"Thank you for being a friend"

Having no prior memories of Korea, I continue to explore my Koreaness each day and try to take in as many experiences as I can while I am here, so that I’ll have a stock pile of memories to take away. One of the things that I want to fulfill during my year in Korea is to spend some time at an orphanage.  After getting the help of a Korean co-teacher, we were able to arrange a visit at a nearby orphanage. 2 weeks ago, we set out for our first visit. If you drive up into the mountains of Chungju-si  and follow a narrow windy dirt road until it dead ends , you  will find a small camp nestled against the hillside. This particular orphanage is overseen by a small group of Buddhist monks who have evidently shown these children how to love and be loved and they do it very well might I add. The camp houses 30 children in total with ages ranging from 3 to 21. We were received with open arms (literally) and the greatest outpour of love that I’ve ever had the opportunity to be a part of.  After our warm welcome, the children were dismissed. Myself and fellow teachers sat on cushions on the floor around a small table with the two heads of the orphanage having tea and exchanging dialogue. I had so many questions. They explained how each of the children came to them from different backgrounds. The oldest is 21 years of age but is still completing high school because he had no schooling prior to coming to the home at age 10. Each child is provided for until they are comfortable to stand alone in society. We spent some time with the children after finishing our tea.

We spent Christmas with the kids. Here are a few snapshots from the day. Uncontrollable laughter during a rowdy game of English charades, taking and decorating polaroid pictures and geeking out to K-pop made for a full day with new friends.

The kids put on a Holiday event and here are some snapshots/videos from that day.

Seon Saeng Nim Me Finishee

Today is a momentous day. It will go down in the books as the day the students of class 2k1 did not once say "Teacher my finishee" or "Teacher me finishee", which at the sound of it, makes me immediately cringe and tense up, like being subjected to freshly filed finger nails running down the chalk board. Oh geez, I think I’m getting light headed just thinking about it. Anyway, today I distinctly heard something else, it was a clear, clean, “Teacher I’m finished” from every student after completing their work. It was music to my ears :) Anyhow, I’m not sure if this means we permanently kicked the habit of wanting to pull random vowels out of thin air and attaching them to words in order to pronounce them (in Korean no consonant can stand alone to make a sound) but I’m just saying it was a successful day for 2K1.

The craziest ride this side of the DMZ

This past trip to Seoul yielded this video .......... I feel like they should've been harnassed in or something but that's just me.

Interesting...

Immediately after I published that last post (re: a tumblr/blogspot mashup - something, something programming geniuses of the world should sort it out), my blog conveniently inconveniently (for me), has been blocked and cannot be accessed. I'm using an anonymous proxy server for the time being, so if you are also having trouble finding the site or Blogspot in general, you may also have to do the same. However, I think the issue is isolated to SK. Arggggh. I'm not sure if it's a connectivity issue (speaking of "internet literacy"and such, here's an interesting article on the subject) or a political issue. SK tops the list of countries across the globe in internet speed and connectivity, but the achievement also comes highly monitored (the big C word).

Oh Christmas Tree

If Blogspot and Tumblr had a baby...it quite possibly could be the golden child of blog platforms. Ok fine, maybe that's taking it a little too far and I haven't been doing this nearly long enough to uphold a serious debate on the subject (is it really necessary to pit the two against each other anyhow? c'mon - all you computer programming geniuses figure it out already!),  but I do know that I would appreciate having the ability to feature different "types" of posts in one platform, because let's be honest, sometimes you feel like a nut and sometimes you don't. Sometimes I just want to quickly share or document random thoughts and such that don't necessarily warrant a lengthy explanation.

For example, I may want to share a photo of the most precious miniature Christmas tree to date from the fam to help launch me into the spirit of Christmas and it definitely is working. Nuff said. :) XOXO

Homesick in Korea

I imagined coming to Korea I would immediately feel a sense of belonging closeness to my Korean heritage. It’s coming up on month 4 of living in Korea and I still feel like a tourist in a foreign land. It’s not to say that it’s an uneasy feeling but more of a reinforcing feeling that I am an American and I am proud of that. My admiration for this country grows everyday. I have and always will have a special place in my heart for Korea, but it won’t ever feel like my home.

