Here are the 'you don't have to be part of facebook to view them' pictures of the lantern festival. It really was very pretty. I got to explore the castle in the distance in the picture with the bridge on it.
Work is a little stressful because I'm having a hard time learning the kids names, but other than that I can't complain. I'm only teaching 20 hours a week, spending a total of 23 hours a week at work. Not too shabby. I'm starting to get my feet under myself here.
Thursday I'm going back to the Penguin Bar (so called by us foreigners who don't know its proper name, just like the place that I get my yummy chomchi kimbap (like a tuna sushi roll with many mysterious-yet-tasty ingredients). I went to the Penguin Bar last thursday, too, and I got shabu shabu on friday with another large group of foreigners. Lots of neat people here. Saturday I went with yet more (and some of the same) foreigners to see a band play at O'Briens Pub in Changwon, where I drank more than I ever have in my life and didn't get sick, though I did feel a little nauseous on the taxi ride back to Busan with Sunny, Stephanie and Beth. Korean beer apparently appeals to me. Not too keen on soju, though. Sunday Hazel and I went out for Italian (Korean Style), which was tasty. Then we puttered around until Becoming Jane started at the local cinema. This saturday we're going to Gwangalli (one of the Beaches) to watch fireworks and go to a bar on the beach. I've never socialized this much in my entire life.
Hwamyeoung is an interesting little city-neighborhood. It's smaller than Albuquerque, but the downtown seems bigger because all of the restaurants and shops and stores and religious centers are crammed into high rises (6 - 12 stories) in about 9 city blocks. Most of the surrounding area is high rise apartment buildings. I live a 6 minute bus ride from Hwamyeoung, in the much smaller neighborhood of Yulli, (GeumGok) though we have a better/cheaper Market than Lotte.
For once I feel lucky to be oblivious to the obvious, because I don't feel like a zoo animal yet. Having every random kid I meet yell "Hi!" at me will probably get old soon, though.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Finally in Korea and working.
PICTOOOORS (yoinked from Hazel's camera). This was the Festival. Hazel's computer is a bit odd, since it's Korean, and I can't get Quotation marks in here for doing the pretty http link. o.0
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=4834&id=532562747
Sorry for spelling and grammar errors, too tired to fix now.
Arrived on monday exhausted, but because I made myself sleep on the plane to Japan I came out ok. I had no problem going to bed again once I was in Korea. Kelly (one of the recruiters) met me at the airport in Pusan and helped me exchange money, as well as flagging a taxi to take us to my school. I just got to see the outside while we waited for Mr. Kim, my school director, to come with his car and someone to help get me and my stuff to my apartment. The school is in Hwamyoung-dong, as anticipated, and is pretty big. It's on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floor of a building in downtown Hwamyoung, which seems pretty big. It's really only 3 long blocks of 5-6 story buildings, but they crammed a lot into those blocks.
Mr. Kim seems nice, with ok english. I like the guard at my apartment building better than I like Mr. Kim, though. Sweet old man.
The apartment itself is much bigger than I expected. It's not a studio, but a real one-bedroom apartment with a seperate bathroom (with a tub! AND A WORKING SHOWER!!! I've taken like 10 showers and 2 baths in the 5 days I've been here and in Japan) and a decent living room. I don't have a couch yet, though. It's only a matter of time - I live on a hill with a ton of other apartment buildings, and it's a lot like living in a dorm. People are constantly throwing good furniture out. I have a stove but no oven of microwave. I'm not much of a baker, so the stove isn't a big problem, but I'll need to get a microwave. Mr. Kim and Kelly got me set up with my cell phone before leaving (still trying to figure out which button is menu and which is select, but I'm figuring it out slowly), and gave me their contact info before leaving me to rest. I slept like a rock in my western-style bed. It must be noted that the furniture that came with the apartment is too big and frou-frou to really go with the apartment. My bed takes up half of the bed room, with the wardrobe taking up the rest. There's also a bit of old dirt (the kind that's more stains than anything else at this point) in my apartment. The front of the building faces a river (pretty!) and the back is up against a small mountain (large hill?) that makes the air coming in to my laundry room fresh and nice every morning. The only big downside to where I live is that it's at the top of a huge hill itself, which makes walking up from the supermarket a pain in the ass. It makes the dorm hill at SCAD look like a speed bump.
