

So, every 4th Saturday, we have a special activities class. Mine is "English Newspaper" but we don't really focus on the newspaper part. Mostly we do a writing activity every week as well as various other activities, which may or may not one day come together to form a "newspaper." Dong-Yun's activity is arts-and-crafts, since she is a Home Ec teacher. One Sunday she had a special edition class that met at a local cafe, whose owner also makes and teaches pottery. Since I'm Dong-Yun's friend, she invited me and a few of her other friends to join the students.

It was fun and her class is comprised mostly of second grade students that I really like, so I enjoyed being there, even though my pottery skills were below average. Here are the students at my table at work. For more pictures, follow the cut.

Medical Attention

Our school got a bad run of eye infections. I don't know exactly what it was, only that dozens of students had pink-red eyes and had to sit in the back of the classroom to avoid contaminating others. The word on the street was that the going rate for rubbing an infected classmate's eyes was 500 Won per rub, plus an additional 500 Won bonus if you actually got sick. The school had to change its policy so that sick students were quarantined rather than sent home to curb the purposeful spreading of disease. Personally I thought 500 Won was a little cheap (about 50 cents). On the other hand, if you pay three different kids to rub their eyes (to increase your exposure), do you have to pay ALL of them the bonus if you get sick, since it'd be pretty hard to prove which was the "lucky" rub? I was wondering.

In other news, I hurt my knee a month ago while running for exercise. It still hasn't healed completely, and I was worried about it but avoiding the doctor, as usual. So Dong-Yun convinced me to go to acupuncture with her instead. I agreed since I've never done acupuncture and I was curious. Today was my second trip. So far there's been no noticeable change in my knee, but I did get to experience some traditional Korean healing. Plus some kind of electro-therapy.

I managed to snap a photo, too. Surprisingly, despite my childhood fear of needles, the pins didn't really bother me. They hurt just a little bit going in, but after that, it just feels a little prickly, but not painful. Both times the treatment included receiving some kind of electric pulse therapy (which did hurt) and an ice pack. We're going back on Wednesday. Dong-Yun, meanwhile, is in for a slipped disk. I guess it could be worse.

"Camping"

I forgot to post about this. At the end of the summer vacation, Mrs. Yu asked if I wanted to go "camping" with her church group. I like those people, so I was glad to say yes! I wasn't sure what to expect, and indeed, I didn't hear anything more about it until the day of the trip. So I threw a few extra things in my bag just in case I needed them. One of them was a swimsuit. Good thing I did! On the other hand, it wasn't what you or I would usually term "camping."

Basically, we stayed at a lodge in a small village resort spot. The whole area of the countryside was full of resorts, hotels, and swimming spots. The rivers were full of people playing and swimming. I spent much of the trip (including the car rides) with the Ha family, one of the members of the church group, and one I like very much. Their middle-school-aged daughter, Sun-Yoon, speaks good English and is exceptionally friendly, smart, and cute. She informed me that the rivers were full of Korean children and fathers, and that Korean mothers were all camped on the shore, hiding in the shade of the tents. She went on to teasingly explain that her mother, like all Korean mothers, was afraid of any water that was more than ankle-deep.

The resort was near a famous mountain spring which remains frozen all summer long, despite the heat. We hiked up to see it, although there was no ice at the moment, only blasts of cold air coming from under the rock. The weekend was a great one, with good weather, and the location was beautiful. Click on the cut for some photos!

New Apartment!

Last Friday, I moved into a new apartment. It's a brand new building, built by the Office of Education specifically to house foreigners. It's a little smaller than some people's previous apartments, but about the same size as mine, although the layout is very different. The amazing part, however, is that it is not only cute, bright, and clean (unlike my last place), but also ridiculously well-stocked with brand new appliances, furniture, and little luxuries. It has things like a humidifier, oven, computer, and wide-screen TV, things not required or promised by the contract. It also had two sets of brand new bedding and a ludicrously large fridge. In fact, I was a little embarrassed by these riches, since the teachers who helped me move all saw them, and there were some comments. I'm sure this all seems unecessarily generous for a bunch of under-qualified foreigners, half of whom use their time in Korea to drink and travel around Asia.

But, uh, hey. I guess I'll take it. I'm lucky because it's all brand new for me. My successor will be getting my hand-me-downs. To help show it, I took a short video tour. It's a bit shaky and short, but it makes its point.

