The other day I was asked...

1. If I was capable of making rice.

2. If Canada voted for our Prime Minister, like they do in Korea.

Gyeongju Rice Cake and Korean Traditional Drink Festival

This weekend there was another Festival here in Gyeongju. It's pretty fun being in such a cultural little city. The festival was at the same venue as the KPOP one a few weeks ago, which is about 7 minutes from me! So fun.

Rice cakes are these super glutinous bricks of chewiness. You may be able to tell I am not a huge fan haha. The worst is when they appear to be something farmiliar, like a brownie, but then you take a bite and it's just chewy chewy raisin rice cake. Bleh. There were some really pretty ones at the festival though!

Rice cakes

Adri and me in front of the Gyeongju King and Queen. I love them.

Traditional alcohol includes various rice based drinks. Soju is the hard liquor or Korea and it tastes like watered down Vodka. It's also unpleasant. There's also a rice wine called Makgeolli (I don't know why the romanisation is so crazy. It's pronounced Makoli) which is actually quite nice. It's a cloudy sort of sweet sort of tart drink. I drank some really interesting ones, including a black bean one that tasted a little like peanut butter. There were also regular types of wine, including a super delicious apple wine and a way less delicious tomato wine. We were given little shot glass necklaces and could walk around trying all these different makolis. It was lot of fun! We were even followed by a camera crew as we tried the different kinds haha.

Tasted a little like a Cesar, but I don't like those either.

Korea game at the festival.
People were throwing sticks
into it. 

Other than the rice cakes and alcohol, there was a lot going on. There were food stalls, jewelry and clothing stalls, and little performances. I even found a guy selling Turkish shawarmas. I obviously had one. Here are some more photos. In total it was a super successful weekend. Also I tried duck for the first time. It is the bacon of fowl: I loved it.

Women dancing outside to extremely awful music.

Really cool place called Art Box that has all these beautiful
sculptures and moving sculptures make out of recycled stuff.
Here is a sea turtle. 

These butterflies were flapping.

And a cool garbage fish.

Sports Day!

What an awesome day. Today was Sports Day, which consists of the entire school competing in various sports (mostly racing but some neat relay activities too). All students race in little groups with the first 4 earning their team (blue or white) points. While these are happening, the other students either watch or do other competitions like tug of war, or just crazier team racing thingies. One of the races involved grabbing people from the audience and running with them. Not being able to understand anything made the day particularly hilarious. Later, the top runners from all grades participate in one final mega relay race and a team is declared the winner. 

Because the internet lasts forever, I won't post any pictures where you can identify the children.. but when you see me next you can ask for the closer and better shots ;)

The day starts with a mega warm up of all the students.

The warm up is done to a military style musical recording.
Apparently they tried to phase it out at one point, but
everyone knows it so it stuck. It's funny.

Living in Korea, you get used to
randomly smelling something
AWFUL. Usually the smell
passes quickly. However, today
there was a persistent nasty smell
and to my horror/amazement,
it was these bad boys cooking
up. In the words of my students
"Delicious. Butterfly baby!"

Bebes running. Too cute.

Represent!!

While walking around, all my students were beyond adorable. Firstly, they absolutely ADORED my sunglasses. I bought some fake Ray Ban wayfarers in Seoul.. so pretty much the most unimaginative and standard sunglasses ever. However they were freaking out. I could see them talking about them from afar and when I'd get closes they would simply say "Teacher! Sunglasses!!" One group of girls even borrowed them to try them on and proceeded to make Psy poses. It was adorable. They also called me beautiful, which they haven't done in a while. I would answer "You are beautiful!" and then they would all giggle and blush. Cuties.

Secondly, some gave me treats. One boy gave me a stawberry Pocky, a delicious cookie stick thingy I used to eat, and then some girls gave me hickory sticks and gum. HOWEVER I was then offered this tasty treat:

They begged and begged and begged. "Teacher! Try! One! So delicious! So delicious!" My policy has been to try everything that I can while over here...

