Teacher, what's your blood type?

Well I survived my first week of school!  I arrived to Daegu last Thursday from Jeonju.  Orientation felt like college and when we boarded the buses to go to our different cities I felt a little bit sad.  I made tons of friends that would be with me in Daegu but I also met people who would spend the year in cities all over Korea.  It took us about three hours to get to Daegu and when we arrived our co-teachers were waiting to pick us up.  We were all pretty terrified when we pulled into the parking lot.  One of the most talked about subjects by the lecturers in orientation was 'how to get along with your co-teachers.'  We were pretty much told that if our co-teachers don't like us then it would be a excruciatingly long year in Korea.  The most important thing in an EPIK teacher's school life was to be friends with your co-teacher.  If they invite you somewhere always go.  If they don't want to do something in a lesson that you want to do, don't do it.  Always smile and never complain about Korea.  If you don't want everyone in the school to know something don't tell your co-teacher.  The lecturers made it seem like our co-teachers were going to be old, angry hags that don't speak any English and are so overworked because of us poor, helpless foreigners that can't do anything on our own.  I was pleasantly surprised to meet my co-teacher and an office assistant from my school who had come to pick me up.  My co-teacher is a tiny little woman whose 34 in Korean age, 33 in US age.  She's really cute and about 8 months pregnant.  She has a hard time speaking English and seems pretty embarrassed.  Every time she talks she says the sentence first in Korean and then tries to translate it into English.  We leave the Office of Education and my co-teacher, Ju Young, takes me to my apartment.  I am really excited when I walk in and realize that my apartment looks like a very new building and that no one has ever lived in my specific apartment ever before.  It is very clean and the teachers had decorated the bathroom with Winnie the Pooh decals. Haha.  Here are some pictures of my apartment:

As you can see in the picture of the bathroom, Korean bathrooms don't have bathtubs.  The shower head is connected to the wall of the bathroom and the whole bathroom is your tub.  There are drains in the floor of the bathroom.  I kinda like it because that means I won't have to ever clean my bathroom!  The downfall is that the bathroom floor is wet for a good hour or so after you shower.  I've shown my apartment to multiple people and they all say that my apartment is really clean and better than theirs.  I'm pretty happy about it!  I still need to buy some stuff and figure out the garbage system.  I just have a big pile of garbage and recycling that has been sitting on my floor for a week!

The other day I was sitting in the parking lot of my apartment building and the landlady walks over to me and starts trying to talk to me in Korean.  I don't know what she is trying to say but then she points and grabs my hand.  I pick up all of my banjo stuff thinking that she is kicking me out of the parking lot.  I follow her and we go into the building and pass the first floor (where I live) so i figure maybe she is taking me to her office to sign some papers or something.  We walk up four flights of stairs and then I realize that she is taking me to the roof.  We walk out the door and she leads me to a picnic table with benches and an umbrella.  She shows me that I can play my banjo up here and she shows me how to put up and down the umbrella.  The view from the roof is amazing.  Here is a video:

K. So now I'm going to talk about school.  After my co-teacher shows me my apartment she tells me that we are going to our school to meet the head-teacher, principal and vice principal.  I'm really nervous because I've heard that the principals are usually old, stern men that are very traditional and you need to make a good impression so that they like you and make your life easier.  We head over to the school and I realize that my house is about a 7 minute walk to the school, which is awesome.  I am led into the principals office where he, the vice principal, head teacher and my co-teacher are all sitting.  Throughout the whole meeting I make sure that I have a huge smile on my face and that I'm outgoing and try and make them laugh.  At orientation they told us that Koreans don't like awkward silences and that you should just keep talking all the time.  So that's what I did.  I think the principals really liked me because they were laughing and smiling and asking me questions.  One of my co-teachers told me that since I've been at the school the principals have been a lot nicer haha.  I ask my co-teacher about the school and she tells me that it is very small compared to other schools and that there are only about 320 students.  Many of my friends teach at elementary schools with one to two thousand students!  Because my school is so small I will teach 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes and I will see each class twice a week.  I will also have 4 special classes that will only have about 10 students and I have more freedom to teach whatever I want during these.  Since my contract says that I have to teach 22 forty minute classes I will also have to teach 2 teacher classes a week.  This means that the teachers and principals have to come to my class twice a week after school and I have to give them an English lesson!  This is the part I'm most nervous about!  I have two co-teachers.  One I work with everyday and the other also works at another school and only comes to ours on Wednesdays and Fridays.  My co-teachers tell me that we will each teach 20 minutes of every class and help the other during their 20 minutes if they need it.  With seeing each class twice a week, having special classes and teacher classes I will have to plan 16 lessons a week!  Most of my friends do 4-6 lessons a week and have to teach the same lesson like 6 times a week.  My school is also right at the base of Apsan Mountain and because of this there are Buddhist temples all around.  Here is a picture of my school, Namdok Elementary.

