The spring semester just ended which means that it was time for my school to go all out and bus somewhere for some sightseeing and getting drunk and doing noraebang (karaoke). It was awesome. I suppose I'll have a write-up and explanation of things later but for now check out my pictures by clicking on the panorama up there or on the link down here.
This was the first sight-seeing stop with the school on our end of semester outing. My first panorama of many.
Thought I'd blog this since I just finished creating it. A big panorama of Maseok. I like it.
That photo is the first one I took in Korea, at the airport just before getting in the car to drive to my apartment. If you click on it, you'll be taken to my Flickr photo set for my first year in Korea, with this obviously being the first picture. Watch the slideshow or scroll through them or whatever, but have a look.
It's been quite the interesting experience living and working in Korea, a few of the highlights have been the food, Koreans who speak English really well, friends who are not Americans, students who care about school, cheap and efficient public transportation, cheap baseball games and lots of free time.
One of my favorite Korea photos of one of my favorite baseball players, Lee Dae-hyeong of the LG Twins, (out)standing in his field.
Temporally Closed Door. Taken in Gangam, Seoul, South Korea, at Butterfinger Pancakes.
It's like wading through water
Except,
The water is made of children
Little Korean children
And the surface
Of the water
Is a collide-o-scope
Of multicolored umbrellas
And sometimes (always)
It pokes you
But sometimes
It's nice
Head above water
Where no one can see
And no one can stare
Because they're drowning
In umbrellas
I think I'm going to sacrifice chronologicality for the most part since I've been doing such a bad job of making timely updates, and try to stick with more interesting anecdotal non-time-specific posts. Hopefully it turns out well.
Today at school 2 girls came up to me and communicated to me (poorly) that they wanted me to help them with some interview thing after school. I agreed, because, why not, and I like when the students realize that I can help them with their homework assignments because I'm good at English. So, after school rolled around and at 4-ish they came to the office to get me.
Continue reading Teacher, Help Us.
In Busan, one of Samuel's former students led us to the top of a mountain where we could see about 70% of Busan he said. I snapped this photo of the Gwanganli bridge on our way down.
So, since I haven't written anything in a long time I guess this post will be a summary of January, February, March and April. I did Winter English Camp for the first couple weeks in January, it was good and since I had the experience from Summer Camp last year I was able to do it much better this time. I had a class of 6th graders from local elementary schools, only about 2 kids came every day so we were able to do a lot of fun stuff and it was a good time. I also had a class of 1st graders from my school and they were cool but a little bit more rowdy. Overall the camp experience this time around was much better the students were all happy with no complaints, probably because I played a lot of games with them. I had planned a 2-week course of lessons with comprehension tests every now and then but based on the students' reactions to the first week, which was not bad but they just didn't quite have the attention span, I trashed the 2nd week and replaced it with Jeopardy games and other fun stuff.
After Winter Camp came a few weeks of vacation during which time I did almost nothing, just hanging out with Hilary when she was here, and being lonely when she went to Japan and America. Thus January and February passed being pretty uneventful with no school and no travelling for me or anything exciting to speak of, except the Hwaseong fortress in February, but that already got it's own post. I did read a bunch of books in February thanks to the epic amount of free time I had and days where I had to go to school but there was no class (about 2 weeks worth I think). It was good times. Also at some point around there I met some new teachers from Simseok Elementary School and I was in touch with another person named Samuel via e-mail, who'd just moved to Maseok.
Continue reading Springtime in Korea.
A sign on the wall around a construction site near my apartment. Taken December 29, 2009.
My school regularly doles out physical punishment to students for bad behavior. Besides hitting, typical punishments include push-ups, and holding your arms overhead for extended periods of time. I don't know what these kids did this time but the teacher sitting in the left side of the photo was punishing them for something.
The girl on the right had been in a couple weeks earlier, coming in every break between classes to kneel and hold her arms up. I talked to her that time and she said it was because she overslept and was late once. Taken December 23, 2009.
My favorite drink, banana milk, in a sweet 4-pack. Taken December 10, 2009.
I got a new camera, a Canon S90, and it has a sweet macro mode for close up photos, so I have a lot of fun taking awesome close ups of everything. I also had fun building this lego car. Taken December 6, 2009.
