Garden Expos Deserve Their Very Own Posts...

Just last weekend, we took the bus (all by our lonesomes!!!) to Suncheon where we had a fantastic time with James, Mandy, Emily, and Tim who are vegan, vegetarian, Canadian, and Tim, respectfully. It was lovely to hang with peeps and spend some quality time walking around the town of Suncheon (about an hour-and-a-half bus ride to the northeast of Jangheung).

We found a local "Hof" on our first night, after booking into a local hotel, and the hospitality was just what we needed after a full week! Traveling on the weekends to meet up with peeps=happy Ed and Kristen. :)

On our bus ride to and from Suncheon, we listened to Steve Martin’s autobiography, Born Standing Up. In it, he talks about how lucky he was that anyone gave him a chance, considering that he had no idea what he was doing and, in his own estimation, he spent most of his early twenties just being awful at comedy. He felt just as grateful for every gig on stage or writing for a show, even when he had to borrow a joke or two just to get by.

This is exactly how we feel at various moments while teaching and living in SK. A few recent experiences in Suncheon made us feel very thankful as Steve did many, many years ago. And honestly, this past weekend, most of them involved flowers and gorgeous scenery.

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Suncheon Garden Expo

During the weekend with James, Mandy, Tim and Emily, we got to enjoy one of our most memorable times in this country yet!

We walked through a French-inspired garden (above) and it was GORGEOUS! It definitely had a Pride and Prejudice feel to it and even had a coffee shop nearby! [Heaven, I think?]

Next we toured a maze of rose bushes, literally smelled the roses, passed a lot of other tourists taking in the scenery and then wandered up a little mountain to get some sights from the top! Breathtaking!

They even had themed gardens!

We don't quite know why this one was called the German Garden, but in any case, it was very pretty and symmetrical!

American Garden, though very concrete at the entrance, had a grass area as well, which was nice!

Other gardens included the England, Japanese, Spanish, traditional Korean, Dutch...

...and Thai!

Overall, it was a glorious sightseeing day and we very much enjoyed all the sights. Go, garden expos!

Here's to many more weekends filled with good times, good people, and good ol' Korea! 'Til next time...

One Month Anniversary! (Yoesu, Gangjin, and Flexibility)

As of the 17th of May, we officially finished the first year.

I mean the month. Just the first month.

But, even though we’ve only had a little over thirty days, it feels like we’ve been here for quite a while. We’ve unpacked every closed zipper and put our books on the bookshelf, setting up our house just right. We bought new sheets and a lovely comforter for our bed (even though we are just starting the push up into the summer temperatures), and we moved the bed around the room to make the most out of the boss window that runs the length of our bedroom wall and faces our little street of Jangheung. The humidity may be on the rise, and uplifting as the distant thought of summer draws near, things are still beginning to feel nice and casual around our little town.

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Yoesu

We’ve had a few fun weekends thus far, to be sure! Earlier in May, we took a trip to Yeosu, a coastal city that’s just a few towns over from us. Yeosu has a large archipelago which sweeps out into the East China Sea. We were lucky enough to be able to:
    ...stay in an extra apartment not in use by a couple from our orientation, John and Mara
     ...get a lift to Yeosu from a Mister Timothy J. McHiggins, esq.
       ...enjoy the company of some April Orientation friends and had a blast getting to know life outside of sweet little Jangheung.

All of our companions proved to be excellent hosts and companions during our jaunt into Yoesu. Tim, especially, will always hold a special place in our hearts for leading us by the nose to the first sushi restaurant we had seen since leaving the States. My father always likes to use the verb “horking” to describe how my siblings and I tend to gobble things up, without regard to what might be our hands or fingers or the cutlery. I won’t belabor the point too much, only to say that Kristen and I REALLY, TERRIBLY, DEFINITELY, ABSOLUTELY missed sushi and horked with the best of them.

The beaches in Yoesu are not too bad either!

While we lounged and walked and talked about, some kids started up a game of baseball not too far behind us. Adorable as they were, Kristen couldn't help but snap a pic of them:

Anyone want to play catch? Jellies in the sand:

During our short time in Yeosu, we also got to eat Shabu Shabu, which is a sort-of musical chairs type of food, in which, everyone is constantly eating and refilling the same tub of broth and vegetables and meat as the meal progresses. Restaurants with this dining option are usually buffet-type places and the one we went to was rather delicious! Plus it was right on the beach!

Yep, alive-looking squids and sea creatures and all. Other people were more brave than I when it came to these traditional Korean buffet options.

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Gangjin

We’ve further discovered that this is the general layout for quite a few modern Korean meals. Just last Thursday, all of the expat teachers in Jangheung and Gangjin, and even a few from Yeongam, met for dwejigalbi (something that translates roughly into savory marinated pork that one guiltily gobbles up like a playlist full of pop songs). To eat dwejigalbi, you first order your meat. This is a raw pork steak which looks as though it’s been marinated in soy sauce, brown sugar, garlic, and straight-up love. Next, the staff usually brings out a heavenly host of side dishes, including an orange bean paste that we’ve become particularly fond of because it is SALTY AS THE DICKENS. They also bring out lettuce leaves and raw onions and garlic and peppers, along with many other little dishes. The basic form for this, and many other meals, is you cook your meats and veggies then make little individual lettuce wraps. Twenty minutes later, you’ve got a table full of empty little dishes and all your clothes smell of aerosol fats and meat juices, but it brings a lasting contentment that not even a runny bowel movement (or two!) can deter.

