Christmas in the Land of the Morning Calm

Merry Christmas! Christmas can be hard when you spend it away from family and all the traditions that make holidays special. All last week, students and teachers asked me if I was going home for Christmas and when I told them no (even if I could afford a flight to the US right now, there is literally not enough time in a weekend to fly to the US and back, and I had class on Friday and Monday), they asked if I was sad about spending the holidays alone, which, way to bring up that thing I was really pointedly not thinking about guys. I kept busy though, and had a good holiday.

My celebrations started last Saturday when SnB held a curry party & yarn/book white elephant gift exchange. Riah and Caroline made curry, Audrey made cookies, Siobhain made naan using a wine bottle for a rolling pin, and Jen and Robin helped to empty said wine bottle. I wrapped presents since we wanted dinner to be edible. Everyone brought nice things for the swap, so it wasn't very white elephant-esque, but we had fun and I have a quite a few new books to add to the pile of books I need to read before I go home.



Top: Siobhain making naan with a wine bottle; Left: Caroline showing us her new apron and festive Christmas nose; Right: Riah sampling the curry.
Then, on Christmas Eve Eve, I went to Ansan after work for pho, spring rolls and Vietnamese coffee with Marie and Greg. Traffic was horrible, but I made friends with the six year old sitting next to me. I was the first foreigner he had ever seen, and at first he just stared, but he grew more confident as the bus pulled away from the station and he started making faces at me. I started copying his faces, which he thought was hi-larious. After a few minutes of crossing his eyes and rapidly shifting his jaw around, he decided to stick his finger up his nose, watching me with bright eyes to see what I would do. I briefly though about copying him (standards, what are those?), but we were being watched by the ajeosshis sitting across from us and I was going straight to dinner, so I settled with sticking my finger beside my nose, which luckily was sufficiently funny enough for my friend.

Friday was Christmas Eve and I wished my 6th grade classes a Merry Christmas, but I was corrected. "No, Teacher. Merry Christmas Eve." After school, I went to a candlelight service at the Seoul International Baptist Church near Itaewon. It's next to the base and a lot of parishioners were soldiers and their families. Most of the foreigners I see are teachers in their twenties or thirties, and this was the first time I had seen a non-Korean family in almost a year. American children are giant compared to my wee, slight students. After the service, we took a cab to Itaewon, hung out in What The Book until they closed, then went to the Thai restaurant upstairs. Mmmm, Christmas curry. I've never been a fan of traditional Christmas food and I was thrilled for the excuse to spend my holiday eating SE Asian food instead.

Then on Christmas Day, Caroline, Siobhain, Audrey, Riah and I went for Indian and Doctor Fish in Gangnam. We bought ourselves a Christmas ice cream cake, sang Christmas carols (different ones, at the same time), and then used our cake to reenact the current political situation of the Korean peninsula. The cake was divided into five sections. Riah was South Korea, Audrey was North Korea, Caroline was China, Siobhain was the US and I was somehow Sino-American relations, which meant that I spent a lot of time supplying North Korea with rice and cow (decorative cranberries) which North Korea turned into bombs to throw at South Korea. The chocolate decorations served as the DMZ. Tunnels were dug beneath it. I started making "Phew Phew" noises to simulate bombs, which is when the Koreans sitting next to us started taking our picture. My parents called me while I was waiting for the bus home and I pulled a Waegukin Smash to talk to them while they opened presents.


Failboats in public. From (left → right) Siobhain, me, Audrey, Caroline and Riah


Mid-conflict on a delicious peninsula
Merry Christmas, one and all.

ROK On

Sunset at the Pagoda Garden the National Museum of Korea
I've been in Korea for six months today! (Well, a year and six months. Six months this time around.)

I live in Seongnam, one of the northern most southern suburbs, this year. I'm much closer to Seoul this year (twenty minutes vs. an hour) which is nice, but the proximity to Seoul means I haven't really developed a social life in the area where I live in. The handful of foreign teachers living in my building introduced themselves when I first arrived, and they're nice and we chat in the elevator or the bus stop, but I already had a social network set up and I quickly fell back into my old routines. I rarely want to socialize after work, but I miss the spontaneity of getting dinner with friends after work without first having to spend forty minutes on the subway.


