Seoul: Just a small fraction

I felt bad that it had been so long since an update so I decided to give you the very very short abbreviation of the trip to Seoul. We had off four days for the Solar New Year, so we took full advantage of a four day weekend and headed up north to Seoul, even though it was freezing... Literally it was 29 - 31 degrees the entire time. But we totally had a blast. Here are just a few pictures. I am currently writing the NOVEL that is our three full days there and will post them as I finish, but with being back at school this week, and feeling slightly under the weather (again Bleh) I may not get to it till this weekend. Here is a little to tide you over!

One of the Not so busy streets of Seoul. Our first day there, the place was almost deserted... I guess not many people like to go outside when there is snow on the ground and it is under 30 degrees. Go figure... Exciting though that not many tourist of Seoul (one of the largest cities on Earth) will ever see this place so empty.

Joseph and I hanging out in the Downtown area on our last day! We tried to get the building in the picture too!



They have some amazing buildings.....

And subway snack machines!

And ancient temples... Wait till you see the picture I got of the throne inside this palace. Fantastic.

Look for more later one this week. We had a great time, and I can't wait to share it.

Teresa and Justin Porter Rule!

What a trememdous week it has been. Not only did we say farewell to our fellow Korean teacher Sera ( she left after at least four years working at the school) but I also got a package from home. The Korean teacher are jealous at the amount of packages Joseph and I receive, and always want to know what all we get in each package! So as my thank you ( because I was crazy busy this week) to Teresa and Justin, I dedicate this blog to you guys!

Ahhh the mighty box in all it's splendor. After a long cold january, this was exactly the pick me up I needed at the beginning of the first week in a new month!

The one thing I know I asked for, a coloring book, because sometimes I really just want to color. I searched high and low, all over Geoje and never found a good coloring boo. They have mostly activity books, but since I can't read Hangul very well not many of the appealed to me. So with this coloring book I promptly went out and bought some cute hello kitty markers to go with it!

Here is a general shot of the goods. A sweet sweet card from Teresa and Justin, chexmix ( cheddar, MY FAVE) and of course resses cups, and something I had never thought of , pop tarts, which are excellent if I forget breakfast I can just gobble one and get going on my day! ( I am weird and never put them in the toaster!)

And of course reading Material, I laughed that both magazine she sent had the same chanel ad on the back!

But the front covers were different! Yeah! They have Glamour here but it is in korean, so it automatically becomes a picture book.

And the best part of the entire box, BUBBLE WRAP, we played with this for about twenty minutes before digging into the actual box! Fantastic!

Thank you Thank you Thank you. I miss you guys so much!

We are going to take the valentines day treats to work to share with our co-workers since they are always wondering about American foods and such! I think they will get a kick out of the heart shaped snack cakes!

Heartbeat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKtvDv7eykg

This is the link for the newest Korean sensation 2pm. G-dragon is no longer king.

I actually had an 8 year old student pretty decently perform the first half of this song during my class.

I was so entralled I almost forgot we were supposed to be learning about plural nouns, and let him go for longer than I should.... but he was really good!

Check out the video for "Heartbeat"

Shabbu Shabbu, Okpo and faulty sidewalks.

I forgot to put my photograph drive back into my camera, so I had to take pictures on the actual camera this weekend, but I happily found this picture of Joseph and I in the old teacher office on one of our first weeks of school. We have come such a long way ( and both of us have much longer hair now) But it was fun to reminisce and think how much has changed and how much we done and how much we have learned.

Us in early October, Picture by Sen.

Now onto this weekend. We decided to be Adventurous with our appetite. We stopped at a street stall and order a Japanese fad food item called "Unbelievable Taki Yako"...which is a piece of octopus tentacle cooked in a breading dough outside layer topped with Mayonnaise, BBQ sauce, Fish shavings, Seaweed pieces and vinegar... It sounds awful, but it is actually quiet tasty, but you have to wait for them to cool off a bit or it is more like octopus tentacle covered by LAVA.
We actually passed this octopus in a bucket near the Okpo fish market, he was still alive and blowing water bubbles, so I got a picture. WE ATE THIS!!!! VOLUNTARILY!

We did a bit of Shopping in Okpo before we went to dinner, and while looking for fun gifts to send to people we came across this coolest combination, Keychain, toenail clipper and bottle opener... I have to add this to the list of Mustard with Paper towels.

While doing our shopping an interesting thing happened, Joseph is so powerful he broke the sidewalk... Literally he was walking and the sidewalk gave out underneath him... just one brick though, which was really odd... here is a side view with his food exactly as it was placed when said collapse occured.

The offending brick. Crazy.

