This blog post is gonna give you a quick recap on a couple of things--life around my apartment, school food, some school volleyball, and (of course) plenty of cute kids. This should just about round out the month of October up to Halloween or thereabouts. This week is what we like to call "video week" in our semester--that is, it's time to show the Korean-subtitled "Shrek The Halls" Christmas special, which all the kids seem to love, as well as make some Christmas decorations to put around the school or have the students take home. Also...plenty of candy, and some occasional soda and snacks, which always makes the kids freak out. Note to myself for the rest of the semester and going forward--grape Fanta for 3rd graders at 9:15am is never a good idea. Anyway, let's kick this off:
Mostly pictures in this post, so as to keep things moving. Here we have a University of Wisconsin hockey jersey, which I conveniently hung from my A/C unit which sits just above my bed. Great to wake up to or fall asleep to a little momento of my alma mater, and just in time for hockey season. "UH, RAH, RAH...WIIIIII-SCCOOOOOOOON-SIIIIIIIIN!"
And here are some photos of friends and (mostly) family. These hang right above my desk in the corner of my apartment room, right next to a sign that states my (more or less) motto in teaching the elementary runts: "GIVE 'EM HELL." Always a nice reminder of where I've come from when I'm sitting at my desk lesson planning or checking out the interwebs.
So one cool thing about Korean schools is that there is (quite often) plenty of food to be had in the teachers' lounge(s)! These tend to be placed in the middle of the room, on long tables, like so, and surrounded by plenty of couches and chairs. As Korea is still a very Confucian, traditional society, gender comes into play here--men tend to sit in the middle of the room, on the couches (I'm usually placed next to the principal or vice principal), while women are relegated to the perimeter, with their own share of food and expected topics of conversation. Anyway, we have some snacks in this picture. In the foreground, you see some delicious grapes (grapes here are a bit more sour, and taste more or less like wine grapes, but I love them), which have plenty of seeds that Koreans like to spit out along with the skin--they tend to only prefer the flesh, as the rest can be messy and tough to chew. Those beautiful golden things pierced by toothpicks are persimmons, which are an extremely abundant fruit here in the fall...mild and delicious. In the back are some rice cakes, but the following picture illustrates them a bit better:
These look a little more delicious than they are, but they're still dynamite; what with the colors and the texture, one might mistake them for the kind of cake that a Westerner might be more familiar with--i.e. icing, sprinkles, etc. On the contrary, rice cakes here are delicious but extremely healthy--rice is mashed together into a cohesive, sticky glob that is then covered by various things--in this case, red beans on the left (my favorite) and straight-up food coloring and flour on the right.
And here are those persimmons I spoke of. Really nice looking. Teachers will usually send me home with half a dozen on what seems like nearly every afternoon--often times, they are worried about my health and how much weight I've lost here; other times, there are just too freakin' many of them around not to dish some out to everyone.
It took a while for me to realize this, but it was probably a good time to start bringing my camera to school every day. It was not until October or thereabouts that I started to teach 1st and 2nd graders on a weekly basis, but I have the pleasure of doing just that at Sonbul Elementary on Wednesdays. The first thing I learned about them is that they love coloring, they love shouting out various alphabet letters and pictures, and they make for such natural photographic targets--everything they do in pictures looks so sweet and innocent, despite their sometimes mischievous and rowdy behavior away from the lens. We mostly sing various "Hello" songs, review our alphabet, sounds and basic words, do some coloring, maybe sing a song or do a dance, and sing some "Good-bye" songs. And we take lots of pictures. Er...I take lots of pictures.
This sweet girl coined the name "Pinocchio" as the most popular alter ego of Sam Teacher. When asked why, she really did respond in the most practical manner: "big nose."
She got a hold of my glasses! And made for an awesome and cute picture. Note the awesome rabbit teeth!
Again, lots of these pictures didn't look so cool in their time, but looking back on them, they make for really simple reminders of just how calm, cool, and innocent kids can really be--especially these ones, who can quiet down and concentrate on just about anything they're given the chance to color, cut, or glue, or all of the above.
...And she's back.
All these 1st grade girls seem to have their own tendencies and quirks when it comes to interacting with the teacher--in the case of the previous girl, it's just an elephant noise and action, in this cute girl's case, it's sticking her tongue out and sort of spitting everywhere--although, I swear it's still really cute.
In her case, it's putting my glasses on, staring at the camera, and them promptly digging through every English dictionary in the room and asking me to review and repeat (so that she may practice) every word I see.
Again, her favorite quirk is the "Pinocchio" schtick.
One last thing I should tell all of you about (and this is one of my favorite parts of life in Korea) is volleyball! Korean teachers love playing volleyball together--I don't know if those goes for all schools, but most elementary schools (and especially those in Hampyeong) love to get together a few times a month and play volleyball together--either within their own faculty, in smaller teams, or at larger tournaments between multiple elementary schools, in larger teams. There is always food, too! In fact, some of the craziest food I've eaten (pictures to come in later blog posts) tends to come at volleyball sessions--this includes month-long fermented skate meat, raw eel, live octopus, and various other awesome treats. These pictures were taken during the course of a Wednesday tournament between 4 schools, 3 of which I belong to--Singwang (yup), Sonbul (yup), Sonbul Seo (yup), and Haebo. Two teams are currently playing, while folks from the other schools are seen in the background, sitting together around tables of food and drink on the stage of the gym. Oh yeah, when I say drink...I mean beer and soju. At 2:00pm. On a Wednesday afternoon. At school. On the clock. Awesome.
Between points.
Getting ready. Koreans, as a general word of encouragement, tend to tell each other and their team (hell, the whole room), "FIGHTING!" It comes out as more of a "PITING" or "HITING" and sounds really cool--no matter how good or bad a player you are, no matter if you score or suck, you can generally expect to hear, before, after, or during every point, "SAM TEACHER, HITING!"
Some nice peppers and pepper paste to go along. A good rule of thumb when checking out peppers in Korea is: the bigger they are, the less spicy they are. The seedier, the spicier. The fatter and more hollow (what we're looking at here), the more mild.
Here are some random foods from volleyball--apologies for the distance, but I felt awkward enough snapping pics of the whole table! In the foreground are some chewed grapes I described earlier, skin and everything. The main plate you see is full of onions and greens that have been soaked in a thin red pepper paste to spice them up a bit. Adjacent to this is a nice shallow bowl of kimchi-ed radishes, with a few lonely pieces of (probably) raw pork in the back.
Anyway, there are a few quick things for you to check out while you wait for the next post, which should hopefully follow tomorrow. I don't see why not; it's video week after all...
Thanks, as always, for reading! Will be back soon with more good stuff. Lots of love, and all the best.
-Sam Teacher
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