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Published: August 4th 2018
The hike up to Gamcheon
Little did we know, this was only the beginning of our hill adventures.Hey everyone,
Wow I feel like I always say this, but it really has been a while. I’m not sure if I should blame it on not really doing anything or on doing too much. I suppose it’s been a bit of both. Life here has basically settled into a routine, between going to the gym, going to work, and eating food in the time between. In the last few months I’ve begun teaching reading classes to some of my students, so I am in charge of making worksheets to check my students’ vocabulary and reading comprehension. I’ve set my worksheets up such that one of the sections is intended to test my students’ ability to understand words in context (for example, the word “funny” doesn’t always indicate that someone is laughing, but can also mean “strange.” Or “topple” can mean “to fall over” or “to knock over,” depending on whether it is transitive or intransitive). The second section checks their ability to match an idiom or phrase with a definition or synonym, with only the usage in the book to aid them. The final section asks them to write complete sentences and checks their comprehension of the section we
read. Each worksheet takes me about an hour or two to write, and I am currently writing worksheets for
Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl, and
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White. I’ve previously completed a set of worksheets (nine total, including quizzes and a final test) for
The Magic Finger by Roald Dahl. For the most part, the worksheets have been pretty successful, although I think the director has allowed the students to use a dictionary for the first section, which kind of takes away from its impact, especially when it’s obvious students are just copying dictionary definitions without thinking about their answers. However, I have noticed that many of the students’ sentences have improved since they’ve begun this journey, and they’re generally starting to make fewer little mistakes. In fact, most of my students have started catching on that when I repeat part of a sentence to them without moving on it’s because they’re generally missing articles (a, an, the) or prepositions (on, in, to, etc.). Progress!
Okay, so I promise I’m not just writing to talk about my students and teaching, contrary to that start. Actually, as you’ve probably gathered from the title of this post, we
had our “summer vacation” this past week, so Tanya and I took advantage of our break to take a trip to Busan, the second most populous city in South Korea. Let me just interject and clarify: our “summer vacation” was Monday and Tuesday. Yep, that period is in the correct place. The entirety of our summer vacation was four days, because South Korean students continue attending academy through their school vacations, meaning we continue working. Actually, the Korean teachers, who all teach Monday-Saturday were really excited because they got three whole days off. Meanwhile, Tanya and I felt robbed, as we are accustomed to our American idea of vacation—a week long, at least. Four days isn’t a vacation; it’s a long weekend. Anyways, to celebrate our long weekend Tanya and I went to Busan to explore a bit. You might remember that I went to Busan last year for Chuseok, so this was my second trip.
On our first day, we took a bus to Gamcheon Culture Village, a district of Busan that is known for its colorful houses and is a definite draw for tourists. We did minimal research before going, so we ended up walking straight uphill
for about 20 minutes to even get to the correct area. We realized later that there ARE buses that go to the entrance of the neighborhood, but hindsight, am I right? Anyways, one of the ways the neighborhood encourages tourism is by offering the goal to collect 12 stamps from around the neighborhood. The stamps are spread around in a general circle, and the map of them says it should take about three hours to collect all of the stamps. We had some trouble with the distances on the map and did some extra backtracking (did I mention the village sits on a very steep hill, and one of the main attractions is a staircase called the “Stairs to See Stars” because it’s 148 steps and villagers say walking up it makes you so out of breath you see stars?), so it took us closer to four hours to finish. Once we finished, we decided to walk from the end of the circuit back to the beginning, thinking it didn’t seem to be too far a distance on the map. Oh were we wrong. The way back was entirely uphill, and we got about three fourths of the way back
Stairway to see stars
It's kind of hard to see, but spanning the picture vertically is a narrow staircase between the buildings. before stopping in a cafe. As soon as we walked in, the mother of the cafe owner was all “get them water!” and cups of ice water were placed in our hands and the owner refilled our water bottle without us asking. We must have looked so bad. A little later, the cafe owner informed us that she lives in the area we had come from and she always takes the bus to her cafe. She admonished us for walking, and when we recounted our adventure to my friend Julia on Tuesday, she got a kick out of it, saying she was definitely going to tell all her Korean friends. I will say I don’t think it helped that we did all of this adventuring during the hottest part of the day, on one of the hottest weekends to date (high of 36°C/97°F).
