The tale of Ice Fishing

The terrifying thing about blogging is that if you are trying to keep your posting up to date, you want to get more then one event behind. I went ice fishing three weekends ago, and this coming weekend I am going to Seoul so my motivation to write this post is pretty high.

Alright! So there is this great guy Pedro. He is a Korean man and he runs a business where he sets up trips to get foreigners to different amazing places in Korea. He'll take care of transportation, accommodation, and have a loosely structured schedule and you pay an incredibly cheap flat price. Our friend Kezia found a trip for an icefishing festival, and six of us decided we were in!

We woke up at the freaking crack on dawn on Saturday to pile into a very warm bus with 35 other foreigners (it was the most non-Koreans I have seen since coming here). Since it was 6am almost everyone promptly fell asleep (except for some truly terrible evil morning people who were loud and God forbid CHIPPER. Yuck.) After a 5 hour drive WAY north we stopped for our first days adventure: Nami Island. Nami Island is supposed to be the most romantic place in Korea. It probably would be if it were covered in snow like the pictures showed. But it was certainly lots of fun. There were all sorts of silly things like the first kiss bridge and big hearts made our of recycled soju bottles. It was wildly eclectic, and definitely a blast to explore. After a decent amount of wandering and snacking we headed back to the bus for our meet up time.

Next we headed to the place where we would be staying. It was a little imitation French village in the middle of Korea. Let that idea mind boil for a second. The drive was through a lot of hilly ups and downs, and by the time we got there I was feeling pretty nauseated. The room distribution took a while, but in a lucky switcheroo me, Ben and our friends Jack and Kezia ended up sharing a four person room instead of being smooshed in a room with 8 strangers.

There was the option to get back on the bus and go to botanical gardens about half an hour away. Buuuuut Jumanji was on TV and none of us really wanted to get back on the over-heated bus. It was fortunate that we didn't because about two hours later the bus returned, having fought through traffic to get a few kilometers away, only to be told it would be an hour and a half wait. That group returned and dinner was served. We knocked out for another very early morning.

On Sunday we woke up at 6 once again. We had a quick breakfast and hopped back on the bus to go the last two hours to the festival. When we arrived we were given passes and shown the area specifically blocked off for foreigners to fish. Our early arrival and the sectioned area ended up being really great. Korean festivals have a reputation for being really great, except that so so so many people come to them that they can be ruined by crowds.

ANYWAY, we stepped onto the ice after being handed things that look sort of like twirly fly swatters with a line and bait rolled up on them. There were some lovely Korean guides there to show us how to use them. I was the LAST of my group of friends to get a trout, but I did indeed get one! Well, two.

I was enthusiastic. After a decent amount of time fishing, we handed our fish off to some military volunteers and were told to come back at 11:30 to eat them on the grill. We wandered around and did some other ice activities, like sitting in a giant inner tube while a dude on an ATV flung us around the ice, and going down a slide coated in ice on a tube. 

When we returned, our fish were all cooked up and FREAKING DELICIOUS. We ate them off the grill with chopsticks.

After lunch we did some more wandering around. We headed into the actual town to go to a place called the Illumination Palace. This was pretty sweet. It was giant room willed with ice replicas of famous architecture from around the world. Most of them you could walk through and climb. All of them had lights of different colors built into them. There was everything from igloos to the Coliseum to the giant Buddha.

After all that we had to head back to the bus. We braved the 5 hour trip back and knocked out once we got home. It was a great weekend and I look forward to taking more trips with Pedro soon! 

 Here we have from the left: Nate, Cheryl, Jack, our fisher-guide, Kezia, me, Ben

She does, he does, CUE SYNCHRONIZED DANCERS

Let's talk about Korean weddings.

Yesterday, my co-worker Connie got married. Instead of getting gifts, Koreans give money for weddings. As co-workers we are required to give money whether or not we go, but we are also somewhat required to go.

I was excited to go anyway, seeing a Korean wedding was actually something I came here hoping to attend. Connie looked gorgeous. Her dress was lovely and MASSIVE. We arrived and took a co-workers picture with her on this massive couch thing in a room with carpets and shiny beads and fancy lighting.

