Birthday Parties and Myeongdong

This will be a post that has happened a while ago now, since it's already been 6 weeks and counting since we moved to Seoul!  I cannot believe that the time has flown by so fast.  It is amazing how in many ways we feel settled and comfortable with our lives here, but in SO MANY other ways still feel like we just got off the plane.  There have been many milestones since, but those will have to wait until the posts to come!

Apparently, birthday parties are the majority of what you pay for when you send your child to a Korean hagwon, because they are an enormous production.  We, as the teachers, are expected to bring gifts for the child - all of the students bring gifts for them as well, and their parents send them to school with gifts, and they give presents back to the kids who brought them stuff... It's just gift-giving hullabaloo all around.  The hilarity was doubled because my class celebrated 2 birthdays in the same month for Donna and Toby.

Notice how bored all of the kids look?  The picture taking in Korea is endless.  The party had 3 cakes and was fully dished out with pizza, fruit, snacks, etc.  The following is the best series of photos we were able to capture, complete with screaming, a yawn, and general lackluster... hahahaha. From left to right: Justin, Alice, Jean, Donna, Toby, Yours Truly, Jeremy, Helen.

Immediately after the party the kids went downstairs and had lunch... What?!  This time was also especially awesome, because Toby's mom hired a magician, so the whole school got to watch a magic show, including us.  We were able to stand witness to the fact that kid magicians are the same pretty much anywhere.  The bubbles were cool, though!

We also went this week to the (one of many here in Seoul) shopping hubs called Myeongdong.  I think Taggart's pretty DONE with shopping, though the markets do offer a lot.  We went with our friend Nate (remember Nate, from the airplane?) and his girlfriend, Danbi.  They introduced us to the Korean version of Monopoly, which is the first game I've ever tried to tackle in Korean.  I think we have it pretty much down, and the theme song is catchy too.  We went for lunch and ice cream in Myeongdong - there's a stand where you can get 32 cm. ice creams for like $3.  It was really fun.

Here's a really cool clock tower facade for some indoor shops, and the view from the maze of the streets.  One thing that is pretty cool, and weird, about Korea is that on hot days, the shops have people outside that stand in the middle of giant circles of dry ice and yell at you all of the cool things they have inside (we don't understand the yelling, but that's what Danbi told us they do).  The dry ice melts(?) in the sun, and so they look like they are standing on fog.  Its weird, but the cold does touch you legs as you walk by and it feels great.  Danbi says it's advertising for the shop having good air conditioning inside, which is a big selling point here.

 Here's us with yet ANOTHER ice cream excursion picture, and below a shot of our fabulous selves.

Abode Abroad ( As Coined By Taggart)

Alright, since this is kind of a tradition with us, here is a photo spread of our new kicks in Seoul.  We are on the north east side of the city right on the southern border of a suburb/district called Dobong.  The place was in need of a once-over with the Korean Mr. Clean, but we whipped it into shape the first week here and now it's a pretty nice place to come home to every day.  And we're on the 9th floor, which is crazy and fun! So here you go, first off a picture of our foyer! Aren't you excited!!! (So excited, I know you can't even stand it...)

We have a washer, but no dryer, as is typical for most Korean homes.

This is the view from the entryway, you can see into our kitchen and bedroom.

The bedroom was originally in this room, and not only is it really small, but it's the furthest room from the air conditioning, so we made this the sitting/junk room for now (right now we're using it to dry our laundry).  

Here's the kitchen with our cute little two burner gas stove and metal counter tops.  It actually makes for an easy cleanup since I can basically hose everything down when I make my usual cooking mess haha.

On the other side of the kitchen is our little nook for storage and food prep.  The previous owners even left us a little basil plant!  We'll see if I have any luck keeping that thing alive... O_o

Yes, we know everyone has been worried about how big our bed would be, but it is just fine for us!  It is a double, which definitely is smaller than what we've been used to, but we fit in it and everything :)

The desk nook in the far corner, which already came with those small boxes and a couple books on Korea.

Our his and hers closets are awesome, and here's a shot of our sweet sun room/balcony!

Did I mention we have a GREAT view??? We're pretty excited to make some sweet memories here!

School Times are Fun Stuffs

Alright, here it is, the report from our first week of school! I realize that now I am running about a week behind on blogging - I'm sorry! Life is already going full speed but we are catching up to the routines of life in Korea.  Is it weird that we've almost been gone for a month already? I think we have the basic in and outs of daily life down pat, and now we just need to fine tune our comfort ability with the mundane activities like going to the store, etc.

