VIEW FROM THE TOP

Offf HweHya Elementary School.

Weekend was great, had a few bday celebrations with friends. Some got me a surprise Baskin Robins cake that was monumentally delicious. But when I just hooked up my new phone to my computer to get those pics they got deleted somehow. 

So, drag! But none the less. Below is not a bad view yeah? That's from the window behind my desk. In the center is Namsung Tower, one of the very famous landmarks in the city. That means that's directly south (and also a dirty window sorry!)

Then that building in the center with the green glass is my building from my school's north window.

Directly behind my apartment is a hill I'd never ventured over, and I went wondering down the other side today and here's the picture from the other side. I think that people (specifically me) forget how hilly Seoul is, which makes it a lot like San Diego. OH Also it SNOWED on Saturday! I didn't see it, but in neighborhoods to the south a little bit there was some snow and people done flipped their lids. So, now it's been a year since I've seen snow, can't say I've missed it all that much. Will be plenty come winter! 

Now that I am 'online' that gives me no excuse to update more! Sorry there couldn't be any Maui-esk experiences and pictures (looking at you, the awesome Jack Chronicles!) but I'm sure there will be more exciting times ahead.

Stay tuned.

MARCH 27th

Matt Rogers Gets the Innawebs In His Seoul Apartment

THE LAST WEEK.

Not like, my last week here or anything, but you know, the last 6 days.

And they've been packed! Saturday I went to a St. Paddy's Day festival for foreigners in south east Seoul. Here are 'Korean U2" preforming:

Below is half the amphitheater where the event took place. The gentleman front and center is getting ready to make an obscene gesture at the camera, not on this blog sir!

FOR AUNT LINDA! A BIRTHDAY CARD IN PICTURES..

CLASSROOM STUFF. FINALLY!

So second week of teaching is over!!

Let's do a quick run down then we'll get to pics:

* I teach 5th and 6th graders only
* Each class has between 26-31 students
* On Mondays and Fridays I do 5 5th grade classes in a row
* Tue, Wed, Thurs I do four 6th grade classes in a row, or twice a week for them
* The 6th graders come to my room, we go to the 5th grade rooms. Each has a clock with a different time. I am going to come early one of these days and fix that!
* Classes are from 9am - 2:30pm, 6 total periods with 50 minutes for lunch. I work from 8:40-4:40.
* Each class is taught with a co-teacher, both are awesome I couldn't have hoped for better
* All the 6th grade classes are in my/our English classroom with a touch screen TV
* All the students are pretty much awesome, I rarely have to discipline
* We use the text book a lot, it has a lot of videos, songs and materials
      -- The songs are really catchy and I sing them all the time outside of class
      -- However each lesson has 7 units. That's 7 classes on one topic/sometimes sentence. Next week's topic is: "I'll visit your house tomorrow." Which sounds like a vague mafia threat to me but I digress. 
* The school is considered sort of small, and it's a neighborhood school so all the students walk
* My job here is primarily as a conversation and pronunciation teacher. Unlike my last job, where I had to run the classroom and give tests and all that, here I am used almost specifically for my accent, and of course helping run the classes.

Here is my 6th grade classroom!

That's my desk. Above is the TV with the whiteboards. Out those windows you can see the building where I live which is pretty cool. The classroom is almost TOO spacious! The only complaint that I've gotten from either co-teacher is from my 6th grade one, who has said a few times that I walk around the room while I talk and that students are constantly having to turn their heads and follow me. I say, "but that keeps them paying attention!" but really, I don't even notice that I'm doing it.

Above is the 5th grade class in action. They are playing a game that I designed where there are three paper dice: one with 6 names, one with 6 countries, and one with 6 emotions. Each has a point (1-6) value, the students had to roll all three dice and say, "My name is ____, I am from ____, I'm feeling ______ today." If the students say the sentence correctly they get to add up the point value. First to 50 points wins. I got off work at noon yesterday and I had till 4:40 to kill so I spent 90 minutes cutting out and making those dice all for an 8 minute activity, but I think it worked well.


So in total I teach about 360 students. I remember each class by the four or five students that stick out for whatever reason.

More updates to come!

WOAH WEDNESDAY ALREADY

[EDITOR'S NOTE -- It's not Wednesday, I know. I was at a coffee shop for a few hours on Wed. and my computer over heated and shut down. At that point it was time to go so this got shelved. Here it is though!]

The week has gone by so fast thus far. I know I promised pictures and details (at least to my mom) soon but I want to take some in-class photos and I spaced on that today. Real quick I am going to talk about the 'welcome dinner' this past Monday. Welcome dinners are something every school has at the beginning of the year for all new teachers. They are notorious in a few ways because everyone is going out together for the first time in a while.

