Tis the Season

The last few weeks have been full of delicious food, good cheer, and love is in the air! Us LCI teachers managed to pull off a Thanksgiving feast towards the end of last month and we had the amazing opportunity last weekend to go to a Korean wedding! Our amazing food! I cooked the stuffing, gravy, and Bapka's apple betty and the other teachers contributed the rest. Josh had to go onto one of the army bases to get the turkey, that is one meat rarely consumed here in Korea! For most of the Korean teachers, it was their first time eating turkey and trying gravy. Josh and I carving the turkey! Felt weird to be in charge this year instead of just eating! My first (and maybe last :) Thanksgiving eaten with chopsticks! Brianna, Katie and I. One of my partner teachers, Bora and I. Here's the little man! This is Isaac, Jade's son. He is too cute and he really likes me! So in the friendly Thanksgiving competitive spirit, I suggested we do trivia like we do at home. It was too funny! Here is the winning team, Jennifer, Ian, Katie, Nick, Lynn and Sylvia. .....and here's the losing team. Jade, Sue, Nick and I. We only lost by one point and if Nick would have listened to me and not vetoed like 4 of my answers we would have won! The gang's all here! This is the whole group of us LCI teachers. It was such a good experience to have shared that feast with each other. It was a delicious fusion of Western Thanksgiving food and Korean food, so much fun to see the Korean's reactions to our cooking! Well, we managed to pull of a Thanksgiving meal in the middle of Korea. I was surprised it all came together! Another big happening of the last few weeks was Lynn's wedding. Her and her boyfriend G-Money (that's not his real name haha that's just what we call him, I can't pronounce his real name!) of 8 years got married and were kind enough to invite all the teachers from LCI. Let me tell you, it was quite the experience! Such a different process than a western wedding. The venue was a huge convention center in Suwon that we nicknamed the "wedding factory", it was maybe a 6 story building with tons of rooms on each floor for different wedding ceremonies. There was a new marriage in each room every half hour or so, there must have been 20 other couples married at the same time as Lynn. Right after Lynn and G-Money walked down the aisle as a married couple, they were changing the coffee cups on our table and ushering us out of the room to make way for the next ceremony! Lynn sat in a beautifully decorated room for a couple hours while pictures were taken. She just sat on this loveseat thing and everyone would crowd around her for pictures. Lynn looked absolutely breathtaking, she was wearing the most stunning beaded and sparkling dress! The beautiful bride! Lynn with Katie. Check out Katie's new do! She has been blonde since 6th grade and just dyed her hair dark, she looks so different than what I am used to! Lynn and I. The LCI boys with Lynn. They all got bowties and suspenders for the wedding, clean up nicely huh! This is a picture of the stewardess-looking women who tended to Lynn all afternoon. Us girls, we clean up nice too, huh?! :) Here's the aisle, it looked more like a runway to me! Lynn and her father. After the ceremony, the bride and groom approached each set of parents and did the very traditional bow. Josh and I having a spot of tea!

Field Trip to the Bear Farm

Yes, you read the title correctly. We took about 25 small children to the bear farm last week for an LCI field trip! It was the first field trip I've been able to go on since switching to teaching at LCI in the mornings. It was great to be out of the school for part of the day and doing something outside, and you could tell all the students just had a blast. I think the "Bear Farm" would have been a little more exciting in the summer, there were a lot of run down areas and empty swimming pools. But we did see bears, as promised!



Entrance to the Bear Farm. Random, right? Random Bear Farm Scenery Picture #1



Easter Island, or Osan Bear Farm? Random Bear Farm Scenery Picture #2



Random Bear Farm Scenery Picture #3



The first activity: grass sledding. This was actually pretty fun and the kids just went bananas for it. There were metal tracks secured in the grass that the sleds ran on and you actually got going pretty fast!



It's a race!



Clara and I, she was too small to ride by herself!



Brianna with one of her favorite students, Mimi.



