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Wow, it's 2016 and I have less than two months left in Korea. What an amazing year 2015 was - moving to the other side of the world, experiencing a completely different culture, trying many new foods, seeing many beautiful places and learning a lot about myself as I grew as a teacher. There have been various up's and down's over the year but for the most part it has been a wonderful experience that I highly recommend to anyone.
So my last post was 6 weeks ago - this seems to be becoming a theme lol. The biggest thing that happened over that time was the arrival of my boyfriend David and another friend Ross. They are staying here for three months before we continue our world travels together. In early December I went up to Seoul to meet them at the airport and then we stayed two days in Seoul. A highlight of that trip for me was getting to try on traditional Korean Hanbok clothes at the Bukchon Hanok Village. I have wanted to try that for a long time. We also got to see parts of the changing of the guard ceremony at one of the palaces, which I didn't see last time I was in Seoul, and we went to a couple of museum's about King Sejong (the inventor of the Korean language Hangeul), and their famous general Admiral Yi Su Shin (who invented the turtle ship). Unfortunately some mass protests against government policies prevented us from seeing everything we wanted to - basically the Korean government has been cracking down on employment protections and trying to change school history textbooks to be more supportive of their ideology. We also went to Gangnam and saw the area where the Gangnam Style song was made.
During the weeks, I am at work so David and Ross either stay at home or go exploring round Eonyang. However on weekends I have been taking them to see the sights. We have been to various places in Ulsan including the Grand Park, River Park and Old Downtown. I took them to the Korean Sauna which they loved and we have been back a few times since. We went to the Amethyst Cave, Sinbulsan Hot Springs, Tongdosa Temple and we went to Busan to see Haeundae Beach and the largest department store in Asia. We also went to Gyeongju to see the sights there.
Yesterday we had a brilliant day out at Golgulsa Temple in Gyeongju. Golgulsa takes a bit of time to get to, but it was definitely worth it. While it's buildings are few and not very interesting, you can get sick of seeing the same type of architecture all the time and we have already seen a few other temples. What made Golgulsa excellent was that it was different - it has a big rock face which you walk (climb?) up and it's full of small inlets with buddha statues and the Shinsan (mountain spirit). At the top is a 1500 year old carving of a buddha which was stunning. After we had explored that, we were treated to a performance of Korean martial art Sunmudo. The temple is famous for this art and you can learn it there if you do a temple stay. It's more of a yoga/ qi-gong/ meditation style than fighting but it's still amazing to see. Golgulsa is definitely one of my favourite three temples - the others being Tongdosa which is one of the three "jewel" temples containing parts of the buddha's skull, robe and dish (apparently), and Beomeosa where I did my Temple Stay experience.
Teaching has been fairly relaxed during December. As the Korean school year goes from March - December we were finishing up the textbooks with the students and then they had exams. English club was reduced from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, but despite that I was still able to get the students to make a school newspaper which I hope they were very proud of. They required a lot of help but it was a success. During my after school classes at middle school I updated the "how to make your own country" module I did with elementary school and the kids did that - I think they enjoyed the more creative side but unfortunately we didn't get to finish before the classes were over. At Christmas I taught my students about Christmas traditions in England, from the nativity story (which I was very surprised to learn they knew nothing about despite many going to Church here and having some Christmas celebrations), to traditions such as wassailing, crackers and kissing under mistletoe.
I also taught my elementary students about Christmas in England, got my older ones to write a letter to Santa and my younger ones to learn the song "we wish you a merry Christmas." We did a lot of crafts too and I was very touched when one of my youngest students made me a Christmas card. I taught them to make Christmas trees, Christmas crackers and some snowmen crafts. I also got both my middle and elementary school students to do some listening to Christmas songs, but they struggled a lot with this. It has made me realise that in future if I teach again, listening to songs is going to need to be a bigger part of my classes in order to improve their listening skills.
Both Christmas Day and New Year's Day are national holidays here so it was nice to have them off. Christmas Day is not really a family event though - it's more seen as a couple's day. We had a very quiet Christmas Day at home although we went out for Korean dessert (Bingsu) which was nice. We managed to find a small Christmas tree and decorations before Christmas too so it was nice to have some symbols of the Christmas season here. Christmas eve was great because the language exchange organised a party which many foreigners and koreans attended and we got quite drunk lol. New Years was also quite quiet but we went out for Italian on New Year's Eve with some other friends here and then had Shabu Shabu in an all you can eat place on New Years Day.
It is the winter vacation now so I have 9 days holiday during January. I also have two weeks of winter camps at my elementary school - hopefully they will be more successful than the summer ones. I have decided not to do many craft things this time because they just chucked them in the bin when we did that in the summer one. I am teaching grade 1 and 2 students the alphabet and simple short vowel phonics, I am teaching my grade 3 and 4 students about a variety of topics including colors, weather, sports, family and the house. I will be emphasising spelling of words during those lessons. For grade 5 and 6, I'm being quite ambitious and doing a music camp. I have 14 classes with them so I am going to teach them how to have a conversation about many aspects of music, lots of new vocab about things like musical instruments, musical genres and saying how music makes them feel. I will also teach them some pop songs and we will make a music video. It should be quite fun as long as it's not too over their heads. After the camps end I will have another week of holiday and then the kids are back for a completely pointless couple of weeks where there is really nothing to teach them so we will probably play games and watch movies. Also during that time we have three more days off for Lunar New Year.
My contract ends of 25th February and I will leave that day by Ferry to Japan for the next leg of the trip. At the moment the plan is to visit Japan for a few weeks, then go to New Zealand for 3 months and finally onto Australia to work for a year. On New Years Day we applied for our Australia working holiday visa's and got them granted the same day which was excellent service and a complete contrast to the incompetence of the British government's online systems which have caused me major headaches and a lot of wasted money. While our plan currently is to go to Japan for just a few weeks, we are looking at extending that time if we can find a way to stay for free (maybe volunteering) and get to experience the cherry blossom festival and and an interesting fertility festival at the beginning of April. We will have to do some more research first.
Ok, finally an update on my foot. I went back to hospital about it in December and the doctor said I should just keep doing exercises. I also had physical therapy again and that seems to have helped significantly as I have experienced less pain recently except for when walking for long periods of time. It's still not better but I think it's on the mend.
Right, I'm not sure when the next blog post will be, but hopefully not 6 weeks from now. Byeee.
- comments
karen Great post Matt glad to hear Christmas and New Year went well speak soon . Mum x