a day in the life

We haven't really been up to much lately, so I thought I would just post a schedule of our standard work day.

9.50am:  Start work

Generally we would arrive at work and get told by our Korean Kindergarton partner what we had to do for kindergarton that morning.

10am: Kindergarton

Kindergarton lasts around 80-90 minutes.  Pretty much you get there, take attendance, ask all the students how they are today (answers : i am happy, i am angry, i am so so).  Then story time, it takes 10minutes to read 4 pages of a story with them repeating after you.  The hardest part is probably getting them to sit still on the mat.

Then maybe you would have some language activity (for example : "what is it" "it is a scissors") and then it's time for a toilet break.  Toilet break is kind of weird because you can't close the doors to the toilets and my girls always look at the wee boys using the urinal and giggle.

Then game time.  Then math time.  This is less math and more learn to write the number 4 etc (down, across and down again - that makes number 4!) and then colouring.  Or coloring, as we're now bound to spell.

At 11.15 it's snack time.  My favourite part.  Generally consists of a drink or some sort and some food.  Today was a muffin and some orange juice (in Korea muffins go straight up).  Yesterday was a cookie and a little yoghurt drink.

At 11.30 we go back to our desks and usually write lesson plans etc until 12.50.  

12.50: Lunch

We go home.  Cam checks the cricket score, then cooks us lunch.  Sometimes we go to FusionChina for some Ja Jung Myon.

2.00: Back to school, for more sitting around/lesson plans.

2.40:  Class 1, first half.

We take 3 classes a day, each have 2 parts.  We spend one part with one class, and then move to another, swapping with a Korean teacher.

The first class is usually the younger (and dumber) students.  You spend half the lesson making sure they've done their homework and assigning them new stuff.

3.20: Class 1 second half

Generally similar to first half except you don't have to check homework and instead play games for most of it.

4.10: Class 2 first half

Similar to above but slighty better at english

4.50: Class 2 second half

See above.

5.40: Class 3 first half

These are the funner classes because they're still kids, but they're a bit older and more fun.  And they're almost fluent in English, they can pretty much find some way of explaining anything to you, which is cool.

6.20: Class 3 second half

My second half class are so amazing.  And they had a surprise birthday party for me where they all brought chips and candy and fanta, and someone's mum (mom) brought us 2 pizzas (on both the topping was potato).  It was really fun.

7.00: Home time

is anybody out there?

hello?  is anybody reading this blog?

some comments might be nice.

Major building, busy road.

Due to pay day still being a good 3 weeks away we decided to have a quiet weekend and explore Suwon a bit.  First stop, our apartment building.

Floor 1 (aka ground floor) has a lot.  A book store (misleadingly named "Candy House"), a stationary store, a burger joint, a japanese place, a pizza place, a dairy, a chemist and several over the counter fast food joints.

It also has Tekken 2.  This is Cam and his new friend.  

Floor 2 has about 3 korean bbq restaurants and the upstairs of the burger joint.  We went to one of the korean bbq restaurants the other night, you get like, hunks of fatty pork and a whole lot of side dishes.  Take a piece of lettuce, put a bit of meat and a few side dishes (ie. garlic, onion, kimchi, some spicy sauce and some meat salt) on it, wrap it up and eat.  Yummo.

Floor 3 had a some english schools.

Floor F (4 - but they don't use the number for buildings.  something about death.. I can't remember) had 2 dentists, and a pharmacy.

Floor 5 had more english schools (3 of them)

Floor 6 more english schools.

Floor 7 we hit the jackpot.  Ping pong world for starters.  We were going to play but were unsure whether there was a tournament going on, or if just all Asians actually are amazing at ping pong.  Across from that is a yoga studio.  And down the hall was virtual golf!

Floors 8, 9 and 10 were all more english schools.  We live on Floor 11 which along with Floor 12 is only apartments.

This was happening in our apartment

Bath Time

We went to some korean bath house in the gym the other night where everyone gets all nakie. I got plenty of stares, probably for a number of reasons. Unfortunately for you there were no pictures taken. My highlight came from the sauna with some real fat guy, who keep looking at me inappropriately and then smiling and nodding. After that we went to the cold pool and he did a bomb. Also I saw my boss from the school. It was all really weird.

Birthday

On Penny's birthday we went shopping and found the bestest of all birthday treats, candy floss on a stick. None of that crap you get in a bag. STICK. 

Some crazy shop. I was trying pretty hard I guess.

CONTACT US

Last time we posted the wrong phone number.  Here are some real contact details.

To call us from New Zealand (and China)

00 82 31 243 1408

To call us from Korea, outside of Suwon

031 243 1408

To call us from Suwon

243 1408

To post us letters/postcards

1126, Jun Yeon Major Building 877-4,

Jungia-dong, Jagan-gu,

Suwon,

Kyunggi-do,

440-841

Korea

To post us parcels/valuables

SLP-Buk Suwon,

5F Sogang Plaza Building,

876-6 Jungia-dong, Jagan-gu,

Suwon,

Kyunggi-do,

440-841

Korea

Saturday

On Saturday night we went to some bar down this alleyway up this elevator and down this tunnel. You had to take off your shoes and then lay around and take time delay photos to make capture the feeling of the place. The vibe. 

There were some areas to lounge around on.

This is expert lounging position that I am demonstrating. My heart rate dropped to 3. 

And just to show it wasn't all relaxing in sipping green tea frappa's, here's me doing some boogying. WOAH SLOW DOWN, everyone was saying. 