For ours we went to a resturant very close to the school, owned by the father of one of my students actually (no idea which one). So all the staff pile into this resturant. The principle and VP make a stylish late entrance. The was a woman organizing it and it was all on the school's dime. 

Here's the food from the night:

This 'Korean Pizza' was perfect -- grilled veggies, squid and that light pancake stuff. 

Korean bbq style taco wraps. That white stuff btw the two red mounts is unseasoned kimchi. The soups below were amazing each for their own reasons. I'm going to go back to this place for the soups alone.

FOOD SO FAR

! Coffee shop closing soon !

Three food events to start off this year of the blog:

This is street food. Or, really, 'late night' food. Closest one is deep fried squid with spicy sauce. The next closest is dup-bok-y which is like rice pasta ish noodle stuff with hot sauce (that's like a national food), and then the furthest is BLOOD SAUSAGE!! Who knows what that is but with the salt that's on top of the upside cup it's sooo yummy. 

Above was my lunch. About $10 US, it was spring rolls four ways (that pink one was crazy! It had like a croquet like stuffing), and the bottom was chicken something with something, that one had the perfect amount of kick and that rice was perfect.

And this was my dinner. Yeah, that's right, I'm almost 26 and now I eat salads for dinner. No biggie. That's Korean pear, manderins, greens, garlic shrimp, a cheap little kiwi sauce (pictured) and two quail eggs sunny side up.


Food's been good so far, judging by my neighborhood there's a lot more to come!

IN TODAY'S POTENTIALLY GREAT NEWS...

I went to the top of my apartment building and it opens up to a wide space and THIS:

With pretty sizable patio space too! So that narrows down the care package list to a webber grill! Thanks guys!

Oh and This reminds me I keep forgetting to post about my school!! Well week two starts tomorrow and I'll get right on that. But real quick, in the above picture the brick building with the triangle blue arch thing on it...that's my school! and That window directly to the right of the blue triangle is my classroom!!! It's a lot closer in real life. But yeah that's how close I am. Also, one of the white buildings on the right is the "Young Korean Astronauts Academy". Can't make that up.

THE WEEKEND.

Back to the a fore mentioned hike. It's at my friend's place who's about 8 stops or 20 min up on the subway. He lives in an awesome little suburb and five minutes from his house is a little national park and hiking trail. Here are the pics!

So the 'rumor' was that this was used during the Korean War. 

That's my water bottle...

That's me!  I guess we'll never know if I'm smiling.

Statue.

My friend Jay.

There were tented off badminton courts around the park. There was exercise equipment as well as a Helipad on top of which we played Rock Paper Scissors with a Korean family. Great exercise, good times. We are going to try and go back and play badminton soon!

QUICK PIX

WAS going to write another post but former roomie from orientation just msged me to go for a walk on a mountain trail by his place. So I'm going to do that and I'll take pictures but in the mean time, here's my apartment in Hyehwa!!

                                                                 (Those sheets are loaners!)

WHATTA MESS!

OH MMAAAANN blog. This last week has been out of control. My plan was to gradually catch up to real time by catching you up on the end of orientation and then what's going on at my school and with my apartment and stuff. But not having internet at my apartment is no joke! Saturday I went and got a $5 coffee and was going to sit for two hours and do internet stuff but their wifi wouldn't work on my computer so the manager (they just opened so I think he was little nervous) insisted I used his computer Sunday I went and bought a $5 coffee and it turned it it was only 30 min till closing time.

Monday I started teaching! More on that soon, and I went into the city to buy kitchen utensils and stuff second hand. AND I remedied my no-counter-space situation, here's a before and after:

So that top part is like a table for sitting on the floor and eating food, then I put it on a char and used a 10 pack of mini cereal boxes on the left side to balance it, tied it down with shoe lace strings and BOOOOOMM COUNTERSPACE!! Also, for some godawful reason I bought a rectangular frying pan.

Tuesday I spent 6 hours at the department of immigration waiting for my Alien Registration Card. I wish I had taken a picture of my ticket - it said you are number 1562, there are 354 people ahead of you in line. So it took all day and it's in the middle of an awesome neighborhood but it was a frozen tundra inside so had to stay put. After that the 4 or 5 people that commiserated with me went to a 50cent wings night pretty close by. Then Wednesday after a failed attempt to get a phone set up I went to an orientation mini (5 day?) reunion to talk about our schools with all the people who got stowed way up north. I volunteered to find a restaurant for everyone while they were meeting up I found an empty traditional Korean soup place that would hold all 20 of us.

A lot of the people are new to Korea so they were sorta being loud foreigners at the place (you should have seen to faces of other dinners with their dropped jaws) but that was a great time because we had all been teaching at different schools for 3 days and it was good/useful to hear about everyone's situation.

