Daenam Elementry School

I have to be at school at 8:30am, which means I have to leave home at the horrible time of 8:15am! A huge improvement on leaving home at 7:40am to start work in Narre Warren at 9am. The only downside is the hill I have to walk up to get to school.

It is steeper than it looks in pictures

 I'm not looking forward to it in summer, I will be a puffing sweaty mess by the time I get to the top. This will be made worse by the fact I walk to school with half of the kids.

The front of the school

Once I get to school I (and all the children and other staff) take of my nice shoes and put on a pair of bright blue slippers. Looks pretty sexy with my work attire! Sorry I forgot to take a photo.

I share an office with the 5 other English teachers. Originally there was no desk for me, so they found a random one in a classroom and some how managed to squash it in. When I am sitting down no one can get past me, which is hard considering the door is right behind me. My office (and the rest of the school) is cleaned daily by the students. It is so cute to see 10 little 6 year olds sweeping the corridor with tiny brushes and pans.

My desk (note the terrible monitor in the desk set-up)

At least being up a giant hill means we get a pretty good view over the city.

The view from outside the 6th Grade classrooms, on the 3rd floor

I teach in 2 different classrooms. The 3rd Grade room is awesome, It is called the English Zone and it is equipped with all kinds of things we are yet to use (and according the other native English teacher were never used lat year). It has a section with areas for role plays, games and reading. There is also a classroom area, with desks.

Backgrounds for role plays. You can open them up to other scenes.

Listening stations and the bookcase, filled with brand new English picture stories

The stage, with more backgrounds. The ones as the front roll up and down like curtains

 

My 3rd Grade co-teacher Hyunji, preparing for class

 I teach 6th grade and my after school classes in my other class room, it is nice, but nothing like the English Zone room (i.e. it is just a classroom).

 Our cafeteria is too small for everyone so the teachers and grades 1-3 eat there and grade 4-6 eat in their classrooms. I get a lot of "Hello's" at lunch time.

Lunch time

On Wednesday I teach 4 after school classes. School finishes at 2pm (1pm for 1st-3rd grade) so these classes are actually only 35 minutes over my normal work hours, finishing at 5:05pm rather than 4:30pm. Because for these classes I am working for a Hogwon (private after school institute), which teaches out of our classroom, I get payed over time to work when I have to be at work anyway. Korean are crazy about education and after school most kids go to Hogwons for all sorts of classes, not just English.

After school A and B class (Grade 1-2 ish)

After school, A and B class

After school, E class (grade 6-ish)

Fun things that happen in Korea (Part 2)

Walking down the street in South Korea can be tricky and takes some getting used to. You see, the cars and people share the road. There is no foot path or side-walk or anything. You walk down the middle of the road with the cars. This gets very tricky when there are parked and moving cars. If you have a car parked on each side of the road there is only room for one more car to squeeze through the middle. I have been keeping a tally and I have almost been run over by 23 cars.
The larger roads/highways/free-ways have multiple lanes and a foot path so this isn't an issue here....but all other roads you share it with cars. It takes some getting used to and a little courage but this strange system seems to work. So far I haven't seen anyone get run over. Only 23 near misses for myself.

There is an interesting cultural difference between Korea and western countries. At home it would seem very rude and a little disgusting for someone to hock up a loogie and spit it out next to you while you wait for a bus. 

On the other hand it is quite acceptable for you to blow your nose into a tissue in public.

In Korea these two things are flipped. It is very rude to blow your nose but is fine to snort, cough and spit right next to someone. It's a bit weird and a little yuck but  I do now have the freedom of spitting when ever I like... 

Video tour of our apartment

Gyeongju and love motels

"Love Motel" lane

On the weekend just gone Brenton and I went for a our first weekend away to Gyeongju. Gyeongju is known as "the  museum without walls" and has more tombs, temples, pagodas, and ruins than anywhere else in Korea. We arrived on Friday night in the dark, but luckily there were about 1,000 neon "hotel" signs right near the bus terminal.

The first place we passed had little pictures of topless women on the step, so assuming it was a brothel we kept walking. Then the next and the next had the same pictures. I decided that these must be "love motels". I had read and heard about love motels before coming to Korea. Lonely planet describes them as being the best value for money accommodation in Korea.

