Beer: 맥주

Ways this post is like a hamster: it's short and quick!

Despite a broken air conditioner at Mun Hwa on Friday, we managed to survive our first session of classes! Monday begins our regular 4-9 schedule with some minor class shuffling.

Just wanted to let everyone know that the housewarming was a success and that the social circle has been expanded. Also, I'm totally going to have to replace all the glasses and dishes in this apartment before I leave next year, because I have broken 2 wine glasses and a mug in the month I've been here (all sober).

That, and I've been in Korea a full month! Hooray!
~Hannah

Yeo Yeo: 여 여

I know you all want to read a blog about my new hamster, right? That's Yeo Yeo (named after a student... yeah, I know). I needed something more than a fish, and she's been pretty succesfully (and quickly!) hand-trained, when I open her cage she just walks right out into my hand. Best $3 I ever spent (and with the exchange rate it was actually LESS than $3!).

Friday is the last day of our 1-7 schedule and we go back to 4-9. Some classes were shuffled to. I got to keep my 3rd and 4th grade class, as well as keep my favorite 6th grade class! Mostly I am pleased that I don't have any 7th grade classes. My 7th graders have been my most problematic class, the disrespect and unwillingness to do work. I had hoped that I had gotten through to them, and they had convinced me to give them a pizza party Friday. This week had been going ok, and then today came and I had one student out of 12 who did their homework, so I took the party away. I don't even feel a little guilty about it, I was so mad.

I managed to accidentally shame both my 6th grade classes though, when I explained why they couldn't write essays in Korean and then run it through a translator. There are two ways to tell when they do this, it either comes out a garbled mess or you get sentences discussing the "evaluation of Van Gogh's psyche" ("Can you tell me what "psyche" means?" *silence* "how about evaluation, what does evaluation mean?" *silence* "did you actually write this?" "...no..."). So basically I announced to the whole class why they couldn't use translators like this for more than individual words. I wasn't mad, or yelling, but when I finished they all looked like kicked puppies (except for the kid who tried to fight me using the line of rationale that 'it said so on google!').

I've had a lot of fun this week. I taught a nursery rhyme to my 3rd graders (Hickory Dickory Dock, because they had just learned about time... they loved it!), I have one of my 6th grade classes doing a project on ocean creatures, and the other on famous artists. With the 7th graders we've been reading folktales and scary stories. Overall good lessons.

I've gotten quite pleased with my ability to navigate the downtown area and have found some great clothing stores. It's nice to know that yes, I can actually find clothes that fit in this country (the length of things is a huge problem, because as you all may know, I'm not exactly petite and I like my shirts to cover my stomach and my dresses to cover my butt). Now I just need to learn Korean!! We also received our alien cards, so now we can get bank accounts and cell phones!

I'm enjoying my time here, it's been almost a month since my arrival! Skype certainly makes things easier. I'm having a housewarming party this Saturday and am very much looking forward to expanding my social circle (if you're wondering how I know anyone to even have to a housewarming: I let Lori do all the inviting). Also, playing hostess will give me reason to thoroughly clean the apartment.

I hope everyone is doing well, especially those who are starting school/returning to school in the very near future!
~Hannah

And then life was easier...

So now both Hannah and I have survived our first full week of teaching. I hadn't realized it, but even though Hannah was here a bit longer then me, one week longer, two weeks? Anyway, this was the first full week of teaching for both of us because of the vacation. And we made it! Haha! And we made it through the whole process of immigration and are just waiting for our card thingys.

After all of that hassle, and the fiascoes with the hospital and such we are done! We got our results on Thursday from the hospital, surprisingly easily. No more taxi drama either, thank G-d. So on Friday we met Mr. Lee at 10 AM to go to immigration, we weren't sure how long it would take so we met early. After getting there, we took numbers and we were done within 10 minutes. Easy. No problems. We had to wait a little longer so Mr. Lee could do Britton's Visa stuffs, but that went fairly quick too. So we ended up at school two hours early. It was a ridiculously anti-climatic end to all the issues we have been having. Even starting from the beginning, all the issues I had with getting the Visa because of the police check thing, which apparently, Korean is one of the only countries that requires and apostille. And then, this takes about 10 mins, no problems. Not that I'm not incredibly thankful it was easy, I was just surprised.