On our shopping adventure we stumbled arcoss a photo studio.

I still maintain that Koreans are weird when it comes to photographs. Here is a picture of a baby looking out the window at the rain, crying, completely naked and taking a leak all at the same time... I would have a hard time having this above my mantle place with company coming over..

This was right off the main street as a promotion of what kind of work they do... yeah....

And I love how the underwear stores do the same thing... Gee I guess Valentines day must be coming up.... I doubt many American boys would be caught dead in this get up!

We also found another bookstore (SCORE) with some aswesome english books, this one caught our Eye. The Obama story, he is so famous here, there were several biographies of him as well.

I like how the back cover makes it look like he had to escape Kenya via hot air baloon to live in American so he could be President.

We also found this comic book retelling American History in comic form, unfortunately these comics are not as funny as Calvin and Hobbes. According to the comic, the Native American Indians were peaceful hippies corrupted by Europrean Greed.

Here is a selection of the wooden tables to use for the Solar new year holiday, they also had a chart that told what kind of food you had to eat for a successful new year and the placement it needs on the table. Very traditional, and beautiful.

We actually had Indian food in Okpo but Sunday night we went out for our other favorite food, Shabbu Shabbu! I figured I would show pictures of this meal instead since indian food all kinda looks like mush!

They start you off with a big pot of beef flavored broth, and fill it with several different kinds of mushrooms and cabbage. They give you different sauces to dip the boiled mushrooms in. They also give you a big plate of thinly sliced beef, and you put it in the pot to cook it ( another place you cook for yourself) The you place the cooked meat on these already prepared rice balls on a type of lettuce. (they also garnish it with black seeds and crab meat.)

Plate -o- meat

Half of the mushrooms, the other hald are in the pot.

Here is the pot, the table acutally has a burner in the middle of it so you can adjust the heat as needed. Joseph is picking out some meat right now.

They also put additional things in the broth including shrimp, a weird bread/noodle thing and dumplings. All of it is boiled in a delicious broth.

After you eat your fill of all the different mushrooms, and the meat, they then take the leftover broth and cook rice in it adding seaweed, dried carrots and mushrooms, soy sauce and an uncooked egg to create a rice porridge so nothing is wasted. You can also get noodles, but they tend to put spicy kimchi with the noodles, so the rice is a bit more bland and more to Joseph' s and my liking.

It is so delicous, and we have gone several times, but this is the first time I have ever remembered to bring my camera.

Hope everyone is doing well and staying warm with all the Snow... we hope it will start warming up here soon!

Random Week.

This week has gone by terribly slow (mainly because it is the last week of our extra winter classes) so we are pretty much pooped for this month ... We just finished making and giving a huge array of writing and speaking tests, so now with the vast majority of the grades finished, we finally get to relax a bit .... Nope, just more stuff for February.

I took my camera to school and just captures a few images from our week ... just a few though.

This is Jenny, she used to be one of my students but after december all the kids switched classes and moved to different times so now she is in Joseph's class ... She is super smart and really cute. Jennifer (the sweet girl who worked in my position before me) asked for an updated picture of her, so I was happy to get one. Unfortunately when I went to school last week jenny was sick, and then I proceeded to forget my camera, and then finally remember on wednesday! She even said the customary "Kimchi" for the picture ... I miss her in my classes!

I also tried my hand again (this time more successfully) to make some pea soup. Joseph's mom sent us all kinds of beans, and this time the peas turned out much better than the other beans did. No idea why. I added some bacon, butter and seasonings to it ... it was still a bit bland, but at least all the beans were soft ... I think next time I will try some ham, and maybe buy some bullion cubes or something to try and give it a boost of flavor. It ended up being a good dinner.

We have also formed a habit of eating dinner in front of the laptop, since it is usually around 9 - 9:15 before we eat dinner (it takes a while to walk home and then I have to heat up the preplanned meal) we watch our favorite old shows like Muppet Babies and Salute your Shorts ... it is always funny to catch jokes you didn't get when you were little. We can appreciate the shows in a new way now.

And then Thursday we heated up the "Hobos" that Joseph loves, they are so easy, and I can make them the night before, and then when we get home in the evening, just throw them in the microwave oven and let them cook themselves . it is just Hamburger meat, potatoes, carrots, onions and steak sauce. It is almost like having a crock pot!

Mmmmmm. Delicious!

And just beacuse I like posting pictures of the kids, this is Kyle. He is such a trouble maker, but it is hard to get mad at him because he makes me laugh so much. He drew a picture that spanned 6 pages of paper, and when I asked him what it was, all I got was " teacher.... I don't know".... it was very detailed and looked like some kind of weird flying kite/zepplin/airplane/hot air balloon thing. He didn't want to take a picture, so I caught him off gaurd while pretending to talk to jenny.