Tombs in the background. They built a wooden coffin chamber
and then made a hill of rocks on top of it and then soil and
grass over the top of that

So, thankfully, I worked up the courage to walk past the topless women and in to the very dimly lit reception area. Love motels are awesome! Sure there are some weird things like the complimentary condoms, broken English about love on the ceiling and the free soft porn channel on the cable TV. But there was also a spa, giant TV, room about double the size of my apartment, computer with free internet, 80 cable channels and everything was brand new! All that for less than $50 per night. I am now seriously considering moving in to a love motel instead of my apartment!

Our weekend in Gyeongju was great, apart from spending the first hour lost on Saturday morning, we did a lot of walking and saw a lot of tombs, temples and ancient artifacts.

Anapji Pond

Bulguk-sa

Seokguram Grotto

Fun things that happen in Korea (Part 1)

I wanted to make a post that lists all the fun things that have happened since I came to Korea. By fun I mean either very annoying or just weird. There might be a few of these posts so I called this one "part 1".

The first fun thing was when I was having breakfast at orientation. It was a buffet breakfast so I grabbed some cereal, a piece of toast, some jam and an apple prima (fruit box). I sat down and started with some cereal, then a bite of toast then a sip of.....yuck....what is this? I took another look at my apple drink and saw that it was not actually apple. The box is green and it is served with breakfast. But this juice was definitely not apple. Oh no no. This was bean juice. Yes, BEAN JUICE. I'm not sure you have ever tasted the juice which comes from a bean. I sure hadn't. If you get the chance, DON"T try it.

On another day, Loren and I went for our first shop to buy the essential house products for our new apartment. We bought dish washing detergent, toilet paper, laundry liquid, milk, bread, etc. On our way to the checkout we ran into another Australian teacher we knew from orientation. He was with his Korean Co-teacher who was taking him to buy the essential home goods like us. We showed the co-teacher our items to see if they were the best/cheapest things to buy. To our surprise we found that they weren't what we thought they were. We were going to wash our clothes with dish washing liquid and wash our dishes with toilet cleaner! It's a good thing he was there or we might have got very sick.

First few weeks in Korea

A lot has happened since my last blog. Our arrival in Korea was smooth. We spent a night in Seoul and then flew to Busan (the orientation location) the next afternoon. Finding the EPIK people at the airport was easy. There were 5 of us on the flight from Seoul and we were told by the co-ordinator that we needed to wait for another 20 people to fill the bus before we could leave for the orientation location. An hour and a half later, after no one else had arrived, they eventually gave up and bussed the 5 of us to Pukyong National University. We left in the middle of peak hour and what should have been a 40 minute drive took more like 1 hour and 30 minutes.

Orientation was fun, but very busy. Everyday we had classes about teaching from 9am till 5:30pm and then Korean Language class in the evening, we didn't even get a weekend!, It was great to meet some people who are living in our area and other parts of Korea. Last Friday we were all loaded on to busses, good bye Brenton! And driven to our new home town, Daegu. In Daegu we were all quickly collected by representatives from our schools and shown our schools and apartments. Luckly finding Brenton and I's meeting spot that night was easy and we both arrived at the same time!

It was a public holiday Tuesday so we had a four day weekend, which we used to shop for our apartment and explore Daegu. Wednesday was my first real day of work. I had no idea if I had to teach or not, luckly I didn't! Wednesday I spent sitting at my emptry desk (my computer didn't arrive until I was going home), going to school assemblies and staff meetings, all in Korean, and meeting lots of people. I also found out my schedual. I will be teaching every grade 6 class (there are 7) twice a week and every grade 3 class (5) once a week. I will also be teaching 3 of the grade 2 classes once a week in first semester and 2 grade one classes once a week in second semester. Both of my co-teachers (I have one for grade 6 and one for grade 3, grade 2 I am alone!) are very nice and are both brand new to the school and I think teaching!

Yesterday classes started. I had 1 grade 6 class in the morning. We were locked out of the room for the first 10 minutes! The kids understood a lot less English than I had expected and most didn't know how to write their name in English. The class flew by and we only covered about half of what we had planned, helped by the fact we were locked out! Overall I think it went pretty well, but we have lots of room for improvement!