Korean doctors

So I've been pretty cough-y and stuffy nosed lately, so Thursday after work I went to a ear-nose-throat doctor, and it was pretty cheap and hassle-free. We went in, showed my ARC card, talked with doctor a few minutes, and was out the door with a prescription. It was super cheap as well, about 3500 for doctor appointment and 2700 for two days' worth of prescriptions. Altogether, that's 6200, or about $4.50! Not bad. Now, after taking my random pills for two days, I do feel a lot better, although still coughy sometimes (but not as often!). Ah well, we can't have everything.




Oh yes, and Aaron came back from the GEPIK orientation with stories and pictures, so he'll post his stories and such soon. Click here to read more

5 years and Italian food in Korea

Today is April 8, 2009, and that means it is me and Aaron's five year dating anniversary! Unfortunately he is at his GEPIK secondary orientation so we won't be able to celebrate until the weekend. Since it is election day or something here, I do have the day off, so right now I'm sitting in my apartment (alone). I am still sickish - I've been coughing a lot and sometimes I have stuffy nose, so I am hoping to pick up some medicine soon.

Yesterday near the end of the school day, last year's foriegn teacher at my school, courtney, came to visit and say hi to the kids and her former coteachers, which was pretty nice. Afterwards, we and some coteachers went out to eat. We went to this little place on top of a hill, which was very interesting and unique. There was a little gardeny place and a little greenhouse filled with really nice flowers and plants. And then there was a restaurant that looked like an Italian villa, and it served.... pasta! In Korea! So I got this creamy spaghetti with salmon, and it was really good. It even came with bread and a tiny salad. Of course, we were served pickles on the side. Click here to read more

last few days, cell phone, and sickness

Right now it's Sunday morning, yet another weekend. So far we've been here for 5 weeks now.

On Thursday my school had another dinner, of which they of course didn't tell me until the very last minute possible. Literally, I was just going out the door when they were like "Oh, did you want to come to dinner?" So that's how it is, last minute plans. We had a spicy chicken stew, dakbokkemtang. It was pretty good but pretty hot and spicy. You don't really drink the broth, you just eat the pieces of chicken from it.

On Friday evening we met up with some other expats in downtown Anseong for dinner. Since no one could decide, we went back to that samgyeopsal place again. We did meet a few new people, so that was pretty nice. There was a guy Paul who came from Seattle only a few days ago who seemed pretty nice, so we invited him to join us to Seoul the following day.




So on Saturday was our "seoul errands day." First we went to Yongsan, the electronics district. It was quite confusing because there was a ton of buildings and stands and it wasn't very organized it seems. So finally we ended up in a cell phone booth in one of the buildings and I got my cell phone. I got a prepaid phone since I didn't think I was going to use it too much, and txt messages are pretty cheap anyway. Also, Aaron already has a phone as well so we can use his if we really need to call anyone.

Aaron's phone

my phone

Next we went to costco. We didn't buy toooo much, but we did pick up more cheese, some bacon, rye bread, conditioner, curry, etc. We didn't spend as much as last time! We also got some lunch by buying a bulgogi pizza at the food area, which was actually very good.






I think I am getting a little sick these days. I've been coughing and having itchy/sneezy nose these days, but I really don't know what medicines and stuff I can take here. I did buy some halls at a local store to maybe help my throat a little bit, but we'll see. It's a little inconvenient to be sick right now

And now for three random pictures.

We saw a turkey last morning near our area!

"cheese factory"

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Our Schedules

Jacki's Schedule

Aaron's schedule

I finally updated my class schedule as well as wrote down Aaron's schedule as well. Mine didn't change too much, except I added another advanced class, so now I have it three times a week.

For Aaron's schedule, since he is teaching a much larger (twice the size as mine) school, he only teaches every class once. The first number in his schedule is the level (1 = 7th grade, 2 = 8th grade, 3 = 9th grade), and the other number is just which class he is teaching.
Click here to read more

First Month Costs

Well, we've been here for a month now (11 more to go!) and in case anyone is curious, here is the breakdown of our spending. Keep in mind though, since it's first month, there are some parts which will differ.

50% Groceries and Supplies (this includes all the "set up" stuff, such as toilet paper, shampoo, dishes, drying rack, food, floor mats, laundry stuff, slippers, etc)
10% ARC Card (this included everything to do with getting the ARC, including medical check, photos)
12% T-Money Card (this is our transportation card that we use on the buses daily, and also on the Seoul subway when we're there)
5% Eating Out (we didn't really eat out too much this month, just street foods and maybe once out to dinner)
7% School Lunches
4% Long Distance Bus (taking the buses to Seoul and to Cheonan)
12% Bills (including electric, gas, internet, tv, etc)

In total, we spent approx. 1.3 million won the first month, which is not bad, because together we will be making approx 4 million won, so we should be saving at least half each month.

