Camp Life

It has now been three weeks since I've arrived in South Korea. I started working last Monday and all in all it was a looooong week. It probably didn't help matters that I went to bed at 7:30 am Sunday night (due to the previous subway fiasco) and then I woke up at 12:30 to get ready for my first day of English Camp. Luckily I only had to work from 2:00-6:00 that day. I'm working the camp and then will start working at the elementary school in August when school starts back up again. Camp has been fun, and once again the students are adorable. They're always saying, "teacher look" "teacher same" "teacher help"! We're still working on them to say our names, i.e. Ms. Grace. It will come though. Basically I am teaching reading, spelling, idioms, speaking, grammar, writing, math, and science from 9:00 til 2:00 and then we have games such as roleplaying (bank for me), pronunciation, and then activities for the afternoon. I am soooo happy to be back in the classroom teaching! It has also been great meeting other English speaking teachers whom are in the same boat as me, although one teacher has been working for the school for four years now (He fell in love and married a Korean woman when he came to teach abroad, awww). I'm getting free lunch and dinner while at camp and its been good for the most part. However, last week I went to bite into a side dish that simply looked like a side dish of greens, and to my amazement I saw little whole fishes staring back at me! Umm, looking around, I noticed that other people were eating it no problem, but eating a fish with its head, eyeballs, and body stil attached wasn't for me. I'll look carefully before I get my food next time!

Familiarity in an Unfamiliar World

Here it is Monday evening and I can't help but smile about the amazing weekend and discovery that I found in Seoul. To start off with, I met up with my cousin who happens to be in this "lonely planet" himself although for different reasons. Needless to say, we caught up and had a great time. We understood that we had been mistaken for a couple after some koreans motioned for us to move our table closer to the stage, and then proceeded to pull down a theatre size projection of Mariah Carey singing in concert and having us perform the "hugging chug" with our german beer! Understanding the miscommunication, Ryan and I almost died laughing before turning to the words "sa-ch'on" aka "cousins" in America. Everyone had a good laugh and said "sorry, sorry"
Alas to conclude a wonderful fun-filled weekend, Ryan and I happened upon quite an attraction in Seoul. Thinking we found a cool little hill and tower to explore, we quickly learned that this "little tower" was quite bigger than we expected and actually was SEOUL TOWER!!! all I can say is unbelievable view and dining in style while overlooking the lights of the city is a great recipe for a night to remember. I'll try and leave out some of our subway mishaps but with the delightful guidance of "whoop, whoop!" we made it back to our respective abodes in Korea safely...enjoy the view!

Korean Egg Mishap!

I woke up this morning and got prepared to cook some breakfast. I had gone shopping with my roommate yesterday and was looking forward to having some fried eggs. When I had bought the eggs, I had noticed that they were browner than I was used to back in the states, but didn't think too much about it and went those eggs because they were sold in a six pack. Anyways, I heated up some oil and went to crack the eggs. I immediately noticed that they were harder to crack than eggs I was used to. When I finally got one to crack, expecting the nice yellowy substance of an egg yolk dripping out, all I got was a hardened substance that moved about as fast as a cement block! Hmmm...upon further investigation, I peeled the rest of the egg open and discovered a hard boiled egg sitting inside of the shell! What, now how am I going to tell the difference for future shopping trips? Any suggestions? Interesting discovery to say the least.

Week 1

I can now say that I have lived in South Korea for a little over a week. My first impressions on the country are wonderful. My first challenge was to navigate through an unfamiliar city and meet up with a recruiter (whom I had only had contact with via computer) so my recruiter could then bring me to the apartment I would be living in for the following year. Luckily, and maybe with some help from above, I happened to sit next to a friendly Korean during my flight from Japan(got rerouted from the states) whom spoke English, showed me how to claim baggage, exhange my money, buy the correct bus ticket, and also use his cellphone! wooo...met the recruiter showed me to the apartment, passed out!
The next day I met Ms. Lim whom is an administrator and liasion for Kyungmin College. She was very sweet and showed me around Uijeongbu as well as introduced me to the president. I attended an end of the semester celebration where I met my future students and watched them perform English skits, ballet skits, musical pieces, tae-kwon-do with a humor twist..It was great, and the students are absolutely adorable! They love calling me Teacher! Teacher! with huge grins on their faces.