October 19, 2008

Orientation

Posted in Yeoju tagged at 11:59 pm by Veronica

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!

Posted in Seoul tagged , , , , , at 7:11 am by Veronica

First, thank you to everyone who has been leaving comments.  I’m glad to hear people are enjoying the blog!

Second, a reminder about my complete photo collection of Korea:

http://picasaweb.google.com/vero.tays

Third, onto the actual post!  This past Tuesday my entire school, all 70 or so of us, went on a fieldtrip to Seoul.  You guys get to see some pictures of my students!
After arriving at school, we rode in style in a coach bus to Seoul with one restroom break, where the kids really just bought themselves a ton of food.  Chicken nuggets were quite popular.  We first went to the old royal palace from when Korea had a monarchy.  The palace is called Deok Su Gung, and it’s right in the heart of Seoul in the financial district.  It’s actually across the street from City Hall and a few blocks away from the Korean Embassy.
The palace was nice, but it wasn’t quite what I was expecting.  It was more a giant park with a few large, traditional buildings in it, which we weren’t permitted to go into.  The kids ran around screaming for the most part.  Here we are in action:
Some of the fifth grade girls
All the fifth grade boys.
The dramatic curve of the traditional roof marks it an important building.  The larger the curve, the more important it is.  As the royal palace, it has a very steep curve and fancy roof decorations.
The complete kindergarten (who I don’t teach) and the first graders.  They are soooo cute.  Also, fourth graders working on their assignment in the background.
Juyeon, the special ed teacher, the three sixth grade girls, and two of the third grade girls (wearing the red shirts).
Also, here is a picture with me and the Korean teachers I know the best:
Left to right:
Jiyoung, the fifth grade teacher who lives in my building and drives me to school; Hyojun, my Korean co-teacher who speaks great English, me, and then Juyeon, the special ed teacher who’s studying English for graduate school.  They all speak English really well and I can have conversations with them.
Also, Hyojun, Juyeon, and I wandered through an art museum which had an exhibit on old Korean handicrafts, but I couldn’t take pictures, and all the items in the exhibit were actually modern items made using ancient techniques.
We spent a few hours at the park, then boarded the buses for the Korean War Museum.  First we ate lunch out in the pavilion out front.  The kids ate gimbop (it’s rice, raw fish, and veggies all wrapped in seaweed) and plum juice while we teachers got a lunchbox with meat, kimchi, rice, and gimbop.  Gimbop is all right… It’s actually a little bland, I think.  The kids also discovered the gift shop, and promptly bought a bunch of junk.  The store had a few boxes of stuff that was just 1,000 won which was mostly bad practical joke stuff.  The kids loved it, of course.
Then we wandered around the museum.  I ended up being clung to by a group of girls from 4th and 5th grade, with one of the 3rd grade boys, and got dragged around looking at the exhibits.  It was a museum about Korean wars for centuries, but a large focus was on what we Americans call the Korean War, back in the fifties.  I don’t know what the Koreans call it, actually.  It was a nice museum.
We also saw some Korean soldiers practicing a routine out front (they have a big changing of the guard ceremony on Fridays, so it was just rehearsal).  I got a few pictures of them before my camera died.  I should have charged the battery after Andong, but I forgot.  I later got a lot closer to the soldiers, too, but no pictures of those!
AND WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS PERSON?  SHE LOOKS JUST LIKE A KOREAN!
After watching them, and meeting back up with some of the other teachers and students, we found the part of the museum where you can climb over actual tanks and go into some old cargo planes.  The kids went nuts with this stuff, needless to say, and I got dragged around a lot of old equipment.  It was really cool, though, to sit inside an actual tank, even if it was a really old one.
After that, we climbed back on the bus and headed back to school.  Traffic was pretty bad, but we got back before the school day officially ended, so nobody was late for anything.  Whew.
It was an exciting day!  It was really fun to travel with the kids, who were really excited for, well, everything.  And it was cool to see some of the more “tourist-y” things in Seoul.  All my other trips there have been for shopping and visiting friends.
After reading Natalie’s comment, I realize I still haven’t done a blog explaining my job at the school, so I’ll start working on that.  Look for it in a few days, since I’m not going to be going anywhere exciting for a little while.  I also have pictures of my town, Yeoju, so I should have a post up on that soon.

