Pictures!!!

Okay, so I have the pictures hosted for your viewing pleasure.

This is Jo's K8 class at our first field trip to a giant indoor playroom. Think a McDonalds playground only Much much cooler and larger:



And here we have a series of pictures from our previous apartment.

This is looking into our apartment from the entrance. The door on the right is the bedroom. You can see the back of the couch and a hanging rack for clothes. The door straight ahead is to the bathroom. And the glass door leads to the kitchen.

Here we have the bedroom -- Cozy isn't it!

OOOOH look at this amazing blacklight poster wall-art that was glued to the bedroom wall? Classy!

Here is the bathroom. It could be worse...

Ah, welcome to worse! Thats our kitchen. Hey, at least we have a sink!

Well, thats where we lived, We'll get some new pictures of our new place once we get it cleaned up to our satisfaction. It's not a mess really, but it has some decorations up that aren't our thing, and we'd like to personalize it more before we unveil it to the world.

We've reached the three week mark...

Well, three weeks have come and gone now in Korea -- We have most definitely fell into the swing of things much faster then I think either of us had anticipated. This week is the summer vacation week, so for the next 10 days we are on our own in Korea with no work and no English friends. The other English teachers, who have been here for a long time, have arranged interesting trips to Thailand and Vietnam for themselves for much needed rest and relaxation. Jo and I, on the other hand, having only recently arrived did not have time to plan any grand adventures and we will have to wait until Christmas time to go on some neat trip to some exotic place. For now, however, Korea is exotic enough. It is likely that we will make a trip to a larger city at some point this week. Trains and busses are rather cheap here in Korea so traveling isn't terribly difficult.

The biggest news, however, is that we have finally moved into our large apartment as the previous occupants contract is over and they've gone home. The apartment is huge. That's the best way to describe it. Its a three bedroom apartment in a building that is populated with upper class Koreans. Back in Ottawa, a place like this would EASILY cost >1500$ a month so we are VERY pleased with it. The only thing lacking is there is no Air Conditioner. Since it's the hot season, this is actually a rather large annoyance, but we've decided to tough it out for now since we've been told things cool down after August and we're not about to spend money on an A/C unit for only one month. That's about the ONLY major negative thing about this place. There is one other minor issue; the fact that this apartment has been used for the past 4 years or so as residence for various English teachers from our school. As such, there is a large accumulation of what is best termed as 'junk' left behind by former inhabitants. Nothing disgusting, mind you, but enough to realize that it is obvious that the place needs a good cleaning and organizing. So we may spend a lot of our week off trying to sort out what's worth keeping, and what should go. There's more space then we know what to do with, though I'm sure in the next 11 month's we'll think of something. Jo and I moved in yesterday, and today is our first FULL day here but we've already fallen in love with it.

As for pictures (I know many people have asked for some) I'm working on finding some good host for images and then I'll post up a few shortly. Now that I have the Internet at home its a lot easier to accomplish things like this.

Everything is going very well, we're quite happy with our jobs, and with Pohang in general. The both of us miss a lot of people back home, but so far the adventure has seemed well worth it.

Talk to ya soon...
Lucas

My Take out Triumph !!!

Posted by Jo

Well Wednesday night Lucas decided that he wanted to eat at a restaurant near work, right after work, at 6:20, which is quite early for our dining schedule here in Korea. We usually don’t eat until nearly 8, so clever girl that I am I decide I’ll just go out and get take out. This was not a wise course of action. I did not know the word for take out. After many futile attempts to order food in a bag and miming the motion for walking I finally found a restaurant that would sell me some kind of duck dinner for 22+ dollars, but not anything else on the menu. After over an hour of searching I happened upon a very kind man who translated for me and got me some pork soup. He was also super sweet and asked me to sit with his family while I waited for my food to cook. He wrote down his number for me and even offered to let me taste his family’s soup so that I would know what it tasted like, but I declined as mine was ready by this time. He really was a life saver and I am so grateful. The sad thing is that when I got home Lucas enjoyed the soup, but I didn’t really like it.

My plan is from now on in to just let him fend for himself if he is too chicken to go out and order something new. I will never wander for over an hour in search of take out food to bring home to him, especially considering that it was 100 % humidity at the time.

