Good things

Woo! #1: I just found out that I DON"T need to be here over break!! I maybe gave the impression that my "learning about Korean language and culture" was a bit more formal that it really is. I also maybe asked about how they would let me know not to come in if there was bad weather, how to call in sick, and how many days I had to take as "sick" before I needed a doctor's note. (no one who speaks English will be around over break) I also wrote a letter that was almost a work of art. If ass-kissing is an art. If not, it was just really good ass-kissing.

Woo! #2: The package my parents sent in mid-October arrived! Yay!! Today is the last day I will be at this school until mid-February, so in terms of coming through at the last minute, this was spot-on.

Woo #3: New Year's plans in Suncheon are in full effect. Tomorrow, it looks like after I take care of friends' pets, I will head to Suncheon. There will be ice-skating, sauna-ing, and food that isn't Korean. Sunday, I will dash back to take care of the critters, and then will do what I am told to do. Which it seems may involve watching the sun rise from a temple in Yeosu on the morning of the 1st. How this will happen has yet to be determined. Details.

Okay, because pictures always make things more interesting, here are some from last week/weekend:

grade 1 middle school at my main school. that is about the equivalent of 7th grade in the States


Grade 2 middle school students at my country school


Grade 1 middle, country school


Me and Virginia the Organizer (a compliment, really) in Gwangju.



I'm in hyper-paranoid-data-loss worry still, so I bought a flickr pro and am uploading before editing a lot of stuff. If you want to see a gazillion other pictures (warning, some of them are really kind of crappy) go here.

4.5 months

Illustration of adaptation:

This morning I was running late so I brought most of my oatmeal to school.

I ate it with chopsticks.

It should probably be noted that I tend to make my oatmeal kind of thick, and that when faced with the choice between the plastic spoon that had been used by uncountable people or the metal chopsticks that were in the sterilizer thingy, my decision was basically made for me, but still.

external hard drive failure

it seems that i have a fried external hard drive on my hands. Which means I may have lost almost 20 gigs of music, all pictures that weren't uploaded to flickr or photobucket, and all documents.

I should be able to retrieve things like my resume that were sent via email, but most of my grad school papers are gone. More than anything, it is the pictures that have me the most worried.

I currently have the hard drive in the freezer, as I've read that can buy me some time to transfer data. I gave it 45 minutes a while ago, and while I got it to boot, it wouldn't read. I'm hoping if I give it more time I'll be able to at least grab most of the pictures and the documents. It sucks to lose the music, but that can be replaced.

I'm basically looking at this thing as being dead. I'm willing to take any and all suggestions in terms of getting any data possible off the thing.

Weekend

The past week or so has been pretty wonderful - from meeting a couple from Germany who live about a 5 minute walk from my apartment (friends of a friend), to school festivals (pictures coming soon), to seeing a friend's band and Western food and talking to cute boys in Gwangju, to the two-day Christmas party in Gwangyang. I feel like I have friends here, which is really nice.

To the families we are given and the families we create - may the new year bring us all much love. And as the days get a little longer, may we all have a bit more brightness in all our lives.

yogurt sauce.

Note to self:



Even though the package on the healthier yogurt says that it is plain, it is not. Even though it has less sweet than all the others, it is still too sweet to cook with and have it turn out the way you want it to.



You will forget this is a few months when you really want a sour cream/stroganoff/yogurt based sauce and decide that it really wasn't all that bad after all.



It was.



Don't do it.



Even though you totally will. And you will be just as disappointed in the outcome.



love,

me.