Marie and me at a clam bake in Kongdae.
I've been back to Ansan (the city I use to live in) a few times to see friends. Nostalgia is a funny thing. I'm glad I don't live in Ansan anymore, but that didn't stop me from getting emotional over old sights. That was my bus stop, the kimbap shop I went to that once, the store where I bought my chopsticks and extension cord, and I go all ♫ memory // all alone in the moonlight // I can smile at the old days // I was beautiful then ♫ The quickest way from Seongnam to Ansan is by bus, and the route happens to pass directly by my old school. I usually spend the trip with my nose in a book, but the first time I happened to look out the window at a stoplight and spotted a teenage boy that looked suspiciously like one of my 6th graders last year. Huh, I thought, he looks just like Jinho. And then the light turned green and the bus drove past my old school, and I realized the kid probably *was* Jinho.


Your average Saturday afternoon: riding your motorcyle to the park to practice traditional Korean dance with your friends. AS YOU DO.
School life is different this year. A new national curriculum was introduced this year and the 3rd and 4th graders now have English twice a week instead of once a week. This means there are 42 English classes taught at my school each week, more than I can personally teach. Instead, my co-teacher and I teach each grade together once a week and the co-teacher teaches each grade solo once a week. It works okay, but it means that I'm never the primary teacher and I'm always playing by someone else's rules and cues. There's also a lot less communication between me and my co-teachers. Last year, my co-teacher and I would plan lessons together and then prepare our respective parts. This year, I plan my lessons alone, without discussing the lessons plans with my co-teachers, and half the time I feel like we're teaching two different lessons that just happen to share a vocabulary set or grammatical concept. There's no cohesion between my lesson and my co-teacher's lesson.


4-4 Class playing a board game in English class.
I think my current students are lagging behind my last school. Both of my schools have been in poor areas, but I think this area is more impoverished. A significant number of my students are on welfare and we did so poorly on the national tests in July that the principal has decided that all the homeroom teachers have to teach three extra classes a week and extra teachers have been hired to offer remedial classes for struggling students. Right around the six month mark last year, I saw an explosion of English from my students. Almost over night, they went from only using sentence fragments to full fledged sentences arguing the merits of different Kpop bands. Teacher, I don't like Top. He is ugly and has big face. I LOVE G-Dragon! HEARTBREAKER! I just can't see a similar widespread surge of English use among my current students. It's not all bleak - a group of 6th grade girls and I recently got into a discussion about our favorite member of 소녀시대 and a 5th grader brought me his essay on the wonderful cockroach to edit - but for every bright student, there are another dozen who, when asked what their name is, can only answer, "Teacher, WUT?!"


WUT?
I really wanted to make the effort to travel around Korea more this year, but I haven't done a very good job of it. In April Siobhain, Caroline and I went to the Nonsan Strawberry Festival in Chungcheongnam-do. It was your typical country fruit festival, full of giant strawberry balloons suspended over the fair ground and strawberry infused foods, many of which were not improved by tasting like strawberry. (Strawberry flavored hot pepper paste is not delicious. Nor is strawberry flavored seaweed.) There were also copious amounts of fried food and I finally tried a french-fries-covered-corn-dog-onna-stick, which was exactly as delicious as it sounds. I'm just a little ashamed that Korea beat the South to inventing it. The weekend was lots of fun and navigating Korea outside of Seoul was too difficult and and I remember thinking on the train back to Seoul that I need to take more weekend trips. That was five months ago and I haven't left the Seoul area since. Hopefully I manage to see a bit more of the country before my contract is up.


(l → r) Siobhain, Caroline, Strawberry Chick who grabbed my ass, me
It's been a good six months, and I'm glad I came back for a second year.

