Day 77 -- Making Friends, Students' Travel Advice, Pimp-My-Laptop, and Bad News :[

BAD NEWS

The bad news first because I'm one of those types: my family asked today if I would be okay cooking for myself for a few weekends. Yes, that means I am apparently not invited to (1) pick-up Sae Yeob from his TOEFL prison, (2) the host uncle's wedding, nor (3) Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving). I'm pretty bummed about the wedding and Chuseok, but I understand. There may be other weddings, but Chuseok is only once a year so I'm disappointed that I'll be missing it. I guess, instead, I'll have to take a trip around the peninsula or something with my week of vacation to make up for it. Maybe Japan if anybody's up for it?


MAKING FRIENDS

On to the good news! I've been hanging out with one of the other foreigners here, Hallie, and she's great. She's here for the same cultural-curiosity that I am, so we're on the same page with interests and goals for our year in Nonsan. We got together a few times over the weekend, and--as I was sure would happen--once I had somebody to be brave with, we mustered up the courage to go out to the college hangouts. There, we met a lot of people who were curious to talk to a foreigner, but a handful of them wanted to actually become friends, so we've all been talking to one another since then. I'm totally pumped about this and even if the friendships don't last, I think that it'll be easier to build a network now that I've gotten over that initial hurdle and made a few contacts. Hurray! There are pictures, but Hallie hasn't put them up yet?




STUDENTS' TRAVEL ADVICE

With my week long vacation coming up, I wanted to know if there was anything quintessential to do in Korea during the fall. For example, in America, we have apple picking, hay rides with bonfires, and watching football. Essential autumn activities. In Korea... well, it appears they lack these things, judging by the brainstorm I asked my students to do for our Advice Giving lesson today.

PIMPIN' MY LAPTOP

For a while now I've been looking for the perfect Hangul letter stickers to put on my keyboard. I finally found them when I went to Daejeon this weekend and they are pretty sweet. Now, my right-hand shift key has a little white dog saying "Hi" and the words "mung mung" (Korean "woof woof") and my other shift is a panda saying "Keep smile", for example. PERFECT.

TODAY

was a pretty good day. My last-minute oh-man-what-will-I-do lesson plan went over really well, probably because any lesson that uses 6 commercials is usually not so bad. Next week will be review because the week after that is midterm exam week (that's where that week-long vacation comes in). Teaching has become not-so-scary now and the students are getting more comfortable with me, stopping by to say hello, bringing me a flute and asking me to play in between their classeswaitwhat.

Yes, today a student stopped by with his flute and a book of music. He looked at me very earnestly, waving his arms a bit at me. "Teacher, you, flute." (Many of the conversations with my students involve only verbs. Also, most my students just call me "Lindsay" so this was clearly Serious Business.) I took this to mean "I will play my flute for you" but then two girls walked in and, between all three, I understood that they wanted me to play. It's... it's been a while. I managed to find a piece in his tattered collection that I had played for a competition back in the day, so muscle memory helped out a lot.

I, uh, I think that I'm signed up for the school festival now without ever wanting to be an act. So that's... gonna be interesting. I don't even own a flute in Korea, but things like that are minor details here.

Day 75 -- Pictures from Daejeon

[[written on 23 Sept 09 but backdated, clearly, to Saturday]]

I had been totally putting off a visit to Daejeon because I was scared of trying to figure out the public transportation. "But, Lindsay," you are perhaps thinking, "Lindsay, you went to Seoul using public transportation, so surely Daejeon--only 20 minutes away by car--is a less daunting journey!"

WRONG.

Nonsan has three bus terminals. One is for places like Seoul and Busan (big cities that are far away) and one is for smaller cities that are much closer. There is a third but I don't really undersatnd what the deal is with it. I had successfully navigated the terminal for Seoul/Busan/etc but I had never ventured to (nor even knew the name of) this other closer-city terminal.

Anyway, I made it to Daejeon and visited my buddy Sarah! Here are pictures.

Sarah! And some chipmunks at a pet store?

Hurray, I finally found laptop stickers that I really liked! Hollaaaa

A bakery in Daejeon's Galleria shopping center. Please note the bakery's slogan (the name of the bakery itself was Black Uncle) and the statue in the lower left corner. Um... yeah, Korea is not very politically correct. My reaction was captured on film. Not literally, because it was a digital camera, but you know. Captured.

Day 73-- Daily Routine, Non-Teaching School Time, Cham-Cham-Cham Game(?)

It's been a while. Ten days, to be exact. It's not that I don't have anything to write, it's just that the internet at school blocks Blogger and most my internet time at home is spent on Skype.

