Kindie Field Trip

Once a month we get to take the kindergarteners (that means every preschool, prekindergarten and kindergarten class in our morning program), or the "kindie kids" on a field trip. My coteacher took a lot of pictures of my Sealions class and was kind enough to send them to me.

When we first got on the bus, I thought it might be fun to get the kids going on "Wheels on the bus go round and round." Then I remembered we had a half-hour trip ahead of us and the rest of the teachers and I needed to preserve our sanity. But then this OTHER teacher got them singing one of their Poly School theme songs. Ugh, so pissed at her. It should have at least been a relavant song.

Okay, off the bus, off we go!

We didn't really get many animal shots--which is a good thing, because it's a depressing sight. The conditions those poor animals are kept in are not good. Their cages are way too small, and they are not kept clean. There are a lot of things South Korea does right, but animal welfare is not on their list.

Poor deer :(

No more sad pictures. Op, Dana thinks it's fun to try to scare the animals!

(Dana is pronounced Dah-nuh, which I think suits her personality.)

I wasn't really sure if I was supposed to keep the kids from climbing on the railings. They seemed like they could pretty much handle it, and it would have been a nightmare trying to enforce such a rule. So:

They LOVED the guinnea pigs.

Oh, man I just remembered. I wish I would have brought my own camera so I could have taken a picture of the sign next to the donkey's cage which was translated into English: "miniature ass."

Anyway.

I'm going to be honest. The little girl whose hand I'm holding--I don't like her one bit.

But I adore Helen. She's such a little sweetie.

Here's most of us! It's impossible to take a good picture when you're dealing with 6 hyperactive children. (2 of my students were absent.)

The trip back was comparatively wonderful. Sleeping kids are preferable to singing/shouting kids.

What? Friends listen to "endless love" in the dark!

Well, I'm pretty hung over.

Last night our director took us out for the second time. MAN. We've had our complaints about our director before, but you have to hand it to the guy. He knows how to have a good time, and he's pretty outrageously generous when it comes to food and drink.

So.

It was kind of stressful at first. We finished our last class, and as we were wrapping up the day in the office, Dennis walks in and says, "OKyouguyswanttogooutokaywe'releavinginfive minutes." We began the night at a samgyeopsal restaurant in the Incheon Terminal area, which is way more happening and alive than our ghost town. And it was the best samgyeopsal we've ever had.

Oh. Samgyeopsal is probably our favorite food in Korea. It's kind of barbecue-y. You get a bunch of raw pork, onions, garlic and other Korean fixins. Grill the meat, make yourself a little sandwich by wrapping it and whatever else you want in a lettuce leaf. So fresh and good.

Stephen and I usually get like 2 or 3 plates of meat for the two of us. And we leave feeling....satisfied. Never super full, but always happy.

Keep in mind that today was field trip day. (We got to show our kids around a bunch of animal cages and just have fun. Awesome. Pictures to come.) And our students' parents prepared lunch for us. We got so many sandwiches, snacks, yatta yatta, that I thought I wouldn't be that hungry. But I think Andrea and I ate more than anyone. Our boss also bought us all coffee, so this was the first time in awhile that we had "real" espresso. (Korean espresso is not quite as strong.) And among the snacks that we were brought were a few Starbucks packaged latte things. So we were totally ready to have a long nigh after a long and tiring day.

Good Lord, last night the plates of meat just kept on coming. Agghhh and it tasted incredible. And my glass was always full of soju. He never hesitated, he just kept ordering. And we just kept eating. We left that restaurant so full and giddy.

Last night they also had pig skin which I tried for the first time, I'm not sure if Andrea had it. She's kind of a wuss when it comes to weird food. :) Anyway, at one point I was about to try one and Dennis, our director, was telling me how you want it to get a little burnt before it's done and the damn thing pops and just hops right off the grill at me. We were like, well I guess it's done. HA! You know how fatty meat shrinks as it cooks, and so the side that's cooking shrinks and the other doesn't making the meat curl up, (wow that was unnecessary) well the pig skin does it in "bounds" sometimes. (Or out of bounds! (What?)) Anyway, the next time this happens, the fool thing jumps like 18 inches in the air, no joke, and lands in Alice's lap. Alice is a Korean coworker of ours who made a pretty good scream when this happened.

There were five of us for dinner. We met up with a few more coworkers at a bar afterwards, and I could not believe our director ordered more food after our hugely indulgent meal. Pitchers and pitchers of beer, bottle after bottle of soju. You just have to keep drinking. Oh my God, the food. There was this dish that can only really be described as squid jerkey. I have no idea how it's prepared, but when they bring it to you the squid is intact, which is pretty cool. then you just kind of shred it and eat! Tried soju bombs. Not what I'd call exquisite, but fun in a fratty Korean sort of way.

