Monday, March 16, 2009

Korean Music

This is THE song right now. All of the kids love it. We have sticker charts, and if the kids do something good, I give them stickers. 100 on a sheet. The sheets get turned in for "Bucks" which are good at a school sale, where they can get pens and such.

Well if a kid does something bad, I give them a choice. Give me a sticker, or sing a song. I always sing a bar or two from this. "I want nobody, nobody, but you!" *clapclap clap*, but only about 1 in 20 kids sing a song. So enjoy this song, because word has it they're heading to the US and you'll surely here it there.


Sunday, March 8, 2009

Lake Park!

Here are some photos from Lake Park, the largest lake in Korea.


























Photos!

Below: My hallway, my room is the first on the left.





Below: My street. My building is on the right, it goes for about half of the block.



Below: The area in front of the nearby mall.



Below: Yes, Micky D's is every where. Also, you'll notice in front of Mickey D's is a street vendor. There are tons of these. They sell traditional Korean food, on a stick. I like to call it meat on a stick. Some vendors sell cookies, and I even saw one that was giving a Tarot reading.

Also, notice the scooter? McDonald's delivers here. Also, this picture show how there is enough things written in English to be able to know whats going on.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

What's Korea Like?

I keep getting asked the same question by everyone, so I thought I'd try to answer it here. The question is, "What's Korea Like?"

Well I can answer to what all of Korea is like, but I can talk about where I live and what that's like. I live in a town called Ilsan. It's north of Seoul, and is technically part of a town called Goyang. Ilsan is also known as "Ilsan New City" because it was built about 15-20 years ago as response to crowding in Seoul. Yeah, they just went and built a new city.

I've been told that there are between 1 million and 1.5 million people now living in Ilsan. Since it's a new city, it's fairly upper middle class.

And of course I'm from Farwell, a town of 855 people. So when people ask me, "What's Korea like?," my first thoughts are about how big and busy it is. But I suppose the same could be said if you lived in Houston, Chicago, New York or any number of large American cities.

The main difference, obviously, is language. I'm in Korea, and as a consequence of that everyone is Korean and they speak Korean. Also, most thing are written in Korean, but a surprising number of places have signs written in English. And all of the bus stops and subway stops are written in English as well as Korean. This makes it much easier to know where you are.

So I bet some of you are wondering what it's like to walk around and not be able to understand anything being said around you. Well it's like when you have a TV on, but just for noise in the background. Most of the time I have my iPod on and I'm listening to music sang in English.

As for hearing and speaking English, I do get to do both every day. Of course at school the number one rule is: NO SPEAKING KOREAN! But said in a fun sing-song way. And the cable here has two or three movie channels, which will sometimes play English speaking movies. And I get the Discovery Channel, in English. I get National Geographic, Nick Jr, and a few others but they are all in Korean. Sometimes the style network will have American programming. Do you remember that show, "World's Most Smartest Model"? Well that's on here, it's in English but with Korean subtitles. And they don't bleep the swear words.

For right now, I think I'm happy not knowing what's going on. I can remember last week, being in the US and everything was just so negative. The job market is horrible, the economy is horrible. Everyone being so cynical and negative. And I definitely felt myself being sucked into the negativity. I'm not going to say that the negativity is not happening here, I just don't understand Korean well enough to know. And I think I'm ok with that.

p.s. More pictures this weekend, I've been too busy with sleeping and work to take the camera outside yet.

Monday, March 2, 2009

My Apartment

Here are some photos of my small apartment. A couple of interesting things. If you can't tell, the shower head is in the bathroom. No separate area for your shower. It's kinda weird, but no biggie. And the heat comes from the floor, it's a very even heat. Even better than an EdenPure! Which is good because it's snowing right now. I can't complain, it's been in the 40's the whole time up until now.


















Sunday, March 1, 2009

Landing In Korea

Landing in Korea was very cool. As we were coming down it was just getting dark and as the plane was banking I could see lights as far as the eye could see. It was Seoul, and it was HUGE.

As I got of the plane myself and a few other Americans just followed the flow of traffic. One person said we were all lemmings, but I prefer to think we were gazelles running from a lion.

Thankfully the airport had enough English signs that I could get where I need to be. Which was down the esclator, on the tram, along the people mover, to Immigration. I got up to the immigration desk and the man wanted to know wny my address was "not known." I said it was because I didn't know where I was going to live. He gave me a stern look, and asked again. We did this about 3 or 4 times, and finally with a defeated look he stamped my passport and let me go.

It was some what amazing that my bags were coming through right as I came to the baggage claim area. Even more impressive was the bags didn't look like they'd been in a war zone, as some other peoples bags did.

I went through customs quickly, as I had nothing to declare, and I found the currency exchange. I got 1380 won per dollar, which was better than the 1200 they were offering in San Fransisco. It seems crazy but I have over 100,000 of this currency. That seems like a bunch of money, but it's about 70 bucks.

