Gum

For fuck's sake!

I can undersand the allure of chewing gum, it tastes pleasant and it gives you something to do.  But it sure can be fucking annoying.  Older women in Korea seem to be intent on chewing it into oblivion.  They'll just stick in a slice if gum and chew it until their mouth implodes due to over use.  But the thing is that they chew gum with their mouths open so that you can hear each and every chew.  This is something I have come to notice much more significantly since my mp3 player stopped working.  I suppose that this could just be a regional thing, but I think not and I have observed this, much to my irritation from many women. However it only seems to be with the 40 somethings, that likely have a family and most if not all have stopped caring.

Stuff

This week has been a fairly average week.  However I find there are generally things worth talking about in Korea, even though as a whole I have a boring life.  On Wednesday we had a meal to welcome the newest member of staff.  The main administrator of the school had left at the end of last week, which meant that one of the people I have been incapable of having a conversation with all year would be leaving.  However she would also be taking her rather cute two boys in the kindergarten.  So as normal I was not clued into whatever would be occuring in would be occurring.  Normally that would mean that we would be going to a resteraunt for a billion years and I would have to go and would not be able to leave until I had drunk far too much and been forced to do norebang.  However this week it was a suprising and welcoming change.  We had a meal at the caferteria, with food that had been brought in from the outside: Watermelon, sweet and sour pork and chicken.  Really good food and I did not have to loose my entire day to have it.

Thursday was not too bad, not good, but certainly much better than last week though.  I was actually given a chance to do some of the teaching and of course I was completely relied upon to provide games for the lesson which I had been given no time to prefer...great...

Friday was going pretty normally up until later in the afternoon.  When I got a phone call from my co-teacher/supervisor.  She was calling from a local school that I would be teaching the summer camp from in about 2 weeks time.  Apparently I needed to be at the school to talk about the camp and make some plans, however I was not. Therefore she would have to return to the school to pick me up, she should have told me before and brought me along, but she had not read the instructions properly.  Anyway I am used to that sort of thing, but on the way over to the school she backed into another car.  Great Korean driving to see in person...  Okay the rest of the meeting was fine and so brings me to the end of the working week.

On Saturday I went into Busan as usual, nothing special happened there, but it did rain all day and it was super heavy.  Possibly the heaviest I have experienced in here in Korea.  So as you can imagine we got fairly wet and spent our time dodging in and out of shops.

Finally here on Sunday, I decided to make some bread.  It went well, I was able to find some yeast at the Homeplus in Busan so it was a resounding success rather than the catastrophic failure I have come across when trying to make cakes with the available ingredients here in Korea.

Well, that's it I guess.  I always experience the weird stuff of course, but that's seeping into my brain turning it into standard reality and so I fail to report on it quite as often.  For instance the noises you can hear when out and about. The hacking noises people make as the hock up flem and spit it out (something that happens overly much), a man who sneezes in a similar manner that a Turkey 'talks' and a fella in one of the toilets sounded like he was trying very ahrd to produce a baby.

Night all.

Thursday

Had a crappy day on thursday.  It was the sane old bullshit as ever, I had to do 4 hours of classes with a teacher who wants me to give absolutely no input to the lesson and just sit at the back of the room like a useless piece of shit.  I am used to her manner to some degree, but never so far has she pushed me entirely from any control of the classroom.  It was a total affront to me.  I have no interest in being a useless piece of furniture.  I think I could abide being ignored if my co-teacher were able to actually do the job, but that is not the case.  She is unable to control the class in any form, which is a main aspect of her job.  Another issue is that her English is not of a high enough level for her to teach alone, she makes many basic errors that should not be passed on to the kids.  However it appears as though I have no real options though.  I could rock the boat, but saving face seems too important to the Koreans.  So I am forced to see that the best step forward for myself is just to let it pass me by and try to let go of the problems the kids may later face due to her teaching.

This is not a favourable result but it is the only one I can come to at this time.

Typhoon rain

Heavy rain has set in for the weekend, a typhoon is passing over.  However I like rain and it has helped to keep the heat down in Korea.  The humidity is not dimished, but it is generally nicer while it is raining.  I like to go out and enjoy the scenery.  I have been lucky enough to live close to visual attractive places in my life: a steam railway, a park and a canal.  But I have never until now enjoyed the view of a river.  On most days the river is barely worth that name, but when it rains for a couple of days that rapidly changes and it becomes more like a torrent.  I have posted pictures before of a wet day, but this time it has been super wet and I am going to post some more.

Water collection and blasting it's way to the central river.

The hills have disappeared behind the rain.

View from the top of my building looking out onto the river.

The rain is supposed to come to an end tomorrow, but it didn't actually start until a day after the weatherman said so, so I will asume that it is a little changeable.  So let's see when the rain will come again next, which I believe will be soon, since it is the rainy season after all.

Some kids

I had my camera at school on friday, so I thought I would take some pictures of the kids, they were all just messing about in my classroom at dinner time, or with the 6th grade I caught them in class, of couse some of them turned away from the camera, mainly the girls, but that's the same around the world. 

