In the last post, I mentioned that a holiday was coming up soon and we were going to get some time off. The holiday was Chuseok, which is sort of a Korean version of Thanksgiving. They all travel all over the country and get together with their families; they eat lots of traditional food and pay respects to their ancestors.
However, we were in a bit of a tight spot when it came to celebrating this holiday in the Korean fashion, because we don’t really have any family in this area of the world. So, we decided to get together with the closest thing to family we have in this hemisphere—our friend Chris Allison.
Wednesday morning, Deanna and I took the (slow) train down to the southeastern port city of Busan—Korea’s second largest city behind Seoul. Chris took a ferry and met us there that evening. What followed was 3 days of awesome—visiting temples, showing Chris our favorite Korean dishes, helping to ease some of his homesickness with American food (Papa John’s, anyone?), mountain climbing, spa-ing, and subway riding. Oh, and we visited a fort, too. On top of a mountain.
It was a whole lot of fun for Deanna and me both (and I assume Chris, too). It was so good to see him again—it had been nearly a year. Hopefully, we’ll be able to make visits with him a semi-regular occurrence. It’s looking like we’ll have to go to Japan sometime in October to take care of something with our visas, so maybe we’ll get to meet up with him then.
So yeah, overall, lots of fun for Chuseok. In other news, Deanna and I only have 3 days left at our current school. We start at the new school on Friday. It will be really nice to work close to home and not have an hour-long commute every day. We can even ride our bikes if we want to, which will be sweet. The downside of this is that we basically have to start over with our classes. I’m just now getting to the point where I really feel a sort of rapport with my classes, and now I’ve got to start it all over. So that’s kind of frustrating, but oh well—you do what you have to do.
As far as actual teaching goes, I’m really enjoying it. It’s really nice to have a job that is constantly changing and to have to adapt and change with it. I’ve got 4 different groups of students I teach, and each one is a different class (basic English, science, social studies, and geography). So not only do I have to prepare lessons and activities to help with their grammar, but I’ve got to prepare lessons for each of those subjects. It’s really sweet—very challenging and rewarding. Especially when the plans and activities I come up with work and the students respond well to them.
Deanna and I are still trying to learn Korean. It’s definitely a challenge. We bought a textbook for learning it. The textbook teaches you how to read in the first chapter, then after that, it’s basically all in Hangeul, the Korean alphabet. It’s nice as far as practice goes, but it’s hard because even though I can read now, I’m still not at the point where I can read quickly. I’m still just sounding words out, so even a basic sentence takes a lot of effort to read. Part of that is that my vocabulary is still very small—there are a few words that I recognize for how they look and don’t have to sound them out. For example, the word for meat is 고기 (gogi). That’s actually a word I just learned fairly recently, but it’s stuck with me because it’s important for ordering food (I’d much rather have a dumpling stuffed with 고기 than 김치—kimchee).
Ok, I think I’ve rambled enough for now. Deanna and I are looking forward to getting phones/internet soon—we’d really like to Skype with you.
Brandon
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Anniversary Numero Uno
Well, Deanna and I have officially completed one year of marriage. A year ago, I don’t think either of us expected to spend our first anniversary in another country (or at least not Korea), but there you go. Crazy stuff.
We weren’t really sure what to do to celebrate, what with being in a foreign land and all. It seems like usually you might go to a favorite restaurant or have a night out doing something you enjoy. Unfortunately, we haven’t been here long enough to really have a favorite restaurant or have much idea of what there is to do around here, let alone feel confident enough in our abilities to travel anywhere in town we haven’t already been.
So as a result, we decided to have a sort of chill day around here. We slept in late, made brunch (scrambled eggs with red/green peppers and mushrooms, along with some grapes and kiwi), and then decided to go play badminton with our newly-acquired badminton equipment. Unfortunately, all the courts near us were either occupied or flooded, so that didn’t work out too well. But it was nice because it was a beautiful day and we got to walk all over the place looking for a court. After that, we went looking for a coffee shop to have a mini-date. We found a Dunkin’ Donuts (which they’re crazy about over here) and had a couple donuts and coffee (our donut-buying experience was greatly facilitated by the cashier who spoke English—God bless her). After that, we came back and made dinner and then settled in for an evening of downloaded TV shows from my external hard drive (thanks, Brett). So yeah, all in all, a pretty good day, even though we still don’t really know how to do much here.