I think you can guess the end of this story. 

Yuck. They were cute though and after laughing at my reaction, they asked if I was ok and two girls even offered to get me water. The boy eating them offered to give me another larva haha. I declined this time.

The grade 1 students also put on the cutest dance show I've ever seen. They dressed in traditional clothes and did a traditional dance. The story is of a man and woman where the man is trying to get with her but she's having none of it. So amazingly cute. Apparently there are more boys than girls though so there were a few awkward boy on boy couples haha. Also the girls look like adorable bells in the hanbok.

Screaming spectators of the final race.

After the day was over and students were cleaning up, they all wanted US flags from that flag streamer thing. One boy (the one who gave me a Pocky stick AND was super fast in the race) was sad when he didn't find one. So I told him to take a Canadian one, and he did! Then whenever I saw him after he'd wave it at me and say Canada! Ahh they're too cute. He also showed me the Japan flag and said "Teacher, BAD!" Haha gotta love em.

Finally the day ended with my coteachers feeding me to point of explosion, then giving me a beautiful Sports Day towel, and then sending me home early.

Crab Soup

Not a whole lot to update on. Had a fun weekend spent here in Gyeongju and also in Ulsan visiting Adri. We discovered a foreigner bar near her house which was cute and filled with very random "western" paraphernalia. The bar tender had excellent English and we asked when he had started learning. Apparently he went to LA to work as an intern at Forever 21 with no English 2 years ago and just learnt it. How do these people do it?? Anyways this post will be random ramblings.

Today at lunch I had soup with half of a crab in it. I kept looking around at the other teachers to discover what secret methods they employed to extract the meat. There didn't seem to be any easy way, and most would lift it with their chopsticks (which is SO hard because of that whole shell business) and suck out the meat. After years living with the etiquette police I just couldn't bring myself to try this method out, so I pretty much attacked the crab with my spoon. I felt like a challenged raccoon. It was hilarious.

I've stopped asking what the unidentifiable things are for lunch because I imagine it's super annoying for my coteacher to figure out how to translate them, so I pretty much have no idea what I'm eating half the time. However, yesterday I was able to identify it all by myself because I ate KRILL. Dried krill, tiny fishies like baby anchovies or something, and slivered almonds. What a mix. It's actually pretty good. I need to bring my camera in to lunch one day because seriously most of you (friends and family) just would no believe what I am eating (and enjoying).

Tomorrow is Sports Day! Which means there will be no classes as all the students compete in various sports. The parents are coming and everything! I am extremely excited. I will bring my camera and hopefully take some pictures because the school is so huge and the warm up is very militaristic so it's this weird mixture of cute and creepy.

Also there's a teacher at my school who is trying to improve his English, so he's often studying out of this book/CD combo thing. The poor guy asked me if I could help him figure out what a "past participle" is. Oh my god. I Wikipedia-ed it because I don't actually know the rules to English and it is just ABSOLUTELY AWFUL. English makes no sense. I ended up drawing me eating pizza (I ate pizza) and then a monster eating me (I was eaten). Hopefully that helped?

This poster is in my English class and always makes
me laugh. It says "The cucumber day is May 2nd. This
day mean is we don't become the fat. So we share the
cucumber." and "The jerked meat day is June 4th.
This day is we eat the jerked meat." I can't wait for either.

Some of you may know that I am impatient. Sometimes
I click a lot of buttons on the computer. This is my
computer having a major, but pretty, spazz attack.

I live across the street from a music school

Tonight the student is playing a mashup of all the Sound of Music songs. I am so happy.

Myths about living in Korea

Myth #1 - Korean people are tiny and you will never find clothes

Truth: After spending my summer in Montreal, Canada, the people here are very average sized. I  would even venture to say that the average Montrealer is thinner than the average Korean in my city. Of course, this is one reason why I ran away from Montreal haha.