 

(Temple on left, school on right)

As I said earlier, I have 2 co-teachers but so far I have only mentioned one.  My other co-teacher's English name is Emily.  She is also tiny (like the majority of Korean women) and super cute.  She's 38 years old and has 2 kids.  Did I mention that she is freakin awesome?  She speaks English really well and has worked with other foreign teachers before when she worked in a hagwon (private English academy) and she understands everything that we have to do because she has done it all before.  This is how awesome she is:  last Saturday she invited me to go with her family to Woobangland which is the biggest amusement park in Daegu.  Her husband bought us all wristbands so that we could go on any ride and we spent the whole afternoon there riding rollercoasters.  Well, her husband felt bad because no one besides me wanted to go on the rollercoasters so he went on one with me and was terrified and almost threw up!  I felt really bad after that and told him he didn't have to go on any more.  After Woobangland they took us all out to dinner to eat a really yummy fish dish.  The fish was pollock in an amazing spicy chili sauce.  Surrounding the fish was pieces of pig (?) intestines and very large fish eggs.  Sounds interesting right?  It was actually delicious!  I have loved almost every dish that I have eaten here so far.  Our school lunches are amazing!  The other day they served hard boiled quail eggs with pieces of pork in a yummy sauce.  I think I like quail eggs better than chicken eggs!  Anyway, this past week she invited me and a foreign English teacher that works at her other school to the Daegu International Jazz Festival.  It was a very classy evening and I think the tickets were pretty expensive.  I need to figure out a way to
repay her.  Emily is also an amazing teacher.  She is really good with kids and does fun activities to keep the kids interested.  Many of the teachers here strictly teach the textbook (which is not very good to say the least) but she supplements the book with better materials.  I think it will be really fun to teach with her.

Since downtown Daegu is only a 25 minute commute and it is in a very central location we use it as a meeting place.  Daegu has roughly 2.5 million people which is about the same size as Quito, Ecuador but Daegu's downtown is much bigger and way more bustling.  Cars try and stay out of downtown because there is constantly big masses of people walking down the streets.  There are so many restaurants and stores and Daegu is known as the fashion capital of Korea.  The girls here are dressed to the T all the time and all of them wear high heels.  I've heard that Korean women even wear high heels when they go hiking (I'm not even kidding)!  It's pretty hard to look semi appropriate when all the women look so stylish all of the time.  Not to mention they are all really thin and adorable!  To say the least it has been really fun going downtown on the weekends!

Yesterday I met some friends downtown at a local ex-pat restaurant/bar for Sunday brunch.  There aren't many places that serve authentic Western food so there are usually lots of foreigners at the Holy Grill.  It is run by Canadians and features a selection of burgers, Tex-Mex and eggs-and-bacon breakfasts.  After we ate brunch we walked around downtown and a girl we met the night before, Madeline, pointed out this cafe/spa that she had been to previously.  This cafe is particularly special because it has little bath-tubs in the floor filled with tiny minnows.  You pay \6,000 (around 5.50 USD) and you stick your feet in the tub and the little minnows attack your feet with their tiny mouths and eat off the dead skin from your feet.  I can't even explain to you the feeling of 50 minnows nibbling your feet.  It tickled so bad and was such a weird experience it took me about 5 minutes before I could even look in the water.  Lara (a friend) and I were laughing so hard we were crying and we were probably the butt of many Korean jokes since the whole coffee shop was filled with Koreans enjoying coffee and bread.  I'm sure we were being a little disruptive.  So we had to sit with our feet in this minnow infested water for 15 minutes.  To my embarrassment my feet must have had much more dry skin than anyone else because the fish were getting a feast of dead skin from my feet.  There were so many more minnows eating mine than anyone elses.  It was quite an experience!