It was fun though. Hannah and I ended up in the coffee shop next to the school talking and chilling before we had to start school. We were going through a magazine about Housekeeping or something. And we were looking at the ads, and the people in the ads. Hannah was being all anthropology smart-like (that's totally a description!), I was contributing, but mostly having fun guessing at where the models were from. And we got into a discussion on how we could get the kids to understand/talk about what the Asian ideal is for beauty. It was really nice to have a conversation on that level. An intelligent conversation. When we would then spend the whole day talking like we have to explain things to stupid small children because not all the kids have great vocabulary skills. Friday is test day, so it was a fairly easy day.

When I got home after finishing up the grading (mine took longer so I got home last) I decided I wanted to celebrate surviving the first full week, that's when Hannah pointed out it was her first full week too. So we got a pizza (yes, they have delicious pizza here, right around the corner actually), and made muffins. That was a fun experience. I helped, and by that I mean I washed the dishes. And Hannah mixed everything together, and we had a stupid moment trying to work the oven, but it all turned out delicious. Even if I did get a bag of chocolate chips thrown at me, and then I spilled all the clean silverware on the floor...twice. And then we talked and drank a little bit and suddenly it was 1 AM. It was fun. Then today, we were going to go to Art Street, but we got distracted by other things and will go tomorrow instead, maybe...probably. We're definitely going to emart anyway. And that is all I can think of to say. We're going out for amazing chicken tonight with Lori and Petra, whenever they show up (hopefully soon, I'm hungry).

~Lyn

Taxi: 택시

Today started out plain enough. Went to the hospital and got our chest X-rays. We'll get our results tomorrow and thusly end THAT fiasco. We go out to get our taxi to the school (I should mention that it is just Lyn and I). We get in a taxi. I say where we need to go. The taxi driver starts driving.
And here's where it all gets interesting. The stop for the school has a very similar name to the train station on the other side of the town. It's about a 5 minute drive from the hospital to the school. So you realize pretty quick when the taxi isn't going the right way. My pronunciation is bad, so it happens. The failsafe is a handy little card that has the name of our stop on it. I just flash the card, point, and voila! Problem solved. Well, not today. We quickly realized we were going to the wrong place, resaid the name, and pointed to the card. The taxi driver ignored me. Repeat this five more times, and add in me saying no and gesturing back towards where we needed to be heading. It was ridiculous. We got all the way to the train station, and when I said no he started yelling. So there was yelling and pointing and finally I just told him to take us back to our apartment so we could get a competent taxi.
Except he didn't take us to the taxi, he took us to the apartment and church you can see in the photo at the top of this entry (yup, he took us to the view of the apartment.). So that was a $10 taxi ride. Then we walked. Confused, through the back streets of Gwangju. Some children shouted hello to us in English, but as soon as we tried to ask them where we could get a taxi they clammed up. Fortunately for us, where we were dropped off is not nearly as far from our apartments as it looks! We shortly ended up at the market, and quickly grabbed a friendly, competent taxi that took us to our school without any issue.
For me at least, the rest of the day was fine. I was still very stressed so I just let my 4th graders play games. Then the rest of my classes were well behaved (even the 7th graders, relatively speaking). Tomorrow we have to go back to the hospital to get all our test results so we can FINALLY get to immigration. Hopefully we don't have any more adventures and can finally get our alien cards (which will enable us to have lives).
Wish us luck!
~Hannah

Hospital Crazy-ness

So before Hannah and I can go to Immigration we have to get some things done at the hospital first. Easy stuff, height, weight, hearing test, eye test (one of the basic ones, not in depth or anything), minor dental thing (just looking at our teeth), blood work (to make sure we're not diseased), pee test (to make sure we're not on drugs), and a chest x-ray (no freaking idea). We decided to go on Friday, but that didn't work because that's when the guy was coming to fix Hannah's water heater, so we changed it to Monday.