My first day on my own it took me a while to work up the guts to just walk down to the corner store and buy something to eat. The lady behind the counter just tallied up what I wanted and showed me the cost on the calculator, and we got on fine even though I speak no Korean and she speaks no English. I met Hazel, who works for in a different branch of my school and lives two floors above me, in the lobby downstairs upon my triumphant return from the convenience store. I might have come off slightly manic. She was leaving for the gym and then work, but said she'd be by after work.
After I realized that 'hey, I can do this!' I decided to walk to Hwamyeong to visit my school (on instruction from my recruiter). Only I could manage to get lost in three blocks, but I managed it fantastically. I did manage to find the dunkin donuts, though - bug plus there. The green-tea doughnuts were pretty decent. At the school I think I scared the poo out of poor mister Kim. His eyes were big when I showed up, but he gamely gave me a tour and showed me how to use the subway to get back to my neighborhood (Yulli subway station, in GeumGok-dong).
Hazel showed up later, as promissed, and gave me a rundown of what to expect. She's been very helpful, and showed me the grocery store on her way to gym again (luckily they're in the same building, so it wasn't any bother to her). I got Korean FruitLoops (they're pretty much the same as american), milk, some household goods I needed, and some of the best grapes and apples I've ever had. They're massive and tasty. Hazel invited me to the lantern festival in Chinju the next day, and I said hell yes.
The next day Hazel and I walked down to Hwamyoung (at this point my feet were killing me from the combination of no walking on the long flights over and too much walking the day before, so they were about to die). She got me my first taste of Kimbap, which was delicious. It's a lot like sushi, but with assorted Korean foods inside. They're huge and filling, and generally cost 1,000 won (about a dollar) each. One is a meal.
The group that showed up at Hwamyoung station to go to the festival was massive. Every time I turned around I found more westerners. One of the guys (visiting his girlfriend in Hwamyoung) was wearing a green lantern shirt in honor of the lantern festival. =D
The crowd that left on the subway was about 12 people. They're all on facebook, so I'm getting one so that I'll be in the know for things that are being planned - trips and such. In Chinju (a subway ride and an hour long bus ride away) they had giant lanterns that looked like statues floating on the water, and big red helium balloons floating above the river hanged with banners. It reminded me of the state fair or the balloon fiesta, because they were selling the same kinds of foods in the tents that completely lined the sides of the river - roasted corn, chicken-k-bobs, sweets. The group split up and I explored the Castle with a bunch of other americans. By the time we were done one of the other groups had decided to eat, and we tried meeting them at the restaurant, but the group was just too big for the space. We left, met up with some other americans, tried to find another restaurant, then realized we couldn't all fit in one. Eventually my group found a small pasta restaurant that had good meat-sauce pasta for 4,500 won. It's so cheap to eat out here, it's awesome.
We met back up with the others on the bridge that crossed the river next to the floats, which were clearly glowing once darkness fell. It reminded me of the luminarias at christmas - the darker it gets, the cooler they look. We watched the fireworks show (very nice) and then made our way back to Hwamyoung (Yulli, in my case). Hazel called to make sure I was ok, since we'd been seperated, and I reassured her that I'd had an awesome time. She's really very nice.
Yesterday I went to Japan on a jetfoil. I got lost finding the international ferry, but other than that had a safe and uneventful trip to japan. I still don't have a camera, so no pictures, but we couldn't go outside so they all would have been bad window pictures. Pusan is a huge port, though. They played a random Korean comedy about three men in different diciplines of the martial arts trying to win the hand of a girl by impressing her dad. Cute movie. Then they played Happy Feet with Korean subtitles. Random.
Getting around (lost) in Fukuoka was frustrating but fun. I left on the wrong bus with a crazy Canadian girl who, deciding she was really hungry, led me into a restaurant with no pictures of food and no english menu. She pointed to something the guy at the table next to us was having and said she'd have that, and I said the same. We ended up having some really delicious food. I still don't know what it was. We parted ways (still don't know her name). I took a taxi to my hotel after wandering around a transit building for a while and getting frustrated at the lack of maps with any english on them.
