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I haven't written a blog for two weeks so it's time to update you all on what I've been up to.
Teaching has been going ok, although I'm having discipline problems with my grade 3 and 4 classes - one lesson they must have been fed e-numbers before hand coz they were over the top hyper refusing to sit down when I wanted them too and refusing to stand up when I needed them to. I also had two kids in tears from others hitting them this week. I have been sending kids to stand in the corner quite a lot :(. I decided to go back to basics with them this week and started teaching them numbers 1-20 and using songs more. A few of the boys don't seem to like that but the rest of the class seem to engage more and I could actually see that they had improved their English this week. Some of the quieter ones also seemed more comfortable with the level of the English.
One of the highlights of my week has been an after school class with my 7 of my oldest students - they are proving a pleasure to teach. Their English levels are quite good so exploring interesting topics with them is possible. And I can have proper conversations with them.
With Easter coming up on Sunday, I decided to do after school lessons devoted to celebrating Easter. I gave the kids a short presentation about Easter in the west and then had them make bunny hats or easter baskets, I brought in hard boiled eggs for them all to decorate (although they were more interested in eating them) and then hid paper Easter Eggs around the classroom for them to find and give me in exchange for candy. I think it went down well.
Last Friday (27th) I went to Costco with some other teachers. I was able to get some really decent stuff - like feta cheese (YESSSS!), a big towel, a big 1.75lt bottle of spiced rum and some oregano. I also found porridge oats. Well....oatmeal, but its near enough. Getting to taekwondo was a bit of a nightmare though as it involved two long bus rides and having to ask someone on the street to phone a number to find out the correct bus. When we eventually got there we missed the stop and had to walk 30 minutes. Ah well, it was worth it to get those food stuffs.
Saturday I went to Haeundae. This is a famous part of Busan, in fact its the most famous beach in Korea. It's also very touristy so there's lots of nice restaurants and signs in English. I managed to eat Mexican for lunch. The beach itself is nice and sandy (though Paignton is still better) and there was a great sign on a BMW building there "Park where you damn well please". It had me in fits of laughter. There are also some lovely walks there - one around what used to be an Island called Dongbaekseom Island. It is not connected to the mainland though. It was a beautiful coastal walk and included a statue of a mermaid who apparently longs for a lost place, as well as a bronze statue of a scholar called Choi Chi-won who first carved the characters Hae Un Dae on rock there. The Island is also the site of a Nurimaru Apec House which was a memorial site to the Asian Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting. That was interesting and had one of the most beautiful pieces of carved art I have ever seen in it. The other side of the beach was the Dalmaji road. This is another coastal route with the streets lined with beautiful cherry blossom trees and then it goes through a forest with various places to stop and look out.
The other interesting things about Haeundae were that there are internet "cafe's" on the beach (yes....that's Korea!) and I had an embarressing experience in a hot spring. The hot spring is right on the beach so I decided to go put my feet in it....amongest about 40 old women and men. First they didn't like the fact I had been on the beach and through some wild gesturing I understood they wanted me to clean my feet in this other pool first....which I did....badly. This old man got up and had to show me to stamp around in the pool. Then I got into the hot spring but the water was so hot my feet were burning (most of the others had what looked like scalded feet). Then I decided to get out but I was so sat so close to the people next to me that I ended up having to lift my legs up over them to climb out. Needless to say I'm sure they were making rude comments about me as I left.
Haeundae was a wonderful day out but when I got home my feet were so badly blistered from the five hours of walking that even a trip to the sauna didn't ease them and so I had to cancel my walking up Gajisan (tallest mountain in Ulsan) with a friend the next day.
Tuesday saw me quit Taekwondo.....even though I'd just paid the monthly 100,000 won (£70) the week before. I decided it just wasn't for me (and I didn't want to pay another 30,000 won for the uniform.) I kept coming home and finding I wasn't looking forward to going, partly because I had lesson planning some nights, and partly because the beautiful weather when I got home meant I just wanted to go out hiking local mountains instead. One evening I did hike up the nearest mountain to me which was a short hike and when I got to the top, the views over Eonyang were stunning.
Wednesday evening I went out for a meal with friends to a "shabu" place. It was a lovely three course meal - first you cook and eat your meat and vegetables in a hotpot bowl, then you put noodles in the remains of it and make a noodle broth and you finish by adding, rice, an egg and pumpkin to the last dregs to make a very lovely eggy rice meal. It was delicious. Afterwards we popped to a big supermarket and found yeast....which means I can start making Mead YAY!
On Thursday 2nd April, I went with a couple of friends to the Eonyang Cherry Blossom Festival. Every year in Korea, for a couple of weeks, the cherry blossoms come into bloom. Many streets are lined with the trees so it makes for some spectacular displays of colour. The festival was held in a street the other side of town so after a short bus ride, we walked down this street lined both sides with hundreds of blossoming trees and underneath, stalls selling food or providing entertainment. It was a lovely evening despite the pouring rain.
Today I decided to go visit some Petroglyphs locally. These are basically rock art from the neolithic and bronze age in Korea. The people of the time carved lots of animals and strange shapes into rocks and these have been well preserved. For example, they show that the people would hunt massive whales on just little rafts! There was a petroglyph museum which was very interesting and then two walks through a beautiful valley which each led to the rock art. The first even went past dinosaur footprints and a 500 year old house and led to the Bangudae Petroglyphs of over 300 drawings of animals. You had to look through a telescope thing to see them though. I could make out a tiger and a wild boar. The second walk led to the Cheonjeon-ri engraved stones which were mainly symbols like spirals carved in the rock . It was a wonderful day, however confusion reigned in trying to get home when the bus driver of the only bus that goes to the site, told me he wasn't going back to Eonyang and then said he would be back at what I thought was 2pm.....but then a tour guide who spoke English said it would be 5pm so I walked to the main road to try and find another bus.....at which point the original bus returned. Needless to say, I was not happy at the contradiction almost causing me to loose my bus journey home.
Overall, its been a lovely couple of weeks with a lot of cultural visits. I have a three day weekend this week too as the anniversary of the school's founding is on Monday so it's a day off. I hope to go to an amethyst cavern tomorrow and probably the Ulsan Grand Park and Ulsan Museum Monday.
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