Mr. Lee told Lori to take us to this one hospital near our apartments. We went there, Hannah and I had forgotten our passports so we had to run back to the apartments to get them, then go back to the small hospital. Then they told us that they couldn't do what we needed done there, we had to go to a bigger hospital. We still had time before work so we grab a taxi and go to a bigger hospital. But the taxi took us in a big circle like thing because he didn't understand Lori, or was just a *insert swear here* and trying to get the "stupid foreigners" to pay more. Anyway, we get to the bigger hospital and get our height, weight, eye test, hearing test and dental exam. But we didn't have enough time to get the blood and pee tests, and we didn't know about the chest exam thingy, so we decided to finish it on Tuesday (today).

So today Hannah and I went alone to the hospital. While yesterday we found a fair number of people who spoke passable English, today we found very few. And even fewer who knew where we had to go. We got sent in circles a couple of times. Got sent back to the dental exam where we explained we already had it done yesterday to this nice (cute) male nurse (who spoke English and went to UMass Amherst). He sent us back to reception, but while we were waiting for the elevator to go there they called us back because they couldn't find the paperwork and couldn't prove we had gotten the exam done. They told us to call them at the end of the day (we asked Mr. Lee to call for us as we don't speak Korean). Reception sent us to another building/ward thingy. Ended up in a sketchy part of the hospital where there was dim lights, no people, dark offices and no signs (it was creepy and very scary movie-esque). We figured out we were on the wrong floor, went to what we thought was the right one, asked a nurse who didn't speak English (and was also leading a patient who looked kinda beat up, and had half a cup taped to his face for some reason I couldn't figure out), and she had us follow her through this basement level (cue more creepy things, and scary movie feelings) back to where we started. Guessing we had to pay first, or something, we paid and then got sent up to get the blood and pee tests. Neither of us do well with blood tests, Hannah is a bit needle-phobic, and getting blood drawn makes me woozy (I have been known to faint briefly because of it). It was a very interesting process. We got numbers (614 and 615 I think, random memory...), sat in this waiting room like area. Up front is this desk separated into section/cubicle things like sign in desks with numbers over them. When your number comes up, you sit in front of the desk, put your arm up, they tie the tourniquet thingy, stick you, draw the blood, then hand you the pee test cup. It was kinda weird getting blood drawn in front of everyone like that. Hannah had a moment where she had to cover her eyes before her test because she caught sight of the needle a little girl was getting blood drawn with. Picking on Hannah (ponies and rainbows!) aside, I got a little black around the edges of my sight, but all in all relatively good experience.

So we go to school, got there pretty early which was cool because we thought we were going to be late. Hannah got herself a treat for not having too bad a time with the blood drawing thing. I got my students the candy I promised them yesterday. At the end of today Mr. Lee told us that while the hospital had found the records for the dental exams, we didn't get one of the tests we needed. A chest x-ray. No idea why we need it, but we're going to do that tomorrow. It's been one heck of a time trying to get this all done. So much confusion, oy vey. And on top of that, almost all of my classes today were more energetic then normal. I have a sore throat from having to talk over them. I took a lot of points...hopefully they'll behave better tomorrow, if not I might go insane. Not really, I'll figure it out. Especially for those Grade 7s, both Hannah and I have problems with them. Something about that age group...hm....oh well, I'm exhausted and can't think of anything else to write. That's all for now!

~Lyn

Inception (see below for Korean translation)

I ended up getting "kidnapped" yesterday, and it was kinda awesome.

For whatever reason I was massively stressed out by Friday, and my solution was to leave work as soon as I was done, go down town, and sit in a coffee shop and write for about an hour and a half. After destressing I wandered around for a few minutes before deciding to catch a taxi.

