Ji Yoon finally gets to teach the class

My favorite student, Ji Yoon, came in the other day saying she wanted to be the teacher for the day. It was after lunch and I was finished with all my classes for the day, so I told her she can have at it. My classroom was her domain now and she could teach her friends as she pleased. The clip below is five minutes of her imitating me to the best of her ability. I'm sure she would have continued longer, but the bell rang and they were all going to be late to class.
All I have to say is she is quite possibly the most adorable kid I've ever known. I hope you enjoy.

Jinju's Fortress

This weekend Nolan and I decided ed to explore Jinju. It's an hour away from Changwon. We really went with no plan, no itinerary of any sort. We left our home with no directions nor any names of places we should visit. We got to the bus terminal and caught the next bus to the city. We got off after an hour and found what has now become quite a familiar site for us in Korea. Narrow roadways filled with street stalls. Vendors selling their vegetables and street foods. After grabbing lunch we went into a PC room, which are ubiquitous in any Korean neighborhood you end up in. We did some googling and decided we wanted to visit the Jinjuseong Castle, which is the Fortress.
The Fortress was by the Nam River. There were a lot of boat peddlers out on the river. You can see a cute couple here in their duckie-mobile.
Here's some other nice views of the Nam River. The river runs right through the city, dividing it in half. The fortress used to guard the Jeolla province.
I don't know who this man is, but he was looking pretty fierce in his warrior stance.
The fortress was also surrounded by cannon over looking the city. This is me being super excited about all the possible ammunition that once shot through these things.


Night fell as we toured more and more of the fortress. This is a view from the opposite side of the wall. You can see the yellow glowing E-mart (The Korean Wal-Mart) sign in the middle.
After making our way through the Fortress we stopped into a shop named, Silkian. Jinju is known for its silk production as well. There were a lot of beautiful scarves and trinkets of all sorts to purchase. We got a few gifts and headed back towards the bus terminal. It was a pretty good trip considering we hadn't planned a single step beforehand.

Teacher email send

My week has been pretty insane,  I'll bring you some pictures from the open classes I've been teaching this week.  My fellow teachers were invited to see what my coteachers and I have been teaching our adorable students.  The pictures should be up soon.  So needless to say,  I've had a pretty busy week planning and preparing for these special lessons.  I was checking my mail at the end of the day and found this in my inbox.  Another e-mail from one of my students.  It makes little to no sense.  It's fun finding these when you are absolutely exhausted and you can't even begin to think about what they are trying to say.

☆레니☆  to Trishnab 2:30 PM (1 hour ago)

Teacher hello~

my name is emily

umm...

teacher email send

endlish camp finish next witing no

first???? 

it very short...

thank you..

I love you~♥

 

from. emily

Seoul round two

I should have written this two weeks ago when everything was fresher in my mind, but work started up again, and laziness set in. I'll write about as much as I can remember. After visiting Namsan Tower it was dinner time. We made our way out of the cable car station down onto the main street. We weren't really sure of where the train station was, and the walk back to the main part of town was a couple of kilometers, and we were exhausted from our trek up the mountain the entire day. This cab driver approached us and we asked him where the train station was. He cajoled us into getting into his taxi-van. Cabs in Korea tend to be pretty cheap. But this man's meter was running a mile a minute, and he took us the most round about way he could to Seoul Station. I was pretty pissed off at him. When we finally did reach the train station we made our way to the Itaewon stop.
Itaewon is known as USA street. I think a more fitting name would have been International street. There are a lot of foreigners and shops for most everything you'd want. It was weird stepping into Itaewon. I could understand everyone's conversation. I had to be careful what I was saying because other people could understand me too. Part of me felt like I wasn't in Korea anymore, but rather a college town with much older people.

I have to say, this trip to Seoul was the first time that I actually felt like a tourist in Korea. Even when I first arrived to Changwon I didn't feel like a tourist. I felt more like a lost fish in a big ocean full of people that didn't speak my language, but definitely not a tourist. When I go exploring in Changwon and Masan I'm exploring my own domain. But, walking around the streets of Seoul and in places like Itaewon I certainly did not feel like I belonged there.

I don't think I'd ever want to live in a place like Itaewon while living abroad. It seems pointless to me to go live in a foreign country such as Korea and live in a neighborhood where the things that make Korea, Korea are pretty much non-existent.
Here's a pretty back alley way we stumbled into while looking for a bookstore in Itaewon. We never did find that bookstore but we found a bunch of good places to eat. I will say the one thing Itaewon had going for it were all the places you could eat out. We settled on a place called Thai Orchid because both Nolan and I are pretty big fans of Thai food and we hadn't had any since arriving to Korea.Yupp, it was all yummy in our tummies.
After dinner we did a bit more wandering. The later it got the more crowded the streets seemed, swarming with inebriated English speakers.

