Hello April!

It's Monday night. It just started raining. And I'm eating a choco pie.

Classes were fairly easy today. I didn't have to take roll because the home room teacher didn't leave me with an attendance sheet for April. She'll probably have one printed out by tomorrow. I occupied my 1st graders with a worksheet packet on the letters A and B. Man do they struggle. I accidentally excused them 10 minutes early because I confused their class with another class, which tacked on an extra 10 minutes to my break. buahaha. 

My 3rd and 4th graders went wild because we played their favorite game: The Angry Birds Game. It's basically a PowerPoint activity where teams take turns answering questions hidden behind panels labeled with letters from the alphabet. If the student answers the question or identifies the picture correctly, then they move onto a slide with pictures of Angry Birds or green pigs. Angry Birds = points. Green pigs = minus points. If the student doesn't know the answer, then we return to the main screen. It's so simple, but it makes the kids so competitive. Today the girls' team chanted the word for "pig" in Korean hoping that the boys -- who were winning -- would lose a point. Whether a team wins or loses a point, this age group is in an uproar. It's nuts.

I repeated the same lesson with my 5th and 6th graders. They appeared less enthused because they are older, but they still looked mildly entertained. I excused them 5 minutes early because we breezed through the lesson pretty quickly.

Here are some photos of my students. I'm getting better with names, mostly because I use that information to focus the direction of my yelling -- "종표 (Jongpyo), sit down!!!" "이민혁 (Lee Minhyuck), put that away!!!":

1st graders: Yunseo, [gah, I forgot], Jihwan

More 1st graders: That one in the front NEVER listens.

2nd graders: I gave them English names, so I know them as Brad and Jack.

2nd Graders: Alex, Brad, Jack, Peter

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Cafeteria food!

It's seriously the best Korean food I've ever eaten and these kids eat it every school day.

Yep, those are fresh strawberries!

Cafeteria lunch on the day that parents came in to meet the homeroom teachers:
떡국 with fish, sticky rice, kimchi, and melon

♥ Maple Latte at Coffee Meal -- Best latte in town!

Chicken burger & spicy fries at Kunichi BurgerThe fries were hot! 

Pork dinner at 원할머니 in Mokpo

Home made fried rice with stir fried organic green bell peppers, organic kale, and organic carrots :) 

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!!!

Potato wedge pizza at 난타

Red Crab Porridge -- BEST porridge I've ever had!

Dessert at a Twosome Place

Dessert: Tiramisu Latte + Green Tea Latte

Paneer Butter Masala from First Nepal in Gwangju  (광주)

Dessert: Gelato at Café Tiamo

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A bit of my cooking . . . I caved and started buying cheese one day.
I haven't stopped eating it since.

Mushroom & Cheese Omelet;
Mini bow tie pasta with tomatoes, kale, garlic, & mozzarella cheese 

Grilled Cheese Sandwich with egg, tomatoes, & lettuce

Let It Snow

It's snowing today! Last time there were just flurries, but this time it is actually piling up on the ground and on top of cars. I woke up to the sound of many sirens, one right after the other. That's what you get when you confront Korean drivers with snow.

View from my street

View from the bus stop

Up the path to Daebul

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

Got bored and made some no-bake treats from corn flakes and marshmallow fluff. Then drizzled some chocolate and multicolored sprinkles on top. They taste like rice krispy treats. I'm thinking about making a batch for the teachers next week and maybe for my 5th graders because they were perfect during my Open Class.

Made some individual "cookies"

Also made a tray, but when I tried to cut it, the knife went *chink*
It's too hard to cut, so I have to snap it into pieces.

Food Network fantasies

My laptop is back in the hands of the Dell Service Center in Mokpo. I was still getting blue screens and blank screens, so the same technician came back and picked it up. I should be getting it back next week.

I have diagnosed myself with a seasonal disability. It is called chilblains. According to Wikipedia, chilblains are a medical condition that cause swollen, itchy ulcers when extremities are exposed to cold and humidity. Two of my toes look and feel like they were bitten by mosquitoes, but that is impossible because I wear socks 98% of the time. Cold weather sucks.

PHOTOS: Home-Cooking & Cafeteria Nasties

Organic tofu with sliced mushrooms & kale
stir fried in organic chopped garlic & olive oil.
Mexican Style Rice A Roni

More of the same veggies. Different kind of rice.

I found this gem in my cafeteria soup yesterday. I don't care what people say -- clams, oysters, whatever! I swear it is a snail.  There were 2 of them in my soup. Ahhhhh, it was so gross. Usually there are small clams floating between the seaweed, but these things were huge! I cautiously covered them with the seaweed so that I wouldn't have to look at them. Ughhhhh.

A Quiet Weekend in Mokpo Never Sounded So Good

Despite my respiratory battles with the air in my apartment, I have had a pretty good weekend in Mokpo.

On Friday, I went to the YP Bookstore with Joanne on a quest to find the first book in the Game of Thrones series. The bookstore has a wide selection of useless trinkets and perfumes, but the English section has slim pickings. There are two small shelves with "celebrity" novels in the literary world: Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code, Romeo & Juliet, Great Expectations, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and some non-fiction books about Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Believe it or not, I found the third and fourth books from Game of Thrones, but the first one was sold out. Bummer! I know I can just download the books online. I actually have the first book in a .PDF file on my desktop, but reading a book on paper is so much easier on the eyes.

Afterwards, we went to Emart. Friday nights appear to be prime time for shoppers in Mokpo, so there were heaps of free samples of red bean buns to dumplings, wine, beer, and grapes. We puttered around for an hour and a half. I bought some glittery nail polish, so my nails can look like disco balls. We walked home happy with McDonald's choco cones in hand.

I've spent more time Skyping with Michele. It turns out that Kyoto and Mokpo are in the same time zone!

On Saturday, I had that smoke problem. I won't go into it again. I went for a run because the local fuel exhaust was the lesser of two evils at the time. And then I painted my nails. Black French tip with a sparkly grey and sparkly pink base, topped with blue and gold disco glitter.

On Sunday, I woke up late and puttered around. I went back to Emart to do some grocery shopping. Purchased some organic baby tomatoes, garlic, eggs, mini bow tie pasta, and extra virgin olive oil. Also bought some inorganic (aka regular) kale, swiss chard, wild parsley, and black soy milk (I read this has more calcium). I have big plans tomorrow to make mini bow tie pasta with parsley, kale, chopped garlic, and extra virgin olive oil. It's going to be amazing.

For dinner, I finished off the vegetables in my fridge. Here we have fresh organic carrots / green bell peppers and a steamed sweet potato. Egg scrambled with kale, parsley, and chopped garlic in extra virgin olive oil. And a side of kimchi.

Bon Appétit!