Long Overdue update

Yep I'm still here. Its been a while since my last post and I realized that I am have been negligent in my promise to update on signifigant happenenings. Probably because they aren't really all that significant but its all relative right? I'll go through stuff in chronological point form style because thats the easiest way for me to cobble this together and gives the blog all the wonder and mystery of a grocery list (what comes next? I hope its 'bananas'!)

In a UN conference room a S. Korean soldier literally stands on the border of North and South Korea. The aviators make him look tough. The gun helps too.

• Last month I went on the DMZ tour, the De-militarized Zone of course had more armed military than I have seen anywhere else in Korea, perhaps they are using the French 'De'. It is interesting to see a heavily armed border and know that there are severe consequences for walking ten feet in the wrong direction (over the border), but I couldn't quite feel like I was in a Tom Clancy novel as it was fairly touristy. There was an element of tension though, which is quite an interesting thing to experience. South Korea's only neighbour by land is a country very similar to thier own that they have been at war with for over fifty years. You get the idea of how Superman feels when he visits bizarro world.

here the kids are improvising a slide out of a wheelchair ramp, previously they used me as a jungle gym. resourceful bunch.

• Took the kids to the park for a field trip, which is relatively lame as far as field trips go, but they did make a visit to a science center as well. In Canada the science center is run by the government, this one was run by an electronics company called LG. The exhibits were comprable but the corporate product placement did make it seem like LG invented pretty much evrything they were demonstrating (like electricity, DNA and a robot that could draw your picture very sowly). Its never too young to teach these kids about the birds and bees so one of the exhibits was a very detailed crash course on reproduction and heredity. I'm sure our three year old students fully absorbed everything they need to know about XY chromosomes. they followed that presentatoin uyp with a cool machine that will take a male and female and predict what thier baby would look like. Yet another activity that kids ages 3-6 obviously need to experience. One of the pairs was Wendy (age 5) and Denny (age 6), the resulting picture looked older than either of them and exactly like another student in thier class named Valentine next one of the teachers (egged on by the rest) took me into the machine to see what our baby would look like. If that kids face isn't an advertisement for keeping the Korean bloodline pure I don't know what is (its okay to call the kids ugly because it doesn't actually exist).

• I don't have a picture but the biggest actual development is that the school I work for was bought out by another school and my job has changed drastically. I have been moved to a different building while they remodel my old one and starting ext month they will fully integrate the two schools together. For now I mostly just teach kindergarten at my Hagwon, with only two elementary classes there a week (I still teach at an elementary school two afternoons a week). The upshot is that at least for now my hours are drastically cut down (at the same pay) with two days a week where I only have 3.5 hours of class time (down from 6!). the downside is that there are a lot of changes that have been stressing me out and our new boss is very critical. In the end I'm sure it will work out but in the short term its actually a lot tougher. But some changes should be interesting, such as the fact that I now have three classes a week where I will be teaching Musical English, and have been given pretty free rein as to what that entails. This fits perfectly with my plan to get all the kids signing 'the song that doesn't end'

• Climbed a mountain, it was fun. Its the same one Ken climbed with the land mines and stuff. I know its silly but it was kind of scary to even take this pic (wish my camera had better zoom).
  

Recent Pics

A few things I’ve been up to since the last entry.

Firstly Ken and I went to visit the Busan Aquarium three weeks ago, it was a pretty cool place however I didn’t enjoy it as much as I should have since my body started running a fever soon after I got there. Perhaps it was some sort of primal defence mechanism against all the scary sharks? I have no idea so I’ll just assume that is true.

More recently I went on a field trip with the kindergarten kids at my school. We went strawberry picking outside of town. Well kind of. Back when I was a kid strawberry picking was an industrious methodical task. This was more of a ‘lets see how strawberries are grown’ trip where the management dissuaded you from picking too many berries. It was a fun trip though and I got a few pics of some of the kids I teach.

There was a another school there that was tossing rocks at a sad looking dog on the resort. Our kids took a different approach and led by Nick they pet the dog, which turned out to be really friendly. Really really friendly as Mary Ann here discovered.

