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Published: November 9th 2010
Meow
Evelyn the cat.Dear Blog Readers,
I’m sitting in a beautiful ‘Angel-in-us’ café supping on a comparatively ridiculously priced hot chocolate in what can only be described as a chalice. The girl who served me tried out her English before dropping all of my change on the floor, much to the (embarrassed) laughter of the other waitresses - gutted. I need to try and make it last though. Laura’s gone into Cheongju to buy another pair of jeans which will be exactly one inch less than the same ones she bought from the same shop last week because the extra one inch on the current ones make all the difference. I’m sure all of the women reading this are agreeing wholeheartedly with her actions whereas all the blokes will be scratching their heads and adding it to the list of ‘things women do which men will simply never understand’. Anyway, I’m not complaining, it means that I’m sat in a comfy café surrounded by no less than 7 bags and the chance to write about what turned out to be quite an eventful week - on Wednesday evening I was panicking that I was going to be struggling.
The only eventful thing
The Inner Circle
Pyromaniacs Anonymous Meeting. that had happened up to this point was my first ever open class on Tuesday with Eun-bi. We have been preparing for this class for weeks and we knew we had a cracking lesson ready to go. We were expecting, at the minimum, 4 supervisors to be observing, so you can imagine our surprise when 10 minutes into the lesson we had an empty back of the classroom. Eventually, one supervisor decided to wander in. At first I thought she was lost judging by the look on her face, but then she sat down with some papers and looked like she was actually observing the lesson. Unfortunately, the lesson didn’t exactly go to plan but we pulled through OK. I was more disheartened by the supervisor walking out with 5 minutes to go than by the fact that we ran out of time. The students did a good job and the posters they did were good but after all the hard work we had put into the lesson, I felt that the lesson didn’t do the preparation any justice. Afterwards, however, Eun-bi’s offer of a candy cane helped sugar coat my disappointment.
Michelle, our next door neighbour, cheered me
Fireworks
Our haul of fireworks. up in the evening because she’d found a stray cat in the car park near our apartments with wire wrapped around its neck. She took it to her flat but her two cats are quite territorial and the new cat didn’t like being in the same flat as them so we took her off her hands for a few days until she was taken care of properly (Note - this is why she cheered me up, not because she’d found a stray cat with wire wrapped around it’s neck!). Evelyn the cat was great fun. She’s a bit older than a kitten but not a fully grown cat. She loves playing and made herself at home very quickly. It was good fun keeping the cat for a few days but we couldn’t keep one for longer mainly because we aren’t at the flat very often because of work and Laura’s quite allergic to them so that doesn’t help either. Dad was quite worried by the affection we showed the cat, but then he remembered he had to go out to feed the chickens, change their bedding, put them back into the hut, pet them and finally, gather their eggs.
Sparklers
Much bigger than usual. My Grade 3 class on Wednesday is normally a mixed bag but it conjured up the first highlight of my week. When playing the matching game, I had a picture of Jake and the word nephew and they had to think of an interesting sentence to match the two. They knew the picture was my nephew but they couldn’t remember his name. After a quick ‘Hangman’ - four letters beginning with J, the name choices flowed and I wish I’d done this when Pete and Nikki were thinking of names as they would have had some classics - my favourite was ‘Jay-Z’.
Lunch at Naebuk on Thursday is always good fun even if it’s just for the Grade 3 students who don’t get taught English but really want to try some out on me. I’ve been asked three weeks on the trot how old I am and whether I like the food - or for them, “Korean. Food. Delicious?” Mrs Ma, my co-teacher, told me that I didn’t need to come in next week because the students were going to Lotte World. At the start of my Grade 2 class, I thought this would be a good opener to
get used to speaking in past, present and future tense. So, “What did we learn last week?” “Places in the community” “What will we learn today?” “Giving directions” “What will you do next week?”… at this point I used my two months’ worth of teaching intuition. I read their blank faces to mean that they didn’t understand the question, so I gave them the answer, “Next week, you will be going to Lotte World!” Mrs Ma looks at me, and then says, “the students don’t know that yet.” Epic fail.
Luckily there are only 6 students in the class so hopefully they’ll keep it to themselves. And anyhow, their brains are now packed with the English for answering such phrases as, “Please can you direct me to the traditional Korean bath house?” As if they will remember the fact that they will have a day off at the biggest amusement park in South Korea. Right? As I pondered my mistake on the way to the bus stop I was reminded about the lack of Korean health and safety. For example, changing the electricity pylon would probably require a 10 man team and a 500 page health and safety document,
not forgetting the all-important hard-hat. I walked past a man climbing up a pylon on a wooden ladder which was too wide for the pole and shaking violently. Not to mention the three steps that were missing on the way up. Did I forget the fact that he was not wearing a hard-hat, gloves, a harness and that he was holding potentially live electricity wires in both hands. I was wondering how he was going to test if they were live or not - maybe using his tongue?
