more pictures. crazy temple.

why is there a temple hidden behind the giant apartment buildings??


apparently it's very toxic orange dust that makes the sky this color. my korean teachers say i shouldn't go outside when it gets really bad. yikes.



temple #1


smaller temple


little statues placed on a bigger statue


they are pretty intricate.


i think these lead to a graveyard area.

blue skies

hooray! i was getting sick of grey.

korean tv

I love Korean television, which is a bit strange because I never watch Korean TV shows. There's always US TV shows or old action movies on, amazing. But lately I've noticed a new pattern. You can ALWAYS find an episode of 'America's Funny Home Videos' on. It's also the only English show they don't subtitle (translating what people are saying into Korean on the bottom of the screen).

Most of my students watch it.

So basically, AFHV is a show where Koreans get to watch a bunch of Americans make fools of themselves with no context, awesome. Granted, there isn't a whole lot of dialogue to explain, but it's still interesting they don't even try.



If it's a normal TV show there's always Korean subtitles, and if it's a cartoon they redo all the voices in Korean. I'm surprised how many American cartoons are popular here, I would have thought it'd be more Japanese and Korean ones. But Spongebob, Ben 10, Timmy Turner, etc. all pretty popular with many of my students.

I've gotten pretty awesome at drawing Spongebob with whiteboard markers. Though drawing him terribly is much more entertaining. "TEACHER NOOOOOOOOO. THAT IS BAD!!!" Haha, I know.

Efficiency

I live on top of a big hill. It's about a 10 minute walk, all at a decent angle. I'm walking home tonight, and I see a kid on a bike ahead of me. I get halfway up the hill, I am ahead of the kid on the bike. If riding a bike up a steep hill is more work, and slower, why wouldn't he just walk it up? I don't understand.

Teeth

So I'm in my final class of the day. It's a class of four of our best students. The highest level students at our school. One of them, let's call her Anna, says her tooth is 'vibrating.' This confuses me, but okay.

Halfway through the class she starts putting her hand in her mouth. When she said vibrating, she meant 'wiggly,' her tooth was loose. And she plays around with it some, and it pops out.

"Teacher (Korean students always refer to you as 'Teacher') , can I go to the bathroom?" "Yes, please go to the bathroom and clean up the blood." And she does.

She comes back with some gauze and is pretty entertained. We go back to reading our newspaper and everything is good. A little later, she's just playing with her tooth on the desk. I find this hilarious, but I don't want to comment, in case she gets embarrassed. But I like that I have a class with these super hardworking students, and they can still be entertained by a tooth. I have a feeling it would be similar with American students. So you play with your tooth, Anna, I hope you get money from the tooth fairy.

Andrew makes a Good Bad Decision

So my two friends have convinced me to run a 10K. That's a 10-kilometer/6-mile race in April. Now, most people would probably say "Good decision! Running is healthy!" I would agree with that statement. The 'Bad' part of the decision is that I hate exercise, like, really hate. I run when something is chasing me. So going from nothing to 6-miles in a little over a month is going to be pretty challenging.

Captions by random Korean students

The time limit is 90 minutes, and I know I can beat that. But at the current time, I'd have to walk half of it. My goal is to MAYBE be able to complete it without walking. I think that may be aiming too high, but I'd rather aim high than low. If I can do it under 50-60 minutes, I'll consider myself satisfied.

But if I can keep this up and not absolutely hate the exercise it should only have good results (obviously.). Get a little slimmer, get the happy-exercise-brain-chemicals flowing, have more eneregy, hooray.

So for the next month: No soda, minimum of 30 minutes run time 6 days a week, healthier food.

I'll miss you Pepsi.

the city

One of the busier streets in Seoul. It's in a neighborhood called Gangnam. It has a fair number of foreigners and is a really big commercial stop. It's home of one of my favorite bookstores here, Kyobo. Not many stores carry English books but they do and have a decent enough selection. You can actually barely tell this is Korea in this picture, strange.

waking up early

if you consider 8am early, for me it is. i go to sleep at 2! construction workers throwing very large pipes from the fourth story window of a building. lots of pipes, upwards of an hour.























which has led me to believe that the building is somehow alive, and trying to cause me inconvenience. it's really the only reasonable answer. here's what i imagine it looks like when my back is turned or am asleep.

random pictures!

picture from our school's rooftop during the biggest storm in many, many years. most of my students had never heard of a "snow day."


one of the biggest shopping centers in seoul (i think), it was pretty around christmas.


crazy statues outside an art museum. smooshed people.


my friend larry being contemplative at our favorite restaurant near work.


a quaint view from near my apartment on my walking route to work. it's surprisingly pretty during the right time of day.

english names and goodbyes

i got asked about english names a couple days ago (hey shayla). 98% of students at english academies usually take on an english name as well. this is to get more involved in the learning process, and because a lot of foreigners have difficulties pronouncing korean names properly. it took me a few months to get a good hang of it and even now i get some that are curveballs sometimes. yeong eon for example.

so when a student comes along without an english name, sometimes you get to give them one! depending on the teacher this can be a great, or terrible thing. some stranger names of students at the moment: lysol, milk, spongebob, jet, santa. i promised a number of my old students that i'd try to name some korean students after them. so this is an update on that.

i think it's a bit rude to just give names, so i usually write about 5 choices on the board and let them choose. usually i do 4 MO names and one crazy name that i don't really let them choose (like "mr. dangerous" or "sparky") anyways, so far i've had the following names chosen: jacob, brittany, dylan, gabriel and abby. there were also two special cases: su-bin and ye-rim. on the first day of class, they refused to tell me either their korean names OR english names. so they became shayla and shannon. next class they relented and told me their real names, but it was too late.

i'm just glad when a student isn't named 'david' or 'sally.' for some reason a very large percentage of my students have those names. they're not bad names, but i need more variety! i had 5 davids out of 50 students one semester. there's a lot of other really good names too, students!

and on the goodbyes note:
my good friend alex left last evening. other teachers have left since i've arrived, but i've known him almost the longest and i lost my video game buddy. quite sad. he should be back in florida in a few hours, i'm a little bit jealous. i've finally hit my six month mark (that's crazy), so there's more goodbyes coming in not too long. but it also means a lot of my friends are pushing to do more things. i think we're organizing a trip to japan in may. hooray.