My New Place

I told you I'd get you a tour of my new place, right? Well, here it is! I have made a quick video tour of my apartment for you. Due to technical difficulties (1: Youtube has decided that it is unlawful to upload videos while in Korea and 2: For some reason adding any text text to the video post (even a title) makes it think the coding is wrong), the actual video is in another post (you'll see it below this post... or at least you should). Hope you still enjoy! :)

So, a few things I don't mention in my video:

Building: The building is called Bisium (or Visium) Oficetel. If you ask a Korean they will tell you Bee-see-uhm Oh-pee-soo-tell-oo. :)

Shoes: ALWAYS take of your shoes when you go into a Korean home! Even if it's your own! When we were moving all of our luggage into Kendra's apartment the first day we just dragged all the luggage in, shoes still on. The landlord was there and he started laughing at us and yelling, pointing at our shoes. ALWAYS take off your shoes.

Doorbell: The doorbell here is so CUTE! I love how it sounds. Also, I have a screen in my apartment that lets me see who is at the door!



It has a bunch of buttons on it so I bet I can talk to people, too. Unfortunately, I'm in Korea so the instructions for all the toys are in, you guessed it, KOREAN!

Hot water: Needs to be turned on. The kitchen sink and washing machine work fine without it on but if I want hot water for a shower, I need to turn on the hot water.



Took a few tries to get that right. I just pressed buttons until the hot water worked. Then I found a translation sheet under my sink for the washing machine and the hot water heater. Nice.

Walls: They are so BARE!! Waah! I need to do some decorating in here. Unfortunately, I need money in order to do that. I will be a millionaire as of Wednesday, though (my refund for my plane ticket is 1 million won. Yay!). Then I will get maybe a desk, rice cooker, wall art... Which I get first will depend on whether or not I can get rid of the stupid dresser...

Giant window: You didn't see it in the tour, but I have a GIANT window on one of my walls! Cool... I love it. Except that it lets in lots of light while I want to still be asleep. Oh well. That's what pink sleep masks are for. :)

Cable: I found out recently that the money we pay for maintenance and internet also covers cable! I'm paying for CABLE!! I might need to find a cheap t.v. in order to take advantage of this.

My First Week Teaching

Thus ends my first week on the job.

It's been a fun week. I was able to move into my new apartment Tuesday night. I'm so happy to be in the apartment. The place is a little bit messy right now. I'm all unpacked, though. There's just a few things that I need to get from E-mart (a cross between Wal Mart and J.C. Penny's... Mom would love it) like a laundry basket and a container for socks, maybe get some real groceries. I purchased a bunch of furniture from the previous tenant so I have a futon, a coffee table, a mattress (with foam pad! Actually the foam pad is a "yo" or Korean mattress... many Koreans just use this and roll it up during the day), full length mirror, and a big dresser. He also left me a bunch of household items like pots and pans, drying rack, and a bunch of food (peanut butter!). I got it all for 100,000 won, about $85. Good deal. I'm trying to sell the dresser and get a desk and chair. No hurry, though. I'll bend over my coffee table for now.

I had an adventure buying laundry detergent. I was in serious need of doing some laundry, so I went to the grocery store for some one night. I never realized how many choices we have for laundry detergent until now. Also, it's very difficult to tell the difference between detergent and softener just by looking at the pictures.

Oh, and unless you can read the descriptive words, you can't tell what it is. I looked up different versions of the words for "softener" and "detergent" and I couldn't find anything even resembling the vocabulary I found on any of the packaging. So either I found detergent or dishwasher detergent works just as well as laundry detergent.

As far as the actual job went, it went great! I teach two different classes: Memory and Reading. I only see my reading classes once a week and so I teach the same lesson four times a week. I see my memory classes twice a week and I have two Memory classes. So, in total, I teach six groups of kids with my biggest class containing 12 students and I only have to prep three lessons! It's great. Also, my students are amazing. The middle schoolers are super quiet. Very different from my 7th and 8th graders student teaching! I absolutely LOVE my elementary students.

