down with hugo chavez

So today is the glory day of all glory days. We get our first payday! booyah!
Class has been good lately. The kids are getting better the more that I get to know them. I like being a teacher and the benefits of being in a foreign country are many.
Yesterday was election day here in Korea so we had the day off of work. We decided that we would try and go to a beach area with cliffs, called Yeongdo Cliffs. We went outside and the weather was much like home, windy and rainy. It was too bad however. So we went anyway and were liking the weather cuz we felt portlandy.
We took the bus out there and on the way this girl started talking with us so she could practice her English. It was fun and she told us how to get out there! Koreans are pretty cool people.
Natasha and I finally make it out there and we get out of the bus and it is so nasty that the rain is coming in sideways and we can hardly walk because of the rain. The only people there are a few koreans with full body ponchos on! it was too much, even for these two hardy oregonians. So we walked to the map and realized it was another mile of walking and we turned around!
After that we decided that we would hit the Busanjin Market. it was amazing! four floors of shops. it was organized by clothing, kitchen stuffs, wedding supplies, and traditional clothing. it was nice just being inside.
On a completely different note, Natasha just informed me that Hugo Chavez and his government has banned the Simpsons! Now up to this point i was all about the Chavez thing (except for his crackdown on newspapers), but now it is war! He supposedly replaced it with baywatch. bullshit. i'm calling it! The funny part about it all is that he banned the simpsons because it isn't good for children and he replaces it with Baywatch. Mitch would even agree that this is crap. the acting alone isn't worth it! AHGHGHGH!
I must go now. Marcus

makgeolli, work meetings, and field trips

Another day, another adventure in Korea! Today both Natasha and I were a little nervous and we had a rough day the day before. We had a meeting today with our boss and it was our first official meeting about our jobs. We didn't know the aspects of the meeting and we had some rough interactions with "criticisms" from our bosses because of translations, so we had no idea what to expect.
My day today was great. I went into the day after finishing up some things that needed to get done the night before. I had also mentally prepared my whole day before i went to sleep and got a really great night of sleep. Not a common accurance for me, especially with the shitty beds here. Anyways so my classes were good and I think I am getting the hang of this teaching thing.
We have basically three parts to our school day. First is our three morning classes before lunch. I have the same books and the same material for the first three! it can be hard because you do the same thing over and over, but on the same level it makes you understand the differences in class dynamics and child preferences and that is great for a new teacher.
Then we had some sweet-assed BLT's for lunch. Cuz our school is in the same building as we live in, we just go up to our place and hang out! we have a whole hour!
The second part of our day is two more kindergarten classes, and mine are particularly tough. My first post lunch class is Seattle class and they are really advanced for kindergartners, but still young. they are also bored and there are eleven of them! They can get very out of hand. I have a trick to keep them in line and today it worked like a charm. I write S-T-I-C-K-E-R-S on the board and when they are loud and crazy i erase one letter. If i erase all of them, no stickers! I also have started showing them the sticker book. it helps a ton!
My second post-lunch class is New York and they are tiny little kids. there are some smart ones but they are filled with crazy little boys. Danny, Louie and Kevin are all nuts. Danny talks like Mikey did when he was seven (if you know my little bro) and gets the other kids into a frenzy. Much like sharks when they find some food! So today i made Danny cry and then brought him back by giving him smiley faces on the board! he was all over it! AWESOME!
Then after the post-lunch kindergarten i have a block of five forty minute classes of elementary classes. ouch.
the first one is great, my 406 class. They are all smart and attentive and they appreciate that i am their teacher! weird. My favorite in that class is benjamin, his vocab is limited but he is cool!
The second class i teach the same material as i do in the last class but because it is such a rambunctious class i don't get nearly as far as i do in the 406 class
My next class has had it's dilemmas. There were only five kids. they are all at least twelve so i thought i could just be myself in that one and hang out while teaching. Not so. Two of the kids quit LCI school because they were bored. The book sucks and that isn't my fault, but i thought they were "mature" enough to realize the material sucks. Not so much. So i brought in the Simpsons and made them answer questions about it! it was a lot of fun!
My next class is funny but they are all girls except one poor boy who just gets made fun of all of the time, Jude. it's rough being little Jude.
402 is my last class and it is filled with 12,11,10 year olds. They are all over the map. Most are on the same level but because of the age disparagements some are smart and some are not! One kid has brought me in a very very realistic toy gun already and is obsessed with wars! he is a good kid though. they are my last so a lot of times i pretend to play a game that gets them to do their work, like Simon Says. Simon Says, "Open your books to page......" yeah ha ha ha!
So we finished our classes and we had our meeting today. Our teacher Candy is, I'm totally convinced, a dominatrix in real life. So i am a little nervous of her. Anyways we were worried about a reaming from them about our job.
it turns out that we are doing a fine job and that our concerns were justified and very similar to the other korean teachers. The problem is really the language barrier. We don't know what other teachers are thinking because they don't/can't talk to us and us them. So anyways we joked about how weird some kids are and how some of the parents must be crazy and that some kids will be rock stars and some will power ships with their mouths when they grow up. good stuff. we ate some pizza and called it good.

