"Where in the World"

Pepero Day

"Pepero Day is a unofficial holiday in South Korea similar to Valentine's Day or Sweetest Day. It is named after the Korean snack Pepero and held on November 11, since the date "11/11" resemble four sticks of Pepero. The holiday is observed mostly by young people and couples, who exchange Pepero sticks, other candies, and romantic gifts.

According to the story, Pepero Day was started in 1994 by students at a girls' middle school in Busan, where they exchanged Pepero sticks as gifts to wish one another to grow "as tall and slender as a Pepero" (Pepero means "thin like a stick"). However, it is more likely it was initiated by Lotte, the company which produces Pepero."

Jenna and I spent the whole day receiving these chocolate sticks and it became a bit of a competition, after each class we would compare our hoards. Although after about 5pm I was loosing badly as one of Jenna’s students had given her a whole box. This came in very handy when we needed to suppress our chocolate cravings later that night.

Below is a picture of a girl on the subway with a heart made out of Pepero boxes. I couldn’t help but take a photo representing the extreme lengths they go to. It reminded me of being back home on Valentines Day. We saw variations of this all day; everyone was carrying them men, women and children.

A lady on the subway with her gigantic Pepero heart

A collection of various Pepero (unfortunatly it's not mine)

Posted by k_millington on 22/12/2006.
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Chicken Feet

After a long week at work Jenna and I met with Caroline another Hokwon victim from New Zealand for dinner. We headed out for Galbi which I have been told is a popular Korean dish.

Galbi or kalbi is a Korean dish made from beef short ribs, though it can also be made with pork ribs. Galbi is generally served in restaurants known as "galbi houses", and the meat is cooked right at customers' tables on grills set in the tables. It is typically served with lettuce, spinach, perilla, or other leafy vegetables used to wrap the meat, which is then dipped in ssamjang, a sauce made of fermented bean curd and red pepper paste.

So we ordered Sam-gyup-sal becuase despite our efforts she couldn't understand us when we said Galbi. Sam-gyup-sal is served very similar to Galbi but is pork and marinated slightly different, it is served with side dishes and a salty oil sauce. The waitress then came over and put hot coals into a pit in the middle of our table with a grill on the top. Then the meat and side dishes were brought to us, the side dishes consisted of various types of vegtables like Kimchi and some sort of spiced bean sprouts. The meat cooked quickly and soon enought the woman came over and cut it up into sizes perect to pick up with your chop sticks. However since I had very little practice in that department the woman obviously took pity on me and brought me a fork, although I was determind to use them soon my hunger took over and I surrenderd.

After tackling the meat, lettuce leaf sandwich and making it look very unlady like we moved onto a dish Caroline and I had spotted on another table. It looked lovely, like some sort of crispy beef you would get at Millenium Chicken (my local chinese take away) how wrong we were. It arrived on our newly cleaned grill looking rather orange and after a few minutes of silent studying we realised it was chicken feet. Now as they were cooking they did look better and the bones had been removed but they were stil scaly looking chicken feet. I came to the decision that how often do you have an oppotunity to try something new and when will I ever order chicken feet again, so decided to brave one.

The tasty looking chicken feet

'It's all in the tasting' I've heard many a t.v. chef say and ill have to admit once they were lathered in the red pepper paste and followed by a swig of beer they weren't quite as bad as I had imagined. For anyone that wants to know they were like chewing on a large peice of chewy fat that you couldn't quite break down. Ovrerall it was ok, I wouldn't choose it again but at least Ive got a story to tell.

Jenna looking very unimpressed with mine and Carolines choice

Proof! For all of you who doubted me

After the waitress had taken the chicken feet away laughing at our mistake we tucked into some beef Galbi seeing as we were still so hungry. It was delicios and I am sure we will be going out to eat it again soon.

Posted by k_millington on 17/12/2006.
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Seoul Tower

This weekend we were due to visit a small town south of us with Emily and a few of her friends to do some cave walking. This didn't come about as Jenna was very sick all of Friday and when she asked the director to go home he was very unhappy as she had previously taken half a day sick that week as she had been suffering from a cold. To the point where he said he had to think of his school and that if she was sick again he'd have to seriously consider her position. The Koreans dont take sick days you either have to be at work or you have to be in the hospital. Many of the teachers and students come to school with colds and flu's which is silly because they just make everyone else sick and dont give themselves anytime to get better. I have little kids coughing all over me all the time yuk!

