Going with the flow

Since I arrived in Korea over a month ago, I have been humbled by the Korean peoples generosity, kindness and willingness to help me in any way, shape or form.  My co-teachers have been my Korean angels since I got to Busan.  They have helped me accomplish everyday tasks that back home are considered common errands.  For example, I needed to mail something to the US today, so they took me to the post office and made sure it was mailed properly.  They also took me to the bank today so I could get a debit card for my Korean bank account.  All of these tasks are very easily accomplished in your home country, but for a person who doesn't speak the native language they can be daunting chores.  Even a trip to the grocery store turns into a 2 hour ordeal.  I have found it best to keep an open mind and to go with the flow and have accepted that life here is going to be a series of challenges.  However, going with the flow is sometimes tough to do.  Take today for example.  I had a good day of work, and taught my teacher class at 3.  After the class was over, one of the teachers invited me to go on a field trip with the other teachers the following day to take part in the cherry blossom festival.  I was a little shocked I had not previously heard of the event already but I ignored it and told her that I would love to go.  She was excited and told me she wanted to take some pictures with me once we got there.  All was well, or so I thought.  Once the teachers left I told my co-teacher that I was just asked to attend a school function that I had not previously heard about.  The look on her face told me that there was something going on.  She speaks very good English and was perfectly capable of explaining whatever it was that she was thinking, but she chose instead to ask me to wait a second and ran off.  When she came back to my office, our PE teacher, who has become a good friend of mine was with her.  He said he needed to tell me something and that I should sit down.  By this time I am a little freaked out with the situation and if we were in the US I would have bet money they were about to tell me that someone close to me had died.  He doesn't speak very good English at all so he rambled off a few sentences that were a mix of very bad English and Korean.  Typically, my co-teacher would have translated what he said so I could understand him but she just sat there with a somber look on her face.  Finally, my other co-teacher came into my office and was able to fill me in on the situation.  I was informed that my principal thought it would be in my best interest that I not be able to attend any functions with the other teachers.  Initially I was surprised that they took so long and were so afraid to tell me this.  She told me that the principal was concerned about my well being since I had gotten food poisoning the last time I went out with the other teachers.  They continued to express to me that she (the principal) was looking out for me by making this decision. Obviously, I didn't share the same sentiment.  I bit my tongue and let them finish their explanation.  When they were finally done, I had deciphered that the principal was merely looking out for herself, and was taking any liability away from the school if I was to get seriously sick or injured while on a school function.  Hopefully she really does have my best interest at heart but I find it hard to believe that she is looking out for me by removing me from any social interaction with my co-workers.  I may never know her actual reasoning behind this decision but this is the first instance (and I am sure not the last) that I felt like an outsider in Korea.

New Picture Site

Since I can't post all of my pictures on the blog itself, I am starting to post all of them on photobucket.com. If you are interested in viewing them please click on the link titled "photobucket" which is on the right side of the blog just under the main title.

Seokbulsa Temple

Busan is a giant city that moves at breakneck speed at all times. It's easy to get caught up in that and move right along with it but sometimes you just need to get away from the car horns and crowds. Today was one of those days. A few weeks ago I visited the Beomeosa Temple which was built around 678 AD, burned to the ground in 1592 and was rebuilt in 1602 and many of the buildings from that time still remain. It is one of the most well known Buddhist Temples in Korea and is very easy to get to by subway and taxi which is evident by the large crowds that frequent it.

One of the many shrines in Beomeosa Temple. Outside the main entrance to Beomeosa Temple. It was built in 1602. Three Buddhist shrines. Each was dedicated to a different monk that lived at the temple.
One of the four temple gate guards.

Back to today. I had such a great experience at Beomeosa that I wanted to find another Buddhist temple to check out. I had heard of one called Seokbulsa that was very hard to find but would be worth the challenge. My friend Brian and I hopped on the subway at 10am and took it 30 minutes north to Maekdo. From there we hopped in a taxi and drove another 15 minutes up a steep mountain road until we came to a trail head. After enjoying a squid pajeon (which is basically a Korean pancake with squid and whole scallions)that a man cooked for us out of the back of his truck, we started up the trail that would supposedly lead us to Seokbulsa. We walked up a steep trail for about 30 minutes and came to the entrance of the temple. Seokbulsa means "stone Buddha" and there is a reason it's called that. The entire temple is carved out of rock. Needless to say it was a very peaceful place and provided a great view. The feeling you get when visiting a Buddhist temple is pretty surreal. At one point a bee kept buzzing by my head and when it landed on the ground in front of me I lifted my foot to step on it but stopped myself when I realized where I was.

Brian next to the giant Buddha carvings.

One of the shrine caves. I found out the steel box I kept seeing at the shrines are for donations.

There is public health equipment everywhere in Korea. As you can see it's not Gold's Gym standard.