Which is when I was ambushed by Lori and Petra, who offered to take me out for dinner as a thank you for helping get Sandy to Cambodia. We went to this awesome restaurant. It was KINDA like a hibachi, except that every table had their own grill and you did the cooking yourself. You got some raw pork which you cooked on the coals and then wrapped up in leaves (yum sesame leaves!). Lori and Petra were talking about exploring some of the nightlife in Sangmu (a district of Gwangju... think NYC with Queens, the Bronx, etc.). At an unholy hour in the morning we crawled back to Petra's apartment and all passed out.

This afternoon (still with Lori and Petra) we went to see Inception. I thought it was an excellent movie, but this is not a movie review blog, this is a living in Korea blog. Fortunately I learned some cool factoids about Korean culture during my movie viewing experience!
- Korean movie theaters have assigned seating
- You can get popcorn... or you can get fried squid bites! (didn't get either)
- Most western movies come to theaters with Korean subtitles (which further proved my reading abilities!)
- Even the movie tickets are super cutsey and covered in flowers.

Speaking of cutsey, I bought toilet paper that is decorated with little purple giraffes, because apparently you cannot get just plain white toilet paper in Korea! Well that's all for tonight!

~Hannah

Lyn's First Day Teaching

Today was my first day teaching. Wednesday and Thursday last week I met my classes (except one grade 4 class) and observed how Sandy taught. Today I got to actually teach them :) Now I'm having trouble not writing this like the books are written. It's actually kinda difficult, I was just going through them to make up a test and some questions so if my wording is odd, I'm sorry, it's the books fault.

Anyway. I thought I was going to start with the Grade 4 class I met while observing Sandy and I would meet the other Grade 4 class on Monday, however I was wrong. It made me a little nervous because we didn't know each other, but it ended up working out very well. They seem like good kids and I'm excited to get to know them better. I had originally decided to take it easy today and tomorrow because we only had a two day week so I didn't really want to start anything too in depth right before a weekend. This plan seemed to work with my Grade 4 class, but my first Grade 5 class was crazy. I told them about the new rule, No Korean Allowed At All, and they still spoke in Korean almost constantly to each other. I was getting annoyed so I started the unit with them and ended up giving the whole class -5 points because I don't know their names yet. The girls were upset, but the boys ignored me, I think I'm going to have a lot of problems with that class. The second Grade 5 class, however, was amazing. I kinda love them right now. They actually asked to start their unit, so we did some reading. They're going to be interesting. My first Grade 6 class was fine, not a lot of problems with them, they also wanted to do work, I was a bit surprised because I mentioned that I was willing to go easy today and tomorrow. But who am I to not let them work :)

My next two classes I will problem end up talking about the most here. I think. My second Grade 6 class is a rather advanced class, this was the first class I remembered in the beginning of class I wanted them to make name-cards for themselves. They are very good speakers and they are out of the books so I get to have fun with them. Since they are advanced I asked them if there was anything they wanted to learn about, I'm very open to doing anything, even if I have to do outside research to teach them. I got some blank looks, but then finally one of the girls suggested they do a story game. The first student starts the story, s/he writes three sentences, covers the first two and passes it along, the next student continues the story from that one line, writes three lines, covers everything but the last line and so on. They started working on a story for Sandy now, I'm amused what the first three have written, they are certainly creative boys. My Grade 7 class I started the same way. After they made their name-cards (I remembered for them too, barely), I posed the same question and got even more blank looks. I tried to coax something out of them to very little end. The girls started to give me some feedback, they also seemed interested in my language lesson so I might do word roots with them, but the boys were silent and rather uncooperative. I was a little surprised because normally it's the other way around. Finally, after this lasted the entire class period, I told them that their homework was to come up with something they would like to do in class. Hopefully they will think of SOMETHING. I really want to have fun with these two classes, I hope that once they get to know me they will help a little more.

All in all, I had a rather fun first day. I made up my first test tonight (though it's a "Sandy Test" not a "Lyn Test" as I told the students, because it's one they should have gotten last Thursday from Sandy), and made up questions for readings. I feel teacherly :) it's fun. Now I shall sleep and hope that tomorrow goes as well, or better (hopefully better in some cases).

~Lyn