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Published: December 21st 2009
Our TaeKwonDo class!
Austin, Lauren, Mike, me, Mara Drew and the rest of the Koreans in our class. There is one little girl missing too.As some of you know by now, Mike and I decided to take TaeKwonDo lessons to get a real Korean experience. TaeKwonDo is huge here and nearly every kid takes lessons during their childhood. If you weren't currently aware... TaeKwonDo is the national sport of Korea. We are in a class with our friends Mara and Drew and Austin and Lauren. There are also about 6 other Koreans, ranging in age from 8 years old to 19 years old. They are allllll better than us! ahhaha! Our class is 3 times a week for an hour and so far we LOVE it!!
The master, who is a 7th level black belt, doesn't speak a word of English, but loves having foreigners in class so we got our rad uniforms for free!! woohoo! The first belt you start with is white. The first few weeks we spent a lot of class just stretching because we are sooooo unflexible compared to them! They laugh at us when we try to stretch and can't do it! They also like to sit on you or push your legs down/apart to make you stretch farther (and yell out in pain!). Our instructor, is a girl, maybe
Mara, me and Lauren
Right after our test was finished! Phew! 20 years old we think, and she is great!! She tries to say things in English whenever she can, but the class is conducted in Korean, so it's an interesting dynamic at times! She can't just tell us what we are doing wrong, because we don't understand her words - so she hsa to try and show us! We are also picking up some Korean along the way which is good too!
Another cool thing is that the TKD school has a small bus and they pick up every student at their home and being them back after class! Now, for Mike and I, we live about 2 blocks from where the class is held, so we don't get a ride, but for others who live farther away, this is a great help, as well as for parents who have to work late or whatever!
Being the celebrities that we are, they took our picture one day after class and it made the front cover of the December newsletter for the school! The Korean kids in our class are great! They try to help us whenever they can by translating into English and they are really cute, especially this one
little 7 year old boy.
So last week we had our first belt test! If we passed, we would move on to our yellow belt! We practiced very hard to get the moves down properly, and nervously awaited the end of class that night, when we would individually perform our test. I, of course, had to go first, followed later by Mike. When we all finished, we were eager to find out if we passed or not, only to find out that we had to wait until the next class to know! Unfortunately we had to go out of town on foreign teacher training all the following week, so we had to wait a whole week to know our results...but the wait was worth it, because last night in class, we all got our yellow beltttttt!!!!!!!!! Very exciting! We also learned the sequence for the green belt test which we will do in 1 month. The master predicts that we will have our black belt (complete with official documentation!) before we leave Korea...he actually said 5 months, but I'm not banking on us getting through it all so quickly! haha That's right official documentation that clarifies us as weapons. A
martial arts licence.
On that note, we spent this past week (Sun-Thurs) in Gyeongju with all the foreign teachers from our province and 3 other provinces doing training. There were over 250 foreingers there so we got to meet lots of other foreigners from our area. As far as the training went, it was ...well, as most training is...some was ok, most was useless. They told us for the first couple days that we weren't allowed to leave the hotel grounds, even after the training was finished for the day...they should have seen the trouble coming with this decision, but it resulted in parties in the hotel rooms and one room getting doused by a fire extinguisher (and the foreigner who did this was sent home!).
The best parts of the week had nothing to do with the training. One day in class one new friend taught me to do some origami and we made this big ball out of our folded paper, which I brought home with me as a souvenir! One day was spent exploring Gyeongju and we got to experience ink rubbing, which is a traditional art form here, and that was really cool (and now
we have some decorations for our apartment!!). Basically, you get a tablet with a picture on it, put a piece of paper over it, you spray it with water, then dab on ink to copy the picture onto your paper. very simple, but the results looked great!