Well anyway, he has promised to try to be more adventurous, which I doubt will happen unless I drag him to new places, but we’ll see. As I stated previously, he’s on his own if he doesn’t learn to fend for himself a little bit more. Mama bird is chucking his butt out of the nest and he had best learn to fly pretty darn quickly.

Luckily for him on this long weekend we have gotten a strong supply of ingredients from Wal-mart and some fresh fruit and veggies from the market that open a block from our school every 5 days.

Life as a Teacher in Korea

A post by Jo

Well, we’ve had a few weeks now of being English teachers here in South Korea. While our trip here started out rocky, it has steadily gotten better as the days progress. Now that we have the swing of things at the school, teaching is actually becoming rather fun for us! The children are, at times, downright adorable. We are called “Lucas Teacher” and “Jo Teacher”. Our assistant Director picked us up and drove us to work both Monday and Tuesday, which was nice since it was raining quite heavily. There was supposed to be a typhoon passing by on Sunday, but it was down graded to a tropical storm, what wasn’t downgraded was the rain, which fell continuously for almost 3 days. It wasn’t until Wednesday that we actually saw the sun in Korea for the first time.

So more about school I guess. We were pretty much thrown right into things as we arrived 3 days after they were expecting us. The other teachers had been covering our classes and were quite happy to have us arrive, or at least be rid of the additional work load. There are 4 other teachers and 2 will be leaving in a couple of weeks. So we won’t be the new kids on the block for very long. We also found out that after only our first week of work we get a three day weekend. There is almost one long weekend per month, which will be welcomed. We each teach 3- half hour and one 40 minute class before lunch with a half hour break squeezed in there somewhere. Then we get an hour off for lunch.

After lunch we have one more 40 minute class followed by 20 minutes of prep time and then we have 3 classes until 6:20. With a 5 minute break during each class and a 10 minute break between them. These are the private lessons and the classes range in size and abilities. The morning classes all have the same students. There are 8 classes and the teachers move between them. I personally have 2 classes with k6 and the next 3 with k8. They are really starting to warm up to me.

It’s a little bit difficult to come up with ideas for the lessons, but there is a “plan” that tells you which book you are using or what topic you should be teaching. Then you need only come up with some interesting way in which to convey the material.

Having been there for an entire week now, I must admit that I don’t think the job will be super demanding. There are long hours, yes, and the kids can be difficult at times, but for the most part they are adorable.


Some of the kids are obviously less advanced than others, and conversely, some are far more advanced, but they are all cute whether they are show offs or whiners. They are also VERY loud and it is a constant struggle to keep their tiny voices in check.

For anyone adventurous enough to call us here we can imitate their cute but extremely annoying sound that they make when they make some kind of connection. Their own form of eureka if you will. OHHHHH!!!! , said with a significant rising of the voice towards the end.

Our assistant director seems more than willing to help us if we have problems, though we more often than not just ask the other English teachers. I’m certain that they will become tired of our constant questions very soon. Luckily there is this 3 days weekend and they seem to be scattering for the time being. We were invited to go out with all of the English teachers from our school and a few of the teachers from the school across the street from us. We will be going to dinner and then out to a noribang (single room for groups to sing karaoke where only they can hear themselves, and thus only embarrass themselves in front of their own group! Lucas, I’m sure, will sing once he has a little bit of alcohol in his system, I might be a bit more reluctant. This is sort of a national past time though here. People go out to noribangs all of the time and they are very popular. This will be our first time going downtown, so we are both very excited.

We’ve been shown 2 restaurants which serve a couple of dishes that we like and know the names of. Jay-uuk, a spicy pork disk, bipimbap-rice topped with various veggies, and mandu- dumplings. Lucas likes those more than me. We’ve also tried some kind of sushi with ham in the middle that we both enjoyed, but we don’t know its name, so we haven’t tried it again

In suppose that is enough for one post I will write about my attempt to find takeout food in my next post!

I think that the acupuncture worked ! ! !

My neck is feeling much better. It only took 2 treatments at a grand total of $25 , which also got me two days worth of the vilest tasting medicine that I have ever had. I personally don't think that it helped at all. It was a powder that I had to add to warm water, but it was probably closest to a mixture of yeast and hay with a touch of straw thrown in. It tasted awful. The actual therapy did however work as only 4 days later my neck is nearly perfect again. I recommend asking a friend to go with you on a first visit to help explain your injury and translate the doctors questions, but the second time I went on my own and it went fine. It didn't hurt at all and they gave me exercises to do to help the muscles.