All of my students are super smart and I am amazed at how well they speak! Sometimes I have a hard time hearing them (got some quiet talkers), but they are able to do things in English that I would have had a hard time doing with the kids I student taught. They work so hard. Let me give you a quick idea of what these kids do in a day.

School starts at about 7:30am and goes until about 2:30, 3pm. After school, they then go to a variety of hogwans which are like specialized after school programs. There are hogwons for everything from music to history, languages to science or even business! They go to various hogwons every night until about 8 or 10pm. Then they go home to do homework until crashing about midnight or 1am (on average students get about 3 hours of homework from school a night along with their hogwon homework). Many students also participate in sports teams and the like. That's Monday through Friday. They also attend school every other Saturday! Saturday and Sunday are also open game for extra hogwon classes.

The Koreans are very driven when it comes to their education system. It's amazing and kind of scary at the same time. I'm rather torn with how I feel about it. On one hand, I love the work ethic that these kids learn at such a young age. It's absolutely amazing how hard working they are. At the same time, such a grueling pace is frightening. I feel bad for them. I mean, I worked hard in school, don't get me wrong, but NOTHING like what is expected of students here.

As far as my own experience teaching them, it has been great. I feel so much more confident with my students than I originally thought I would. I don't have as many classroom management issues as I did during student teaching, and I feel like I really have a handle on the curriculum.

That being said, I heard some great news from my group leader and faculty manager today. My group leader, Sasha told me that my kids LOVE me! She has gotten e-mails and phone calls from parent telling her that their kids love my class and really feel like I care about them and their success. That made me feel so good. I love my students and hearing that they like being in my class made my night.

THEN my faculty manager, Helene, came and told me that not only do my kids love me, but that parents are calling and asking if their student can be transferred into my class!! She said that never before has a new teacher in their first week gotten this much great feedback from parents and students.

Let me say, I was on cloud nine all night. It also helped that my favorite memory class came back for their second night tonight. Love it!

To me, the fact that parents are asking for their kids to get transferred to my class, shows just how INVOLVED these parents are!! I mean, how many parents are so involved in their students schooling that they hear about a new teacher that other students like and then try to get their own child transferred? Wow.

To make a short story long, my first week teaching was great. I feel more confident in my teaching than ever, and I can't help but thinking back to all of my professors back at BYU who helped me learn how to be the teacher I am right here right now.

Don't worry. It's just the first week. I'm sure one of my middle schoolers (or possibly a specific elementary student I am keeping my eyes on) will drive me to distraction in the upcoming weeks and I'll be back on here ranting and raving about insane children. But right now, I'm pretty happy.

I'll try to post pictures and possibly a video tour of my new apartment soon. Love you everyone!

Korean Culture: My First Church Activity in Korea

As I mentioned last week, we found an English speaking branch of our church and it is luckily only 4 stops from our apartment building. This Saturday we went to a singles activity about Korean culture. It was kind of haphazard, but pretty fun. I’ve found that most things here are pretty haphazard, which is a little bit aggravating for a person like me who likes to plan everything out, but I’m learning to deal. Just go with the flow.

Anyways, we showed up about 3pm, a little late because we were held back a little late learning about making copies and getting books from people with serious hangovers from Friday night’s work party. Hehe… It still hadn’t started anyways. We hung out and talked with some people a while and then they started this Korean game where you had to throw rubber tipped arrows into this vase thing. It was super hard. The red team won with a whopping one arrow in the vase.

After that we learned a few phrases in Korean as well as how to count money in Korean. There are two ways to count in Korean. The one used to count money is actually Chinese, different from the numbers my dad and sister learned in taekwondo. We were given these cute notebooks to take notes in, but I ended up losing mine when they cleaned everything up. Oh, well.

Then one of the girls from the ward performed some traditional Korean music on some crazy awesome instrument.