We then hung out in the reception hall area for a while before sitting in the bride section of the weddingy area. Lets talk about the weddingy area for a second. It was a long room with black walls. There were small lights in the walls that did a twinkling star sort of a thing. There were also flowy flowery light up pattern things, and mirrored stands with purple flowers on them. Down the center isle was more or less a glass case runway. Inside the runway were more lights and glass/mirror flowers. There were also what I thought of as wedding stewardesses whose job it was to direct guests, and help members of the wedding who were either older, respected, or wearing heels to high to move around by themselves.

I have been told (and now seen for myself) that the success of a wedding is determined by how many people show up. I have also been told that there are like four degrees of separation between the actual people getting married and some of the people who show up. Like families of business friends friends sort of thing. Because of this, there was constant talking throughout the entire ceremony. A guy sitting three rows ahead of us was on facebook on his phone for about half the vows.

The ceremony began with the mothers of the bride and groom coming to the front and lighting candles. They were wearing hanboks, which are traditional Korean dresses. They are super beautiful and it was cool to see them as part of the ceremony.

The fathers came in and sat down, and then the groom, followed by Connie in her glorious huge dress. There was some sort of pre-ambley speech thing, and then vows.

This is when things started to become interesting and incredibly foreign. A man (I assume a friend of the bride or grooms) sang them a song. He had a gorgeous voice. The catch? He was reading the lyrics of the song off his cell phone as he was singing.

Next, a big tray with a wedding cake on it was rolled out. And the couple cut the cake. WITH A FREAKING SWORD. Then four women (friends of the brides) did a choreographed dance to K-pop. Like, Brittney Spears type choreography. Everyone loved it! Our co-worker Sue was in it, and she told me today it took them six weeks to learn.

They started a dance to another song, this time with pom-poms, and the groom jumped out and danced with them. He had clearly learned it without Connie knowing, she was surprised and cracking up, that was pretty adorable.

This is all happening while people are talking.

After the ceremony was over we were told we had to be in a picture, so we waited while family members were in pictures, and got arranged and re-arranged for 10 minutes before the photographer snapped some shots.

I think I have mentioned before that the documentation of events is as, or more important than the event itself. Even during the ceremony a friend of Connie's would jump up to the alter where they were standing to fix her hair, or bring her crying tissue, or arrange her dress perfectly.

It was a really interesting cultural experience. I had a blast seeing how it all went. The space was amazing and very fancy, and it was definitely totally different from what I was expecting.

Afterwards there was a big buffet, which was great. Our new coworker came with us, and we got to know her and spent the rest of the day with her and our other foreign co-workers. (All great people).

Work lunch and catch up

I am back! Hello!

Well before I tell you about the work lunch, I'll do a quick catch up. Things are still going well. Teaching is good. We are coming to a strange part of the year. In January students re-enroll in the program. This makes things stressful for the school on several fronts. Obviously they need a certain number of students to keep the school afloat. Also, they rework the schedule. They test all of the older kids to decide who should progress to a more difficult class and who should stay at their level or level down. Our friends and co-workers Joel and Jessica leave at the end of December as well. The two of them are being replaced by only one person (Amelia, who seems great). So that calls for some rearranging class-wise as well. Although none of this changes my current schedule, you can definitely feel the strain of management freaking out. I'll be interested to see how it all works out in January, but there isn't much I can do about it now.

On a less ominous note, Christmas is coming! It's really strange to think of Christmas away from home. My family has gone to Pittsburgh to see my Mom's whole side of the family every year for a looooong time. I am the first to miss a Christmas (except for when my cousin got sick and destroyed Christmas, but don't worry, we rescheduled). It will be hard not to be there this year. Oddly, it helps me to think that our Christmas' won't be on the same day! The 25th comes to Korea a day before the US. But we have a big Christmas party to go to with friends. The lovely people we replaced left us a Christmas tree, and gifts have been seriously pouring in from Ben's and my family members. Our apartment is very festive and we have good people to celebrate with.

