Hello Kitty Cafe in Sinchon

Siobhain's birthday was Saturday, and we celebrated with shopping at Dongdaemun, dinner at Mr. Pizza and an evening at the Hello Kitty Cafe in Sinchon. Look, I never had even the slightest interest in Hello Kitty before I moved to Asia. I was never into Hello Kitty as a kid,* and despite the Hello Kitty cellphone charm I bought last night,** I'm still not. However, if you get a high enough concentration of any sort of paraphernalia in one place, it stops being weird and starts being hilarious. The Hello Kitty Cafe, which is pink and cutesy and other adjectives that would normally make me roll my eyes, is the perfect example. It stops being about the anthropomorphic kitty and starts being about the lolz.***

We bought Siobhain a Hello Kitty birthday cake and sat around and knit for a few hours. Caroline and I explored the cafe, taking pictures and boggling at the breadth of the Hello Kitty paraphernalia. We all laughed at the long-suffering boyfriends who had been drug to the cafe by their girlfriends and emasculated by being forced to drink a latte decorated with Kitty's face in cinnamon on the foam. We also laughed at the WiFi password kiten - a misspelling of kitten.

Dear Asia, please never change.


For all your Hello Kitty teapot needs.


And who doesn't need a Hello Kitty wicker basket set?

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Even the stairs are decorated with Hello Kitty!
More photos are here.

* Baby!Cait was not a girly child. Baby!Cait was really into books and playing make-believe and, before she knew how to read, playing make-believe that she already knew how to read books.
** Which is fitting, since cell phone charms are another thing I wasn't even remotely interested in before I moved to Asia.
*** My motto: Doing it for the lolz since 1985.

Directions: Go to Sinchon Station (신촌역) on Line Two and take Exit 3. Walk straight for about a block until you reach a major intersection; Nature Republic will be on your right. Turn right (without crossing the street) and walk straight for two blocks. Just past Macos (the building with the faux-stain glass storefront) there is a small side street. On one side of the alley is 몬된고양이 (Naughty Cat - a store selling cat related charms and trinkets) and on the other side is a Happy Table and a Baskin-Robbins. Turn right up the side street. The Hello Kitty Cafe is just a few yards in on the right. A quick Google search turns up a location in Hongdae as well.

Home!

I'm back from China! I flew into Seoul on Wednesday night with over a thousand photos, quite a lot of new jewelry and an impressive array of bruises.*  I knew I was home when I saw two giant advertisements featuring Kim Yu-na before I even made it out of the airport. I went back to the airport yesterday morning to drop my family off and managed to get stuck on the Incheon Bridge for over an hour when my bus broke on the way home. Because of course it did. I've spent the past two days holed up in my apartment, trying to go through vacation photos (the terracotta soldier photos just won't end) and discovering that post vacation/house guest laundry is easier to accomplish when you have a dryer.

My plan is write a travelogue about the trip and upload my pictures to Flickr, but I have never successfully finished a travelogue for any vacation longer than four days, so we'll see. (I always start one, but I usually get bored and quit after day four or five.) I do have a solid week of desk-warming to work on it though, so hopefully I'll at least get to the part where my little sister got locked in my bathroom for an hour or my mother was briefly detained in a Beijing train station. FUN TIMES!

*I might have fallen down a flight of stairs.**
**And by "might have fallen down a flight of stairs," I mean I totally fell down a flight of stairs. Face first. Sometimes I'm not so good at walking.

영어 캠프 - Week One

English camp has improved after the snafu of the first day, thankfully, but it's still been hectic. Since I thought I was only teaching the 3rd & 4th graders last week, I had only planned for the 3rd & 4th grade camps and was going to use my afternoons to plan for the 5th & 6th grade camps. This means that I have to plan and prepare two lessons from scratch every afternoon in addition to finishing prepping for the 3rd and 4th grade classes. It's doable, but it means I'm busy and guys, I'm done. I am out of energy, ready for vacation, ready to see my family and ready to not have to deal with students and lesson plans for a few weeks.

None of this ennui is helped by my normally lovely co-teacher. English camp is my responsibility; she's just around to fill out the paperwork and help with translations, so in the afternoon while I plan for camp the next day, she's taking a nap or watching TV. Not exactly conducive to creating a productive work environment, especially when all I really want to do is go curl up in the backroom with a book. I'm glad there are only three days left.


Adorable moppets!
The 3rd and 4th grade classes have been a joy, mostly because the students are undeniably adorable little moppets. Last week, we studied colors and foods, which meant lots of coloring activities. On Tuesday, I gave the students a worksheet with eight line drawings and told them how to color in the pictures. The carrots were orange and green. The dragon was blue, yellow and purple. The flower was green, yellow, orange, pink, blue and purple. "Teacher," my students groaned, "that's an ugly flower."


북 경률 likes chicken and doesn't like French fries, which I think is ridiculous. They taste so delicious together.
During the food unit, I had the students draw their favorite and least favorite foods, which was an interesting glimpse into their minds. While a few kids still claimed to dislike vegetables, no one claimed a processed food (pizza, french fries) or a desert as their favorite food. I doubt a survey of 20 American 3rd and 4th graders would found the same thing. Meat and fruit were popular favorite foods, while other students chose Korean dishes as their favorite food. I had to explain that in English, kimchi is still called kimchi and that while bulgogi technically translates to "fire meat," foreigners just call it bulgogi.