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Holiday

The holidays so far:

* Santa has started to arrive, and between a stuffed animal from my niece, a candle from my sister, a new plant that looks a little like a tree, and a needlepoint angel I made a couple of years ago (really, it is a lot more cool than it sounds...) I have a little corner of Christmas in my apartment. This is more effort then I have put forth in years.
* Have I mentioned how awesome my family is? Because they rock.
* Thursday is the school festival at my regular school, and Friday is the festival at the country school I go to. I'm pretty excited that I get to see both.
* Friday night is a party at the "foreigner bar" in Jungma (Gwangyang). Not really sure what that will entail. Probably general frivolity. And cheese and crackers.
* Saturday, a friend's band will be playing in a nearby city (Gwangju), so a LOT of people will be heading over to see/hear them play. Will be spending the night there.
* Sunday and Monday will be dinner/breakfast at the apartment of some friends here. We did a drawing for Secret Santa, so there will be food and gift exchange and people hanging out and general goodness.


I'm not sure what is going on for New Year's. I start the city middle school English Winter Camp January 2nd, and I think I'm running another 5K race January 7th (if the people I was going to join remember/I can still register). The weekend after is a meet-up for the the rock climbing group here (in a gym this time. crazy, but not insane).

After that, I'm still trying to find a way to get out of having to be here every day I'm not officially on vacation. I'm also trying to decide exactly what I'm doing for winter break. The main goals are beach and warm, so as long as those two things are accomplished, I'll be pretty happy.

food

1.) I have made meringue cookies with egg whites, cream of tarter, and splenda using an electric mixer, and if i remember correctly, I can do it without the cream of tarter if necessary. What I'm wondering right now is if I can do it in a blender, as I don't have a hand mixer and mixers cost about $30 here. Thoughts? I may just try it to see, but if anyone can give me a head's up as to why this might not be the greatest idea, I'd appreciate it.



2.) this PDF from Precision Nutrition looks interesting. I'm wondering what would happen if I replaced the cottage cheese/ricotta cheese in some of the recipes with the really, really soft tofu in a tube. Again with the reasons this may not be the greatest idea would be helpful.



3.) How I lived before discovering the joy of baked tofu, I'll never know. It may be one of my favorite things right now.

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teaching

This morning was notable in that for the first time in a while, I felt like a real teacher.

Granted they were playing a game, but students were engaged, focused, and on task. The only person sleeping was legitimately ill. While much of the discussion was in Korean, kids were arguing and supporting English word choice, justifying their answers, and making creative choices. Once I reviewed the words and taught the game, they were almost totally self-sufficient.

Kids may have been sitting on the tables, but they were learning and working and thinking instead of just regurgitating information and I felt a little bubble of happiness.

School days

In talking to my folks, it was pointed out to me that I really don't talk much about the actual teaching part of teaching here.

So, to rectify that a bit, here is an overview of my work-life here (this gets long - the short version is that I teach at two schools and have 2 adult workshops/week):

I am at school from 8:30-4:30, no matter how many classes I happen to have that day, except for Thursday when I go to the elementary school up the street.

There are about 850 kids in my home-base school, and over the course of two weeks, I am scheduled to see them all (this rarely happens, as there is usually a schedule change, a class gets pulled, or something else happens). I usually have three 45 minute classes per day, as well as both a middle school and an elementary school teacher workshop each week. I go to a second middle school every Friday, and I see all ~30 kids there every week.

At my regular school, I can basically do what ever I want. I have three different grade levels, but there is such a wide range of ability within those classes (and I see them so rarely) that I usually plan one basic lesson and differentiate slightly based on the ability level of the students. My classes at this school are between 29-36 students each.

For a while this year, I have struggled with figuring out what my role here really is. What I have settled on for now is that my class is a time for students to hear English spoken by someone who grew up speaking it, realize that using English can be fun, and to practice speaking as much as possible. Those are really the only things I can give to my students that they don't get in their regular classes. So I play a lot of games, review and introduce some vocabulary, and try to be as engaging as possible. Also, this makes management a million times easier for me, since they know that if they are obnoxious it just takes longer to get to the game. Oh, and I use intermittent reinforcement with candy to buy their cooperation (though they will compete against each other even without the bribe most of the time).

At the country school, I have been asked by the teacher I work with to teach from the text. I can add additional activities, but still, the lesson from the book needs to be completed. There are weeks when I can do whatever I want, and with these classes it is a ton of fun. I LOVE coming to this school! The classes are tiny (about 10 kids/class) and the kids are awesome.