Yesterday, with Hye-Jin's help, I ordered rice cakes to be delivered to school this morning for all the teachers and staff in celebration of my move. Interestingly, many people, including the vice principal and Mrs. Yu, asked me "Who told you to do that?" or "How did you know that was our custom?" When I told them I told myself to do it, they seemed shocked. But I've been here a whole year. I've noticed that whenever someone gets a new car, gets married, has a baby, or otherwise stumbles across good fortune, it's typical to share your happiness by having treats delivered to the teachers' office, usually rice cakes. It's happened a lot of times. And I've eaten lots of those rice cakes. It's funny that they thought I wouldn't figure it out for myself. Or maybe they just didn't think it would occur to a foreigner to actually go ahead and do it. There is, after all, a big difference in Western and Eastern approaches to sharing, community, and generosity. But I always feel bad that so much is given to me, when it's very hard for me to give back. In the past, I celebrated American holidays by baking cookies for the teachers and brought back bread treats from Gyeongju, but this was a totally authentic Korean move, and I'm so glad I pulled it off! (Thanks, Hye-Jin!)

Summer Camp

I had to do a three-day summer camp with Hye-Jin, having about 17 students and lasting about 4 hours each day. We tried hard to make some fun activities, since the kids are giving up part of their already short summer vacation. I like the camps to have themes so it's not just a series of unrelated lessons, and also so the same words can be repeated many times throughout.

This camp's theme was Peter Pan, a theme I tried out last winter with success. I taught them lots of useless English words like "sail," "treasure" and "pirate." Oh, wait. Pirate is a useful word, right? Then again, I don't think pirates have the same iconic coolness they have in the States.

Anyway, here's some photos to sum up what we did. The VP wanted us to take a lot. He also wanted us to videotape some of it and get the kids to write some kind of articles, but he didn't get those wishes. Oh, well. You can't have everything.

Korean Weddings

It's been a slow summer vacation for me here, since my summer vacation days are too short to do much with and I had things to accomplish at home, such as getting ready to move (hopefully) and working on my hanbok. So I figured I'd just make a post about some things that happened during the school year that I never wrote about: going to weddings.

I've been to two weddings here so far. The first was Dong-Yun's cousin's wedding, and the second was the wedding of a teacher at my school. I only took pictures at the first, but they will suffice to illustrate the general ideas in this post. Of course, two weddings out of a whole country don't build a complete picture, but it looks like these were pretty standard weddings, so I'm guessing a lot of the stuff is typical.

Click on the jump to read more!

Mud Festival

The Boryeong Mud Festival is THE most popular festival among foreigners in all Korea. The idea? Boryeong brings in mud from a nearby mud beach, and foreigners turn out by the busload to paint themselves with it, wrestle in it, slide down it, splash in it, and have people throw buckets of it over their heads. Added to that is the fact that the festival takes place on a large, beautiful beach, and the marts and restaurants stay open into the wee hours of the night. There were so many foreigners there, you could almost forget you were in Korea at all.

The festival was very fun and well worth the trip. For one thing, it's cheap. The entry fee was 5,000 Won, but there was lots of free stuff too, including free mud. For another thing, there's nothing quite like being covered in mud. The lines were really long, though, so it's worth it to get there early (we came up on Friday night) and get a motel near the beach. There are a lot of bare bones "pensions" in walking distance of the festival. They basically consist of a single room with a few sleeping mats in the corner, a TV, and a small kitchen. The floor was super hard and the mats super thin, so we were all sore in the morning, but the price was decent when split between five or six people. I didn't take very many pictures because it's hard to take pictures when your hands are covered in mud, and there are many, many far better pictures online if you just google the festival. However, I did snap a few quick shots, so here they are after the cut.

Public Transportation Day

A rare, picture-less entry. I felt this little anecdote was worth sharing. :)

A bit ago we had a Public Transportation Day to celebrate the fuel-saving, environmentally-friendly idea of using public transportation to get to school and work. In honor of this day, everyone is supposed to use public transportation if at all possible. Now, since everyone loves the environment, and nobody wants to look like a jerk, everybody feels duty-bound to follow through on this, if only to save face. On the day in question, I got a ride from Jung Mi-gyung as usual. She always takes a route that brings us around the back of the school, and we were just approaching the back entrance when she suddenly saw a big banner with “Public Transportation Day” on it hanging above the street. “Oh no,” she exclaimed, bringing the car to a screeching halt before executing a sudden u-turn. “It’s public transportation day!”

Right behind my school is the city sports stadium, complete with its own small parking lot. Mi-gyung pulled us into that parking lot and explained. “Let’s park here and walk the rest of the way, so we can pretend we took public transportation.” “Ok,” I said. “It’s our secret,” agreed Mi-gyung.

