Classes Began! The First Week of Teaching

Already I’m getting behind on blogging! That mainly means I won’t be able to be as detailed, which is probably healthier for everyone. I’ve had two weekends in Korea so far! I think the first one might have been a little more “fun” since the second one I’ve had a decently bad cold, but both weekends were outstanding.

Weekend one I went to Bucheon with another foreigner I had met through Facebook and she took time to show me around the city that Saturday. Since that location’s a metro stop, she took me through the steps of getting a transportation card (good for buses and metro) and showed me the basics of buses and the metro station, plus took me on a floor-by-floor tour of the Bucheon station E-Mart (5-10 level cross between Wal-mart and Target). Plus she gave me a paper map of the metro in English, which are rather hard to come by. So that was a really fun shopping and learning experience! The bus ride’s a little wild, and it goes through some definite farmland, but it’s a pretty quick trip.

With the ability to travel over distances then, I was able to venture out last Sunday to look for the church I had searched for on the internet several months ago that I was interested in attending. Got in contact with one of the assistant ministers there and got verbal directions to add to the website ones. My departure time from my apartment was about 11:00 am and I arrived at the church at 12:50 pm! Catching the trains just right might have cut off about 10 minutes or so, but the fact is, it’s just a long way away. I’m okay with that though for right now; this was an amazing group of people and a wonderful church! Got introduced and welcomed right away. So my blog entry waaaay back in September sort of got fulfilled! I got to check out Seoul's Covenant Church after all. And I returned this past weekend too. I cannot begin to express the joy it has been to worship God with these people and share one another’s burdens of the week. My school co-workers asked about my first weekend of course, and were pretty surprised by the answer and by the far distance.

The week that followed went amazingly well. It was my first week in the classroom, so I approached it with some initial nerves. Sailing right along though, I had a super fun lesson for the kids as I talked about Tennessee and the USA in a fully-dramatized fashion. I did sing Rocky Top again for every class, I made sure they knew who the Ohio State Buckeyes were, talked about March Madness, IHOP breakfasts, the importance of a good education, told them about caves, waterfalls, Music City, and the Batman Building… it was great, and they were eating it up. The co-teachers were entertained too, actually! And I had a blast. So it was an exhausting week, but great fun.

Each evening I managed to do a little exploring or a little writing to sort of unwind, so I’m getting a little more familiar with the area now. Went out on Monday 7 with some nearby foreigners like me for some “spicy chicken” with dduk (a kind of long, thin, chewy rice “dumpling). The chicken dinner was delicious—on the spicy side but not overwhelmingly so. It was cooked with noodles and cabbage too, and we had a few banchan (sides). We three gals sat on mats on the heated floor, with our shoes waiting for us in the entrance to the restaurant. It was an experience, as was listening to the “veterans” order a meal in passable Korean. And I found out one of the gals is a neighbor in my building!

Tuesday class (the 8th) went smoothly for the most part. A few kids were rowdy, but no major issues and I was able to run the PowerPoint on my own that day. I have to carry my school laptop to every classroom, so it’s a little complicated. I have to set up every single time plus carry all the cords and stuff (so the computer-sized purse I discovered just before leaving the country has been perfect). The first day, it was rough, but one co-teacher showed me the right keystrokes to get the signal through the TV and I was all set. I also introduced stickers as motivators. After today’s class, I think I need to be a little careful not to egg on people who just want attention, but otherwise the stickers were great.

Tuesday night I got to meet up with a small group of people from church for a Bible Study and fellowship group. It was only about 50 minutes from where I live instead of an hour and 50 minutes, and I found out that one gal in the study lives in my direction, so she and I rode home at the same time that night. It was pretty sweet, getting to sit in on cushy couches in an Asian coffee shop and digging deep into the gospel of John, plus just getting to know each other. I’m by far the biggest Star Trek/Wars fan among the 6 of us who met. :P I’ll try to go back to the study this week though. It was really an encouragement after the exhausting start to the week.

I think I was too worn out to do much on Wednesday, though I might have done some more exploring and shopping. It’s dangerous having an international ATM nearby. :) I’m trying to budget, but it’s hard with the limited space you have to pack, and then you have to outfit an entire apartment! At least mine was well-furnished before I arrived. It just needed smaller stuff like towels, dishes, food, etc.

Classes were canceled on Thursday for me since the students had some sort of exam. That threw off my schedule a little, but it meant that I was able to go get my medical exam report and take it to the immigration office in Incheon to apply for my foreigner card! That's in processing and should be back to me within another week or so. One of my deskmates (a Chinese language teacher) was willing to make me in her car again, so even though she doesn't really speak English and I really don't speak Korean, we managed to get to (and through) both locations successfully. Mr. Kim had already done a lot of the research beforehand, so we both knew from him (in our respective languages) what to expect about the tasks. I registered to be an alien, yeah!

Had a drink with some other foreigners Thursday night the 10th too. Played it safe—no soju and only one beer. :) It was fun though. Unfortunately, I had started sneezing that day at work and it developed into a nasty head cold. It was pretty awful by Friday afternoon, and my ears felt like they had rubber bands in them. Just really unpleasant congestion. Of all the over-the-counter meds I packed, the one thing I left out was a decongestant, so I had an interesting time trying to communicate what I needed to the pharmacist at the base of my building.

I marched in and said in semi-passable Korean, “Hello, I need some medicine.” But when I tried to tell him guaifenesin, he looked at me like I had totally confused him. And he assumed I actually knew some Korean other than my one prepared sentence, so he started rattling something off in Korean. I tried to indicate what was congested, and he thought I meant headache. So I wrote guaifenesin down and he took my notebook over to a computer and figured it out that way. Unfortunately, what he gave me had pseudophedrine in it (I painstakingly translated the ingredients one character at a time in Google translate), and that ingredient makes me a little loopy. The main ingredient was essentially Tylenol though. He had told me *something* about dosage that I didn’t understand, so I just took what I think was half a dose according to the choppy Google translation. Enough to help a little but not drive me off the deep end. It was a little bit of relief, but what actually ended up helping my ears was flushing them out Sunday night with some 3% hydrogen peroxide solution I bought in the HomePlus. Yay, home remedies. :)

The cold kept me close to home on Saturday, and I pretty much rested, received apartment deliveries, and read. They installed vertical shades on all my windows, so I can actually have some privacy from the restaurant and pool table club right outside my window now. :) And I got some cooking pots, an alarm clock, a toaster and iron, and a good-sized clothes drying rack. So I did laundry over the weekend too! One thing I was told on the chicken dinner night was that my little temporary Korean cell phone has a built-in Korean-English dictionary with a lot more vocab than my little phrasebook does! So this past weekend I was able to translate some of the writing on my washing machine and actually activate the spin cycle this load. I put Scotch tape all over the console and wrote the translations in English on tape next to the Korean. It was nice not to have to wring out cold, soggy clothes by hand this time!

Oh, on Saturday I also managed to order my first pizza form Dominoes! It was… interesting! I ordered a pepperoni pizza and got a super deluxe something or other. It had onions, pepperoni, ham, mushrooms, white potatoes, Korean pink sweet potatoes, cheese, and a drizzle of yellow sweet potato sauce over it all. Totally an unusual experience! But it was pretty good tasting. Oh, and as I was carrying my pizza back, some giggling Korean girls started calling out and waving to me, “Teacher!!!” They rushed over and were all, “We’re from Sorae High School! We’re in your classes! It was so fun this week! Ahh! Have a good weekend, teacher!” Totally made me feel like a million bucks, in spite of being sick.