The Jones' Korean Adventure

My last class today was a Conversation class. This class has been the bane of my existence. The kids pretty much refuse to speak English, and so much Korean is thrown around that it ends up driving me crazy! I feel like I should change the name from "English Conversation" class to "Come Chat with Your Friends in Korean" class.
Anyways, today I warned the kids right from the get-go that they had 5 chances. I told them that if I heard them speaking Korean, I was going to put a check on the board, and if they got 5 checks, they were going to write me a "sorry" essay.
Of course, they got 5 checks, and so the last 10 minutes of the class was essay time. I thought I'd share some of the writing I got. The subject was: "Why I'm sorry for speaking Korean in Becky's class":

(p.s This is typed exactly as it was written)

Ben said:
"I'm sorry because I said Korean talking in your class and made crazy. We said Korean talking. You gave us five chance but we violated your rules. I tryed but It's very hard. We born country called Korean. So we learned about Korean anything any where. I tryed but Korean were talked unconscious when I don't want too. I'm so sorry. After I do not Korean talking. I will try who I can English".

Paul wrote:
"I go to another contry. in my class student their's language I'm also angree to student. So maybe teacher was angree to us. and I'm disobey to teacher that "please talk English". It is not good acition".

Kiara said:
"I am very sorry for speaking Korean in your class, Beky. I am very sorry. Because I was spoke Korean. I am Korean. So I am Korea speaking. I want don't speaking Korean but I was unconsciousness. Beky, please you understaning about me. I am very stuffy. I am very carefully. But I'm not fixed that. Sorry. Sorry".

Hilarious...what more can I say?

This past Friday, Sam and I joined Saralyn (our fellow teacher), and Joy & Jen (our director's daughters) for a tour of Cheongwadae...also known as the "Blue House". The tour was completely in Korean, so Jen & Joy helped us out by translating the tour guide's information into English.
Cheongwadae is the building complex where the Korean President lives and works. The grounds were absolutely beautiful, and the buildings were pretty spectacular too! Our tour group was made up of us, about 15 older Korean adults, and 80 screaming elementary kids. My favourite moment by far was when one of the security agents who was trying to give us some tour information, pulled two of the kids out of the screaming crowd and made them stand by him. He was upset that they had been screaming and fighting with each other, so he lectured them, and then made them shake hands. The look on the little girl's face was one of pure disgust at the thought of having to touch a boy. They then gave each other the most limp, resistant handshake I have ever seen...hilarious (the security agent actually had to pull her hand out of her coat pocket, and hold it in place for the "handshake")! I couldn't help it, and burst out laughing, which probably made it MUCH worse for them!
Here are some pictures for your viewing pleasure:

I laugh about this now...

As many of you know, I'm the type of person who gets really, really excited about the littlest things. So, when I found out that Korea has a holiday called, "Pepero Day", I was really looking forward to celebrating it! Pepero Day is kind of like Valentine's Day, but with cookies instead of paper valentines. Peperos are chocolate covered cookie sticks, and the kids take them to school and give them to their friends, or boys and girls may give them to that "special someone"...it's great! Fabulous holiday, right?

Pepero Day broke bright and sunny, and it was stacking up to be a great day. Sam and I had gone shopping the night before to get peperos for all our students, so we were prepared! The other teachers at our school had told us that the kids are CRAZY on Pepero Day...on an intense sugar high that lasts forever! They also told us that the teachers get mounds and mounds of peperos.

My first class started, and I handed out my peperos to my kids. They're my favourite class, so I also gave them each a smiley face pencil...just to really get into celebrating mode! They loved the peperos and the pencils, AND they really were on a sugar high...it was extremely hard to get them to sit still and learn anything. I didn't get any peperos that class, but I figured that maybe the little kids didn't give out as many.

That's what I thought until I went back to the teacher's room after class and saw Sam and Saralyn's mound of peperos. Mel and I both didn't have any, so we had a good laugh about being the "bottom feeders" of the school, and not getting any peperos. That joke was pretty funny until I came back from my second class, still with no peperos, and saw Mel with an armful. It's funny to be "A" bottom feeder, if you're stuck there with someone else, but to be "THE" bottom feeder is an entirely different story!

