I Come From a Land Down Under...

...well ok, so I don't come from there, but I will be going there. Woo-hoo! Just had it confirmed this morning. Until now I hadn't wanted to mention it just in case I jinxed it, but found out from Califf, my Irish friend and now future travelling buddy, that we are now booked on a flight to Australia on the 1st February 2007! How excited am I?! We will be going for two weeks, staying with Carol's brother who lives in Sydney. So free accommodation (except for whatever it costs us in drinks!) and a nice bit of summertime warmth during the darkest depths of the Korean winter!

As you can tell, I'm somewhat excited already, and I'm not sure if I can wait two whole months! I don't normally book holidays this far in advance; you know me, I'm a relatively last minute, impulsive holiday-maker. I think I'll deserve it by the time it rolls around. I'm already hectically busy, and my weekends until Christmas will be spent working English camps (more on that later), and then I'll be working extra camps and training throughout January. I'm going to Oz, baby!!

Ok, so that was this week's excitement. Now to recap the last week. Apart from the regular classes, I've started taking three students for extra lessons. They won't be studying abroad, but want to study at international universities in Korea, which means their English has to be top notch, and they need to know a wide range of subjects for their essay test. Each of them has lived in either the US or the UK at some point, so their spoken English is good. But what this means is that I get to teach politics! Yay!

It will be a mixture of politics, history and current events, so as well as helping them, it will be good for me, as I get to choose their topics and then do some research in preparation for their lecture. Which, sad as it may seem, I enjoy doing. Last week, their topic was on the UN and its new Secretary-General, who is a South Korean. They seemed to enjoy the lecture, as they never get to study topics like this. But they irritated me just a little when they decided not to write the essay for this week, because they want to concentrate on their final exams, which are next week. Which is understandable, except they were the ones who asked for extra work, and they had reassured us that they would do the work. So after expressing my annoyance, it took a great deal of pleading for us not to just postpone the programme until the new semester in March. Even though I secretly would start again this week, just because I enjoy it! Seems that I do still have a lot of research hours left in my system!

Last weekend was my first English camp: extra lessons, hosted by one school, and attended by students from a number of schools. They come for extra intensive teaching, and they are usually middle school students, aged up to 15. So this was a new experience for me in a number of ways, given that I teach high school students.

We started on Friday evening - "we" being myself, and my friends Char and Lily. It was up in Char's area, so she had asked us to help out. We started with one introductory lecture (where I discovered, for the first time, just how quiet and shy students can be!) then broke for dinner. The food was not as nice as my school's, but they did have a few different things for us Westerners. They gave us dumpling soup instead of whatever soup everyone else was having, and they also gave us a pork cutlet each. Pork cutlet is breaded chopped pork, served with a strange fruity sauce (hard to describe). This is what Koreans consider "Western food". It is my students' favourite meal, and they all get very excited when it's on the menu.

What was amusing about the different menu this camp school had for us foreigners, was that our friend Lily is Korean-American, and she went first out of the three of us. But since she looked Korean, they didn't give her the special food! But she really wanted the pork and the dumpling soup, so she went back to get extra, and thus felt quite embarrassed. (As a by the way, I will someday, when I have time, write an entire blog entry on Korea and food. It's a huge deal. a huge deal!)

The class I took for the rest of that first evening was lots of fun for me, though very tiring...I got to play Simon Says! I led most of it, but had the students come up with their own commands and lead for a while. Not so great, but still funny. Some of these kids are so sadistic! One of them had his last few classmates on their hunkers, jumping on the spot while hugging each other! Was fun to see. We finished classes quite late, and headed back to Char's apartment. You'd like to think we went straight to sleep, but no, we had to spend a few hours planning the next days lessons. Which resulted in Char and I dancing the Hokey Cokey at 1am!

We were up early the next morning, back to the school, and right back into lessons. And given my nerve-racking experience onstage during the festival the week before, it may come as a surprise to hear that I was singing in my classes last Saturday morning! It was good ol' Britney Spears, and although I was trying to get the kids to sing with me, most of the time it was just me singing. Which is ok, I like singing that song! And after another lunch filled with special delights for the strange foreigners, it was back to the afternoon classes...