October 6, 2008

Andong’s Maskdance Festival

Posted in Andong tagged , , , , at 1:00 pm by Veronica

First off, I have uploaded ALL of the photos taken in Korea to my google picture account.  Mind you, these are all unedited and some are quite bad in terms of quality.  I didn’t bother spinning a lot of them around, and a lot are blurry, too.  Still, if you want to check them out:

http://picasaweb.google.com/vero.tays

This past weekend was a three day weekend for us foreign teachers, because Friday was a holiday celebrating the mythical creation of Korea. The regular Korean teachers had to teach on Saturday, so they only got one day off. Bummer. While a lot of our fellow teachers decided a three day weekend meant three days of getting drunk in Seoul, we valiant souls (myself, Molly, Robyn, Anna from Seoul and another Seoul teacher, Anne) decided to actually use it productively. So we went to the city of Andong, which was hosting its annual Maskdance Festival (I’m still not sure if it’s supposed to be one word or not). Andong is a more traditional city than Yeoju or Seoul and the mask festival was supposed to be awesome.

So late Friday morning, Robyn, Molly, and I bussed over to Wonju to catch the train to Andong. The bus ride was about 40 minutes and cost 3,000 won (probably about $2.50 since the won has dropped). Then we taxied on over to the train station. Here you can see Robyn and myself waiting with excitement for our train!

The train ride was a little over 2 hours and wasn’t very expensive at all- less than 10,000 won. The scenery was gorgeous. Right now, the rice is almost ready to harvest. It turns a golden color, so the rice fields are awash in green-gold all over Korea. It’s really pretty. I took a few shots out the train:

Excuse the quality, please. It’s hard to take pictures out of a train window.

So we arrived in Andong about 3 PM on Friday. Our first order of business was to find a motel. The information lady helped us a lot and we quickly found “M Motel,” which is actually a hotel, but they don’t differentiate over here. The room we stayed in was for three people, a double bed and a single, and was really nice. It had a big screen television, a computer with free internet, a mini-kitchen which included a single oven burner, and even a bathtub! It was the first bathtub I’ve seen in Korea. The overall price for two nights was 120,000 won, which meant 40,000 won from each of us. Not bad for a really nice hotel room!

Anna and Anne were coming via bus from Seoul and wouldn’t arrive for another few hours, so we headed down to the festival to check it out. It was really cool, but it did feel a bit like a “Korea Fest” would at home. There were tons of little shops selling junk and street food (pork on a stick = very good). We wandered around a little bit and shopped. There was a large stage in the center, and we watch a rehearsal for a traditional drum performance. I took a picture, but it didn’t come out well enough.

We also found the Korean food festival inside the mask festival, so I took a TON of pictures of Korean food that was on display. I really can’t post them in the blog, so here is a link to the gallery I put them in: Here. Enjoy! You will have to look for the pictures that, well, look like food.  That’s my entire Andong folder right there.  I don’t know what most of the food is, sadly, but it looks cool.

After that, we painted our own masks! Most of the stalls were covered with children, but later on in the night it opened up more. Molly and I each painted one. Here is mine!

Then we decided we wanted dinner, so we went to a stall and ordered their pork barbeque. There were about ten large restaurant stalls in a row, all with half of a huge pig slowly turning on a spit.

My picture isn’t very good. Of course we had to order that, and it was totally delicious. Korean meat is the best. I had duck last week, and I thought I was going to DIE it was so good. Anyways.