And that's pretty much how the rest of the day went...each class I would hope that I would get my "mother load" of peperos, and each class I'd come back with a smile and a laugh to report that I didn't get any, while the other teachers added their latest peperos to their piles.

The low point of my day happened when a student came in, looked at Sam's desk and commented on how many peperos he had. S he then looked at my desk, and said, "Becky, no peperos?". To which, I laughed and said, "Nope, Sam's winning, haha". She then dug through her bag, and handed me a box of peperos before leaving the teacher room. Receiving PITY peperos brought me to another place altogether :0)

Luckily for me, Sam is extremely generous and has been sharing his drawer full of peperos with me (seriously, we have a drawer in our apartment dedicated to keeping his peperos safe). What have I learned? Shared peperos taste just as sweet! :0)

Sam, with some of his pepero stash.
Here are my kiddies...crazy about those peperos! (p.s. They're not as short as this picture makes it seem...I was actually standing on a chair when I took this)

This Saturday, Sam and I decided to go biking by the Han River in Seoul. It was FREEZING outside, so we bundled up as best as we could before heading out. We found a great trail, and a bike stand that only charged $3 for an hour of biking fun...not bad! Here's a short video:
(Sorry the words don't match the lips...I don't know how to fix it)

A few weeks ago Sam and I had an "arts and crafts" night. We wanted to be artistic and create some masterpieces for our walls (the white wall paper was getting a bit boring). Here's what we came up with:

Every Wednesday, we get taken out for lunch by our director's wife. It's our weekly "meeting", meaning that we talk about classes and students for about 5 minutes, and spend the rest of the time eating delicious Korean foods and chatting about non-school related things.

Today we had sushi! Now, I've known for awhile that this Wednesday's lunch was going to be of the raw variety, and I have to say that I woke up this morning with a sense of dread. I've never had sushi before, and being a real "weird textures gross me out" person, the thought of it has always, quite frankly, turned my stomach.

1:00 rolled around, and we were summoned to the elevator to begin our descent to the 2nd floor sushi joint. Initial impression of the restaurant: cute decor (low tables, sliding doors, etc.) and a delicious fried smell. We sat down at our table and our waitress almost immediatly brought in the first course. Everybody got three pieces of sushi, and one little fried-batter covered ball (still not sure what was in it). The sushi looked like little balls of rice with wasabi sauce on it, covered by a long strip of raw flesh. There was one pink one, and two white ones for each.

Trying to appear brave and confident, I picked up my chopsticks, grabbed my pink piece and tossed it in my mouth. Not bad...different texture, but not the strong fishy taste I was expecting. I swallowed, smiled, and then moved on to piece number two. Piece number two didn't go down so well: chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. No progress. Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. My thoughts: "If I swallow this now, I will choke and die. If I keep chewing this piece I could potentially vomit all over the table". Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. By this time, our director's wife was starting to notice that I wasn't talking, and that I was just continuously chewing with a blank expression (blank because I was trying to win my own mental battle with the fish). That's when the laughing started. Everybody at the table thought it was pretty funny that I COULD NOT, for the life of me, get that piece of sushi down. Five minutes later, I managed to choke the still-rubbery-as-all-get-out piece down my throat. Victory!

I thought that was the end of the raw sushi, until the doors slid open, and our waitress brought in what appeared to be large plates of noodles. Then, I again noticed the white flesh on top of the noodles. "Oh well", I thought, "at least there are noodles with it". Wrong. Apparently you DON'T eat the noodles...they're just for decoration, and when you've finished your plate of raw fish, and only raw fish, they take the noodles back, wash them, and use them for the next visitor. I felt extreme disappointment as my body broke out into a "I don't know if I can do this" sweat. Again, I managed to work my way through my 5 pieces of rawness.

The doors once again opened, our noodles were cleared away, and many more dishes were placed on our table. We were each given a bowl of rice with what appeared to be seasoning and a bunch of salt on top. I started to mix mine together, and then heard Sam say, "Are these fish eggs on top of the rice?". Of course they were fish eggs, but why couldn't it have been salt? Or, why couldn't I have found out it was fish eggs AFTER I had eaten it. Yes, I still ate it, and was only weirded out once, when I bit an egg straight on and it popped in my mouth.