The ability level of the teachers in my two workshops are pretty dramatically different. The middle school group is pretty high, and so I use "modeling" of more interactive teaching techniques as a way to review basics, and have had some great conversations with this group. My elementary school group has one person with very strong English skills and two who are either intimidated by the older woman or who have a more difficult time with English - probably a bit of both. This is the group that is teaching me how to curse and how to tell old men to leave me alone.

I have an English Lab to teach out of, but the monitor for the video/computer project part is broken. In Korea, the students stay in their homeroom and the teachers move from classroom to classroom for most subjects.

Teachers have work areas in a couple of different rooms in the school based on if they have a homeroom or not. I am in the main teacher's room, and have been told that it is a lot less fun then being in the grade-level homeroom teacher rooms, as it is a lot less social and the vice principal is in there.

Classes are 45 minutes long, and there is a 10 minute break between each. Students get about an hour for lunch/playtime. Also, the students are responsible for cleaning the school. Imagine how well a 14 year old would clean a bathroom, and you have an idea of the cleanliness of the school.

I probably should update some of this with pictures at some point...

ramblings

I was talking to a friend the other night about what he missed about teaching here. In addition to the basics - missing friends and food and the ease of planning on lesson every couple of weeks, he mentioned missing being removed from the drama and politics of being in a school.

Because of language, I'm immune to all of the nit-picking and bickering, gossip and criticisms that tend to go along with working in schools everywhere. I don't have to worry about grades or being held responsible for student performance on standardized tests, or what the teacher down the hall thinks of my management style, or who so-and-so is dating. I smile, show up, and have fun with my students.

But often I find myself really missing the community that goes along with teaching in a school. I look at some of the teachers, and try to figure out who I would have been friends with if I was able to actually communicate other than the most basic of pleasantries. I think I would have been able to hang out with the Korean teacher who tries to teach me both basic words and interjections, and who gave me some sort of powder to use as a mask/scrub (which is AWESOME, by the way - it might get its own post). I also would have liked to get to know the quite teacher who asks about my knitting every once in a while, or the one who always makes sure I know where to go for anything we do as a group. There is the teacher who is a little scary, but spikes better than almost every other teacher in the school (men included) and the secretary at the country school I go to who makes me rosette pins or hair ornaments. The PE teacher who will have to leave for the army soon and who break dances between plays during volleyball games, the soccer coach who drinks protein shakes and lifts weights, or the teacher who is a mother of twins and who is more competitive and has more fun playing volleyball than anyone else on the court.

Of course, I don't mind at all that I'm fairly insulated from the corporal punishment, or the backstabbing or any of the hugely long list of things that suck about being in a school here. I guess I just wonder what it would be like if I really could communicate. I mean, even if I get to the point where my Korean isn't just at a survival level, having a real, in-depth conversation might be beyond me. And while I feel like I'm starting to have a community of friends both in the general area (Suncheon, Yeosu) and within my immediate living area (Gwangyang), it is different than what I am used to from being in a regular school environment. Even as an outsider in New Orleans and in New Mexico, I was still a part of the school community. Now? I don't really know what I am. The teachers love that I eat in the cafeteria and that I play volleyball, that I'm nice and say hello and try to use some of the little Korean I know, and they notice that the kids like me and that I'm nice to them. I'm kind of like a mascot in many ways - the tall, friendly, smiling foreigner with strange eyes. Like a puppy.

Love from home

I am so, so spoiled!!

The package (which contains a winter coat!!) from my parents that has been taking FOREVER to get here got here! There are things I have knit, and pretty yarn. I'm quite exacted. * ETA: Nope - Santa!!

Also, my sister sent a present! I can't wait to get home to open it. I'll either need a taxi or a ride home today, as the two together are too heavy and awkward to carry home* on my own!! Woo!

*My walk to/from school is about 15 minutes most days. Home is all uphill.

