Taebaek Snow Festival

First of all, check out my photos! There are now pictures from my teacher’s trip to Tongyeong and the Snow Festival, as well as updates to the ‘Halloween in Seoul’ and ‘Busan Fireworks Festival’ albums. http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg takes you to all of my albums.

Last Sunday, the 24th, I joined an Eagle Tour trip to the Taebaek Snow Festival. Eagle Tour is pretty much a one-man operation run by Eric, a Korean who speaks English and just puts together short trips for foreigners in Daegu. As the Facebook page for Eagle Tour says, “We provide domestic/overseas tour for foreigner in Korea. As you know that korea have many beautiful, historic place…but you hard to get there anytime alone… If you want go to anywhere, I'll prepare good way…” That about sums it up. Eric is really nice and the whole day, including the bus and festival entry fee, was only 25,000 won.

Taebaek is both the name of a town and a mountain range that runs along the eastern coast of the entire Korean peninsula. The festival was of course in the town of Taebaek, which is in the province of Gangwon-do, in north-eastern Korea. We left Daegu around 6:30am for the 3 ½ - 4 hour bus ride. There were around 25 of us (both Westerners and Koreans) and I knew about five people, including my good friends Jeannine and Diana.

Taebaek was really freaking cold – we were several hours north, of course, and it was also a very windy day in the mountains. I wore a long-sleeved t-shirt and two sweatshirts under my coat, Under Armour under my jeans, huge fuzzy socks in huge fuzzy boots, and two pairs of mittens. With all this on it wasn’t actually too bad, and we managed to stay outside most of the day. We also had a good, if self-righteous, time making fun of the Korean girls wearing mini-skirts and no coats!

There was actually very little natural snow on the ground, but they brought in tons of it from somewhere to create a sledding hill and cover the ground in certain areas. My pictures definitely look winter wonderland-ish, but it was mostly just loose snow piled up on top of the ice (people were wiping out left and right, and poor Jeannine actually dropped and broke her camera when she slipped).

The festival covered a large area, but there wasn’t as much going on as we had been led to believe. There was hill-sledding (on plastic bags) and dog-sledding, but it was pretty much for little kids. We had the most fun with the ice and snow sculptures. There were dozens of these, and they were really big, very detailed and well-done. As you can tell if you look at my pictures, you could climb on them as well! Jeannine and I spent most of our time cutting in front of children and families to get pictures of or with the sculptures; it was pretty crowded and difficult to get your own picture, which is why I have several nice portraits of Korean families and other people’s cute children.

There was also a big tent with lots of different food stalls – basically Korean fair food – meat on sticks, fried tofu on sticks, red bean dumplings, rice cakes and more. We walked around and tried a bit of everything. After buying a box of dried persimmons (delicious) on the street, we settled in for the long bus ride home. Daegu felt downright tropical after playing in the snow up in the mountains all day!

School's Out! Part II

More catching up:

The last week of December was an eventful one. Monday the 28th was a school day, but instead of classes we had a field trip! As I mentioned before, some special school events had been cancelled in the fall semester because of swine flu, so on the Monday after Christmas the entire school went downtown to see Avatar. I got to sleep in an hour and the movie was pretty awesome; the 1st and 2nd graders and their teachers saw it in 2D, but the 3rd graders and the rest of the teachers – including me! – saw it in 3D! I would definitely recommend it. We trooped back to school for lunch and all the students went home after that.

That same day Hyun Ju and I joined a gym - The Fitness Palace in Wellness, which is a five-minute walk from our apartment. The best part so far has been the hot shower, hands down. My apartment, especially the bathroom, is so frigid. The bathroom is unheated, and also has a window that might as well be wide open – it leaks cold air, and if someone smokes outside under the window, I can smell the cigarette smoke inside. Besides that, the showerhead is at a really awkward place on the wall, and although the water is hot, it’s hard to keep it at a steady temperature. Anyway, I absolutely dread showering there in the winter, so the prospect of a hot shower in a warm, clean locker room is the only motivation I need to exercise. I honestly skip showering now on days that I don’t have time to work out! Besides the awesome shower, there’s free soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, even toothpaste! They also provide towels and shirts and shorts to work out in. I got a 3-month membership for 80,000 won, or about $70, per month and I love it.

On Tuesday and Wednesday of that week we had a teachers-only field trip. We (almost all of the teachers and administrative employees at Jeil) left from school Tuesday morning and took a bus to Tongyeong, which is a city and several islands at the southern tip of the Korean mainland. It was a pretty relaxing two days – mostly sight-seeing and eating. Tongyeong is really pretty – a lot of water, a lot of mountains, and dozens of little islands. I got some beautiful pictures. Our hotel in Tongyeong was also really nice – I think there were about eight or ten female teachers in a four-bedroom suite, with a kitchen, living room and big TV, and two bathrooms.