Nick, one of the newer teachers, with Clara and Jenny.



Katie with Peach. She calls her Peachy Pie she is so adorable!



Another of the new teachers, Ian with Clara and then Josh in the background.





This looks dangerous.....



Clara and her boys! She's obsessed with them and already boy crazy at age 4! :)



The LCI group! Clara and I are in the front, and I'm pretty sure I missed the memo on the funny faces!



Yeriel and Jenny, two of Amy's students. Now they have Ian Teacher instead of Amy Teacher!



And now we get to the main event! There were 4 Asian black bears in a little caged area and we fed them animal crackers for 10 minutes. I don't even think the kids were that impressed! I thought it was pretty cool to see them though, you forget what wild animals like that look like in real life.



Antonio and Caesar- sleepy boys on the way home!

Halloween (or lack of) in the ROK

Welcome to November! Or "MO"vember for all you gentelmen out there growing your mustaches/beards out for the month. 9 months down in the Republic of Korea, 4 more to go until I am home to beautiful Sammamish. I have been thinking about home a lot lately as the holidays approach and the weather turns from mild to harsh and instead of leaves falling it is snow!

We have had a beautiful past month, I can't even remember the last time it rained! I was chatting with Sally, one of my Korean partner teachers today and she was telling me that it only rains in the summers and hardly rains at all the other 9 months of the year. The weather has been consistently sunny and warm enough but is beginning to freeze my nose hairs on the bike ride to school! It is funny to think that we have almost come full circle and I have almost spent 4 distinct seasons in Korea. When we got here in February we were greeted by Jack Frost and I can again feel him nipping at my nose (like I previously mentioned, haha)!

Last weekend was Halloween for all you guys back home which meant a huge English Halloween party at work! Koreans do not celebrate this holiday, only now are costume shops starting to pop up and decorations being thrown across store fronts. Maybe to cater to the growing number of foreigners in these types of cities? Just a thought. Anyway- the 8 of us foreign teachers had been preparing and crafting for this party for weeks and it all came into existence last Friday. We were all pretty exhausted after preparing for yet another round of Open Classes, filling out end-of-the-month paperwork, and arts and crafting decorations for our room. My room was the Pumpkin Cookie Decorating room. I strategically suggested the cookie decorating idea because I figured I could just sit with the kids all day and eat cookies. Imagine how surprised I was to see that Jade bought me CHEESE cookie mix, MILK to make the icing, and PEANUTS to decorate the cookies with. REALLY?!?!? Who eats cheese cookies?! Cheese, milk, and peanuts: three of the things I am most allergic to. It may have been a blessing in disguise I suppose because instead of eating 100 cookies that day I ate 1. Each room on the 2nd floor was decorated differently and the kids took turns travelling in and out of each one for 30 minutes each. My favorite way Amy's room: Mummy Wrapping. She spent 5 minutes wrapping the kids in toilet paper until they looked like mummies and then the remaining 25 minutes having an all-out toilet paper fight. Some pictures:









Vicky posing



Clara was "Little Red Riding Hood".... with a purple wizard's cape and a sign that read "trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, if you don't I don't care, I'll pull down your underwear!"



Mimi and Christina from Bri's class.



Best room at the party! Getting the kids all hyped up on sugar....



Jenny



Yeriel



LCI Halloween party = excuse to wear the best purchase I've made in Korea: my giraffe animal onesie



The gang's all here! LCI teachers and students at their finest :)



Random picture (these kids are from my GGUM special classes, not LCI morning class) but how stinkin cute is Jason in his snowman hat?!

That about sums up Halloween in Korea! A group of us went out Saturday night to celebrate as if we were at home, needless to say we were stared at (and probably mocked) by every Korean we passed. Amy and Sarah leave in 2 weeks :( and we get 2 new teachers this upcoming weekend!

OH- and 53 days until Christmas on the beaches of Thailand!

Until next time- I MISS YOU GUYS!!!!