I bet you want to know if I'd ever go out for sushi again, right? I'd probably go...if I wasn't paying for it, and if I could stay miles away from the chewy white piece.

This weekend Sam and I were invited to go with Saralyn, a fellow teacher at our school, to Daegu, a city that is south-east of Osan. Our plan was to check out a "World Heritage Site" in the area. There is a Buddhist Temple in Daegu that houses 80,000 wooden tablets that have ancient Buddhist writings carved onto them. These writings include various prayers, scriptures, and teachings.

We headed down on Saturday, and spent the day looking around the city. Daegu is famous for its shopping, and the markets and shopping districts were unreal! Anything you could possible need had a street dedicated to its sale. For example...if you ever found yourself in need of a safe, you could head over to the "safes district", and check out the numerous stores, all in a row, that were filled with safes...and only safes!

Some random things we saw on Saturday:
1. An Anti-American protest that was displaying various super-imposed pictures of George Bush...my favorite: George Bush's head on an Asian chef's body, holding a hatchet, about to chop a chicken...hmmm.
2. Another protest with 2 people wearing yellow rain-jackets with face masks covering their mouths that had little red X's on them. Oh ya, AND they were doing a dance routine. Not sure what they were protesting: "We won't speak until it rains, and to prove it, here's our rain dance". A random watcher: "Ummm, it rained this morning".
3. A body-building competition for Daegu's most muscular men...complete with tiny bikini bottoms, and oily skin...sick!

On Saturday night we stayed in another Jimjibang. Now, many of you are probably remembering my profession of love for Jimjibangs in one of the last posts, and are most likely thinking, "how nice that Becky and Sam got to revisit such a wonderful place". Let me first say that I now love SOME Jimjibangs, and this weekend's Jimjibang was definitely not a lovable one. It was much smaller, and therefore only had one hot pool, and one cold pool. Also, it had more of a "warehouse" feel...cement walls, metal stairs, and so on. There were no quiet sleeping rooms; instead, people who wanted to sleep would either fall asleep where they were or go up to an open platform to sleep. The platforms were wood floors on top of metal beams. There were no sleeping mats to use, but there were a few WOODEN pillows (???) around. Sam tried to use the wooden pillow, but then ended up just having to tilt his head back a bit so the flat spot on his head was flat against the floor...poor guy! We had to pay if we wanted to use a blanket (Sam got us 4 blankets so we could try to fold them into a sleeping pad). Here's the kicker: the night we were there, a HUGE group of teenage boys decided they would all go to the Jimjibang for a night of fun...with no parents. Of course, they wanted to stay up really, really late, and talk really, really loud. Luckily, I had ear-plugs! I guess us foreigners were the "cool thing" at the Jimjibang that night, because Sam told me that soon after we went to sleep a big group of kids all came and lied down right close to where our heads where...how funny! At one point in the night I was woken up by a loud noise, looked up and saw some random kid rolling around the floor from one end of the platform to the other for fun. I sat up, looked at him, said "No!" in my teacher voice, and he ran away...it was awesome :0) And that pretty much sums up our second-ever experience at the Jimjibang.

Sunday was great. The scenery on our bus ride to the temple was beautiful. The leaves are just starting to turn here, and the mountains were starting to show some yellows and reds! The temple was extremely busy this weekend...there was actually a festival going on that we didn't know about. The wood blocks were neat to see. I took a picture of one, and then got severely yelled at for using my flash. Luckily, because I'm a foreigner, I just had to bow politely a few times, and say "sorry, sorry, sorry", and it was like nothing had happened. The weirdest thing that day happened at the bus stop when a Korean woman sat down beside me, said something, poked me in the face, said something else, poked me in the face again, and then touched/pulled my hair. Very weird...I still have no idea what that was about! All in all, though, a great trip!

Just a friendly little snack stand - squid anyone?

Here's what the carved blocks looked like (this is the picture that got me the tongue lashing).

Honestly...who named this bus?
An artistic shot at the temple...aren't the trees beautiful?