The Adventures of GentlePig and Pig Girl!

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Dear Blog Readers,

Another week has passed and it’s been quite a surreal week to be honest. We spent the weekend recovering from our sickness and we both felt fine come Monday morning. It is currently winter vacation at our schools but the strive for excellence in the Korean educational system means that the word ‘vacation’ means ‘a time period where your son or daughter could learn more and improve immeasurably amongst his or her peers in a subject of your choosing.’

Luckily, my English winter camp has been much less time consuming than Laura’s and many of our friends here in Boeun. I have two hours a day for two weeks with some first grade students. Laura has four hours a day for three weeks and this seems to be quite common for the students at elementary school. The schools are reasonably busy in the morning with students having classes in subjects such as English, Maths and Korean predominantly. There is also one teacher each day who has to stay in school to man the phones. On Monday, this was the PE teacher, who ended up playing Solitaire for the longest period of time without a break that I have ever witnessed. With time on my hands, I responded to the warning email that had been sent around saying that nearly everybody had forgotten to complete the ‘Pre-Orientation online course’.

The course was put online sometime in July or early August and was supposed to be completed before we attended our Orientation at the end of August, but strangely, we were allowed until January 31st 2011 to complete it. I, as well as pretty much everybody at Orientation, had a life before Orientation and so the course was put on the back burner and forgotten about until the said warning email. Weirdly, it said I’d completed exactly 13% of the course before the warning email was sent and I had no idea how or when I’d done the 13%, and superstitiously, I was foreseeing my inevitable unlucky failing. Anyway, the course ended up being ridiculously easy, and at some points, laughable, particularly the ‘Life In Korea’ section given that we’d now been in Korea for four months with such classics as, “Which of these is not a banknote in Korea?” Anyway, once completing the Pre-Orientation online course post orientation, I handed in my 100% certificate to Eun-bi, who, like me, was now wondering what to do with it. We’ve decided to add it to the mounting pile of paperwork.

On Tuesday, I Skyped home to check that my family were still alive and the house had not crumbled due to the massive earthquake that struck Ripon measuring 3.7 on the Richter scale at 9:03pm the previous evening. Luckily, my family were safe and sound, and coincidently, Dad had suffered a particularly ferocious bowel movement at 9pm the previous evening.

Winter Camp was going smoothly and the students I have are at a very good standard. The only down-point so far has been me failing to realise I was flying low until fifteen minutes into the lesson. Lunch at school this week has been great. One day we had a bloke come in to try and convince us to buy his dodgy cod liver oil tablets. This was met with overwhelming disapproval, especially, after his demonstration which was to pour the contents of the tablet onto a polystyrene sheet, and after a minute, the liquid had burnt a hole into the sheet. Even my Principal said, “Don’t eat it. It will burn a hole in your stomach.” I agreed and tucked into the sushi which the advertiser had brought with him to tempt us into buying his extortionately priced product.

Wednesday was truly exceptional because the Chinese teacher bought Pizza from Pizza School. They are certainly well educated in making good pizza! They had ‘potato pizza’ and ‘BBQ pork rib pizza’ which were so good! On Friday we even had bibimbap! (Note: not on top of a pizza.)

One of my winter camp activities was for the students to make their own superhero. My favourite was ‘Pig Girl’ who, if you were hungry, would cut off parts of its body and make it into samgyeopsal instantly and then regenerate the missing body part. We then made our own superhero, called ‘Gentlepig’ who was Pig Girl’s girlfriend (but during the course of the discussion the relationship broke down). He was basically a cross between the incredible hulk and superman but was coloured bright pink.

This weekend has been fantastic. Me, Laura, Yuni, Eun-bi and Sunny (aka Team Kongland) organised a trip to Jisan ski resort which is just outside Seoul. It took us about 2 hours get there and we got a really good deal on the lift pass and accommodation. Laura and I went snowboarding for a week in April in the south of France and Yuni and Sunny had been a couple of times before and Eun-bi was a first timer. Laura and I got lift passes whilst Yuni, Sunny and Eun-bi practiced after we gave them a quick tutorial on the basics. This went down well since after we’d gone down a couple of times, they had improved loads. The number of people there was incredible! The queues were pretty big, but it only took about 15 minutes to get onto the lift (which is still strange compared to how things were in France). We also tried out night snowboarding for the first time which was great fun! In the evening we got back to our room by 10pm and started making samgyeopsal which lasted well into the early hours of the morning! It was a great trip and well worth doing! We got everything (lift pass, accommodation, food, transport, etc.) for about £50!

Tink and Laura

PS: Forgot to mention. In Korea, it's more fashionable to go snowboarding than skiing. The problem with this is that in-between couples wearing matching outfits, you have the Korean girls wearing the latest season's G-market purchases trying to look as good as possible without actually doing any snowboarding!

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Photos

Queues
Hoards of people!

Professionals
Daytime Snowboarding

Professionals 2
Night-time Snowboarding!

Samgyeopsal!
Home-made samgyeopsal! Complete with bright purple cabbage leaves!

Early Hours
Plenty of samgyeopsal later...

The View
View from our room

Yum Yum
Oh Korea.