The hotel room was tiny, about the size of my bedroom in South Korea, and reeked of cigarette smoke, but had a deep, short bathtub that I loved. I got settled and eventually (after a lot of walking) found a bus going to the Yahoo Dome, which is where the Korean consulate is located near. I slid in just under deadline for getting the application in, and then waited through three busses at the bus station - each one crammed full of school kids who just got out of school. My feet were literally dead at this point and I didn't want to stand in a crowded bus, but I finally decided to go. Just then a woman (the first black person I've seen in asia) came up asking if this was the bus going back to the hotel - turns out she was at the same hotel as me. She had her husband and 5 year old daughter with her. Charlie, Aaron and Anaka made the rest of the trip pretty much stress-free for me. Charlie would just ask the bus drivers if they were going where we needed to go, and they could almost always understand and answer with a yes or no. Charlie has been travelling around the world with Anaka in tow, giving her more world-travel experience than most people have in a lifetime - just as Charlie's mom did to her. How cool is that? We went to McDonalds for dinner lastnight, but it was better than any McDonalds here in the states - and more expensive. Japan was pricey, all around, but relatively clean and well-organized. Very efficient. My hotel room wouldn't have any power for lights or airconditioning unless you slid the keycard attached to the door key into a slot just inside the room, insuring that you only had airconditioning and lights on when you were in the room. The bus-fare system was easy to understand once you got a hang of it, which I would have enjoyed if I knew where I was going. The directions the recruiters gave me were to the hotel and to the consulate, BOTH originating from the ferry. How useless is that?
PS. Jessica, I found like a whole row of external USB 10 key pads in an electronics store here. If you didn't have your desktop already I'd have sent you one. ;)
Today I picked up my (automatically Multi-Entry since I'm American =) visa with Charlie and Co., got some delicious chinese food, and left the country. I was behind the same guy in the bus that I had been when I left Korea, and on another one of the busses I'd ridden. He had a very distince necklace, and he and the guy he'd been navigating Japan with made for good conversation on the ferry back. Necklace boy has been teaching in Asia for four years, three of those four in Korea. He says it's hard to find a starting position with the pay, hours, and perks (size of apartment, large support community) that I found. He recommended Hyundae Beach as a good area to teach in - lots of westerners and good food. Not too far from PNU, which has a lot of restaurants and a ton of tourist and western hotspots. I hope he had happy landings.
The first movie was a typical tragic Korean drama where the main character, a little boy, loses his little sister and his dog before his good-for-nothing mom shows up to take care of him. Gragh. The second was My neighbor totoro, without english subtitles. It's hard to sleep with that playing, let me tell you.
I made it back to my apartment with no further pain, and soon after Hazel showed up and offered to let me use her internet, since it will probably take a while to get mine set up. Koreans are known for their inneficiency.
As for pictures, I don't have any from Japan, but there were a bunch of people taking pictures at the Chinjo Lantern Festival, so I'll probably be able to snag some to upload from them. I'll get a korean camera when I get a chance.
Korea is a loud, bright, chaotic place. That is my first impression of it.
Japan is a quiet, busy, and effician place. That is my first impression of it.
I think I'll enjoy my time here. I'm lucky to have ended up where I landed.
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=4
Sorry for spelling and grammar errors, too tired to fix now.
Arrived on monday exhausted, but because I made myself sleep on the plane to Japan I came out ok. I had no problem going to bed again once I was in Korea. Kelly (one of the recruiters) met me at the airport in Pusan and helped me exchange money, as well as flagging a taxi to take us to my school. I just got to see the outside while we waited for Mr. Kim, my school director, to come with his car and someone to help get me and my stuff to my apartment. The school is in Hwamyoung-dong, as anticipated, and is pretty big. It's on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floor of a building in downtown Hwamyoung, which seems pretty big. It's really only 3 long blocks of 5-6 story buildings, but they crammed a lot into those blocks.
Mr. Kim seems nice, with ok english. I like the guard at my apartment building better than I like Mr. Kim, though. Sweet old man.
