The first is a standard posed picture – (from the roof of the school) with all of the Geundeok teachers and staff.  This is everybody

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The second picture is a new-age-awesomeness picture envisioned by the artiste photographers… If we were a band, we would be awesome… but we’re not, we’re elementary school teachers – so it’s just goofy.  But that’s Korea!!

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Some of these people are really amazing.  We’ve become great friends with a number of them and will miss them greatly when leave in a few months.  One advantage of being at such a small school is that it’s really like an extended family.  I know every one of these people pretty well and some of them are really our best friends in Korea.  That’s much less possible at a school with 80 teachers that is departmentalized and divided.   I’d list the names and positions of everyone in the picture but it would probably be silly.  Our closest friends are the woman on the far left (black sweater tan skirt) – She’s the 5th grade teacher, teacher Kim Young-mi and is a year older than us.  She came this year from Taebaek and has been a great friend!  Can’t imagine the past year without her great sense of humor and fantastic English.  The woman in the front with the White Jacket (younger woman) is our official Co-teacher, Son Eun-Jin.  She’s amazing!  Such a fantastic friend and always willing to help us when we have problems.  (And she’s the hardest working person in our school ) In front of Kate (to the left a bit) in all black is Teacher Kim Suk-jin.  She was our first friend here in Korea and really helped us a lot our first semester here.  She was in the U.S. last summer studying English and is now teaching most of our classes with us (long story).  She’s great and we will miss her a lot.  Hopefully some of these ladies will come to our wedding!!  There are a number of other teachers I’d love to tell you about and surely will sometime soon, but for now that’s it  Just wanted post these pictures while I was thinking of it.

All the best…

Kate and I are enjoying homemade apple pie and whip cream tonight.  Thanks KATE!

-Chad

Recently our school went on a double field trip day with some of our Garden school funding.

NOTE: Our school was designated a “Garden School” earlier this year and given some huge amount of money to renovate and redesign the programming.  Kate and I have no idea really why our school was given this “honor” but we can assume it has something to do with our Vice Principal who last year was a supervisor at the office of education, so he has lots of connections.  This all doesn’t really affect us toooo much except that everyone is going crazy trying to figure out how to spend all the money and we’re cramming in a bunch of field trips before the end of the school year to use some of it up.  Hence.. the double field trip day.

The 4-6 graders went to Seoul for 2 days to visit another Garden school and to see some museums etc.  The 1st-3rd graders went to Gyeungju.  This city is about 3 hours south of Samcheok and used to be one of the dynasty capitals before the country was unified and Seoul became the capital.  We’re talking 600-1000 years ago…  So we toured some of the major historic sites, a museum, and a famous Buddhist temple.  I’m glad we got to go on this trip even though the 1st-3rd graders are more difficult to handle than the older kids.  We’ve seen Seoul so many times, it was nice to check off another place (even if our trip was very fast and not at all comprehensive ).

Here are some of our pictures from the trip.  If you’d like to see the full gallery check it out in the photo pages or click here.

*A note to the reader, Chad did the grunt work for this and I am filling in the captions.  Now you know why Chad suddenly became much more effeminate.  It’s just me!    -K

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The sunrise on our way to see the old city.  We have to leave at 7!

We have an english camp at my small school on Wednesday and Thursday next week but other than that we’re pretty much done with everything for the semester!   

Enjoy the pictures..

-Chad

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The Guendoek Booth

This booth was packed with things the students have done. It is also peppered with English Village themed things like a poster of the English teachers! Guendoek is one of the few school that has an English Village so it puts a lot into showing off the facilities.

Above is our good friend Mark in his booth. Definitely the coolest booth! It was all Halloween themed and there were even costumes to try on!

Blue Bobo

Spicy Mexican

This is a complicated tug of war game. I don’t really know much about it. I know that the tug of war rope looks like a pretzel and that the game is very old and a big tradition.

Apparently the pretzel knot is a great place for relaxation after a drum performance.

Chad, Kate, Principle (Kyo Chang Songsamniem), Vice Principal (Kyo Kom Songsamniem), Kumo (A secratary?), and the Special Ed (Slash Art?) Teacher.

This picture was taken right after all of the Education Big Fish came through in their suits. We kind of think that they are the biggest reason that this Fair happened. To show the Big Guys (And Gals) what the schools are doing. It seemed like a lot of money to pour into 10 seconds of bowing and handshakes per school. At least there were fun things for the kids to do at the fair like making soap and mini-books and little creatures made of bark and twigs.

There was also this,

Chad will have to correct me but I think this is like a harness for para-sailing? It was fun and we got some funny pictures of Chad. A newspaper even took pictures and interviewed him about his experience. According to Teacher Kim they wanted to talk to Chad about his experience in this contraption because he looks happy and Koreans don’t show emotion. Yes, that is what she said.

After Chad and I had checked out all of the booths Teacher Kim arrived at the Fair and had us go around with her. It was fun and we actually did some of the activities with her.

A stop back by at Mark’s booth.

An obligatory cute Korean child picture.

Well, that all the new on Lake Woebegon. More to come. As usual I am behind with posting. We have been preoccupied with planning our winter vacation. All of our computer time has been sucked into that. We do have our tickets booked now, so thats exciting!

I just made muffins. The muffin tin was too big for our petite oven so I had to double up the paper cups and bake the muffins on a cookie sheet. We’ll see how they turn out. Oh, that reminds me. . .