So now to yesterday. First of all, it was Ben and my 3 year anniversary. That's crazy. We had to go into school on a Saturday for an open house/information session thing the school does to try and get more students involved. Our job was to dress nicely and look American/Canadian/English. We also bowed at one point. Videos of some of our classes were taken ahead of time to show the kids' language progression. They were actually pretty adorable. After the presentation was over, the school took all the employees out to lunch at a duck shabu shabu place.

Lunch was a fun but strange experience. I found it to be kind of draining. Being the odd one out as far as fully understanding etiquette and Korean customs was a bit exhausting. The lunch was done as a sort of two in one holiday party/goodbye to Joel and Jessica. This is the second goodbye meal we've been to (the first was Johnny and Amanda's just a few days after we got here). Mr. Kim, the head of the school gives a speech thing, and then other people are asked to as well. All of the foreign teachers, including myself, stood up to say something to Joel and Jessica.

Then there were "In This Coming New Year" type speeches. I found the speeches given by the Korean staff to be bizarre (as did many of my foreign coworkers). I have found several times that speeches that have an uplifting "you guys are doing such good work" message always have a "but we have to do EVEN MORE" side to them. Also, there is some concern about the amount of money the school is making. In almost every speech given by management, there was a pretty clear message along the lines of "you guys are doing really good work. Please keep doing good work. The only way we can get more students is if we work harder." While I understand that teaching well and having the students be engaged and excited is very important, the idea that any teacher can do more than put their best energy into teaching to up enrollment is very strange to me. I consider it my job to teach the kids in my classes to the very best of my ability and with the best attitude I can. If I do a good enough job that the kids are happy and stay enrolled, or other kids and families become interested I guess that could count as DOING BETTER. But I'm not sure how much control I have over it.

Something to keep in mind (for you, reader, and probably for me too) is that these speeches were mostly given in Korean and then translated by our head teacher. So it's possible that some of the strange undertones came from being lost in translation. They were also all delivered in a very affectionate way that was clearly meant to be inspiring and motivational. Once again, cultural differences and the Korean work ethic have to be kept in mind.

It was a fun lunch despite the strangeness. There was good duck, and lots of chatting and laughing. Our head teacher Lynn had been pouring her heart and soul into the open house and was absolutely giddy when it was over. It was great to see her smiling and relaxed.

Another interesting note is about Korean drinking etiquette. It is very very common to have drinks at business dinners or lunches. The rules of this sort of business drinking are really complex and interesting. The top things to remember as they have been explained to me are: never let your bosses cup run dry, never fill your own glass, but be sure to fill the glasses of anyone around you who is drinking, face away from your boss when you drink, and when someone is refilling your drink hold your glass with two hands. (Actually taking and giving things to others with two hands applies to everything, not just booze. It's a respect thing I actually really like, it makes passing something less haphazard. It shows that you are putting bodily effort into taking or giving something to someone.) ANYWAY. Fortunately, because I am a female and foreign, people filling up the cups (mainly my boss) were less pour happy with mine then they were with the men.

 It was another interesting experience. Later that night Ben and I had a nice dinner out, and after getting incredibly lost and wandering for an hour and fifteen minutes looking for our meet up point, joined our friends downtown for a great night of dancing and singing (at a nori bong, which is karaoke where you get your own couchy room with your friends). Then there were glorious 5am kebabs, and sleep by 6. It was a great day.
Next weekend we are going to a Korean coworkers wedding. Korean wedding! I am psyched. I will most certainly have something to say about later!

Thanksgiving

We got an oven. Thank goodness. And we got it before Thanksgiving. Also thank goodness. And we got a box full of spices. Glorious. And a beer brewing kit! White Elephant IPA is soon to live in my home.

BUT! Thanksgiving!
So early on Ben and I decided we wanted to host Thanksgiving. We are big cooking people and we like having people over. We have hosted international Thanksgivings before so we figured we were good people for the job. We took care of the turkey and stuffing and did the rest potluck style.

