Funny students

In one of my after school classes we are going to interview Kate over Skype. This week we wrote a list of questions to ask her. Here are a couple of the questions they came up with:

Do you have a man friend?
What time is it?
Are you pretty?
How old are your parents?
Are you rich?

I was very impressed, my students came up with 20 questions to ask, with me only suggesting 2 and the Korean teaching only helping translate another 1 or 2!

An average day for Brenton teaching in Korea

7:00am Alarm goes off. Hit snooze.

7:30am Wake up for a second time and realise I am running late.

7:55am Leave for school....5 minutes late.

8:10am Get to school and say hello in Korean to which ever teacher is greeting the students when they arrive. Fail to understand what the Korean teacher says next, so I just smile and nod.

8:15am Get to my desk. Check facebook, check email, quickly look over class plans for the day, check facebook again.
 

My office

My desk

9:00am First class starts. These run from 9 till 12:30. I have one or two of these classes per day.

My classroom

The front of my classroom

12:30pm Lunch time. Some days are good....most are not so good. This is where I try to eat lots of whatever food they are serving in the buffet. BUT there are a few things to remember:

1. Avoid kimchi as it tastes like spicy poo.
2. If something is red it is spicy. Avoid very red things.
3. Stock up on what appears to be good...although this can back fire.
4. Rice and soup are always safe options.

1:30pm Back to classes. These run till from 1:30 till 4:05. I only have one class to teach each afternoon.

This is what I see everyday in my classroom....but with all the desks full of students.

The world map, world clocks and flags on the wall of the classroom.

4:20pm Head home. Get at least 20 "hellos"  from students as I leave school, even though I am leaving so it should be "goodbye".

4:35pm Arrive home.

So what do I do when I am not teaching?

1.  - Plan lessons
2.  - Go on facebook
3.  - Play Nintendo DS
4.  - Learn Korean
5.  - Watch youtube

Once all these items have been done I repeat options 2 and 3.

Looking at cherry blossoms and looking at Korean's looking at cherry blossoms

Last weekend I went with some friends to the Jinhae Cherry Blossom Festival. Brenton decided to stay home because looking at trees isn't his thing.

The festival itself was really fun. In Korea you can drink in public and there are convenience stores selling cans of beer on almost every street corner. This means we drank quiet a bit of beer while wandering around looking at the cherry blossoms. We also spent a lot of time looking at Korean's looking at cherry blossoms, as there were people everywhere "enjoying the romance".

The Bridge, apparently this is the most romantic spot at the festival.
Although, I wouldn't know because I couldn't get close enough.

More photos of other people at the bridge

As close as we could get to the romantic bridge

 

Makgeolli (Korean Rice Wine)

The trouble started when we decided it was time to go home. We had to get back to a town (Masan) 20 minutes away to catch the bus home to Daegu. All of the public buses to Masan were full and weren't even stopping and there were no available taxis. After walking around for about an hour and 1/2 we finally started finding free taxis but they wouldn't take us to Masan because (we had a conversation in Korean and English, so this is only our interpretation) the traffic was so bad that the 20 minutes trip was taking over an hour. We headed to to train station in the hope that we could get a train anywhere and then get back to Daegu from there. The last train of the day had already left!

We decided it was time to break for dinner. After dinner we were finally able to get a taxi, but just missed the 9:30 bus from Masan to Daegu. The next bus wasn't until 11pm. Finally, 7 hours after we decided to leave the festival we were home, and there were taxi's everywhere! What took 2 hours on the way there took 7 hours on the way home!

Overall the Cherry Blossom Festival was fun, but not worth the 7 hour journey :-)

Bungee

Last weekend ago Brenton and I went on a tour to the DMZ (De-militarized zone) and bungee jumping. I didn't do the jump, I figure that sky diving fulfills my jumping off things from height requirement. Since I didn't jump I got stuck as the official photographer. This turned out to be a stressful job, as I had video and photo requirements from 4 different people and once they were up on the bridge it was really hard to tell who was jumping next. As result I missed Brenton's jump and only got him bouncing around, took about 1 minute of video before everyone else's jump, and took videos of 2 people I don't know.

"Brenton" jumping. Fast forward to about the 1 minute mark, because like I said after stuffing up Brenton's I went the other way and filmed way to much!

 Brenton really jumping.

Korean students

Korean students (especially high school) spend a lot of time at school. They attend normal school during the day from 8:30 to 2pm (elementary) or 3 or 4 pm (middle and high school). After that they go to Hogwons (which are private schools) for all sorts of classes, like English, Maths, History etc... Then they have homework. They also go to school every second Saturday morning.

My co-teachers told me that this video is what a high school students day is like, condensed to 11 seconds. When they were in high school they wouldn't get home from school until about 10:00pm and then they had to do their homework!