Tia Teacher

Yet another Saturday spent working....

Hello all! It's Sunday here in Dongtan and I'm sitting at my usual Sunday spot, back corner booth at Tom Toms Coffee with Brianna and Katie. Listening to Western hits play through the speakers and eating a pretzel, am I in Sammamish?! They love English pop hits here and I frequently hear them being played when I'm riding my bike through town, in my Korean co-workers cars, through kids' iPods, etc. It's sometimes nice to hear though especially on Sunday when I don't have too much to do and I'm feeling homesick!

This was an overall uneventful weekend, we stayed in both nights and had to work yesterday from noon to about 6:30 pm. It was "Sports Day", a huge production for all the 7-year kids at GGUM and their parents. Overall, there were about 200 kids and maybe 350 parents there. GGUM rented out another school and their yard for the event, we wouldn't have had enough room at our hogwon. The whole thing was pretty extravagent and really well-received, the kids had such a fun time and it really looked like the parents were enjoying it also. I really enjoy seeing the kids and their parents interact. For some reason, I have always had this impression that the Asian culture and the parental-child relationship is such a structured and stern one. I picture there being a lot of pressure on the kids to be excellent students, the parents being absent often for work, and just an overall strict environment. I know this is not fact it is just my impression, but I really love to see parents and their children laughing together, joking around, and letting loose to have a good time. So even though we were working on a Saturday, I had a good time at the Sports Day. It started off with a sort of "opening ceremony" with the Olympic flag and Korean flag presented at the front and a speech from the GGUM principal (Jade's mom).



Next was the torch lighting and presentation...



followed by the lighting of the fireworks! Somebody put about 15 fireworks in a dirt-filled pan that was barely supported on its stand and lit it to fire off the festivities. Fire Hazard? I think so!



Oh, and did I mention this was the MC:



haha! If you notice the guy in the red cowboy hat in the other pictures, he was the other MC. These two guys are the gym teachers at GGUM and the kids just adore them. I managed to get a few videos of some of the games before my camera died, and lets just say you probably wouldn't see these at an American "Field Day".




Let's pull a log under 250 peoples' feet and see how many we can trip!




Clearly the white-ball team won this one!




Running-start Tug-O-War



Running-start Tug-O-War MOMS ONLY! I didn't manage to catch it in this video but 2 of the moms almost got into a little scuff after this, pulling back and forth on the rope well after the whistle was blown. Stiff competition!! My camera died after this video but the Tug-O-War dads only was hilarious! They really don't like to lose here.

We had expected it to be yet another unpaid Saturday at work, but we were pleasantly surprised when the principal handed us each 30,000 won at the end and congratulated us on a job well done. It means a lot to hear that from a superior here as it happens very rarely. We were also treated to a 3-course duck galbi (galbi=bbq) dinner afterwards, DELICIOUS! It was a really fun time with us foreign teachers and all the Koreans that work at the GGUM school, there were about 25 or 30 of us in all. Jade and her brother Michael also brought their babies, 4 months and 5 months old. Jade's baby Isaac is so adorable and well-behaved, I got to hold him for a long time at dinner and he loves Auntie Tia! :) I don't think I mentioned before, but about a month ago we went to Isaac's "100 days" party at Jade's apartment. In Korea, 100 days of life for a newborn is cause for a big family gathering and celebration. In older times, most babies didn't live past 100 days so it is a big event for the family to be happy about. Koreans also don't take the baby outside for the first 100 days, so the party is kind of like presenting your baby to friends as well. It was nice to be invited into Jade's home and to spend more time with our Korean coworkers, another one of those uniquely-Korean experiences I so enjoy having here!

That's all for now! Thailand tickets are booked for Dec 25-Jan 2. I am already sad thinking about spending the holidays so far away from home and where my heart is, but thankful I have the opportunity of such an exciting trip to take my mind off it!

Until next time....

-Tia Teacher