I heard a story from Diana about one of my old classes today which had me giggling hysterically: Billy - a second grader - interrupted Diana today in class. Apparently, Diana's teaching method is different from mine - which is fine, although somewhat confusing to the little ones. Billy interrupted her today to say: Teacher! This is not typical!
In other news, I was closing a classroom window today, and saw this spray-painted in the street:
At first I thought it was a lewd drawing. Then I remembered that when there are traffic accidents, what happened and where is often painted in the street in order to allow traffic to move again. Upon closer inspection, I determined that it was not a lewd drawing, but an image of a person having been knocked off a bicycle. There was also a square sketched out, denoting a car! Splat.
And lastly, here's a photo with one of my former students, in which we both look somewhat insane.
Even though Friday was essentially my last day of teaching, I've been at school every day so far this week, helping Diana adjust into her new role as Diana-Teacher. Today (and again tomorrow) I administered the monthly tests for the month of August, making today and tomorrow my last days teaching here at Oedae! I was able to snag a bunch of cute photos of my kids before I left for good, so enjoy!
Me, with Jason and Dragon
The boys in this class are always like this!
Meanwhile, the girls of the class are all well-behaved.
All together now!
Most of the older kids didn't want their photos taken.... Except for Sarah!
Yulia, Melissa and Leah: some of my middle schoolers
Ben, Tom and Scott: middle school boys acting cool
Gwen and I assembled a fan the other day. The assembly instructions also included a bunch of amusing warnings, like this one about preventing fan death. What is fan death you ask? Well, wikipedia has an excellent article on this absurd belief, which you should definitely click here to read. Wikipedia describes fan death as an urban legend, yet Korean fan producers include warnings about fan death in the fan's packaging! I must say that if this were real, I'd have died years ago!
Blogging might be rather sporadic until I get back to the US and get my internet connection hooked up - and I'm not even flying home for 10 days! Saturday I moved all of my things out of what is now Diana's apartment and Mia and I moved in with Gwen and Samson. Gwen does have internet access... although she doesn't have AC and her computer is in the hottest room in the house. I'll try to keep posting if and when I do anything of note, but I just wanted to let you know that things will probably be rather sporadic until mid-September or so.
Diana, who will be taking over all my classes very, very soon arrived last night, with Princess, her gorgeous fluffy cat in tow. I don't have any photos of Diana yet, although I have definitely snagged a few of Princess. She has settled in quite well, and seems perfectly (purrfectly?) at home. Meanwhile, Mia has to be locked in the living room in order to keep from killing Princess. I'm starting to feel a bit worried about how Mia is going to react to the five or so cats who live in my house in Waycross! Meanwhile, Gwen's Yorkie, Songi, needs to be prepping for Mia's imminent arrival; we'll be moving into Gwen's place on Saturday!
A while back when Rob and I went to the Hahoe Folk Village in Andong, I wrote about a mysterious and rather disgusting object I found floating in my soup. Well, Rob has *finally* posted his photos (they're here), including the one he took of this mysterious object in my soup. I've stolen it and am posting it here. Any ideas as to what it might have been?
This weekend I agreed to attend the summer camp put on by the chain of schools which I work for. Ten kids came from my school, and a couple hundred came from Oedaes across Korea.
These two are Henny and Harry from my school, in the van on the way to camp.
At the camp, each foreign teacher (native English speaker like myself) was assigned a group of 10 prebubescent kids to be in charge of 24/7. Thankfully, I wasn't assigned a group of boys. Luckily, nine of my ten girls were awesome: smart, funny, nice and super laid-back. Unfortunately, girl number 10 was psycho. As in that kid is going to end up locked up in a mental ward at some point in her future. For most of the first day she wasn't a problem - she made friends, fit in, seemed to be having fun... Then about an hour and a half after we all went to bed, I was awakened by another one of the girls, who told me that Anna was very sick. She seemed to be genuinely and very seriously ill: thrashing around on the floor, holding her head, crying and moaning. I called Samson, who called the director of Anna's school (keep in mind that this was around 1:30am and they were both asleep) who both came over... at which point Anna became magically cured and started giggling. The other girls, who had been really upset and worried about her, were pretty furious. They didn't want anything to do with Anna after that, so Anna spent the entire next day doing things for attention like running away, screaming hysterically, trying to ruin group projects, and stabbing herself with a toothpick (drawing blood). The other girls kept telling me things like "Teacher, Anna scary!" "Teacher, Anna crazy!" It would have been SUCH a different weekend if Anna hadn't been there, especially since the rest of my group was so awesome. Ahh well. I didn't take many pictures, although I did snap a couple of my costume, designed by my kids for the Teacher Costume Contest. I was supposed to be a sheep (we were designated the Sheep Team) although I looked more like Little Bo Peep who Cannibalized her Sheep!
This was me with the Sheep Team. Quality photo courtesy of Samson. The kid in orange is Anna - The pic was taken before she went crazy and alientated all the other girls.
The foreign teachers got to go home last night, although the kids spent one more night at camp. I got the following text message this morning from one of the girls on the Sheep Team:
My friend Melissa accompanied me on my very first trip to South Korea back in 2001. Here's an excerpt from an email I received from her the other day:
I just copied you on an e-mail that I sent to my nephew, Joseph. He is going to Korea August 10 - 23. He has only traveled in Mexico before, so I am a little worried about him since Korea is so different. I don't have the details, but I assume that he is going with a church group. If he contacts you and is lost and hungry on the street, will you please invite him to your house and give him some food and help him find his way back home? I'm mostly kidding of course, I assume that he will be just fine. But you know, he's still a baby to me, so just in case.