As we got out of the car, she did a double-take on the car parked next to us and checked the license plate. “Oh,” she laughed. “It’s the school cook’s car.”

At the end of the day, I was supposed to get a ride home from Mr. Lim. Since he sometimes forgets, I went to find him and confirm. “Yes, yes,” he said. “You ride with me. Let’s meet in 10 minutes.” “Ok,” I said, starting to walk away. “Oh, wait,” he exclaimed suddenly, beckoning me closer.  In hushed tones, he explained, “My car is in the back today. You know the stadium? In that parking lot. Because… today is Public Transportation Day.”

As I made my way down the hill towards the stadium, I couldn’t help laughing. Nobody actually wanted to take public transportation, but nobody was willing to admit it. The result: the stadium parking lot was suspiciously full for the middle of the day on a weekday!

Barefoot Mud Marathon

Two weeks ago I attended a barefoot mud marathon in Daejeon with Dong-yun. It was not quite what I expected, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Since the bus from Daegu to Daejeon left really early in the morning, Dong-yun and I just went up on Friday and stayed in Daejeon the whole weekend. Since it's Dong-yun's hometown, we stayed with her very kind family, especially her sister, who put us up.

We spent the weekend with Dong-yun's cousin, Yoon-ju, her friend, Hye-jin (not to be confused with my co-teacher Hye-jin, although they have the exact same name), and Hye-jin's roomate, an American foreign teacher named Aynsley, all very cool people. Since Yoon-ju is an artist, she also kindly led us in an art project on Saturday. It took a long time, but it was awesome, and very generous of her to give her time and tools.

Pictures under the cut.

Children's Day

Actually, this was two weeks ago. Children's Day is a holiday here, and since schools are closed, we get the day off. Our school was having midterms the week of Children's Day, so it was an easy week (for teachers) all around. Mrs. Yu's highschool was having some kind of reunion hike on a famous mountain, and she asked me to come along. Since Children's Day fell on a Thursday, I went to Mrs. Yu's house on Wednesday night and stayed with her. On Thursday, we did the hike. Friday morning we came to school together, then I went with Dong-yun to see a National Geographic photo exhibition. Then both Dong-yun and I returned to Mrs. Yu's house to sleep over, and we all came to school again on Saturday morning. Even though it wasn't one of my working Saturdays, I ended up staying at school all day.

The mountain is famous for being covered with rhododendren bushes, which look like a pink sea when in bloom. Sadly, they were not in bloom. We were just a week or two early. Major bummer. The hike was still very nice, however.

Photos after the cut.

Cherry Blossoms!

Two weeks ago, you had only to wander down certain lanes or into certain gardens to find yourself standing under a canopy of white. All around the city, pretty little trees found their branches suddenly covered with clusters and clusters of delicate, white flowers. Of course, these are cherry blossoms, immensely popular in Japan and Korea, such that some cities have taken it upon themselves to plant these trees along every major thoroughfare and scenic spot around. In fact, when I discussed going to one of the popular (and overcrowded) cherry blossoms festivals in other cities, some of my co-teachers scoffingly pointed out that cherry blossoms are everywhere these days, making the festivals unnecessary. Even so, I read that certain places really are worth the visit, and luckily I happened to have a Tuesday off of work for our school's founding anniversary. I figured that, on a random Tuesday afternoon, the crowds should be a lot smaller, and the trip more enjoyable. In fact, I was very, very lucky, because the flowers only blossom for about a week in each location, meaning there's not much wiggle room for planning a visit.

Me with some cherry blossoms outside my school.

Our school's anniversay happened to perfectly coincide with the flowering season in nearby Gyeongju, one of the top cities in Korea for cherry blossom-viewing. Gyeongju is a beautiful city anyway, being the old seat of the Joseon dynasty, and the weather was excellent. I wandered around the city from about 10 to 3, taking many pictures and enjoying the peaceful and refreshing view. Even on a Tuesday, there were plenty of school field trips, families, and other tourists, but it was by no means too crowded. There's lots of pictures (pretty much all of cherry blossoms) after the cut!

Gyeongju World

Last week was the school  picnic week. The second-graders went on a three-day-long picnic to Everland (an amusement park) in Seoul. The rest of us went on a day trip to amusement parks in the area. First-graders to Woobangland and third-graders to Gyeongju World. I went with the third grade because Jung Mi-gyung want me to be in her group. She is afraid of amusement park rides, but decided that she wanted to go on all of them. But the other teachers are always too "cool" or too afraid to go on the rides, so she needed a riding buddy. We even managed to impress the students with our fearlessness. Mi-gyung taught me the phrase:

이것 나는것 안무서워요?
Aren't you afraid of this ride / Isn't this ride scary?