On another note we move in 2 days!!!!

Which means in 2 days we'll be able to add pictures!!! and much longer posts.

only 5 days until our move

We move into a comparatively luxury apartment on Saturday and I (Jo) cannot wait!!! It has 3 bedrooms instead of one, an awesome kitchen, 2, count 'em 2 bathrooms, one of which is a master suite. The only downside is that there is no AC, but I'm sure that we can either rent a unit or just make do without one. The new place is really nice. I've (Jo) already taken pictures and videos of the old place to show just how poorly they compare. We'll also have internet again which will make communication a whole lot easier too. Well, I've managed to hurt my neck playing with the kids, I'm sure those of you who know me will be feeling some deja vu, and I've now had acupuncture twice, it didn't hurt at all, but then again I only had 2 needles. It's still pretty sore, but it's only 15$ per visit, so I'll keep giving it a chance, for now I'm just trying not to hurt it any worse. Keep posting guys, you're all that we have to keep ourselves occupied. We'll make some very large posts this weekend. Alrighty, back is getting sore from sitting too long, I'll post more later in the week before we move. Glad to hear that the heat wave has calmed downa bit back home!

Toodles for now, Josophine

A Quick Update from Jo

I have a much lengthier update on the notebook at home, but as we won't have internet access at home for another 2 weeks , once we've moved into our much nicer and ever so impressive abode, I'm keeping this short.

Lucas scored a transformer that isn't blowing things up or causing them to billow small clouds of smoke, so the digital camera is at home charging, and providing that I remember, I'll post lots of pictures tomorrow. Probably just of the school and my students tomorrow, as we need to clean before taking pictures of our small place.

I've been playing russian roulette with the menus here, just pointing and hoping for the best, thus far everything has been ok if not actually quite good. *here's hoping that my luck holds out*


On another note if anyone is interested in coming to korea to teach for a year, there is a position avalable at my school for the 8th of August. It is becoming more and more enjoyable every day here, so I would highly recommend it. If you would like more info, just let me know, it would be neat to have someone else from Canada here for the year. If not, I'm sure that there will be more than enough yanks who want to head over. If intersted the pay is about 27 000 CAN$ per year, plus the airfare here is paid for and you get a free furnished apt. Oh yes, and the tax rate here is only about 5% instead of the 16 back home. Yup, I know that you are all very jealous of me right now, and you certainly should be. It is going to be an awesome experience and we're getting paid, quite well really, to have it.

Please remember to keep in touch as you are our link with Canada at the moment. Post oftena dn about anything, we haven't explored much yet, so we tend to surf the web for a couple of hours each weekend to pass the time.

Brief Update

Korea is an interesting place. We have settled into the routine here and everything is starting to fall into place. It's a good thing too, alot of our nervousness has been cleared up and we're begining to enjoy ourselves.

We will be moving into a new apartment soon since a couple of current teachers at our school are leaving and their apartment is about 100x better then where we presently live. So we've decided not to bother getting the internet installed at our current location until we move around the end of this month as it would just be a waste of money.

This is just a little update to remind everyone that we still remember this blog exists and that we will be updating more frequently once we have the internet set up at our new place, but until then things will probably be posted at irregular intervals.

We're both relatively happy and healthy here in Korea, it's typhoon season so at any moment the sky opens up and pours rain down which can definately be a drag. Supposedly the season only lasts a few weeks though, so it should be clearing up soon.

Now that we're here...

Well, we got to Pusan, the flight was a mere hour, and seemed to take no time at all after the previous 14 hour one. A man named Simpson met us at the airport and drove us the 2 hours to Pohang. He was a nice fellow with medium English skills, he showed us a few sights, and talked about our school and Pohang. When we arrived, he took us first to LCI Kids Club, where we will be working. It is Saturday so the school is closed at the moment but we took a look around and it seems to be very nice. Lucas’s first impression of Korea is that somehow it manages to look clean and manicured while still seeming run down and dirty, if that makes any sense. After visiting the school, we went to our apartment. Our accommodations are definitely a let down. Never mind the fact that it is incredibly small we were sort of expecting that considering it is Korea. It only has ONE bedroom, and we were promised TWO bedrooms. We spoke with the director of our school, who met us at our apartment and is very nice, and she assures us that within the next month they’ll be moving us into an actual two bedroom place when one of the other current teacher’s contract ends. To be fair, they did offer to give us a 2nd one bedroom apartment for now, but we decided that we will need to face Korea as a team and living in separate apartments isn’t something we really wanted to do.