Also, one night, Lauren, Mara and I braved the Korean bath house for the first time!! This is a big deal because it is super popular in Korea, and Koreans go to these bath houses all the time...so what's the big deal, you wonder? Well, you can't wear any clothes or bathing suits in them! Obviously, they are separated between men and women, but even still, we were not overly excited for this. So, we begged the employee, who, after saying no two times, agreed to let us wear our swim suits inside. The only thing is, people were staring at us more with our suits on than if we hadn't been wearing them, so we ended up taking the experience for what it was, and doing things the Korean way. Yes, to answer your question, it was uncomfortable at first, but you get used to it, and most of the time you
Later in the test
If I knew the name of the poses, I would tell you, but they are all in Korean! are in the water anyways, so it's not really so bad...and it's super relaxing, so it's definitely worth it! Basically in these bath houses, there are a bunch of different small pools of varying temperatures, ranging from hot to cold and you just go between the different pools as you wish. There was also a few dry saunas and a bunch of bathing stations for scrubbing afterwards. We came out of the sauna relax, warm and proud of ourselves for braving this cultural activity that is so different from what we are used to! It's definitely something I would do again!
Mike also had some excitement at his school recently, to here he is to tell the story himself! Speaking of fires... my school decided that this past thursday was awesome excitment day... So whilst sitting in my office (shared with the teachers lounge) I got to over hear a mother laying into one of the grade 6 teachers, this mother was absolutely screaming at the poor teacher (one of the nicest teachers in the school). So because I could not understand anything I decided to put some headphones on and ignore it. A little while later, i realized
some new "ringing" in my ears... slowly realizing it was outside my head and not inside, I took my headphones off to find out that the fire alarm was going off. So I wandered around with a curious angst to see why I was forgotten.... as I head down the stairs to the second floor, I could soon smell and see the black smoke pouring out of my vice principals office. It was so thick that you couldn't even see the windows on the other side of the room. So as I began to run down the stairs, I see my vice principal come running out with fire extinguisher all over him and the maintenance guy running up the stairs to see what was going on. So I ran to get another fire extinguisher, only to return to them simply killing the power, turning off the alarm as the heater/AC unit in the corner of his office was engulfed in flames. But before I could lend a hand, they had the fire out... the smoke pouring into the hallways and the children casually coming by to check it out (oh wait, did I forget to mention they DID NOT EVACUATE
THE SCHOOL) as if it was no big deal. I later found out that they had renovated the room about a month before, and whoever connected the electrical hadn't tied it in correctly and eventually it exploded into flames. In the end, what seemed to be a big deal to me... seemed to be everyday casual mishaps to them. Oh ya,.. and the mother that was screaming at the teacher... well she was still screaming at the end of all this (about 45min later)... and eventually my co-teacher had to break it up and make her realize that there are 2 sides to a story and her son didn't get beat up simply because he was innocent little boy.
We got our first real glimpse of Korean Christmas while we were shopping in the Nampodong area of Busan last weekend as well. We found this great market that stretched for streets, seemingly without end, so we spent the day exploring the many stores and being amazed by some of the talents we found! It's so odd to walk by a store that sells only 1 item, but that is so common here - umbrella stores, red pepper stores,
Kick!
You don't want to cross him with a face like that! sock stores, you name it, it's there! As we were about to leave, it was just getting dark and the streets came alive with the spirit of Christmas! Everywhere you looked there were colourful lights, trees and decorations galore! They even had Christmas music playing from speakers dispersed around the street! It was a festive display for the holiday season, that is hard to come by in this country, where Christmas is just a one-day holiday - not nearly as hyped-up as back home! We spent lots of time walking up and down that street, basking in the spirit of Christmas before heading home to meet some friends for dinner and wine!
Well we hope that there is some snow and home and that it feels like Christmas is right around the corner! Being so far from home and friends & family, as well as being sans the white fluffy stuff, it hardly feels like the Christmas season here! I can't believe Christmas is only one week away! We have a little Charlie Brown tree brightening our apartment, compliments of our friend Melissa who recently returned to New Zealand! We would love to Skype with anyone and everyone over
the holidays so message us and let us know when is good for you!
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