The apartment itself is much bigger than I expected. It's not a studio, but a real one-bedroom apartment with a seperate bathroom (with a tub! AND A WORKING SHOWER!!! I've taken like 10 showers and 2 baths in the 5 days I've been here and in Japan) and a decent living room. I don't have a couch yet, though. It's only a matter of time - I live on a hill with a ton of other apartment buildings, and it's a lot like living in a dorm. People are constantly throwing good furniture out. I have a stove but no oven of microwave. I'm not much of a baker, so the stove isn't a big problem, but I'll need to get a microwave. Mr. Kim and Kelly got me set up with my cell phone before leaving (still trying to figure out which button is menu and which is select, but I'm figuring it out slowly), and gave me their contact info before leaving me to rest. I slept like a rock in my western-style bed. It must be noted that the furniture that came with the apartment is too big and frou-frou to really go with the apartment. My bed takes up half of the bed room, with the wardrobe taking up the rest. There's also a bit of old dirt (the kind that's more stains than anything else at this point) in my apartment. The front of the building faces a river (pretty!) and the back is up against a small mountain (large hill?) that makes the air coming in to my laundry room fresh and nice every morning. The only big downside to where I live is that it's at the top of a huge hill itself, which makes walking up from the supermarket a pain in the ass. It makes the dorm hill at SCAD look like a speed bump.
My first day on my own it took me a while to work up the guts to just walk down to the corner store and buy something to eat. The lady behind the counter just tallied up what I wanted and showed me the cost on the calculator, and we got on fine even though I speak no Korean and she speaks no English. I met Hazel, who works for in a different branch of my school and lives two floors above me, in the lobby downstairs upon my triumphant return from the convenience store. I might have come off slightly manic. She was leaving for the gym and then work, but said she'd be by after work.
After I realized that 'hey, I can do this!' I decided to walk to Hwamyeong to visit my school (on instruction from my recruiter). Only I could manage to get lost in three blocks, but I managed it fantastically. I did manage to find the dunkin donuts, though - bug plus there. The green-tea doughnuts were pretty decent. At the school I think I scared the poo out of poor mister Kim. His eyes were big when I showed up, but he gamely gave me a tour and showed me how to use the subway to get back to my neighborhood (Yulli subway station, in GeumGok-dong).
Hazel showed up later, as promissed, and gave me a rundown of what to expect. She's been very helpful, and showed me the grocery store on her way to gym again (luckily they're in the same building, so it wasn't any bother to her). I got Korean FruitLoops (they're pretty much the same as american), milk, some household goods I needed, and some of the best grapes and apples I've ever had. They're massive and tasty. Hazel invited me to the lantern festival in Chinju the next day, and I said hell yes.
The next day Hazel and I walked down to Hwamyoung (at this point my feet were killing me from the combination of no walking on the long flights over and too much walking the day before, so they were about to die). She got me my first taste of Kimbap, which was delicious. It's a lot like sushi, but with assorted Korean foods inside. They're huge and filling, and generally cost 1,000 won (about a dollar) each. One is a meal.
The group that showed up at Hwamyoung station to go to the festival was massive. Every time I turned around I found more westerners. One of the guys (visiting his girlfriend in Hwamyoung) was wearing a green lantern shirt in honor of the lantern festival. =D
The crowd that left on the subway was about 12 people. They're all on facebook, so I'm getting one so that I'll be in the know for things that are being planned - trips and such. In Chinju (a subway ride and an hour long bus ride away) they had giant lanterns that looked like statues floating on the water, and big red helium balloons floating above the river hanged with banners. It reminded me of the state fair or the balloon fiesta, because they were selling the same kinds of foods in the tents that completely lined the sides of the river - roasted corn, chicken-k-bobs, sweets. The group split up and I explored the Castle with a bunch of other americans. By the time we were done one of the other groups had decided to eat, and we tried meeting them at the restaurant, but the group was just too big for the space. We left, met up with some other americans, tried to find another restaurant, then realized we couldn't all fit in one. Eventually my group found a small pasta restaurant that had good meat-sauce pasta for 4,500 won. It's so cheap to eat out here, it's awesome.
We met back up with the others on the bridge that crossed the river next to the floats, which were clearly glowing once darkness fell. It reminded me of the luminarias at christmas - the darker it gets, the cooler they look. We watched the fireworks show (very nice) and then made our way back to Hwamyoung (Yulli, in my case). Hazel called to make sure I was ok, since we'd been seperated, and I reassured her that I'd had an awesome time. She's really very nice.