Next month I'd predict that our groceries and supplies may be lower and the eating out higher. There won't be an ARC card section. The T-Money is probably pretty similar, and of course the school lunches and bills will probably be similar. Click here to read more

GEPIK Orientation Silliness

The whole GEPIK Orientation thing is really weird and confusing, because I had assumed that mine was next week. However, apparently the elementary school teachers from GEPIK have been backlogged, so they did not have any room for any of the teachers that started this March.

This completely does not make sense to me, because this orientation that starts tomorrow is going to be filled with teachers that started in September, which are people that already halfway done with their contract. Apparently the next orientation might not be until October. Having an orientation when you already done months and months of work already?! Absolutely weird.

Of course for the secondary orientation, they have enough room, so Aaron's going to his in two weeks, but I have to wait until later. Blah. Click here to read more

Foreigners in Seoul, Spicy Rice Cake Festival, and Mystery Pills

So today is Saturday, so yes, another trip. This time we went back to Seoul.

We took this express bus, which cost a little bit more, but it was really nice and roomy. Across a row, there was one seat, aisle, and two seats. We could prop our legs up and lean back and everything. We had bought some steamed buns (two packages of them of four each for 6000 won only. Or about 4.50). They were pretty yummy.

We had TWO boxes of this for 4.50

At Seoul, first we went to the so-called foreigners' district, Itaewon. We didn't really do too much, other than check out a foreign food's market, where we found plain oatmeal(!), ricola, and some other random things like Indian curry mixes and nuts and spices. We checked out a phone store for me, but I wasn't sure yet so I'd think about it. Itaewon is interesting because it is full of foreigners everywhere, and the signs are mostly in English. I almost felt like we weren't in Korea anymore.

I think they are trying to imitate starbucks

Next we wanted to check out a "topokki" (I'd rather write dukbokki myself, but that's what the signs said, romantized Korean is so confusing) festival. Dukbokki is pretty much rice cakes in spicy red sauce. We got to the festival ok, didn't get lost, but wow was there a lot of people there! We didn't expect this many people, honestly. There was a line to get into the festival room, and then we waited in this superlong line for a bowl of dukbokki that we had to buy anyway. The dukbokki was alright but it was too spicy for me, and I've had lots of dukbokki before that wasn't. I think they made it super spicy. Anyway, the festival itself was ok, lots of vendors displaying and selling their foods, and a stage where there was dancing rice cakes and some break dancers. It was an okay event but not worth the long lines and the crowds, in my opinion.

line to get inside the room

and crowds inside the room

fancy rice cakes

dancing dukbokkis

and breakdancing...

aaron is a dork

too spicy dukbokki

So then we took a bus back home and didn't get back until 8 or so.


In other news, I had been slightly sickish the last two days. On Thursday I woke up with a horrible sore throat, but later in the day it was okay. And then yesterday I woke up again with a sore throat that was almost swollen and hard to swallow or breathe, but during the day the throat was better (still a bit sore but better) but later that night I felt really achy and cold, so I wrapped up in a blanket for awhile. Aaron went to a pharmacy yesterday to get me some medicine, and the Korean pharmacies are interesting. They gave him this packet of random pills, and we still don't know what exactly they are. I guess that people here must really trust the pharmacists a lot because they just take a cocktail of random pills without knowing anything about it. At least it did seem to help because I feel better today.

random cocktail of pills, oh joy!

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Internet guy and strange bills

Internet Guy

So, the internet was changed into the new account yesterday.  It was semi-rough coordinating with the internet guy, the latest they can come is 5:30pm and thats barely when we return home.  First, they had the wrong address so came super late one time and told us that they had to do it the next day (Tue).  But, then I remembered I teach advanced students on Tue so I rescheduled by phone for Wed.  Then, on Wed, my co-teacher tells me that there is a hike/dinner planned for the afternoon.  (Telling me information last minute is a common occurrence at my school... It's lots of fun especially when you think you have a hour break between classes, but it can change in a heartbeat.)  So, I had my co-teacher call the guy and reschedule for Thur.  So, he comes and tweaks the internet settings and messes up the IP (internet protocol) numbers I have set for my school to use the internet there.  I spent about an hour re-doing the ad-hoc network between Jacki and I.

