August 29, 2009
The second year!
Ah, yes, here we are… my biyearly apology post.
Anyways, today begins my second year in Korea. I decided to stay another year for several different reasons, which there isn’t much use going over, because it’s all be settled! So.
My first year was, overall, an enjoyable success. No regrets that I came.
I’ve been working on setting some goals for myself, but since many of them are a little boring (you folks probably, honestly, do not care about how I would prefer to structure my classes), I won’t dwell on them.
There will be some changes in the upcoming year. Come Tuesday, I will be getting a new principal at my school. My last one was a nicer guy, who let me choose my own vacation and camp days, so I’m a little concerned I won’t get the same liberty with the new principal (who is also supposed to be very ‘active’, which means making us work harder arrrrgh). Hopefully it all goes well! Come March, my super nice co-teacher will leave, too, and I don’t know what will happen after that! I may get a new one, or I may be teaching on my own. That, I think, will honestly be a little disastrous.
As for my travel plans…
Around Christmas, I’m planning an Asian tour with my pal Andy. We’re hoping to hit Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand! This is one of my concerns with the new principal, as I can’t request the time off until she’s decided our schedule and I find out if I can pick my own vacation days or not. HOWEVER I am maintaining ~positive thinking~ about it. I think the trip will be fantastic.
There’s a Korean holiday, Chuseok, coming up in October. Last year it was on a Monday (it’s a lunar calender holiday) and we got the whole week off.
This year, it’s on a Saturday, and we get the following Monday off. I was planning on going to Taiwan. I don’t think that will be happening. 
All in all, it’s looking like a DISMAL semester for travel. I’m going to be broken-hearted if spring semester looks to be the same, because one reason I stayed was to get more traveling done in Asia.
The place top of my list to visit is Japan, because I must get over there to get the tour from Andy before he leaves in July. My parents are visiting in May, so I may be scrounging for time. Bleah. But! I maintain ~positive thoughts~! It’s still early, I’m sure I will have time to see plenty of Asia.
I’m really hoping this year is going to be awesome, because I already have some big events I’m missing, namely Grant’s graduation from bootcamp in October, a wedding, and a baby. Geez.
So it’s about 365 days until I’m done here. It seems like a long time, but I think it will go by surprisingly fast. I hope to have something nice to update about soon, but I don’t have any trips planned, so maybe it will have to be something nice about Yeoju. Soon the rice fields will be turning gold and it’ll be beautiful.
I hope everyone is having a good time at home!
May 26, 2009
a small little update, that’s all.
Not my promised picutre-heavy recap of my Sokcho adventures, but I thought I’d address a few things relating to South Korea, for those interested.
1) http://underquarantine.tumblr.com/ : Some English teachers down south, near Busan, were recently put in quarantine because one of them was suspected of having swine flu. One of the teachers has started up a blog of their “adventures” (their greatest foe is boredom). But it’s interesting to note that the Korean government isn’t being honest about the amount of teachers (there’s actually more quarantined than the 15 being reported) and the quality of their treatment seems to declining.
I bring this up because yesterday my principal made me pinky promise not to get swine flu when I come home in July. I do plan on being particularly cautious (I would feel terrible if I brought it back with me and infected the little kids), but I’m not too worried- by that time it’ll be mid-summer, insanely hot, and hopefully calmed down a little more. But I will probably avoiding sick people.
2) Re: North Korea’s nuclear experimentation. I don’t want anyone freaking out, everything is really fine. It seems to mostly be another ploy for attention. The real victims of the situation, as usual, are the regular North Koreans.
3) I’ll be visiting home in July. I have decided to renew my contract for another year, although it’s not signed yet, so I’ll be spending a few weeks of summer break at home. 
My dates will be July 18th through August 4th.
4) Mmm, I think that may be it. I hope everyone back home had a nice Memorial Day weekend… sadly, not a holiday celebrated here, so it was a regular workday.
<3
May 10, 2009
This might be what they call “Too Many Pictures”
Warning: lots of images ahead!
I thought my blog could serve as an educational tool, too. So I decided to write up a little entry.
“How to Rekindle Love for Korea”
Step One: Have a nice 3 or 4 day weekend thanks to convenient holidays, like Buddha’s birthday (May 3rd) and Children’s Day (May 5th).
Step Two: Choose a location. Samcheok and Sokcho are both nice seaside cities with lots of attractions, particularly of the natural type. Total travel time via bus was about four hours.
Step Three: Use the buses. Nice, clean, cheap, and direct. Enjoy the scenery. The Korean mountains on the way to Gangnung are marvy. Too bad the cherry blossoms are fading.
Yeah, that's right, I take pictures out of bus windows.
The cherry blossoms, sadly, are not so pretty now.
MORE MOUNTAINS!