She then taught us a traditional Korean fan dance, which we were all pretty bad at. I think it would have looked much cooler if we had been wearing hanboks like she was.


After that we learned how to make vegetable pancakes. They were SO good and really easy. All you do is mix the flour mix stuff with dehydrated potatoes (I think… the bag had potatoes on it), add water and cut up chives, green onions, and string mushrooms. You can also add other things like kimchee or I’ve had it with various types of sea food. I like them a lot. I’m going to practice making them so I can make an awesome Korean meal for my family when I come home. Maybe I’ll practice on my dad when he comes to visit in October. ;)

After gorging ourselves on pancakes, we then got pizza from Costco!! It had bulgogi (thinly sliced seasoned beef), green peppers, mushrooms, and some other stuff. Yum yum. I’ll definitely be indulging in that kind of pizza again.

The pizza was accompanied by aloe juice… which tastes just really sweet with giant chunks of fruit in it. Ok. If you like pulp. And sunscreen…

It was fun hanging out with everyone from church. I’ll be living a few blocks away from a girl named Jessica, so we plan on getting together sometime.

Monday starts classes for me. I’ll be teaching Memory giga (early ESL level), and Par Reading (maybe early middle ESL). I only see my Par Reading classes once a week, and I got four classes of that. I see my memory classes twice a week, and I got two different classes of that. So, all in all, I only have to plan three different lesson plans a week! I plan on taking some time tomorrow to prep. It shouldn’t take too long since I’ll be teaching the same lessons I prepped in during training.

Wish me luck starting my new job!! My first job actually teaching… wow.

Korean Barbeque = the Best Thing I've Eaten So Far

Have you ever heard of a Korean barbeque? No? Well, you’re missing out! It is so good. I visited one with some friends back home before I left and it is just as tastey, if not more so, here in Korea. Basically, what it is, is you sit at a table with a little grill set in the center. You are given dipping sauce (what kind depends on where you go, usually a soy sauce based sauce), various side dishes (kimchee, garlic cloves, onion… stuff, bean sprouts, etc), and MEAT. Raw meat that you then cook on your little grill.

Sooo good.

The first place we went to was cool because the meat was marinated and hey! Already cooked! They just put it onto the grill to heat up. Nice. We went out with two girls from out branch: Lauren and Kelly. They were nice enough to show us this little gem of a restaurant.

We had pork. Pork is the meat of choice here. It was red and spicy and delicious when dipped in the sauce and eaten with the marinated raw onions. Sounds dumb, but it was super delicious. Also, it was only 7,900 won.

Raw onions in sauce were delicious with the food.


These are the kind ladies that took us to dinner. :)


The spicy pork was delicious. None of us ate any of the kimchee soup that came with it though.


That was Thursday. Friday we went to another Korean barbeque, this time with our branch. We went to what is called a Hweshik. It’s basically an employer sponsored employee party. They paid for two different types of meat: pork and beef, which we had to cook on our own at this place. Kind of fun.

Along with the requisite sides, rice, and sauces, they also cooked egg on the grill. “Korean style.” I’m not a big fan of eggs and I liked it.


We were also given “service,” which is a free item given to inspire customers to come again. We were given a kind of spicy miso type soup with tofu, beans, zucchini, and who knows what else. Tastey, but spicy. The restaurant also gave us coke and cider (Sprite) on the house. Chungdahm paid for the beer and soju.

Oh, was there beer and soju.

I’m not at all familiar with alcohol beverages, but I have been told that soju is comparable to the love child of sake, vodka, and gasoline. One guy told me you could get drunk on soju for about $6. Good to know.

At one point they called up all the newbies to do a drinking game from a bowl of mixed beer, soju, and kimchi. Bleck! Kendra and I had to explain to our less than sober superiors that we don’t drink. You say it with a smile at first and then get a little more serious to show, “No, I’m not just being a coy lightweight. I don’t drink. AT ALL.” Luckily, at that point Kelly got up and offered to drink in our place. We ended up leaving about midnight, but I heard some people stayed out past 5am. Wow.