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Aside from food...

When we are not eating, Kristen and I are at school for most of the days and recuperating from them for most of our weekday nights. Teaching, though a rewarding profession in many aspects, is very interactive and demands engagement from teachers. Nonetheless, we are enjoying it thus far! Kristen's Thursdays and Tuesdays are particularly brutal, as she is on her feet for the entire day teaching sixth graders who sometimes tend to DGAF harder than Tyrion Lannister. Then for Mondays and Fridays, her 5th graders are rather pleasant and have for-the-most-part alright attention spans. I have three to four classes a day, my Mondays and Tuesdays are filled with Grade 1 (sophomores!) and the rest of the week with Grade 2 (the grade after sophomore). Every Thursday, I catch a ride with Kweon Shik, an English teacher at Anyang Middle School which is in a nearby town. He likes to catch me up on holidays and what they need for the day at school and how his garden is doing. He took me to see his plants and they seem to be thriving, although his butter lettuce was sadly overrun with weeds and have been abandoned.

I then take the bus back to Jangheung proper after classes and usually have enough time to grab lunch at Mom’s Touch, which is so far Kristen's and my favorite chicken and fries place (sorry, back to eating again). I’d like to say that our general week is all but routine, but our lives are far from it.

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Flexibility

Looking back on our orientation in mid-April, it was incumbent upon us that things were always going to be dependent on our situation and things, everything, were always subject to change. So far, this has meant a lot of canceled classes for testing or sports and some extra work doing recordings for pronunciation or perhaps a speech or two over the PA system for the students to hear. Now, during orientation, a lot of teachers were a little shellshocked as the answers given by the speakers for most of our questions was: “In my time in Korea, it’s been like this. But for you, it all depends on this and this and probably that or this or that yadda yadda yadda. In addition, it will also depend on your school, your co-teacher, your age, your foot size, whether or not you faint when your blood is taken, etc…” To us frightened newbies—not for the peeps who had been here for 1, 2, 3 or more years since (cold-eyed killers, as they are)—this was not the response we had hoped for. We all seemed to want hard facts and answers we could actually turn into a plan before we hit the ground at full sprint, like the spinning blur that appears beneath the road runner before he disappears leaving a cloud in the shape of his body. We wanted to know what to expect, but the reality was and still is that nobody ever knows. This is not because Korea is not an intensely-organized society, but because, as foreigners, its complexities and actions are as mysterious to Kristen and me as the mating rituals of turkeys; and we are just helpless. We’ve been very lucky, though, to have had so much help from our friends and families back home as well as our friends and and co-workers here in Korea.

For instance, just this last week our gas went out during Kristen's shower. She was IMMENSELY displeased at this eventuality and did not find it quite as funny as I did when her scolding hot shower had a sudden arctic flow. Providentially, she went to her co-teacher, the marvelous Oh Kyoung, who helped her call the gas company so they could send, who Kristen could only describe as, “the smallest, oldest man in the world” to switch on the other tank.

This only-one-of-many-many-kind moments in which we’ve been grateful to Oh Kyoung and my co-teacher, the Edna Mode-sounding and amazing, Ji Song. Oh Kyoung brought the school janitors by to show us how to us the oolong heating system (pipes under the floor that fill with hot water), which we promptly left on the entire weekend we were away in Yeosu. Oops. We know they work in any case now! The janitors also (thankfully!!) patched a break in the floor which we found was slowly filling with centipedes. Sure, we’ve been able to do some things ourselves, like fight the ever-encroaching slug invasion, and we are learning to do more; but we wouldn’t have phones, bank accounts, or half of the well-being and contentment we feel if it weren’t for everyone we have around us to help us out. I’m not sure if we’d ever eat if it weren’t for all our good friends (you know who you are!) mapping out all the best spots in our happy little river town. SO THANK YOU!!! :)

BUT from our first week time of freaking out and then chilling and then freaking out a bit more, we learned firstly that you can’t know everything right then and there. You have to be confident in your skills and talents and know that yes, you’re going to suck at everything first and that’s just how it is going to be. At the beginning of any new job, there are going to be struggles and setbacks and goof-ups. It’s almost to be expected. And so, with these new thoughts enveloping us and a new language immersing us, our final day of our first month came and went, just like another day. The meeting and greeting of our no-longer new co-teachers—who essentially will continue to be our right-hand men and women, our gods and goddesses of translation, our paradigms of Korean teaching came and went. It happened and now we are more than month into our new jobs and traveling all over the province of Jeollanamdo.

Though we are all still new to things here in SK, the April batch of English teachers is a close-knit bunch and we enjoy spending time together, sharing what experiences we have already had and what we have to look forward to. Sure, we like to talk about where we all came from and what we all plan to do here, but it is the position within each of our schools that links us together. It is always comforting to walk into a store or coffee shop or bar and hear your native language and to get to hang out with friendly folks even though they come from vastly different backgrounds. Kristen and I have had a great first month and we are very excited for the next and the next and the next. It’s always lovely to check in with family and friends and to enjoy our time with new ones in our new home, and it is grand to be settling in nicely as a generally confused, but mostly just thankful couple, grateful for this gig.

Grateful face:

Cheers, ya'll! Chat again soon...