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Published: June 13th 2011
B-O-E-U-N
Represent.Dear Blog Readers,
I weed a little bit at 10am on Monday morning. This wasn’t because I’d drank a lot the previous evening and hadn’t had my morning bladder relief. No, it was because an air raid siren was going off. A real-life air raid siren! You know - the ones you see on old war movies as families race to the shelter as a fighter pilot sets a Zepplin on fire. Laura and I looked at each other in disbelief. Was this the North Korean invasion we’d been anticipating? We started looking on the internet and flicking through the TV channels. Mythbusters still wasn’t on. Damn. After a minute, the sirens stopped and it twigged. It was Memorial Day in Korea and this was its way of signalling a minute’s silence. Unfortunately for the people at Gukdong Apartment, their silence was shattered by Laura and I trying to work out what the hell was going on. I suppose it could have been worse – we could have been vacuuming.
It was a national holiday and I considered buying some Pepero chocolate sticks to be ironic (Koreans celebrate Pepero Day on 11th November, Remembrance Day in England). It was
Garlic
Enough garlic to feed the five thousand...or the population of Boeun. Clare’s last day in Korea so we went to Songnisan and showed her around Beopjusa. I’ve now clocked up my fifth visit there but it doesn’t get old and it’s still an amazing place. I learn something new about it every time I go there. The weather was fantastic and pleasant enough for some families to go and play in the river. Luckily there weren’t any foreigners trying to jump off the rocks into the river below.
It was back to school on Tuesday. Tuesday is my worst day of the week because I have four classes of second grade. Second grade middle schoolers this year have terrible behaviour. Weirdly, it isn’t just my school. It’s the whole of Korea apparently. The other schools in Boeun agree, and the teachers at school have commented about the schools throughout Korea complaining of the same situation. The reason, apparently, is because the economy in Korea took a huge turn for the worst in 1997 and there was a financial crisis across Asia. This has meant that the childhoods of Korea’s current middle school second graders were filled with all the negativity of financial hardship. Consequently, these so-called IMF babies, have turned
Songnisan
Clare and Laura in front of the waterfall in Songnisan. into unruly students.
Mr Oh turned up in a traditional Korean hanbok which was well received by the students. I thought it looked pretty cool, but I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. In one class, he was taking the English-name register. I was busy setting up the PPT on the computer so I was only paying half attention. He got to about number 12 on the register and was berating one student for not acknowledging his name. He turns to me and asks if he is pronouncing his name correctly. I look at the list and he’s pointing at, ’12: Katie’. He’d been reading the register for Grade 2-1 for my Girl’s High School, not the Boy’s Middle School! Amazingly, he’d got to number 12 before anybody noticed the mistake!
Wednesday was great fun. The girl’s at the high school are a joy to teach. Unfortunately they’ve got tonnes of exams coming up and you can see the stress, tiredness and exhaustion on their faces. I genuinely feel sorry for them. My suggestion last week that we should go out for lunch every week has been taken seriously by Mrs Han! We went out for dolsut-bab
Gate
Gate to Beopjusa. (rice in a stone pot) for lunch this time. Annoyingly, I’m not teaching there because of exams for the next three weeks!
The strive for excellence in schools due to the education system here in Korea means that we have open classes every semester to check that we can do our job. This often means having parents, other teachers, vice principals, principals and office of education inspectors sitting at the back of your classroom watching your every move. I don’t remember Ofsted inspections being so rigorous, or as frequent, but maybe I’m wrong. My first class on Thursday had 8 adults at the back staring at Carrie and I, occasionally marking something down on their pads of paper. My lesson was on Astrophysics subtly disguising the comparatives and superlatives that lay within. The students bought it, and fortunately, some of the inspectors learnt something new, “I thought every planet had one Moon?” was my personal favourite.
I was surprised that the students could even think straight due to the building work going on outside. Korea seems to be a constant construction site. The building work at the school is to build a wheelchair ramp into the science building
Baby Shower 2
Wendy and Laura posing Korean style. so expect an influx in wheelchair bound students in next year’s enrolment as we currently have none. People are building things all the time. I’ve commented before on the health and safety, or should I say, lack of. They have huge mechanical diggers and industrial sized pneumatic drills in the middle of the playground for the students to play under, on top of or next to during their break time. Madness. The chances of a wheelchair bound student for next year are almost inevitable.
It was a sad week for the Boeun crew. Betty and Chris made their way back to the US of A on Friday. We had an unforgettable night of Apples and Pears on Wednesday night as the Last Supper. The remaining disciples of Boeun trudged out on Friday night to reignite the fire and commemorate our USA bound friends. It wasn’t the same but we had a great laugh playing pool and trying to decipher the rules of Geoff’s new game (it ended up him winning 3000 Won) so the magic wasn’t completely lost. In hindsight, we should really have recorded Betty’s hysterical laughter to play at opportune moments during the evening – normally after
Baby Shower 5
The party people! one of Stephanie’s punch lines (that’s so funny).
The week finished on a high with a trip to Cheongju yesterday to have a little get together to celebrate Michelle’s friend, Erin, who is expecting a baby in a couple of months. Michelle has been trying to organise it for ages. Erin’s Korean friends weren’t interested in coming to a baby shower. Unbelievable. It ended up being Erin, Michelle, Leonard, Wendy, Laura and I having a nice drink in town and giving presents for herself and her baby. It was great fun and she was really touched by the gesture. What a great way to end the week!
Tink and Laura
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