 I have seen all different kinds of body types, and at 5'2 I am still decidedly short compared to the average person. I have students in grade 6 who are taller than me!  (Not many ok??)

Unfortunately, you are usually not allowed to try clothes on before purchasing, so people who still could fit in the clothes are hesitant to buy them. Also the sizing is in Korean.. So while it's definitely a little harder to find clothes, it is totally possible. A friend bought size 12 shoes this weekend in Seoul! I did buy a dress that's a little snugger than I expected...

Specialty sizing may be difficult.

Myth # 2 - The children will be perfect angels 

Truth: Kids are kids! Mine are adorable and I love them, but they aren't perfectly behaved robots. They will talk over me, they will talk in Korean, and they will smack each other so hard you will wonder how they are all still friends. My particular school is full of great students and teachers so I am lucky that I don't have any real problems and no students are in any way malicious, but I have heard some other people who are not as lucky. I have never taught anywhere else so I can't really compare, but these kids definitely seem to be the same as I was at their age: awesome, but occasionally naughty. Turns out the naughty ones are usually the most fun.

Myth # 3 - In this hierarchical culture, the women are meek and submissive.

Truth: No. The women here are awesome.

Myth # 4 - The toothpaste sucks.

Truth: The toothpaste sucks. So much worse than I could have imagined.

Footbridge I use to walk to an area called
Seong Nom Dong? Seong Om Dong? Who
knows. I go there sometimes.

During the Typhoon this bridge
disappeared. Now it's completely out of
the water.

Amazing praying mantis on my classroom window.

Super cool potato creation street food
we saw in Seoul (pic was on my phone
and not uploaded for my previous post)

Toronto, Canada. Gorgeous photo my mom just sent me
that I thought should be shared. 

Blueberry "latte". No coffee involved. Tasted like a muffin
cloud of happiness. 

My craving for some homey-ness. Yes, that is Twinning Lady
Grey and La vache qui rit cheese!

Chuseok in Seoul

Happy Chuseok faithful readers! I asked my coteacher how to saw "Happy Chuseok" in Korean. It is "Chuseok chai pu ne seyo" (This is my non official romanization). When I would say that to people they were soo happy and impressed with me! My students laughed and said "Teacher you sound.... funny." Shop owners look at me very confused, then realize what I am trying to say, and then clap. I'm sad it's no longer Chuseok because it was fun to impress people.

I just got back from Seoul! I went with Adri and some friends I've met here and it was a really fun weekend.

Firstly, the Seoul Subway system is the coolest thing ever. It's so amazing. The trains are huge and gorgeous, and it is beyond easy to get around. We were all very impressed.

So a summary of the weekend: We went shopping in the shopping district Myeongdong, saw some Palaces in Insadong, went out for dinner in Gangnam (!!) and finally went to Lotte World (Korean version of DisneyLand!). Very busy weekend, and I am so happy that tomorrow is still a Holiday and I can relax and decompress. We also had an EPIK reunion and I saw a whole bunch of teachers I haven't seen since orientation, included our Korean class leaders. It was really nice to see everyone! The weather could not have been more perfect: beautiful crisp sunny fall days. Seoul is North of Gyeongju, so it was quite a bite cooler there. 

Seoul has a very different feel than Gyeongju. It is much more multicultural, so we are way less special there. I was warned about massive crowds, but I think most people spent Chuseok with their families so it was actually less crowded than usual. It definitely seems like a very fun city, and I imagine if I were going to live in Korea for a long period of time I would want to be there. Still, I like the slower pace of Gyeongju as well as the specialness of being foreign here. I think in Seoul teaching would feel more like a job, separate from life, whereas here I feel like I get a more engulfing experience.

Pictures!

Beautiful KTX station in Gyeongju. Only took us 2 hours
to get to Seoul.

Persimmon tree! I still haven't tried one.

Gangnam style!

Your everyday squid shop.

Terrifying monkey robots at Lotte World.

Lotte World was very magical and
fun. The views at the top of the
rides were stunning.