Dang, I sort of lost track of the time this month. I didn't realize it had been so long since my last post! I don't even have the excuse of any exciting or time-consuming adventures - the last few weeks have been relatively quiet.
After a really beautiful fall, it's definitely gotten cold here. It's still sunny most days and very dry here - I think it's only rained once or twice the entire time I've been in Daegu. Even though it's pretty nice and not even very cold, I might still buy another coat - in school, the teacher's room and classrooms are (usually) heated, but the hallways and bathrooms are not. Everyone just wears coats everywhere - even to teach or work at their desks in. I don't really like it - it's uncomfortable and weird for me to eat and work in a coat, but I'm sure it's much cheaper and more efficient than heating the entire building. Koreans also have a thing for fresh air - outside doors and windows are left wide open in the hallways, even though it's cold, and sometimes there's even a window left open in the heated teachers room. Have I mentioned that everyone wears sandals indoors? Yeah, it's cold.
On the 9th I had my open class. Every native English teacher has to teach a class for at least one supervisor and two other native teachers. I was a bit nervous, but it really wasn't that stressful - Carrie and I chose a lesson that I had already done with my first-graders, and the supervisor and two native teacher were the only people that showed up (my principal didn't even stick around for the whole class). It's all pretty fake - I guess at most schools they take the best students, stick them in the fanciest classroom, and teach an easy lesson. It's definitely not representative of my normal classes or teaching ability!
November 11th was "Pepero Day" in South Korea. Pepero are long skinny cookies that are dipped in chocolate or some other flavor, and since the date is 11/11 and the 1's look like pepero, children exchange it. It's kind of interesting - Pepero Day is a very young holiday, maybe only twenty years old, and in Korea pepero is manufactured by only one company, a huge corporation called Lotte. So a lot of people believe that Lotte started this holiday on purpose to increase their sales! But it really caught on, and at school teachers and students were giving each other pepero (couples often exchange it as well). Like our Valentine's Day, only cheaper and with less pressure.
Last Saturday, the 21st, Mark, Jayson, Vince, Jeannine and I headed to the city of Gwangju to visit some fellow EPIKers there. After a three-hour bus ride we met our host Amanda (the same Amanda that went with us to Busan), and after dropping off our stuff and hanging out at her apartment for awhile, we hit the town for a night out. Gwangju is a smaller than Daegu, but we still managed to keep ourselves occupied until 5:30 Sunday morning! We ate a fantastic Korean meal, hit up a few bars, danced for a few hours at Club Houze, and of course a night out isn't complete without an hour or two of noraebang. We left Gwangju at 6:40 Sunday morning after being up all night, and I slept for the entire bus ride home and most of the rest of Sunday!
I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I taught my students a little bit about it (they loved pictures from the Internet of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade) and had Italian food on the day of with my 'family' here - other EPIKers in Daegu. It wasn't quite the same as being at home but I'm definitely thankful for having such a solid group here.
My new goal here is to write shorter posts more often so it's not such a project anymore (for me to write and you to read!). Thanks for reading, check back soon and keep in touch!
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
I can now say I've lived in a Yellow Submarine
I have a lot to catch up on, and despite my repeated promises I still haven't managed to update or organize my photos. All I can say is that I haven't forgotten and it will be worth the wait!
Halloween was pretty sweet; I never really celebrated it in college, so I was super excited this year. It's not that big of a deal in Korea, unless you're in a town with a large Westerner population! I had a fun lesson plan about Halloween and Thanksgiving with all my classes, and on Halloween day five of us from Daegu (Jeannine, Mark, Jayson, and Vince - most of the same people I went to Busan with) took a KTX train up to Seoul! I was so excited to finally see Seoul, even though I knew we wouldn't be doing much sight-seeing :) It was raining when we arrived, and we bought or loaded up our T-Money cards for the subway and set off to find our hostel.