Step Four: Arrive at your destination! Samcheok is a popular seaside town with lots to do. It advertises itself as the “cave city” of Korea due to its huge limestone caves. I recommend grabbing a hotel first so you aren’t hauling bags everywhere.
Step Five: Choose a strange local tourist gig. For example, the cave museum in Samcheok. Which… happens to be shaped like a gigantic cake. Okay! It’s a nice place to walk through, but there’s little English, so we were left with laughing at the strange mannequins and watching the IMAX movie (The World of Fantasy: Caves).
It's a cave museum! Isn't it obvious?
A giant cake and a giant globe. What more do you need?
Tinkerbell lives in the Korean cave system, didn't you know?
These also live in the caves. Dear god.
Step Six: Go to a … unique local park featuring phalluses. Local legend has it that at Haesindang Park, a young woman died in the sea a virgin and was really, really mad about that. She messed with their fishing until the village people starting putting up large phallic totems, which appeased her.
I’m going to spare you the photos of the, uh, phallic statues. I don’t think my image host would let me keep the photos up, anyways. The coastline at the park was beautiful!
The shrine to the perished maiden.
The large rocks on the beach.
Step Seven: Bus back to town from the distant park. Catch a cab and go for sashimi! Actually, order a nice set of everything on the menu (for 4 people) so you get a taste of all the seafood deliciousness. Explaining each dish would take too long, so just look at the pictures. The vast majority of it was very, very delicious.
Part of the first round.
Still round one.
Probably my least favorite dish, because of the seasoning of the crab.
Round two! The majority of this dish, sadly, was not so good.
The main dish, sashimi. SOOOO GOOOOD.
The final course, fish bone soup.
The true end to any Korean meal: rice!
As a special reward, have a video! We got octopus tentacles that were still moving. They didn’t taste any different, though, so it wasn’t a big deal. There were also some sea anemones, which I ate, too, and they were just bland and chewy. Later, we realized they were also moving.
Step Eight: Sleep.
Step Nine: Get up and go to the actual cave! Oh, BTW, surprise! There’s a 35 minute uphill (STEEP) climb with lots of stairs! Have fun!
More bus pictures! Very rural Korea. Gorgeous.
I don't know... my guess, obviously, is a temple of some sort.
A view outside the cave.
A waterfall outside the cave. "Fairy Falls"
Inside the cave.
Fences? Railings? Nooo, it looks safe to me!
There was nothing under that grate. NOTHING.
Oh, yeah, the picture of the grate. That grate was all that was between me and a black bottomless pit of terror and horror. I should not have looked down until I was off the bridge. 
Step Ten: Bus home, then bus to your second destination (Sokcho)! But this is going to wait for another entry, so check back later. I hope to have it up in the next few days (editting and resizing these pictures takes awhile!).
April 29, 2009
It’s like rising from the dead. Except it’s my birthday.
My apologies for a lack of posting. I was merely caught up in… other things. Yeah. That’s right. Other… important things. So! Onwards!
Okay, let’s get this blog restarted in style!
Mmmm cake!
Mmmm makkoli
Mmmmmm blueberry cake
December 19, 2008
An animal-ific two days.
Well, the kids here at my school certainly love their animals.
Yesterday, one of the fifth grade girls, Dayoung, found a baby rabbit in the school yard. They managed to catch it. (And insist on showing me while I was in the middle of brushing my teeth.) So now the fifth graders have a pet rabbit! Apparently, however, they know where it came from… I guess they just aren’t going to give it back! I hope the poor thing survives… I don’t think we leave the heat on in the school at night. Guess we’ll find out!
I guess the sixth-graders didn’t like the fifth-graders getting a pet, however. Today, when I went with my co-teacher to class, they had a dog in there. Not just a dog, a puppy! They stuck him in a box and tried to hide him behind the heater, and then tried putting a basket on his head. Too bad, I saw it, and called them out on it, and my co-teacher made them remove it from the classroom. Poor dog, he was obviously terrified. Later, one of the boys (I assume his owner) asked me if he could bring it back in for our discretion class, but I decided it probably wouldn’t be acceptable. It was a pretty cute puppy, too!
Tomorrow, Alicia comes! It’s the start of two weeks of MADNESS around here. Alicia stays for a week, then the day she leaves, my friend Andy (who is teaching in Japan, and his blog is linked at the side) comes for a few days, and then two days later I fly out to Hong Kong, and then my parents will be here for a two days, and then I finally have a weekend break before my one or two week English camp starts. Whew. There won’t be updates during that time, but I hope to have some good posts once I’m settled down again!
I hope everyone has a merry Christmas and a happy new year! I’ll be thinking of you all, and I’m sorry I won’t be able to join the festivities.
December 14, 2008
A Korean Skiing Adventure
Ah, the first semi-exciting thing I’ve done for awhile: teacher retreat! In Korean, it’s very traditional for the teachers at school to go on trips together. It seems there’s usually two a year, at least at my school. Many times, it’s just going mountain climbing or going to another town a night and drinking. My school decided to go skiing!