It's been long enough now that I've settled into a routine at school and home. It looks something like this:



Or if you want to be VERY specific, it looks like this:


You can tell that during the school day, I have quite a bit of free time. Usually I spend this time:
(a) on the internet, catching up on Facebook and webcomics.
(b) prepping for lessons.
(c) planning lessons.
(d) observing other classes.


However, this week I managed to find a torrent of last Saturday's Penn State v. Syracuse football game, so I watched that on the giant 60" screen in the English room. The lunch ladies, cleaning up from the day's meal, stopped by the glass door to see why I was alternating between clapping, cheering, and swearing by myself in the classroom. Cultural exchange!



As a peace offering for not updating in a long time, here is a video of my 3-2 boys playing a very common game(?) here in Korea. You will first see Rock-Paper-Scissors, then the real fun begins. I guess it's called the "Cham-Cham-Cham Game"?

Day 63 -- Making Kimbab

Kimbab is Korean-style sushi: vegetables and meat wrapped in rice and seaweed. It's ubiquitous because it's cheap and easy to make. For the most part. If you don't make the rice with the right texture, your kimbab will fall apart when you try to cut the rolls. I did pretty well with my tuna kimbab. Also, pictures.

In the foreground, all the vegetables, meat, seasame leaves, and egg-omelette-thing ready to be rolled up. In the background, host mom and Min Kyeong checking the texture of the rice.

Moment of truth--host mom cutting up one of my kimbab rolls. yayy it didn't fall apart!

Ta-daaa

Day 59 -- Wildly Inappropriate Students, Eels, and Dog Soup

The students have gotten much more comfortable with me, leading to some cute situations and some not-so-cute situations. Example of a Cute Situation: three of my junior boys (including Swastika Boy*) giving me a little stuffed rabbit as a for-no-reason present out of the blue yesterday. But with the sweet comes the "wtf". Examples of Not-So-Cute WTF How Do I Respond To This Situations: my TOEFL boys letting me in on the reason why they always talk about hitting the DDR, TOEFL Student Maybe Cousin** unbuttoning his unform shirt to show his "sick pack" and rub a piece of paper on his chest (?), and TOEFL Wise Guy showing the split in his uniform pants from him playing soccer earlier that day.


So there's the weird classroom situations that happened to me. Now let's talk about the weird food I ate this week.

Seriously, how gross does this look? PRETTY GROSS.

Yesterday, I had another school dinner meeting with all the teachers, this time to welcome the new vice principal. On the menu: Jang-eoh. As we walked into the restaurant, I got a good feeling because we would be sitting in chairs for this meal instead of on the floor--score! But then we passed by large tanks. Oh noooo. That meant seafood. I'm not a huge fan of fish, but it turns out that's okay because we didn't eat fish. We ate eel. HINT: there is no way to make eel sound or look appetizing. NO WAY. ZERO METHODS. The picture is literally what I ate. That is what was swimming around in the tanks and then swimming around in my stomach acid. Later it was accompanied by the peanut butter and jelly sandwich I made myself as a small "Good Job on Choking Down That Eel Tonight For The Sake Of School-Jeong, Lindsay" reward.

Jang-eoh (Eel): C+

Today, I went out with the principal, my coteacher, and another random teacher to eat dog for lunch. When in Korea, right? I was concerned that I would have to look at a bunch of dogs in cages as I walked in to the restaurant, but luckily I didn't have to see the live-version of what was in my soup. The meal itself was pretty anticlimatic. The soup was really spicy and I found the dog meat to taste mostly like tough, low-quality beef. The pieces were small though and the soup flavors pretty much overwhelmed the taste, so I ate it all without complaint.

Dog Soup: B-

Needless to say, when I go to Seoul this weekend to visit my friend from college, I will be gorging myself on less adventurous foods, such as tacos and pasta. yeeesssss

*Swastika Boy is actually Buddha Boy. What I thought was a swastika on his wrist is actually a symbol from Buddhism. In my defense, that symbol is like the mirror image of the swastika.

**TOEFL Student Maybe Cousin is, in fact, a cousin. At least, my assumption grows stronger because his family name is the same as my host family and his name (Sae Kyoon) is so close to my host brother's (Sae Yeob). So I guess by "in fact" I actually mean "slightly stronger maybe".

Day 55 -- Movie Theatre, Church-Shopping, and The Great Korean Cookie Baking Adventure

"Linji, you are ready?"

When you are asked this question by your Korean host family, know that it is very much a loaded question. The last time I was asked this question was the day I ended up spending four hours in a car just to drop Sae Yeob off in Seoul when I was expecting a tourist day in the city. Needless to say, I was wary when my host mother popped in my room and posed this seemingly innocent question.