My first thought was, What does she mean by "Korea is so different"? Korea isn't different. That thought was followed by I've definitely been here too long!
Rob and I went to Andong yesterday, with the goal of visiting the Hahoe Folk Village. I took an enormous amount of photographs. I’ve only posted a handful here; to see the rest, please check out this set on flickr.
Anyhoo, the day got off to a slightly rocky start. For one thing, I awoke at exactly the point in time when I’d planned to be leaving my house. Whoops. After scurrying around like a madwoman, I managed to meet up with Rob and head off for the bus station. When I asked to purchase two tickets to Andong, the woman at the counter asked if I wanted to leave “now” – I assumed that was a bit of language barrier thing and that by “now” she meant the next bus. Turned out that she really did mean NOW, as the bus we purchased tickets for was leaving RIGHT THEN. This meant we got to race out into the parking lot, chase down the bus and beat on its door as it was pulling away. But we made it – whew!
An hour and a half or so later, we arrived in Andong. It was a gorgeous day: the sky was bright blue, accentuated with little puffy clouds here and there. And unlike in Daegu, the skies above Andong were clear, not filled with the haze of pollution. Directly across from the bus station, we spied a small playground, filled with statues of a variety of animals (camels, elephants, rhinos, etc), which we felt we *must* climb on and photograph. The playground also had a replica of the Jebiwon Buddha.
I ride an elephant
Rob rides a camel
Buddha in the playground
After playing about on the playground, we headed down to the train station, where we knew a tourist information booth was located. We wanted to visit the nearby Hahoe Folk Village, but didn’t know how to get there. The tourist information people were quite on the ball. We were given a map of Andong (in both English and Korean) and a bus time table (also in both languages). We learned that we needed to take bus 46, which would be leaving from the bus stop opposite the train station and to the left at 2:05. That gave us nearly an hour to go forage for some food.
We entered a local restaurant, which offered bibimbop on its menu. (If you’re in a hurry, bibimbop – a rice and vegetable dish – is always a good choice.) The owners of the restaurant, however, we quite insistent that I try their specialty instead. Their specialty was some kind of soup. It was quite delicious, except for one scary, unidentifiable object floating in it. Rob took photos of this object, but until he gets his pics online, let me describe it for you: it was a dark maroon color, and was very porous, like a sponge. However, while it was a little squishy, it was nowhere near as soft as one would expect of something so porous. I took a very small nibble of it and decided that it was something I very much did NOT want to eat. The rest of the soup, however, was delicious.
After lunch we made our way to the bus stop, and boarded bus 46 for the Hahoe Folk Village. If you’re wondering what this folk village is, I suggest reading the wikipedia entry which is quite informative. We arrived at Hahoe shortly before 3:00, and were told that a mask dance show was getting ready to begin. This was excellent timing! I certainly didn’t understand all of what happened during the show, but based on the visuals, I can give you a run down:
A group of traditional Korean musicians came out first, and arrayed themselves on the stage. Then a masked woman was carried around the stage on the shoulders of a man.
Here she is!
Next came a masked man, who began dancing, speaking and singing.
Then an anatomically correct bull appeared on the stage. The bull first made its way around the audience. In addition to being anatomically correct, they had rigged it with a water bottle, so that it could lift its leg (like a dog, not so much like a bull) and “urinate” on the crowd. Being that it was so unbearably hot, even in the shade, this was actually quite pleasant. The masked man and the bull faced off… then the man conked the bull on the head three times with a hammer, killed it, and proceeded to disembowel it, then run about waving its testicles. Yeah.
Man and bull face off...
...and man wins.
Next came a scantily clad "old woman" (she was portrayed by a fairly young man)
Followed by a demure maiden...
And a skeezy old dude intent on wooing her.
Then came a drunken old dude character.
The drunken old dude first pulled a Korean woman out of the crowd. Then, while talking to her he said “Waygookan” (foreigner) and pointed in our direction.
This was the point where Rob and I simultaneously said Uh-oh! Luckily, they came for him.
Rob got to his version of the Hahoe Mask Dance
(Hahaha!)
The bizarre mask dance show came to an end soon thereafter, and we made our way out into the Hahoe Folk Village itself. I must admit, I expected it to be a model village, not an actual one where in people live traditionally – which is what turned out to be the case. (Well, augmented by TV antennas and SUVs and other modern trappings…) Anyway, the village was beautiful, and full of all sorts of hutville-esque thatched roofed domiciles and a plethora of minbaks (cheap hotels in which one sleeps on the floor). We wandered about and took numerous photographs.
The Hahoe Folk Village as seen across the rice fields
Inside the village
I think this is a minbak.
I thought this tree was gorgeous!
I look like a hobbit!
We found a very large swing...
...and swang!
We waked up the hill to this picturesque dwelling...
...and found a demonstration on the proper etiquette of tea drinking.
See the flowers floating in the teapot? Yum!
We took a boat across the nearby river (powered the old fashioned way!)
The view from across the river was beautiful.
There are plenty more photos where those came from... view them here!