So saturday morning we realise that Jenna cant make it and i had no way of contacting emily once i got there on my own so we decided we'd take the morning easy and then head into to Seoul to do the tower and my first real bit of doing the tourist bit. Now the plan was that this would be nice an easy seeing as there was a cable car. As you can probably tell this story did not go as well as we had hoped. The subway map told us once we came out of the subway to walk for 10 min and we'd find the cable dock. So we walked and couldn't see the cable dock but found some stairs we thought led up to it as we could see the tower in the distance. We came to a road at the top and there was loads of people around so we thought they were ones coming down from it. After we'd been walking for about 45min and realising that the tower seemed to be getting further and futher away, we tried to work out where we were. We didn't want to turn around incase we were close but we didn't know if we were going in the right direction, we decided to press on. After we'd been walking for over an hour we decided we were really lost and found a man selling some food on the side of the road (now when i mean road there were no cars just people using it to keep fit.) We asked him and he pointed to yet more stairs shouting "tower, tower." Jenna was feeling pretty rough by now but we figured we'd come this far. We reached the top and paid for our ticket and went up to the observitory. It was very beatuiful because it was so dark you could see the whole city and beyond lit up beneth us. We could even see the road we had walked up which turned out to be about 3,000m at least we would have burnt off the Macdonalds we had, had earlier. There were the directions of all the countries on the top of each window so naturally we had to have our picture taken on the one facing London.

I managed to pick up a postcard whilst I was there that had all the tallest towers in the world on it and what made Jenna and I laugh was that the smallest one on the list was Blackpool Tower, dont think that the Koreans would find that very impressive, but bought it for novelty value.

Posted by k_millington on 13/12/2006.
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Insadong

Insa-dong (Insa being the name and dong meaning town)is a culture street market. It is a large tourist area mainly due to the amount of Korean gift and souviner shops it boasts. It sells anything from traditional style masks, scrolls and wooden carvings, to key rings, masks and plastic budhas. It is beautiful at night when all the shops are lit up with fairy lights in the trees outside. We wandered down a little back street where all the resteraunts were tucked away from the main street. We found this beautiful little resteraunt that had little balconies in it with shutters to make your room private from the rest of the resteraunt (kinda like a tree house) and the waiters had to climb stairs to get to them, glad it wasn't me carrying a large tray up them.

We ordered a seafood pancake and this was my first time eating out (f you discount domino's on the first night and home plus the local supermarket). This was my first experince of Kimchi which i later found out that it has to be the Koreans most famous dish as they eat it for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Some of the students even told me that they have fridges at home just for Kimchi. It is a variety of vegtables most often cabbage dressed in a hot spicy sauce and served cold as a side dish to every meal you order over here.

Kimchi, also known as gimchi or kimchee is a traditional Korean dish of fermented chili peppers and vegetables, usually made from Chinese cabbage. In Korea, kimchi is served with most regular meals, and is also used as an ingredient in cooking, including kimchi jjigae (kimchi soup), kimchi bokkeumbap (kimchi fried rice), and other dishes.

Though there are hundreds of variations, most types of kimchi tend to have a strong, spicy, tangy flavour and odor.

Traditional cabbage kimchi

Since being here and eating out I have been told the many things you should and shouldn't do at the dinner table here are some of them:

Never leave your chopsticks sticking out of a bowl of rice this is a ritual reserved for the dead and doing this at the table is very disrespectful.

Never blow your nose at the table, only in the bathroom. If your nose is running from eating all that spicy kimchi, simply wipe.

Do not drink from your soup bowl. (although i have seen my director do this)

Along with our kimchi we had a seafood pancake that was delicious because it only had prawns and squid in and a sort of chicken soup. Except the chicken was whole and had been put in a bowl of hot water until the chicken fell off the bone didn't have a lot of flavour to eat so we wont be ordering that again.

It was a lovely day and I’m sure I will be coming back to do some souvenir shopping for everyone back home.

Emily and Jenna in Insa-dong

Yeuck (a sweet nutty substance like toffee that is shaved and put onto a stick to create a sort of lolly pop)

Posted by k_millington on 04/12/2006.
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Halloween Korean style

Tuesday October was the day I went to school in all black, dark make-up and red lipstick and felt very out of place, but once I received my hat I thought I made a convincing witch. K had previously told Jenna and I that all we would be doing was handing out sweets in the classrooms, before the kids settled down to watch a true Halloween horror movie Garfield.

However, completely forgetting or choosing to forget that when I had asked the day before whether he wanted a game prepared he had said no. So when he came and told me we had to do the game in the first class at 3.00pm were pretty pissed off. Luckily Emily had already gone through this the week before and had told us about this game she had made, which to be fair was far better than what me and Jenna came up with. So we got to work, spent ages trying to enlarge this picture of a vampire and some fangs and made a makeshift pin the tail on the donkey.

