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!