A Day in Cheonan

Yesterday, Saturday, we went with some other expats to Cheonan. Since two of the others had a car, we actually drove there. Unfortunately it was raining, but we still had fun. We did have to take our plans a little bit, we were planning to go to more outdoors temples, but instead we got some lunch at the food court at the Cheonan bus terminal shopping plaza, and then we went to the Independence Hall of Korea and a giant Buddha, and ended up eating some samgyeopsal.

The Independence Hall of Korea is pretty much a complex of some monuments and museums about the history of Korea, mostly about the Japanese occupation period of Korea. There was a lot of different replicas and artifacts and pictures. There was a couple of semi graphic torture scenes from when the Japanese used to torture people in jail cells. There was also a room which we can try old games and instruments and old Korean stamps as well, which was pretty fun. There was also a "4d" film, which since it was all in Korean, I didn't understand it, but it seems to be about a boy who travels back in time to the time of some battle between Japanese and Koreans and helps them somehow. It's pretty odd because the boy was draw all cutelike and then there's all these guns and bombs and blowing up right next to him, like a cartoon but more action-y. The "4d" part is just that we felt some wind, some seat vibrating, and had 3d glasses.

We just made fun of the sign. It actually meant look into the tiny windows on the side, but why not have fun with it and make a funny picture with the literal meaning of the sign

The Buddha place is a complex of temples and a giant Buddha on top. It was still raining but at least the weather is pretty cool. Today it's actually sunny and quite hot, so at least yesterday the weather was more pleasant, we just had to get rained on. So after we walked around the temple complex and saw the giant Buddha, we drove around looking for dinner, and settled on some Samgyeopsal at a local restaurant.






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Doggy at the Park

So today this morning we took our doggy (YES, still un-named because I thought about Coconut but Aaron didn't really like it, so we might end up with a Chinese name because it's different. Right now top contender is (xiao) bai luobo [thank you cskies6!] aka little white carrot, but we'll see) to the park. We first took it to the vet to get a vaccine, and also got his ears cleaned and temperature checked. Afterwards, we took it to a nearby park, since we were out of our little town and actually in the city part, there are some parks.

We worked on sit and leash training, which might take awhile because he seems to have a pretty short attention span, he wants to sniff and explore everything. So we walked him a bit and tried to train him to sit and stay.


Anyway, here are some super cute pictures from our park session.










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Gepik Elementary Orientation, June 9-12

So I am back from a 4 day orientation, and here are some thoughts and pictures of it.

First of all, the place is held at KSA Training Center, which is technically in my city, Anseong, BUT since so few teachers live in Anseong and the place is in the boonies where it might be hard to get to by bus on our own, I had to trek all the way to Osan to catch the shuttle they provided, so it felt like a bit loop around, whichh was annoying.

The training center itself was okay. Very clean, and it was located in the middle of nowhere, literally. You walk out and there's nothing except the training center, which consisted of 3 interconnected buildings. The front building is where we checked in, and also had the small group classrooms and the big auditorium. The annex, which connected to the front building on the side, had some ghetto rooms and a smaller auditorium. The third building, connected to the front building on the back, had the nicer rooms (which I stayed in), the convienence store, the computer lab, and the cafeteria. There were some hills around us, but other than that, not much else. The food was pretty good for the most time - breakfast was pretty dinky, lunch was western food, and dinner was korean food. They also had snacks sometimes during the lecture breaks.










The lectures and activities were sometimes useful and sometimes not as much. The coteaching, lesson planning, and teaching methodology lectures were pretty good, because they had some songs and activities that I could possibly use. Classroom activities lecture was okay, but some of the stuff she had talked about I don't think most of our students won't be able to do, since they are pretty high level, it seems like. The optional Korean lesson was pretty easy, especially the numbers part, and the Korean curriculum lecture was done by a dull Korean guy.

We also had some activities to do in our small groups, which was dividied by region. Our region consisted of Anseong, Pyongtaek, and Icheon. In these small classes, we divided into groups and did a presentation on Conflicts and then another teaching presentation. Our topic was seasons, and since we ran out of time at our teaching presentation, we weren't able to get it all done, but it was ok.












As for meeting people, I did meet some new people. In fact, my roommate-slash-teaching partner actually was the teacher in Samjuk, which was the little town that I live in. I talked to some other people too, but there wasn't too many people that had a lot in common with me.

Overall, it was an okay experience, not great, but we did get to miss work and sit in a few semi useful lectures. Not too bad. Click here to read more