Achasan

Hi!

I went for a hike on the mountain near our house, Acha Mountain, hither to known as Achasan. It was a normal hike for me. But then I started to wonder, is it normal because I've been in Korea so long? So, with fresh eyes, I thought, what might I have found fascinating when I first arrived here. This is what I came up with.

At the bottom of the mountain, a fun performance. Usually they sing folk songs and everyone in the audience cheers and claps along.

As I reached the summit I found ANOTHER singing group! What!?

It's really common to have exercise parks in Korea. Our friend Matthew made a fun video of Jamie and I exercising. One day I'll post that. For now, look here. This is at the TOP of the mountain. As if hiking the mountain wasn't enough!

Please note two things.

One: Look how huge that woman's hula-hoop is. She didn't carry that with her (thank heavens!), it's just there for you to use. She's currently paused from hula-hooping because she is talking on the phone. I'd like to note that she, by my count, hula-hooped for 20 minutes. She didn't look like she was ready to give it up anytime soon.

Two: The man that is lying on the sit up board. He's napping. Upside down.

I'll leave you with this city scape.

Couples Housing

They let us out! On Friday morning our “tour guide” David brought Jamie by for a visit and just before he left he informed us that my test results came back negative and that we could get out. Thank god! He ordered us breakfast, gave us an hour to pack up and then brought us back to the university. It was so anti-climatic. When we got back, we step out of the cab and he says to us, “OK! It's your choice if you want to go to class. Do what you want. Bye!” That's it. No check in from the illusive supervisor, no report on the week. In seconds we were free. Not that I'm complaining, mind you. It was just interesting.

We finished off our week (day) of orientation by watching the practice lesson plans of the other teachers and thankfully we got back in time for the Tae Kwan Do performance. It was amazing. Lots of kicking and breaking boards of wood interspersed with ridiculous skits and adorable dances. That night we played card games with our friends Chrissy and Dave (I'm hoping they'll be recurring characters so remember their names). When we woke up the next morning we put on our suits, packed up our rooms and loaded up the buses. We had a closing ceremony where again we were warned about H1N1 and told that we wouldn't be able to teach at all this coming week! They said that we would go to school every morning to check in and show that we were healthy and then we would just go home. So funny! Anyway, we took it in stride (we didn't care at this point anyway). They then served us a delicious buffet and took us to our district offices to meet our co-teacher.

Part two: The district office:remember when I joked about not being given Couple's Housing?

Arriving at the district office was real cute. All of us western teachers are standing there in a group in the parking lot waiting to be introduced to our Korean Co-Teachers who are also standing in a group in the parking lot. Everyone looks very excited and you can tell that everyone is trying to decide who they want as a co-teacher. Anyway, we get paired up and instantly swept away to our schools and new lives in Korea.

This is when the fun begins. Shortly after the crowd started to disperse I see a western man trying to contact John Pak (our “supervisor” with SMOE). Having just seen him hug a woman goodbye I'm a bit curious - upon examination it turns out that he wasn't given couples housing with his wife. Great. Jamie and his co-teacher are waiting to be picked up so I go over and ask about our housing. The co-teacher is obviously confused (it turns out she was actually just filling in so she had no idea what we were talking about). My co-teachers arrive and I ask them if they know about the situation. Their response is not encouraging. No, they say. They didn't know I was married. They had prepared a room for one person-with a single bed. At this point more people from Jamie's school show up and now their on the phone with S.M.O.E and there's about 6 people trying to figure out what to do. Finally it seems like we've been placed in the same building. So we decide we'll just see what this looks like and we head out to our schools.

We arrive at our apartment building and yes, thankfully Jamie and I have been placed in the same building, 2 floors apart. The rooms are just that. Rooms. It's an open room with a kitchen area that includes, a range, sink, and a small fridge. The bathroom is the only separate room, it has a washer, toilet and shower...but the shower is more like a shower head attached to the sink. Not actually a distinct space. Shannon's room is considerably larger than Jamie's. Shannon thinks it's funny that the rooms were so obviously prepared by men vs. women. Jamie's room was prepared by a man, as he was showing the room he pointed out the arm chair, the cable television and the big bed (he was also very proud of the curtain). In my room, prepared by my female co-teachers (both mothers), they bought me sheets and pillows (and a pig stuffed animal), cleaned my whole room top to bottom, left me with towels, plates, laundry detergent, orange juice and water. Anyway! At this point the numbers have grown, I have my two Co-Teachers, the Vice Principal and the Man in charge of Administration (he set up the room). All 5 of us traipse up to Jamie's room where there's the equivalent people from Jamie's school. They all talk trying to figure out what's happening and how to handle this situation. Ultimately we just told them we'd decide on Monday whether or not we want to keep our rooms or move to a bigger apartment.