I was met at the airport by a man from the recruiting agency. He had a big sign with my name on it, typed very large. He was really easy to spot. He took my bags for me, which I thought was great, and we scooted off to his car. A Kia if you can believe it!

It was about an hour drive to get to the apartment.

The area that I'm living in is very exciting. There are night clubs in my building, a bar called "Miller Time" which has MGD branded into everything. Oh, and a place that claims to have hamburgers and tacos. I'm excited to see how good that is.

A manager from my school and another person (I'm not sure on titles as I haven't been to school yet) met me at the lobby. They showed me how to work the security system, and how to work the heat and all that.

Shortly after they left I crashed. We planned to meet at 1 the next afternoon, but I was awake at 8. So I showered, got dressed and did some exploring! Turns out the malls that I've been reading about are just around the block from here. I took about a half mile walk and found a movie theater, with an IMAX!

At 1 a person from school met me and took me out to eat traditional Korean food. Ramen with cheese (very good, and spicy), kimbap (a kind of Korean sushi, rice rolled in seaweed with veggies and one with tuna), and the most famous Korean food, kimchi. I did not care for the kimchi, and I'll leave it at that.

After we were done eating I went for a walk to look for my school. Since I don't have a map, and don't speak Korean this was an interesting ordeal. I had a general idea of where it was, but it took me 2 hours of walking around to find it. The good news is that I've found it, the bad news is that it's about 2 miles from the apartment.

Also while I was out and about I had my first meal in korea, before I went with the guy from school. What did I have? KFC. I could have had Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, or Starbucks. Very exotic!

In Korea they use 220 power, not 110 like we do in the US. So I went out and found a converter at this little hardware store. It was cool to get it becuase I didn't speak Korean and the old man didn't speak English. But I still managed to find what I needed even with the language barrier.

There is a little corner store in my building. I walked into it yesterday to buy a coke, and they guys were listening to Eminem.

Plane Ride

I've made it to Korea.

It was a very long Friday for me. My day started in Chicago, and I flew from there to San Fransisco. I was stuck in a middle seat, but it wasn't too bad as I could fit my feet under the seat in front of me.

On that flight I sat next to a guy from New Zealand who worked for a company that makes milk separators. He had made the trip quite a few times and he would tell me what we were flying over on the way to San Fran. Seemed like it was an awful lot of Wyoming.

I was really worried about finding my gate in San Fransisco on time. I had an hour and 45 for my layover. Well it took about 11 minutes to find my gate, which left me plenty of time to find food and so on.

I was expecting the plane to Korea to have a lot of ESL teachers like me on it, but when I got to the gate I could tell I was wrong. Nearly everyone was Asian. I saw a few people who might be teachers, and a few guys who were definitely military.

As I boarded the plane, and walked nearly all the way to the back I found my seat. Thank goodness it was an aisle seat! And even better instead of having someone as big as I am in the seat next to me, there was a young lady named Hanna.

I said hello to her, and she shook my hand and told me she was, "10 in the us but 12 in Korea." Very quickly she needed to beat her little sister in filling out the little game book she had. Mostly it was the pictures from Highlights where a bear is having a birthday party and you need to find the hidden thumb tack, and needles. You know the kind right? Well we beat Minna, most of the time. Minna looked to be about 4 or 5, but she was getting help from the people sitting next to her, an young married couple.

This airplane was what I had expected an airplane to be like. We had pillows, blankets and a little TV screen. We also had satellite radio to listen to with our "souvenir" ear phones (in other words, "please take the ear phones with you so we don't have to throw them away). The TV showed 4 or 5 movies, one or two episodes of Desperate Housewives, and a few hours of the Disney Channel. There was also a cool map function where we could see where we were, our speed, and all that fun stuff. Of course about 8 hours in it wasn't nice to see that we were only in Alaska.

We were fed 3 times, and a person would come by with a drink about every hour.

Most people seemed to sleep most of the flight, I did not. Mostly because I had such a good flying companion. We had fun watching the Wizards of Waverly Place, and cartoons. Unfortunately, because the flight was 13 hours long, we saw the same episodes about 5 times or more. Hanna was not pleased with this. "This one again? Ohh this isn't really the Disney Channel, it's just a tape."

Koreans love to give each other business cards, and I got my first one on the plane. It was from this guy who is a Korean Mennonite Preacher. He has a Youth Culture Center in Elkhart Indiana. He takes Korean kids to this center so they can see if they really want to go study in the US. He only takes kids from rural areas. And while he was clearly Korean, and had a heavy accent, he assured me he was 100% American and a citizen of the US. This was a big point of pride for him.

Hanna and Minna's parents sat right behind the girls, and once the girls were sleeping their dad grilled me on Hanna's English abilities. I told her she spoke very well. I found out later that many Koreans can read and write English, but they struggle with speaking it. And that was what Hanna's dad was most worried about.

I told him where I was going to live, and he said I will like it very much. I told him I was going to teach ESL and he said, "Oh, very good. You makes lots of money."

Right before we got off the plane Hanna had to give me something: