Hwa Sun and Jaebin!

Favorite day of the week. Can't beat seeing my 5th graders and having them participate in the activities I prepared for them.

After school it was off to visit Hwa Sun and Jaebin. When I arrived, Jaebin was working with his English tutor. While he was studying Hwa Sun and I did some catching up. I shared some cookies with them and they loved them. Later, her husband returned home and we went to dinner at the Smoky Saloon for a burger. Jaebin got Hwa Sun's old cell phone (she got a new one) and he was busy playing with it all through dinner. His parents got mad at him, but Hwa Sun said if I wasn't there, they would be much more mean about it. We chatted some more when we got back to their house and I played some card game with Jaebin (Hwa Sun and I were pretty sure he was making up the rules as he went!) Jaebin also played the violin for us. He recently won second place in some school contest, which means next year when he enters 4th grade, he automatically gets a spot in the orchestra.

They walked me to the subway and said goodbye. I hope it's not another 3 months til I see them again!

"There is a polar bear in the water". This picture cracked me up--all the students on his team were yelling at him because they couldn't tell what it was! Haha

One of my 5th graders drawing "there is a polar bear in the water"; the opponent's picture

Jaebin playing his violin

My big sis and me

Teachers Fieldtrip and Joe's Birthday

We had another fieldtrip for the teachers. This was a hiking trip to Bukhansan Mountain. I asked my COT if she was coming and she said no because her health isn't that great and in the 5 years that she has been at our school she hasn't missed one day of work or ever came to work late. And if she went hiking her condition would be bad and she would get sick. It was actually beautiful and I took off one of my layers once we started walking some. There were 2 groups-the male teachers took a more challenging course, and actually went to the peak that Kwang Min and I went to last time. The other group was the one I was with-my life COT and some other female teachers--we just went on "Dulegil" which is just a path that goes around the mountain, but there was a little bit of 'hiking' or stair climbing we had to do.

We left school around 2 and hiked for about an hour and a half. Then we walked to a restaurant that our school has been going to for a really long time after doing a hiking event like today. Our walking group met up with the rest of the teachers from my school there. We had some traditional Korean food for dinner. Afterwards, we got "service" and the restaurant had a shuttle bus take some of us back to the school. That was really nice. I got home a little after 6 and had decided earlier in the week I would be making cookies. I ran over to Emart to look for pretzels and M&Ms. I found a bag of M&Ms but no pretzels, but Jacob said his store had some and told me he'd come up to deliver them. So, I whipped up the batter and waited for my pretzels to arrive. Jacob came over and I added my final ingredients and--voila, M&M Pretzel Cookies were born. They turned out really good.

Jacob and I watched some TV on my computer and did a little bit more research for our trip.

Happy Birthday to Joe!

Bukhansan

Teachers

Fall

Red, red.

Love Fall

Some pretty purple berries

CUTE dogs we passed on our way down the mountain--I WANT ONE!

Just the first round of dinner--a few more plates were brought out after this

Dinner, Popcorn and Cheonggyecheon

I came into class and tried to get our touch screen monitor to turn on and it wouldn't. My COT came in late and she tried to get it to work as well. She called the IT lady who came shortly. Meanwhile I tried to continue class while they were talking. Turns out the previous day during the after school program it just went "POP!!!" and the screen went blank. The touch part still works, but it doesn't display anything. Anyway, it was time for improvisation to finish the class and the rest of the classes. So, we ended up playing charades after they did some more listening and speaking drills.

After school I took a bus to the center of the city. I went to the underground shopping at Jongno. I bought a dress shirt, sweater, long sleeve shirt and tights. Then I went to go meet Jacob in Myeongdong. We went to a restaurant for jjimdalk 찜닭 which is like a chicken stew with soy sauce, noodles and vegetables. It's one of my favorite dishes. After dinner we stopped at the CGV (movie theater chain) and I got some cheese popcorn. We took it to Cheonggyecheon for the Lantern Festival and walked along the stream. As it turned out some of the other English teachers I knew, including Krystle were also visiting Cheonggyecheon and we ran into them.

We were going to go to Tom n Tom's for Honey Butter Bread and to do some research for our trip to Thailand/Malaysia over my winter break after I teach my winter camp. We walked in and could not find any open tables, so we headed over to a Starbucks closer to City Hall.We stayed there for almost 2 hours, which meant I got home really late. :(

Jjim Dalk Dinner

Cheese Popcorn!!!

Lantern Festival!

Jacob and me at the Lantern Festival

One of the lanterns

Another lantern

Planning Monday

Pepero Day: I can't remember if I explained Pepero already--they are chocolate dipped cookie sticks. They are long and skinny and look like the number 1. So, Lotte (a big brand here that owns almost everything...) has decided to capitalize on this and make a "Lotte Holiday" (like Hallmark Holidays...) and say that 11/11 is Pepero Day--it looks like 4 Pepero sticks. It is kind of like Valentine's Day where students bring in a box of Pepero for their friends.

