Oi, God, What Did You Turn The Central Heating Down For?

So, now we're freshly up to date...it's time to talk about today. And I suppose I'd better (seeing as I haven't yet) give you an idea about what actually goes on during my average day.

So, on a Tuesday I go to my primary school (Monday and Tuesday are my primary school days, Wednesday Thursday and Friday my secondary school days). This means the alarm clock goes off at 6.50am, and after a coffee and breakfast I'm out the door by 7.45am.

10 minutes walk away is my bus stop on the main road running through Cheongju, and once there I wait (for never more than about 5 minutes, I hasten to add) for my particular bus that will take me on a 30-40 minute ride to the village/town where my primary school is. The city public transport system here really is worldclass (cheap, fast and efficient), however this is somewhat tempered by the driving style of some of the bus drivers, who seem to take great pleasure in what I like to call 'suicide runs' - cutting up cars whilst blasting their horns, ploughing through junctions around 0.000001ns before the traffic lights turn red, and hitting the brakes so hard when arriving at a bus stop that standing up in preparation to get off normally results in you flying halfway down the bus.

Therefore bus journeys are inevitably interesting.

Anyway, I managed to get a seat rather than having to stand for the first part of the journey (usually about 50/50 chance on this, though as you pass through the city and all the schoolkids get off at their various schools you usually end up with a seat anyway) and stuck on my music whilst enjoying the scenery - as I always do - as we headed out of Cheongju and into the countryside.

Roughly half an hour later, my bus dropped me off outside my school - around 10 to 15 minutes before lessons started at 9am.

At my primary school, I have 4 classes in the 'morning' session, all 40 minutes long with different groups. As I'm a 'native English speaker' my lessons are largely focussed on speaking and listening exercises as opposed to reading and writing. One of the reasons why I'm here is that English is a very difficult language to learn in terms of the nuances of pronunciation and inflection, and only a true native English speaker knows most of these nuances - most Korean English teachers, though their spoken English is very good, would have trouble pronouncing certain English words in what would be considered the 'correct' manner. Therefore, my lessons involved a lot of speaking and repeating - but there's some fun in there too.

My lesson for today (for all 4 groups) involved a quick review of the previous lesson, and then an introduction to some new words to extend the vocab of the students. After that, we played a quick bingo game, before watching a dialogue video and repeating the conversation. That's pretty much standard fare for my primary students...get them talking as much as possible.

Repeat 3 times...and we're at 12.10pm, and lunch. Today there was rice (staple over here) and some other seafood-stuff that I tried to force down but couldn't. At least they throw in a piece of fruit with every meal - I actually look forward to that and it's giving me some vitamins and minerals.

Then I get quite a long break - nearly two hours in fact  - as I have no lessons until the 'after school' club I run from 2.40pm. During that time today I realised that I hadn't put my phone on charge the night before, so it has died and I couldn't text my girlfriend. Massive facepalm.

Putting that to the back of my mind I rested up and checked out the BBC website before heading back to the classroom at about 2.30pm.

My 'afterschool' English class is made up of kids who are pretty good at English and want to learn more, which usually makes for a fun environment. We play some games ('Guess Who' being one of the most popular with the kids and me because it encourages good questioning and answering skills), do a little bit of textbook work and sometimes watch some video clips (last week the students were introduced to the wonders of Wallace and Gromit with Korean subtitles - they loved it). Today they learned a bit about animals and their characteristics - it's very good to see how quickly they pick stuff up, even though sometimes they are inattentive and I have to whack them put on my 'loud' voice which invariably leaves me with a sore throat.

So...lesson finished at 4.15pm and I was out the door and on the bus home. Stopped off in Chungdae (my local area of Cheongju) for a Lotteria (Korea's answer to McDonalds and I really couldn't be arsed to cook) before checking my bank account (been paid on time this month, LOADSA MONEY!) and heading back to my humble abode to do a bit of lesson planning and get up to date with this.

Pretty much the moment I'm out of Lotteria I figure something.

It's cold. Really, really cold. I've got my shirt on and my leather jacket done up to the top, and I'm still cold.

When did this happen? From when I came out here to yesterday, all day every day it's been warm enough to go out with just a shirt or t-shirt on your top half. Suddenly the temperature has dropped around 10 degrees overnight.

Guess this highlights how seasonal the weather is over here - very different to England in that respect.

And that's pretty much the long and the short of it, and what I get up to on an average school day. Know this entry has been a but humour-lite, but it's been a long day...

...another update tomorrow. In the meantime, please comment!