The original class Kyle was in was Joseph's class. Joseph used to have alot of trouble with that class because Kyle and his friend James were little troublemakers. One day, James, out of the blue, quit the school. This left Joseph with a perfect opportunity to change the class dynamic. He came to school the next day (early November) and found some left over halloween decorations in the classroom, behind the dry erase board and randomly decided to tell the kids that James had been so bad, that he got turned into a fake rubber centipede. He put the fake centipede on James's old desk, and would still write his name on the board for not speaking English (I guess they are not allowed to speak korean or centipeded in class) and he would call on him to answer questions. Kyle thought this was hilarious, and in turn started talking to "james the centipede" like a real person, and would even help Joseph discipling him by pulling his fake legs off if he was bad, and even half melting him in the class heater. ( James is so bad, he didn't do his homework, now the heater!)

Ever since then Kyle has carried "James" around in his pencil case. He took it out today during my special winter class and started saying " Teacher, james need more homework... he bad", so I gave Kyle two worksheets to do... one for him and one for "James".

Our kids are funny.

4 months!

No cool pictures today, but I did feel it was worth noting that it is January 25th ( here) which is officially four months since we stepped off the plane in Busan. It feels like such a short time and yet it is all I have known for Four Months!!!! It seems longer... Sometimes I worry I will forget how to live in the states....

It is amazing to think about how drastically my life has changed these four months.

I have not watched cable in four months

I have not driven a car in four months.

I have not talked on a real phone in four months.

I have not hugged my mom and dad in four months. ( though I did try to hug the webcam one time)

I now eat rice almost daily ( and sometimes, even kimchi)

I walk to and from work.

I take the city bus to get out of the city.

I use chopsticks without any trouble.

I now spend money in the 1,000's.

I have not tipped a waiter or had to calculate tax on any item in four months.

It is amazing, and hard to believe... sometimes I don't feel that I live in a totally different culture, and other days my head explodes with the differences. Now, suddenly knowing that I am 1/3 of the way through my trip is very sobering and I am ready for some warm weather so I can start doing more with the time I have left.

See you all in 8 months!

Renovations.

To celebrate last weekend Joseph and I purchased one of the amazingly beautiful cakes we see all over the place at different bakeries. The woman told us "Much chocolate" so we figured this cake for 12,000 won was a steal, but it ended up having huge walnuts in ever layer of chcolate... so it was kind of a bust, but really you can't complain too much when there is chocolate, so we gutted up and picked out the nuts, and will know next time the korean for "nuts" followed by the crossing of my arms in a big "X" for no sign.... that move has saved my life a few times... But here is a picture of the cake in all it's chocolatey splendor before we found the aforementioned "nuts".

So beautiful against the 70's wallpaper in our kitchen!

Now on to the real reason for this blog. The renovations of the school are FINALLY complete...

( NO MORE PAINT FUMES)

This is where the front desk used to be, it is now just the Boss Graces office, the windows just got frosted yesterday, so for about two weeks she had NO privacy, and the kids would constantly press their faces up against the windows... come to think of it, that is probably why they frosted the windows so late... haha.

This is now where the reception desk is, if you come in the door and look straight ahead, the desk is right in front of you when you enter. It used to be on your left, but they moved it so it could be closer to the teacher room. Which is now in the old Canada room that belonged to teacher Jenny! The Bricks are supposed to add a "cafe" feel to the school. I think it actually turned out really pretty.


Inside the old Canada classroom that has now converted to the Teacher Room. Joseph and I sit in the back ( unfortunately away from the copy machine and heater... bummer) but we have nicenew shelves to put all our stuff in and they have our names on them too! They put up wallpaper, new desks all the way around the room and so much shelving room.

The Old Bookroom and teacher room were converted into two joined classrooms, so now this hallway has been created. The refridgerator moved out onto the porch area, and we have a bistro nook outside for the teachers ( which we will enjoy much more once it warms up!), but now the old book room and teacher room are two connected rooms with moveable doors ( I could not get a picture because Teacher Jenny was teaching when these photos were taken) This way if we ever need a school meeting, we can move the doors and everyone can fit comfortably!

The new floors are great too, really slippery, which is funny when the bell rings and all the kids Rush like mad to get to the door, some more successful than others.

And Just because this caught me off guard during class, I had to take a picture of it. I didn't really look over the material in the book because normally it is reallybenign and a functional use of the English language, but the authors of the book must have been cracking up when they made this example of future tense with will.

Oh, My Jimmy!

That made me smile! The kids of course didn't really get it, which is probably a good thing!