As it turns out, I spent most of the day (which I had originally set aside for teaching preparations and solo errands around the town) going around Nonsan with the family. We went out for lunch, where I was openly stared at by some ajjumas in the restaurant, then headed to the movie theatre to watch some mystery/horror/haunting film. In Korean. With no subtitles. There was a section about five minutes long where I understood every single word and I almost cried. But then I didn't understand the rest and I just stared at the screen dumbly, not understanding why people were gasping or the music was getting dramatic.

Afterwards, the host family took me on a drive around the town while we searched for churches. I'm really interested in finding a youth group somewhere because in my experiences, youth group kids tend to be a lot of fun and incredibly accepting. Considering I'm a foreigner and don't have fun with kids my age here, that's a winning combination. We finally did find one, so I'll try to find a way to get out there next week.

Then... I decided it was time to try cooking. Specifically, chocolate chip cookies. I had asked my host family yesterday if they had everything I needed and after about 30 minutes of hunting, they assured me that, yes, they had everything. Fantastic!

But they didn't. Specifically, no vanilla extract (expected, no big deal) and no white, granulated sugar (not expected, big deal). We throw everything in the bowl and start mixing... and keep mixing... and still mixing... They don't have an electronic beater. Guess what's really difficult to do by hand? Mix cookie dough. We finally get it homogenous and throw the stuff on a (small) baking tray. But wait! The oven only goes up to 250! These cookies need it to be 375! Well, we'll just leave them in a little longer... About 10 minutes and the smell of OMGBURNING later, I realize my mistake.

PROTIP: Korean ovens are in *C, not *F.

We figured it out in the end, and in the mean time, we picked at our burnt cookies with chopsticks. Because this is Korea, and that makes sense.

A picture's worth a thousand words...

Mutilated cookies, milk, the recipe (on the bag), and my needs-to-be-upgraded cell-phone

My host mother with the product of our experimentation

Aw yeah, eating cookies with chopsticks.

Day 54 -- TOEFL Shenanigans, Random Foreigner, and Routines

So, it's been a while. Here's a short montage of this first week of teaching.

--Lessons for the rest of the week went pretty well. I'm bonding with the teachers and I had my first "company dinner". I was really nervous going in, then I realized that nobody places as much importance on these things as was insinuated at orientation. Either that, or my school/principal is just really chill, which is very true.

--TOEFL is ridiculous. I have (1) complete liberty to do whatever I want with the class provided they practice speaking and (2) no idea how to improve their TOEFL scores. I ended up structuring it like KEY Club, where we open with a short lesson on a difficult grammar point or a few useful vocab words or phrases. Then, there's a short discussion group followed by two short speeches.

I say ridiculous though because the boys have gotten over the "new foreigner" factor, so they're not shy at all anymore. When I asked them about their hobbies, my TOEFL Wise Guy answered, "My hobby is watch [sic] AV." AV? He does AV club with the school? "No, AV. AV is adult video." Oh. His hobby is watching adult videos... waitwhat?

Here is a video of them one day after class.

Blue shirt = TOEFL Class Maybe Cousin
Sitting at the PC = TOEFL Wise Guy
Sitting at the laptop messing with cords = TOEFL Helper JH
Sitting at laptop watching video = TOEFL Buena Vista (BV) Applicant

--In other news, the other day I came home only to find a foreigner coming out of the elevator! I was totally shocked to see another foreigner who was young and female like me. To be honest, a lot of the English teachers here are creepy dudes with yellow fever. I didn't even know what to say to her. I froze up, said "Hello?" and punched the number for my floor. It wasn't until the doors were closed that it hit me. I should've asked for her number, where she was from, where she was teaching, see if she wants to hang out some time... oops. Min Kyeong happened to see her, though, and found out she lives on the 7th floor. I'll have to go up there and see her sometime...


Today is Saturday, so I slept in late then made grilled cheese and PB&J sandwiches for Min Kyeong and I, since we were the only ones home. I've kind of settled into a routine here, so it's nice to have that comfort. I wake up at 6:30am, meet a fellow teacher at 7:45am, catch a ride to school with her and arrive at around 8am. I stay at school until about 5:30pm, at which time I catch a (totally unreliable) bus back into Nonsan so that I can get a taxi back to the apartment. Dinner, short run at the public track, TV, bed. When I have time, I like to go to the (only) coffee shop to study Korean.

Things I'd like to change? I need friends my age. I think if I find an easy way to get to the local university, which is in one of the neighboring towns, then I'd have a better chance meeting random people. Even if I just passively sit in one of the coffee shops or wander around the campus, I think I'd be able to meet more people my age than I would if I actively tried to find friends in Nonsan. So yes. On my list: make friends.

Maybe that foreign girl will be up for adventures in downtown Nonsan?

P.S. Welcome to the countries list, UK!