Our school is a Hagwon, which is a private school that teaches both kindergarten and after school English programs for elementary students.  We have two classes each day, though the afternoon classes rotate depending on the of day of the week, so essentially we have 3-4 classes total.  Most of the day is spent with our kindergarteners though, and they are a hoot! Taggart lucked out with these two cuties, Jay and Yeriel, who are both so cute and smart:

Jay is a total ham, and says the funniest stuff in this monotone way that cracks you up.  Yeriel is sweet and quiet, but also says funny things from time to time.  They love Taggart Teacher!

It is the running joke with us Western teachers that my class is kind of the struggle bus class.  Not in smarts, by any means - they are all really, REALLY smart for their age and most of them can actually almost read completey on their own - they are just supremely unruly.  I actually am losing my voice this week because my entire day with my class is, "sit down, don't bite, pay attention, 1,2,3, eyes on me!, SIT DOWN, your workbook is not origami, don't stab each other with pencils".... You get the idea.  It is totally exhausting but so awesome.  The kids are sweet and though I sometimes hate that I have 7 of them in a class with 3 very hyper and unruly boys, but I already love all of them individually and have been able to watch their improvement from day to day.

Here's Justin almost licking the teacher's stool, and Alice drawing me as a princess.

My afternoon classes have 3 students each, 3 girls in the first class, and 2 girls and 1 boy in the to second.  They are Korean age 8, which is U.S. 7, and they are seriously so flipping smart it's insane.  The vocabulary on a couple of my students is staggering, though, as expected, they have the attention spans of 7-year-olds, so we still have to discuss staying in your chair and paying attention.  One of the the big problems in these after school programs is how tired these kids are after having already attended a full day of school before coming to our school.  They get really burnt out, so it's our job to make sure they still get their work done but also get to blow off some steam.  I make sure we always have multiple break times in the afternoons so that everyone takes their sanity home with them at the end of the day (teacher included!).

Here's some of my afternoon class (Kate and Jihyun) playing with my photo booth, and a combination of both mine and Taggart's kindergarten students and their kitty masks.  The green ones are Ninja Turtle cats, just in case you were wondering.  They all thought this picture of them was hilarious.

Our school is so nice, and from what we've heard, we get taken really good care of for a private Hagwon.  We get fed lunch every day and the Korean teachers have been awesome at making sure we have everything we need.  They made sure we got our immigration taken care of, they double and triple checked to make sure our apartment was ok, they paid us cash for our first check because we can't get bank accounts until our alien cards come through, and they even took us to dinner this week for this AWESOME korean BBQ that you eat wrapped up in lettuce and mint leaves.  Overall, the work is rewarding but tiring, and we walk everywhere, so we are definitely sleeping well at night cause we are beat! I'll post more about our activities soon - tomorrow we have a birthday party in my class, and then we have a three day weekend for Korean Independence Day.  Woot!  

Date Night!

Korean BBQ is amazing.  I could ABSOLUTELY eat it every day.  There is this incredible place we went to when we first got here that I've been wanting to revisit every day, but we haven't made it back yet until yesterday.  It is SO GOOD.  We also went to Baskin Robbins for the first time here.  Baskin Robbins is everywhere in Seoul, but it is so much less janky here compared to the states.  The displays were so cute and the shop was so swanky that I took a couple of pictures.  So here is a brief glimpse at our date night last night!

 This place's "gimmick", so to speak, is that they cook the egg for your BBQ in a ring around the coals with some kind of delicious seasoning, bamboo shoots, and onion on the bottom (sorry Taggart).

 Each of us posing, excited and hungry!  Ok, maybe not as excited for the kimchi, let's be honest... haha.

 Apparently I have to be the model in these photos to prove that I enjoyed our date night haha.  So here's me, first with this awesome cold cucumber noodle salad that is served at a lot of places here, and then with pistachio almond ice cream.  You may notice that I am magically no longer wearing makeup in the second picture...?  I got a piece of hot something in my eye because I'm THAT talented and had to go flush my eye out in the bathroom.  But I'm fine, we got ice cream to drown my sorrows in!

We were impressed by how perfectly round the scoops of ice cream were!!!

 This was the most beautiful, clean, cute, swanky Baskin Robbins I've ever seen.

And the ice cream cakes were adorable!!! I know what I want for my birthday, please!

Vacation Week!

Man, is vacation awesome.  After having basically been busy continually since January, it was a REALLY nice reprieve for us to get some R&R for a week after our craziness of a move.  And boy, did we need it.  For the first two days of vacation, we did nothing except try to right our body clocks and catch up on Zzzs.  After that, we decided it was best to not waste the time we'd been given off and actually do some exploring!!! Here are some of the highlights of our week off:

National Museum of Seoul - The Ichon stop on our subway line was the first of our vacation adventures and connects directly to the free National Museum, which is enormous.  We didn't even see the whole museum because we had to give up halfway through the 2nd floor, it's that big.  We've heard a few people talk about how boring it is, but we really enjoyed it - there are lots of really old relics inside and there's also an impressionist art exhibit next door (which we haven't gotten to yet).  We'll definitely be back for more, but here's a few pictures from the excursion.

