Korean School Lunch in Photos #1

I'm running out of blog post ideas since everything is becoming so normal in Korea.  In the beginning it was super easy to come up with ideas for blog posts since everything was so new and exciting.  Now it's definitely harder to notice the subtleties in Korean culture that once popped out like the first pimple on an adolescent boy's face.  Since I first got here though, Korean food has been a subject that has popped up time and again from people back home.  I, just as friends and family back in the U.S., am really interested in Korean food and it helps that I actually enjoy it quite a bit.  I love it's spiciness, which often comes from the use of chili in many Korean dishes.  I also love the taste of fermented soybeans, seaweed, and kimchi which are staples of the Korean diet.

Although I am definitely not a chef nor do I pretend to even have any talent when it comes to cooking, I have become increasingly interested in the art of food since I have been in Korea.  This stems first from my abundance of free time at and after work when I am able to indulge in the beautiful media vomit that is Reality Television.  Since it has been on the air I have been a fan of Top Chef but the current season I am especially fond of.  Second, there is a grave lack of satisfactory foreign cuisine in Daegu and, I would argue, most of Korea in general.  In the past few months I have been scouring my city for good Mexican, Italian, Indian and Thai restaurants because I know that they could possibly, maybe, potentially exist.  I could never seriously think I am going to find that Cajun catfish po' boy that I've been craving or the Ecuadorian food I salivate for. I couldn't bare the let down after having even a glint of hope and finding out that there would be no one even thinking of this idea for the next 20 years.  The few foreign restaurants that I have found and gave the chance though have made me look more critically at food than I ever have before.  But don't expect too much from this.

Now that I've taken care of that I will get to the point.

Since the first lunch I ate and Namduck Elementary School in Daegu, Republic of Korea I have looked differently at school lunch.  I remember being in elementary school and dreading the days they would serve "ribeque" sandwiches.  I swear I would gag as I tried to choke down that unidentifiable "meat" that they put down our throats.  But I lived for the days when a big square of processed cheese and pepperoni pizza was slapped on our trays.  I think this was served at least once a week!  I definitely don't remember school lunch being healthy by any means.  They did have a salad bar but when you have the choice between pizza or the salad bar what do you think an American child is going to pick?  If I did ever eat salad I'm sure I drenched it in ranch dressing anyways to cancel out all of the nutrients I would have gotten from the veggies.  Now I look forward to school lunch, each morning I wonder what surprises I will be chop-sticking into my mouth at 12:10.  Usually lunch is awesome.  Sometimes dishes are served that I'm a little wary about but I try and end up loving.  Every so often there is something that I know to take very little of because I might throw up a little bit in my mouth (it's easier to take a little of something and then not eat any of it than to not take something.  Every coworker at your table will question you).  But these instances are few and far between.  The tasty treats definitely outweigh the dried minnows in syrup.

Because of all these factors I have decided to do a series of posts on the school lunches that I am served and kindly accept for a meager paycheck deduction of around $35 a month.  Less than $2 a meal!  Pretty awesome if you ask me.  And I can eat as much as I want.  Okay, here it goes.  "Korean School Lunch in Photos #1" starts now!

Top left: Cabbage kimchi.  There are many different types of kimchi, the most common being the cabbage kimchi.  "Kimchi" actually just refers to fermented vegetables in Korean cuisine.  The kimchi that is seen here is definitely my favorite.  Some of the ingredients in the sauce are red pepper powder, ginger, garlic, fish sauce and green onions.  You will always find some sort of kimchi served at school lunch and almost every Korean meal that you eat.

Bottom left: "Bap." This is obviously rice.  Rice is served with every school lunch too and like kimchi, is a staple of Korean cuisine.  I am often questioned why I take so little rice at lunch time.  I even take more rice than I know I'm going to eat sometimes just so that I am not pestered by the school chef.

Top middle: "Sook-joo-na-mool"(?)  These are bean sprouts mixed with imitation crab and 'minari' which is Japanese parsley.  Apparently minari is a seasonal herb that is consumed mostly in the spring.  I think my coteacher was trying to point out that spring time is coming and that is why this herb was put into the dish as the dish is most often served without it.  Honestly the dish did not have much flavor at all.  With the main ingredient being bean sprouts you can probably imagine.  I liked that it was healthy but it definitely could have used something to make it more flavorful.

Top right: "Jang-jo-rim"  The school has served this dish a few times since I have been here and I absolutely love it.  It is boiled quail eggs and chunks of pork in soy sauce.  The quail eggs are so much creamier on the inside than chicken eggs.  Plus, the yolk to white ratio is much more even, which I thoroughly enjoy.  The bite-size eggs fit perfectly in your mouth and the pork is tender.  The soy sauce is watered down which is good because it would be much too salty if it wasn't.