 My co teacher (COT) and I wanted to try something new with one of our classes to give more focused attention on the students. During the online training I have to do, I saw some strategies for co teaching and one was "parallel teaching" where we split the class and each take a smaller group and teach the same material. Well, she split the class based on ability and she took the lower group. My group enjoyed the lesson and then we met back as a whole group for a game. Afterwards, my COT said that her group noticed the class was split on ability and were not as responsive because they found themselves in the 'low' group. I didn't realize she was going to split them that way actually, and she came to class late so we weren't able to talk about how we were going to split up the class. She said she did not like that idea and we didn't try adjusting it (not splitting by level) for any of the other classes.

After school I came home and relaxed a little bit. Then I went to go meet Krystle in Hapjeong. We had seen a cafe the other day we thought we would try because it had wifi. I arrived before Krystle and checked it out--it only had coffee and we were looking for dinner. So, when she arrived I took her down some of the side streets I walked with Kwang Min before and we found a place. The only drawback was that they didn't have a smoking room and people could just smoke anywhere in the cafe. We had already looked at a few places and trying to find vegetarian options and wifi was getting a bit difficult, so we stayed put. We ordered a margarita pizza and it was pretty good.

We ate and then we did some research for our Christmas trip. We originally were thinking Bali, but found out that it is their rainy season. So we spent most of our time looking at other countries--cost of flights and things to do at other places. Now Singapore is in the running.

Chuncheon Weekend Trip Day 2

We got up and went for the hotel breakfast. It was alright. Our group met up at 10 to leave for a hiking trip. It took about 45 minutes to get to the location. There was a Buddhist temple near the top. So we hiked to the temple. It wasn’t very challenging and was really beautiful. It was also nice to get out of the city and have really fresh air.

We had lunch at a restaurant right near the hiking area. We had “Dalk dori tang” which is a spicy chicken stew. It was pretty good. Then it was back to Seoul. The trip took us 4 hours. We were supposed to arrive around 5 maybe, we didn’t get in until almost 7. Unbelievable. The traffic was really bad. I was so disappointed that I had to miss soccer. I did make it to church on time and Father Francis (the Indian priest) had mass.

I came home after church and had a snack and watched some TV shows to relax and settle in. I’m not ready for winter—it is already too cold for me and it’s barely dipping into the 30’s. I’m definitely going to need to invest in another blanket and possibly a space heater.

Roasting Chestnuts!

Beautiful colors!!

So pretty out here

Krystle and me

Buddhist Temple

At the temple

Buddhist Temple

John and me

Lunch

Chuncheon Weekend Trip

I had to wake up bright and early for the trip to Chuncheon. We were meeting at 8am at the GOA’L office in Hongdae. I made it a minute or two early so I got a muffin from a shop in the subway station and waited for Krystle. She arrived and we walked to the office together. A few other people arrived and then all of a sudden a halmoni/ajuma street cleaner came up to our group and started yelling at us. She was angry because we were standing on the street and were “in the way” of where she wanted to be sweeping. She spent almost 5 minutes yelling at us, went away for a few minutes and then came back to yell at us some more. Luckily one of the GOA’L workers that was Korean was with us and she tried talking with the lady, but she was very frustrated by the older woman’s attitude. Finally everyone arrived and we walked to our bus.

We stopped once on the way to Chuncheon and arrived in about 2 hours or so. We got to the canoeing place a little early and had to wait for our reservation time. Then we had an “orientation”/training to explain the canoeing and course. And then, we were off! Krystle and I went together in a canoe. It was a lot of fun and the weather was actually warmer than I expected-all that paddling and I got warm in the 3 layers of clothes plus jacket I was wearing.

When we finished I had really bad cramps and felt sick. I got some pain meds from John (my soccer captain-he works for GOA’L) and just took it easy. I was in a lot of pain though. Everyone ate lunch, but I couldn’t even eat. We finished lunch and went to the hotel to check in. We had an hour to just relax and I took a nap. When I woke up I felt a lot better. Our group met up and went to check out downtown Chuncheon. It was raining, which put a little damper on everything. We walked to a bowling alley our hotel told us about, except when we arrived, it wasn’t there. So, we had to take a taxi to another location. We bowled 2 rounds. The first one we tied! The second one my team won! I also got one strike. It only cost 8,000W (a little less than $8) to bowl 2 rounds and rent shoes-nice. After we bowled, we took a taxi back to the area near our hotel and went in search of a restaurant. We found a Pho place and almost everyone ordered noodle soup. After dinner we came back to the hotel and Krystle and I talked until bedtime.

Canoes

Ready to go canoeing!

Krystle and the beautiful scenery

Alex, Krystle, ? and another adoptee

Krystle and me

Finally Friday

What a long week this has been. TGIF for sure!

My classes went fine, nothing too out of the ordinary with them. I was surprised that the last set of 6^th grade girls weren’t as excited about the INFINITE lesson as some of the other classes had been.

After school I came home and changed into my pjs. I was going to go to a party in Hongdae with other English teachers, but when the time rolled around to head out, I was too cold and too tired to even want to step out of my room. I stayed in and watched some TV shows on my computer, packed for my weekend trip and got ready for bed early.