Hi Korea, I'm Here!

I even get to listen to the pitter patter sound the rain is making on the roof. My new desk is made out of wire. It also functions as my drying rack. Multipurpose, isn't that awesome?

I've got a lot to write and lots of pictures to post up about last weekend but I've been too busy to do that at school. I have to start preparing for the Saturday classes I'm teaching :[ I received my health card today as well as a break down of my pay and the deductions for this month, but that wasn't the things that I'd been really waiting for. I want my internet and cable TV!!

So the cable/internet guy was scheduled to come at 5pm on Wednesday. That fell through. He had pushed it up to 4pm (called at 2:30pm to let me know). Kinda sucked because I needed to go to the bank to set up internet banking so I had to leave school in a hurry. After getting home at 3:30 from the bank, I get a call from my coteacher informing me that the cable guy had just cancelled the appointment (it was 3:40pm by this time) because of the rain. Pissed off as I was, I decided to find my own internet. I proceeded to my table next to my kitchen b/c Ashley had said she was able to pick up internet on top of her microwave, but no luck for me.

I didn't want to give up.. so I went out onto my balcony and yay, 2 networks in range!! One unsecured!! Because Korea's slowest internet is faster than fast internet in America, even with a crappy low connection, it's still faster than back at home. I found that if I lowered my laptop any lower than the bottom of the windows, the connection would cut off. That meant either holding up high constantly or finding something tall to prop it up. I decided to use my drying rack.. With that, I had to stand. But I wanted to sit down! So I grabbed a dining room type chair and stuck it on the balcony. I now either kneel on the cushion until my knees hurt or sit on top of the backing of the chair until my butt hurts. It's all worth it though, I have internet :p

He rescheduled for today.. and he did come even though it was raining just as much as it was yesterday but after examining the lines and seeing how oddly they're set up and kinda go out the windows down to the first floor, he informed me that he'd be returning tomorrow. :( I think it's just not meant to be! I should just cancel totally and forever use my balcony as my computer room. I think it'll be a lil cold in the winter, but it'll also keep my laptop's temperature down~

That's all. I posted new pictures of my wild students in between the paragraphs because they're just too cute (even if they're wild). I wanted to smack some of my 6th graders today though. I'm glad my coteacher freely yells at them. The most I do is glare until their friends are like "Susan teacher is staring at you!!" which gets them to stop fooling around. And if they're supposed to be watching the monitors (TV died today lol) then I grab their heads and turn them in the right direction. I'll post about the fun weekend later~ Oh, lunch is still super yummy :D

On to the food and fun! So Anthea and I went into a restaurant where the menu was completely in Korean and there weren't any pictures. We had the owners pretty much translate/use hand motions to describe the dishes on the menu. We ended up ordering Samgyopsal and rice. It was sooo much food! I'm still not used to the massive amount of food that Asians eat. If I weren't walking home everyday and ate barely anything when I'm home alone in my apartment, I'd definitely be so much fatter than when I came. I have to mention again, school lunches rock ;p

Cooking for 1 is a hard task. Sometimes I undershoot and end up having to supplement my meal with snacks/yogurt.. but quite often, I cook way too much. Korean beef is extremely expensive.. I found that out the hard way when I bought a small smaaaaaaallll lump of beef for 20,000 won (~$20 US). The price was labeled as 3980 in the case but I didn't know that was by 100 grams until she weighed it and asked if that was ok. Because the other meat department people in the grocery store I went to (department store grocery store) were kind of making fun of me when I asked where the beef was -_-;.. I just wanted to get away as soon as possible and ended up taking the beef with me.

So I've been trying to make some of the dishes my mom cooks at home with the beef. I don't eat a lot so one dish takes me forever to eat.. that small lump of beef is down to 1/4th the size after 2-3 weeks. I don't have internet at home so I can't really look up receipes so I've been doing stuff by what I THINK is right. One dish = tomatoes (cherry tomatoes b/c that's all I had), garlic, soy sauce, and beef. My mom later told me that she never adds soy sauce to that.. oh well. Another dish = Beef, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, and seasame oil. I added onions, green onions, bits of carrots, some kind of stringly white mushrooms, and the dokpokgi rice cake things. It turned out um ok/looked ugly? Last one I tried was beef, garlic, soy sauce, onions, and oyster sauce. That turned out incredibly salty. I mixed up two of the recipes my mom mentioned.. you don't need soy sauce lol. I ate a ton of rice with that one XD

For veggies, I've just been frying them normally. I've noticed that the rice here is kinda hard.. and gets hard after one day in the fridge. I've been cooking 1 1/2 cup of rice with 1 3/4 cup water and have been letting it sit in the water for about 15 minutes before cooking but it's still harder than I guess the Japanese rice. I'll try 2 cups of water next time. Just for anyone who likes the tofu skin sushi thing and want to make it themselves.. One and a half cups of rice is more than enough (1 cup might even be enough). As you can see from my picture, some of my tofu things exploded b/c I put too much rice lol. There's also 14 skins in a pack so either prepare to eat a lot/microwave next day, or make them only when you have guests to eat them with. It took me 3 days to finish mine with me stuffing myself all 3 days. Anyone else have good simple recipes, please let me know!!