Bottom right:  "Soo-je-bi-gook" School lunch is also always served with a soup.  I generally really enjoy Korean soups.  They are usually spicy and brothy and I prefer brothy soups over chunky ones.  The noodles you see in the picture are made from flour and cut in a rectangular shape.  Accompanying the noodles are potatoes, zucchini and green onions.  I was pretty disappointed by this soup.  It had absolutely no flavor.  There was very little seasoning, if any besides salt, added.  The noodles tasted like squares of flavorless dough and the cooked zucchini and potatoes weren't much better.

Overall this was a very average meal.  If it wasn't for the egg and pork dish I wouldn't have been very fond of it as two of the three main dishes were lacking in flavor.  It wasn't an extremely healthy dish compared to others that are served, but it beats by a long shot what I imagine kids are eating in schools and at home back in the U.S.

More to come!
Peace

Balut!!!

I have yet to write a post about my time in the Philippines, and don't know if I ever will.  But I do want to share with you all an interesting edible which is common cuisine amongst locals and which I had the opportunity to try. Those of you who know me probably are aware that I am a bit crazy and adventurous in daily life and when it comes to trying new things.  I decided since the Philippinos eat it then why shouldn't I.  Here is a less graphic picture that I took from google images.  Trust me, it could have been a lot worse.

It's called "balut" and is a fertilized duck egg with a partially developed embryo inside.  They incubated until between 14 and 21 days and then boiled and eaten as a snack.  You can find people selling them all over the street at night and get to choose how developed you want your fetus to be.  I chose the 14 day fetus because I didn't know if I could handle the crunch of a beak and little feathers stuck between my teeth.

To eat the balut first you must find the end with hollow space, crack it open, pour in some vinegar and suck out all of the juice.  After you have sucked the juice you can begin peeling the egg.  You then eat the egg, pouring vinegar and salt on to your liking (use a lot).  I was very thankful that when I ate the balut it was  night time and could not see what I was eating.  I don't know if I would have been able to do it had I seen a fetal duck inside.

I wasn't so lucky about three days later when I got very sick to my stomach and probably had a mild case of salmonella poisoning for about three days at the end of my trip.  It all turned out okay though and if I had the chance I would do it again.  Maybe next time I'll go for the 21 day old fetus.

A New Semester

For the teachers who came to Korea in August 2010 we have now been here just over 6 months.  Our second and final semester of teaching has just begun and most teachers are experiencing work related changes.  Many native teachers will be working with one or multiple new coTs and have a completely different schedule than last semester.  The English curriculum has changed a bit for elementary school students and there are new English books some of us must utilize.  Some native teachers working in larger schools will even be getting another native teacher at their school.  This was almost unheard of before this semester, at least in Daegu.  As Winter Vacation and Spring Break come to an end EPIK teachers here in Korea are preparing as best as they can for these changes.

I'm sitting at my desk right now, feeling strange in a world I felt so comfortable in before(see *1).  I had it pretty easy over the past few months compared to other teachers.  Instead of having to deskwarm for the past two weeks during Spring Break, I spent my time waking up at 11:00 a.m. and lounging around all day, watching reality T.V. and trying to think of things I could/should be doing.  These past 2 months have been a little bit strange.  We ended the semester just before Christmas, had a few days off and then started winter camps.  I had a light schedule for two weeks during camp, only teaching two or three classes a day.  I then headed to the Philippines for about two and a half weeks.  When I returned we resumed school for one and a half weeks of which I only taught about 6 classes all together.  Two weeks ago, on a Wednesday, we had our end-of-semester teachers' dinner where the principal got drunk and told me I didn't need to come in during Spring Break.  I was instructed not to tell any of the other native teachers as they would probably be jealous since the majority of them had to go in to work and sit there for 8 hours a day.  I was pretty stoked on this and went home and told my entire facebook network with a status update.  I guess the point is that since I had to work even less than most people did during the vacations, it must be way harder for me to be back at school now than for everyone else.

The changes that I'm experiencing this semester make it a bit harder to be back here at work.  I think the biggest challenge for me is going to be the fact that I have two new coTs.  It was a bit frustrating to me because I didn't even know who one of my new coTs was going to be until the teachers' dinner and the other I met last Friday.  For native teachers here your coteacher can make or break your experience in Korea.  If you have a coT that doesn't speak English or if your personalities clash it can make your life hell.  My coTs last semester were pretty awesome and I felt that I would for sure not have as good of luck this semester.  It turns out that my main coT is one of the fourth grade homeroom teachers from last semester.  She's about 24 or 25 and in her second(?) year of teaching.  One of the first things she said to me about this new semester is that she is very nervous about teaching English because she doesn't speak much English and because she can not discipline the students.  The latter is what I'm worried about most.  Some of the students can be quite a handful and when you don't speak their language it can be really hard to keep them under control.  She is quiet, a bit shy and petite and definitely does not look threatening at all (maybe even less than I do).  Hopefully the students will not walk all over us.  My second coT is only here two days a week: on Tuesdays and Fridays.  She speaks almost perfect English as she studied in Canada and has been a teacher at a private academy for about ten years.  Although she has had this experience, it is her first year teaching in a public school.  Public and private schools are very different in many ways.  When I talked to both of my coTs for the first time about teaching they both expressed to me that they pretty much had no idea what they were doing.  For the first time in Korea I felt like the experienced one, instructing the Koreans on what they needed to do.  We'll see how this semester goes...