When we were in orientation many people warned us about the personal questions that Koreans ask you right when they meet you.  They told us that we would definitely be asked our age, if we are married or have a boyfriend and many other questions to determine our status.  Older people have a higher status than younger people and there are different words for everything in Korean depending on if you are using formal language with an older person.  I was introducing myself to one of my classes and a student raises his hand and asks, "Teacher, what's your blood type?"  I laughed and thought this was a pretty funny question coming from a fourth-grader but i answered it anyways.  After the fact I learned that Koreans believe that one's blood type says a lot about their personality.  I don't know what O positives are like...  Anyways, I don't find these questions too personal and I take it as a sort of game where I try to one-up the Korean by asking them even more questions than they ask me.  So it just so happens that I have a very good looking co-worker who is 26 and took me on my first night here to get groceries and eat dinner.  I was pretty curious about his relationship status so about an hour after meeting him I ask him, "Are you married?"  He answers, "No."  "Do you have a girlfriend?"  "Yes."  "How long have you been together?"  "Five years."  "Are you going to get married?"  "Yes."  "How did you meet her?"  No answer.  Either he didn't hear me or I totally won the Korean question game.  So the next day I tell my co-teachers that I think my co-worker is really hot and that I wished he didn't have a girlfriend.  I was also warned in orientation that you should not tell your co-teachers anything that you don't want the whole school to know about because Koreans like to gossip.  I notice a week later that it seems like my hot co-worker is scared of me because he won't talk to me and doesn't look at me when I see him in the cafeteria.  I tell my co-teacher this and she giggles and looks at my other co-teacher.  I ask her what's so funny and I know what she's going to say.  She says, "You remember the first day when you told me you thought he was cute?"  I say yes.  "Well that day I was talking to our co-worker and I told him that you thought he was really cute and you were sad that he had a girlfriend."  I am so embarrassed that she told him that and now he's too scared to talk to me.  Hopefully it's not awkward next time I have to talk to him!


Next weekend me and a few friends are going to Busan, which is on the coast, to see some friends from orientation.  I guess you can see Japan from the beach on clear days.  It should be a lot of fun!

Oh and in many public buildings they use squatter toilets.  There are only squatter toilets in my school and they really scare me.  I don't know how to use them properly and I don't particularly like them at all.  Let's just say I have only gone to the bathroom once at school.

Either my co workers put this little note on the door of my apartment or someone is in love with me and creepily spies on me:

안녕하세요 Ahn-young-ha-seh-oh from Korea!

Hello from Korea!
So I have been in Korea now for exactly a week and It would probably take me a few hours or more to describe all of the interesting/different/crazy/weird/hilarious things that I have experienced so far!  To save you and myself from this I am only going to pick a few details and experiences to share.

First I will just give an overall description of EPIK (English Program in Korea) and some of the things we have done while we have been here.  When I arrived in Korea I quickly realized that there were probably over 100 other EPIK teachers that were on the same flight.  Everyone was really outgoing and eager to meet people and exchange knowledge.  The program directors were waiting at the airport for us to load us on the bus and take us to Jeonju University, where we are now for orientation.  This year there are three EPIK orientations and at ours alone there are over 400 teachers.  I heard that about 150 will be going to Daegu, the city I will be at.  This is the highest number of teachers going anywhere besides Seoul.  I have been incredibly surprised by the organization that EPIK has put into this orientation.  They have treated us so well from the moment we stepped off the bus.  We are given three hearty meals a day and between every class there are Korean snacks and drinks waiting for us outside the classroom.  For the past few days we have had about 6 hours a day of lectures to prepare us for teaching and differences in Korean culture.  Overall the lecturers have been AMAZING and I've learned a lot.  In a few hours I will meet my MOE (Metropolitan Office of Education) supervisor and find out in which school I will be placed and what level, so that's pretty exciting but nerve-racking!  Thursday (your Wednesday) will be our last day here in Jeonju.  We will be taken by bus to our cities where we will immediately meet our co-teachers and see our apartments.

Ok.  So EPIK took us on a field trip on our day off to a traditional Korean village and a Buddhist temple.  When we first arrived at the village we were taken into a building and made traditional Korean fans.  Here is a picture of my fan:

After we made the fans we were sent out to explore the village on our own.  We were walking aimlessly through the village when a Korean man started talking to us in English.  He told us that we were at the museum and that we should go upstairs and he would guide us through the museum.  At this point we really have no idea who this man is but we decide to follow him anyway.  As he takes us through the museum we are super impressed because he seems to know so much history about Jeonju and Korea.  At the end of the 'tour' he asks us if he can show us around the rest of the village.  Then he tells us that he had studied in the States through his doctorate education.  Thirty years ago he decided to come back to Korea and now he is a professor of national security teaching in Seoul.  We were very lucky to have met this guy because he guided us all around explaining everything and showing us things that we would not have been able to see were we on our own.  When we parted ways he gave us his contact information and told us that if we were ever in Seoul he would love to give us a tour of the city.

