Summer is Here and My Students are Hilarious (and Disturbing)

After the weather this week I think we can safely say that summer is officially here! Daegu is known for being the hottest city in Korea and it’s definitely living up to the hype. Because it’s situated in a geographic bowl all of the hot air gets trapped in the valley and none of those nice coastal breezes can make their way in. It’s 95 today with a high of 98 projected for tomorrow. Yikes!

I grew up in Louisiana and most recently lived in North Carolina, so I am used to some merciless heat and humidity, but it’s different here because the air conditioning is non-existent. That’s right. It’s 95 degrees and my classroom is NOT air conditioned. All of the windows are open (they don’t have screens, by the way, so there are always bugs), but unless your classroom has windows on both sides (mine doesn’t), it’s hard to get much of a cross-breeze going. There are these rotating fans that hang from the ceiling that we use instead of air conditioning, but they won’t let us use them right now because “they haven’t been cleaned yet” and they are dusty. Apparently a little bit of dust for a few minutes would be hazardous whereas the “yellow dust” (toxic pollution from China) that we are breathing in from the windows being open is no big deal. Hard to argue with that kind of logic.

Aside from the heat, Daegu is so much prettier in the summer. This is a path where I like to run.

It feels a little weird for this to be summer because we still have two full months of school before our summer vacation. So while everyone back home is graduating and getting ready for summer trips we are still in the middle of the semester. Apart from being sweaty all of the time things are chugging along like normal here in the ROK. I realize that we do a lot of blogging about traveling and fun new experiences we have, but not a lot about everyday life, so I thought I’d share a few recent teaching experiences.

I teach 3-6^th grade in an elementary school and my students are generally pretty low level, but I have this one magical 6^th grade class where at least half of the students have really good English. They are really positive and motivated and can do so much more than my other classes.

Our last chapter has been about jobs and how to say, “I want to be a police officer” or whatever. I wrote a bunch of jobs on the board and then had the students read them, trying to explain any words they didn’t know. When I got to “waiter” and they gave me the blank-faced stare of ignorance so I said. “When you go to a restaurant, the waiter is the person who comes and asks what you want.”

My boy, Min Woo, interrupts me and says, “Oh yes, yes, teach-ah. I know.” And then, doing different voices for each character: “’Hello, what do you want?’ ‘Oh, I’ll have the foie gras’.”

Oh em gee. Most 6^th grade kids who actually speak English don’t know what “foie gras” is. I was dying.

Min Woo is a particularly bright student, but some of the others are equally amusing. Later on I taught the same lesson to a different class of 6^th graders. While playing a game, one boy couldn’t remember the word for astronaut. I patiently waited for it to come to him.

“As… As… uh”

Encouraging nod from me.

“Ass-pilot!” Triumphant.

Burst into very unprofessional laughter.

While my 6^th graders are fun because they understand more and can interact at a slightly higher level, it’s hard to beat the cute factor of the third graders. Except for this one girl who really creeps me out. One morning I was teaching them animal names. I showed a slide with a picture of a cartoon penguin with a little bowtie. The students were all exclaiming, “Oh! Cute!” Then this one girl in the front row mutters in a creepy-deep voice, “Mmm…delicious.”

I told this story to a few other teachers and they mostly thought it was funny, but also that I might have misheard her. I conceded that this was possible. Until yesterday when I taught her class again. We were singing a youtube song about the colors. There’s a little yellow bird flying around the tree in the video singing sweetly. Once again this little girl said, “Oh, delicious.” This time the other students around her looked shocked. “No! Not delicious!” But she just smiled creepily and said in her husky little voice, “Yes, very delicious.”

All I can say is I am not turning my back to that girl. Ever.

My Parents’ Visit to Korea: In Which I Almost Become a Human Kite

Sorry we’ve been silent for so long! My parents came to visit for almost two weeks and we’ve been so busy hosting them and showing them around Korea that we didn’t have much time left for writing.

