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Published: October 24th 2010
Botanical Gardens
Eun-bi and I at the gardens.Dear Blog Readers,
I woke on Monday morning with breath smelling like something had literally crawled into my throat and died during the evening, but more worryingly, that whatever had died had also caused my vocal chords to more or less cease to function. The Daejeon Rock Festival had well and truly taken its toll. Fortunately, Wonnam is a pretty small school and there was no need to be shouting to 30+ students so I was able to push through without sounding too ridiculous. The coughing fit that ensued in the second lesson prompted my co-teacher to get my a jinseng drink, which apparently pretty much solves any health problem in Korea. It worked a trick, and the embarrassment of me nearly dying in front of the students was soon forgotten when one student offered an answer to describe his friend’s physical appearance as “gay”.
The music teacher at Boeun was so impressed with my piano playing that she has invited me to play at the school festival next week. This is great, except I now have the added pressure of trying to learn a Korean song on the piano so that the students know what I’m playing! Practice
Mr Oh
Mr Oh's Grade 2 class after climbing a mountain. has been going well but whether I will be ready in time or not is a different question! I’ve also had plenty of suggestions, including playing Bridge Over Troubled Water by Simon and Garfunkel simply because my name is Simon - good idea.
On Tuesday, I volunteered to go on a school trip to the botanical gardens about 30 minutes drive north of Boeun. I went with the second grade and after a bit of waiting around waiting for something to happen, Eun-bi and I had a nice stroll around the gardens. After about an hour we went back to where we started and the other teachers had already started putting out the most amazing spread of food for lunch. Pretty much every teacher had brought two or three dishes and there was enough food to last the week. Anyway, we set about it and sat, ate and drank for about 2 hours! The students were left to do what they want. Mr Oh, the other English teacher at our school, had took his grade up the side of a mountain in the time it took us to eat an uncomfortably large amount of kimbab! The man is inspirational
Huge Spider!
These spiders are everywhere here! - if only I could control my classes like he controls his grade. I also got to know a lot of the teachers better and now that they know me a bit better, it’s amazing how good their English is once they relax into a conversation and not worry about getting each sentence grammatically correct!
My classes on Wednesday were fine - I’ve been doing a music lesson with them which they have really enjoyed and I’ve got some really good answers out of the students. At the school trip I had been talking to the special needs teacher at the school who is great and has really good English. I asked her what I should do with one of my students who has Downs Syndrome and suggested whether I should try teaching him the alphabet in English. In my class on Wednesday, the student comes in proudly armed with his English textbook and proceeds to write out the letters brilliantly! It made my day!
After lunch, I noticed a small group of third graders milling around the teachers room pointing and laughing at the wall. I was inquisitive and soon realised, to my horror, that my passport
Kimbab
The amazing spread of food for us! photo that was taken in Seoul when I came here (remember that I had an actual photographer and Photoshopped face!?) has now been put up outside the teachers room! Everybody else looks professional and not to be messed with, whereas I look like a painfully unattractive male model posing for the next Hello! magazine cover! My poor judgement of sarcasm now leaves me unsure whether to take “Ah, Simon Teacher, photo, good!” as a compliment or not!
Probably one of my favourite lessons of the week was on Nationalities with the third grade. Most of them have now finished mid-term exams and are looking forward to high school. Consequently, I’d be surprised if any of them have conversational English as one of their key priorities in life. Nevertheless, I enjoy the lessons because the students that do want to learn now have a good grasp of English and can give some quality answers. I taught them about different nationalities and what they are famous for and finished it off with a game at the end. I wish I could give marks for comical, yet incorrect, answers because I had an absolute gem - “What is the capital city of Scotland?”
Teachers!
The Sang-san-nims! “Haggis.” If only!