Bill Confusion

Also, there's some weird thing about bills here.  It really doesn't matter whose name is on the bill, the person currently living there is supposed to pay it.  We've been trying to sort out a weird mix-up from a left-over bill from the last tenant.  The internet bill was for two months, but we've only lived here for one month.  My co-teacher calls the company and tells them the situation and then they say that because we 'continued' to use the account, we're responsible for the bill, since its as though we took over the account...  I can understand this logic to a point, but how can I take over the account for more than a month if I'm not physically in Korea... lol.
The internet company woman was asking my teacher over the phone why I used the account, and I was like when people come to Korea and your utilities are hooked up, its not as if you assume your not supposed to use them... lol.  The last tenant left the password on the computer and we just used it.  So, we're running it through our schools trying to sort out the mess.


Click here to read more

Coldness, advanced classes, and readers

The weather here has been pretty unpredictable these days. Last weekend it was quite nice, maybe 60s, and it was nice enough that I was wearing a sweatshirt and tshirt when we went to the dog shelter, and I didn't feel cold at all. And then yesterday the temperature dropped and this morning it was freezing. I think it might be sprinkled some snow but most of it melted, but yet, it was still biting cold with chilly winds. It's almost April! I hope it warms up soon!

I think my advanced class has been doing a lot better these days. I had them on Monday and on Tuesday, and I made lesson plans about face and body parts. I gave them some worksheets, such as label the body/face, unscramble words, and word searches, as well as playing some games, such as simon says and draw a monster (of which I dictated what the monster has, such as two noses, one eye, long neck, big shoulders, etc), and that was quite fun and hilarious. I think I am having a bit easier time with them, but I did have to plan the lessons on the weekend, because I'm still not very good at it. For the warmup I've been showing them optical illusion type images, such as "how many xxx can you find in this picture" and "what do you see?" when the image can have multiple meanings. I hope these entertain them somewhat. I have one more advanced class this week tomorrow.

Today is Wednesday, which means I've been 25 for one week so far! It will almost be the end of our very first month in Korea. 11 more to go!


Oh, and I am curious, who actually reads our blog? The counter reads 800+ but we've only gotten one comment occasionally. So if you do, leave a comment below.
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Aaron's Random Post 2

Cavemen speak

So we've been traveling around during the weekends like no other, quite literally. Most newbies to Korea are fairly slow to emerge, let alone, travel far from their dens. But, we've been out an about to Seoul, some neighboring places, and probably back to Seoul soon enough. We manage to get around using my patented "Korean caveman" speak, lol. People seem to understand me if I bother enough of them.

Transportation

Korea has pretty decent transportation methods as we've been slowly figuring out, we're just slighly outside of the loop for convenience though. We've been trying to take different methods to go back and forth to figure out the system faster. Nothing like getting lost to help learn the system faster. Figuring out certain things as the days pass like the buses don't seem to run how we want them to, i.e. twice as many buses go in the opposite direction than the direction we want to go. We seem to refill our T Money (transportation money) card every week with about 20,000 won (~$13).

Food

Food is always an adventure. We go pick up most of our food from the E-Mart. They have a semi-decent variety. The only problem is that they are about 40 min away by bus. We do have a local Family Mart but variety is lacking severely. We've been meat and cheese binging lately (which is a semi-expensive habit, at least the cheese part), must be the American diet catching up to us.

Traveling

Traveling on Saturday has its pros and cons. We do go out and do something which is generally interesting or useful, but it is tiring. We do end up running into other expats and generally learning something new. Something different is that the subways have these weird vendors that pass through each subway train car and try to hawk their wares. Some are loud and play loud annoying music and others seem to be selling small toys or trinkets.

Lesson Planning

Well, lesson planning sucks, lol. So, a new teacher with no experience teaching, comes to Korea teaching about 700 students about 40 at a time... a logical person might think there would be some sort of training involved...um, nope. So, I've been winging it, but its been draining quite continuously. I generally am planning for half of the week, and tweaking the lesson I'm currently doing the other half. The other teachers seem to think I'm doing well enough, they don't usually do very much in my class although I do know they are quite overloaded in their own teachings. Teachers here have a double duty of teaching about 20-25 classes a week and administrative duties.

Punishments

Some days, classes, and students, are better than others. I keep on resisting the urge to punish them, but I can tell its not going to be long before I start doing it more often. The other teachers are allowed to whack the students on the palms with a stick, although they don't do it in my class (some threaten to do it at lunch). I'm generally going to stick to the stand and arms up method, I figure I'll start with that and see how it goes.

