KRISTINE IN KOREA: I Get Paid To Eat

What's up blogosphere!

I've been pretty lazy about updating the blog. I spend most of my time eating good food, listening to music, thinking about my next shopping splurge in Gwangju, and chatting up friends on Skype.

Even though the kids are on Winter holiday, English class is still in session. I get up at the buttcrack of dawn (6:30am) Monday-Friday and meet Nari outside at 7:50am. Truth be told, I really struggle in the mornings and meet her by 7:53am at best. We take the 500 bus together. I usually arrive at school before most of the other faculty, so I bypass the morning greeting and go straight to my classroom. By this time, my hands are freezing as I turn up the class thermostat to 30 degrees Celcius, which only makes the class feel like 60 degrees Fahrenheit.

Sunrise over Mokpo (목포)

Sunrise over Yeongam (영암)

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One day it snowed pretty hard, which was really cool.

My first class starts at 9am, but half of the class runs in 10 minutes late, red in the face from running in the cold. My classes are divided by grades: 1-2, 3-4, 5-6. Initially, I started teaching them simple phrases such as "I am (not) a girl / boy / man / woman / student / teacher / doctor / artist / singer," "You are (not) ...," and "He / She / It is (not) ..." Then the school gave me workbooks to teach out of --where were these books 4 months ago? So now I am teaching: "I like apples / oranges / bananas / kiwis / watermelons / pears / strawberries / peaches / grapes" and "I don't like [insert vegetable here]." The older kids learned "He / She plays [insert sport here]," which gets a little confusing when they want to talk about swimming, hiking, running, or wrestling.

We play the same 3-4 games. The younger kids love this Angry Birds PowerPoint game that I tailor to each lesson; Angry Birds is the new Pokemon, and every kid is obsessed with it. The older kids like to play --what I call-- the Chair Game. One kid stands in the center, while his peers sit in the chairs around him. He says a phrase such as "I am a boy," then everyone who identifies with that phrase gets up and runs to another chair. The person left standing dictates the next phrase. My favorite game isn't a game at all. At least once per week, we make mini books, so that they have practice writing the sentence and drawing a picture to accompany it. I walk around the class and police the kids for misspellings and grammatical errors. I also pretend to be impressed by their drawings, which are actually pretty good sometimes, so I don't always have to pretend.

5th grade girls working on mini books

5th grade boys working on mini books and hiding from my camera

"I am not a singer."

"I am a Korean."

At 11:20am, I am done. After turning off the computer, the lights, and the heater, I head downstairs with Hannee to help prepare for lunch. The cafeteria isn't open, so the faculty cooks over portable gas camping stoves in the teacher's lounge. My responsibilities are limited to setting the table with spoons and chopsticks. Then I huddle near the heater, while Hannee scoops the side dishes. Lunch is the same 4 foods on rotation. We either eat kimchi jjigae (김치 찌개), fish stew, tteokguk (떡국) with mandu (만두), or ramyeon (라면).

Lunch in the teachers' lounge

Kimchi all day, e'errrrydayyyy

There's never a shortage of Korean side dishes

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Once in a while, we go out for lunch. Those times, the food is really, REALLY good.

Raw fish!

Different parts of the same fish

Huge Mussels

Fish Stew

With the whole afternoon to myself, I mostly Skype, fight the urge to take a nap, and/or go to the gym. Joanne and I joined a local gym, one fully equipped with treadmills, bikes, weights, and other machines. It's on the 4th floor of some random building near Rose Street, a workout in itself just trying to get up there. The gym blasts music that you would find on a Dance Dance Revolution soundtrack: Asian techno.

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More food, food food!!!