We went two provinces over to the High1 Resort. It’s Korea’s newest and largest skiing resort, complete with casino and all sorts of shiny, resort stuff. Very first-class. It was about a two hour drive through some beautiful mountain scenery, but I sadly didn’t manage to capture any pictures. I brought my camera, but it was tucked away during the drive over, and I didn’t want to break it when I went skiing. We actually only had a half-day of school! We taught until one o’clock, then the teachers packed up and left.
Several of the teachers, like me, have never been skiing before and didn’t have any gear, so we first had to stop and get that. We rented, of course, and I think our rental guy was friends with our third-grade teacher, so I only had to pay 10,000 won! That’s probably about seven dollars with the current exchange rate. Not too shabby. Then we went to the actual mountain to have a lesson in skiing.
The lesson was, well, probably a very typical ski lesson. For not understanding a single word the instructor said (the other teachers would occasionally translate for me, but I had to mostly figure it out by watching), I didn’t do too shabby! We only practiced on flat land and the very bottom of the one of the hills. I must admit I was feeling quite confident about my skiing skills when the lesson was over, which was about seven o’clock.
Then we ate a special dinner: Korean beef. I guess Korean beef is very expensive: it costs three times more than American beef. I know there is a big controversy in Korea about American beef, but I have to admit I don’t really know what it’s about, other than the Koreans are convinced all our beef has mad cow disease or something. (I’ve heard that the meat the American farmers ship to Korea is far less quality than the meat they give the American market, so that may be part of the dispute.) In any case, it was delicious.
The strangest part was after we ate a bunch of it, the restaurant gave up two plates of raw beef and some dipping sauce. The Koreans ate it, but one of the teachers are my table put most of ours on the grill to cook. They offered me a piece of the raw stuff, so I went ahead and tried it. Hey, when else are you encouraged to eat raw beef? It was actually really tasteless and had an unfortunate texture. It wasn’t anywhere as near as good as the grilled stuff.
Then we went to our sleeping arrangements, which were not as the resort, sadly. Apparently, our rental hook-up was also our sleeping hook-up, as we had strange apartment/hotel rooms for the night. I’m just going to assume it was an empty apartment they happened to own. The female teachers slept in one and the male teachers in another. It was like a big, strange sleepover. In winter, Koreans sleep on the floor, because the heat comes up through the floors (the heated floors are amazing!). So we spead out thick blankets and slept on those. Also, we ate a lot of tangerines. Mmmm.
The next morning, we had Korean breakfast, which was kimchi and a soup with beef and rice which was pretty good. A touch bland, but I like my breakfast food to be bland. Then we went skiing again! That is to say, we went skiing for real! We went back to the resort, got on the ski lift, and went up to the top of the only open beginner hill, named Zeus. All the courses at High1 are named after Greco-Roman gods, for some reasons. The two beginner ones were named Zeus and Jupiter. A little strange, I think, but hey. And “Zeus” written in Korean is pretty funny, too! It’s more like Zee-hoo-suh. They turned a one syllable into three.
So, I figured I could handle a beginner hill. I was pretty good at that two-hour lesson! People complimented me! Maybe I was born to ski, after all! Well, it didn’t quite go according to plan. The ski lift was a lot of fun, but I realized that hill was a lot bigger and longer than I had originally thought. That’s ok! There were lots of other beginners on it! So then we got off. I was with the vice-principal, Ms Lee (our administrative lade) and Kim Jiyung, my neighbor (who, actually, just moved today. ). So Ms Lee and Kim Jiyung took off, and I followed after them, figuring, hey, it can’t be so bad! So I got to the edge of the actual slope and looked down.
But once you’re up, the only way down is to ski! Or snowboard, which was really what about 75% of the people were doing there. Snowboarding looks like a lot of fun, too, plus you fall down a little more naturall than skiing. Anyways. So I pushed off the slope! And went down! At first it was really fun, and I was really good, and I was skiing past everyone! Woo! Then I realized I actually had no control over my skis, and my attempts to gain control were not working too well. I was making an A with my legs! I was pushing the skis into the snow at an angle! Alas, my only option seemed to actually be fall. But I never worked out falling properly, so let’s just say it was a total wipe-out. I had snow all down the inside of my coat and pants. I was lucky not to lost anything. Whew.
Ok, well, there went my arrogance at my skiing ability. After catching my breath, I regathered my courage and got up again. I managed to get aways down, but realized how freaking tired my legs were. Skiing is killer on the knees! So I stopped to rest. And by “stopped”, I mean “wiped out.” This time wasn’t so bad, but still no good. Fortunately, that was my last wipe out. I did manage to survive the rest of the way down, but it was LONG and I was TIRED. It was a lot of fun, but definitely something that needs to be practiced. It was really exhilerating when I was just rushing down the mountain, but there were too many people to be careless. Once down was about all I was up for, and I passed my lift card to one of the other teachers and relaxed and chatted for another hour or so, and then it was time to go home!
