More about my bus stop

My bus stop now has a little roof.

winter vacation plans

Winter vacation is approaching. Yesterday I bought plane tickets to Bangkok. I'll leave January 11th and return January 31st. I haven't finished planning the trip, but I also want to go to Cambodia to see Angkor Wat and Laos while I am in that area.

Christmas decorations on the bus

Mc Donalds

Korean McDonalds recently started serving the quarter pounder with cheese and double quarter pounder with cheese. I just had one and it tastes the same as in the US. I went there once before when they first started serving it but they were sold out. I was so pissed.



In the US McDonald's is not my favorite fast food restaurant, but since there are less food options for me here I eat McDonalds much more than I ever did in the US. The menu is about the same. Some Korea only things they have are the bulgogi burger and double bulgogi burger. The bulgogi burger is ok. The double bulgogi burger is not. They put too much sauce on it and its just a saucy sticky mess. So after trying that a few times, the Big Mac (which I had never had once in the US) became my regular meal at McDonalds till now.

more pics from the kumdo tournament

One of my students goes to the same kumdo school as me, today he showed me some pictures from the tournament that were posted on the schools website. Here are some pictures of me during the team matches:







I am very bored in this photo:

hangul stickers

I finally got stickers for my computer keyboard showing the Korean characters. Now I can type in Korean on my computer.

new iPod Touch

I finally got a 32 GB iPod Touch 4G today. The iPod Touch is my favorite toy cause it's pretty much a pocket sized computer. I just wish I had an iPhone cause the iPod's functionality is limited when there's no wifi connection.

I ordered it from Amazon in the US and had it sent to my parents house and had them send it to me because it's about $100 cheaper than buying it in Korea. Most electronics seem to be cheaper in the US.



My old iPod 2G on the left, and the 4G on the right:

1st Kumdo tournament

Last Sunday (Nov. 21) I participated in my first kumdo tournament. There were 5 kumdo schools in Paju participating.

I lost my first match in the individual competition, won my next match in the team competition, then lost my next 2 matches in the team competitions.

It was fun, but too long. I was picked up at 8:30am, went to the kumdo school for a while, got to the high school where the tournament was at around 9am. Tournament started at around 10am. My first match wasn't till the afternoon. I didn't get home till around 8pm. I don't like all day events like that.

Kumdo

Here are some photos of me at my kumdo class Wednesday night....












One of the instructors took some video of my training, but I haven't seen it yet.

Kumdo armor

Monday I got my kumdo armor. I don't have any photos of me wearing it yet. The pic below shows how it is stored.
I had them put my name on it in Korean characters. The top line of writing is the name/location of the school. The big character in the center is Jon. Below that is my last name "Ra i eon" (Ryan)


The blue armor stains the white dobok (uniform). I don't like it, but everyone's gets stained.

sports day

Last Friday (10/29) was sports day at my school. There were no classes, all the homeroom classes just competed with each other at various sports. There were a lot of things going on, I didn't photograph everything.


Running:



Korean wrestling:









This was some kind of race where people kneeled down and someone had to run on their backs:



Tug of war:



More running:





My co-teacher and I took pictures all day:



Random melee on the sidelines:



...still going during the closing ceremony:



Finished:


The rest of my photos from sports day are in this set on Flickr.

bus stop

Some of the bus stops in Geumchon finally got these bus information screens that show how long till the different buses will come.


Click on the photo to enlarge it...


On the left is the bus number. To the right of that is how many minutes till it will come. To the right of that shows how many stops away the bus is. You can also check how much money is on your bus/subway/train card, and theres some other things you can do with the information screen, but I haven't played with it yet.

The 600 bus is one of the ones I can take to school. In the photo the screen doesn't say how many minutes till it comes, I think it just says something like its almost here, I never bothered to try to read what it says.

open class

Every foreign teacher has to teach a class to be observed by other people, (principal, vice principal, other teachers, maybe parents) at least once a year, it's called an "open class". Yesterday I had my open class. I was really nervous about it, but it wasn't bad at all. The day before my co-teacher and I taught the same lesson to the same class to practice. So the students had an idea of what we were doing in the class, and they behave better with other people watching them.

I only had a few observers in my class, and the principal and vice principal weren't there. We had a critique of the class afterward that was mostly positive. As far as I know this will be my only open class this year.