The next day we decided we wanted to head back a little early so that we would make it back home at a decent hour. We grabbed lunch at a Moroccan place named, Marrakesh Night's. It was complete with hookahs and authentic couscous.This was one of the things we ordered. I forgot the name, but as all the food we'd had during our stay in Seoul it was just as delicious.

We got back Saturday night, and spent Sunday drinking coffee and reading the entire day. Pretty relaxing, oh and then there is this.In between our coffee drinking, and reading, we like to pop into the arcade from time to time and shoot zombies. I took this picture after a zombie had killed me and I was no longer of any use. There's always one or two kids that come watch in awe as we shoot at our enemies.

Finally, some Seoul

I would have brought this to you a lot sooner. However, all this traveling has taken its toll and I've been sick.

I finally got the chance to make it up to the heart of Korea, otherwise known as Seoul. It's a five hour bus ride from Changwon, thanks to the traffic. Just to give you an idea where I was going from and to -- here's is a map. I journeyed all the way from Changwon which is the red circle at the bottom, to the circle at the top of the map. Nolan and I left right after work on Thursday. After an entire day of dealing with kids, the five hour bus ride was actually a welcomed treat. I got to finish up the book I was reading, Life of Pi (which if you haven't read, yet, you should), and I got to listen to some RadioLab along the way (one of my favorite podcasts, here's a link to their website, http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/.

I'd start with the Morality episode. It's the one I started off with, and it had me hooked ever since.)

Okay so back to my trip. After five hours of reading, and listening to podcasts and music, the bus finally made it to Seoul. Once I was off the bus I still had a while to go. Thank goodness Nolan accompanied me through the trip, although I still felt completely lost. The hostel we were staying at gave us complicated directions on how to get there. We maneuvered our way through the Seoul Metro and reached our final stop. Once we got to the street we needed to be at, our directions became more confusing. We asked around, luckily most people in Seoul know English. This was pretty awesome, since neither Nolan nor I have ever ventured the streets of Seoul. We located our hostel and Nolan spotted this sign welcoming us to our hostel. That's right, no guests allowed in the guesthouse!

We were starving the minute we got off the bus, an hour or so later after finding our destination and settling into our quarters I think we were ready to eat just about anything.

We befriended some other people that had just arrived at the hostel shortly after us. We went with our new friends to wander the streets and find a place to eat. We found a bunch a restaurants open. Don't forget we were wandering the streets at midnight in search of dinner. We settled on this outdoor place where we had Samgyeopsal.

Here's us enjoying our midnight meal along with some soju. This was our food that we all helped devour.

This was the cool Korean man that helped us grill our meat, because we certainly don't know how long to keep it on there.

I spotted this little gem on our way back. If you read nothing else in this blog post, then please just read this. It makes no sense but I found it funny. I don't know how I feel about men that are made from 100% beef.
The next morning it was just Nolan and I armed with a Lonely Planet guidebook. It's is an excellent companion for any traveler. That book has come in handy numerous time when we've been out searching for hostels or other popular locales in other cities.

After thumbing through the pages we settled on visiting the North Seoul tower. Before heading to the train station we stopped in at a place called the Persian Palace to have some lunch. This was by far my favorite part of visiting Seoul. All the food! Any kind you wanted from any country.
We followed the camels all the way into the Persian Palace.
This was our food. I forgot what Nolan got, but his thing is in the genie lamp. All I can tell you is that it had chicken in it. I got shami kebab. I have to say we were both pleased with our meal. We don't really get many places to have ethnic food out in Changwon, unless we take a trip to Busan which is about 40 minutes away. After we stuffed ourselves with delicious food we made our way to the tower.
We took the train to Seoul station.
Here's a view of the area right as we got out of the station.
When you make a turn the opposite way you can see the N Soeul tower from the station. We'd be headed to the top of that thing in no time! They have cable cars going to the top. We opted not to take them because we were keen on climbing up Namsan to get to the tower. Little did we know how many steps there were to the top.
I have no idea who this guy is, but he looks pretty badass on that horse. I'm guessing he might be a Korean independence fighter.

But, I do happen to know that this is Li Si-Yeong, and he is a Korean independence movement leader.This is just Nolan climbing up a whole bunch of steps. The sad part is that this was just the beginning of the steps. We had a ton more to climb.
Here are more steps. I just want to get the point across that there were a lot! On left of this picture is a cool science museum we popped into. I won't spend to much time on what was in there. It was pretty standard stuff about electricity, biology, engineering, and acoustics.

Here's a neat clip of magnetic fluid.