The class schedules have also changed.  Instead of having each grade (3rd-6th) twice a week, I have 3rd and 4th twice a week and 5th and 6th three times a week.  Last semester this would have been fine because I liked my 5th and 6th graders and it was my 4th graders that were devil spawns.  This semester, since it's actually the beginning of a new school year (guess I coulda mentioned this earlier), my 4th graders have now moved up to the 5th grade.  I will have to teach each of two classes three times a week.  That means instead of four, I now have six classes a week of students that pretend they are shooting me with AK47s.  The only positive about this situation is that I will not have any "special classes" which I had to plan and teach by myself last semester.  These classes caused me a lot of stress because I didn't have a coT to help translate.  Often times the students had no idea what I was saying or what they were supposed to do and they would act like crazy midget monsters on crack.  I almost cried in my 4th grade special class because I didn't know what to do and my coT was nowhere to be found.  I ended up screaming at the students and the next day my 3rd graders came in saying "Kailey teacher angry! Ahhhhh!!" and trying to mimic what they thought I would look like mad.  Seeing Kailey Teacher angry is a rare occurrence.  I guess the whole school heard about it.

Another change this semester is the elementary school curriculum.  I guess some teachers are using the old curriculum but I have a new text book for each grade.  I was a bit excited when I heard that we were getting new books, as the old ones are pretty horrendous.  I guess I shouldn't have expected the books to be that much better.  I mean it's hard to go from horrible to good or even mediocre.  Well, it's the first day back at school and I have in my possession only the 4th grade text book.  I have been asking my coT to get me the new books since last week and she always says, "OK, I get you the new books," but has yet to do so.  It's kinda hard to plan lessons without the book and CDROM.  Actually, not really.  I usually just take other people's plans off waygook.org, a site where teachers in Korea can post lesson plans and a shit ton of other stuff.  Judging by this site it doesn't look like the new books are much different than the old ones.  I think they just changed some of the chapter titles and tweaked them a bit.

Some larger schools have hired a second native teacher.  Since my school is really small and I teach every English class there is, there is no need for another native teacher.  But larger schools have 40+ English classes per week.  Since each native teacher only teaches 22 classes per week a second native teacher is necessary.  I can't give my input on this since I am not in this situation but it's definitely got to be a bit weird to go from being the only foreigner in the school to having another there too.  It could be nice to have another English-speaker to talk to but weird for the native teacher that has been there for the past semester.  And to top the weird-meter, some people have gotten English teaching robots in their schools.  How can you compete with a robot?  I guess it could be easier to make friends with a robot than some of the weirdos that come to Korea to teach English.

I think a lot of native teachers have made plans to change their habits during second semester.  A lot of us slack a bit while at work, sit on facebook or twitter, write blog posts, watch reality T.V. and feel a bit bad about it (maybe I'm speaking for myself on this one).  Instead of doing this for so much time each day I would like to try and be a bit more productive while at work.  It might take me a few days to figure out how to do this but at least it will keep me busy for awhile.  I also would like be more conscious about saving money each month.  The first month I was here I made a budget on my computer at work but never printed it out.  It might be a good idea to try and follow this so I have something to show for my year here.

Despite these changes and the prospective challenges I face, hopefully this semester will be as good or better than the last.  First semester went by super fast and I hope in 6 months the same can be said for this one.  The first six months have been great but i've definitely hit that point where i'm not as easily excitable.  I guess we'll see how it goes...

Peace out

*1  One of the reasons I feel a bit out of place at my desk is that it looks like my new coT went through all the stuff that my old coT had by her desk and decided what she wants and doesn't want near her.  She decided against having a table and two filing cabinets.  I guess she thought that the best place to put them would be around my desk.  On top of these surfaces is a bunch of odds and ends; paper clips, CDs, paper.  The first thing that she says to me when she walks in the classroom is "You clean around desk."  Well thanks for throwing all this shit around my desk just because you didn't want it and then asking me to clean it.  That's sweet of you. (I really love footnotes and miss them dearly)