One of the more bizarre moments of the week was turning up at Naebuk school shortly after 11am with a present on my desk. The students in grade 3 had just had their home economics class, and although I don’t teach them, they had made me none other than a beef burger! It tasted really good and struggled to get through my actual lunch at lunchtime. Ironically, just before leaving, one of the teachers said how slim I was - if only she had seen the amount of food I’d consumed that day! My bus ride home from Naebuk often has a ‘only in Korea’ moment. This week, an incredibly old woman (I use the word incredible because the woman was evidently very old, but the speed with which she walked and the amount of stuff she was carrying was insane!), after paying the bus driver, proceeded to dig deep into her bag and give three or four handfuls of jujubae to the bus driver. I felt two emotions - firstly, it was probably the nicest thing ever, secondly, almost embarrassment for the bus driver as he then contemplated what to do! His options - throw
them away (too offensive), eat them all in one go (probably impossible but would have loved to have seen him try) or drive the bus. Thankfully, he did the latter whilst balancing all the jujubae on his lap - this was impressive in itself.
After my successes with the tennis club a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been trying to get down to the courts at least a couple of times a week. They are expecting me to go down every day! The guys at the club are great and the English teacher who translated for me during the tournament has been popping down every now and then and we’ve had a good chat. The funny thing with the tennis is that there will be people playing and then I will turn up and everybody stops to watch me play! I’m far from being the best player at the club, in fact, the standard of the players is very high (probably because they have been practicing every day by the sounds of things). I’m going to try and link Dunnington Tennis Club with Boeun Tennis Club. It will be the next best thing since the twinning of Sandwell with
Konglish
15 Minuted. Bangalore.
On Friday, we woke to the main story on CNN being the spending cuts back in the UK and the prospect of half a million job losses occurring over the next few years. This means we’re now having to decide what we we’re going to be doing a year from now already! Not an easy decision to make! Unfortunately, this meant our minds were elsewhere for most of the day trying to contemplate our future. Ironically, where the UK cuts spending left, right and centre, Korea is planning on spending the same annual budget for education on building the best broadband system in the world. They are planning on having the whole country wired to 1Gb/s broadband! That’s about a hundred times better than the best broadband in England! Check out the article here -
Article Luckily, however, my Grade 2 class first thing in the morning provided enough entertainment to see through the day. My lesson was on Things In The House. I showed them our house back in England on Google Street view (complete with an old couple staring straight at the camera and my boxer shorts on the washing line in the back garden).
Outdoors
The Gyro Drop on full display behind a castle. The activity was to build their own dream house given a price list and a list of options. One student had the following creation:
My dream house is called MT. This stands for the Morning Tent. It has one room. It is small. It is the best dream house because you wake up with a smile and have nice time in the Morning Tent.
Absolutely brilliant.
In the evening, the foreign teachers in Boeun normally get together for some drinks or food and to catch up on what’s been happening during the week. This week’s favourite discussion was on the ‘Hi-bomb’. This is when a group of students suddenly spring up on you and begin saying “hi”, “nice to meet you”, “bye” in rapid succession. The problem is, if you ask them a question, they normally respond with stunned blankness or in perfect English they will reply, “I don’t speak English.” I’m also trying to teach the students different expressions to reply to for “how are you?”. I’ve banned “so-so” because nobody ever says it. I’m also trying to avoid the ‘robotic’ response of “I’m fine, how are you?” This is because it gets to a point now where I will say, “hi!” or “good morning!” and the response will be automatically and in unison, “I’m fine, how are you?”
This weekend has been great fun. One of the teachers at my school who welcomed
Locked up.
Sad faces all round. us on our first day, Sunny, had her birthday last week. We had planned to go out for a meal but that got postponed because all the teachers went to Songni Mountain for a meal. Instead, we decided to spend the day in Seoul, and more importantly, to try out Lotte Word Amusement Park! The journey from Boeun was painless and cheap - it takes just short of 3 hours by coach for about £14 return. We got into Lotte World and realised it was going to be busy…very busy. Coach loads of school children came and the buzz outside was full of Korean excitement. We got inside and tried to orientate ourselves but the map was very confusing - even Eun-bi and Sunny were having difficulty! Oh, I nearly forgot one important fact, the majority of the amusement park is actually indoors! We only found this out after queuing for 45 minutes to go on the monorail which took us around the park.