So we got back on track to go to the top of N Seoul Tower. Here's some more hardcore folks who are brave enough to take all the steps.
When we got to the semi top there was a lookout deck for people to stop ad enjoy the view.I managed to weave through the crowd and get to the edge to take this picture with the city behind me.
Here's some Seoul rush-hour gridlock.
Unfortunately, we hadn't reached the complete top just yet. Here's more stairs. When we did get to the top there were a whole bunch of things going on. There were street vendors to buy souvenirs from, places to chill out, and a neat heART exhibit that was displayed.
Here's the heART exhibit they had out in front of the entrance to the tower. This one is especially dear to me because half of it's an ostrich. I like to think of it as an turstrich. While I was teaching an English summer camp my first month here I learned some of the Korean words for animals, because I made my kids draw their favorite animals. One of the girls drew an ostrich and I learned that thajo is the Korean word ostrich. Don't ask why, but for some reason I thought that word was really cool. It was awesome to say and I felt cool knowing how to say ostrich in Korean. It's one of the words I'm never going to forget learning. So this is why I hold this ostrich-heart looking thing dear.

Straight ahead of the ostrich was this.
That's N Seoul Tower. It sits on top of Namsan, which is the mountain we climbed up with the help of all the stairs. The tower sits 479.7 m (1,574 ft) above sea level.
Here's some people chilling at a sweet outdoor eatery.
We saw a few historical performance artists walking back to store away a few weapons. This guy had some swords and shields.And then there was this guy. He went with the trusty, time tested, no fail sound box to ward of his enemies.
We finally made it up to the top of the tower.
Inside they have windows that lookout onto Seoul. The windows are also lined with names of different cities and their highest peaks.Remember those people sitting and enjoying their sweet view? Here they are again looking even tinier.
Even the view from the bathroom did not disappoint.
After making it out of the tower we rode the cable car down from the mountain.
I can't imagine having to walk down all those steps. This was not the end of our first full day in Seoul. I have so much more to share, which is why I'm splitting this Seoul trip into two posts. So I'll bring you the next half as soon as I get a chance to blog again.

My favorites before their field trip

I came into school this morning and Jhi-Yoon came up to me, she was struggling to find the right words.  I could tell she was trying her hardest to get out the correct words.  And finally she spurted out "Teacher I'm jealous."  I asked her why?  She  explained to me she was jealous that she could not spend time with me today or tomorrow.  Usually,  it's Jhi-Yoon along with 5 others, who are students I get to see everyday --  in the morning, after lunch, and after school in addition to when they are in my class.  But today all the fifth and fourth graders are off to Hapcheon.  The sixth graders are in Seoul for the next three days.  My teachers invited me on this field trip but I opted not to go because I already made plans to go to Seoul Thursday, right after school.  Friday is a national holiday here.  Some of my girls were pretty bummed out that I wasn't going.  That's them posing for a picture right before loading onto the bus.  I told them to take lots of pictures for me.  I also made them promise that they'd tell me all the fun things they did when they got back in class next week.  We'll see how well that goes over.

These are two of the boys in the class.  I'm sorry I cannot tell you their names, because I forgot.  I feel horrible.  They insisted on not being in the picture with the rest of the girls.  Anyways, it'll be interesting to hear what they did on their field trip once they get back.  

Korea's Jurrassic Park

Okay it's not exactly Jurrassic Park.  It's Goseong's Sangjokan county park,  and as the website says, it's "land of dinosaur".

I visited the park over the weekend with Zoe and Nolan.

Before we even got to the actual park we got a little taste of dinosaurs in the cab ride. The cab driver realized we were going to Sanjokam Park and wanted to show us what we could expect. This is what we got.

Once he dropped us off at the park we made our way through the museum, saw a short 15 minute 3-dimensional flick about dinosaurs, and made our way down to the tracks.

The park has fossilized dinosaur footprints.  It's a beautiful place to visit.  It has gorgeous cliffs, and huge boulders along the edge of the water.  

But, back to the cool stuff --  dinosaurs!  I was reading somewhere that the footprints are from the  Cretaceous period of the Mesozoic Era.  That would put the footprints being from 145 to 65.5 million years ago.  I think that's mind blowing!  Usually when people throw these numbers around I rarely ever think about it.  They're just numbers to me.  But when you have footprints right before you from that long ago and try to wrap your head around it, it's really something else.

Yupp, those are dino tracks.
This is a nice view from the top of the stair case that was leading us down to the tracks.  You can see the footprints from here too.
This is the landscape the surrounds the area.  Huge rocks and cliffs.This is taken from inside one of the cave.  Those are kids rowing out in the middle of the water.

This is just another great view. Before I move on from the dinosaur trip. I have one more clip to show.  Inside the museum there is a little game where you try to outrun dinos.  You get a score at the end, but we never figured out how the scoring system worked.  Anyways this is Nolan putting forth his best, so the dinos don't catch him.  

I think he was a little disappointed with his score.

On another random note that has nothing to do with dinosaurs I have a clip of Jhi-Yoon.  She was too shy to talk while the video was on, but she wasn't shy enough the do this little jig for the camera.

  I'll see if I can get her to talk a little more.  She's really smart.  As soon as I turned the camera off, she started telling me about her favorite Japanese baseball team.