Aside from food, we went to Seoul last weekend! Ashley is here now so we went exploring :D Anthea came over to my place so we took the train to Yongsan together. We met up with Ashley there. It took us 30 mins to find her b/c none of us have cellphones lol. After finding her we went to Yongsan Electronics Market to shop around and mostly to survey what's there. I think we explored most of the area. I can't really tell b/c the map online didn't help too much.


After Yongsan, we headed over to Dongdaemun to meet up with Mi-Young (Semi's friend). Mi-Young is really nice and overall an awesome person. Her personality is really funny and matches with ours pretty well. We went to Doota to shop for clothes and then went to dinner. It happened to be Samgyopsal again but it was just as good :D Mi Young kept eating these really spicey peppers and she was addicted and claimed they weren't too hot. But then she dipped the pepper in the hot sauce and after biting into it she finally said oh too hot! That didn't stop her though.. few minutes later, she repeated the process. It was really funny to watch XD


After dinner, we walked along the "artificial stream" all the way to the end of the stream. It was a really nice walk. She said it was about 4 km and we walked maybe 2/3 of it. She did this all in boots. Craziness. I wish I was able to walk in heels as long as Korean girls. My feet were hurting from the little amount of time I had to walk in heels yesterday. I don't know how they do it all day long and on uneven ground.

Ashley came back with us to Guri that night and spent the night! The next day we had McD's in the morning for breakfast b/c it's right next to where I live and explored my market a little bit. I can't wait for this coming weekend. We're going to be exploring more of Seoul again and going to a crochet club. Jack might be coming up this weekend too :D Unfortunately, no Guri teachers were on the list for GEPIK orientation so we all have to stay at school and teach, but I'll just make up for all the fun this weekend :)

I've been so busy since my last post! To start off, here are two pictures from the front door of my apartment. Today, 6th grade has midterms and I happen to only have 6 graders on Thursday so I'm finally free to post up pictures/write up entries.

One day my coteacher comes to me and says "So you said you have no friends here? There's a foreign teacher at the Guri middle school next to us." This got me excited b/c it was still only maybe the 2nd or 3rd week I was here and without internet and without any other fluent English speakers besides my coteacher, I pretty much had no one to speak in English to. I could already feel my English deteriorating like it did in Taiwan XD Anthea came over to my office after the work day ended and we talked :D I had originally thought it would be a teacher that has been here for a while but it turned out she was slightly newer than me haha. That was just as fun though b/c then we could go exploring together! My English is still deteriorating from having to use super short/easy sentences and speaking slow, but at least it's slowing down XD

Teaching has been going pretty good. I'm slowing finding ways to make my students speak and to keep up their interest in English. I dislike the book/curriculum provided so I only loosely follow it. One of my coteachers doesn't like the CD at all while the other one does every part of the CD. I'm trying to slowly do half/half so both are satisfied and I can still do whatever else I plan for the students.

I've been using a whiteboard game to supplement the "Let's Write" section and the "Let's read" or whatever. It forces them to write/read as fast as possible and forces them to help each other in their groups. If one person makes a mistake in their group before putting up all their boards and yelling finished, their group gets disqualified for that round. The first group with all boards up and correct gets a point. I've started giving the first 2 groups that get their boards up so that I can end up giving each group at least one point. The kids don't pay attention to other groups enough to know who was 2nd, so it encourages groups that otherwise wouldn't participate as much when they notice that, oh they have a point too and they could possibly win :D

We had an open class yesterday. We were kind of hoping not too many people would come so it wouldn't be so nerve racking (for my coteacher.. I'm new so they don't expect anything from me yet :p) but a ton of people came. The whole back of the classroom was super filled and the hallway was filled too with teachers looking in through the windows. It made the classroom really hot but the students for the class were awesome. My coteacher picked her favorite class but it was still iffy on whether they'd volunteer or not with so many people watching. Luckily they all responded loudly and did everything like incredibly well behaved children. Two groups ended up tying in a couple of short quick games we played so they received candy, but at the very end, my coteacher asked me to give candy to the rest of the students too since they were so good :D

The meeting was pretty long and completely in Korean (besides when I had to speak) so I don't really know what the other teachers thought. I'm planning on emailing them all and asking for feedback in English.

Besides that stuff and watching the kids while the play soccer after lunch, I'm pretty much just busy with making lesson plans. I finally received my ID card in the mail on Tuesday though. My coteacher and I will be going to the bank to open up an account at the end of the day. Hopefully.. HOPEFULLY I'll have internet and a cellphone soon!!I'll continue writing about life outside of school in my next post.

edit: Just wanted to comment on the playground. They usually have like 2 soccer games going on at once (but only 2 goals on the playground..) and then all the other students are running around on the playground as well at the same time. It's pretty interesting watching little kids run across the field fearlessly as balls are being kicked everywhere. I'd be too afraid to play on the playground :x