Kumdo pics

I have been doing kumdo almost 2 months now. I enjoy it, as I knew I would. I have been going 4-5 nights a week.

Here are some random photos and video from my class Friday night:





Jukdo (practice swords):




Armor:


The school is on the 4th floor:

computer crash

Last week my computer crashed really bad. Windows won't start now. My friend tells me I have to take out the hard drive and get some enclosure thing so I can plug it into the USB port of my other computer and try to copy the data off of it. I didn't bring my external HD to Korea cause I didn't have room for it and its almost filled up. I hadn't gotten around to getting a new external HD here yet. Most of my photos are on Flickr, so if I can't get anything off the HD I won't lose too many photos. Still theres enough stuff on it that I have to try to save it. It totally sucks.

6 months

Its October already. I have been here almost 6 month now. It doesn't feel like it. This month I will have to decide if I want to renew my contract for another year or not.

Korean Thanksgiving

Last week was Chuseok, Korean Thanksgiving. I had Tuesday - Friday (21st-24th) off work. I didn't do much. I went to Seoul a couple days. Wednesday there was heavy rain that shut down some subway stops, or maybe whole subway lines, in Seoul. The rain combined with a reduced number of trains going from my city to Seoul (which I didn't know about till I was waiting at the station) made my 1 hour trip take over 2 hours. That was about the most exciting thing that happened that week. The days I didn't go to Seoul I stayed home and played computer games and watched tv.

this semester

Wednesday was my birthday. I went out with some co-workers for dinner. Each year I feel worse about getting older.

This semester I am busier that last semester. I teach 20 classes per week. They can give me up to 22 classes per week. Last semester I was scheduled for 19, but I only had 14 real classes. Four of those classes were classes for the teachers who wanted to take them, but only about 6 teachers wanted to go to the class, and only two of those scheduled classes had teachers showing up regularly. One of my classes was just a weekly meeting with the English teachers if they wanted to talk to me about something. Usually I only talked with one guy about lesson plans for 10-20 minutes.

So I had a lot of free time to sit at my desk and do what I wanted. It was nice. The only good thing about teaching more classes is the days go by faster.

Vacation - Korean wedding

My co-teacher got married on Aug. 14th in Ilsan. The wedding mostly looked western because most people involved were wearing western wedding clothes, but the ceremony was different.



The wedding was held in this wedding hall on the 5th floor of this building:



The ceremony and dinner were at the same place. We sat at tables during the ceremony and ate afterwards. The buffet was good. I ate a lot of meat.



The most noticable differences between this wedding and a western wedding were the bride and groom didn't recite vows, the minister, or whatever he was, just talked for a long time. There was no exchange of rings and there was no kiss. There were some things with the mothers bowing to each other, and the bride and groom bowing to each family. Various people (friends of the groom, a bunch of kids, bride's grandmother) took turns singing in front of the bride and groom:



Those are just some of the things I noticed that were different. I can't really go into much more detail.

Vacation - Daegu and Busan

I took my vacation from August 6 - 17. I mostly just sat around at home, but I also went to Daegu and Busan for a couple days. I was planning to go Monday Aug. 9th, but decided to leave Sunday night since I had nothing better to do. Since I planned to stay at motels I didn't need to worry about hotel reservations. I got to Daegu station around 1:30am.



Monday I walked around Daegu a bit. I found this jewelry area near the station, but it seemed to be mostly just retail stores:



Later I met an old friend from GIA. She had just returned home to Daegu a couple weeks ago after studying Japanese in Tokyo the past year. She is the same person I met when I was in Tokyo last year:



Around midnight I went to Busan. I don't know anyone in Busan and there wasn't anything in particular I wanted to do, so I spent most of Tuesday just hanging out at Haeundae beach, which is where I spent most of my time last year in Busan.







The next day it rained most of the day. I rode the subway around with no destination in mind, which I like to do, something no one else seems to understand. And I went to Shinsegae department store in Centum City, which is the largest department store in the world, though it didn't hold my interest very long.

After that it had stopped raining and I went back to Haeundae beach. I had planned to stay another night in Busan, but it was supposed to rain the next day too, so I decided to go home that evening. I think I will probably go back there again either this month or next month.