We stayed and partied in the Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul. Hongdae is known for and named after the university there, and besides the university there are a ton of bars, restaurants, shops and clubs - it's a really popular area with foreigners and tourists as well as students. Our hostel was called The Yellow Submarine, and the outside was actually yellow. Despite the weird name, it was actually the nicest hostel I've ever stayed in. It was really more like a bed-and-breakfast, just a big house with a few rooms, a nice big bathroom on each floor, and breakfast and coffee in the morning. The hostels I visited in Europe were much bigger and more institutional, so I had low expectations, but the Yellow Submarine was downright cozy. We all stayed in one room, and there were even extra beds. No one had to sleep on the floor and we didn't have any strangers staying with us (which have also been my previous experiences in hostels).
We dropped off our stuff around 3:30 and went looking for food. Mark had been to Seoul several times before and knew his way around, so we found a samgyupsal restaurant pretty quickly. After eating, we went back to our room and napped for the rest of the afternoon until 7pm (most of us had been out late the night before in Daegu). After dressing up and getting ready, we hit the town! We went for pretty simple costumes - Jeannine and I just wore masks and dresses, Mark had these really nasty fake teeth, Jayson was a one of the JabbaWockeeZ (male dance group), and Vince dressed up like a Korean student in a school uniform.
Hongdae was absolutely crawling with foreigners, and even some Koreans, in costumes. We kept meeting up with other people we knew, that were either living in Seoul or had traveled there for the weekend like us. We went to a few bars whose names I don't remember, and then a club called NB, for Noise Basement. That's a pretty accurate description of the club- it was literally a dirty, noisy basement. It was big but insanely crowded, I mean wall to wall, to the point where you couldn't move or turn around. And since you can drink and smoke on the dance floors in Korean clubs, cups and ash were flying and spilling everywhere (the feathers on my Mardi Gras mask ended up soaked in gin, it's pretty much a lost cause). When we were ready to leave after a few hours, we pretty much had to plow through or literally climb over people to get to the coat check and then the door. It was like the subways in Busan all over again, only darker and full of foreigners in weird costumes ;)
After that craziness we got some street food (gyros) and then hit up a noraebang club to relax a little. The singing rooms were really nice - our 'room' had two floors and two TVs, with pillows on the ground floor and a ladder going up to a loft! There were even free snacks. It felt really good to be able to sit and relax after running around outside in the cold and rain all night or being crushed by the sea of humanity in NB.
I don't remember exactly when we got back to the Submarine on Sunday morning, maybe around 5am. We slept for a few hours and most of us were up by ten to shower and get ready to check out by noon. We checked our bags at the Seoul train station and then headed to another area of Seoul called Myeongdong. It's really well-known as a shopping area, as well as the oldest Catholic cathedral in Korea (we walked to the Cathedral and looked at the outside just to say we've seen it). It had stopped raining by then but was still pretty cold, and I bought two scarves and a big sweater. We also ate in a restaurant whose name I can't remember; we had to wait in line awhile to be seated, but once you're seated you choose from the four items on the menu and get your food in 30 seconds!
Our last adventure in Seoul was the infamous Korean photo sticker booth. Photo sticker booths are really popular here but I had never been to one, and in Myeongdong we found a store that had a bunch of different booths. We found one big enough for the six of us (we had been joined by another EPIK-er from Seoul for the afternoon) and chose from the selection of different backgrounds or settings (everything from ballrooms to stripper poles). We had a few seconds between each picture to pose, and then moved over to the computers to choose from our best shots and decorate them! On the computer you can put different stamps, pictures, backgrounds, borders, word bubbles, and colors over your pictures before printing them off as tiny stickers. It was fun, if you're with some friends and you see a photo sticker booth you should definitely try it!
So Seoul was really fun, and I really liked the little corner of it that I did see. I definitely need to go back at some point, to stay longer than 24 hours and see a little more of the city besides the insides of bars and clubs!
Halloween was pretty sweet; I never really celebrated it in college, so I was super excited this year. It's not that big of a deal in Korea, unless you're in a town with a large Westerner population! I had a fun lesson plan about Halloween and Thanksgiving with all my classes, and on Halloween day five of us from Daegu (Jeannine, Mark, Jayson, and Vince - most of the same people I went to Busan with) took a KTX train up to Seoul! I was so excited to finally see Seoul, even though I knew we wouldn't be doing much sight-seeing :) It was raining when we arrived, and we bought or loaded up our T-Money cards for the subway and set off to find our hostel.
