Squid ink.

Hello,

Gavin here. Today I'm writing about my very first evisceration.
Last week we decided to expand our cooking horizons to include squid. And the cheapest way to get squid is to buy the entire squid. So we headed home from Lotte mart with two full squid, a couple lemons and salad fixings.  We planned to make calamari, but first we needed to figure out how to gut a squid. One quick internet search later we were on our way.
Basically the insides of a squid is just a bag of ink, a bird beak and a glass feather with a bunch of tentacles poking out the bottom. Squeezing out the beak is the odd-feeling part and scooping out the ink sack without breaking is the hardest part. The glass feather is this thing called a quill. It's like the backbone of the squid and does look like a glass feather.
Having been a vegetarian for quite some time prior to coming here, and a non-eviscerator for longer still, I can report that once something's been chopped in half it's all of a sudden not that hard to keep dividing it up. Whole things are nice, but once you have it in parts it's easy enough to keep on cutting it.  I think this is probably a lot easier to say this about the grosser animals, like squid, than the cuter ones, like rabbits. Also, we've been watching a  lot of Man vs. Wild lately and I'm pretty desensitized by Bear Grylls' messy habit of eating live animals.
Anyway, we gave it a light batter (flour, salt and pepper, although next time we'll use cornstarch I think) and tossed the rings and tentacles in oil in a frypan on high for about 30 seconds and voila, delicious.
If you want to try for yourselves, here's the video I used to help me:

http://how2heroes.com/videos/techniques/how-to-clean-squid

Below are some pictures of the process.

We found a couple nice beers for the occasion. Paulaner White.

School!

Hi All,
I thought I'd put up something that shows what class here is like. These photos are of an exercise I did with my PK1-301 class. They're kids who've been through the kindergarten program and are in the first year of elementary school.

Part 1 of today's activity in PK1-301

I love teaching this class and I have them five days a week, more than any other class. They're quite mixed in abilities, with John who's able to carry on a relatively sophisticated conversation (for a seven-year-old) at one end and Sarah, who has difficulty forming even the simplest sentences at the other. There are two others- Thomas, major cutie, and Anna, a hyper-enthusiastic kid.
I've taught John and Thomas from the beginning and they are two of my favourites. I also teach John's little brother Chris from Melon class, another favourite. John probably takes the top spot though.
The textbook I have is a collection of picture books with complementary material, but it's meant for native English speakers so I have to make up my own exercises. Right now we're studying "Days with Frog and Toad." Today I had the kids draw pictures on the board of scenes from the book. Pretty much all kids love drawing, especially if it's on a large novel surface like a whiteboard, so I find it's a good way to get them involved in the lesson. They had to read the captions and draw representative pictures. Later, Beth

PK1-301: Sarah, John, Anna, Thomas

Part 2, with John sneaking into the picture.

Thanksgiving weekend noraebong

Happy Thanksgiving!
We just finished a lovely dinner of noodles with salmon and grilled zucchini while watching Terminator 2. Although we're in a festive mood tonight, the real celebration happened on Friday when we went to Long Life bar and a noraebang (Korean karaoke) with Kyle and Jay, the other foreign teachers here.

Ace!

Pirates!

Beer guitar!

Way more enthusiastic beer guitar.

Kyle intimidating Jay before as he deals.

Long Life serves their drinks in novelty glasses that look like tall, thin vases. Last time Gavin and I got the Queen size, but this time we went all-out and ordered Aces. It's incredibly inconvenient trying to drink out of a two foot long glass but also kind of fun. I only spilled once. 

One Ace in, Gavin ran back to the apartment for cards and we played euchre. After a 1-1 tie we decided to pick up some beers at the corner store and head to a noraebang. 

Twist and Shout

Some kind of '90s rock song

Two months in

Hello All,

I sincerely apologize for our month long blog absence. Things have been chugging away here…

The job has been going well. I’ve kind of gotten the hang of kindergarten, although I still prefer elementary classes. We have “open classes” this month where parents observe their kids being taught by us. It wouldn’t be stressful if our director wasn’t so intense. She wants us to prepare the lesson second-by-second to practice with the kids beforehand so they don’t screw up. So instead of real learning for two weeks they will be imitation learning so that the school looks better than it actually is for the open class. I’ll keep you updated on the outcome…

Here are some pictures of some of our preferred kindergarten classes from the Chusoek event we had at school.

Banana class: Eric, Amy, Jennifer, David

Melon class: Chris, Caleb, Grace, Olivia.

