Thursday 12 November 2009

The school and some leaves...








I hope everyone is doing well, and thanks to all the veterans who have served the country...sorry, I missed it by a day I think. So, to anyone who reads this and has helped to keep the world a safer and better place...thank you.
I am doing well...just enjoyed a nice Pepero Day yesterday. In Korea November 11th is Pepero Day...pepero are little snack sticks covered with chocolate. They are skinny and look kind of like a piece of dry spaghetti, so since 11.11 looks like 4 sticks, they celebrate by giving pepero to each other. It's mostly a newer holiday, and usually just celebrated by kids, or people involved with kids like teachers. Usually the teachers give them to the kids and vice versa...I got quite a few yesterday, so I didn't even have to eat supper! :) It's funny, some of the older people hate Pepero Day, they say it was just made up by the company that makes pepero to increase sales. I usually have the comeback of "sort of like Valentine's Day?" and that catches people off guard! HA! Or Halloween...anyway, I think if kids want to give snacks back and forth...what the heck old people, let 'em! Some schools are so against it that they won't let the kids bring them to school...a little extreme I think. So, anyway, now you have the run down on pepero! If you care to be even more enlightened, feel free to check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepero
HA!
Well, things are going well at the school...so for my usual readers who have requested some info one the school, we are doing well. We have just over 35 kids...it's been holding steady, we exploded the first month and it's been just a gradual climb the last month plus. A few here and there. A lot of Koreans are terrified of H1N1, and so I think that has kept some people from joining academies...Dana seems to think that after the new year that things will get busier. Apparently there are quite a few people talking about our school and have had some nice things to say. We are branching out a little more too...which has been nice. The first little bit, all of our students were from the apartments right next to the school...unfortunantly we are still too small to have a bus and so we've had to rely on most of the kids walking. Well, we've had a few higher level kids who live about 3 or 4 miles from the school, and their parents just drive them to and from school. That's really nice, because that's quite uncommon here. Usually most schools have a bus and they make the rounds and pick the kids up for English, piano, math, taekwondo, etc. So, I'm hopeful if we can ever afford a bus that we can get some more kids, maybe a little further from the school. I think it's been huge having a foreigner (me) working full time, as I've said before, Asan is kind of a smaller area, so most of the schools either have no foreign teacher, or if they do have one, they come by once a week, which isn't really that helpful. So, Dana and I are still the only teachers at this point, we're hoping someday to have enough students to warrant hiring another Korea and/or foreign teacher. We had a fun Halloween party, and the kids really liked it. Halloween isn't celebrated in Korea, well...I take that back, until recently some of the English schools have started celebrating them with the kids, and so at EMart you can see a few Halloween costumes, decorations, etc. but if the kids went door-to-door trying to get candy, I don't think they would score much! HA! So, the kids had a fun time doing that, we allowed them to invite 2 friends if they wanted, and we played some games, carved a pumpkin and did some trick or treating. So...that's pretty much the update. We still just have one adult student, he's really cool, about the same age as me and I teach him M/W/F. I actually enjoy teaching adults much more than kids...so hopefully some day we can get some more adult students, it's just hard with a lot of people's schedule.
This past weekend, Sam and I went to Mt. Kyerangsan so take some pictures of the leaves, it was really beautiful. For those of you who follow my blog, my trips with Sam usually involve just getting in his car and going somewhere. Sometimes if I think ahead I will draw a little map on a piece of scratch paper in my pants or something...but even that's rare. So, this time I did make a crude little map and so I was ready to roll. We left out and headed to the mountain. I had the road numbers down, well when we got to the city about 20 miles from the mountain, there were signs saying to exit to go to the mountain. I was a little surprised, and so Sam exited. It was well marked, and so I figured it would be easy to just follow the signs (the signs here for things like that are usually brown, and the regular road signs are green). So, we got off, there were three or four big signs...then we got to a major intersection and wham...no more signs. We just guessed and drove for about 20 minutes and realized we were going totally the wrong direction. So, Sam suggested just getting back on the highway and going the way I had marked. I concured and that's what we did. So, we were back and cruising along...as we were getting close...we noticed that the exit we were supposed to take was completely gone, and they were doing road construction! HA! Apparently that's why they had the signs to exit earlier. So, we were close to Daejeon at this time. Daejeon is a really big city, so Sam suggested just finding a bookstore and (novel idea here) buying a map! HA! :) So, that's what we did...so now he has a nice sturdy map...it cost around $30, but he said that will help us avoid any future problems traveling. So, my blogs might not be quite as interesting in the future...we'll see!
Anyway...we got the map, found an alternate route and made it to the mountain. The leaves were beautiful and I was glad we got some pictures that day...there was a big storm that night, with a lot of rain and wind, and I think most of the leaves were about gone the next day...so I hope you enjoy the pictures!

