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.