Bills

Bills are significantly different. I think we're paying about 70 USD for gas, 20 USD for internet, around 3-5 USD for tv, and about 15-20 USD for electricity. Haven't gotten a cell phone bill yet, so I don't know how much that will be.

Technological Savvy

So, understanding basic computing skills has its uses. Making nice powerpoints seems to impress the teachers here. Most of them have/use really old computers that the school provides. I think most of the classrooms don't have internet.

The internet, at our apartment, was a problem by itself. So, it was hooked up to a really old and heavy computer. Also, the dsl that we have has a password on it. So, I had to download a password revealing program, figure out the password so that I could use my own laptop. Then, I had to figure out how to send the internet to Jacki's laptop since their is only one cable connection and also one login/password. I ended up creating a network from my laptop and allowing her computer to connect to mine to use the internet. So far, it seems to work fine. Click here to read more

Apartment video

Video post!


Untitled from Jacki on Vimeo. Click here to read more

Our apartment!

We finally made a video and pictures of our apartment, because we cleaned up a bit and well, I'm sure soon our apartment won't be this clean ever again, so why not.

Here are some more pictures. We will follow up with a video post.

Our neighborhood dog

Our clothes rack, since there are no dryers here

Our bedroom

Our kitchen

Our kitchen from the other view

Main living room. The sliding door on the left is to the kitchen, the brown door on the right is to the bedroom.

Living room towards the door

Our tiny bedroom

Click here to read more

Doggies!

Yay, we survived three weeks of teaching!

Thus far, teaching, for me at least, hasn't been too difficult. For my normal classes, I just use a textbook and CD-rom, which is pretty easy to follow. It has some activities and random video conversations of which the students can watch and/or repeat. Pretty easy stuff. The only part I do worry about the advanced class, of which I have to make lesson plans from scratch, for 3 times a week, 80 min classes. So... I've been trying but I'm not sure if my lessons are that good, so we'll see I guess.

Anyway, today we took a journey to a dog shelter in the Asan-Cheonan area. First we took a bus from the main bus terminal to Cheonan, and then we got a taxi to the Asan-Cheonan KTX station. I think we got ripped off because we paid 8900 and I think we were supposed to pay half that. Then we met up with the other English speaking people to go to the shelter. It was on top of a steep hill, and there were tons of dogs. There was two pens, one for small-medium dogs that was outside, and one smaller one for smaller dogs inside. As well as a cat area. There are also a long row of random dogs in cages, as well as the larger dogs outside in their bigger cages, further up the hill. So we basically played with some of them, and lots of them were super hyper. It was mostly fun but a pretty long day. We didn't leave until maybe 5 or so.

Here are a few pictures of the shelter:











And thus began the huge journey home. This time, we took the subway to Pyeongtaek, and then we took a local bus to the Emart in Anseong, where we picked up groceries, then we waited FOREVER for our bus to our place. We were waiting for like 45 min or so before we caught a bus to downtown Anseong and then finally our bus came. I don't think we got back until 9 or so, and we left in the morning at around 8:30. The whole time we survived on a few snacks in our backpack and a bowl of noodles at Emart. By the time we got home, it started to sprinkle, but at least we got back to our nice dry apartment before it started raining hard.


More pictures from the Asan shelter are here. Click here to read more

Jacki's Birthday

So today was my birthday, I'm quarter of a century years old now!

Today right after school my coteacher and other coworkers threw me a surprise birthday mini-party, which was really nice of them. They bought a little Asian styled cake and ordered pizza. It was Korean pizza so one had shrimp, imitation crab, and sweet potato on it, but it was actually pretty good. Of course the cake was delish as well, and they made me wear a silly hat while blowing out the candles.

me and my co-teacher

When I went back home Aaron had bought me some yummy chocolate foodies (brownies, dark chocolate chewies, chocolate sticks, and some other random snacks), so that made me, a chocoholic, quite content.



Then we went to eat at a very small local restaurant in our little town. I had some kind of seafood rice and he got jjajangmyeon, which was his favorite dish. We only spent 12,000 won, which was a little less than $8.50, for this entire meal. Living in the rural boonies does have its benefits!





All in all, a pretty good birthday, although I did have to work today.

***

In other news, yesterday I taught my advanced class, and so the first half I had some slides and a short animated video on St Patricks Day, but I think it was pretty boring, so the second half we played charades again, but with harder phrases than the day before, so I think they did seem to enjoy that. Click here to read more