And you thought we were dancing the Hokey Cokey in the middle of the night just for kicks! My afternoon classes were a dancing activity. First of all I taught the afore-mentioned kids' party game, had a great laugh doing that, throwing myself around the room and making a right eejit of myself! And then we did Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, something else I haven't played in years. Did it super fast, and had the students in stitches, even the quiet ones. I had fun, don't know about the kids! Afterwards, my Korean co-teacher (who stood silently at the back of the room most of the time) told me he thought I should take a rest, since I had put so much energy into my dancing!

So English camp was fun, and since we finished on Saturday afternoon, we had the rest of the weekend to relax at Char's. After a nap (hey, we were tired!) and listening to Christmas songs for a while, we headed out for dinner. Lovely samgyupsal, which is like barbecued pork, which you then wrap in lettuce with rice and garlic and other tasty things, and stuff the whole thing in your mouth! Delicious food, one of my favourite Korean dishes, but so unhealthy because the pork used is very fatty. We also had beef, and we even ordered extra! It was gooood. We then went and chatted to one of Char's Korean friends, who works in the local Adidas shop. I should explain: Char lives in a much smaller town than I do - Uiseong - it's quite country, and she has heard rumours of one other white person, but other than that, she's on her lonesome. So she befriends the local people! Which I think is great. We talked to the guy in the Adidas shop for a while, discovered his disturbing penchant for girls who look like they're still in middle school, and then...we hit the noraebang!

This particular karaoke session was dominated by Christmas songs and attempts at rapping. We rocked! Two hours of singing and dancing later, we made our way home, and collapsed on the floor for a nice long sleep. After a lazy morning and some yummy fried egg sandwiches, I headed home. To find that my internet was, once again, on the blink. This happens every now and then, especially at the weekends, but usually happens when I need it most. I had lots of work to get done on Sunday night, but ended up watching bad TV instead. And then on Monday morning, my hairdryer decided to stop working, so I was in a completely anti-technology mood. Of course, when I discovered the next morning that the hairdryer wasn't actually broken, just the plug had come loose from the wall, I felt quite silly.

Monday night was the best teachers' dinners I've ever had! For once, it wasn't fish or seafood, no, it was tasty samgyupsal again. I had gone weeks without eating samgyupsal (after a bit of a binge) and now I had it twice in a matter of days. The food was good, but the reason the night was so much fun was because I ended up staying for hours and chatting to some of the teachers. I spoke for a long time to one of the Japanese teachers (actually Japanese), and wowing him with my knowledge of Japan, garnered from my three weeks of holiday there nearly three years ago! Then spent a long time talking to another teacher (Teacher Kang) about Ireland, and him teaching me more Korean. In return, I taught them all "slainte".

Problem is, the teachers have figured out that I can drink more than your average Korean woman. So a couple of them were constantly plying me with soju, in the customary Korean way. One of them was also constantly piling more pork onto my dish, even though there was plenty left on my grill, because the other folk at my table had left. Later on, the same teacher appeared with an ice cream for me! I have no idea where the ice cream came from. It was rather random! But it was lots of fun; most of the teachers had left a lot earlier, and there were only about 12 of us left, but it was good talking to some of them a bit more. I walked home slightly tipsy afterwards, and once again, got no work done!

But the next couple of weeks should be easier. Next week is finals, so I have no classes; the following two weeks will be presentations by the students; after that there is only one more week before winter vacation, and since no one will want to work, games it is!

This entry has, once again, been a lot longer than I intended it to be. And this was only a week! Hope I haven't bored anyone - believe me, I could if I tried! I also did have some other photos I wanted to put on, but the site doesn't seem to want me to do so right now. Evil site. But there are lots of lovely new photos up on Flickr, as well as photos from the last couple of years, so go have a gander.

All the best my lovelies. x