The challenges: turkey. It's difficult to find turkey around here. There is a bar/restaurant downtown that caters to foreigners (and is run by foreigners) that sells holiday meat around the holidays. So for an arm and a leg we covered the turkey. 2. Bread. It's all puffy white bread here so Ben and I made bread. Fortunately Ben worked on a farm in Italy and made bread every Friday for 5 months. Convection oven. I love our convection oven, but it does take some getting used to and some recipe tweaking to use it. The turkey came out perfectly, the stuffing was a little dry in spots, but mostly pretty delicious.


We used veggies from the market and cooked for like six hours. We set up the apartment with all kinds of weird seating, different level tables, cheap table clothes, candles, and wine. But it looked awesome and we had a great turn out of people. It is pretty cool to be in a foreign country and have over a dozen people come over to celebrate a holiday with you. I am thankful indeed to have so many great friends who welcomed us so quickly.

Anyway, everyone brought AMAZING food. It took a lot of re-arranging just to fit everything. We all pigged out and then played cards against humanity (for those of you who don't know, this is the pg-13 version of apples to apples). There were tears of laughter involved. The last people left at 2:30 in the morning. It was a massive success.

As is proper, we have been living off the leftovers this week.
Christmas shopping has begun and we are looking forward to our next holiday in Gwangju.

Korean shopping culture shock, view out my window, and the art of dressing in ski gear to go to work

Hello there! Long time no information I'm afraid! That's because not a whole lot has happened that screams BLOG ABOUT ME! But I will give you a general update.

It has started to get chilly in Gwangju. There were a couple delightful weeks where I would look at the forecast here and see 60s and 70s and look at the forecast for Syracuse and see the oncoming tundra wasteland that is Syracuse winter. It was quite satisfying and I highly recommend it for any grad who has moved to a kinder climate than that of Syracuse. But it has started to get chilly so I'll bite my tongue. The awesome thing though (which I was actually told about before I came here) is that fall in Korea is really beautiful. It sort of happens overnight. One day it's 75 degrees and the trees are green and the next morning everything is yellow and red and it's 50 degrees. Apparently that's how all temperate weather in Korea comes in (and out). Abruptly. I have taken a few pictures out the back window of the apartment to give you an idea of the view we are working with. (These were taken about a week ago, so it's even more colorful now).

  Alright, so I also stuck a picture of our plants in there. But they are pretty great, huh? huh?
Also! Here is a video out the window of a bus to give you an idea of the area near downtown/the pretty tree business.

So briefly back to the weather, the strange thing is that the school doesn't turn up the heat in the building until a certain point. It's possible this is a legal thing (I know in the summer large spaces like grocery stores can't turn the ac up very high), Regardless it makes for interesting attire choices. Today I am wearing two pairs of tights, a shirt, a dress, and a wool sweater. Inevitably I will end up in the giant shawl thing which Amanda kindly left behind for me. It makes me look like a wizard.

Enough about that! On to the shopping tale. So Ben and I got paid on Wednesday after seven weeks of living off the money we brought with us. We did fine off of that, but it was pretty exciting to start filling in the gaps as far as kitchen supplies, house stuff, groceries we didn't need but wanted, AND PLANTS. Two other things we were really looking forward to investing in were a beer brewing kit (Korean beer is like Natty Lites sad cousin) and an oven. (Koreans do not bake much, and so do not consider an oven a necessity. Because so many foreigners do consider it a necessity and we are cooking people we decided to buy one that we will easily be able to sell on when we leave). We tried to buy one online at a store called GMarket, which is the Ebay of Korea. This did not work for us. Apparently sometimes it can be a bit faulty. It was for us. So in person stores it was! First we went to Home Plus, a big department store that is connected with Tesco, a department store in the UK. This makes finding certain things easier. Alas, their ovens were wildly expensive. We also couldn't find a good number of the things on our list. We decided despite the fact that we had been shopping for around two hours, that we wanted to get everything on our list and we would venture to Emart, another department store nearer to our house. We returned home, unpacked, and took the 20 minute walk to Emart. Both of us were oddly nervous as we headed to the ovens. And with good reason. Once again there were only five-ish ovens there and they were well out of our price range. Highly disappointing. It was at this time that I started to feel exasperated. The phrase "come on, Korea" was said a couple times. It was only after we failed to find the correct (and much needed) vacuum bags for our vacuum, and a freaking pot for less then 60 dollars that I really lost it. Thus far it is the first time I have noticeably felt culture shock. There have been plenty of instances where I have noted cultural differences, or been told about Korean beliefs or customs that are greatly different from American ones. This does not rattle me. But having a good number of things that we need, or have been really looking forward to getting and being totally incapable of getting them was pretty daunting.