I asked the students that when we ended up in line together. Of course, if they asked me back, I said "아니요!" No!

The weather was really perfect. And the next day was the "radiation rain" day, so we were really lucky. I guess radiation rain would've spoiled the mood of the picnic.

Bwhahahahaha! A few pictures after the cut.

Sandy's Birthday

A few weeks ago Sandy, my friend, had a birthday, which was well-planned out and totally organized, like all events Sandy takes part in. This was a good thing, because she had chosen some fun stuff for us to do. We visited an activity center in a village near Daegu that seemed to have been designed for school field trips and such. There was a big playground with places for students to play traditional Korean games as well as see historical things like an old-fashioned outdoor stove and a stone fountain/stream. There were numerous activities there, including kite-making, candy-making, and strawberry picking, which is what we did.

The weather was perfect, sunny but with just enough wind for kite-flying. It was a little early for strawberry season, but the strawberry "fields" were in a greenhouse, so the strawberries were ripe anyway. Actually, they were quite large and delicious! After all that, we went back to downtown Daegu for a delicious supper, where I ate a burrito, because I periodically miss Mexican food. I'm happy to have found such a good place for burritos so close by. I forgot my camera, so I took a few photos on my iphone, which are after the cut.

Rainy Day

Today is the first day it's rained in awhile. Normally, I like rainy days (especially since yesterday, on the first truly sunny day of the spring/summer, I got sunburned!), but it was hard to appreciate it because everyone kept warning me not to let the rain touch my skin lest I get radiation poisoning. One teacher told me, while we were eating seafood, that we shouldn't eat any seafood, since it might have come from affected waters (Korea imports a lot of seafood from Japan). Some elementary schools in Seoul even closed today so that students wouldn't have to risk going out in the rain. That struck me as odd, since official sources have continually been saying that the radiation levels reaching Korea would be miniscule and harmless. Seems like closing schools will only make people worry more.

We were lucky, though, because yesterday, the day of our school picnic, was bright and sunny - perfect weather. Flowers are starting to bloom and I hardly need a jacket at all anymore. I was also very happy today because I talked to some teachers who barely speak any English. My Korean was terrible and halting, and half made up of pantomime, but we managed to communicate. A little. :)

I guess, you win some and you lose some. Or rather, you lose some and you win some.

Crab-Eating!

Actually, this happened around Christmastime, but the pictures were just sitting in a folder on my computer, so I'm posting about it now. Every now and then the teachers have an outing to promote comraderie and socialization, etc. In the winter we had a special trip to the East Coast to eat crab, which was just coming into season.

The bus ride was about 2 hours long, but it was a nice bus and they gave us snacks (just like kids!). On the ride back, however, the bus turned into a loud, drunken karaoke bus with absolutely no volume control! The young, female teachers at my school aren't very adventurous, so they all huddled in the back of the bus, pretending to sleep so that they wouldn't get called up to sing. Real sleep, however, was impossible with that level of noise.

Pictures after the cut!

Daily Life

Now that school is over for the winter, I finally put together a blog entry about my daily life. Still, it might be interesting to see, so here's a blog on what my life over here is like on a day-to-day basis.

Today's Korean: 본교의 방문을 환영합니다 : Welcome to our school.

It's a lot of pictures, so it's all after the cut. Click to read more.

Dreaming of a White Christmas

I've been really bad about posting lately, but I have plenty more to say, so new posts are forthcoming. First of all, I sort of skipped right over Christmas and New Year's Ever. In America, that would be really missing out on a lot, but here in South Korea, those holidays aren't celebrated much. There wasn't any exciting buildup, no decorations or parties, and not much to say about it in general.

Of course, the foreigners tend to make up for that by having their own parties, so Sandy, Sam, Courtney, Melinde and I had a Christmas party for ourselves. It was very cute, including a Christmas Eve dinner, a sleep-over, present exchanging, and lots of laughs. I didn't take any pictures, though, except the following of us eating our Christmas Morning breakfast.

After that, I had a very busy weekend visiting my friend and co-worker, the school nurse Yu Jung-im. She is Protestant, but when I told her about my desire to attend a Catholic Mass, she very kindly arranged for me to attend with a friend of hers and her friend's daughter. Both of them were very friendly and we all ate lunch together afterward. I was really glad to attend Mass. I noticed that the women keep up the old-fashioned tradition of wearing veils, but otherwise, it was pretty recognizable. We even sang carols in Korean.

There are a few pictures of the rest of the weekend, so I'll post the rest under the cut. Just click to read more.