Oh Our Students!

In many ways, our students are the same as students everywhere else. You have the super smart ones, the obnoxious ones, the slow but persistent ones, the cute ones, the mean ones, the shy ones, the energetic ones, and the dramatic/emotional ones. But our students at Chungdahm definitely have some characteristics that you won't find in classrooms back in states. There is a marked difference between the elementary kids we teach and our middle/high school students. Lets start with the elementary rascals first...
First off, Leslie and I are not referred to by our actual names. We are known simply as "teacher" or if they want to get fancy and are referring to us in the third person: "Ian-teacher" and "Leslie-teacher." Although a few of my slow students still think the upper-case "I" in my name is actually a lower-case "l" and call me "Lan-teacher."
Second, elementary kids here (both boys and girls) are fixated by death, computer games, and thievery and it seems as though all our classroom discussions somehow weave their way towards one of these topics.
Third, Korean children love to speak their mind and find no shame in saying what they think, without any intention of verbal harm or praise. I have been called: fat, bald, crazy, sexy, boring, not funny, poor, trans-gendered, ugly, handsome, and nearly everything in between. None of these are really meant respectfully or disrespectfully, but either as the crux of a good natured joke or simple objective observation.
Fourth, little Korean kids love the word "crazy" and will burst into laughter at nearly every mention of it, no matter the context. Korean students have a great sense of humor, especially when it comes to slap-stick type stuff, like me falling town and pretending to hurt myself, or talking and acting like a woman.
Fifth, a lot of kids love to give their teacher part of their snack at break time. For the first few weeks of class I foolishly accepted and ate the generous gifts, against the advice of Leslie and some of my more seasoned colleagues. However, after a garlic bread incident that nearly had me blowing chunks into the first row of students I learned to accept only packaged foods.
Lastly, most of our students are very well behaved and have a great attitude in class, especially considering that they are in some kind of school for at least 10 hours a day! They work very hard and are extremely smart, perhaps a little too smart. Some of my students don't play sports or exercise, and thus have no idea how to catch. I learned this lesson the hard way when I tossed a marker to a student that went straight through his outstretched hands and slammed into his face. Oops!

Now the middle/high school kids are a different breed. Some of them are either to cool for school, too tired from their intense schooling, or are too self-conscious to participate. However, others are very talkative and have a great sense of humor. They love simple things like fart jokes, but also more creative humor. Some also refer to us by our actual names.
The biggest challenge the older students face in our classes is having to interact with the opposite sex. In my classes, boys and girls will sit on opposite sides of the room and would rather go skydiving over the DMZ than suffer the unbearable agony of working with the other gender on a project. Many times I relent and let boys and girls work in unisex groups (Leslie is better than me with this), just to spare myself the hassle and utter despair that befalls the class when boys and girls are forced to interact. Sometimes they won't even say a word to each other. Leslie and I still aren't sure why this is, since most of the younger kids work perfectly well with the opposite sex.

Next week our students take what is called a 'Level-up Test", which basically determines if they can advance on the next of the 16 levels at our institute. We are hoping that our students do well. Wish us luck and we miss you all!

New Blog Post Coming Soon...

The past week has been filled up with work, work, and more work. While this is great for the bank accounts, it leaves us with nothing to update you with. So, we uploaded a few photos and hope to have a blog post up within the next week. Sorry for the delay but we hope you enjoy the photos!

You Know You're In Korea When...

1. When you read a sign that's completely in English and you still have absolutely not idea what it's saying.

2. When every meal cooked at your apartment consists of one, if not all of the following ingredients: peanut butter, noodles, eggs, and milk.

3. When moving your couch two feet to the left creates an entire new room in your apartment.

4. When an 80-year-old woman elbows you in the kidneys just so she can relish in the pleasure of being the first person off the bus.

5. When words like "intefrity" are a perfectly legitimate part of the English vocabulary.

6. When "traffic laws" are created solely for drug control and not motor vehicle safety.

7. When you go to buy a fancy beer for dinner and return with a can of Budweiser.

8. When 85% of all restaurants sell basically the exact same thing.

9. When you believe you are biting into a scrumptious chocolate filled pastry only to be fooled yet again, as the inside is actually stuffed with red bean paste.

10. When Leslie is the only woman over the age of 15 wearing tenni-runners.

11. When the white Anglo-Saxon Christian guy ALWAYS stands out.

12. When you begin to notice the innumerable subtleties found within the smell of rotting garbage.

13. When there is a mandatory law to re-wallpaper every apartment, but no law what-so-ever for the installation of smoke detectors.

