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.