Okay, yadda yadda, that was fun. I think most of you already know about the noraebang. It's like karaoke, but you get your own little room and you can eat and drink. If you think it sounds like fun, then you're right, but you don't really understand. There's just something about singing songs into a high-quality microphone in front of people that you either know well or sort of know or work for that is out-of-this-world-crazy-fun. There's this kind of outspoken, staunch Republican kind of guy we work with...He and our Canadian-Korean boss kind of butt heads a lot, but all was well when they sang "Endless Love" together. There's this moment last night that's sort of frozen in my memory. We had been there for 15 or 20 minutes and everyone was drinking coffee. -- The coffee was in a can! Warm coffee in a can is so silly!-- So I sort of had this feeling that we were going to cool it with the drinking. I was sitting down, kind of checking everything out, and then the door opened and in came a cart full of liquor bottles, pitchers of beer, and plates and plates of food. Fresh fruit, fried chicken, friggin french fries! Agh!

Okay, I don't think I'm good at describing events. It's more fun to go out than it is to read about people going out. But Stephen and I didn't drop a dime last night (er, 10 won?) and we are trying to figure out who we are and how we got here, that we're living like kings.

Note: This is from Friday. I forgot to push "publish post." :/

-Andrea

Korea meets Rhumba

This was fun! Yay cajon!

DO NOT SPEAK KOREAN!

Holy Geez, is it already almost Friday? I can wear jeans tomorrow! Hallelujah! It's funny the things you come to appreciate when life is kind of insane. Yesterday one of our coworkers was going on about how much easier her life is now that she can print from her computer (she's not the only one who's been having computer problems...ugh, nightmare). Why do we have to be grateful for being able to print?! It's a school! We're teachers! We're SUPPOSED to be able to do our jobs!

Anyway, though, I am really totally stoked about rocking my new chucks tomorrow. I got grey ones. They're pretty :)

Lately I've been bothered about our school's philosophy. The number one rule at Poly Schools is you can't speak Korean. Speaking Korean is the most punishable offense. I hear and probably say "Do NOT speak Korean" several times a day. Which...is good. I mean, it's an English school. You can't learn English if Korean is your crutch. To be an effective speaker, you have to express yourself in the language you're learning. It's a really, really good philosophy, actually.

But it's kind of the way we present it...It's like we're drilling into these kids' collective subconscious: "Korean is bad. English is good. Korean: bad. English: good. Korean: bad. Korean: bad." It doesn't help that their visual resources are jam-packed with cute little white children. And their textbooks are filled with American culture. How difficult for a child to process!!! I feel like I'm part of an institution that encourages these kids to deny their heritage...And that's hard to justify.

Our school employs one cleaning lady. She's Korean, obviously, and she doesn't speak English. And, well, she's a cleaning lady. She's obviously way lower class than the super rich kids who attend this fancy English private school. Anyway, she has this really lonely job...She's surrounded by people who are nothing like her: foreigners, rich Koreans and rich Korean children. Even the people who speak her language don't really share her experience. Idunno. Anyway, she came into my prekindergarten class and my kids all smiled at her and said, "an-nyeong-ha-se-yo," which means "hello." And she smiled and said "an-nyeong-ha-se-yo" back. Without even thinking about it, I pretty sharply reprimanded the kids....and then it hit me. I might as well have been saying, "Students, we do not address the cleaning lady," on top of the whole, "hey remember your culture is bad?" sentiment.

At the time I felt really terrible. That must have completely alienated her. Geez, they can't even say hi? ...In retrospect, I feel conflicted about it. Yeah, I don't feel comfortable with the way we're punishing speaking Korean, and what kind of implications that might have on the development of these kids' cultural identities....But the cleaning lady totally shouldn't have interrupted my class, right? How disruptive, to just walk in and start sweeping in the middle of a lesson. And she knows they're not supposed to speak Korean. Why would she respond?

I kind of imagine her sort of watching the kids every single day and wanting to, I don't know, play with them, be part of their lives. They're so precious. We get to play with them, and have a relationship with them...And she gets to clean up after them. And I wouldn't blame her for disagreeing with the system, and deciding to interrupt the classroom as a way to sort of gratify herself. Kind of a little "eff you" to the place she maybe has to work for, but doesn't like.

Stephen and I are getting our first real paycheck tomorrow. We're really, really excited :)

Hopefully we'll do something neat and exciting this weekend so we have something besides work to post about. It's funny, we're in this foreign country so it seems like we're supposed to be having some kind of adventure...Nope. We go two places: to work, and to sleep. We are so much more boring than we were when we lived at home.