We then got a ‘magic pass’ which reserves us on a ride for later in the day and moved to the Wakiki Wave which was good fun and the queue wasn’t too bad. Our luck
Queuing
120 Minute queue. No thanks. run out there though as we were misled by the information given to us on the boards. The main rollercoaster - Atlantis - had a queuing time of 2 hours - yes, two hours! So we opted for the less extreme, Gyro Swing, which misleadingly told us the wait was 45 mins. So two hours later when we eventually got to the front, we were contemplating whether or not we could have been on the Atlantis, or whether (using a mathematical conversion), the real Atlantis queue is more like 4 hours. Anyway, the ride itself was bloody brilliant!
We got ice cream and wandered around the amusement park and folk museum before going on our final ride which we had the magic pass for (which saves us queuing!). We were about to go on the Gyro Drop. This is basically a lift taking you up very high whilst spinning you and then dropping you before the brakes eventually lock in to slow you down. Laura was absolutely messing herself that the brakes wouldn’t work - I don’t think she appreciated my comment at the very top, “I don’t think it will grab us this time.” I’m sure you’re all
Queue
120 minutes into a supposedly 45 minute queue. wondering what our statistics for the day were:
• We went for 7 hours.
• We queued for 4 hours.
• We got onto 4 rides (I don’t think the monorail will count as a ride).
• This works out at 0.57rph (rides per hour).
• 50% of our rides had the word ‘Gyro’ in them.
We then went to an amazing Chinese restaurant with awesome views overlooking the city before getting on our way to Insadong. We heard this was a good place for motels and after a bit of looking around, we were not disappointed. For the equivalent of £20 each, we got a four poster bed, a flat screen TV, computer, and the icing on the cake, a whirlpool bath! Oh, did I forget to mention the unlimited supply of popcorn and slush puppies? Bearing in mind we paid about £70 for a Travelodge in London before we came out here!
After a phenomenally good nights sleep, we got the subway to Itaewon. Just as we got out of the station, we heard a shout from one of the ice cream shops and our friends Dan and Amelia were there! Quite lucky considering we probably only know about 50
Scotland
Bagpipes!? people in Korea! It was good to hear how they were getting on and they had just been to the DMZ so I’m definitely up for going there soon just for the experience! We then found a place which sold homous and some Indian and Thai curry sauces and pastes so we can rustle up something at home!
Laura says: Hello! Sorry I haven’t really messaged on here. Our adventures are mostly the same! However, I work in three primary schools and it’s mostly great. I have awesome co teachers in two of my schools. I have a crap memory so when it comes to Tink writing up the blog I can never remember any of the funny moments from my week. Sorry I know I’m rubbish! I’ll try to make more effort. Also the sports I get involved in aren’t nearly as funny as Tink’s Tennis and Volleyball adventures. I go running and Swimming and then at the weekends I try to get to the ice rink in Cheongju. One thing I just forgot and Tink reminded me about is that my school has a rollerskating rink so in the PE lessons at school the kids go rollerblading!!!
Folk Museum
Good display. Amazing. I went on the rink the other day and the kids treated me like a rockstar just cs I can skate backwards haha!
Before coming to Korea I had heard that Koreans didn’t have a sweet tooth and that generally their diets are healthier than ours. Absolute lies! At school I eat cake pretty much everyday around twice a day. The cake or cookies are awesome and everyone sits around the table in the staff room to et them and share the food. It’s a great atmosphere but one of the reasons I will come back from Korea around 10 stone heavier! On Thursday, shock horror, there were no cakes or cookies. The cupboard where the backlog of sweet stuff is stored was EMPTY!! so the teachers ordered two buckets of fried chicken to be delivered to the staff room! Amazing! Only in Korea! The fried chicken here is about a million times better than at home and I will deffo miss it when I get back to the UK!
Tink and Laura
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Rox
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POP TARTS!!!
OMG! you have poptarts!? how much is 60 000 won? xxxxxxxx