After the Hanok Village we were bused to a Buddhist temple.  My friend Lara and I were walking a bit behind the group because we stopped to go to the bathroom and put our feet in the water.  It is ridiculously humid here and it has been really hard getting used to it.  So we are walking up this hill towards the temple trying to catch up with the group when this man comes up to us and says, "Kogi?"  We have no idea what he is saying to us because he is speaking in Korean and we are answering in English but he obviously doesn't speak any English.  We have been told that if someone invites us somewhere, we should always go.  So naturally, we followed him.  He took us over by the river and introduced us to his friends and wife and made us sit down at a picnic table.  On the table is a little grill with a few small pieces of meat.  The man says something to his wife and she frantically starts opening containers of rice and kimchi and puts some raw beef on the grill to cook for us.  We had just eaten about an hour before so we were not hungry at all but I didn't want to be rude and deny the food.  While the lady is preparing our food all the men (seemingly drunk) are speaking to us in Korean and laughing.  The men offer us beer and soju (a Korean sake type drink) but we graciously decline.  Since the only thing we could communicate about was our ages, we talked and joked about each others ages for awhile.  By the end of our little lunch date the woman has loosened up a bit and accepted our presence and we had all laughed a lot about our attempts at communication.

Another funny thing happened to me while I was playing my banjo.  I really wanted to go somewhere outside that was light enough to see my book so I found a balcony on the other side of our dorm building.  So I go outside and start playing.  Apparently this floor was where Korean students live because they kept coming outside to smoke.  I start trying to talk to one of the Korean guys and he sits down by me and tells me his name is Sang.  He is wearing basketball shorts and a tee shirt and looks like he has just been chillen out in the dorms.  I use very simple sentences and vocabulary to ask him about himself and when he understands he tries to respond.  We end up being able to understand each other pretty well, or so I think.  I conclude that he works at a bar that is ten minutes away in taxi and that he has to leave to go to work at 10 o'clock.  It is about 9:30 at this point and he tells me he has to go get ready for work and that he will be back out in 10 minutes and I should wait for him.  By this time we have accumulated quite a crowd of people and a girl named Esther comes out and is very eager to try and talk to me.  Her English is quite a bit better than that of Sang so we are able to communicate more productively.  When Sang comes back out I literally did not recognize him for a few minutes.  He looked completely different.  He had gelled his hair up and was wearing fitted black slacks and a white button-up long-sleeved shirt.  He looked sharp!  Sang sits back down and he and Esther begin to try and ask me something that I can't quite make out.  Finally I realize that Sang is trying to ask me out to lunch through Esther.  I ask them, "Restaurant?  You want to take me to a restaurant?"  And they both go, "No! Not restaurant! Eating house!"  I agree to go out to lunch with Sang the next day even though in my mind I'm thinking, "what have I gotten myself into?  This guy barely speaks any English.  I figure it will be a good chance to practice communicating like I will have to with my students.  Finally it is time for Sang and his friend to go to work so they leave but Esther keeps talking to me.  She invites me into her dorm room and shows me that she has been learning the guitar.  She is very interested in me and excited to tell me about herself and Korea.  She also asks me what the difference is between "restaurant" and "eating house" in English.  I tell her that we don't use the word "eating house," only the word "restaurant."  She laughs and tells me that in Korea "restaurant" is a place to get expensive Western food like spaghetti.  An "eating house" is where you can get Korean food for very cheap.  She then tells me that Sang was embarrassed when i kept asking if we were going to a restaurant because he doesn't have very much money and couldn't afford to go to a restaurant, only an eating house.  That is why he kept saying, "not restaurant!"  I feel really bad and tell Esther that I want to go to an eating house, not restaurant!  We end up talking for about an hour and a half and I have to cut the conversation short because I am exhausted from trying to communicate with someone who speaks little English for such a long time.  The next day I meet Sang for lunch in the lobby.  I am surprised to see both him and his friend.  He says to me, "friend?"  Implying that he expected me to bring a friend to this date for his friend.  I must have missed this part of the conversation the night before.  I think he and his friend are a little bit embarrassed about this but the three of us walk down the road to a little "eating house."  Naturally he orders for me and the server brings over the plates.  For he and I Sang ordered a dish called "kimchi bokkumbak."  It is fried rice with kimchi and sauteed onions with a fried egg on top.  This was definitely my favorite Korean dish so far.

(Sang on left)

The date is not awkward at all but I do end up talking the majority of the time and they laugh (I don't know if it was with me or at me).  We end by exchanging numbers and I tell Sang that if he is ever in Daegu that we should go out and drink Soju together.  He says, "I want to drink soju with you."

Well I'm off to meet the head honcho from the office of education!
Ahn-yeoung-ee-gay-say-oh!  (Goodbye!)