I love and miss you guys. I've been kinda homesick. Well, not really homesick, just peoplesick. July is going to be amazing.

-Andrea

ps: Amalt, thanks for the encouragement :)

Monthly Test

For monthly test, one of Stephen's students wrote a paper so delightful that it almost redeemed our hellish week of grading and writing report cards and whatever else caused us to work insane overtime on top of ten hour already-completely-energy-sucking days. During which time we mastered the fine art of complaining.

Anyway, look how cute:

Okay, I tried to sharpen the quality with my fancy macbook, but it's still hard to read. I'll transcribe.

The prompt:

Imagine you lost your pet dog in the park. What would you do in order to try and find it? Who would you ask for help? Write your answer with details.

The response:

First, I look around the park slowly. I see inside of the grass, tree, and my backpack. Next, but I can't find it. So I'll went the police office. There have a many children that lost there mom, but I can't see my dog. I'm so sad. Then I go to the city hall. They have a P.A. System to citizens. But steel I can't find it. Finnally I went home! I'm so sad. And I went upstairs to sleep in my bed. But one dog is sleep in my bed! It is my pet dog! I hug him and cry! And I promise to him. "I will more carefull to don't lose you again."

This KILLED me.

Okay, goodbye office. Thank God this week is freaking over.

-Andrea

exhaustion city

worked 13 hours today.

ate vietnamese food.

derek, i ate a shark fin dumpling. it was....okay!

exhausted.

probably will work 13 hours again tomorrow. at least. have 20 writing tests to grade. eight intensive prekindergarten grades to complete. all before 3:00 on friday. and 21 classes to teach between now and then. also, afternoon lesson plans to, er, plan, for tomorrow. plus friday's afternoon lesson plans which will need to be planned sometime between tomorrow afternoon and friday morning...but i need to do my prekindergarten grades. oh, and my writing tests.

BAAHHH!!!!

the vietnamese food was sooooo good.

and stephen and i have shared almost three bottles of cheong-ha (ehhh...i don't know how to make hangul on this computer. and that's the best roman spelling i can come up with. it's kind of like sake. it's good!!) tonight. which is the most alcohol we have consumed in a consecutive period since we've been in korea.

much needed, my friends.

stephen's smoking a cigarette.

ps: have i told you that our kids' parents get us gifts from time to time? usually it's some kind of fancy candy. today i got a starbucks drink. and stephen got...aftershave...from CHANEL. WTF.

I HAD PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLY THIS MORNING!

Today we went to a Poly Schools workshop. The free lunch was awesome. I mean, of course there was the usual weird/gross things, but there was plenty of awesome things too. Really good raw salmon. mmmm. If you've got to work on a Saturday, it's nice to get a good free lunch out of it. I'm not sure what else to say about it. I'm kind of boring myself trying to think about what to say about it. We did go to one of those "Thinking outside the box" deals. We were signed up for a different class (Our director signed us up for classes) that was about a program we didn't teach so we skipped out and went to the fun one. So, you know, outside the box, right? We got to do the thing where two people make up movie lines and the other two act it out. [Teaching skillz growing!]

Can't talk much more about Korea besides school yet because we don't do much else right now. We are getting more efficient at getting prepared but, with the amount of teaching we do, by the time the weekend comes, the most fun thing to do is just lay around the apartment.

I should note that my class is getting better. Or I am, or both. A couple of weeks ago I was really frustrated with them. I'm learning how they work, and they're learning how to be students. I also prayed very earnestly and sincerely that first week. It's one of those things that is easy to explain in material/human terms once things work out, and if I had to guess what would've happened had I not believed and prayed, things may have gone the same way. But somehow I felt God's presence in this time of trial, if only so that I remember I depend on him always. Wow, that got thick for a second. Oh yeah, and Andrea's eyes are better. Now it seems like, of course they just needed a few weeks to heal. At the time, we were both a little nervous. So however you want to say it happened, those prayers were answered as well. Ok, done with the testimony for now.

A random funny thing about Korea is, in the supermarket you have guys in the fish aisle or wherever, just yelling out constantly about deals I assume, or how good the fish is or whatever. Because I can't understand any of it, it sounds like they could be angrily calling people names as they walk by. "Hey you, get back here! Check out these deals you son of a.." As we're walking out, I like to imagine that they're yelling, "The Americans are escaping! Get them!" It's hard not to turn around to make sure there's not a swarm of ninjas running at us. That's just one of the fun things I like to do in my spare time.