Catching Up

Sorry...did I say tomorrow? Really? Oh dear...I meant 11 DAYS LATER. Hope that's a bit more clear.

Well...I've had a lot going on over the last couple of weeks, but I'll try to sum it up as succinctly as possible.

There have been three pub quizzes (won the 1st one, set the questions for the 2nd and finished runnerup in the third).

There have been multiple drinking sessions involving multiple different people, and some very good times (especially the scavenger hunt/pub crawl last week which was a great deal of fun).

There is a new mobile phone (yes, I finally HAVE one - got it last Tuesday).

There is also a new girlfriend. :-D  (But more on that at another time).

There have been multiple different lessons, a brand new 'Millionaire' quiz that the kids rather liked, and a not-so-subtle attempt to turn my students to the side of Leicester City FC by playing 'Heroes in Blue and White' during one of my lessons. (though I don't think they knew what the hell was going on...)

There have been multiple coffees, rice snacks and failed attempts at eating some of the food in the school canteens.

There was an acquired medical insurance certificate (useful to have just in case...)

And, to be honest....that about covers it. Going into too much depth would result in an entry about 10 miles long, and I don't want that....but suffice it to say I'm now fully settled in!

Coming up STRAIGHT AFTER this...today's entry, and I fully, FULLY intend to post daily from this point on. Promise... ;-)

Won-illionaire

More regular updates on the way folks....I promise! In the meantime, here's the first part of a multi parter.

Going back to last Friday...I didn't have a three-day weekend sadly, but I did get the chance to accompany some of my school on a field trip. Which is nice because it meant I didn't have to teach, and Friday is the only real day where I have to deal with some real little basta interesting people. So it made for a nice diversion.

(Of course, when dealing with such people, it's quite nice to actually be able to USE discipline over here too. Not in the corporal sense, but if you tell a student to leave the classroom, they then have to kneel outside the classroom against the wall for the remainder of the lesson, and then accompany you to the staffroom for a 'chat' with their homeroom teacher or tutor. Believe me, I don't know much Korean, but the language of a good bollocking is pretty universal :-) )

Our destination was the 2010 World Oriental Medicine Bio-Expo on the outskirts of Jecheon, a town about 90 minutes coach ride away. We stopped off at a service station on the way and I got some scenery pics in:

So far, I'm not getting bored of the seemingly limitless awe-inspiring vistas that Korea seems to provide on a regular basis.

Anyway, we arrived at our destination in good time, and on a very nice day too: it was sunny, but the temperature was just right to be comfortable.

Heading for the entrance gates.

This was a cool looking bird thing near the entrance of the expo site.

After a quick brief, everyone headed off to do their own thing and myself and a few other teachers got to look around a bit. It was pretty interesting actually: different kinds of herbal remedies from all over the world, not just the Oriental countries. There were headache cures from Ghana, cough remedies from Argentina, roots with...erm, "uplifting" properties for men from Thailand...the list goes on. However, it wasn't just limited to traditional medicine either - there was a pretty good exhibit from a local hospital showing the latest cancer-inhibiting technology they're using. To be honest, I think both traditional and modern medicine have their place in the world of healing - after all, most modern drugs are derived from traditional remedies rather than synthesised in a lab.

After a quick lunch here:

 

there was enough time to take a bit more of a look around and take a couple more pics

before we had to get going back to the school. Once we got back, I was free to head home and find a very, very nice surprise.

I had expected to find myself still in abject poverty with only a few tens of thousands of Won to last me through the weekend. On the off chance, I checked my bank account.

7-digit Won balance.

What? 7-DIGIT WON BALANCE!!!!

Yup - my EPIK flight allowance had finally come through, to the tune of 1.3 Million Won, roughly £800!!! First thought: relief. Second thought: ALCOHOL. Third thought: Treat myself!

And indeed, that was the way most of the weekend passed. I did some shopping at HomePlus on the Saturday (was nice to actually be able to buy what food I wanted without watching how much I was spending). I also indulged in some computer speakers, and a spanking new 500 GB portable hard drive that can basically fit in my pocket. It's USB powered too, so I don't have to worry about power supply issues when I bring it back to the UK.

On Saturday night I went out for dinner with two of my friends here, Lara and Jessica, for a belated birthday celebration.

Two bottles of wine at the restaurant (shared) + vodka mixer on patio + multiple shots at Buzz + two rum/cokes at Road King + norebang (karaoke) at 4am = Sore head on Sunday afternoon when I eventually woke up. Was a fun night, though.

I managed to get my head together just in time to help my team win the pub quiz at Buzz on Sunday night - won a nice bottle of Jameson for doing so, and our team has to come up with the questions for this weeks quiz. I've chosen Space as my round topic - trying not to make the questions stupidly hard.