Random students:

These other kids are students from my 6th grade class:

English Speaking Contest

Today some of the kids were participating in an English speaking contest.  They could talk about any subject they wanted and they would be judged on their confidence, pronuncination and internation and content.  There was one kid from the 4th grade, four from the 5th grade and four from the 6th grade.  The ability of the kids varied.  Some of them were very confident, but their pronunciation was not very good and others had great content.  I was acting as one of four judges, although as it turns out my votes carried much more weight than the others.

All of the kids had a good stab at it, but there were clearly some better than others.  One kid was basically reading out Korean that had been written to sound like English, but it made the speech sound pretty awful.  Another chose to retell a story and a further kid chose a controversial subject regarding an island in dispute between Korea and Japan.  Unfortunately the speech regarding the island was clearly the work of his parents and it was rather fanatical if not quite a bit racist against Japan.  Of course that is not an issue here in Korea, but I was not in favour of it at all, and so he lost some marks in content from me, yet he would not have won anyway due to his pronunciation.

In the end we came to a decision about who had won and who would be the runners up, the 4th grade student would get a special commendation for having a go.  The prizes are simply certificates, although I can see that this may be something to use and look back on I decided that I wanted to reward all those that participated and hopefully not deter them from having a go again at another time.  So tonight I have baked a batch of cookies that I will distribute to the competitors.  Hopefully it will be a nice treat and likely cause a little jealousy from those kids that could have participated, but chose not to.

Rigth I'm off to bed, wonder when I'll add another post...

6 months coming up

This week my 5th ad 6th grade teachers came to a decision to split my classes up, quite independent of one another, but the same idea shone through.  I will take the more advanced kids and keep them going through the stuff I have been set to do and they will take the slower kids and teach them more fundamental things.  Now kids are always going have different levels of ability, however the difference is quite drastic at my school.  For instance there are some kids in the the 5th grade that can almost hold a conversation with me in English, all be it very basic and then there are some who are still trying to understand the alphabet.  This is not to say that any of the kids are stupid, rather that in a small rural area as mine there are a lot of kids coming from broken homes, plus society here is not driven in the same manner as other parts of the country.  Anyway all that just boild down to me getting better classes.  I do like the kids that I won't be teaching for a couple of weeks, but I can be more lively and run through a variety of things with the kids that can keep up.  I had my first lesson with the 6th graders and it wemnt really well, they seemed to enjoy themselves and so did I.  I hope the 5th grade class is just as good and that these good classes continue.

Now it's not all hunky dory of course.  While I do have these great classes from time to time, I am still subjected to having classes with kids that don't want to learn.  There are some kids in the 5th grade that have no intention of doing any of the work I set them in the after school classes.  The issue of discipline comes into play here.  The kids that come to this have a very low level of English and I think that that is the problem, they have not done very well in the class and turned away from it.  The only way they will even consider doing the lesson is if it is basically just a bunch of games, however English games require a certain amount of preamble, which they will not allow.  So in short I am unable to get them to do anything of actual value, which means they will just play games and then depart, if anything mildly challenging arises they will certainly depart.  I think also it has a certain amount to do with peer pressure, when the 3 girls come together they are worse, than if just one were to show up.

Today I went to Busan to meet up with Matt as ever.  We were not in line to do anything in particular.  However, however when I met up with Matt this time he was helping out two fellas.  These guys were from an engineering firm based in the UK and they were out in Korea working on a ship.  They're only staying in Korea for a month this time around, so we hung out for the day.  They did a bit of shopping for their families and I couldn't believe the amount of money they were able to just hand over and it seemly meant nothing.  After some shopping we had a meal, which came free from them as they said they could claim it back on expenses, that was cool.  The two guys were really down to earth guys and if they are in the area any time soon, we'll maybe hang out again.

On Sunday I will have been in the country for 6 months, a couple of days later I will have been teaching for 6 months.  I am half way through my contract.  I have to say that these 6 months have not been the easiest in my life, ha, no they have most probably been the hardest.  I am in a country where I do not speak the language and I have generally failed to increase the small level I do command.  I am in an alien culture,  with alien foods and few comforts of home.  The town I live in is very small and has few English speakers and the only excitement to be found lies with walking in the hills or drinking one's self into a stupor.  I experience a great deal of racism on many levels in my daily life.  I had a terrible experience that none should have to go through, by means of an earthquake rather than the holiday that I had paid so much for and really wanted to have with my family and finally I have issues with the restrictions placed on how I may teach and what I may do.  Yet it is not all doom and gloom, I am earning large amounts of money, gaining experience in many walks of life, meeting some new people and I like my teachers and students for the most part.  All I can say is that I do not love it here, but I do not hate it either.  Life here is just...meh.

I can hope that things will get better in the next 6 months.  I doubt this very much, but I can hope at least that life remains tolerable.  Yet I can at least look forward to my planned visit to the US to meet up with friends when I am done here.