Dear Blog Readers, Another crazy week in the land of Korea! My first week where trying to keep track of things back at home whilst being here has well and truly been put to the test - and I believe, passed with flying colours! I’ll explain more later! My co-teacher at Wonnam was away in Gangwon on Monday, and according to the vice-principal, the students wanted my lessons to be taught so I obliged by going solo! I’d been working on a cracking Who Wants To Be A Millionnaire for Places In The Community which went down a winner. I’d also been practicing my Hangul by translating their names into English and I’ve decided to do a register each week to try and get used to their names. It also provides much entertainment because of my ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, I’m glad that these blogs are typed rather than spoken because all you would hear now is a croaky old man voice which is sometimes comically interweaved with the odd very high pitched note which comes from nowhere. Unfortunately my throat has been getting progressively worse during the week and the rock concert in Daejeon last night may have finished me off. More on that later! Monday at Wonnam was great. I did my lesson on ‘What Do You Want To Be When You Are Older?’ - although I have since changed this to ‘What Do You Want To Be In The Future?’ because Koreans find the word ‘older’ really hard to pronounce. The school is currently being demolished because next year, Wonnam, Songni and Naebuk are merging together. The new school will ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, A pretty quiet week in Boeun and a sudden change in the seasons as Autumn settles in for the next couple of months bringing with it a 10 degree temperature drop - we were told the seasons were more extreme here before we came but we didn’t realise it would be this drastic! On Monday I had one of my first crisis classes - I had spent (too much) time making a music lesson for my class at Wonnam on Sunday preparing music clips and a PowerPoint to go with it. Twenty minutes before the lesson is due to start my co-teacher, Jinny, breaks the news, “Ah…today, we have a problem. No computer. No TV.” Damn! The school is being completely renovated so pretty much every classroom was stripped bare and stuff was ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, We get ushered into the finance department of the Boeun Education Office after another horrifically awkward meeting with another supervisor who is the supervisor of my co-teachers’ supervisors’ supervisor. Angela, Laura and I exchange confused looks as to what the 20 minute meeting could possibly have been about but then were overwhelmed as everybody in the department stood up and began applauding us. After this welcome, one of the supervisor’s introduces us to the department, “Please welcome, Angela, Simon and Neall.” So, quite a good, well actually, funny end to our third week at school! Last weekend we completed our settling down period in Boeun by finally getting our mobile phones! Thanks to our co-teachers Yuni and Eun-bi, they managed to wangle us a good deal. Laura has got a swish touch-screen phone ... read more

Dear Blog Readers, Orientation has begun and it has been great so far. Luckily, the first day wasn’t too intense so we were able to get over our jetlag a little bit. We started off the day with a breakfast of bacon and eggs (classically Korean) and some cereal. We then had our first class meeting which has everybody who is going to the same province as ours - Chungbuk. Some employees from NH Bank came and helped us open up a new bank account for our salaries to go into and we’ll be getting our cards by the end of orientation which is great. Lunch was a mixture of chicken and pork with rice and it was pretty good! We then went to the main auditorium for the official EPIK 2010 Opening Ceremony. This included ... read more