Other than work, we’ve been spending a lot of time outside since the weather has gone from unbearably hot and humid to warm, dry and sunny. These days the highs are between 20-25 degrees and the lowest it drops is about 10. We have retired the AC until next summer.

Being destroyed by the spicy seafood soup on our first PNU outing.

We picked up a set of crappy badminton rackets at Lotte and have been trekking up the mountain to the outdoor courts they have up there. There are five courts and a clubhouse/shack thing for spectating and hanging out. Even though the temperature has improved you still work up a sweat, so we usually bring a litre of Pocari Sweat, Korea’s answer to Gatorade, with us.

Scrabble at The Basement.

The Rugby Worlds were on recently and I found a bar online that allegedly played all the games AND sold fantastic nachos. In hopes of catching a few games, we took the subway to PNU (the neighbourhood that surrounds Pusan National University) and the aforementioned bar, “The Basement,” only to find it closed. Long story short, we wandered around the area, periodically checking back to see if it was open, before heading back to Hwamyeong. More recently we had a card night at our place with the other foreign teachers and ended up craving nachos. Our second attempt to make it to “The Basement” was successful and we ate fantastic (by Korean standards) nachos, played scrabble, and met some Koreans who speak English.

Gavin realizing that he doesn't stand a chance. 

There’s a river that runs alongside the city (and our neighbourhood) where a massive park has been built with a bike path, all kinds of sports pitches, gardens, a rock foot massage path, a couple of outdoor gyms etc. One of the coolest parts is the boardwalk through the marshy riverbank. We walked down there the other day after school and saw a white heron and an otter (probably). It’s really great to be in a city of nearly 4 million and be able to walk 15 minutes to the mountains and 15 minutes to the water. I hope you like the photos, we had fun taking them. xo Beth

Hwamyeong from the boardwalk.

Down by the river.

         

I also must apologize for my even longer absence from the blogosphere. It’s not often that I’m out of the classroom and feeling like sitting down in front of a computer for anything other than Jersey Shore and Man vs. Wild (more on both of those later).

My schedule hasn’t changed much with the new session, but my attitude towards it has. Some classes I liked initially I’m not so fond of anymore and some classes that I hated I’m finding an uneasy peace with. A lot of people will tell you that all children are special and are basically little miracles every one. Nope. No dice. Some are just, to borrow a term from Beth, duds. That isn’t to say that they can’t at some future point pull out of their current pattern of idiocy and screaming, but it’s looking iffy for a few. Really, some kids will just scream for no reason, others can’t find a square on a page no matter what language it’s in. It gets you thinking about the nature vs. nurture debate. Go ahead and blame the parents, but man, it seems like a stretch sometimes. Sheesh.

Now for the good kids. Some kids are super smart and nice. They’re in kindergarten and are well on their way to handling a second language.  Amy’s 6 years old, cute as a button and can tell you a story about what she did on the weekend about as well as a native English roofer. Beth has her cousin Chloe who is 4 and also well on her way to being an excellent Englsih speaker (that’s what I write on report cards, the ‘well on their way…’ bit). The unfortunate reality is that hen you have larger class sizes, particularly in elementary, the good kids get sidelined by the  noisy and disruptive kids. Then you have your middle-of-the-road kids (I think I was one of these) who will be quiet and generally well-behaved and studious when most of the other kids are but who will get loud when it’s the only way to get in on what’s going on around them. Everyone’s somewhat susceptible to this from time to time a guess. That seems to be the case here.
In other news, we might have seen the last few moments of a drunk Korean's life two weeks ago. It was Saturday evening, around 7:00, and we decided to go to a local third story resto-bar called KKunorri. It's important to know that after work Korean businessmen habitually get shit-faced drunk. At KKunnori you get your own little room with coloured translucent walls. We were in our little room and had just ordered when a commotion started up outside. A jolly Korean guy was reeling down the hallway falling all over the place and landing at/on our corner. His friend came along and picked him up and escorted him away. A moment later this same guy careened back into view and tried to have relations with a girl caught in the same hallway as he was. She escaped and the drunk's buddy held him against our see-through wall and gave him a good slappin', through him in a headlock and escorted him the hell out of the place. We got and finished our food and left with in the next 20 minutes. As mentioned, the bar was on the third floor and when we left there were a tonne of official-looking guys milling around the stairs. We scooted through to the stairway and noticed that at the bottom of the first flight down the bottommost window-pane was smashed out. Weird, eh? We thought so too. On the ground floor I poked my head out of the back door and saw a huge pool of blood on the ground. So wht happened? We think inadvertent swan-dive out of the window...Whatever happened we are committed to staying away from the soju. At least off the ground floor.
More later.