Goodbyes, Part 2

I spent the last few day signing the backs of worksheets and blank pages in textbooks and notebooks. Every time I sat down in between class, a line of students wanting my signature instantly appeared. Students have been coming by my office all week with presents; there were a few material items, but it was mostly letters. Wonderful, precious letters full of broken English that they wrote themselves, letters they couldn't have written when I arrived a year ago. I've been torn between wanting to spend the week behind the lens of a camera, capturing every last detail of my school and my kids for posterity, or just enjoying these last few days.

Today was my last day of school and oh, it was hard. I knew I was going to cry when I left and I did. After I untangled myself from students wanting one last hug, one last reassurance that I wouldn't forget them, I sat down on my bus and silently cried, tears running down my cheeks while I watched my school and the town disappear. What I wasn't prepared for was walking into my classroom for the last time, one last quick trip to throw away the last of the trash from my office, and starting to sob. Great, noisy, undignified sobs because despite all the frustrations, I've been so happy here.


The boys were a bit rambunctious and the boy to my right was being crushed. He kept shouting, "Help me, please! Help me, please!" It's a fitting end of my year here: we started studying Chapter 12: Will You Help Me, Please? today.
After school, I went out for samgyeopsal with friends. We ate at an outdoors galbi restaurant along a pedestrian road near our apartments that is overrun every night with dinners. We had beer and pork and kimchi and a metric ton of cooked garlic (that might have just been me) while we talked and toasted Korea and watched squids bob for freedom in the tanks at the restaurant next door. A good way to celebrate the end of a good year.

Ansan Asia Town, Redux

One of my favorite things about living in Asia are the bizare and amazing electronics you find here. For example, the machine where you can text your camera phone pictures and have them printed out as Polaroids on the spot or the claw vending machine where you attempt to fish out live lobsters. Only in Asia!

Last night, I went down to Ansan Asia Town for some amazing Vietnamese with friends. (To get there, take Line 4 south to Ansan Station. Exit 1, cross under the street, turn left and walk along the main road until you get to the restaurant with the Vietnamese flag. Order the pho, you won't regret it.) Marie, Greg and I walked around for a bit afterwards and we found Sea World, a claw vending machine with live lobsters as the prize. Greg gave it a try while I took the video. We didn't manage to win a lobster, which was probably for the best, because what the hell would we have done with the thing if we had won. I have this mental image of me trying to shove a live lobster into my purse, along side my bus pass and knitting, as I hop on the subway home. It's not a mental picture that ends well.

Ansan Asia Town

I went to Ansan Asia Town twice this week. (When Tina first called it Ansan Asia Town, I laughed and said, "We're in Korea. It's all Asia town," but according to the internet, she was right and the area is called Ansan Asia Town. My bad, Tina.) The city I live in, Ansan (a suburb of south of Seoul), has the largest foreign population in Korea, mostly laborers from SE Asia or Southern Asia. At Ansan Station, they formed Ansan Asia Town, a several block district full of ethnic restaurants, supermarkets and 3923590 places to buy an international calling card. (For any K-bloggers reading this, it's like Itaewon without the jacked up prices, American military presence or the Quiznos.) To get there, take Line 4 south (towards Oido) to Ansan Station. Take Exit 1, cross under the street and have at it.

On Wednesday, Tina and I went to the Thai market in Ansan Asia Town. Tina is Thai and wanted to make curry. I like Thai food and am incapable of cooking for myself. It was a good match. We bought several heavy bags worth of Thai food and carted them back to Tina's apartment. I chopped the vegetables (see above: peas, mushrooms and eggplant) while Tina did the cooking. We made Thai stirfry and oh my Lord, was it ever spicy!


Tina forgot that Thai peppers were spicier than Korean peppers, and consequently almost killed me. It was one of those meals where I couldn't stop crying and drank an entire litre of water, but it was too tasty to stop eating. I went back to Asia Town yesterday night with Marie and Greg. We ended up eating at an Indonesian restaurant because none of us had every tried Indonesian food before. We're pretty sure the place was a front for a brothel and as the only two women in the dinning area, Marie and I got a lot of interested looks. The food was tasty, even if we only got what the waiter could translate. (Rice. And chicken. And some fried rice called nasi goreng.) We were able to also order some fried fritter type thing (the internet tells me they are called gorengan) by pointing to another diner's table. We ate the fritters with a sweet viscous soy sauce we called Soylasses. (It's thicker than soy sauce, thinner than molasses. It's sweet, it's soy, its soylasses!) After dinner we wandered around for a while and salivated at all the other restaurant choices: Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Filipino. I might even be able to find some Middle Eastern restaurants there. I want to do my own version of Man Bites World.