The Korean guy rushed to her aid I rushed for my camera ad the doggie tried to become special friends with her.

It wasn’t a great shot but luckily she went back to the dog a few minutes later and I managed to snap this one. The reaction on the other kids’ faces is priceless.

These are the kids using hammers to mash wet rice into a paste that I soon had to beg off of eating.

This is a shot of the kids enjoying the fruits of their labors.

These are some members of my youngest class: April, Kari and Sidney. I think Kari wins this round of the "cute off".

This is Luke and Wendy from my smart class. They’re holding hands, but I don’t know if that means anything. I think Luke maybe likes Wendy and she likes him but I think Wendy like likes Valentine (not pictured) more.

And here are all the kids together.

Yesterday Ken and I went to a Baseball game, only $2 admission and you can bring in your own beer and food. Our team was the Lotte Giants, who won 8-2. Fun time and met a bunch of Ken's friends.

Went to the game and next thing I know they draft me.

Then Ken and I hit a Casino downtown. First time in a casino for me. Yeah, yeah I know by this age I should have been to one before but it turns out my intial instincts were right and I’m just not a good gambler. Fun time and when the dust settled I was only down $30. Luckily before we went to the casino I won a Winnie the Pooh doll in a crane game so I consider myself even for the night.

Next week going on a tour of the border’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) with Ken. Should be a fun time.

less updates from now on

I'm deciding on whether or not to continue this blog in a regular fashion. Will probably just update with any major events a few times a month. theres various reasons and you can email me if you want to hear them. But basically I just have other things I need to do.

Me talk pretty one day

The title from this blog comes from a David Sedaris book I read recently that chronicles some of his mishaps in trying to learn French while living in Paris. Even correcting for his self deprecatory humor I know that I have got him beat for linguistic ineptitude.

Learning Korean can be tough. Especially when you don’t put any sort of planned effort into it. It occurred to me that I am now 5 months into my stay in South Korea, almost halfway into my contract and I speak the local language like a very young very slow child. And that is being very generous.

Now anyone will tell you that the best way to learn a language is immersion. It’s a lot like swimming that way. You go to a country where no one speaks English and you have two options:
a) Get everyone to speak your language
b) Figure out the local language

Now I have obviously been failing miserably at the first one, if you look at my students as an example, so I’ve really got to start putting more into the second option. There are some easy things about Korean, especially their alphabet.

The English alphabet is a bit of a mess. Each letter has multiple sounds and there are so many silent ‘e’s and messed up sounds like ‘ph’ and the word ‘colonel’. Hangul is completely phonetic and fairly easy to pick up. Here it is in its entirety:
Of course reading and understanding are two very different things. This has been evident when I’ve ordered things off the menu at restaurants with a decent pronunciation, but was still just spinning the wheel of fate when it came to getting something I would like. When you think you have ordered spicy chicken and you get deep fried chicken patties drowning in a black sauce it sucks to have only yourself to blame.

Now I’ve tried a few different methods for learning this language; video lessons, audio lessons and interactive computer lessons. Nick invited me to take actual lessons with him with an instructor but I turned him down. I have all these modalities already available, I should master them first. Sure there are failings to some of these ‘teach yourself’ methods, but as a language teacher myself I can see that there are problems with any form of instruction.

Of course what I seem to be lacking is some real motivation. This sounds pretty bad but if I’ve been getting by on so little Korean this long there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to finish up my stay here without acquiring any more. I also wonder how useful Korean will be to me in the rest of my life, since I don’t currently plan to return here for a second year. Spending my time watching American television online and listening to English podcasts makes it very easy to avoid soaking up even nominal amounts of Korean.

But then it occurs to me that a darn good reason to learn Korean is that I am here, and so is the language. And there is probably a whole heck of a lot I’m missing out on by not being able to converse with 99% of the people I meet.

So I will resume my efforts to get my Korean to a less embarrassing level. I may even take classes. I suppose I could start turning my television on again from time to time and see if anything starts to click. I remember in my first few months here being very disappointing that I could watch an entire episode of television aimed at two year olds and not pick up a word.