I have taken a lot of photographs since being here and unfortunately I can't post them all on this site. I am going to open an account strictly for pictures and when I do I will send everyone the link.

Teaching the teacher's

A week ago I was informed that I would be conducting English classes after school for the teachers. Today was our first class and it went really well. Originally I had 11 teachers sign up for the class which is going to meet on Tuesday and Thursday but only 6 showed today. Included in those 6 was my principal who is a fantastic lady and showed me a different side today than I normally see on a daily basis. My first order of business during class was for the teachers to chose a western name that they will go by during class. Here are the names that they chose: Grace (my principal), Sally, Candy, Mary, Mina, and Shining. As soon as the lady chose the name Shining it was all I could do not to laugh but I bit my tongue and told her it was a lovely name. I then had each teacher/student write down three interesting facts about themselves and present them to the class. One of the facts on three of the teacher's lists was "I am single." And I am fairly certain they weren't letting the other teachers in on this secret considering everyone but me was female. The overall English proficiency level of the teachers in the class is pretty good so that will make teaching them a lot easier. The night before our class met I was invited out to dinner by one of the teachers who was going to be participating in the class. She informed me that her husband, Kim, really wanted to meet me to practice his English. I couldn't turn down a free meal so I accepted the invite and had a lovely evening with them and their three year old daughter, who was the cutest kid I have ever seen. Tonight, I got a call from Kim, and he told me that his wife really enjoyed our class and that he thought I was the greatest teacher on earth. I wanted to tell him that he didn't have to butter me up to get me to agree to meet with him again for some English practice. As long as there is a free meal involved I am happy to speak in my native tongue for a few hours. I am working hard to learn Korean but it is a pretty tough language. I have mastered the vowel characters and am working on the consonants, then comes putting them together to make an actual sound. After that I will be able to read Korean, which doesn't really help at all since I won't know what the words I am reading mean. I will keep you posted on my progress. Keep an eye out for a post with some pictures of my students.

My Korean digs & school

I moved into my apartment after a 3 day hiatus at a local "love" motel on Monday. They call them love motels because they are cheap and the owners don't ask a lot of questions so I will let your imagine take you where it will. My principal lobbied for 2 months to get me in the building that I am living in, and I will tell you why in a minute. When I arrived to moved into the apartment I didn't know what to expect. Since some of my fellow teachers had already moved into their apartments on time I was able to see a few of them during my motel stay. Most of them were very small, dirty, and in high rise buildings which are never very convenient. Very few of them were nice by Western standards so I was anticipating something of the small variety. I was relieved when I finally saw that my place wasn't as small as some and def not as dirty. And the best part about my apartment is that it's literally 100 feet from my school, hence why my principal wanted to have me in this building so badly. Most of my friends have to commute at least 15 minutes by bus or subway and some as long as 45 minutes to get to their school so I am perfectly content with walking 100 paces. The view of my school (the building in the background) from my apartment.
Front entrance. Shoe closet in the background since you cant have shoes on inside of Korean homes.

The only downside to my place is that the hub for the entire building's internet and phone lines are in my apartment. The silver lining is that my internet is free for the inconvenience.

Desk and bed. Koreans don't believe in the concept of sleep comfort so my bed is about as hard as a slab of granite.

Where I dine...alone.

Kitchen, which is actually fairly well equipped with all the "western" appliances. I also have a rice cooker which comes in handy since rice is it's own food group here.

Fairly self explanatory but with a few surprises. Look just above the sink and you will notice the shower placement and the hose connected to the sink.A better view of my "shower."

Oh, so the washing machine is in my bathroom, that's convenient. But where is the dryer you might ask? Koreans don't use them so therefore I don't have one.

I successfully completed my first full week of classes, well, almost. I went out with some co-workers on Tuesday night and dined on some jok-bal, which is fairly popular here. Jok-bal, as I found out is steamed pigs feet that are thinly sliced. They weren't bad, but the next day I was severely ill and couldn't get away from the toilet long enough to walk the 100 feet to school. Thankfully my PE teacher, Myungwoon, who also dined on the jok-bal, has a friend who is an internal doctor so he took me to visit him on Thursday after school. The doctor's visit and the meds he prescribed me were all free for which I was blown away. I am thinking that favor will come back around in the next year though at some point. I managed to finish out the week strong and aside from frequent bathroom trips (which aren't easy in my school, explanation in a minute) I had a very good first week of teaching. I am teaching 3rd,4th, 5th and 6th grade students, as well as 5 classes per week for the teachers to learn English. The kids are unbelievably excited that I am there and they treat me like a celebrity. Since I am the first native English speaking teacher in my school's history, most of my students have never had any contact with a foreigner. My school was built around 65 years ago and was used as a hospital during the Korean War. There are about 600 total students and I will be teaching almost 500 of them, the only exceptions being the 1st and 2nd graders. I hope to take some pictures of some of my students soon as well as my co-workers.