I had a bus to catch, so I ran to the bus stop hoping the man wasn’t going to get killed in my presence. I was then shocked once again, not by faulty electricity wires, but by the increase in bus fare! My usual 1500 Won trip is now 1900 Won - that’s over a 25% increase! I didn’t need to calculate this because the sheet of paper on the bus window not only shows you the change in price but also the percentage increase to two decimal places. This seems a bit excessive, it’s almost like they want to rub salt into your wounded bank balance. There would be, and
has been from experience, outrage when such an event happens with First York in Dunnington. However, I’m soon reminded that the same trip in England would cost me about 5000 Won so I wasn’t too bothered, but I bet the old man who gets on at stop 2 every week wearing the same clothes and smelling like a farm will be annoyed.
When I got back to Boeun, I was walking back up the hill to the flat when I noticed a couple of familiar faces. The Jehovah’s Witnesses have been there the past couple of weeks and I’m worried that they think I’m a prime candidate for suddenly making a U-turn in my beliefs. When I first spoke to them, I tried to explain that I don’t actually believe in anything but I don’t think that this is a possibility in Korea because they simply couldn’t grasp that concept. “You don’t believe in….anything?!” Basically, each week they ply me with some more information about Christianity, however, this week they went to new levels - they’d brought with them a portable DVD player complete with their own DVD. I admired their effort and enthusiasm and stood for a good
Hula Hoop
Giant Hula-hoop which pulled a muscle in Laura's back. couple of minutes trying to change the subject to the weather rather than to God but they somehow turned the conversation around rapidly without me noticing. This was doubly impressive due to the language and conversational barrier. I walked back to the house, looking forward to seeing Evelyn, and remembering the time when I got woken up by two Jehovah’s Witnesses in Birmingham at 7am on a Sunday morning greeted with the line, “Some people believe that pets go to heaven and have an afterlife, do you?”
On Friday we had period 1 cancelled which was great. What was even better was the reason we were having it cancelled. Basically, some students were competing in a marathon (yes, a 26.2 mile marathon!) and we had our first period cancelled to go and cheer them. It took about 20 minutes to walk 150 students to the designated corner, about 15 seconds for the runners to go past, and about 20 minutes to march them all back again to the school. Time well spent if you ask me. When I got back to the teachers room, there was a strange man with a large bag going around each of the teachers.
Weights
Hitting the gym hard. I’ve noticed this a couple of times. It seems like it is OK in Korea for people to come into the school to try and sell their product, whether it be perfume, make-up, or in this case, socks. Each teacher pretty much dismissed the sales pitch amid all the effort and exuberance displayed on each occasion. It came to me and I could see the cogs turning in his head weighing up the advantages of getting custom from a ‘rich foreigner’ or the disadvantage of not being able to actually do the sales pitch due to the language barrier. He went with the latter, smiled and moved onto the next teacher.
We’ve had a couple of interesting Korean dishes this week that should be mentioned. Laura couldn’t contain her excitement after her first try of ‘green tea cake’. Those of you who know Laura will know that when she was younger, she wasn’t allowed to bake a cake unless it was actually the colour of a normal, everyday, run of the mill cake. This was because she often had a tendency to massacre a good cake with food colouring to make it into a ‘rainbow cake’. The thought that
Ice Skating
Holding on for dear life. a bright green cake could be acceptable meant she was overjoyed and her childhood pastime would actually be accepted here in Korea. I’ve also tried a soy bean soup which basically looks and smells terrible, but the taste could be similarly terrible, however, this is masked by excessive quantities of salt.
My principal at Boeun Middle School is great. We were told before coming here that more often than not, your principal will not only not speak any English, but probably won’t speak to you at all and contact you through other channels, such as your co-teacher. My principal, on the other hand, has been brilliant. We went for bulgogi on my second week here and he has always tried out his English on me. We now try and meet up every couple of weeks, and normally, this is because he’s been studying English hard during the week and wants to watch CNN with me in his office for half an hour. It’s because the anchors on CNN speak too quickly and he finds it hard to understand, but he’d rather watch the English news than the Korean news to practice his English. I admire this determination and I’m
95% Pork
What's the other 5% made of? more than happy to talk through it with him. This week, we were talking about Haiti and he was trying to explain that there was a lot of ‘chilra’ in Haiti at the moment. I was confused and racked my brains for what he could mean - children maybe? He then explained that it was a bad disease or virus and I realised he was trying to say ‘cholera’, which, when you think about how it reads, is pretty much ‘chilra’. We had a laugh about our misunderstanding which was then exemplified when he explained that if you have cholera then you vomit and … well, he racked his brains for the word for ‘vomit out the other end’ so I preceded in teaching my principal the word ‘diarrhoea’.