Yesterday I tried to get my internet hooked up for a while but that failed. Then I went to a friend's birthday party at a Mexican restaurant for a lil taste of home.

Today, great news. I got a bed!! Oh I should have mentioned, I have a good apartment, amazing school and fantastic location - but I only had a couch for the last week, the hot water hasn't worked for a few days and I have no TV or internet. The hot water thing got resolved and wasn't that big of a deal I just heated up water when I needed it, no internet is horiffic, and no TV is whatever. But the bed has been sorta rough. The school said that I would be getting a bed in "late March or April" and I tried, as politely as I could to say that that was sort of a long time to go on a couch. In addition the previous teacher had sorta pulled me aside in the 10 min we've talked and said "make sure you get on them about the bed" so that added another layer of stress. Then out of the blue today a brand new bed and frame showed up with movers who assembled it as well! I am bedded up!!! Also the landlord, who lives next to me (**pulls collar**) heard the movers come over and she came and helped me fix my hot water! That, AND I got my bank account set up today as well.

So all that's left is my Alien Registration Card, my internet, a phone and a paycheck and I will be back to being a functional human soon!

Like I said, more on the teaching part tomorrow, but for now I am gotta go take a nap or three! Sorry again for the delay, talk as soon as I can guys xox

9 1/2 DAYS LATER, part hanna (1)

HEY!

There's been so much going on I was a little perplexed as to where to pick up again. It's been so long since my last post because I was at orientation for my public school job since last Thursday. Well that's not the whole reason it's been so long, the real reason is FACEBOOK. Imagine 100ish foreigners in the same dorm, on the same 15 hour schedule every day, so when there actually were breaks everyone would pile into the lobbies and collectively shut down the internet with their facebooking 'necessities'. So I didn't even try -- wha'd I miss from the last 10 days!? Everything still as everything was? Good.

Back to the time line of the last week. Showed up at the airport at 2pm and met up with 7 or 8 other people who arrived around the same time and we took the bus to a university dorm which was in the Hyehwa, an area that is still considered downtown but it's in the north-east section of downtown. The picture above was take on the hill directly behind the school, pretty great view eh? I'll just say this to get it out of the way - I couldn't have been more impressed with how the orientation was run. It really was streamlined, organized, accommodating, informative and impressive.

We arrived and that night was open for meeting, re-meeting and getting the 'where are you from + standard joke/myth rumor about that country' conversations. I moved into my room which I ended up sharing with a guy named Jay from Chicago who was really great person to room with. I think we're both old enough to know how to be decent roommates, also he was hilarious.

The first ACTUAL day of orientation was Friday. The week was stacked with a combination of lectures on various topics, Korean lessons, and a field trip. They kept us busy, which i think was really smart because it prevents possible homesickness. So if you include an hour for breakfast, lunch and dinner we pretty much went from 8am to 9pm every day.

Probably my favorite part of the whole week (classes wise) was on the first day. I didn't take any pictures (UPDATE, found a pic one of my friends took below!) like a fool so I'll try to describe it as best I can. We had our introduction where we all were in an auditorium and there were a few guest speakers. Then half way though they said, now will you please welcome  _____ ______ High School's ______ band to preform traditional Korean music. Back in Hwajeong last year there was a lot of traditional music performances and I watched many and it was usually the same. 7 or 8 band members with one drum or one symbol each sitting in a half circle creating and changing beats in perfect time for 10 minutes. Fine, good, traditional, simple. But those were middle aged adults.

These 8 high school kids came out in the same manner and traditional dress, and same hair cut - the lenghty black bowl -- and sat in a half circle and the room was silent with anticipated apathy. After the first minute of setting up the beat and building the sounds and rhythm together, the music started to slowly crescendo and when the beat finally hit the peak and go into boisterous beatings the band members started to FLAIL THEIR HAIR AND HEADS in time with the music! The two base drummers were swinging their head to it's upper most left and then swiftly to the upper most right. The rhythm drummers were rocking their heads in an up and down, a lift and drop rocknroll fashion. Periodically they would slam the drums with their wooden batons and then do a choreographed arm extension with a twist of the baton at the end, come back and hit the drum and then repeat the extensions in a different direction.  And they rocked. They rocked the crap out of that song for 12 minutes and then wound it down and got a standing O from (me) everyone. The energy that the brought to the seemingly bland music was fascinating and memorizing. I talked to a few people who said after it was all said and done that the performance was the best part of the week. 

I've been waiting a long time to write that on here and so now I am going to get some lunch. Be back later with another post about the rest of the orientation process!!

Good 2 b back!