My Week in a Love Hotel

Last you heard, I was moving out of one hotel and into another where I would be staying until Wednesday when I would then move into my new apartment. Well, it’s definitely been an adventure. A lot has happened and I think I’m going to separate it into several posts rather than one big HUGE post.

The hotel I stayed in was an adventure in and of itself. I told you last week that the realtor didn’t speak English. Well, the same guy (Mr. Han, by name. Turns out he’s not actually the realtor… just some guy from the office that does legal work such as getting us our Alien Registration Cards. NO idea why he was the one acting as our realtor.) met me at the branch office on Wednesday to get me into a hotel. He found another staff member to translate for him. Her English was about as good as my Spanish. Not too shabby, but a lot of writing, repetition and pantomiming to cover what she couldn’t get across with vocabulary. I was rather confused by what she was trying to explain. This is finally what I got: I had to wait until 6pm to check in. Then I had to check out the next day by noon, but I could leave my bags at the front desk until 6pm when I could check back in. Also, hey! Only 40,000 won a night.

Dear Lord. They’re putting me up in a love hotel.

For those of you who don’t know what a love hotel is, well, I should think that the hours kept and the name “love hotel” would tip you off. Basically, a place for couples to meet discreetly. (Mom, think our last “trip” to Reno… that kind of place. Though a little nicer.) Complete with a free channel that I quickly learned to skip. Oh, and calling cards in the desk drawer. Careful with that.

On the bright side, it’s clean (I did a pen check on the sheets to see if they change them everyday… they do), has a water purifier machine in the room so I haven’t had to buy bottled water this week, good air conditioning, and has a tv with cable! I’ve spent much of my time watching NCIS reruns and random movies. Skip channel 90 though… awkward.

Yes, it’s safe. Doors double lock. The hotel is off a busy street so no skulky alleys to go through.

That being said, I’ve saved 100,000 won staying at the hotel and am going to be using said money to purchase all the furniture and other “stuff” from the guy currently living in my apartment. Sweet! No moving of furniture for him and no searching and buying of furniture for me! I’ll move in and I’ll have a bed (mattress), futon, coffee table, dresser, full size mirror, kitchen supplies, drying rack, and whatever else he decides to leave. I told him that I’d take care of whatever I want. For all that furniture and stuff at 100,000 won, I’ll figure out how to get rid of stuff I don’t want. That’s about $80. Nice, eh?

So, I’m really excited about the new apartment. I like the layout, which is a little different than Kendra’s; a little bigger, too. The only problem is that my mattress will be queen sized when all of the sheets I brought with me are full size. Well, crap. Now I have a bunch of full sized sheets with nothing to do with them. AND I have no queen sheets. Snap. I’ll have to figure that out by Wednesday.

Stay tuned for tales of my first time at a REAL Korean barbeque, my first work party, and a really fun church activity.

Korean Washing Machines and Finding an Apartment

The last few days have provided ample opportunities for adventures. Sunday we decided we needed to do some laundry. Funny thing about Korea... everything is in Korean. Yes, even washing machines. So what did we do in the face of such adversity? Why, ask Youtube, of course!!


So, I found a video on Youtube (I won't post it here... it's very boring unless you by chance need to figure out how to work a Korean washing machine) that a helpful girl posted about how to find settings for normal and such on a Korean washing machine. Ours was a little different, but we did find something that looked like unto settings similar to her "normal" settings. I don't know WHY, but it takes a lot longer for laundry to run in a Korean washing machine than I'm used to. This particular machine in our hotel room takes an hour and 36 minutes, to be exact. Apparently that's normal here.

Also, most people don't have dryers, so you need to air dry all your clothes. I'll need to get me a drying rack for my new apartment... luckily the hotel provides one for us here.
And THAT was our washing machine adventure on Sunday.

Monday was even more fun.

