Blogs from Gwangju, South Korea, Asia - page 2

Hey everyone, Officially finished my second week of teaching! For the most part, so far so good, although I did encounter my first actually “bad” class. As I believe I mentioned last time, I teach elementary through middle school-edged kids. One of my (I believe) sixth grade (which is still elementary here; middle school is seventh and eighth graders) classes is four girls and one boy. From the very beginning, getting the girls in this class to concentrate was definitely more difficult than other classes-and that was when my role was literally only to play an audio file so they could do dictation work. The second week, Mpho (the other foreign teacher) and I were given more independence for some of our older classes in terms of teaching and lesson planning. So instead of simply doing ... read more

Day 22 Yesterday I travelled to Gwangju, it's the sixth largest city in South Korea and there lives about 1.5 million people. From Daegu it took about 3 hours by bus and I arrived to U-Square Bus Terminal, which is Gwangju's main terminus. From there I took a bus to Pedro's House hostel. In the hostel I was greeted by the owner Pedro. I was given a welcome drink and got to also browse 3 folders, which were full of information about things to do, see and eat in Gwangju. I was really lucky that I had booked my hostel quite early, because the 2015 Summer Universiade is held in Gwangju while I'm staying here. After getting my stuff to the room I went to eat dinner to a restaurant called Mudeungjeong. The restaurant is a ... read more

I used a three-day holiday weekend at the beginning of October to take a trip to the city of Gwangju with 3 friends. Gwangju is about 3 hours southwest of Daegu. Originally we had wanted to go to Jin Island (Jindo), but we decided if the weather were bad we’d have little to do. We decided to go to Gwangju instead because it seemed close to the beach and near a lot of islands. We’d never been to that area of Korea, so this was our chance. We left Saturday morning and arrived in the early afternoon. We dropped our bags off at the hostel and then set off to sightsee around the city. Gwangju is advertised as being artsy. It did seem artsier than Daegu. There is a huge art gallery (which we didn’t go ... read more

So I'm now a month into life in the ROK and so far I'm really enjoying it. Despite many frustrations of not knowing where things are, difficulties with simple things like finding a meal and household items I'm slowly getting a grasp on things. I can now read Korean somewhat, although I need to work on my vowels, and therefore I've become much more comfortable finding food on menus written only in Korean and finding my way around when only a few of the street signs have English translations. Still pretty lost but starting to figure things out. Next missions include finding Homeplus to check out microwaves, and finding my way to the jimjilbang in Cheomdan and the Ethnic Cafe downtown when my cousin Russ comes to visit me in just a few weeks, as well ... read more

After spending a few weekends in Yangsan, we were feeling a strong need to get out and see something new, so we decided to check out Gwangju, the 4th largest city in Korea, with 1.4 million people in Jeollanam province on the West side of Korea. We randomly ran into two friends, Eric and Moiz on the bus, who just happened to be heading in the same direction! We decided to stick together since none of us had the faintest idea where to go once we got to Gwangju at 10pm. After wandering around for a bit, we came across this small, old motel that had ondol rooms. Now, Moiz and Eric had done the ondol thing before, but this was a first for Mike and I, and overall it was kinda cool! Essentially, its a ... read more