Thanks●giving was probably the hardest time I’ve had in Korea as far as homesickness goes. Nothing can quite replace the warmth and comfort that comes from togetherness with family. Altho the holiday itself passed just like any other day, I still yearned to be close with my family and spend the day with them. If it weren’t for skype, I really do not know what I would do (there’s my skype plug for the week). Gratitude and Love are not limited to a certain distance so that's good news for me and altho I did not have the opportunity to physically be with the family, love was felt from across the ocean and the opportunities for gratitude are abundant.

Presents are garnished with ribbons and bows. A present comes in a box. Pizza comes in a box. Pizza boxes should be garnished with ribbons and bows. Makes sense.

The ribbon isn't just Pizza Hut's signature, seems to just be the way pizza is presented.

Fast Food in Korea

American fast food has infiltrated Korea and (good or bad) they’ve managed to take it to the next level. Here, there isn’t the same low class feeling and shamefullness that goes along with walking in/out of a McDonalds. It’s quite the opposite. A little less shame and a little more delight. It's clean. It's happy. It's delicious. I'm addicted and I'm not ashamed to say so :)

MENU at Taco Bell.

...and just in case you're having trouble deciding - jumbo flat screen displaying top picks to help encourage the decision-making process.

Our neatly wrapped lunch in a tray (btw the tray makes all the difference in the world)

You know me, can't ever pass up dessert! One of the few items on the taco bell dessert menu.

McDonalds in Korea delivers. Brilliant. Fleet of McDonalds delivery scooters.

GGGG-20

In other news, the G20 Summit is in 2 days. Obama has managed to make front page on a few of the major Korean publications here, which is weird to see I have to say. It’s like randomly seeing a family member or someone you know on t.v. and you suddenly get a burst of exhilaration and an urge to tell EVERYONE in the surrounding area that you TOTALLY KNOW THAT GUY!!!  As of late, the talk has mostly been all things G20.

I miss American politics. I miss the news. Being a teensy bit of a “news junkie” (hate that term btw), it’s hard being spoon fed your news for so long and having the assurance that you couldn't possibly miss anything because things don't get buried away in the "old news" cemetery until it's been recycled through every outlet (legit or not) at least a few times (even then, it may be exhumed to appear in a “Best of” montage) and now being here, it's not so effortless. I have to actually (with intent) search out "the news" and even then, the news that’s worthy there has little relevance anymore to me here (Sigh). So, I'm feeling a bit detached these days. However, being here has forced me to look at things more globally which I suppose is a good thing. Anywho, so this week, the hotspot is here for a change. SK is preparing for one of it’s biggest performances, which North Korea  ironically enough has prime balcony seating. Weird! In preparation, SK unveiled the official logo of “Seoul’s” G20 Summit, which bears a likeness to this. Maybe they hired Obama’s campaign manager/graphic designer. SK is expecting this pageant, I mean summit, to help it's standing in the international community. Hmmm I wonder if the big guy up North will let me borrow his all-access pass for a day.

Adorable

I had to share this video. A fellow English teacher is currently teaching the brother of this little boy. This is probably the cutest thing I've ever seen.

3-year old child star Here.

Confucius says, women are lacking men's capacities?

My JI2 class (I realize this means nothing to most of you reading this, so in short, the classes are categorized according to grade and English proficiency) is one of my favorites. They inspire me as much as I hope I inspire them and as cliché as that sounds, it’s true. HOWEVER (this is a big However), today I collected their books to do a quick progress check (I am supposed to assign “detention” to those that have incomplete pages – seems a little harsh to me but I don’t make the rules). As I'm flipping through one student’s book, I find this (her response to whether men's sports programs should get more money than women's programs). I think a little piece of me died just then.

I spent the entire class discussing Title IX and it's objective to provide equal opportunity within education programs for men and women - albeit a low level discussion; they got the gist (so I thought). Everyone is entitled to their own opinion (sigh).  

OH it's Halloween!!!