So we begin our first day in Pohang, South Korea. Joe and Gloria (The Director) took us to lunch at this buffet place that only serves organic vegetarian food (Lucas believes that the medium sized garden outside the restaurant may be where they get some of their produce). For vegetarian fare it was absolutely FANTASTIC. Forget about that vegetarian crap they feed you in Canada, here in Korea they do it right. After lunch, Gloria told us that she would come pick us up on Monday at 9am for our first day, though our apartment is probably about a 10 minute walk from the school and that will most likely be our primary method for getting to and from work. We exchanged cards with Simpson, who told us that we should call him if we need ANY help or have any problems.

We’re alone now, in Korea. Things could be better – Jo goes to the bathroom, and discovers that we are missing toilet paper; Gloria had been at our apartment setting things up and had provided us with all the basics but it seems she forgot toilet paper. So we had to make our first trip out into the Korean streets in search of essentials. We surveyed the apartment and determined that we’ll need to find some towels, get drinking water, and maybe a bit of food so we don’t have to depend upon restaurants all the time as well as much needed toilet paper. Out in the streets we headed up towards our school since we remembered several shops and stores in that direction, and quite frankly, it is the only direction we know. After a few blocks, we found a corner store that did sell water, toilet paper and snack food, but we were after better fare (and prices) the clerk there did not speak much English, but Jo managed to convey the fact that we were looking for a place to buy some towels and she told us that there was a WAL MART (They’re everywhere!) further up the road. So, we continued up the road, asking a few locals if we were on the right track. We located store about 10 minutes past our school, or about 20 minutes walk from our own apartment. Once there we managed to buy some towels, eggs, water, a fan, and a clock/radio so we would have an alarm. Prices were pretty good, apparently WAL MART rolls back prices everywhere in the world.

Back at the apartment, we were tired (remember for us it’s supposed to be the middle of the night) sweaty, and feeling like crap. A much needed shower was in order for both of us. Lucas decided to go first. Now, here in Korea, your apartment is heated by your hot water running under the floorboards, but in the summer time you turn off your heat since it is not needed. Simpson told us about this and mentioned that we would have to turn the heat on to get hot water so we did what we were told and Lucas stepped into the bathroom to take his shower. It should be noted that our bathroom is the shower. There is a drain in the floor. It is actually pretty neat since you have a lot of pace for your shower. Anyhow, despite our attempt and using the controls to turn on the heat, hot water was not being generated. Poor Lucas, tired and grumpy and feeling gross after 20+ hours of travel decided to suck it up and just take a cold (VERY) shower. Afterwards it was Jo’s turn, but fortunately for her, while she was preparing to brave the icy water, Lucas noticed a noise coming from the kitchen and managed to figure out that a wall mounted box was our hot water heater, and that turning on the heat HAD in fact turned it on, but it uses natural gas to heat the water and that the gas input line was closed. Turning the valve we were rewarded with the whoosh of a flame and shortly afterwards VERY hot water came flowing forth from the pipes. Lucky Jo got to have a hot shower, but we were both happy that we figured out this puzzle so that no more cold showers will be required.