Luckily, we managed to figure out the oven purchasing online. Now we are just crossing our fingers that it comes before Thanksgiving (which we are hosting). So long story short, everything worked out, but I had my first noticeable and distressing culture shock experience! Still having a blast and learning a lot. Now off to write some tests! Toodles.

Halloween ECC Style

So this will not be a writing heavy post. But brief Halloween update:
We celebrated Halloween with the kids today. We were required to dress up, and led the kids in various party activities. We trick-or-treated from classroom to classroom, gave out candy, played pin the tail on the donkey (I was the donkey artist, that's goin on the ole CV), and did some trivia games. There were also pictures of us posted for the kids to vote with stickers on the best costume. We found out a week before the day that there would be cash prizes which was unfortunate because I would have been MUCH more elaborate had I known that. FORTUNATELY Ben had decided to be Jack from The Nightmare Before Christmas. I was his makeup person and it turned out pretty awesome, so we won grocery money! Huzzah! Without further ado, here are the pictures of me and some of my kids and Ben's sweet award-winning costume!

Busan! Our first adventure out of Gwangju

This weekend we ventured to Busan! We went with the hope of getting to the fireworks festival, but I will tell you up front, no fireworks were seen. It's ok though! We had an awesome time.

Our friend Chelsea was the one who suggested we go. We aren't getting paid till the second weekend in November, so we are doing our best to be frugal, but with the promise of free camping and cheap bus tickets we signed on. On Friday's the school day ends at 10. We decided that not having a super clear idea of the plan it was best not to try and negotiate Busan in the dark. So Friday night we picked up all the camping gear from Chelsea's place, and she crashed on our extra bed so we could make an obscenely early start on Saturday morning.

The thing we learned from this trip is: book your freaking bus tickets. Apparently for heavily traveled routes like Gwangju to Seoul it is super easy to show up and end up on the next bus. Not so for Busan. We got to the terminal at 6 and couldn't leave till 8:30. But we played card games on the floor while simultaneously providing well dressed Koreans with entertainment. We got on the bus and I passed out for the next four hours and woke up in Busan!

 So Korea is basically all mountains. And Busan is on the coast. The combination of mountains and super blue ocean is really stunning. We took a subway to the main beach to figure out our next move and admire the view. After finding a hotline to get Busan info, we discovered that Songjeon was the only beach we were allowed to camp on. We had actually figured that was the case ahead of time, but wanted to check if we could be any closer. We jumped in a cab and scouted out an excellent beach camping spot. Once we were all set up we waited for Luke, Chelsea's boyfriend who was coming from Seoul. We did a bit of walking around and exploring until he arrived. When he did we went to an AWESOME restaurant. The building was modeled after an old Korean turtle battleship which apparently kicked ass many moons ago. The cuisine was basically the Vietnamese take on shabu shabu. Again you get the hot broth, meat, noodles and rice, but this time there were like 8 piles of fresh veggies and rice paper to wrap all the deliciousness in to eat it!

 After that we grabbed beer to sit with on the beach! We talked, played games, put our toes in the water. We decided we didn't want to spend the money on a cab to and from the inevitably packed beach, and looking on the map figured we'd be able to see the fireworks. We moved to a dock nearby in the hopes that our view would be a little better. But come 8:00 we didn't see or hear anything. We were a little bummed, but pretty happy to be mellowed out with all our camping stuff on a gorgeous beach. 

The next morning we cook a WHOLE LOTTA meat on a little mini stovey thing that Chelsea brought. We got coffee in an awesome shop overlooking the beach, and then headed to the bus station. We got there at two in the afternoon, only to discover the next available bus was at 6:40. Needless to say it was a bummer and a long wait, BUT WE LEARNED OUR LESSON.
It was a great first trip out of Gwangju and we definitely want to go back.