We stayed and partied in the Hongdae neighborhood of Seoul. Hongdae is known for and named after the university there, and besides the university there are a ton of bars, restaurants, shops and clubs - it's a really popular area with foreigners and tourists as well as students. Our hostel was called The Yellow Submarine, and the outside was actually yellow. Despite the weird name, it was actually the nicest hostel I've ever stayed in. It was really more like a bed-and-breakfast, just a big house with a few rooms, a nice big bathroom on each floor, and breakfast and coffee in the morning. The hostels I visited in Europe were much bigger and more institutional, so I had low expectations, but the Yellow Submarine was downright cozy. We all stayed in one room, and there were even extra beds. No one had to sleep on the floor and we didn't have any strangers staying with us (which have also been my previous experiences in hostels).
We dropped off our stuff around 3:30 and went looking for food. Mark had been to Seoul several times before and knew his way around, so we found a samgyupsal restaurant pretty quickly. After eating, we went back to our room and napped for the rest of the afternoon until 7pm (most of us had been out late the night before in Daegu). After dressing up and getting ready, we hit the town! We went for pretty simple costumes - Jeannine and I just wore masks and dresses, Mark had these really nasty fake teeth, Jayson was a one of the JabbaWockeeZ (male dance group), and Vince dressed up like a Korean student in a school uniform.
Hongdae was absolutely crawling with foreigners, and even some Koreans, in costumes. We kept meeting up with other people we knew, that were either living in Seoul or had traveled there for the weekend like us. We went to a few bars whose names I don't remember, and then a club called NB, for Noise Basement. That's a pretty accurate description of the club- it was literally a dirty, noisy basement. It was big but insanely crowded, I mean wall to wall, to the point where you couldn't move or turn around. And since you can drink and smoke on the dance floors in Korean clubs, cups and ash were flying and spilling everywhere (the feathers on my Mardi Gras mask ended up soaked in gin, it's pretty much a lost cause). When we were ready to leave after a few hours, we pretty much had to plow through or literally climb over people to get to the coat check and then the door. It was like the subways in Busan all over again, only darker and full of foreigners in weird costumes ;)
After that craziness we got some street food (gyros) and then hit up a noraebang club to relax a little. The singing rooms were really nice - our 'room' had two floors and two TVs, with pillows on the ground floor and a ladder going up to a loft! There were even free snacks. It felt really good to be able to sit and relax after running around outside in the cold and rain all night or being crushed by the sea of humanity in NB.
I don't remember exactly when we got back to the Submarine on Sunday morning, maybe around 5am. We slept for a few hours and most of us were up by ten to shower and get ready to check out by noon. We checked our bags at the Seoul train station and then headed to another area of Seoul called Myeongdong. It's really well-known as a shopping area, as well as the oldest Catholic cathedral in Korea (we walked to the Cathedral and looked at the outside just to say we've seen it). It had stopped raining by then but was still pretty cold, and I bought two scarves and a big sweater. We also ate in a restaurant whose name I can't remember; we had to wait in line awhile to be seated, but once you're seated you choose from the four items on the menu and get your food in 30 seconds!
Our last adventure in Seoul was the infamous Korean photo sticker booth. Photo sticker booths are really popular here but I had never been to one, and in Myeongdong we found a store that had a bunch of different booths. We found one big enough for the six of us (we had been joined by another EPIK-er from Seoul for the afternoon) and chose from the selection of different backgrounds or settings (everything from ballrooms to stripper poles). We had a few seconds between each picture to pose, and then moved over to the computers to choose from our best shots and decorate them! On the computer you can put different stamps, pictures, backgrounds, borders, word bubbles, and colors over your pictures before printing them off as tiny stickers. It was fun, if you're with some friends and you see a photo sticker booth you should definitely try it!
So Seoul was really fun, and I really liked the little corner of it that I did see. I definitely need to go back at some point, to stay longer than 24 hours and see a little more of the city besides the insides of bars and clubs!
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