ETA: I got a ride home, and I've been in shock since I've opened the boxes.

I really am without words right now. That in and of itself is shocking, I'm sure.

Thank you. I really am so deeply grateful that so many people are (and have been) thinking of me. I'm actually crying - in a good way - right now.

working

I'm actually trying to work and be creative this afternoon, but I just wanted to take a moment to comment about how easy it is to turn a drinking game into an EFL game.

Um, hi Mom. I mean, not that I have ever played a drinking game or anything like that. I'm just saying. I've heard.

Anyway, moving on.

Kokkiri Bawi and Mokpo pictures

Kokkiri Bawi



From the base of the climb.




I like these pictures because you can see the water and the farmland and sky.

The sun was kind of in and out all day, and so while up there, it wasn't too bad. However, at one point I was wearing almost every shirt, pair of pants, and jacket I had with me. That would be a hood up over a hat with earflaps and 3-4 layers. Cold.

In Mokpo on Saturday night. The street is lines with these lights.

updates

Hey, I'm playing with the template of this blog a bit, and added a bunch of links to people in Korea. If I added you and you don't want it linked for some reason, please let me know. Also, if I SHOULD have you linked and don't, let me know that, too.

The concise version:

This weekend, Mokpo. Good food, good friends, rock climbing (at which I am really bad, but enjoy). In pain, but in that good way that says you tried hard, so it is okay that you got your ass handed to you (at least that's how I'm looking at it).



The more verbose version:
This weekend I went to Mokpo, a town on the opposite side of Korea (on the coast on the China side, whereas I'm on the Japan side) to go rock climbing and hang out with friends.

Saturday afternoon was made up of meeting new people, chai, coffee, talking, the vegetarian buffet (that was almost wipped out by the time we got there but still pretty darn good) and hottok from a street vendor that was WONDERFUL (of course, I'm not sure how you can screw up fried dough with brown sugar and nuts...) and the night was spent at a good friend's apartment with girl talk, homemade banana bread and cheesy movies.

Sunday morning, the best breakfast I've had in months. Seriously. Massive amounts of coffee (for the Canadians, my first experience with Tim Horton's), pancakes, fruit, maple syrup, deliciousness. My friend Sloane is wonderful and amazing.

It was cold but looked like the sun would be out, so we climbed outside. I suck, my fingertips are scraped raw, I fell a bunch, and my entire body hurts right now, but it was a good time. I didn't complete the route - I just couldn't see anything, and what I did see I couldn't make myself do at the end. Back on the ground, I almost couldn't open my nalgene bottle. I was done in. But I tried and I'm learning, so there's that. I think there are pictures, so once I re-charge the batteries, I'll upload what came out.

bullet

* People usually giggle at me when I speak Korean. I ask why, and they say I sound "cute." When I ask what they mean by cute, I only get that my pronounciation is good. Whatever.
* The women in my elementary workshop are great for teaching me how to curse/tell off rude men. "nappun namja"=bad man, and "byeontae"=pervert - but in a really bad way. According to outspoken adjuma in my class, I should use nappun namja for the average run-of-the-mill pervert (like the creepy taxi driver who remembered me from driving me before and scratched the inside of my palm when he wanted to shake my hand yesterday. yuck. They wouldn't tell me exactly what that meant, only that it was very rude and rather sexual.)"shipal byeontae"= the big guns. Shipal is a catch-all curse word, and can mean everything from "damn" on up, and is REALLY rude to use.
* I am going to head to Mokpo to go rock climbing this weekend!
* At this moment, I want a plate of biscuts and gravy with a side of hashbrowns. A lot. Like, way lots.

Verbosity

Yesterday was a happy mail day. One of the packages I've been waiting for showed up (thank you again, Mom! The teachers at my school believe you to be highly concerned about my nutrition - and with the horror of the cafeteria the past few weeks, you should be) and one was totally out of the blue and a wonderful surprise from Dave and Shannon. Between cereals and chocolate, all bases are covered - I can find the diet coke here to complete the trifecta, and I think the combination of the three might be the most perfect thing ever. EVER.