Tuesday 3 November 2009

November, really?

Wow, I can't believe that 2009 is basically over...where did it all go? I feel like an old person (which, I guess these days I am! HA) saying it, but 2009 has just flown by, seems like just yesterday was Christmas 2008, and here it is almost Christmas 2009.
I hope everyone is doing well! Things have been going well for me. I had a nice Chuseok holiday (a month ago! HAHA). I went with my friend Sam down to Busan, it was gorgeous...the weather was amazing and we had a nice trip. We had planned to go to a lantern festival...I had seen some pictures from last year, and it looked quite amazing. As usual, when the two of us take a trip we usually just wing it and go...we hadn't really planned anything out, and just went. In fact, we didn't even have a map when we left Cheonan, so we stopped at a 7-11 and asked the lady there if they had a map we could buy. They didn't, and so Sam asked her where the closest place was to get a map. She told us that most things would be closed for Chuseok, and so she gave us her personal map! Koreans are so kind. It was funny though, the map appeared to have been used quite well...as I unfolded it, it fell apart into about 5 different sections. That was a bit of a challenge to navigate, but, oh well! Anyway, we chose to take some back roads as Chuseok holiday is know for INSANE traffic. Just imagine Thanksgiving AND Christmas traffic combined, and keep in mind Korea is a small country, so there are literally millions of people all trying to drive to their hometown...suffice it to say, it's a mess! So, we took all kinds of back roads and finally made it down there. It was a beautiful drive, and as I said, the weather was amazing! Crisp and clean air, nice sunny day, and probably about 75, hard to beat that. So, we get down there, all excited to hit up this lamp festival...Sam hollars at a taxi drive at a stop light. "Where is the lamp festival?" "There isn't one," he replies. (Of course, this didn't take place in English, but I figured if I typed in Korean this would be a less interesting exchange!) Sam and I looked at each other, "what?" So, Sam decided to go into a store and ask someone...sure enough, the lantern festival had been cancelled due to H1N1...ugh! I was a little upset, as was Sam. We had just driven about 5 hours...now no festival. The ironic part to cancelling things like this is that the city looked everybit as alive as if there WAS a festival, so why not just have the thing? Not like people were sitting home and not out and about...but anyway. So, yeah, no lantern festival. But, we usually try to make the best out of everything, so we headed down to the beach in the evening and sat down there and talked for a while. There were a lot of people there shooting off fireworks, and the night was beautiful, so we still had a great time. We got a hotel and stayed the night in Busan and decided to drive up the east coast the next day. The next day was even nicer (Saturday was actual Chuseok)...it was amazing and a really really nice day to be out and travelling. We made our way up the east coast and back to Cheonan by around 10PM, I think we had driven around 1000km in two days! HA! Anyway, it wasn't what we anticipated, but we had a great time, and got some great pics. Sorry the night pic is a little blurry, I don't exactly have steady hands, and good thing I wasn't born in the 1800s in the west, or I'd more than likely have been killed my first duel!