In other news, I’ve learned to read Korean. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, but it still doesn’t help much since my vocabulary consists of about 8 words. That means that even if I can tell how to say what I’m reading, I still don’t know what it means. But yeah, I’m still pretty excited about it. I’ve impressed some of my students when I’ve read their Korean names, which makes me happy.
We’re still waiting on internet at our apartment. We can get a pretty simple browser on our Kindles, so we can check email and Facebook and stuff like that, but it’s not very good for responding to things. We also can get online when we’re at the school, but usually when we’re there, we want to be planning and/or grading. Hopefully we’ll get our Alien Registration Cards (ARC’s) soon so that we can get that stuff taken care of. As of now, we’re pretty much cut off from the world—no tv, no internet, no cell phones—when we’re at home. It’s kinda nice, but I miss being connected with people, too.
Other than that, we’re still trying to learn our way around here. We took the wrong bus the other day, which ended up taking us the complete opposite direction of our school. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized it when it turned the wrong way, so we were able to get off and walk back a ways and get on the right bus.
We’re also halfway done with our time at the first school, so soon we’ll be close enough that we don’t have to take buses. Which will be nice. We also have a holiday coming up called Chuseok (추석…I think. It’s either that or 주석) where we get almost a week off school. We’re going down to the southeastern port city of Busan (부산) for a few days and meeting up with Chris Allison (가리스 알이산)—our now (basically) Japanese friend. We’re getting really excited about that.
Ok, that’s all for now.
Brandon
We weren’t really sure what to do to celebrate, what with being in a foreign land and all. It seems like usually you might go to a favorite restaurant or have a night out doing something you enjoy. Unfortunately, we haven’t been here long enough to really have a favorite restaurant or have much idea of what there is to do around here, let alone feel confident enough in our abilities to travel anywhere in town we haven’t already been.
So as a result, we decided to have a sort of chill day around here. We slept in late, made brunch (scrambled eggs with red/green peppers and mushrooms, along with some grapes and kiwi), and then decided to go play badminton with our newly-acquired badminton equipment. Unfortunately, all the courts near us were either occupied or flooded, so that didn’t work out too well. But it was nice because it was a beautiful day and we got to walk all over the place looking for a court. After that, we went looking for a coffee shop to have a mini-date. We found a Dunkin’ Donuts (which they’re crazy about over here) and had a couple donuts and coffee (our donut-buying experience was greatly facilitated by the cashier who spoke English—God bless her). After that, we came back and made dinner and then settled in for an evening of downloaded TV shows from my external hard drive (thanks, Brett). So yeah, all in all, a pretty good day, even though we still don’t really know how to do much here.
In other news, I’ve learned to read Korean. That’s a pretty big accomplishment, but it still doesn’t help much since my vocabulary consists of about 8 words. That means that even if I can tell how to say what I’m reading, I still don’t know what it means. But yeah, I’m still pretty excited about it. I’ve impressed some of my students when I’ve read their Korean names, which makes me happy.
We’re still waiting on internet at our apartment. We can get a pretty simple browser on our Kindles, so we can check email and Facebook and stuff like that, but it’s not very good for responding to things. We also can get online when we’re at the school, but usually when we’re there, we want to be planning and/or grading. Hopefully we’ll get our Alien Registration Cards (ARC’s) soon so that we can get that stuff taken care of. As of now, we’re pretty much cut off from the world—no tv, no internet, no cell phones—when we’re at home. It’s kinda nice, but I miss being connected with people, too.
Other than that, we’re still trying to learn our way around here. We took the wrong bus the other day, which ended up taking us the complete opposite direction of our school. Luckily, I was paying attention and realized it when it turned the wrong way, so we were able to get off and walk back a ways and get on the right bus.
We’re also halfway done with our time at the first school, so soon we’ll be close enough that we don’t have to take buses. Which will be nice. We also have a holiday coming up called Chuseok (추석…I think. It’s either that or 주석) where we get almost a week off school. We’re going down to the southeastern port city of Busan (부산) for a few days and meeting up with Chris Allison (가리스 알이산)—our now (basically) Japanese friend. We’re getting really excited about that.
Ok, that’s all for now.
Brandon
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