Thank you all so much. I really do appreciate that folks are thinking about me, and it was so wonderful to feel loved.

Also, I was able to figure out how to pay my bills. I know that sounds silly, but being able to do a basic transaction like that on my own (without an interpreter or someone telling me what to do every step of the way) was huge. Here, you have to go to the correct bank in order to have the money transferred to the account for the given company. Some banks will process payments for all the utilities, for others you have to go to the right bank. After some hit and miss, I found the place that would let me pay for everything all at once. Go me - being able to take care of life skills independently.

Today I found out that the South Korea Apple store has an English-speaking customer service rep. And they will accept bank transfers for payment. This is huge, and a little dangerous, as I was able to send money from my bank account here to a bank in Seoul and in 3-5 days will have a new toy on my doorstep. And there was much rejoicing.

I went out to dinner with the folks from my elementary teacher's workshop tonight after class, and it was incredibly good. I think the main reason I'm down on Korean food right now is that most of the Korean food I eat is cafeteria food. And the only good cafeteria food I've had was at the country school I go to most Fridays (which usually is VERY good, and when it isn't, it makes me sad). But tonight, there wasn't a single tentacle on the whole table! (Let's not talk about lunch, which was tentacle surprise. Again.)

stream of consciouness

* I really want cookies right now. Or rather, cookie dough.
* The delicious udon noodle bowl I had for dinner last night either had an enormous amount of MSG or an enormous amount of sodium or both, because I've had a wicked headache all day. Which is sad because the noodles weren't fried, it was cheap, it was low-cal, and it really was pretty tasty.
* The word "mitten" is very close to the Korean word for "crazy." Also, many of the students wearing mittens in class are a little michin.
* The heat is on!! The teacher's room is warm enough that I don't need to wear my coat at my desk! In my classroom I still need it, but I can no longer see my breath in there.
* I have no classes at all tomorrow or Friday due to exams. I'm not sure if I have the two third grade classes on on my schedule for Thursday. I still need to be here all day.
* I'm making up an ESL version of the game Apples to Apples. I tested it with my supplemental class this morning, and they LOVED it. One of the girls with the lowest levels of English in the class was so incredibly clever in her choices, and argued for them really well.
* I'm having a really good time with my classes, once I get them hooked in to whatever we are doing.
* I am wearing a sweater I knit myself today.

cold

In terms of being winter, the outside temperature isn't that bad - right now, it is about 40 degrees f.

However...

The heat isn't on in my school. I could see my breath in the hallway on my way to class this morning. But the teacher's room was finially at least tolerable, and since half my classes were pulled due to exams later this week, it wasn't too horrible. Until the kids came in to clean and opened ALL THE WINDOWS.

I am so cold i can hardly stand it.

I am going to go home and turn on the ondol heat (mmm - heated floors)and force myself to go to the gym before i settle in too much and refuse to go back outside.

Weekend randomness

1. There were snow fluries today. SNOW. It's cold. I understand that I sound like a big whiner when lots of people have had inches of ice and snow and all that, but still, cold. This is like the New Orleans kind of cold where it seems much worse than the temperature actually indicates. Don't like it one bit.

2. The foreigner community in Gwangyang is pretty amazing. Very open, accepting, and while somtimes difficult to get ahold of, inclusive. I've really liked getting to know the handful of folks I've met here so far. This seems to be something that is pretty similar in the smaller towns - while sometimes it can be hard to find people, once you do, they are very welcoming. I've heard that the bigger cities can be different, but from what I've seen here, I feel very lucky.

3. This weekend, I saw a movie in a theatre (!!) in English (!!!)- The Devil Wears Prada - for free because a friend was able to get tickets to the "Art Center" on Jechul (where the Steel company POSCO is located). Also, after some directional mishaps in going to meet people at a rugby game, went to the Outback here for the first time. They had sour cream. And steak. And brown bread. It was delicious.