On Monday we visited Haeundae Beach, which was definitely more popular than it was in October, when I visited last. One of the things that we noticed was that even though it was crazy hot out, there wasn’t a lot of skin showing. If you go to a beach in the US, most women are wearing
Haeundae
The beach part (and most of the people) are behind the rocks. bikinis, and men are shirtless, but here in Korea, both men and women wore rash guards, and had their tops and arms completely covered. Even among the men, the few people we saw shirtless were mostly foreigners. Even at the beach, can’t let your skin get tan!
We walked the length of the beach to a nice path that goes around the coastline for a little ways and overlooks the water. The upside to the insanely hot weather was that the day was clear, and the water was beautiful. It made for a nice scenic walk, which we followed up by hopping on the subway and going a few stops to the Busan Cinema Center, intending to watch
Incredibles 2 in a huge, 200-400 person theater. Unfortunately, they were not running any English movies while we were there, so we decided to skip the cinema and go across the street to SpaLand, a fancier version of the pervasive traditional
jimjilbang (public bathhouse).
One of the surprising things living in Korea has taught me is to be more comfortable with public nudity. Showering at our gym in the one-room open showers has definitely made me more comfortable being naked
around (mostly middle-aged) strangers. Even being used to nudity around our local
ajummas (middle-aged women), I was somewhat unprepared for SpaLand, which boasts 22 spas (probably about half for women, half for men) at varying temperatures fed by two different kinds of underground spring water. It was kind of incredible seeing that many naked people at one time, especially as someone who grew up with the American, “bodies are private, shameful things” mentality. However, SpaLand isn’t just about the public baths, oh no. Once you’re finished soaking in the baths, you change into gender color-coded outfits and go out into the main area, where you can choose to enter any of the saunas, varying from 13.7°C to 71.5°C (the ones that were over about 38°C had warnings not to bring cell phones inside to prevent cell phone explosions). Alternatively, you could choose to opt for a massage, a pilates class, a massage chair, a snack (hard-boiled eggs are the most popular snack here), or even a nap in one of the many areas designed specifically for relaxation.
The best part, though, has to be that it only takes $15 to access all of this for four hours. Of course
SpaLand
In the background, you can see some of the couches where (mostly couples) hang out and rest. massages, classes, and food all cost extra, but what’s cool is that the key to the locker you store your shoes in as you go in also works for a locker in the gendered locker rooms so you can store your clothes and personal items, as well as a way to charge everything that you do within the
jimjilbang, all of which you can then pay for right before you leave, so you don’t have to carry money around with you inside. If you ever visit Busan, make sure SpaLand is on your list of places to go, because it’s a traditional Korean experience that is extremely accessible to foreigners (especially if you can bring yourself to get naked and enter the baths themselves!).
On our final day in Busan, we got ourselves up a bit early and checked out of our hostel before heading out to meet up with Julia, the first friend I made in Korea. We had to meet for brunch because she had work in the afternoon, but we figured if we went to one of the pedestrian areas with lots of food options, we were bound to find something to eat, right? Well, sort
of. It turned out most of the food places didn’t actually open until 11:30 or later, so we found ourselves in a coffee shop just chilling out of the heat. It was cool (no pun intended, hah) getting to catch up with Julia, since somehow it had been about eight or nine months since I’d seen her last. After we ate at the first open place we found, we said goodbye to Julia and made our way back to Gwangju.
The journey back home was uneventful, and it turns out that Gwangju was three degrees hotter over the weekend than Busan was, so we made a good choice to get out! Our Korean coworkers also all apparently spent most of their weekends hanging out in their hotel rooms (one went to Seoul and one to Busan), saying it was too hot for them to go out.
We are since back at work, and back to our everyday schedule. Sorry that I’m so bad at regular updates, but I’m planning a trip to Osaka in September, so if I don’t post before then, I will definitely post sometime around the end of September, so I will see you then!
Until next time!
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Nancy
non-member comment
Glad to see you are able to get in some sightseeing between the work.