Now I don’t really think the kids quite understood the concept of Halloween because when we walked in to the class room, instead of seeing ghosts, witches and Dracula, we were faced with Spiderman, white rabbits and snow white, although I think she may have grasped the concept a bit better than most as she was wearing devil horns. Each class did a little performance that they had been practicing the last couple of weeks and I managed to get it on film.

http://www.mediamax.com/katrinaleanne/Hosted/MOV01731.MPG

The kids loved the game and using my scarf as a blind fold it worked pretty well apart from the fact that they don’t have and have never heard of blue tack. The whole went well and was a nice change from lessons. All the kids enjoyed but I think it was mainly because they got sweets and didn’t have to do any work.

Someones riding their broom backwards

Posted by k_millington on 04/12/2006.
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My first day at a Hokwon

My first day at school was over whelming to say the least and couldn’t imagine how Jenna must of felt because at least I had her there to show me the ropes. I didn’t have to be there till 2pm as 2pm – 3pm is teaching preparation time and is when all the lesson planning is supposed to take place. Anne one of my Korean co-teachers and the only one that speaks good enough English briefly explained to me how each class was run.After I sat in on part of Jenna’s lesson and I had the tour guide of the six small classrooms in the school and was introduced to every class I was told by Mr Kwack that I could go home because I must be very tired. I was very thankful for this and just went home and slept.Wednesday morning arrived and I was a little nervous that the students wouldn’t understand me, or do anything I told them to do. I had also realised in my visit to the school the day before I was a bit of a novelty and had a constant stream of kids coming up and staring at me. Some managed to ask my name and tell me how beautiful I was just before they ran off giggling. My first lesson was on a book called ‘Bear Hug’ I will never forget it. It went something like , “Mama bear I want a hug, a big hug, a small hug, a growing very tall hug…” and the teacher I share the lesson with Jennifer (who speaks very little English) kept repeating memorise, memorise. I quickly worked out after speaking to Jenna and after a few more lessons that I was literally here to read aloud and get the students to repeat it. At this point I felt a little deceived, that everything I had been tested on through the online TEFL course was nothing like what I was expected to do here. From the impression I got on my first full day, I was there to simple teach pronunciation, by getting the kids to memorise the book. Unfortunately memorizing a book doesn’t mean you can read a book, which I quickly found out over the next few days.

A picture of my school its the floor with all the little blue bears on, Jung- Chul.

I am a little excited to get stuck in though you get to plan your own lesson and play games with the kids and as long as you get results the teachers don’t really care how you do it. So I am going to try different techniques with different classes and see if I can make a difference. Watch this space!

Posted by k_millington on 04/12/2006.
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My Arrival

I arrived at the airport expecting to find John (my contact in Korea) on the other side of the gate waiting for me, maybe holding up a sign with my name on and was quite nervous. Unfortunately I had no idea what he looked like and walked right out of the entrance without anyone calling my name. My baggage had taken a while to collect and I was half an hour after when I told him I was due to arrive and I was worried that he had gone. I went to the information desk and after 10 min managed to get the girl to understand I needed an announcement made. So I sat and waited, nothing. I then managed to find my way to a computer and check on an email the number of the school. I rang the school and spoke to what is now my director and asked or demanded to speak to Jenna. At this point I was in tears because I’d had such a long journey and I was tired and to top it all off i thought i was stuck at the airport. The director rang john and spoke to him and eventually found me 2 hours after i was due to meet him. He had said that he thought i was flying with Emerittes and wasn't due till 6.00pm even though i had emailed him my flight number and details. John's brother then took me to the school and I was dreading going out and having to be social able with everyone because I was so tired and upset by this point. But thankfully the director introduced himself and then drove Jenna and I home. The flat is lovely it has 3 bedrooms which means we have a spare one for anyone that comes to visit. I have a double bed and enough room for everything. There is a smallish kitchen and a large living room, although we only have one living room chair so there might be some fights over that. We have a utility room that has a washing machine and place to hang and dry our clothes. There is a TV. in the living room with some sort of digital box which means we get some American programs and some BBC channels which will be nice down the line when I’m missing home.

The area is quite nice but very different from home and Jenna has assured me it is a lot smaller than Seoul the nearest big city. I explored the next day because I don’t have to go work until 2pm which means i get a nice lie in and for anyone that knows me well will know how that fits very nicely into my normal student routine. I found little shops selling clothes, shoes, bakeries etc. There are loads of little cafe style places you can eat at and even little windows where you can buy chicken on a stick, or weird looking dough things, which I will eventually pluck up the courage to taste.

The view from our apartment building

Posted by k_millington on 21/11/2006.
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