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Published: February 3rd 2011
Hey everybody! I’ve been in Korea for an entire month! And luckily it started to warm up FINALLY. After weeks of being in the single digits, we are currently at 43 degrees! The news of greatest importance is that I finally got my Alien Registration Card (ARC) on Tuesday, so I now have a bank account and a cell phone! I was ecstatic, to say the least. My cell phone was really cheap, has a great camera, a Korean-English dictionary and a subway map. It’s pretty impressive.
At work we’ve just started a new month of classes, so I only kept one of the classes I had last month. All of my classes were just for the month of January, but my phonics class became my beginner class. It was really nice to have them as my first class on Monday since I was so stressed out over all the changes. It was my first time making the lesson plans, which was incredibly confusing, and I had to figure out how to get all of the books I need, and print out all of the stuff I need to hand out, etc, etc. Because of when I showed up, and why I had to show up so early, my training was basically non-existent. I just stumble through things until I make a mistake. And then I learn how to do whatever that was. There’s a definite learning curve, but I think I’ve almost mastered it.
This month I don’t have to teach gym anymore, which is kind of awesome. I let it slip to the supervisor who makes these schedules that both of my parents are scientists. So I was assigned science every day. Which is great for me. Especially when the science experiments are light on science and heavy on coloring. Which they were this week. We learned about vibration by coloring dinosaurs and attaching them to those vibrating boxes with the pull-strings. But last Friday I had an older class and they made them mix metal powder, sand, salt, and water together to learn about mixtures and separation. Naturally it got everywhere. And Teacher Allison had a lot of cleaning up to do.
I wouldn’t mind having science every day, except that it means I have “activity” everyday. Which means I have to serve lunch every day. And eat school food every day. Sometimes their food is delicious. But sometimes it looks like it might attack you. Or sometimes I’ll be putting something harmless looking on my plate and another teacher will be like “I’m pretty sure that some sort of dried, sticky, squid thing” and suddenly I’ve lost my appetite. Also, they serve the teachers’ food at 11:00. But I can’t go get something to eat until 12:40. So it tends to be on the colder side. And I’m pretty sure that when I come home I’ll never eat rice again.
Speaking of eating, there is a lot of good Korean food, like the beef galbi I had my first weekend here, or the chicken galbi that I had a couple of weeks ago. Though they’re both galbi, they’re completely different. The beef galbi was like our own personal barbeque with some vegetable sides. Chicken galbi was cooked on more of a griddle with a bunch of rice cakes and cheese. And it was MUCH spicier. I ordered something that looked like chicken galbi the other night after work. It was OK, until I lifted up some of the rice cakes and underneath found a bunch of claws. That, combined with the overwhelming spiciness of the dish, made me decide never to order it again. I finally found pizza around here, as well. There’s a place that basically across the street from where I work called Pizza Maru. Their pizzas are really good, and really cheap. And they have green tea crusts on all their pizzas. It’s incredibly delicious.
I’ve expanded my shopping horizons past E-Mart, though they do have an incredible selection of absolutely everything. It’s pretty far away from my apartment though, so I found HomePlus, which is similar, but with more American-type goods. It only took me 2 visits, a map, and a few wrong turns to figure it out. It’s inside Metapolis, which is the giants shopping center/apartment building. BUT you can’t go into the building. You have to go around this sketchy outside area, through a park, into a new building, down a hallway, around a hidden corner, and down some escalators. Naturally. What kind of confuses me about places like HomePlus and Emart is that they have people at every entrance bowing to you and welcoming you to the store. And I’ve seen no universal way to treat these people. Some people don’t acknowledge them at all, some people bow back. I’m going with a head nod and a smile. I think that’ll work.
I went to an electronics store the other day, HiMart, to buy a blowdryer. I found it quite easily despite the fact that the coworker I asked for directions is one of the worst direction-givers I’ve ever encountered. “OK, so you’re going to see a statue of a man wearing a hat…..Walk right past him and cross the street. Then you’re going to see a restaurant with some flags. All sorts of flags. Some of the flags are going to be Korean and some are going to from all sorts of other countries…. You’re gonna want to keep walking past that restaurant and cross the street…” And this went on for about 5 minutes. But HiMart has basically everything I could ever need electronics-wise. When I went to check out, they clearly called over their designated English speaker, who calmly prepared himself and then YELLED at me “HIMART POINTS CARD?!?” I do not have a HiMart points card. And you can only get one if you have an ARC, which I didn’t.
So far I’ve been to Itaewon, which is the foreign district of Seoul, so you can get all sorts of international food, and Songtan, which is near a different military base and also has a lot of good foreign food. Yesterday I went with another teacher to get Turkish food with her friends and it was SO GOOD. And there was bread. It was first taste of bread all month. Koreans don’t do bread like we do. They have rice. If you want bread you have to come to a restaurant that serves bread or go to Paris Baguette (which are actually pretty prevalent) and pick up some French bread.
I’m currently on a 5-day break for Lunar New Year aka Seolnal aka 설날. We got presents from the school and from one of our coworkers so I know have a lot of vitamin C tablets and lotion. Luckily they don’t just give us SPAM like some schools do. Gift packs of SPAM are pretty popular here. The break is nice, but I got a gym membership earlier than I was going to, just so I’d have something constructive to do over break. But my gym closed for the break. Oh well. I’ll just have to do a lot more walking around. Which isn’t so hard considering it’s pretty warm. I’ll also take lots of pics with my phone. It’s less conspicuous than a camera, so I don’t feel like such a tourist.
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Mom
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Go get the Himart Points Card
So now you can get the all important HiMart Points Card!