We drove around in our bus, took a cable car up a mountain and hiked around a bit, took a one-hour ferry ride to one of the islands, visited the market (there must have been dozens of kinds of seafood and fish, much of it still alive, swimming in aquariums or hanging off of hooks), took a lot of pictures, and ate a lot of good food. As you can imagine, being by the sea we ate a lot of fish and seafood – including raw fish and live octopus! I tried some of each, and they were okay – raw meat in general doesn’t have much flavor to me, and the texture is really hard to get used to. Plus, I was terrified that the octopus was going to stick to the side of my cheek or throat and I would choke on it. Check out my pictures – even though I didn’t eat a lot of the fish, there were definitely enough side dishes to fill me up! Here are all my pictures from Tongyeong: http://picasaweb.google.com/kristin.laufenberg/TeacherSTripToTongyeong?feat=directlink

We got back to Daegu sometime Wednesday evening, and I woke up the next morning, December 31st, intending to spend the day cleaning my apartment, working out, and repacking my bag, because we were headed to Seoul for New Year’s Eve! Unfortunately it was not meant to be – as the day went on I was feeling worse and worse, and by 3:30 or 4pm, I was throwing up and my temperature was over 101 degrees F. I called my friend Jeannine to bail on the Seoul trip, and then my coteacher Carrie to get a ride to the hospital. The doctor pushed around on my stomach, and Carrie’s interpretation of his diagnosis was ‘inflamed intestines’ from eating too much raw fish in Tongyeong. I don’t really understand that, because I didn’t really love the raw fish. Even though I tried everything, I don’t think I ate very much of it. Guess it doesn’t matter though – the doctor’s visit and mysterious prescription from the pharmacy came to less than 10,000 won, or 8-9 dollars, and I did start feeling better after a day or so. But I completely missed Seoul and New Years, and still paid for the hostel and train ticket! Lame.

School's Out! Part I

So it has definitely been awhile since my last update, and the reason is Winter Camp. Winter and summer camps are special times in the Korean school schedules. My case was a little different, but most of my friends did 2-4 English ‘camps’, for 3-5 days at a time, either at their own school or another in Daegu. My school just basically held classes for 3 weeks this month, rather than having a special camp. I taught the 1st graders, totally on my own, for two hours every morning. The class itself was pretty easy – the kids were very quiet and well-behaved, and there were only 9-13 of them in each class. The lesson planning totally sucked though – I had to have two new lessons every day, so I was basically a hermit for those three weeks. However, I could go home as soon as my classes were done at 10:40 each morning, and the time went really fast because I was so busy.

It was also worth it because right now, I have two weeks of ‘unofficial’ vacation - I’m supposed to be desk-warming at school, but since there are no classes and no work, my very generous principal is letting me stay home. I’m not allowed to leave the country, but as long as I’m quiet about it and the main office doesn’t find out, I can be away from school! I will be using this time to catch up here on everything that’s happened, besides winter camp, for the last month and a half.

First of all, I had a really nice birthday (December 10th). At school, some of my first grade classes sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, and one of my students even gave me a box of cookies (this same girl also signed up for my winter class, and gave me a candy bar on the last day! I want to take her home with me). A group of the teachers sang to me as well, and even gave me a birthday cake with candles! It was a sweet potato cake – not just sweet potato flavored, but it actually had sweet potatoes in it. It was delicious, and so thoughtful of everyone.

That evening, about 15 people came out for dinner with me! We had samgyupsal and soju, and my friends surprised me with another cake and a round of singing. The picture at the beginning of this post is from the restaurant; check out the streamers over my shoulder. We went out to noraebang afterwards for some more alcohol and singing. I had a great time – it was so worth being sick the next day and having to teach four classes with a hangover!

Christmas was also really special, even though I couldn’t be home. There were about fifteen of us, including my coteachers Bosun and Soo, that met Christmas Eve at Dave’s studio for a potluck and Secret Santa. Between the fried chicken we ordered in and the sides that everyone brought, we had way too much delicious food. We had a good time exchanging presents and guessing about the givers (I got a pretty scarf and warm fuzzy socks from Kelly), playing drinking games, chatting, and later going out for noraebang (of course!). I got home around 4:30am, and stayed awake for another few hours to Skype with my family – all the relatives were over for Christmas Eve, and it was great to see and speak with everyone.

It was strange how normal Christmas was here. The noraebang place was open all night on Christmas Eve, and I woke up in the middle of the day on Christmas (after going to bed at 6am) because of the construction noise outside my house. It was basically just a bank holiday.