View from the "English Zone" the school is in the process of building.

What will be the English library and my office.

My future exclusive English classroom.

Front of the classroom.

I told you it was difficult to do your business in my school. I have only found one western style flush toilet so far. Most of them are just like this one. That's the floor by the way, although it looks like a wall.

Jagalchi Fish Market...

Over the weekend I visited the Jagalchi Market about 3 times and each time I found something new to marvel at. Jagalchi is the largest open air fish market in Korea and is divided into sections for shellfish, live fish, and a big section for dried fish. You could literally spend all day walking around and not see everything, that's why I came back 3 times. There were fish and sea creatures being sold that I have never even heard of before. And some that I questioned would actually be edible. The "ajummas" that work the market and sell their catch are one tough breed. They have been working at Jagalchi since they were little and they are unbelievably precise with their knives. When someone would buy a fish, the ajummas would clean the fish immediately for them. It was amazing to watch them clean the fish and somehow keep the fish alive to make sure it stays as fresh as possible. I watched one lady behead and skin a bucket of eels and was shocked when the eels were still wriggling as if they were still whole. I was always told that a picture is worth a thousand words so hopefully the pictures below will do some justice to how wonderful Jagalchi is.

On Saturday, I met two friends from orientation at the market for dinner. There are hundreds of restaurants in the market that serve the freshest fish imaginable. We chose a restaurant that required us to cook our fish at the table on a little ceramic grill. This is a very popular way to dine in Korea so we thought it would make for a good experience. Since none of us speak or read Korean very well, we had to resort to the old point and pray method of ordering. So, we pointed to a picture that looked appetizing, and prayed that what we received was the same as the picture. I guess we didn't pray hard enough because we were brought two freshly killed eel looking fish that were still squirming on the plate. Like I said earlier, its all about the freshness. Once I got past the fact that the fish heads were looking at me with their mouths moving up and down and the tails trying to wriggle off the plate, the fish was actually really good. We polished off most of it with the exception of the backbones, the head (I ate the eyes, which are supposed to be good for your health) and the tails.

Busan!

Where do I begin? I have about 4 days of good stuff to catch everyone up on so there will be several posts over the next few days. Let's start with the 5 hour bus ride from our orientation site in Cheonan City to Busan. Pretty standard drive, cramped bus filled with hoards of nervous English teachers. I slept the vast majority of the way but tried not too so I could see as much of the Korean countryside as I could. This country is crawling with mountains from the top to the bottom. I heard that if they could flatten Korea's mountains that the land area it would create would be as big as China! After we finally arrived in Busan we were shuttled to the Provincial office of education where all of our co-teachers were waiting for us. We hadn't so much as unloaded the last of the suitcases before people in our group were being scooped up by their co-teachers and taken away. It was quite a scene with the native English speakers anxiously waiting for their co-teachers to recognize the name on their name tags and take them away. Once I finally found my co-teacher, most of my group had already been whisked away. I realized later that I wasn't wearing my name tag which would have been helpful. Kim Hoeun (she wants me to call her Judy) and I took a taxi to Bumin Elementary where my Principal and Vice-Principal were waiting to meet me. Our taxi driver tried to get us as close to the front door as possible since I had a lot of luggage but he got a little too close and rammed into a guard rail that protects the front of the school. The cab driver apparently was in no mood to wait for the police so he bolted as soon as my luggage was out of his car. I was introduced to my Vice-Principal and Principal as well as my other co-teacher, Kim Eunyoung and some more administrators. After the intros were over I was informed that my apartment would not be ready until Monday but that they would pay for me to stay in a hotel until that time as well as reimburse all expenses I incurred doing those three days. My initial impressions of everyone I had met so far were very positive and they would go out of their way to make sure I was happy. I received a personal escort from my principal, Judy, and one other administrator to the hotel to unload my bags. I was then informed that we were all going to be going out for dinner, which was perfectly fine with me since I was starving. The restaurant was very traditional. We all sat on the floor and were served around 40 different side dishes consisting of veggies, seafood (cooked and raw), meat, soups, rice, and some things that I was not familiar with. My personal favorite was the fiddler crabs that were deep fried and eaten whole, shell and all. During dinner, I was informed that my principal was very impressed with me and that she wanted me to stay an extra year on top of my original contracted year. Keep in mind that I had only known this lady for about an hour and we couldn't understand a word each other says since she doesn't speak English and I don't speak Korean. I told her I was flattered and that I would seriously consider staying longer as long as this year went smoothly. I also learned during dinner that Judy had just spent 5 months living in New Jersey as part of a teacher exchange program and had landed back in Korea that day. That pretty much sums up my first day in Busan. I spent the next two days wandering around the city and checked out the Jagalchi Fish Market and went to the Beomeosa Temple. More on these two places will be available shortly as well as pictures of my apartment which I moved into today and of my school.