Fridays (for me) are the toughest days of the week. Hands down.  This is unfortunate. Fridays are supposed to be pleasant just by their positioning (to the weekend) alone. Furthermore, Thursdays are a prelude to “pleasant Fridays” so naturally these generally are expected to be good days as well, but I can’t have a proper Thursday knowing that I have to “survive” Friday in order to get to the weekend.  Sheesh. I’m not one of “those” that lives for the weekend, but I guess my point is, I can anticipate a “challenge” (or 2 or many) on Fridays. I teach 14 completely different classes and 10 of those classes have the honor (or maybe curse. Haha) of having me, as their teacher, twice a week. While the other 4 classes I only see once a week.  This gives me a total of 24 hours of actual classroom instruction. I have 4 particularly challenging classes and wouldn’t you know, they all fall on one day.  Can you guess which day? Hence, my lack of enthusiasm for Fridays. However, last Friday was great. The school put on a big Halloween bash for the kids. It was awesome. Kids were reduced to tears the entire day, I was able to hand out candy without having to extract a correct answer to a question like a dog trainer rewarding a puppy for completing a trick and I got a little mini break away from having to regulate a classroom of screamers, name-callers, desk-jumpers, glue eaters, marker-hurlers.... 

Anyhow, I spent the prior week getting my students pumped up about Halloween, which isn’t a holiday that’s celebrated here in Korea, so this complicated things a bit. I still don’t know whether they fully grasp the concept other than it’s a day when it’s ok to ask random strangers for candy and they give you candy. At least I was able to get them to say "trick-or-treat" instead of "give me candy". My kids are still trying to trick-or-treat me for candy.

Here's a couple pics from the day. The upper elementary kids had their party, which is shown below and then later, the youngsters had theirs. I wish I would've gotten snapshots of the little guys but alas, my camera decided to stop working.

(click bottom right corner to view full screen)
To be fair, I stuck my tongue out first :)

T is for Teaching

Or maybe it’s for Exhaustion……..I can’t really remember.  I’ll just go ahead and begin by saying that teaching is greatly underappreciated (teachers are way awesome - just had to throw that in) and I definitely underestimated the labor involved. I’m specifically referring to the unceasing demand for stimulation. Uh, if I could get some help over here ..... I'm looking for the “off” button on these kids (I’ll settle for “pause”?) …..no? nothing?  It’s definitely a mental workout. Teaching is the ultimate labor of love...I suppose that's why I'm here :)

Teaching in Korea is crazy (for lack of a better word). Primary education is rigorous and taken extremely seriously. It is highly competitive, starting at middle school age. There is a lot of emphasis placed on learning English. A bit of an obsession, actually. Kids (mostly elementary and middle school) in SoKo will attend their regular public school in the morning and afternoon and then go directly to English Academy (and do not pass Go). Academy is a supplement to their regular schooling but to my surprise, it has as much bearing on their education as the regular public school, because A. the parents are now forking over hard earned money for additional school, B. academy provides concentrated learning, specifically English, on a more individual basis, C. parents have become somewhat disillusioned by the English programs in the public school so they rely on the academy to help fill the gap, and more importantly D. is there such a thing as getting too much English?!

The kids have a slightly different view:

Academy = more homework

More homework = no play time, so;

Academy = their nightmare

I can't help but sympathize. Most of these kids aren’t finishing up with school until 10 or 11 at night. A classroom full of middle school students + too cool for school attitude + going on their 13th hour of school for the day = The most PAINFUL 45 mins. of my entire existence and after about 25 of those mins. I'm wondering if maybe this thing isn't even on........ummmm helloooooo?!? Wow, tough crowd tonight.

If you don’t speak Korean, how are you able to teach these kids?  I’ve gotten this question a lot. Well, I’ll be completely honest, there’s a lot of stickers involved.  Seriously.  I’ve found that bribery is not only essential but also a very effective teaching method (sorry mom). The younger ones are a little more, how should I put this .... not as complicated and more forgiving, I mean we're talking where anything that's of real significance is settled by rock, paper, scissors. 