Ahn Chakhee and Ji Seungyeon, the two ladies that have been trying so hard via pirated video to teach me their language. God bless them.

Kinda funny

While walking out of the elementary school today one of my 1st grade students, Maria, caught up with me and walked for a block.

She curiously asked, in a mix of Korean and English, if I was going home to Canada now.

Apparently she thought that's where I went home to every night.

Kids are adorable at any point that I'm not teaching them.

Enough about me...

There have been a lack of updates. For this I apologize. i have plenty of ideas and the same amount of time as ever but just haven't been in the right headspace.
Breakups will do that to you.
this isn't the type of blog where I publicly muse on completely personal issues (although it does unintentionally veer in that direction sometimes) so suffice to say I'll get back to blogging and away from brooding soon enough.
until then, how about you tell me how your day was?

White Day

White Day

It shouldn’t surprise me that there was yet another Korean holiday to celebrate that involves candy. After Pepero Day (chocolate stick day)nothing should surprise me

It would be too much to call this a bonafide holiday, although I’m sure the women of Korea would disagree with me. But they would probably do so in Korean, which is just water off a duck’s back to me lately (you just assume everyone is yelling ‘nice hat’ after a while). The only other country that celebrates this holiday is Japan, and in this place its basically the female equivalent of Valentine’s Day.

On Valentine ’s Day girls give chocolate to boys. One month later on White Day boys give those same girls candies and chocolates (originally marshmallows, hence the name). Moreso than even Valentine ’s Day this day was created and promoted by commercial businesses.

The general rule is that a White Day gift to a girl is supposed to be three times the value of the gift that a man received from a girl on Valentine ’s Day. Which is a pretty solid candy investment for a girl if you think about it. It’s actually a better system than back home for the guys, since we usually have so much trouble on valentines day. This way we already know what to buy, how much to spend and who to give it to- rather than the crapshoot that was 24 He-Man Valentine cards hastily addressed that I remember not getting me any action as a youngster.

Now much like Valentine’s Day there are also smaller candies that are given out to every girl just for the sake of the day. So I picked up a few bags of Hershey kisses to pass out to my female students and fellow teachers, figuring that it might be a good occasion to buy some goodwill. Nick had forgotten all about White Day so I let him have one of my bags of chocolates, since it wouldn’t be fair to have kids in the school feel left out. So with my chocolate supply at half five minutes into the day I didn’t give any to the other teachers, figuring they would take it better than six year olds (who knows a grown woman to keep a grudge?). Now obviously its not a huge deal but both Nick and Patrick gave them treats (wonder where Nick got the chocolate?) so I might be seen as a bit out of touch. Only time will tell.

Now its hard for me to give out chocolate to kids, since I believe that most of them have had plenty enough candy as it is. But I don’t want my personal beliefs on nutrition to one day turn me into some weirdo that gives out toothbrushes on Halloween so I could justify this day. Some of the boys in my classes were a little miffed that they didn’t get any candy- amazing how quickly they forgot about just one month ago when they got candy and the girls didn’t. The school handed out lollipops to everyone so there was some eveness, but the three boys in my youngest class started crying despite my gentle consolations of : ‘tough luck fatty”. So I gave them chocolates too, they seemed more than willing to accept the gender confusion in exchange for some sugar.

I also served to alienate myself a little further from the staff near the end of the day when a bunch of them were sitting around the various cakes, cookies and chocolates brought in by parents and invited me to partake. They all already know me as a ‘picky eater’(which I guess is a step sideways from the ‘health nut’ moniker I had back home) which is a bit of a big deal since food is such a social event here in Korea. Many restaurants only serve one dish with plenty of sides that everyone at the table shares in. The communal sharing of food is essential to the culture and I’m the weirdo foreigner that doesn’t participate. But there doesn’t seem to be any animosity stemming from it, just curiosity at my quirkiness.

Now if White Day was somehow centralized around the exchange of pizza (Dominos take note!) I’m positive that I would have seen nothing wrong with packing away a slice or so ('so' meaning the number 14 here).