We drove back, stopping for lunch in Wonju. We had this interesting stew with beef and regular potatoes. Koreans love sweet potatoes, but I haven’t seem much regular ones, so I was really happy. I love potatoes! Then the waitress cleaned out our serving pot of the large stuff, so only the sauce was left, and we cooked ramen in it. It was better than I expected! Then, once we ate most of that, she cleaned it out again and put bip-bim-bop into the pot. Yum! Bip-bim-bop is a Korean dish which pops up a lot. It’s a rice dish cooked with five different things: rice, kim (delicious thin sheets of dried seaweed [it's the only way I like seaweed!]), and certain vegetables. I like it best when it’s cooked in the remnants of the main course, like this was. It’s like a nice little desert. Only spicy and not sweet at all.
And then we went home! I was dropped off near my apartment in the evening, so I relaxed the rest of the night. Today, however, I’m all sore from skiing. Oh well, it was definitely worth it!
November 27, 2008
Happy Thanksgiving!
Wow, the blog has been quiet for a few weeks. I’m sorry! I just haven’t been doing anything news-worthy lately. Work has been busy, and there haven’t been any opportunities for me to travel. Sadly this will continue up until Christmas time, but I’m sure I can find something to blog about between then and now (maybe an actual post about cute little Yeoju, hm).
I hope everyone back home in the States has a happy Thanksgiving! Obviously, it’s not celebrated over here, but we foreigners plan events together. I have dinners for the next two nights (including DUCK, which is DELICIOUS) and a party on Saturday, so I can’t say it’s a completely boring holiday. It’s sad to be missing the holiday season back home, but I hope everyone enjoys it! Eat lots of turkey and mashed potatoes for me.
November 2, 2008
A Typical School Day
Whew, sorry, I had a super busy week and didn’t get a chance to update. I had orientation, which I may make a short post about mainly because I took some videos and would like to experiment with posting videos in the blog, and last week was our school festival, which was mainly a concert with each class performing a song and a skit. While enjoyable, it’s not really blogging materials, especially because I didn’t get any good pictures.
Because people have been asking, I’ll basically explain what I do all day.
Technically I’m not a full teacher, but only an assistant teacher. There is always supposed to be a normal Korean teacher, either my co-teacher or another, in the classroom with me (which doesn’t always happen).
So every morning I get a ride with another teacher out to our school, which is about 20-25 minutes from our apartments near downtown Yeoju. We usually get there about 8:30AM.
Basically at school I do one of three things:
1) I teach a class. They are 40 minutes long. In some we teach the government curriculum for English, which is a set of unintentionally hilarious book which aren’t really all that good. Otherwise I teach my own stuff, which is mostly learning new words and phrases and then practicing, usually with a fun game.
2) I prep for classes. The curriculum classes require almost no prep, but for my own classes I have to make sure I have flashcards and all my necessary tools prepared.
3) I kill time on the internet. Most days I at least have some time to mess around the computer, because I have no responsibilities except for my own classes (the Korean teachers are always very busy doing paperwork and whatnot, but I don’t have any of that to do). Sometimes I also read, if it’s a particularly boring day.
Unfortunately, I’m not lucky enough to have my own English classroom, as most of my fellow teachers do. All I get is a desk in the teachers’ office:
It’s a small desk with little space and isn’t exactly private. Having my own room would be super nice, because then I could really design an English space for the kids. Instead I have to go to their classrooms, which I think may lessen the effect a little. At orientation, we discussed all sorts of ideas for how to use an English classroom to its best potential, and I’m irritated now that I don’t have one. My school is just too small. They turned our old English room into the computer lab quite awhile ago.
So then I basically stay until 5 and then I ride home with a fellow teacher. I have the weekends off usually (not always) but the Korean teachers work way more. School is in session every other Saturday, but I never have to go then. Any Saturday I have to work, it’s usually a special event and I get paid overtime.
It’s not terribly exciting, but it is enjoyable. If there’s any job related questions, please feel free to ask.
October 19, 2008
Orientation
Hello all, just a quick note that it will be about another week before I post again. This weekend was quie busy, so I didn’t have time to write up a post, and today is a fairly busy day because I don’t have my classes planned, and Tuesday through Friday I have teaching orientation! Seven weeks after I … started teaching! Ok!
So enjoy the week and look for a new post, focusing on my actual job, next weekend.
October 12, 2008
School Fieldtrip!
First, thank you to everyone who has been leaving comments. I’m glad to hear people are enjoying the blog!
http://picasaweb.google.com/vero.tays