This is one of my classes. Good class. We have fun. These guys are 9 (in Korea, one year of life is counted when you are born so they are 8). They may look like a subdued bunch but Andrew, top row/2nd from left, is a desk jumper so don't be fooled.

Last week I posted this riddle to one of my intermediate classes:  What vegetable do you throw away the outside, cook the inside, eat the outside, and throw away the inside?

They were promised duk bok ki (a favorite snack food among Korean kids) for guessing the correct answer.

The duk bok ki ladies dishing it up (below). 13 to be exact.

My final thought: Altho, each day brings new challenges and some awkward moments; there have been just as many awestruck moments and hilarious moments. Having been fortunate to experience Montessori primary education, I am able to appreciate self-directed learning and truly believe that as a child, you possess a natural propensity to progress forward and grow.  This has become/will be for the year, my common ground with these students and I find comfort in that :)

Chuseok Concluded

In the interest of concluding this post of our Chuseok weekend, I may (I will) just construct a photo montage instead. I know I know. I’m probably committing some kind of “blog faux pas” by doing so, but there seems to be an obstruction in the way of the creative juices.

Photo montage begins .... Now!

We met up with fellow Americans, Paige and Annie for a day of palace touring...

 ..which then led us to these little critters ...

... followed by a slight detour to Myeong-dong shopping district (I don't know why the picture quality is so poor. Boo!) ...

 ... where you can find a plethora of t-shirts in "English". (I'm just wondering what "they" were trying to say ...hmmm)



Seems so much more appealing when it's written in Old English Text

I'll try to resist the URGE!

Could it be?!? We stumbled upon this little treasure while walking around Hong Dae. That became our 2nd Mexican meal in Korea. Krissy and I had Mexican for my "last supper" in the states and she and I joked around that it would be my last time having Mexican food for a while. Yeah, we had a good laugh. I'm not laughing anymore.

I end with this photo. Koreans take their karaoke very seriously. If you look closely, this was a 5 story building with little individual karaoke rooms. I'm sorry, but Sing Sing has nothin' on Korea. Notice the girl in the upper right corner by herself. Watch out! Korean Idol in the making.

Our day of exploring began at this palace ...

... with these sweet children.

We then journeyed to the War Memorial of Korea (the largest of it's kind). Unfortunately, the museum was closed that day in honor of Chuseok, however the memorial grounds were open to the public, which is an entire outdoor exhibition, housing Korean War monuments and an extensive collection of military equipment used during that time period. 

Walking through the grounds was rather powerful and I was moved by several of the statues depicting the hardships that were endured during the war.

It is hard to believe that the conflict was not that long ago. The amount of civilian and military lives that were lost is overwhelming. A war that has been coined “The Forgotten War” in the U.S. (overshadowed by the Vietnam War), is very much remembered here and still families are separated by the division of the North and South.

I thought this was a very touching statue (below)

As we were leaving the memorial grounds, this lady approached us. She wanted to tell us something but we couldn't understand her. She reached into her bag and handed me a red crayon and began repeating words as I wrote them. We weren't able to communicate with her completely, however the few words that were exchanged between us was all that was needed to be able to grasp her sincere gratitude towards America.

(pic from Rebecca)

Chuseok ... Hosteling, Touring and Eating

Hostels give me the creeps (generally speaking).  When I think of hostels, I immediately think of bed bugs (hmmm…perhaps that’s where the phrase “sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite” originated from).  Of course, I have absolutely no basis for associating the 2 things seeing as I’ve never actually stayed in a hostel ………..
Until now! I have to say tho, my first hostel stay (ever) exceeded my expectations (never mind that I had the bar set so low, my little niece Maddie could’ve kicked it over).  I'm pretty sure experiencing a hostel is a prerequisite to "earning" a traveling rite of passage, however this was not our aspiration. In an effort to be budget-conscious, stay in a cool area of Seoul and be able to get the 411 (the dirt) on touristy sites and other neat-o things to do, we chose to hostel it up in Hongdae (Hostel).

(Women's quarters)

Not too shabby, right? This is what 20,000 won will get you ...

