Sorry for not blogging for over a week. I have been waiting to figure out how to transfer pictures from my cell phone camera. Also the school district decided to block blogger.com, but that is not keeping me from writing my blogs at school. I just have to write them in MS Word first and then copy and paste once I get home =)
Last weekend I was sent by the school on a guided tour of Seoul. I went to a famous palace where King Sejong lived and had his scholars invent the Korean alphabet. Then I tried on one of the old fashioned Korean outfits and took some pictures with it on. There was a middle aged Japanese couple who wanted to take a picture with all of us wearing Korean clothing, so my co-teacher took a picture of us. Also I took a picture with some staff members who dressed and stood like palace guardians. Eventually I will get these pictures up.
Then I went to Seoul tower. It is surrounded by a forest, and it is gorgeous right now because one can see the leafs changing colors. Unfortunately, my co-teacher was feeling sick, so I just talked with the tour guide. We saw a whole bunch of locks that couples had locked onto the fence at the base of Seoul tower, which is on top of a mountain. My tour guide made a funny comment that those kind of couples don’t stay together though because the guy is most likely a player.
Then we went to kind of like the America Town in Korea called Itaewon. It is a neighborhood in Seoul that has a lot of soldiers and American restaurants and bars. So I had a Guinness with my tour guide. She told me that she was an engineer for a couple of years, but hated the long hours, so she quit and then she learned that if she became a tour guide, she could study a lot of history, so she decided to do that instead.
After that, my co-teacher and I went to a few markets. The first one was Myungdong. It is an area with a lot of Japanese people, but unfortunately no Ramen shops. It is however a place where buyers for clothing stores go to check out what kind of fashions people are wearing. I was looking for a jacket, but the clothing there was more expensive than usual. However, my co-teacher showed off her bargaining skills and knocked off about 30% from the price. It is funny how much more dramatic buying clothes in Korea is. Sometimes when you are about to leave, the seller will beg you to stay and then offer a lower price. I found out from my co-teacher that the seller is only paid by the hour.
Then we went to a large old fashioned outdoor market called Namdemun. I was expecting some lower prices there, but in order to get the low prices you have to haggle a lot. I ended up just getting a spatula for my studio.
While 11/11 is veterans day in America, in Korea it is a made up holliday which is kind of like Valentines Day, but it is called Ppepporo Day. Peporo is a kind of candy that has a long skinny cracker that is dipped in chocolate or is filled with chocolate. So because the date is 1-1-1-1, people give these candies which look like the shape of the number 1. The ones that are stacked were all given to me by the Tae Kwon Do students. It was a really sweet surprise. I did not eat all of them though. The girls in the background came into my class to prepare for the foreign language high school exam held that Saturday. Attending a foreign language high school is a major factor in getting into the college of their choice.
This week I am doing the battleship lesson. It is just a game that gets the students to ask basic questions in a fun way. So far it has been difficult to get the students to follow the rules because a lot of them don't get that they are only supposed to mark the board after they ask a question. By the way, I am going to meet the people who made this lesson this weekend.
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