Best Friday so far...

So this week was a little lonely, but I had a good Friday to look forward to.  I got to go on a field trip with the kindergarten classes.  We went on an hour and a half bus ride out to an apple farm to pick apples.  It was really nice to not have to teach and it was a fun day being outside with the kids.  Then when we got back to the school, I still had a few classes i was supposed to teach, but it was a big testing day so I didn't have to teach at all.  I just gave a test to the students and hung out. Pretty easy day for sure it was very nice.

Here is a picture of me and 3 or the 4 other teachers at my school. from left to right its Shiny, Melissa and Kate (obviously their English names)

I should have a bunch of pictures they took with me and the kids, so look forward to those!

Oh a holiday, is it?

Okay, so.. it has been a while since I have updated this blog, but it was because things were a little boring for a while. My friend Josh was back in America for some interviews at a couple schools to go into a dentist program.  But I did eventually find some way to cure my boredom. 

So this last weekend was Chuseok! (Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving) I also got gifts for Chuseok.  One of the student's parents gave all the teachers a big gift box, each containing 6 tubes of toothpast, 2 bottles of body wash, and 1 bottle of lotion.  cool.  All of the teachers also got another gift box from the directors. This one had 2 bottles of canola oil, 6 cans of tuna and 3 cans on original spam.  Im atleast happy about the canola oil haha. And I had a nice long weekend. I had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off!   Over the long weekend I met some new friends.  They are also English teachers at hagwans that live near by.  Their names are Josh (from Canada)  and Paul (from London).  We seem to have a lot of fun together and have hung out quite a lot. It was nice to have some days off and meet some new friends. There was a little of a downside though... Teaching only 2 days in the week makes the kids very restless in class because it is almost the weekend on the first day of class in the week.  Even though a few classes were difficult, I still had a good time teaching this week. 

My school just hired another teacher, but not a native speaker.  Melissa is a Korean teacher, but she just returned from being at university in Canada for the last few months, so she has good English.  It is nice to have conversations in good English with someone at the school finally haha. 

I have also gone to dinner and drinks with my German neighbors Hani and Maria.  They are leaving this Sunday to return to Germany for about one month.  So I am taking care of their plants and their mail. They are extremely nice to me and I think this is something nice I can do for them.  They gave me a bottle of wine for helping me, I hope my friends like wine!

All is well in Ulsan and at St. Andrew.

Here are 2 pictures i took on my cell phone camera of cool things from the Tongdosa Buddhist Temple I went to my first weekend here.

These are two of the four guardians carved out of wood.  They are truly awesome in person. They are about 20 feet tall. Sorry for shaky hand cell phone quality :)

Here is an huge 3 floors high woven Buddha and other important figures. again bad quality...

First week down.

I have now been in Korea for over a week.  My first few days were taken up by travel.  I had a 12 and a half hour flight followed by an hour train ride, and then again followed by another 3 hour train ride.  I didn't arrive at my apartment until 1am two days after my flight...  Getting picked up at the train station by my two directors was an experience in itself.  For one it is a married couple, the man doesn't speak one word of English, and the woman speaks very little English.  Once we loaded all my bags into the van, the first thing that was said to me was,  "we think you are very handsome, you are so tall."  I thought this was kind of a weird start at 1am to our employer - employee relationship. 


I finally arrived at my apartment where they kind of gave me a tour of the place and told me how everything worked, but I was so tired that the next day I was very confused about how to get hot water.  I had to turn on a thermostat, which is all in Korean, and also heats your floors which I found out later by standing in one place too long.  For my first two days I just walked around aimlessly around my area of the city.  Its a pretty cool area, I live only about 5 blocks from the ocean.  Unfortunately it is not a part of the ocean you would want to swim or go to the beach, there is a ship yard kind of near by and the water is a little dirty.  but there is a good beach about a 20 minute drive from here. 

My first week of teaching was very interesting to say the least.  I teach from 12:50-8:40pm  I teach 3 kindergarten classes first which only last 20 minutes.  then I have a break, then the rest of my classes are 30 minutes a piece, with breaks scattered throughout the day.  some classes speak almost no English at all, and others are decent.  The ones that speak none are very difficult to teach because they just sit there and stare at you and getting them to speak is a challenge.  But other than those few classes it is pretty good.  I am definitely worn out by the end of the day. 

The first weekend I went to an Irish pub and met a couple Russian guys who were a lot of fun.  They took me to this other bar which was not as awesome...  So here in Korea there are many bars which say "Western Bar" on the outside, which I kind of found out to be a sort of brothel for foreigners.  Once it got later in the night I noticed a lot of foreign guys getting frisky with the bar tenders, and then I quickly realized what was happening in the bar.  I quickly paid for my drinks and hightailed it out of there.  The next night some neighbors, who are German, noticed me just hanging out on my balcony and invited me to dinner with them.  They were extremely nice.  We had an awesome meal at this restaurant has the grill in the middle of the table and you get to cook right in front of you like its your own benni hannas, pretty awesome.  Afterward, they took me to a couple of bars that were not shady like the ones the Russians took me to, thankfully.  Then on Sunday, they took me to Tongdosa, which is the largest Buddhist Temple in all of Korea.  It was beautiful.  That was really a sight to see.

This weekend I went with a new friend, Josh who is from Indiana, to meet up with other English teachers.  We ended up going to a nori bong.  If you do not know what this is I feel sorry.  Nori bong is awesome, it is basically a room you rent and for your group and its a karaoke room! you get served food and drinks and do way too much karaoke.  It was a blast.  Afterward we went to a bar and met some new Korean friends and had a blast with them.   I also played some soccer with one of my little students which was kind of cool.

I will update the journey soon and hopefully get a camera soon to help share the craziness.