Winter Camp – Tteok

Despite getting paid to go to a movie or a theme park, one of my favorite special activities with the kids was making Tteok, or Korean rice cakes at our school.  Cactus and the administrative staff decided to have Tteok chefs come to our school and teach the kids how to make the traditional rice cakes.  It took a relatively short time to talk about the history and method.  Before long, the kids were hard at work making small balls of red bean paste, rolling those little balls into larger balls of hot steamed rice cakes and stamping them with cool wooden relief stamps.  I only made a few, but according to my table (of fourth and fifth grade boys) they were the best and kept trying to have me make more.  Even the troublesome students were getting into it.  I was really encouraged to see the kids asking how to talk about their new creations in English and to see how proud of them they were, even if they ate too many and made themselves sick before they even left school, which a number of them did.

-Kelly

Winter Camp – Field Trips

Our camp had two field trips: one to Lotte World and the other to the movie theater to see Sherlock Holmes. Lotte World is a huge amusement park with five indoor floors and a significant outdoor area.  Much to the kids disappointment we were restricted to the indoor rides due to the weather, which hovered around twenty degrees, and the solidly frozen gears on the outdoor rides.  The movie theater nearest our school had a sparsely modern aesthetic and a copious amount of popcorn and pop, which were happily handed out to each student.  These two trips might seem to be quite different affairs but they were more similar than one might think.

Chaos

If you have ever been in charge of riled up elementary school kids you can imagine what taking them to a 5 story indoor theme park might be like.  We only

Lotte World

maintained the image of control and even that was tenuous.  I completely gave up trying to keep track eight seconds after we gave them their tickets and told them when to meet for lunch.  After lunch a few students disappeared (yes, John the Runner was one of them) but since I was put in charge of the girls I had a great time on the Viking Ship ride which I was demanded of to go on three times in a row.

Later that week when we saw Sherlock Holmes, I found it much more enjoyable but somehow only a little less chaotic.  We kept a (relatively) strict line enforced this time but somehow still seemed to lose people going and returning.  Just before we got into the mall I found two older students from my school standing next to each other with a concerned teacher between them.  One was staring at his shoes and the other was holding a wad of tissues under a bleeding nose.  Although I kept telling my students to stay in line and not through snowballs I felt reaffirmed in my choice to teach the younger students.

Once in the theater and sitting down for the movie I actually forgot about being at work and having tons of hyper kids around me.  It was really relaxing actually.  When the lights turned on it was back to sheep herding all the students back to school for lunch.  On the return trip our line fell apart a little when the boys started to re-enact Holmes’ fighting scenes, throw snowballs and try to pet the horses that students from a different winter program were riding around the track at our school.

-Kelly

Winter Camp – John the Runner

My co-teacher, Na-Ri, and I had the lowest level (English Ability) at camp.  At first she had to do a lot of the interacting with the students because I was still figuring out how much they understood me.  Because Na Ri was Korean and knew more of them than me, she was a great intermediary when my abilities fell short.

The first week of camp, while we were still feeling out the students, one fourth-grader disappeared just before lunch.  We lined up the students and Na-Ri said that she would go looking for him while I took the kids down to the cafeteria.  I knew my school wasn’t too big and there weren’t many places for him to hide, so I was surprised to see Na-Ri slide open the lunch room door in a mildly controlled panic.  It turns out John had really disappeared.  She had no idea where he was and none of the other teachers had seen him either.  I finished quickly and began looking for him too but when the time came for class to begin I collected all my students and corralled them back to the classroom.

When Na-Ri made it back to our classroom a little while later she discreetly walked in through the back door with a poorly disguised smile.  When a break in the lesson came I asked her where John was.  She told me that she had found him on the edge of the playground just after lunch.  When she called to him and told him to come back inside he took off running.  She followed after him but he was too fast and wouldn’t listen to her so she called Cactus for help.  When Cactus found him he caught the student and handcuffed him…  I was speechless and had all kinds of mental pictures running through my head as to how he did it.  Later I asked Cactus about the handcuffs and he smiled and said simply that he just used packing tape.  I still laugh to myself when I picture Cactus wrangling a stocky 4^th grader rodeo-style on a busy street near our school.

-Kelly

Winter Camp – National Smell

It is tradition in Korean culture to have meals together.  Families don’t move away as often and it is normal to have multiple generations living under the same roof.  Businesses are known for having meals and drinks together because they are often at work for two or three meals per day.  Because all of the teachers at camp were working together, we were expected to be relatively close with one another even though most of us had met on the first day of camp.  The solution was to have a shared meal, and I have to say it worked.