Urban Garden

The balcony of my building is lined with planters, and my neighbors have started planting things. The edge of the balcony of lined with brilliant yellow flowers. Whenever I glace out my window, I catch a glimpse of the bright yellow buds between the blinds.


If you get closer, you can see the bright green buds waiting to open. It's still cold (currently 10°, but it's windy and at night it still drops to close to 0°), but spring is finally coming.


There is also a row of planters right in front of the apartments. (It's quite a large balcony. One row of planters is next to the edge, the other is about two feet away from the front of my apartment.) My neighbor is taking advantage of it and growing some form of plant life. It's almost enough to make me wish I knew where I buy seeds or seedlings. Almost.

[as I was walking through a life one morning]

As I was walking home from the bus stop this afternoon, I got a call from Tina. "Stop walking," she told me. After a brief pause she added, "I hope you didn't stop walking in the middle of the street." I assured her I was safety on the sidewalk and she asked if I had any plans for the evening. Nope, I told her. "Well," she said as she walked up behind me, "do you want to get dinner with me and my co-teacher." We went to the pasta place near the train station (nom nom nom pumpkin cream pasta) and then to Baskin-Robbins, where we sat on the garish orange couches, talked and had desert.

When I first moved here, my social life revolved around Seoul. Through Stitch'n'Bitch, I made friend, but they mostly lived in Seoul. I also met people through the training conference, but they lived throughout Gyeonggi-do and when we meet up, we do it in Seoul. And that's okay. I love Seoul and my Seoul people are great, but sometimes a girl doesn't want to spend two hours on the subway to see her friends. Sometimes I want to go out to dinner after work, something spontaneous and uncomplicated. The past few weeks I've been spending more time in Ansan, meeting more of the Ansan expat community and exploring more of the city, and it's been fun.

Nom nom nom

Today's post is brought to you by Indian food, exhaustion and my new camera, an Olympus FE-370 that I bought with Siobhain's help at the I-Park mall this weekend. (On New Year's Day, while spending three hours wandering around Lotte Mart & Home Plus [like Wal-Mart, ON STEROIDS] I realized that I've hated my camera since I bought it and I actually have the money to replace it now, so maybe I should do that.) It has a much better zoom, super macro mode (be glad I'm not making you look at the photos I took of my knitting where you can only see like, ten stitches) and most importantly, the colors aren't insanely washed out.

I went out for dinner tonight and ended up pulling out my camera and really, let's all be happy only one of these pictures is of food, even though my camera has a special setting for photographing food. Oh yes, it does.


This is Tina. Isn't she adorable? I met her walking home from school about two months ago. She lives across the street from me and is an English teacher at a middle school near by. We eat dinner together a couple times a week, whenever one of us doesn't feel like cooking, which, tbh, is quite often. Today, we went to the Indian restaurant near the train station.


Indian food is delicious. I might be meh about Korean food (some of it - mandu, bulgogi, gimbap, most of the soups - is delicious, but the rest of it I could do without), but I have discovered that I love Indian food. Indian restaurants are all over Korea and they're some of my favorite places to eat. Phil's India Camp, the one near my house, isn't the best, but it's also a five minute walk instead of an hour long train ride, which earns it a lot of points.


Nom, nom, nom.


And here I am knitting after dinner. I'm working on the Lizard Ridge afghan, which I've dubbed The Monitor.


Dooooooooooooooorks! Shortly after Tina took this photo, the manger of the restaurant came over and asked us to be the models for the restaurant website, probably because Tina is adorable and I'm obviously foreign. He brought his camera over and took a few photos of us laughing at our table and pretending to eat. Of course, I can't find a website for the restaurant, so who knows what he was really up to.