In the mean time we get taken to visit our schools. Shannon's school is literally across the street. We can see it from our windows. Jamie's school is a 15 minute walk down the street but there are 2 buses that go that way. There's everything in walking distance, including, but not limited to, a Dunkin' Donuts (we've already tried the Garlic and herb coffee roll and Red Bean Paste filled donut), 2 bakeries, a grocery store, shops galore. You get it. We live in the city.

Well, that brings us to today. We slept in Jamie's room last night and I think we've decided to just keep the two rooms. We'll use Jamie's room as a bedroom and Shannon's room as everything else. Not great, but now we have a guest room! Come Visit! We debated having them get us a new apartment (and they would), but it's a gamble. It might be considerably farther away from our schools, we doubt there would be as much space as the two rooms combined and this really isn't so bad.

Well, that brings us to our “exciting things about Korea” section:

• Chinese food is just as popular in Korea as it in the states; instead of being “Americanized”, though, they are “Koreanized”

• Dunkin' Donuts are very prevalent in Seoul, and they are waaay nicer than in the states

• You can set up your debit/check card to draw fare money from your account for busses and subways

• The trash disposal system is very extensive in Seoul, and you need to separate EVERYTHING – the collection system is based on how much trash one produces and everyone must purchase special trash bags (one for general waste and one for food waste); recycling is highly encouraged and free

We still have a whole lot to learn and experience so keep checking in for more updates!

We're Here!

Yes, we landed outside of Seoul on Sunday night (here) It was a really long travel day - about 23 hours in all. Logan to San Fran layover (where we furiously wrote all of our thank-you cards) to Incheon airport Korea - very crazy. The international flight was pretty sweet as far as planes go. The food was pretty good and it was free alcohol, plus in front of all the seats were these multi media video/computers that was pretty neat. When we got to korea we realized that we hadn't read the paperwork about where to go so we furiously searched the crowd for another person with a footprints travel tag. Thankfully when we found her she was prepared and we walked with her through security (a BREEZE by the way). Anyway, because we're all English speakers in a country where we don't speak ANY of the language and nor is one bit of it understandable it's been pretty easy to make friends. (incidentally, mom and dad keller-that first woman, Shauna, is from Arkansas! Near eureka springs! i felt so proud that i knew the geographic location).

We checked in at the University where we will be staying this first week at some time between 8 and 9 PM Korean time. Our time zone is 13 hours ahead of you all, so i guess we were arriving here between 7 & 8AM EST on sundayMorning! They have us divided into male and female dorms while we're at the university (SungKyunKwan University), so Shannon and I are separated for the moment. The dorm rooms are cute. They look just like the UMASS dorm rooms only newer and with a shower and bathroom. The whole university is great and the dorms are painted lime green and yellow. You know how shannon loves the bright colors. This week we are basically quarantined to the university so we haven't explored anywhere yet - we have a weeklong training that goes until Saturday afternoon, after which we will meet our Korean co-teacher and the principal of the school we'll be teaching at.

Monday we had a welcoming ceremony that started with musical performance and ended with a warning about Swine Flu! They are very paranoid that we are carrying swine flue so every night we need to tell them our temperature. We also have medical tests tomorrow (including bloodwork) before they will give us our Alien Registration card.
ANYWAY, after the warning we sat through 3 hours of lecture. If we weren't jetlagged it probably would have been better, but it was hard to stay awake. On top of that we tried to go to a "survival korean" class last night from 7p-9p (it was optional), but the woman was going so fast and neglected to talk about the alphabet or use the English phonetic equivalent to English, so during the break we booked it back to the rooms to sleep. We probably should have stayed up past 9 though to get over the jetlag but both of us pretty much collapsed after saying as much. i Of course we both thought we be fine by today but this morning we both woke up and were wide awake at like 2:30. The excitement and nerves wasn't helping.

Today, tuesday, we had two sessions on teaching. One about using technology and the other about getting students involved. Both were highly engaging and enjoyable. We're just about to head out to dinner and then go to another optional class on Korean Culture.

Food has been good so far, but shannon thinks she'll get tired of it ultimately. Every meal we are served Kimchi (EVERY meal), but the also put BBQ sauce on pretty much every meat and we really like it. They served us french fries today for lunch which i think they did for our benefit. It was hilarious because they gave us about 7 french fries a piece. Not your typical american style serving, but we made due.

Well we both now have skype! Yay for skype! Jamie's name is Jamierlyon and shannon's is Shannon.a.keller and again, just think of your time, subtract an hour and change the AM to PM or vice versa, and you've got us. It really makes getting in touch kind of difficult... but for as long as we have jetlag we could be chatting in the afternoon in your time!