We had a long weekend off of school at the beginning of May because of three separate holidays that just happened to be back-to-back. May 1^st was Labor Day and although school was still open, certain types of government workers were given the day off, including the foreign English teachers. May 5^th was a holiday called Children’s Day (basically what it sounds like – a day celebrating the value of children) and May 6^th was Buddha’s birthday, both of which are national holidays where schools and businesses are closed. It worked out so perfectly that we had all of this time off while my parents were in town visiting. Many schools made May 2^nd a temporary holiday so their teachers could have a 6 day holiday, but neither Jonathan’s nor mine did. There is a similar holiday situation in June where we have holidays on a Wednesday and a Friday and many schools are making the Thursday in between a temporary holiday. Again, neither Jonathan’s nor my school are. Frown face.

We spent my parents’ first few days in Korea seeing Seoul and eating tasty food that we don’t normally have access to in Daegu. My parents were still getting over their jetlag so we didn’t do a comprehensive tour of Seoul, but we did try to hit the highlights. We went to Changdeokgung Palace and Seoul Tower, ate fantastic Western food in Itaewon, window-shopped in Insadong and stayed in Myeongdong, where I took full advantage of the 3-story Forever21 to stock up on clothes that actually come in my size.

Because of the holidays, everywhere we went was exceptionally crowded. My parents flew into Incheon Airport near Seoul and I took a train up there to pick them up. Normally we don’t worry about reserving train tickets in advance because the high-speed KTX train runs every 15 minutes or so all day long and even if you can’t get on a train immediately, you can be pretty sure there will be tickets available within a few hours. In fact, the longest we’ve ever had to wait for a train was about an hour, even on holidays. Because of this we were completely unprepared for what happened when I tried to get my parents back to Daegu and found that all of the tickets were sold out for the entire day. We ended up having to buy tickets for 5:50 the following morning and find a hotel to stay in that night.

Eventually we made it back to Daegu, where we showed my parents around downtown and in our area. On Children’s Day we took them to Palgongsan, the highest mountain in Daegu, and did a short hike up one of the gentler sides.

For Buddha’s birthday we traveled to Gyeongju, which is about an hour from Daegu by train. Gyeongju is the ancient seat of the Silla dynasty and has a lot of special meaning for Koreans. Much of the significance was lost on us since we don’t have the sense of Korean history that we do of our own country, but we still enjoyed a truly gorgeous day exploring Gyeongju National Park and the Royal Tomb Complex, the very old, but not very tall Cheomseongdae observatory and the Anapji royal pond garden.

Royal Tomb Park. The hills behind us are burial mounds.

This tomb had been excavated so you could enter it.

World’s shortest observatory.

Anapji Royal Pond

On Wednesday, Jonathan and I had to go back to school, so my parents hung out in Daegu for the next few days while we worked. On Friday my parents actually came to school with me and observed/participated in my classes. I was able to do a special lesson introducing them and then talking about Mother’s Day and Father’s Day in the US. It was perfectly timed because in Korea people celebrate Parent’s Day on May 8^th (the day before my parents came to school) and Mother’s Day in the US was May 11^th, so it made for a perfect topic.

The following weekend, we all trekked out to Busan to check out the Yeongdo Lighthouse which Jonathan had read about. It was a bit of a hike to get out to the peninsula, but well worth it. The scenery was stunning (I’ve always had a thing for rocky coastlines), the water was this gorgeous color I didn’t know existed in Korea, and the weather was perfect. When we got out to the point the lighthouse was on it suddenly became insanely windy. Like, I was actually afraid I was going to be picked up and carried off the cliff. It was equal parts terrifying and exhilarating.

The wind was insane, but the coastline was stunning.

I legitimately thought I was going to picked up by the wind and carried off this cliff.

King of the Rock

Other than that, we spend the rest of our time enjoying each other’s company and introducing my parents to the BBC’s Sherlock which they’d been missing out on. They left on Monday which was bittersweet. It was wonderful to see them and to get to share our world with them, but it also reminded me of how very far away we are. Saying goodbye this time wasn’t nearly as hard as when we left in August though. We are planning to visit home for a few days this coming August, which is really only a few months away. We’re trying to squeeze in a brief but good visit to both my family and Jonathan’s in our two weeks of summer vacation because, BIG NEWS, we have officially decided to renew our contracts and stay in Korea for one more year!