For those who have not experienced a traditional Korean meal it is somewhat different than a comparable social BBQ at home in the States.  All twenty of us sat at the same table, which was at knee level and we sat on pillows on the ground. The table had all kinds of kimchi, rice and leaves (piles of lettuce leaves, but not a salad) that we made mini Korean-style tacos with.  At the center was a grill where quartered cloves of garlic, strips of beef, and bacon later cooked together.

Before the food came the head teacher asked if anyone wanted something to drink.  Everyone hesitated.  The foreigners did because it is a little awkward to drink with your boss and the Koreans because they were being polite and letting the foreigners initiate.  The awkward pause was alleviated when Cactus—yes, that is the camp’s head teacher’s English name—ordered large beers for everyone.  Korean’s have a casual, or rather cavalier, attitude towards drinking and getting totally tanked is very common after work and during “hiking.”

After some of my coworkers had worked through a few rounds of beer the conversation moved towards kimchi, and then logically to how most Koreans smell like garlic. One of the American teachers asked if foreigners smell like anything in particular.  There were a few mumbled answers like “Well… maybe, many people smell all different things?”  But the one that got everyone’s attention was “dairy products.”  Apparently one Korean teacher had talked to a number of people who all thought that foreigners (Americans, Canadians, and Europeans) all smelled like milk, eggs, cheese and butter.  Mmm, if only we had more cheese here…

-Kelly

Photo of The Day – 16

Stone Man

Photo of the Day – 15

Little Man

Your Least Favorite Cities

This is courtesy of Lonely Planet:

Your 9 least favourite cities

1. Detroit, USA – Because of the crime, pollution and crumbling infrastructure.
2. Accra, Ghana – Ugly, chaotic, sprawling and completely indifferent to its waterfront location.
3. Seoul, South Korea – According to one traveller comment, ‘It’s an appallingly repetitive sprawl of freeways and Soviet-style concrete apartment buildings, horribly polluted, with no heart or spirit to it. So oppressively bland that the populace is driven to alcoholism.’
4. Los Angeles, USA – A highly contentious pick, placed here because of its ‘uncontrolled sprawl, pollution, appalling traffic and ugly freeways’, according to one traveller.
5. Wolverhampton, England – So bad that we don’t even have it on this site! Check out post 35 on this thread. Update: a lot of you have pointed out that this review is flippant, and you’re right. We should have mentioned that many travellers had colourful anecdotes regarding Wolverhampton, most of which revolved around the industrial nature of the landscape and a generally gloomy aesthetic. In contrast, Tom Hall (our UK travel editor) has mentioned that he thinks Wolverhampton is ‘a nice place’.
6. San Salvador, El Salvador – Widely put forth by travellers as the grubbiest of the Central American capitals.
7. Chennai, India – On our website, we describe it as lacking Mumbai’s prosperity, Delhi’s history or Bengaluru’s buzz. Even the movie stars are ‘not that hot.’ We go on to describe some of its charms, but most travellers find it disappointing.
8. Arusha, Tanzania – A gateway to natural wonder that has more than its share of rust. One traveller urges others to ‘Get out as quickly [to the surrounding region] as you can.’
9. Chetumal, Mexico – Combining mass tourism and outlying decay, Chetumal just doesn’t charm you.

Hahaha….ha.  Seoul isn’t that bad (really?  worse than San Salvador?), but I’d be lying if I said that there isn’t a kernel of truth to it.

Boys Over Flowers

We are both still teaching at winter camps.  Since this is supposed to be fun, most of the curriculum I am teaching from is about K-pop stars, sports, TV dramas, travel, etc.  Although I do review the rather detailed lesson plans (4 pages for 50 minutes?  really?) , I don’t normally review the media before I am playing it in class.  Bad, bad I know. And this is after I heard a story at the SMOE orientation about a teacher that almost lost his job because of a random seal clubbing section of a National Geographic documentary.  I guess my logic is that someone along the line must have approved the songs/video/content..

No, this is not a story about me majorly goofing during class…but it is a story about me turning on the TV for the kids to watch an episode of Boys Over Flowers and having my mouth drop a little. Boys Over Flowers (a short clip that you MUST watch) has so much that is so Korea to me.

Winter Camps

Right now, at this very moment, we are in the midst of school vacation.  So what is an English teacher employed by SMOE to do?  Teach at English Winter Camps of course!  Three week long English winter and summer camps have been ingeniously created to provide kids with more precious Native Speaker English Teacher (yup, that’s the job title) contact time.  Or it is to keep us busy during our contract and not run amuck in Seoul.  We’ll let you decide which is the true motivation.