 These are huge Buddha and Bodhisattva statues that date between the 900-1100s.  The picture with Taggart is dark, but we thought you'd want to see how huge they were (in reference to him, of course)!

 A scepter of carved jade and gold, one of the many gorgeous pieces of pottery, and a bronze mini pagoda.

 Come on, you don't think we'd forget the Samurai sword?? Or the armor... also a huge stone pagoda.

This was a really cool bronze gilded horse that predates the Ming Dynasty.

You can't really get the whole perspective from this shot, but the entrance is a huge glass atrium, and this was taken from one of the staircases that looks out over it.  It's really laid out beautifully.

Dongdaemun Market - This was seriously the craziest, scariest part of the whole week.  This market seems at first glance on a map like it will be busy but pretty straightforward. Oh. My. Gosh.  It is labyrinth after labyrinth of textile stalls, back alleys, hats, shoes, backpacks, anything you can think of.  Dongdaemun is the textile and clothing market, so if you need to select from a million types of suiting fabrics or (heaven help you) shop for some trim or have a hanbok made (traditional Korean dress), then this market is for you.  We wandered around for a while just in awe of all of the vendors, and then we found one of the three side by side malls and went in (for the air conditioning, of course).  This ONE mall was 9 stories with a food court on top, and this particular mall was only designer stuff.  So one FLOOR was for jewelry, one for cosmetics, one for shoes, etc.  It was huge.  I can't even imagine what the other two must look like, but I'm grateful for our sanity's sake that we only scratched the surface in the first day, otherwise I may have died.

 We were so tired from this excursion that by the time we found food, we were just happy to be alive!!!

We got to meet up this past week with my friend Bryan who is here teaching on the other side of the city from us.  We happened to chance it well enough that our other friend, Pratyush, was in town for the week visiting Bryan, so we had a mini reunion over Korean BBQ in Dongdaemun.  We had been out and about all day, and it was REALLY FLIPPING HOT, so we were sweaty messes, but still had fun exploring the back alley street markets of the Dongdaemun area, which are just jam packed with all kinds of kiosks, shops, restaurants, etc.  It was really nice to catch up with those guys and see how they were, as well as get another perspective from a teacher here.

We also had our first Korean movie theatre experience on the 31st and went with one of the teachers at our school to this awesome theatre in Nowon, which is one neighbourhood up from us, and went to see Guardians of the Galaxy! The movie was amazing, and yes, that's right, we got to see it first ahead of our US friends because of the time difference. The theatre is at the top of a high rise Lotte department store, and serves carmel popcorn along with regular, though we didn't get to try it because the cashier misunderstood us and gave us some kind of ranch-cheese combo, which was gross.  But the movie was awesome, and we thoroughly enjoyed being the only Westerners in the theatre who laughed at all of the English inside jokes that went right over everyone else's heads with the subtitles.

 The movie was so good!  Seriously had some major geek moments, but I think that's also because I've been reading the comic.  Also, Korean bed frames are made of marble?  Also, They're like $9,000. Weird...

Ssangmun (our neighbourhood) - Most of the week was spent exploring our neighbourhood.  There are so many cool shops and weird markets around us, that it's really interesting just walking out our door.  There's a brand called Lotte that is basically everywhere, from department stores to pharmacies to grocery stores... I think it's the Korean equivalent of Kroger here.  Yesterday on our way home from dinner, we passed a small seafood store that had tanks of fish in the window, including, but not limited to, octopus, clams, sea sponges, and what looked like eel.  The biggest thing for me, too, is the smells here.  The smells are so varying, and conflicting with each other, that walking down the street is pure olfactory overload, from sweet breads to fish to garbage to korean BBQ.  And the Korean BBQ is amazing! We've been to a few places since moving here and they have all been fantastic, and reasonably priced considering how much meat you get for the cost.  Meat in Korea is very expensive, especially beef and chicken, and a lb. of ground beef here is over 10,000 won (about $9).  But never fear, there is a Costco near! Well, thirty minutes away by train, but still. It is more crowded in the middle of a weekday afternoon than Walmart on Black Friday.  Seriously, it is terrifying. We made the trek on the Friday of vacation week, and were able to find a lot of good staples. There is also a Home Plus across the street from Costco, which I'm told is like a mix between Walmart and Target, but we haven't been there yet.  But we DID get a slice of Costco pizza, and it was divine!  Here's some pics from around our neighborhood:

 There is a cute little pet shop on the way to the subway station, and last week there were mini-Mays!!!

Here's us, the masters of the subway, or as Scott recently put it, the "Seoul Train"... Get it? *nudge nudge* 

Stay tuned for reports from the first week of teaching and more!