I thought this was very sweet ...

Chuseok Seoul-style

I arrived in Seoul to meet Rebecca et al for a week of sightseeing and such and take advantage of the few(er) crowds. However, the often humorous Mother Nature had a different plan for us. This was how we were welcomed upon our arrival…

At least the subways were operating .... sort of ....

Nevertheless, we decided to test our luck with them. After all, what's the likelihood of our exact stop being the one that is shut down? Turns out, pretty good.

Ok, fine. So, we get off a few stops down the line. No biggie. We exited the subway and proceeded to hail down the first taxi we saw.  Rebecca was carrying the “directions” to the hostel, which would have been quite useful had we gotten off on the right subway stop. Likewise, they were walking directions starting from the subway station exit, which went something like this, find the Paris Baguette and take ten paces to the right and continue until you reach the Dunkin Donuts.

So, Rebecca and I found ourselves having to quickly pull ourselves together and somehow explain to this guy where we needed to go…”Uh, Dunkin’ Donuts”. Ok, good job girls. That’s definitely a start but unfortunately, blurting out Dunkin’ Donuts is not the same as saying oh, I don’t know, take me to The Eiffel Tower (while in Paris), simply because there are more DD’s in Seoul than there are in Bean town and I feel fairly confident in making that statement.  Needless to say, our taxi driver was unimpressed. Ok, let’s try “Hongdae Hostel"? By this time, he's given up on Rebecca because clearly she's not from "here". He immediately looks to me (naturally) and to his disappointment and in my state of anxiety, I also blurt out “Dunkin Donuts”. So now the taxi driver has two babbling Americans in the backseat with no clue as to even what direction to go in. Let's try this again, “Hongdae Dunkin Donuts Hostel-UH”.

Here’s a tip. When you find yourself in a communication barrier with a taxi driver in Korea, 9 times out of 10 you can break it down by simply adding an “uh” to the end of your words. Example.

Me:  I need to go to Daegame Park

Taxi Driver:  Mwuh?! (WHAT?!)

Me: Daegame Park… go....please

Taxi Driver:  Huh?

Me:  Dae-ga-me Park…(repeat and louder)

Taxi Driver:  (shakes head) ???

Me:  Daegame Park-uh?

Taxi Driver:  Ohhhhh OK! Daegame Park-UH!

Me: Yes-UH!

10 minutes later, we pull up to Dunkin’ Donuts and to our amazement, the hostel was directly above. Sweet-uh! We bid our driver adieu and went on our merry way.

Chuseok

Chuseok is one of the most significant holidays in Korea and is a 3-day celebration during the harvest season. Traditionally it is a celebration of the year’s prosperities and good harvest. For Koreans, this is a time for families to gather together to give thanks and to remember and honor their ancestors.  I suppose it is believed that just as a strong root system is important for producing healthy crops, the same value is placed on ancestral roots as the anchor for continuing generations.

Apparently there are numerous harvest events and traditional folk games going on during this time that are organized by local city governments. So, to kick off the holiday, a few fellow teachers and I walked over to a nearby field where we found pretty much the entire town gathered around in a circle formation, holding hands and singing - turning clockwise, then counterclockwise. The dance is called Ganggang-sullae.

 This was the wishing "tree" where people had hung their wishes. We weren't about to pass up that opportunity so all of us wrote our wishes down on a slip of paper and then all the kids went running up to see if they could make out what we had written ....

.... and then this happened! Uh, we think this was a good thing. I mean, wishes only come true if they're torched to smithereens, right?

                                                                                                                                                                           These were dancers dressed in traditional Hanbok

This was a really awesome experience and I was elated to have been a part of it all.

Now, the thing about the Chuseok holiday is that many Koreans return to their hometowns to eat copious amounts of food (food? oh, I almost digressed but I will stay on track) and spend time with families. SO, for us "foreigners", this was prime time to be in Seoul! I will write about the trip to Seoul (Part deux, errr I guess it would be Part dul) but not before seeing the shout out from Secretary "Clinon", wishing the Republic of Korea a joyous holiday here.