This weekend has been great fun. We got on a bus to Cheongju to see our friends Gavin, Kim and David. We met them at orientation and I’ve talked about them before but for brief introductions - Gavin is from New Zealand and is writing an awesome blog about his tales at www.gavinsinclair.wordpress.com so check it out. Kim and David are from South Africa and are pretty much at the
same position in life as Laura and I in terms of finishing University and wanting to do something different. We got there in the evening and the first port of call was to celebrate Bonfire Night without a bonfire or Gordon’s Big One. These two hindrances didn’t stop us and we soon found a disused construction site to set them off (typically following the Korean health and safety measures rather than the English). This was great until we saw somebody walking towards us. We’re still unsure whether it is illegal or not to set off fireworks in public so we scarpered like little children and went downtown for a drink in Buzz, ‘a Western bar’, just below the ‘Korean pub’. Buzz was cool, it had a free pool table, darts, Western beers and absolutely no kimchi in sight. Typically Western.
We rolled into bed in the early hours of the morning and had the best night’s sleep. Kim’s bed was ridiculously comfy and her duvet was so good that we bought the same type in HomePlus today. I’m worried that this might be the end of being able to actually get out of bed in the morning. We had
Free The Beatrice
Is this a designer label? a lazy morning and ate croissants at the top of the forest behind Kim’s apartment. There were plenty of old people doing exercises on the non-chav-destroyed exercise machines that line the route to the top. We were sitting in one of the gazebos where an old man laid flat on his back doing sit ups before using a massive hula-hoop finishing his workout off by smacking his back against one of the posts holding the gazebo up whilst we were sat inside trying to stop our hot chocolate from tipping over.
We got a taxi into Cheongju, and more specifically to the ice skating rink. The monotony of going around in a circle perilously with the impending doom of, at the very least, falling over onto ice, and at the worst, breaking a bone was more bearable this week because we went with Kim and David who were about as terrible as I was. Laura was being outshone by some young Korean figure skaters who were practicing for an exam in the afternoon. David, Kim and I slowly improved and an hour and a bruised arse later we decided to have a drink and a 95% pure pork hotdog
(which took 25 seconds to cook in the microwave) at ‘Deutsche Café’ which was distinctly un-German (or French) apart from the Gustav Klimt painting in the corner. We then did some shopping and met up with Gavin at Appleby’s which is an all-you-can-eat restaurant which was recommended to us. The four waitresses played rock-paper-scissors to decide who was the unfortunate one to attempt to try out their English on us. She explained that it only cost 20,000 Won for all you can eat including beer! Can you imagine that in England!? What I don’t think anybody there was expecting was the four of us staying four hours polishing off about 40 plates of food, 10 desserts and 30 drinks between us before being asked to leave by the manager because they were closing. We went back to the construction yard to set off the rest of our fireworks before going back to Kim’s where I destroyed the toilet, not because of the 15 plates of food I’d just managed to consume, but because the chain inside the cistern snapped off the handle. Damn!
We spent this morning eating pizza and going to HomePlus - all I needed was some
Chocolate Fountain
Laura skips starters and mains. thermal socks but I think the strange man who was selling them in the teachers room earlier in the week had bought them all out of stock. Laura’s back now so I’ll wrap things up. She’s just displayed her new skinny jeans, which she insists are actually two inches smaller than the old ones. She’s also publicly displayed her new bright purple flowery fluffy trousers which I have vowed that this will be the one and only time that they should be displayed in public. All in all, a cracking end to the week! I’ll now finish supping my cold chocolate…
Tink and Laura
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Some classic moments here Tinks. Especially like the Deutsch hotdog and the variations of the phrase 'Deutsch hotdog & coffee'; although the 95% pork is probably a lot more than what you get here... Turns out Reilly forgot to bring the video camera to the Halloween show as he took it home after finding it left out at a show. He kept that one quiet whilst I panicked that it was nowhere to be found! I've ensured we will film the Christmas show so don't worry about missing that one! Hope you're having fun. Inabit mush.