Billy In Korea!

• 2010-08-22

  

  Kickin’ it South Korea!

• It’s been over 2 months you say…

  Who’s keeping track! :)

  Well, summer vacation is almost over and it’s ridiculously hot here… so hot in fact that I’m just going to stay inside and post on here!

  Well it’s almost been six months since I came to Korea and the time went by kind of quick. People have asked me whether I’ve miss the US or want to go back home and I always tell them not really :) Now before people from back home start poo-pooing me, here me out! I’ve lived in the US for 25 years or so and I’ve been in this country for almost 6 months, why do I need miss the place or go back so soon? I’ve been there and done that :) The US isn’t going anywhere so I’m enjoying my time here :)

  I will say probably the single biggest thing being in different country has made me realize about the US is that is really is a “melting pot” off different things. People have always said it and I’ve just never really thought about it, but the US has variety. There are many different people from many different countries and cultures and they bring who they are and mix it into the American culture. In Korea, everything is Korean which isn’t necessarily bad it doesn’t have the variety. If anything should stay the same in the US it should be that it’s about about everyone and how they are different!

• 2010-06-02

  Can We Skip Tomorrow?

  My co-teacher is out-of-town tomorrow (on his honeymoon) so I have to teach all 4 classes (3rd-6th grade) and an after-school program class by myself. I’m not sure why I’m making this post instead of preparing for my lessons. Having never prepared a lesson by myself before I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. I’ve been looking for content the last couple of days and I just can’t seem to find anything to go along with the lessons. Without having a Korean teacher in the class I feel like they’re not going to understand what I’m saying, so I’ve been trying to think of ways to teach the lesson so that they’ll be easy to understand. For some reason I agreed to draw a picture for one of the students so I also need to do that before I go to sleep, this night will never end.

  So to end on somewhat of a happier note I got my longboard in yesterday and I went riding with another native english teacher that has a longboard here in Hapcheon. The place were we went at the park had a bunch of other kids practicing roller-blading so it was kind of fun skating around as they watched us. Whenever the kids where done practicing we let a couple of them ride our longboards which was pretty funny because they almost fell the first time, but they seemed to get the hang of it after that. Today was also the first time I fell off my longboard, I tried turning too hard and hit the concrete… it wasn’t too bad, but my leg might hurt tomorrow.

  Random side-note I added a comment system.

• 2010-05-31

  Excuse Me, You Don’t Look Like Your From Around Here… Let Me Ask You Directions

  Well, that felt completely backwards. So as I was walking back from the supermarket and a random person asked me where the supermarket was. Granted the only reason they probably asked me was because I was walking with a plastic bag which had a supermarket name on it.

  In English I wanted to say “Keep going down this street and take a right and go all the way down that street and it will be on your left.”, with my limited Korean it turned into “it’s over there”. Realizing that those were horrible directions I then told them “go this way” pointing down the street and then I said “go that way” pointing down the other street to the right and finally I said “if you go that way there’s a super market”. It was funny to me that they asked the person that looked the most out of place for directions. Hopefully they made it there because I’m not sure I would have with my directions.

• 2010-05-30

  Still Here

  I’m still here and things are going good, sorry for not really posting. Sometimes I don’t think things are interesting enough to post about, but maybe I should just write about stuff anyway.

  I promise to post stuff soon :)

• 2010-04-29

  Gahoe Girl Squad Badges Of Honor

  This is the cell phone that I use in Korea.

  

  You might be asking yourself, what are all those things attached to my phone!? Well, let me tell you…

  First, let me talk about the black and white things since they’re unrelated to the story, but you might be curious anyway. The black thing allows me to attach a charger to the phone, I’ll never understand why they didn’t make it so the charger could attach directly to the phone. The white thing is a thumb drive. This story deals with the green frog and the red koala.

  At one of the schools I teach at, Gahoe Elementary School, there’s a group of girls in the 5th grade that are a step above the rest of the class when it comes English, they’re all eager to learn and they hang out together. I’m going to refer to this group as the Gahoe Girl Squad or GGS for short.

  After lunch the other day as I was walking through the library I saw the GGS doing a dance number while singing a song, it was definitely silly looking. We all had a quick laugh about it and then I continued on to the classroom.

  A few minutes later one of the girls from the GGS came into the classroom and told me to follow her to the library. When I got into the library she pulled up a chair and told me to watch. The GGS performed their full routine, which was awfully cute and then the proceeded to “demand” that I dance with them. I told them I couldn’t dance, but they said it didn’t matter because they could show me what to do, so we went back-and-forth like this for a few minutes. In the end I wound up giving in and danced part of the their routine with them. As goofy as I felt it afterwards, it was fun and we all had a good laugh.

