2/12/2010
Korea celebrates New Year's by the lunar calendar, so on the 14th Valentines day was dwarfed by a New years which includes all Koreans simultaneously eating rice cake soup and aging another year together. That's right, if I haven't told you, everyone in Korea ages at the same time. So this New Years Day, it's a pretty big deal. My church collaborated with a church in another part of Seoul to put on a 'foreign worker camp'. There are a lot of people from other countries temporarily working in Korea, including many from China, Indonesia, Philipines, and Nepal. During the major holidays in Korea these people, for whom 12 hour workdays are pretty standard, get a few days off work, so for people who don't have anything to do during the holiday, or want to eat some great food for free, the church has been offering free meals, fellowship, singing, and Good News for almost ten years now. We played a lot of music at the church, and also went into some outdoor markets to play worship songs and pass out flyers inviting people to come to the camp.
This picture is pretty much a 'english teachers helping' photo op - the women from the church tirelessly worked throughout the weekend to cook enough to keep everyone fed, cleaning plates, spoons and chopsticks, and then doing it all over again.
Originally Steve Meharg (left) Steve Morel (right) Keith (middle) and I had planned on staying in a korean jimjilbang...which is probably the closest thing to a hostel you can find in korea, but it's all in this common area where you're camping out with all these other strangers in the same room...It's still just hearsay for me, I still haven't stayed at one, because this one girl from the church was like "Oh, my parents are visiting my grandparents for the lunar New Year and they said you all can stay in their apartment since it is much more comfortable than a jimjilbang." And we were like "okay, thank you".
If you know anything about Korea, you know that robots are in, and will be for the forseeable future. Robots in Korea can do many things, such as teaching english, and stage acting (no I'm not kidding), but these particular robots dance. I went on a trip with all the teachers from my school to a space observatory about an hour away from my town. While we were waiting for the group ahead of us to finish learning about the constellations, we watched in wonder as the robots danced.
...and I was not the only one captivated by the jiving androids...
My room at the observatory.
Steve likes this pastry from Dunkin Donuts, which so closely resembles the maple leaf of the Canadian flag.
Keith said this door was awesome, I can't remember the context of the conversation...
2/12/2010
Last Saturday night the youth group at my church put on a big presentation complete with skits, singing, and two musicals.
These were the MCs.
This is John and Priscilla, some friends from church that just got married in December (See December blog). Priscilla's dad owns a duck restaurant and she was able to get some of this coveted duck, as well as some smoked chicken, and put on a real feast after the youth group show on Saturday night. She and John live kind of far away so Doug and Ho-Sook from church, hosted the meal. Steve, Keith and I took the bus from church to their house, and got kind of lost for an hour. By 9pm we were good and ready for...
...duck..
..and chicken. Honorable mention: kimchi, hot sauce, radish slices to wrap the meat in, and cole slaw.
After we ate we watched the DVD of John and Priscilla's wedding.
This was graduation week at my elementary school. We celebrated the last day of classes by going to a pumpkin roasted duck restaurant with Candy and Jihyeon.
This being graduation week with not very many classes, I had time to bring this new coffee making apparatus to school, realize I had everything I needed but the filter, realize there are no filters in the school since everyone makes coffee with instant coffee mix, rack my brain for a solution, and find that solution in the inner lining of an unused medical mask originally meant to protect me from swine flu.
It also snowed off and on all week. I think it's still snowing right now.
2/6/2010
Here are a few more pictures from my English 'camp' classes, which ended this past Thursday. No campfires or s'mores. I had the kids play a spelling game with scrabble letters. The first time I made the mistake of counting different letter values, which was a terrible idea because it was almost impossible to keep track of who had what point total. Plus most of these kids are better at math than I am, thus subjectifying the whole outcome. I learned from that and the next time I just counted each letter as one point.
Most of the kids are pretty good at drawing. It's interesting that for many simple words, students all draw the items the exact same way, as if theres a national emblem for things like banana, candy, book, or pizza (see pizza symbol above). We played this pictionary style game where each team's designated "draw-er" got two minutes to draw as many pictures as his or her team could guess. A couple of times they got ten pictures within the time limit.
I've been trying to practice Korean speaking and listening as much as possible for an upcoming language course entrance exam. One of the most popular shows here is "One Night, Two Days" about travelling to unknown places in Korea and having as many adventures as possible along the way. I've been watching shows like this a lot lately since they use a lot of common expressions and most of the things they say flash on the screen in Korean. It's really hilarious, please click the link and check it out - there are English subtitles.