ZOMG!?

friday

So on the weekend there was some sort of celebration about some guy ridding Ireland of snacks. The rules were that you had to wear green, have orange hair, drink heavily, look depressed (poetry optional) and have some english guy with you whose jovial spirits worsen yours. 

Here's me covering all of those with Penny's (and mine to a degree) friend Alex, from Liverpool or Manchester or some god awful place.

VICTORY!

Just round the corner from this photo Penny almost got ran down by a rogue on a rogue motorcycle and meanwhile I was setting all kinds of records on this game where you have to boot a ball as hard as you can. 610. Emails have been sent to Mehrts challenging him. 

International drinking rules are just that. Penny closely abides by them. I'm sure if St Pat saw us drinking that horrible CASS instead of Guinness he would have rolled over in his grave, or where ever Saints are buried. 

Watches!

On the street round where we live there are these games, like you see at movie theatres in New Zealand with a claw that comes down and grabs prizes. Its like 10c a turn so we were playing and we won some totally sweet watches. This is us blinging out.

Mine says cowboy and has some dudes rustling cattle or something on it. The pants I got for one buck at some place nearby.

Dunedin or Suwon?

MINCE!!

our phone number is: 82 031 243 1408

our address is: 1126 Jung Yeon Major Building 877-4, Jungja-dong Jungan-gu, Suwon, Kyunggi-do, 440-841 Korea

The school address is: SLP-Buk Suwon, 5F Sogang Plaza Building, 876-6 Jungja-dong, Jangan-gu, Suwon, Kyunggi-do, 400-841 Korea

Party time.

So we went out to Hongdai on Friday night and met up with my friend Nick Brown from unicol and some of his friends.

Here is Nick dressed up as a korean. We are at a place called the Ho Bar, and according to this asian guy I was talking to Korean Ho is good to go.

                                                      

This is us with Dave, this guy from Sligo prison or something. Penny couldn't understand him and whispered to me "is english Dave's first language?", but unfortunatly for her at that stage her whispers were rather loud and Dave overheard.

 This is Me with The Han, which roughly translates as 'The One'. He was a pretty cool guy, and taught me some korean and gave me advice on how to approach korean babes, all of 

which I have thankfully forgotten.

                                       

                      

                               24 hour KFC. Wicked!

This is Nick, Keith and Penny (twins in matching white skivvies) and me, the bar we were at actually ran out of the cheapest beer so we had to drink the dreaded CASS (next cheapest) then they ran out of that (no doubt largely due to us) so we had to drink bud. People don't come to Korea for the beer, although the price is pleasing.

Nick and Dave went to Thailand and saw Transformers. Dave got a t-shirt and Nick got a tattoo..  One guess which is more pleasing to the ladies.

After any good night there is the train and bus ride home at 8am, this is how we felt.

I am so happy. The flash of that photo made me feel really nice.

BBQ'in it up

This is some korean barbeque action shots. We are with some other teachers from our school. This place is just round the road from where we live and is highly recommended by all concerned, but when we arrived there were no spare tables. Seeing us being 7 and a couple who had just seated being 2 they were promptly removed and we took their spot.  Much to everyones embarrassment and confusion, but I think they eventually found a seat for everyone.

You cook the food yourself on a hotplate situated in the centre of the table. Normally a korean guy in your group will cook for everyone but seeing as we were asian free we got the closest coloured guy to cook. Closely coloured to koreans, not a coloured guy that was just around close to us. He was both. The beer in the foreground is korean beer called CASS. I put that in bold so you remember to keep well away from it. 

Here's a close up of the action. The other stuff in shot is kimchi soup, which compared to kimchi is really good, which shocked Penny. There were assorted spicey dipping sauces and veges to help remove the CASS taste from your mouth. Oh yeah and Penny trying to grip meat and garlic with chopsticks is worth the price of admission.

VIDEO. (beyond 2000)

So this is a video tour of our apartment for those of you who care about that. 

. 

ok, blog time.

this is cam, knitting on our bed.  it's about the size of a king double in width, and about 1.8m long.  so not huge. 

this is us on monday before school.  it's like, 10.45am.  we're pretty jet-lagged, and i have the flu.  but we're still pretty excited i guess.

we used that bottle tripod.  it's so sweet.

this is blake and i sleeping on the plane.  blake wears those masks like a total pansy.

atleast i drool like a man.

my other photos won't load.  but maybe cam will be able to post them later.  plus we're going out for some korean bbq tonight so maybe there'll be photos of that.

so far korea's been pretty amazing.  it's insane because there are just really tall buildings everywhere, and they have real brightly coloured ads all over them.  and the buildings are weird because like, our apartment building is not just apartments.  it has 12 floors, and only 11 and 12 are apartments.  the basement is a grocery store (smells weird), first floor has tonnes of stuff, like a pizza place, a hamburger joint, a waffle place, somewhere to buy cell phones, somewhere to buy rubbish bags.. and probably heaps more.  floor 2 has a bank, and other stuff.  uhm floor 9 has a gym, but not an apartment gym but one that you pay for, floor 3 has 2 beauty parlours (they're real big on skin peels over here).   i don't even know what else yet.  it's insane anyway.  and all buildings are like this.  

we haven't done heaps yet.  we've been jet lagged and real busy and i've had the flu.  but we went to a supermarket that was like 4 floors.  it sold like bikes, and rabbits (pets) and pet birds in bird cages.  it had like, literally 100 different taste testers going on.  it sold clothes.  it had a 1 2 3 dollar shop inside it.  real amazing.