Then natasha and i had a little bit of freedom. We went out for some alcoholic refreshments. We went to a new place. We only "knew" it had alcohol by the rice beer pots on the outside. We can't really read the signs and we can't really tell if it is just decor. So on a dare we went in and asked if they had Makgeolli (mak oly) which is just fermented rice drink. it is really really good. So we got a pot of that for 3000 won (about three bucks) and a bunch of food which we ordered and were very proud of ourselves. We ordered stuff we actually knew and didn't get anything we didn't like! oh yeah. try doing that sometime at a restaurant that isn't in English!
Then as we sat and ate our meal and drank our Makgeolli, I got to watch baseball and Natasha deciphered the menu! She figured out about ten different things just by looking through our travel book! The Hangul (korean written language) is surprisingly easy to read, once you know what to look for.
So we sat and drank and ate and had just the most relaxing time ever. All of the food we could eat, including some sweeeeet assed kimchi, the pajeon (onion pancake) and other stuff was only 7000 won! about seven bucks. Korea is amazing.
now we get home i am writing this and Die Hard is on TV in English! Ahhh Sahh (Korean for Awesome)

March 27th: three years and one month

March 27th Marc and I celebrated our meeting on the greyhound bus exactly three years ago, as well as our official one month mark of being in Korea. We enjoyed an evening out after a day of teaching by going out for a pizza and to a lovely Korean tea house afterwords. The pizza was suprisingly delicious. The pizzas here tend to be lacking on the sauce side, really just melted cheese on a crust that is sometimes filled with a sweet potato filling. Really? Who thought that would be a good idea. We actually drank a whole pitcher of fanta too. Ouch. We decided to get the "well being salad" which ended up being a super wierd salad full of kiwis, pineapple, sweet potatoes, egg salad, and fake crab meat. They call things "well being" here as a way of saying that it's health food. It always makes us laugh because the translation just isn't quite right. After dinner we went to the nearby teahouse which I am totally in love with. Back in portland going to tea chai te was one of my favorite places, so needless to say I was really excited about going to a tea house in Korea. It included a really extravagant setup with many different bowls to pour the tea in. You first poured hot water into a big bowl, then a little bit of hot water into the tea holder, then after steeping the tea you pour the tea into the bowl with the water, then pour that bowl of tea into your cup. Whew! Who knew tea was so complicated. The green tea (called nokcha in Korean) was from a nearby province named Jeollanam-Do. Pretty cool to be drinking tea that's from only a few hundred miles away. Marc had a matcha green tea. It's funny at home I thought that matcha was only some coffee house fad, then I come here and find that matcha is an ancient form of tea, one that is amazing all on it's own. Back home we make it into a latte with sugar and whip cream on top. This simple matcha was a million times better than anything we had a home. We really couldn't speek to the tea lady because we can't speek much Korean, yet, but somehow we were able to communicate enough to get some wonderful green tea and a few wierd tea snacks. The tea lady was so sweet to us. She kept apologizing for not knowing more english, really we should be apologizing for not knowing more Korean. Meeting poeple like her and going for tea at places like this make me love being in Korea. All in all it was a lovely night, we will be regulars there for sure.