  After going back to the classroom for a little while, the GGS rushed in, surrounded me and demanded that I give them my cell phone. It was all a little unexpected so I didn’t question what was going on at first and just gave them my phone. Then all rushed off and huddled in a circle so that I couldn’t see what they were doing. I finally asked “why?” while trying to see what was happing, but they quickly told me “No!” and pushed me away. A couple of minutes later they returned with my phone like it’s pictured above and told me “This is gift!” and then quickly ran out of the classroom.

  It’s time like these that make me glad to be here.

• 2010-04-18

  Where toilet paper is the new napkin

  So I’ve realized that it’s been about a month since I’ve posted on here… for shame!

  I find that I want to post about stuff, but what I want to say winds up being to long so I never get around to it. So this time I’m going to keep it short.

  It’s been a little over a month and half since I’ve arrived in Korea. A quick update of what’s happened since I’ve last posted…

  • I got my apartment, which is pretty nice (will try and take a video of the place soon)
  • Went to an orientation in Seoul for all the new native English teachers like me and met a bunch of people
  • Went to a dinner party in Seoul put on by my recruiter (and another) and met more people and had fun
  • Got my first paycheck!
  • Finally met most of the other foreigners in my city

  Living here has definitely gotten more comfortable and I’m far more willing to do more things.

  I was thinking today, now that I’ve been here for a bit is anything different from when I was living in the States?

  • I’ve eaten more onions and tomatoes then I ever have in the past (big deal if you know me). I will agree with most people that onions cannot be tasted most of the time, but there are times when you can really tell they’re there (yuk!). Tomatoes aren’t as bad I originally seemed to think they are, they’re still a little weird though.
  • I’ve haven’t played any games since I’ve gotten here (also a big deal if you know me), mainly because trying to hook up the xbox 360 that I brought is a bigger pain then it should be. I can’t really say that I’ve missed playing games because I haven’t really thought about it.
  • I haven’t programmed a single thing since I got here, not sure why. Maybe unconsciously I need a break from the 4-1/2 years of programming from my previous job. I am started to get the burning desire to make things though, so this probably won’t last.

  Well that’s it for now! My new goal is have at least one post a week, so I’ll see how that goes. Till next time, enjoy your life!

• 2010-03-18

  Anonymous asked: How are you helping the students learn English, besides just playing games? Are the classes very different from back in the US?

  At this point, I mostly do what is asked of me, so I don’t teach the classes outright and instead assist the current teacher. It’s almost like I’m a tool for the teacher that they can choose to use in different ways.

  There are a couple of teachers that are interested in working with me to come up with stuff. Many of them have told me that if I would like to change anything they would be willing to listen. For now I’m learning as much as I can about how they teach and I think I’ll try to contribute more after I get a better feel for the classes.

  I would say the biggest thing difference that I’ve noticed compared to schools in America is how unorganized the classes here. I don’t think most teacher plan out ahead very far and it seems like the daily lessons can be changed on a whim. The last school I teach at I only go to one day a week so the 5th and 6th grades have two English classes back-to-back. On the first day of the 6th grade class there we played games for the first hour and then we were supposed to do one of lessons during the second hour, but do the persistence of the students we played games for two hours.

• 2010-03-17

  It Means What!?

  Nah-pun-num!

  This word doesn’t mean what I thought it did. Growing up, I heard that word from either my mom or other kids and I always thought it meant “bad person”. Yesterday, I found out that it does not.

  So a couple of days ago one of the girls in the 6th grade was being mean to me and I thought I would be clever and call her a bad person in Korean, so I pointed at her and said “nah-pun-num!”. She look surprised and then went to tell the 6th grade teacher that I called her that. The teacher didn’t say anything to me, so I just assumed that the girl was surprised that I was saying she was bad. This should have been my first clue that maybe I said something wrong.

  Last night I was hanging out with some of the other teachers and they were joking that they thought that one of them was mean when they first met him. So, I was like “no, he’s a good person” in Korean and then I said that he was not a nah-pun-num. Everybody was then like, “nooooo! don’t say that!”. They told me that the num part of the word was a bad word. I told them I had said that to a student that was being mean the other day and then they said that it would have been really bad if I said that to a girl. Great, that’s exactly who I said it to, so now I feel really bad about doing it and I’m still not really sure what it means, but I’m sure the student didn’t appreciate it.

  Lesson learned: Not all the Korean words I learned while I was little should be said.

• 2010-03-14

  Anonymous asked: What are you doing for food these days?

  Hmm, lets see…

  breakfast: ham & cheese sandwich, kimchi, kim, rice

  lunch: whatever the school serves, which so far has been stuff lke bibimbap, chicken, soup, rice, kimchi, bananas, and other stuff that I can’t remember

  dinner: rice, kimchi, kim, squid, sanjipso (pork with salty dipping sauce), tenjang jigae, chinese food (not american chinese, no orange chicken), and dukbuki (squishy spicy goodness)

  There’s of different kinds of food that I need to try out.