Monday pretty much passed like any other day - some fun games and activities at the elementary school, and I got another very welcome surprise when I checked my balance once again. Seems like the admin people at my school had finally decided they were actually going to pay me rather than pointing and laughing as I starved (flight allowance notwithstanding) and they'd shovelled another 2.4 Million Won into my account. So...that makes me a multi-Won-illionaire. Nice. Hopefully now the first payment has gone in they'll know what the transaction details are and I won't have a problem with it again. Next payday is in only 10 days time too!

To be honest, the cost of living here is so low and there's so little to actually spend money on here I should be able to save a great deal, and if I still have designs on that Masters degree (and I do), then that's what I must do.

Right - end of the first part. Part 2 to come tomorrow and bring you up to date!

Familiar Territory Once Again

Once again, a long gap between updates, and I apologise for that.

However, I now have no excuse for such gaps because....it's here.

HOME INTERNET HAS ARRIVED. EPIC WIN.

Yup, finally after 5 weeks hijacking poor wireless connections and staying for far too long in coffee shops while people look at me in a funny way...I have my own web connection in my apartment. And it's an absolute monster - 30Mbps, which anyone who knows about such things would say is pretty Ferrariesque speed.

Obviously in light of this development, a new portable hard drive to replace Behemoth II (lost a couple of months ago to a virus with 600 GB of films and TV series, grrr) is definitely on my shopping list, and when I have it there will be a massive pr0n film and TV series download session!

Anyway - back to more interesting current events.

I had a decent last couple of days up in Seoul, including having a very nice Korean buffet and hitting many bars on the last night

and being given a phonecard as a gift for being class leader (even though I didn't actually have to do anything in the role other than say one or two notices), before heading back to Cheongju last Thursday with Mary Hahn, my liason at the Chungbuk Office of Education.

We headed back into Cheonjgu on the bus, and actually seeing the now familiar big buildings as I came in actually gave me the feeling that I was coming....home. I know it's only been a little more than a month, but I'm really settling down here now, thanks largely to the people. I know I'm repeating myself here...but nothing is too much trouble for them. It's amazing.

Anyway - after getting back to Cheongju it was back to routine on the Friday with 4 classes, including two which are probably my most difficult. However, I had an ace-in-the-hole - my Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Team Quiz! Seems to be an easy way to run a lesson - compose 15 questions, stick them in a PowerPoint you prepared earlier, print out several copies of the letters A, B, C and D and you're good to go!
Thanks largely to that, Friday passed without significant incident, and after visiting the Immigration Office to FINALLY lay my grubby little mitts on my Alien Registration Card (the piece of plastic which you need for practically anything important here) I did my usual Friday night thing of consuming horrific amounts of alcohol and appearing in random photos, eg.

Incidentally, I had known all of these people for about 10 minutes before this photo was taken. Fun times.
Anyway, crashed through my door at around 5am Saturday morning (which is about the norm for Korean nights out) so Saturday was something of a writeoff. Sunday passed pretty uneventfully too - unless you count sorting out washing and cooking a nice chicken curry eventful.

So...back to work at elementary school on Monday, and in my afterschool classes on Monday and Tuesday I showed off two of England's greatest TV institutions - Wallace and Gromit and Dr Who. I had managed to dig up some dubbed Korean footage of the good Doctor, and my coteacher has all the W & G episodes in Korean, so we were able to show them off to the kids. And they loved them both. Maybe it's my bad sense of humour, but Wallace's mad run to grab the crackers in A Grand Day Out still makes me laugh - even if the dialogue is in a language I know roughly two sentences of.

In any case - come yesterday evening, I get my internet installed, quickly run a speed test, and pass out when I see four-figure KB download speeds when I try to torrent Pitch Black. It finishes in 25 minutes. Sensational.

And we move onto today - not much really to say other than some other Year 9 groups got a taste of my Millionaire quiz, and I finally have an idea about when I'm going to get my allowance from EPIK and my pay packet, which is good because I still don't have that much of this. However, considering I've had four separate offers of help on that score should I need it I don't think I need worry.

So - I skimmed on massive details of the events of this week so as not to bore you to death with an impossibly long post. Hope I did a good job giving you an overview without being either too detailed or too vague. Trust me, subsequent updates will be richer, fuller and more REGULAAAAAARRR!!!

Coming up this week - possible three day weekend :-D and definite birthday party to attend on Saturday! :-)

Peace out! And remember people - RRC (Read, Review and Comment!)