Chuseok in Busan

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