The final major upset of the day came after this. Our apartment has TV, with cable, but most of the channels are, obviously, Korean and there is only one channel that is always English. We are going to need some entertainment, so Lucas unpacked our voltage converter and power bar/surge protector and set about preparing to hook up the Nintendo so we would have something to do. Unfortunately, it seems our “Universal” converter is not so universal. None of the adapter plugs matched the configuration of the Korean outlets, one came close, two circular prongs spaced widely apart, but the prongs on our adapter were not wide enough themselves to fill the plugs. Lucas decided that maybe it would work, if he just firmly wedged the adapter in place so it maintained contact, and he wisely decided that risking something like the Nintendo as a trial device might not be a good idea. So instead he used the power bar and his electric razor to test things out. The result was the surge protector making a big pop and electrical smoke coming from one of the outlets and no power to our devices. Looks like we’re going to have to find another power converter, hopefully somewhere in Korea one can be found, we’ll wait until we talk to some of the other teachers and see what solutions they’ve found before we really experiment again. Until then, we’re operating off of battery power on the laptop (part of the reason we haven’t been more prompt making posts and why this one is consequently so large)

We were determined to stay awake until a reasonable hour in order to get over the time difference as quickly as possible, but sometime around 6pm we lay down on our incredibly firm beds (good for the back I suppose) and passed out.

So ended our first day of life in Korea, only 364 more to go.

Greetings from the Far East

We have arrived in The Republic of Korea at about 3am Saturday Morning, which is about 2pm Friday for you folks back home. We still have some traveling to do as we are only at Seoul Korea at the moment and are on our 6 hour layover until our morning flight to Busan. In any event, here is an account of our adventure thus far:

We got to the Toronto airport around 9pm Canadian time and our flight was pretty much on time for departure, leaving only 2 minutes late at 11:52 pm. The Korean Air crew all looked snazzy in their teal and cream uniforms. They were very polite and we tried our first real Korean food on the plane. We got honey roasted peanuts to get our appetites up to scratch and then we were offered the option of bipimbap or chicken, we went for the bipimbop and were pleasantly surprised. It was bean sprouts, pickled, and mushrooms and cucumber, with sticky rice and a minor amount of beef. Lucas’ eyes got a lovely shine to them when he found the small tube of hot pepper paste that accompanied the meal, he was quite happy to use the whole thing. I personally feel that might be the reason I was able to eat the soup, (my taste buds were singed from the pepper paste). There was also a side of pickles; Katie, Chris and Scott will remember those from London. We had seaweed soup, which, if you only ate the broth was almost like a chicken broth, Lucas didn’t like his, but Jo ate all of her broth and there was also a lemon cheesecake for dessert, YUM!!! The flight was surprisingly pleasant the crew offered us tea or coffee at regular intervals and there were large amounts of pineapple, and orange juice, and water available. We had seats on the emergency exit row which meant that we had literally 5 feet in front of us before the next passengers so boy oh boy did we have leg room. Rule number 1 of flying: always ask for the emergency exit row. For entertainment, there was a lot of world cup highlights both of the current tournament and ones of years gone by. There was also some Korean movie that was about a man from North Korea and a Woman from South Korea who met and fell in love, Jo slept through that. The only American movie during the flight was Ultraviolet, which was ultra crap. For breakfast we got a very hearty bowl of green tea rice porridge. Yum… It had the same consistency as rice that wasn’t properly cooked and should have been on the stove for another few minutes. Then we added sesame seeds, sliced seaweed and what must have been powdered green tea to the mix. Lucas could have handled it if he didn’t add the flavoring, but as it was he didn’t heed Jo’s warning, and as we all know, Jo is very frequently right! LOL. Luckily for Lucas is also came with a small fruit salad. There was some pickled (radish I think, it was large and yellow, but I’ve been told in Canada that it is a radish) thing in addition to the porridge and fruit salad that neither of us ate, we are not that brave yet, but we are slowly working up to it. I think that Lucas will certainly lose lots of weight if he keeps to his current pace of only eating half of the things on his plate, as for myself, I’ve been eating everything close to palatable for fear of not being able to find decent food later in the day. Once we leave the airport it will be everyman for himself, so we might be living on Mr. Noodles for a while until we can figure out the Korean packaging! The airport we arrived at in Seoul is Incheon Airport, it is VERY empty at the moment, we got through immigration and customs incredibly fast – coming back from the Dominican into Canada took about 5 times as long. So far, the impression is that Korea is clean, but humid. There is no air conditioning in the Airport so it is a bit sticky at the moment. Maybe they just turn it off at night. Anyhow, there isn’t much more to say at this time, hopefully we’ll be able to post this from the airport before we take off to Busan, and then have a follow up post once we actually get to our apartment in Pohang.

That’s all for now! We’re alive, and well but a bit tired and decidedly jet-lagged.