14. When absolutely everything can be delivered to your home.

15. When your job demands professional expertise in the arts of pictionary and charades.

Chu-Suk

Fall has finally arrived and fortunately the cooler weather has arrived too. We were getting extremely tired of the heat, humidity and mosquitoes. However, we have been told to enjoy these few weeks of Fall weather because Winter apparently hits hard and quick here.
Fortunately, Korea recently had its Thanksgiving holiday called Chu-Suk, which meant that we got the entire weekend off! Yes, we got an entire Saturday AND Sunday off. While that seems like a very short holiday to most, to us it was unbelievably amazing and seemingly long. Since the big city wears on us a bit, we decided our holiday vacation would be spent venturing outside of Seoul.
Since most of the two-way train tickets out of Seoul were booked we decided to try our luck with riding a bus. After reading through our Lonely Planet Korea, Ian decided we would attempt the hour and fifteen minute bus ride to the town of Chuncheon. So, in the morning we made ourselves a tasty lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, two cookies and two apples. Excited and a bit nervous we set out on our adventure!
In order to get to the bus station, we had to take a bus ride and then a thirty minute subway ride. We actually found the bus station with considerable ease and were able to buy our tickets without any trouble. Spending only 9,000 won for the bus ride was a little disconcerting at first, but to our surprise it was clean and the seats were very comfortable!
Driving to Chuncheon was extremely relaxing. Korea’s landscape consists mostly of very densely forested mountains. The trees almost look like a mixture of pine trees and oak trees. The mountains aren’t huge, but are relatively big. The foliage is so dense that hiking within these mountains seems impossible.
After an hour and fifteen minute bus ride we finally arrived! Our first stop was to the Tourist Office. The employee knew a small amount of English and was able to give us a Korean map of the city. We eventually took a public bus and a taxi (definitely got a bit lost) to one of the four lakes that surround the city. Fortunately, there was a walking path around the lake, so we took full advantage of it.
After walking along the lake and seeing parts of the city, we decided it was time to make our way back into the depths of Seoul. Since getting to Chuncheon was so easy, we figured that getting out of Chuncheon would be just as easy! We learned very quickly that was not going to be the case. We asked the ticket office employee for two tickets back to Seoul. She proceeded to tell us something in Korean and then gave us two tickets for the total price of 3,400 Won. Remember that we were a little concerned only paying 9,000 won to get to Chuncheon. Paying half of this amount made us even more concerned. So, we immediately thought she gave us the wrong tickets causing us to ask one more time “Does this take us to SEOUL?” Again, she rattled something off in Korea and motioned us to get out of the way for the other customers. In a mild panic, we decided to ask the employee at the Tourist Office. We very slowly asked if these tickets would actually take us all the way to Seoul. She also nodded her head and said in broken English to take bus 3.
Before getting on bus 3 we saw a sign above the bus that said “Seoul” but it also had two other destinations below it. We were immediately relieved and thought “Of course! This bus must stop two other places and then proceed to Seoul. It must just take longer.” We were then very pleased that we only spent 3,400 Won to get back to Seoul.
While getting comfortable in the bus and enjoying the scenery Ian and I relished in the fact that we were able to get to and from Chuncheon with very little hassle and spending very little money. Boy, were we wrong! After fifteen minutes of driving the bus abruptly stopped on the side of the rode and the driver proceeded to yell something in Korean towards our direction. He then opened the door and pointed outside. In a panic, we got up and showed him our tickets. At this point other Korean tourists are yelling in Korean to get off the bus, and to tell us that our 3,400 won tickets are only going to take us this far. We attempt to give the bus driver more money, but he shakes his head and points to the door.
So, we were left on the side of the rode near the outskirts of a town we didn’t know the name of or where it was. Fortunately, I saw a sign that said Station, so we made our way there. We were able to find a train station, which had two available seats for a train that left in an hour. Relief finally set in again and we walked around the town. To our amazement the town was very quaint and had delicious dakgalbi (a Korean mixture of fried vegetables and a spicy red pepper sauce). We then sat out in front of a convenience store, had some drinks and people watched.
Surprisingly, the best part of our entire adventure started after getting kicked off the bus. Enjoying our dakgalbi, drinks, and people watching was definitely not part of the plan, but was well worth the mild panicy feelings! While our trip didn’t go as planned, we found a new town that we will definitely be visiting again and have learned that when you think you’re getting a great deal you’re either going to be kick off the bus early or going somewhere not expected.

Healthy Korea

Well, we're almost at the three month mark and we are enjoying Korea more and more. It was definitely a difficult transition at first, but we are starting to find our rhythm and settle nicely into the pace of life here. This "settling" hasn't always been easy, greatly due to our new environment, and equally as much to the cultural divide. We would like to highlight for you one example of this cultural difference, so that you can get a glimpse of the"Korean mentality." This example mostly highlights some negative aspects of Korean culture (there are many positive ones that we hope be come forth in other posts) and definitely does it share of generalizing, as any reflexion on an entire nation will tend to do. But we still think it paints a relatively good picture, so here it goes!