A truth universally acknowledged amongst 5th graders: big, fuzzy dice are awesome!
The 5th & 6th grade classes have been small - only six boys are regularly coming to the basic class, which is fine by me. Lessons have been a mixture of a review of topics we studied last semester and a preview of topics we will cover next semester. It's a bit of a cop out, but having six kids versus forty kids changes how I can teach a topic, especially difficult concepts such as prepositions. I gave the boys a piece of candy and told them what to do with the treat. "Put the candy on your head. Put the candy in your pencil case. Put the candy next to your eraser. Put the wrapper in my hand. Put the candy in your mouth!"

We studied houses and furniture (Lesson 12: This Is a Bedroom) on Thursday. As an activity, the boys drew and labeled their dream houses. There were the usual rooms - bathrooms, kitchens, bedrooms - but the boys quickly grew tired of such plebeian rooms and dreamt up homes with PC방 (a LAN gaming center, a popular place in a country where Starcraft is the national sport and there are such things as professional computer gamers), ski slopes, department stores, subway stations, banks and their friend's house.


Left: Three PC방, two kitchens, one bathroom and one batroom! Right: I like the attention to detail - the ski slope has easy, medium and difficult slopes.
The 5th & 6th grade advanced class has continued reading Aesop's Fables. Last week we read, The Grasshopper and the Ants, The North Wind and the Sun and The Wolf and the Crane, and through the magic of Youtube, I showed the students video clips of the stories. I've had the kids do lots of writing exercises: they drew a cartoon version of The North Wind and the Sun and wrote down what they would have done as the characters in The Wolf and the Crane. Tomorrow, I'm gong to have them argue whether hunting is ethical. I'm not use to having this advanced a class, and it's been fun.


Drawing cartoons is srs bsns!

and then I cut off all my hair

I got my hair cut this weekend! One of the many ways I fail at being an adult is getting regular hair cuts. You're suppose to get a hair cut what, every six weeks? I can probably count on one hand the number of hair cuts I've had since I graduated college three years ago. I've spend half that time in Korea, where hair cuts are made difficult by the language barrier and hair dressers who don't believe me when I tell them I don't have a perm, just naturally curly hair, but I have no excuse for the year and half I spent in the States.

I went to Bucheon for the hair cut.  For those of you who aren't familiar with the southern suburbs of Seoul (so... most of you) here's a map:


I live in Seongnam, the blue check, and went to Bucheon, the red check. It's not a short trip - between the local bus to the Seongnam bus terminal and the express bus to the Bucheon bus terminal, it took about an hour and a half - but it's worth it for a hair dresser who both knows how to cut curly hair and doesn't charge a small fortune to do so. Also my friend Marie, who was also getting her hair cut, lives out that way.

So right, my hair. It's short! It's a little shorter than I wanted, but after that first snip is made, the die has been cast, and now that I'm use to it, I think really like it. It's been a long time since my hair had a proper style. For most of my life, I had very very fine hair. No, whatever you're thinking, it was finer than that. Then, at some point during high school, my hair started to get thicker. Then it started to curl, and one day I woke up and realized I had a completely different head of hair than I had had a few years previous and I had NO IDEA how to style it. I think this is the first hair cut I've had that properly deals with the curls.  I worry a little that this makes me look like a dandelion, but I like it!


This was taken at lunch right after the hair cut. The hair dresser blew my hair dry and then went back and curled it. He called it "punk style". Then I walked outside into the pouring rain and my hair immediately went SPROING!


This was taken about an hour ago in my bathroom. (You can see the dinner dishes in the kitchen in reflection.) I let my hair air dry and curl as it pleases with just a little product to help combat the dandelion effect. The curls are a bit softer and bouncier than when the hair dresser styled it.


After the hair cuts, Marie and I waded (like I said, pissing rain) to a shabu shabu restaurant for a seriously delicious lunch. Om nom nom.

영어 캠프, Day One - A Bit of a Disaster

Today was the first day of English camp and it was a mild disaster. There are four different camps: 3rd & 4th Grade Basic, 3rd & 4th Grade Advanced, 5th & 6th Grade Basic and 5th & 6th Basic Advanced. I was under the impression that I would teach the two 3rd & 4th grade camps two periods a day this week and the two 5th & 6th grade camps two periods a day next week. I was wrong, and will actually be teaching all four groups one class every day for two weeks. I don't know if I misunderstood the schedule or if the schedule was changed at some point and I just wasn't notified, but I discovered the mix-up fifteen minutes before the 5th and 6th graders showed up. I wasted a few precious moments staring at my co-teacher with wide eyes and whispering that I had nothing prepared for the older students before rushing to my office to swear like a sailor and throw together two lesson plans.

It turned out okay. I taught the 5th & 6th grade basic class a beefed up version of the 3rd & 4th grade lesson and plied them with candy to make up for boring them. The 5th & 6th grade advanced class was saved by an Aesop's Fables easy reader textbook and the magic of Youtube. The girls read an abridged version of The Grasshopper and the Ants, answered the textbook provided listening comprehension questions, wrote their own summery of the story and then watched the 1934 Disney Silly Symphonies retelling of the story. God bless Youtube.

Considering how unprepared I was for the lesson, I'm impressed with how well my 6th grade girls did. This was 엄예솔's summery of the story:

Ants are saving food for winter.
But grasshopper doesn't working. (She struck out the -ing on her own.)
Winter come. Grasshopper was very hungry.
Grasshopper comes to ant house.
Ants and grasshopper eat together.

Pretty awesome, right? She flubs the tenses a bit, but that's a good summery of the story with no major grammatical mistakes, all in her own words. I count it as a win!


3rd & 4th Advanced class playing Go Fish. Assa!