For the next three weeks, until more desk warming and a vacation to Thailand, we teach at the aforementioned Winter Camps.  In my case, the deal was pretty sweet: I teach from 9am-12pm at another middle school nearby with other NSETs.  I have about 10  students in my class high-intermediate class (two of them being from Suseo Middle School!) and we are the Pandas.  In the Panda class, we have three class periods: Reading, Writing, Listening & Speaking.  We hang out, we speak English, then we go home.  I give out a lot of stickers and drop the Superintendent award a lot–which I am, truthfully, not sure what it is, but I get to award one.  I get more normal salary and a bonus to boot.

Kelly’s winter camp is a but more grueling, involving more planning, working 7 hours, and bad lunches.  But, he also gets adorable little kids and does things like book-making, so we shouldn’t feel too bad for him.

I like being at winter camp, I really do.  However, I feel like this is a time to discuss a little cultural difference that drives me batty every once in a while: procrastination.  Now, I am really not the type of person who gets things done ahead of time, unless it involves vacations or minute life details 10 years in advance, my mother even remarked that I should fit right in here.  But, in Korea, I am incredibly ahead of, well, every one.  Example: I come to camp a few minutes early to make sure everything in my classroom (which I had not seen) was up to date.  Within 5 minutes, I discovered the heater was broken, my computer was riddled with viruses, and the files that someone else was supposed to put on the computer a week ago were not there.  These files have EVERYTHING.  Video clips, powerpoints, games, lesson plans…everything.  Looking at my watch, I saw I had a half an hour to get the CD, extract the files (this would take about 20 minutes) and show up to the formal opening ceremony.  Then the CD didn’t work.  After talking to my Korean coordinators, I discovered they knew about the heater/computer last week.  Last week. Long story short, the heater wasn’t fixed for another day (I lost feeling in my feet near the end; we have a ton of snow here!), and I had to play dancing monkey (pull games out of nowhere) for two hours while a tech guy was called in to work on the computer and replace parts.  Material was not taught that they would need for their tests.  Additionally, no one had planned the opening ceremony into the schedule, so that was fun chaos, too.

As an aside, things like this happen quite regularly at my school as well.  After realizing that they don’t really believe me when I say things are broken (they think I just don’t know how to use them and won’t admit it), I have to resort to threatening not to teach.  By that I mean, that I start apologizing profusely that I simply unable to teach without electricity/internet/a computer/a projector/chalkboard/whatever the issue is in order for someone to come up and help me.  Thus far it has worked, usually.  I am used to this by now, so it didn’t really surprise or fluster me, but I think it will always bother me.  Just the American in me.

Happy Blogiversary

Well, loyal readers (we’re looking at you, Mom and Dad), it has been a year since we started this blog thing, after convincing ourselves that blogs weren’t just for angsty teenage girls.  Really, we were just trying to be polite and not flood everyone’s inboxes with “Hey, guess what I’m doing updates!”.

Our blog accomplishments are humble and mainly included to 1) Being a featured blog for Cuenca…until we left Cuenca; 2) Having our posts plagiarized and used as “articles” for start-up travel sites (hey, plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery, right?); and 3) People have begun quoting us on the web.

Here is some stat trivia for ya:

Best Search Terms: the poor people who stumbled on our blog,

“cold students drinking coffee”

“lord of the rings sam frodo climbing”

“anthropology of being tired after work”

قهوة

Top Posts according to most read:
Here in Cuenca

La Ruta del Sol

“Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more”

The Need for English is Great

Work Less, Live More

And, lastly, what have we been doing for the past year?

• Been married for a year.  Sweet.
• Went to Ecuador
• (Almost) climbed our first mountain together (Climbing Cotopaxi)
• Met amazing people…everyone from students to other teachers to indigenous people working in co-ops to…well, you get the idea.
• Got robbed
• Came home
• Went to Korea
• and this part of the story is still continuing…

What is coming up in the year to come?

January:  We will run Winter English camps in the Gangnam school district.

February:  Thailand…sun, beaches, elephants, climbing, kayaking, massages, good food, my parents…

March:  The school year begins!  Kelly’s parents will come to Seoul to brave Korean culture and hang out!

April-June: No idea.

July:  Run summer camps for the Gangnam school district.

August:  viva Japan!  But will we go there by boat or by plane?

September:  Come home to Seattle!