Then we met Anna and Anne at the bus terminal around 7:30 PM, and we went back to the fest for a little while but didn’t really do anything new. We decided to explore Andong. We ended up at a noraebang (singing room) where we did kareoke for an hour, and then we went to the bathhouse. Soooo nice. I have been converted. Hot tubs and saunas for super cheap!

Then we went to bed. Whew. Anna and Anne found a different motel (ours filled up during the evening). At our motel, we closed all the windows, which had large mirrors on the inside. At night, we couldn’t tell, but those mirrors blocked EVERY speck of light. The end result? We slept until 11:30 AM the next morning, when Anna finally texted me to find out where we were. Oops!

We decided to check out something outside of town, so we went to Dosen Seowon, an ancient Confucian school. It was a forty minute bus trip, but the scenery was absolutely wonderful because of the sea inlets and large islands. The school itself was defunct, of course, but it was very pretty. There wasn’t much to see, since its small and pretty much empty, but i was interesting to learn about some aspects of Korean Confucianism. Here are various pictures from the place:

Anne, Anna, me, by the way.  We’re so Korean!  You can’t even tell we’re American!

We caught a bus back to town and decided to check out the local giant Buddha statue. Anne asked for help for a young Korean guy who spoke English, and the next thing we knew we had a guide. Ok. He got us to the statue, which would have been really hard by ourselves.

It was cool, and, er, very big. What was even cooler was that temples give out free food to all visitors, so these little old ladies fed us noodles and rice cake and fruit (have I mentioned how delicious Asian pears are? Because they are. Amazing.). The noodles were really good, and we got to control the spice level, so I kept mine a little bland. And after that, we had tea with the temple monk! It was really good green tea. He didn’t speak any English, but our guide (whose name I still don’t know) helped us have some sort of conversation with him. It was really cool. I don’t have a picture right now because Anne was the only one who got pictures of tea, but once I do, I will post it.

We taxied back to the festival after that, and enjoyed more shopping and eating. Our guide got us tickets to the 8PM show which was a traditional Korean mask show called Good Morning Mr. Heo. It was … really cool. I think I’ll let the English translation explain to events and pictures to you.

The first act:

“The bride standing on somebody’s shoulder enters the stage.”

The second act:

“Two Juji (lions) dance to the rhythm.”

The third act:

“A butcher catches a bull and uses the ax to remove the heart and testicles.”

The fourth act:

“An old widow works her loom and tells her hard luck story and begs for some money from the audience.”

The fifth act:

“The Bune (flirtatious maiden) urinates and the fallen monk smells it and they run out together.”

The sixth act:

“Choraengi (meddler) calls the aristocrat and scholar and eventually they argue.  Then the butcher returns to try to sell the bull testicles.  The aristocrat and the scholar fight over who will buy them, only to be ridiculed by the old widow.”

It was a little confusing, but still cool to see their play, and it wasn’t too difficult to follow for the most part because there wasn’t actually much talking until the end. It’s a political play, as there’s lots of satire and mocking of the higher, educated classes in it. During the show, our guide’s friend (he called her his “younger sister” but they’re not related) joined us for, well, more food and drink. I was exhausted by this time, so Robyn and I bowed out around 11:30 PM and went back to the hotel.

The next morning we headed home! We got an 8:30 train. Originally we were going to go to Seoul, because we didn’t think there were any early trains to Wonju, but then our train stopped at Wonju so we got off there and went back to Yeoju from Wonju, which cut about two hours off of traveling time. Whew. I spent most of Sunday relaxing because it was a busy weekend, but lots of fun. It was cool to see more traditional aspects of Korea, because Yeoju and Seoul don’t really have much of those (especially Seoul).

This was a long entry, but it was a busy weekend. Expect another entry either tomorrow or Wednesday, because tomorrow is a school field trip to Seoul! We are going to the royal palace and to a museum, so I hope to have pictures up of those cool places and maybe even some of my adorable students. 🙂