On Saturday, I set up a time to meet with So Young, a realtor recommended to us at the Chungdahm training center. We were to meet her at the Mokdong subway station, exit #2 at 11am on Monday. Great. So we left the hotel at 9:30am and got there with about 15 minutes to spare. While we waited, several others we met at training showed up to meet So Young as well. Ok... that works. The place we were waiting just happened to be outside of the building where we'll be working from now on.

At about 11:10, this guy came down with a Chungdahm name tag on and was asking for Jennifer. That's me. Ok, what? He starts telling me that I'm supposed to meet with Helen, the faculty manager right now. What? No, that's not until 4. His English wasn't too good so it was difficult to figure out what the heck he was getting at. So I go with him up to the office to meet with Helen and figure out what the heck is going on. We get up there and he talks on the phone in Korean for a few minutes and then gets off and tells me that I'm supposed to meet Helen at 2:30 about housing. What? No, I'm meeting with a realtor right now to go figure out housing. After a few minutes trying to figure out what he's trying to tell me, I ask if I can just speak to Helen.

I get her on the phone and she asks me what the heck I'm doing at the office at 11am? I'm thinking, "How in heck did you KNOW I was at the office at 11am?" I explain that we're meeting with So Young and she says, no, no, no. You're supposed to meet with the branch's realtor. Ok, well, why? She's explaining that I could go with So Young but her people know more blah blah blah. I tell her that everyone from training is downstairs waiting to meet with So Young and she was just quiet, trying to figure out what to do.

I was about to just say, forget it. I'm here and I'm meeting with So Young and I'll see you at 4 when everyone from downstairs comes up. One of the girls had called So Young because it was getting close to 11:30 and she hadn't shown up yet. So Young tells us that she won't be meeting with us because the branch has realtors.

...

Well, thanks. That would have been nice to know YESTERDAY before we spent over an hour trekking across Seoul to come see you at 11am.

I relate this all to Helen and she says to just stick around until 2:30 for a Reading workshop and then she'll talk with us at 4 about housing. Great.

So we walked around a bit and eventually found a place to buy Kimbop! I mentioned Kimbop the other day, right? Well, I got me one. Yum! This one had a bit more egg than the last one... but I picked nothing out!! Go me! :) Here's a picture for your viewing pleasure.


In the end, we were finally taken out with the realtors about 4:30. Come to find out, the cheapest places are right around the school. Yay! Unfortunately, there are only three apartments available around here and there are six of us looking for places. Greeeaaat. After that, we'd have to go to some other places that are up to a 25 minute subway commute and are more expensive. Kendra, Chris, and I grabbed the ones here. All in the same building and only about a ten minute walk from school. Sweet. Only problem was that only TWO were available to move into on Wednesday. The third will be available on September 1st. They wanted a Chungdahm teacher in it so much though that they offered to put that person up in a hotel until it's open. After a little squabbling, I agreed to be the one to take the hotel. With Chris translating (thank God he spoke some Korean! Our realtor did not speak English... good times), I got a week taken off the rent, a discount on top of that, and 360,000 won taken off my first month so that I can just pay for a hotel (I can go as cheap as I want... the realtor is going to help me find one tomorrow around the school that fits in that budget... not too hard). I'll save a few bucks but will have to move in next week. Oh well.

The apartment itself is TINY! A little hallway kitchen, tiny living room, and a loft for the bedroom area. Oh, and a bathroom. The shower is what I'm sure Mom will be freaking out about. Haha... man, I'm excited to see her reaction when I show pictures of it. :) It's enough for one person, though. Anyone else and it would get pretty tight.

I'll give an official tour once I actually move in. In the meantime, I'm going to get in touch with some teachers moving out in the area (particularly the one living in the one I'm going to be living in) and see if I can't get some furniture etc. to make it more livable once I move in. Should be fun.

Wow, feeling all grownup now. I got me an apartment and I'll even own my own FURNITURE.

It's the little things in life. :)