Yesterday I went to Japan on a jetfoil. I got lost finding the international ferry, but other than that had a safe and uneventful trip to japan. I still don't have a camera, so no pictures, but we couldn't go outside so they all would have been bad window pictures. Pusan is a huge port, though. They played a random Korean comedy about three men in different diciplines of the martial arts trying to win the hand of a girl by impressing her dad. Cute movie. Then they played Happy Feet with Korean subtitles. Random.
Getting around (lost) in Fukuoka was frustrating but fun. I left on the wrong bus with a crazy Canadian girl who, deciding she was really hungry, led me into a restaurant with no pictures of food and no english menu. She pointed to something the guy at the table next to us was having and said she'd have that, and I said the same. We ended up having some really delicious food. I still don't know what it was. We parted ways (still don't know her name). I took a taxi to my hotel after wandering around a transit building for a while and getting frustrated at the lack of maps with any english on them.
The hotel room was tiny, about the size of my bedroom in South Korea, and reeked of cigarette smoke, but had a deep, short bathtub that I loved. I got settled and eventually (after a lot of walking) found a bus going to the Yahoo Dome, which is where the Korean consulate is located near. I slid in just under deadline for getting the application in, and then waited through three busses at the bus station - each one crammed full of school kids who just got out of school. My feet were literally dead at this point and I didn't want to stand in a crowded bus, but I finally decided to go. Just then a woman (the first black person I've seen in asia) came up asking if this was the bus going back to the hotel - turns out she was at the same hotel as me. She had her husband and 5 year old daughter with her. Charlie, Aaron and Anaka made the rest of the trip pretty much stress-free for me. Charlie would just ask the bus drivers if they were going where we needed to go, and they could almost always understand and answer with a yes or no. Charlie has been travelling around the world with Anaka in tow, giving her more world-travel experience than most people have in a lifetime - just as Charlie's mom did to her. How cool is that? We went to McDonalds for dinner lastnight, but it was better than any McDonalds here in the states - and more expensive. Japan was pricey, all around, but relatively clean and well-organized. Very efficient. My hotel room wouldn't have any power for lights or airconditioning unless you slid the keycard attached to the door key into a slot just inside the room, insuring that you only had airconditioning and lights on when you were in the room. The bus-fare system was easy to understand once you got a hang of it, which I would have enjoyed if I knew where I was going. The directions the recruiters gave me were to the hotel and to the consulate, BOTH originating from the ferry. How useless is that?
PS. Jessica, I found like a whole row of external USB 10 key pads in an electronics store here. If you didn't have your desktop already I'd have sent you one. ;)
Today I picked up my (automatically Multi-Entry since I'm American =) visa with Charlie and Co., got some delicious chinese food, and left the country. I was behind the same guy in the bus that I had been when I left Korea, and on another one of the busses I'd ridden. He had a very distince necklace, and he and the guy he'd been navigating Japan with made for good conversation on the ferry back. Necklace boy has been teaching in Asia for four years, three of those four in Korea. He says it's hard to find a starting position with the pay, hours, and perks (size of apartment, large support community) that I found. He recommended Hyundae Beach as a good area to teach in - lots of westerners and good food. Not too far from PNU, which has a lot of restaurants and a ton of tourist and western hotspots. I hope he had happy landings.
The first movie was a typical tragic Korean drama where the main character, a little boy, loses his little sister and his dog before his good-for-nothing mom shows up to take care of him. Gragh. The second was My neighbor totoro, without english subtitles. It's hard to sleep with that playing, let me tell you.
I made it back to my apartment with no further pain, and soon after Hazel showed up and offered to let me use her internet, since it will probably take a while to get mine set up. Koreans are known for their inneficiency.
As for pictures, I don't have any from Japan, but there were a bunch of people taking pictures at the Chinjo Lantern Festival, so I'll probably be able to snag some to upload from them. I'll get a korean camera when I get a chance.
Korea is a loud, bright, chaotic place. That is my first impression of it.
Japan is a quiet, busy, and effician place. That is my first impression of it.
I think I'll enjoy my time here. I'm lucky to have ended up where I landed.
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