In short, Koreans seem to continually obsess about their health, and the H1N1 swine flu virus has only amplified this obsession. While swine flu, at least so far, has not shown itself to be more virulent that other forms of flu, Korea has gone berserk in an overblown, illogical, hypocritical, hopeless and at time racist effort to prevent its spread.

When we first arrived in early July, our temperature was taken as soon as we disembarked the plane. I'm not sure what would have happened if we had a fever, but thank God we didn't. We were then technically "quarantined" in our hotel for 4 days, which simply went that we were forced to take our own temperature twice a day, and email it to Chungdahm (our employer). After quarantine we went to training and were forced to wear masks all day while we studied and practiced teaching, and had to sanitize our hands every hour. We also had to take lunch in shifts and could not use the stairs, so as to not infect the other occupants in the building. Now, while we teach we have to sanitize our students' hands three times a class, and also have to take their temperatures.

Oh, and did I mention that every foreigner that came to Korea during the summer had to go through some kind of quarantine, but any Korean who came home after traveling abroad for any period of time was quarantine free!

Also, for being a highly developed country with a health obsession, Korea's general population still has many backwards views on disease prevention. For instance, it is always a gamble whether you will find soap in the bathroom (including at our school), and covering your mouth when you cough or sneeze is definitely an unknown thing here. Further, we've been told by Koreans that you could not possibly catch swine flu in Hawaii because "it is hot there," or in Japan because it is in Asia. The notion here is that foreigners and western nations are more susceptible to this flu. Why?, who knows!

Perhaps the best example of Korea's unique stance on health would have to be "fan death." This episode occurred when a Korean air conditioning company, in a effort to boost sales, paid doctors to go on TV and say that fans kill people because they suck all the air out of a room, thereby slowly suffocating their victims. Some people here believed this, thinking that doctors could not lie to them, and fan sales dropped throughout Korea, or so we've heard. However, this scam was ultimately exposed and thankfully fan sales today are as strong as ever.

We hope this post showed how problems can be addressed over here, and why adapting to this culture has taken both time and a generous serving of patience. Overall, Koreans are a kind and wonderful people, and it is a joy to be around them, especially the younger generations. Just make sure if you come and visit us that you don't have the flu!

Another Slideshow

We've posted another slideshow to go along with this blog post. You just have to click on the slideshow, which will link you to Flickr. Then you need to click on the box that says "17 items" (it's on the right side of the pictures). Enjoy!

Biking, Parties and Musicals...

Fortunately, our boss and her boyfriend have been kind enough to take us under their wings and show us more of Seoul. They have shown us some of their favorite restaurants, bars, and outdoor activities. Since they will be leaving Seoul in February, they are trying to get all of their favorite outdoor activities done soon. So, the four of us ended up biking along the Han river.

The walking/biking route along the Han attracts thousands of Koreans each Summer weekend. There are even bike rental shops along the river, so we were able to rent bikes for 3,ooo Won each. Even though they were crappy bikes (my seat wouldn't raise and Ian's gears wouldn't move), they were cheap! We ended up biking about 14 miles and enjoyed every second of it. It was one of the first moments that we didn't feel completely surrounded by a gigantic city. However, the best part was that the Korean families didn't bring a typical blanket to sit on while enjoying the sun. Rather, they brought camping tents! They put in the effort to set up an entire tent just to get absolutely NO sun rays. Apparently, getting a sun tan is not as popular as it is in the states.

This past week, a couple who works at CDI took their vacation to get married in Hawaii. Since they didn't have a bachelorette/bachelor party, our co-workers decided to throw them one. Ian and the boys first went to a casino. Suprisingly, it is illegal for Koreans to gamble, so it was built just for the foreigners. Ian enjoyed it thoroughly, especially since you get free food and drinks while you're there! After loosing some money, they decided to experience a Korean arcade. Just imagine lots of bright lights, sounds, and some really weird video games, like firefighting and river-rafting games. After the arcade, they went to a couple of bars and ate some street food.

The ladies (myself and six other women) went to dinner to at a Thai restaurant. It was delicious and suprisingly not too expensive. We then made our way to a couple of bars. I think the bride had fun, which was the most important part.

The following day we went to the play RENT. It was the actual broadway cast, which was exciting. Ian and I really enjoyed just sitting and listening to people talk/sing English for an entire two and half hours. We felt right at home! The only aspect that brought us immediately back to reality was that Koreans get REALLY into broadway musicals. They basically act like they are at a concert. The audience clapped during most of the songs, screamed like little girls when the band started to play, and the front row even had RENT posters. It was definately something we were not expecting. But as we have now learned, you should never have set expectations in Korea because they will most likely always be different or the opposite from what actually happens! Korea has definately suprised us at times, from tents in a park to hooting and hollaring during a broadway show.