Last Sunday Chad made peanut butter cookies. They were fabulous, I just polished the last one off yesterday. We brought a large portion of the cookies to school thinking we would share them with the teachers during our 10:40 snack time/teachers meeting. We put them out on the communal table and they were gone before school started at 9:20. Amazing. I love the teachers we work with.

Have a great week!

K

We celebrated with the kids all month long during our Camps on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Here are some pictures from the 2nd grade camp last week. Tonight we are having a few people over for Halloween and we’re baking an Apple PIE with our new oven!!!

We made pumpkin masks, skeletons, watched Winnie the Pooh Halloween, Charlie Brown, Disney, Sang songs about pumpkins and witches, and ran around like mummies! It was all quite exciting. Here’s a few pictures from the camps.

Kate, “Make a witch hat if you are finished!”

“OK”, says the cutest 2nd grader ever.

Everyone is almost finished, even teacher Chang!

I didn’t really help much, I was just playing with the kids

But the pumpkin masks all got finished!!

They weren’t happy then… but they were soon enough when we gave them candy!!

The sixth graders got to run around in toilet paper like they were mummies. This was mildly successful.

What a mess…

Two weeks ago Samcheok hosted the SAFEM Exposition. It happens every few years, no one was able to tell me how often. This week long event is the biggest safety fair in all of Asia. Samcheok was flooded with people from all over to visit booths about safety. Last Thursday our Camp was cancelled and we got to accompany the 5th and 6th graders on a field trip to the Expo.

Inside a Tank

Peace

I have to admit that on the surface this was all fun and games but I think I can speak for both myself and Chad in saying that the exposition of the military gear was a bit unsettling. A lot of what we encountered was very familiar. I do not know the specifics but I do know that the US was the designated country to help South Korea get on its feet after the Korean War. Considering how familiar these tanks were I assume that they might be one of the few American things we have encountered here.

Anyone know more about this?

Daddy, look! We got a new car!

Okay, so we got into it a little bit . . . For the kids.

Teacher Joe!

Teacher Cha-duh

Do you remember us mentioning the creepy mannequins that stand on the side of the road to direct traffic? Here are a couple of examples.

Another main highlight for us was the indoor cave reconstruction.

Kate the Stalagmite

This was really fun. We ran around the plastic rock with the students for a while but then we got separated which was great for a photo shoot.

Chad going down the Ice Shoot!

At least someone in Korea is painting!

Flash backs to the Knife Edge (inverted) on Capitol Peak!

Henry is back! Chad takes a fierce approach to conquering this gigantic bat!

Treasure Chest! I felt like the Little Mermaid but not as graceful. . . no mer-tail.

I took this picture for my Mom. Are they not too cute? I am not sure where they but their little sweaters.

Here is the stage that we could here from our apartment late at night. This is a Chilean band, it made me think of my boys back home.

Dancers from Thailand (Marlie do you have one of these outfits yet!?) (My friend Marlie is teaching Thailand right now. Chad and I want to go and visit her in January!)

This is the huge smoke stack-cake in Samcheok. I just thought you needed to see it.

This is our grounds keeper/bus driver! Check out his fancy bus driving outfit!

This brings me to an interesting and off topic point. I think that through out this blog you have probably picked up on the fact that the social system here is very different from in the States. AKA WOMEN ARE NOT SEEN AS EQUAL. Another piece of the social differences is the hierarchy of position. So, for example, this bus driver is supposed to treat me, a teacher, with more respect than he would treat a fellow bus driver. I am not supposed to treat him with the same respect as I do the principle. This has been incredibly difficult (possibly even more difficult than knowing that they are always going to go to Chad about anything and not me). I grew up with my parents pounding into me to treat everyone equally. Everyone should receive the same amount of respect. The fact that it is offensive to some that I treat someone “bellow” me with the same respect I give to someone “above” me has been incredibly difficult. This part of their culture is incredibly difficult to adjust because in my opinion it is WRONG!

Well, we are here to promote change, to help bring Korea into the Western World. How much of that can I do without offending everyone? A thin, wavering line. All I know is that I will not stop respecting people. i just need to figure out how to respect without offending others. Wow.

I just had to get that out there. One of the reasons I know I will never make Korea my permanent home.

Happy Sunday! We are off to play Badminton!

Finish Line!

Tug of War!

This is Teacher Kim. She acts as out co-teacher and English speaking connection!! She has been absolutely wonderful to us. She usually teaches at a Guendeok branch school but the branch school joined us for sports day!

Chicken fighting. Falling. Like what we weren’t supposed to do in the pool when we were kids. The do it on the ground as part of school.

Aerobics. . . what we would call organized dance party for minors. We practiced the dance with them. Pretty fun. We’ll show you when we get back. At my other school, Jang Ho, the students wore spandex midriff and back exposing, bell bottoms, corp tops and halter-mini dresses. Electric green and yellow with kelly green ruffles. Whoa Nellie.

Dress the little guys in clown outfits for their relay race!

Not only the kids do relay races. The parents are major participants in Sports Day. Sometimes they are competing alongside the children, other times against each other. My favorite of the parents vs. parents games is the one bellow.

1. Inflate balloons.
2. Place filled balloon into a huge trash bag.

3. Compare balloon-stuffed trash bag height.

4. Relay race with the balloon-stuffed trash bags.

This kid is the only one that held my hand as I played surrogate Mom.

After I acted as Sports Day Guardian to a few children Chad got to play Mom too. The teachers thought he looked sad because he didn’t get to play.

He caught it!

Waiting for out turn.

We had to squat the whole time. They constantly squat for EVERYTHING! Have we mentioned that? Western knees don’t work that way.

We won!!