Cloud Nine?

Nine months. That’s how long we’ve been here for now. While it seems like ages in some regards at the same time it feels like the time has flown by.

Last week I taught with a substitute teacher for the week while my normal coteacher was away. It wasn’t the best of weeks. The kids had very little interest in anything she had to say. Of course this didn’t stop her from talking. In a lot of ways they teach more lecture style in schools here. So the substitute teacher just stood at the front talking and most of the kids turned away and began conversations with themselves. This would happen in each and every class. Thankfully, when it was my turn to teach they’d tune into me. Most likely because I teach them for five minutes and then we spend the rest of class practicing what I taught through various games and if they don’t pay attention to my spiel they know they’re done for when game time starts.

The substitute’s English pronunciation was horrid. It was driving me up the wall all week. She kept adding the Korean ending to everything (They add a –eu or –ee sound to way too many words to count). She would say Breakfast-eu, Lunch-ee (to be fair it was more like Runchee), English-ee, etc… The Japanese would do the same thing, but at least in that situation I could correct them since they were my students and they were small classes. Here I’ve tried and I continue to try, but it’s too hard when your co-teacher can’t get the pronunciation right and the class size is 40+. Her grammar was also awful. At one point she tried asking them if they knew how to spell the word Breakfast (at least I think that’s what she was trying to as) and it came out “Do you remember the spell?”. I’m pretty sure none of my kids or witches or warlocks, although at times I’m not so sure…

This week we were teaching the future tense in class. The main question was “What will you do this summer?” The kids would respond with one of seven possible answers to this question (I will…ride my bike, watch TV, play computer games, read books, play baseball, play soccer, visit my uncle). As a side note, I found it interest that in all my classes the children all knew what “uncle” meant but only one or two kids a class knew the word “aunt”. After the kids watch the movie and I read the dialogue with them my coworker translates it into Korean and explains the meanings and how we use it. In this particular case he talked for a bit and then said “What will you do…tomorrow” the kids answered, then he asked “What will you do on Saturday”, the kids answered and the he asked “What will you do yesterday?” and the kids answered what they did yesterday using the future tense. I just sat at the back of the room contemplating banging my head against the wall.

In other news, I got an email this morning telling me that Meg’s sister Sarah’s water had broken, but that it was a false alarm and the baby likely wouldn’t come for a few more days. Meg had to explain to me that in the real world (and not tv and movie land) that the water breaking doesn’t always mean the baby is mere seconds away from arrival. We’re both a little sad that we can’t be there to meet the newest entry into the Farrell/Gow family, but hopefully it won’t be too long until we find our way to Philadelphia.

The dog we’ve been caring for this week goes back home tomorrow night. I’ll be sad to see him go on one level and extremely happy on another. He’s been a bit of a handful. 5 month-old puppies (bigger than the size of a rat) were not meant to be raised in Korea. Our apartment is fairly large by most standards over here and yet no where near large enough for him. Also, the lack of a backyard is really a pain. Oh and the fact that there’s garbage everywhere. There’s a little field beside out apartment I take him to when he needs to pee and every day I have to pull trash out of his mouth at least a few times per walk. Although it’s an empty grass and rock field people just throw their garbage there. It’s very strange. I’ve actually watched people do it while I’ve been with the dog. They walk out of their apartments and dump a bag or box of trash onto the field. There is a pile of broken plates that I need to keep Brody away from every time we go into the field.

There’s a little company run by an American (I believe) who makes t-shirts for foreigners living and working in Korea. I just got my “I’d rather be in Japan” shirt in the mail last week. Now all I have to do is build up enough courage to wear it out in public here. It is a pretty cool shirt though. Meg wants one too now. Of course some days I suspect she'd probably be happy enough to wear an "I'd rather be in Iraq" shirt.

There have been protests here in Korea over the decision to import US beef for the last 40 days or so. Every night thousands of people attend candle-light vigils near the Blue House (their White house). It's gotten pretty violent on a number of occasions and it has been front page news almost every day. Most people think the protests are more anti-American driven than anti-beef and I suspect they're right. Of course I've been reading up on Korean protests and it seems like they'll protest anything. Apparently there's an average of 11,000 publiuc protests a year in Korea and the average riot police officer will have to deal with 85 a year. Definitely not a job I'd want to do.

There's an interesting article on Korean protests. It's worth a read if you have the time. Though it is mildly disturbing:

The Exciting World of Korean Protests

There's also an article on the crazy ice cream flavours of Japan. For example, Octopus flavoured, Horse flesh, shark fin, tomato, garlic, etc... I can verify that these are true flavours and not made up as I saw some of them with my own eyes and read about them in the Japanese paper when I lived there:

Japanese Ice Cream Flavours