Its all about the food

I know why you are reading this blog. It’s because you want me to tell you about Korean food. And now that you have been patient and read through some stuff about my life here I will oblige you. Let’s talk about ordering food. It is dirt cheap people. Dirt cheap. They bring the food to you in regular restaurant plates and bowls and when you’re done you leave them outside your door and they come and take them away. So I have ordered bibimbap, which is rice with cut up veggies, sometimes ground pork, and an egg on top of it. You add sesame oil and chili paste to it and mix it all together to make an insanely delicious fried-rice-on-crack type deal. Then there is kimbap. Which is essentially Korean sushi. Like sushi you can order it based off of what the main meat or veggie inside is. Unlike sushi it has a bunch of other stuff that gets rolled into it. It costs like 2.50 a roll. And we are talking like 12 pieces in a roll. Two is a large meal. And now I will tell you about the market. It goes for about four blocks and has a whole lot of delicious food. Amanda introduced us to the butcher and produce people there that she likes. The veggies are all from small farms in the area and they are absolutely amazing. And dirt cheap. We bought eggplants, peppers, onions, garlic, and peaches. When we asked from the eggplants she told us the price for a kilo and we thought it was the price for one. A kilo was 3 won. We had 9 eggplants. I kid you not. And the garlic was 5 won a kilo. We have probably fifty cloves of garlic. Not kidding. We are excited to go back and get all sorts of things, crab, fish, beef, veggies, Korean pears. Its all pretty awesome. Ciao for now, and I will inform the interwebs when we have a connection at home.

Makin' friends, learnin' stuff, shabu shabu

It’s been one week! Wow. We don’t have the interwebs in the apartment they have us in until we move into Johnny and Amanda’s place, so my communication has been limited. But hopefully we will be able to make that move by next weekend. As for what has happened this past week, phooowf! I shall tell you. This week Ben and I shadowed Amanda and Johnny for all their classes. It’s a training period, so it has been a lot of information, and a lot of me asking Amanda one million questions. When she leaves I will be taking over about 12 classes. They range in size from three kids to thirteen kids. They are divided by level but the age range in each class is only about two years. But I am teaching from 7 to about 15 year olds. The most confusing thing is the curriculum. There are textbooks, workbooks, and supplementary material. For me the biggest challenge has been getting my head around what classes use what books and how often and all that jazz. But its pretty exciting stuff! I won’t actually teach a class until this Friday, but I have lead games in the classrooms, given speaking tests, and been introduced to most of the kids I will be teaching. They seem fun. Because the Korean school system is so hardcore (students attend regular school 8-2ish, and then often go to up six afterschool Hagwons like the ECC where I work) they are pretty fried and don’t get a lot of social time. This makes classroom management a little more difficult then I expected it would be. But I won’t really know how that’s going to go for me until I am in control of the classroom as opposed to watching someone else’s classroom. This Saturday we were required to go to the once a year training seminar that happened to fall the weekend after we got here. I wasn’t wildly pleased about that, but the information was actually really helpful and the guy who was presenting had been a teacher and had a lot of really good advice. The other teachers at are school are all really fun people! There are three other foreign couples (excluding Johnny and Amanda who leave Thursday). We have been taken out to fried chicken (apparently its a thing) by Joel and Jessica who have been at the school for over a year. And we spent a lot of time with the other two couples last night but I will get to that. There is also a large staff of Korean teachers, who seem like very nice people and who we will work pretty closely with as they teach our students either before or after the foreign teachers to deal with phonics and grammar. Alright, so before we left we received an invitation from Dan, who works with the recruiting agency thing, to go out to dinner with all of the new teachers in Gwangju. So last night we went to the downtown area with Cheryl and Nathaniel to have shabu shabu. WOW BOY, let me tell you about shabu shabu. You take your shoes off as soon as you walk into the restaruant, and you sit at low tables on the floor. Built into each table is a burner with a big ole pot on it. In the pot is a spicy broth that gets heated up once you are seated. They bring out a plate of giant mushrooms, srouts, cilantro, and a bunch of other stuff and that goes in and cooks. Then they bring out a plate of thin sliced beef that goes into the broth and cooks. AND THEN YOU EAT IT TILL YOU EXPLODE. Well, actually, once you have eaten that down to the appropriate size they bring out fat delicious noodles that go into the pot. Then they bring out rice. It was delicious. Whilst we were at dinner we made friends! We sat across from a couple who had both been in Korea for a couple years before. We actually started talking because we are going to buy a phone from Chelsea. Her boyfriend Luke works waaaaay north a couple miles from the DMZ but she lives a couple minutes from us. We talked with them for all of dinner. Turns out they have similarly nerdy interests to us and there was much talk of Doctor Who and Firefly. Long story short, Chelsea is coming over tonight to drink wine with us and play dominion. We are making friends! Bahaha. It also didn’t take us long to realize we are really lucky as far as the foreign staff of our school goes. There’s more of us then is usual, and we ended up clicking really well with everyone we came with! Besides Cheryl and Nathaniel there is Kezia and Jack. They met and started dating last year while both working at different schools in Gwangju. The six of us ended up spending the rest of the evening together. We had a LOT of fun with them. We went to two other bars with them and met a friend of Kezia’s named Kat who is really delightful as well. She is on her second year back too. There was pool playing, beer drinking, dancing, all sorts of fun stuff. We both came back to the apartment feeling really really good about getting to know the people who are here with us! We also all arrived within two months of each other so we are all going to be here pretty much the same time! It’s exciting stuff. There is a big expat community here and it seems to be good people.

First day!

School day number one was interesting. After 25 hours of travel jumping into a full day (that starts at 9pm according to your body clock) is tough cookies. We went to the school at 10 am to go to the hospital to do our medical check. We were whisked through about five different departments to do blood tests, x-rays, vision checks, etc. This process is required to receive your alien registration card. We then returned to the school and met Lynn, the director of all the teaching staff. She was very kind, and showed us around and set us up with some packets to start familiarizing ourselves with the rules of teaching, lesson writing, classroom behavior expected of the kids, etc.

Shoulda brought some sleeping pills.

Hello! Happy blogging to ya. This is my attempt to fill you all in about my daily goings on, and to catalog this crazy adventure of living and working in Korea. So lets talk travel! Fourteen hours on a plane is not awesome, but it wasn’t quite as bad as I was expecting. Because of the time of day we left, it was light outside for the full trip. After they served the plane meal (Ben and I both opted to get the Korean meal of bibimbap and kimchi, YUM) they shut all the window shades and turned off the lights. I think they wanted us to sleep. I wanted me to sleep, but alas, it was many movies and a half hour nap for me. Once we landed in Korea we got our stuff and did a quick run through customs. We then had to locate the bus to Gwangju. This wasn’t too difficult and the transition from airport to bus was quick. Our bus driver was a freaking crazy person (apparently this is standard for Korean drivers) but we both slept some. Once we arrived in Gwangju, we were picked up by Amanda (one of the teachers we are replacing) and Will (the do-it-all guy for the school). They brought us to the temporary apartment we will be staying in until we take over Amanda and Johnny’s place once they move out. They also gave us some snacks and information for heading to the school the following morning. We crashed at midnight Korean time.