Jeju Island

I spent Thanksgiving weekend on Jeju Island (or Jejudo, in Korean). It was nice and warm there and the island is known for tangerines, which were right in season when I was there. It was fun to get to see all the tangerine trees full of the fruits. Jeju is also known as a big tourist destination for Koreans and others, so there are a bunch of different museums on the island. I went to a folk museum, 2 lava tubes, a botanical garden, a waterfall, a citrus museum, and a sex museum! Regarding the last one, Jeju is also known as a big honeymoon spot and there are 3 sex museums on this little island! So it was a very educational trip, all the way around.

Here are some pictures from the trip, from the top to bottom:

• The view from Seongsan Ilchulbong out over the South Sea/East China Sea. Ilchulbong is an extinct volcano that is shaped like a punchbowl, but doesn't have any water in it because the volcanic rock is so porous.
• Kimchi pots at the folk museum
• The view of Mt. Halla, in the middle of the island, after a 2 and a half hour hike. I enjoyed some lovely ramon (ramyon in Korean) up there!
• At Hallim Park, a botanical garden that was set up in 1971.

Pottery

Today some of the other SIS teachers and I went to the town of Yeoju, which is known for its pottery and ceramics. Yeoju is about an hour southeast of Seoul (well, actually from Songnam, which is officially the city where I live). I bought 12 pieces for about 60,000 won, or 70 bucks, so it was a good day for me! The main thing I was looking for was a little kimchi pot, which I got. I don't really know what I'm going to do with it, but I like it a lot! I've put some pictures of bigger kimchi pots and one of the men making the pottery on this post. These are the types of pots that used to be buried underground for months at a time as the cabbage and spices fermented. Today most people don't have anywhere to bury their kimchi, but they make little kimchi fridges that keep it at the perfect temperature for fermenting.

Ever since I got here, I've been hearing about how the SIS students have to walk a fine line between their Korean lives and their American lives. I've had a chance over the past few weeks to hear from my students about this topic and learned some interesting things. I already told the story about getting yelled at for speaking English on the subway. I told some of my freshmen about it and they all had their own stories about speaking English in public. It's really looked down upon for Korean kids to speak English, which is interesting because I believe it's mandatory for all Korean public school kids to take English in school now. One girl told me that she and a friend were speaking English on the subway and an older Korean woman came up and smacked her and told her she should only speak Korean! This same girl said that she hates having to have her textbooks visible on the subway because they're all in English and she gets people staring and making comments about her. Another girl told me that she and her mom usually speak English when they're together, including when they're in public, and that she hears other Koreans swearing at them, thinking they don't speak Korean. She said she loves to say something to them in Korean just as she's leaving to let them know she's understood everything they said. It's not just older people who get mad at the kids speaking English...many of them had stories about having Korean public school kids beating up friends of theirs for speaking English in public. I asked my students why there are so many hard feelings and they said that they thought with the kids especially, there is a lot of jealousy because the English of the international school kids is so much better.

I'm taking a course on ESL in the Mainstream and we're talking about our students' English speaking abilities as well. Quite a few of the teachers in the class have taught in other international schools around the world and pretty much all of them say that this is the only school they've ever worked at that doesn't offer classes for the kids in the native language. One of the teachers in the class is a social studies teacher in the high school who teaches Asian Studies. She said when she first came to SIS last year, she was so nervous to teach the course, thinking that all the kids would know so much more about Korean history than she did, but that's she's found that to not be true at all. It turns out that many students at SIS speak Korean to some degree, most pretty well, but do not know how to read and write fluently in Korean. I think about what an awkward position that puts them in, especially those that plan on living in Korea as an adult, because most of these kids aren't American either. A lot of them were born in the US, but moved back to Korea as babies or young children and don't really remember the US. Even those that moved to Korea later seem to be much more Korean than American to me. Yet they may not have the ability to read the newspaper or write an e-mail in Korean. It's an interesting paradox and seems to really limit what the kids will be able to do. In fact, some of the kids go to hagwons to learn to read and write Korean, which seems funny that they'd have to spend all this time outside of school to learn the language their parents speak and for the country they live in. Also, they don't really know their own history, which is especially interesting (and sad) to me considering that this generation's grandparents lived through the trauma of the Korean War and these kids may have great aunts and uncles, aunts and uncles, and cousins living in North Korea who they've never met due to the Korean War.

In the conversation I had with my freshmen about speaking English, we started talking about the US military presence. A couple of kids had stories about seeing the American soldiers here drunk and/or acting very inappropriately to Koreans in Itaewon, the neighborhood near the big military bases. One of the other new teachers here has a couple of friends who are in the military and they told her that Korea is seen as a very undesirable post, so a lot of people don't want to be here. My response was, if I were in the military and got stationed in Seoul instead of Iraq or Afghanistan, I'd be jumping up and down and kissing the ground! But one of this teacher's friend who just left the Army 3 months ago said that the best soldiers are getting sent to Iraq and Afghanistan, so it's the real doofuses who get sent to Korea...so the folks here are not exactly getting to see America's best! There is some resentment amongst the Koreans about having the American soldiers here for various reasons, and my students gave me some interesting insight into that issue.

Chusok Parade Pictures

Wow, 3 posts in one day! These are pictures from Chusok, about a month ago. The elementary kids had a little parade through the school and while I didn't get to see it, I heard about it. The girls are wearing hanbak, the traditional dress. I don't know what you call the outfits the boys wear. I think most of these kids are first graders and they're all cute! At some point, I'd like to go price hanbaks for myself...I'd have a halloween costume for the next few years!

In the picture with the little boy in red, you can see all the shoes on the little shelf by him. The little kids have slippers that they wear inside the classroom, so they keep their outside shoes outside the room in these little cubbies.

Whoa!

How's this for a store's name! And the clothes aren't even that lovely!

This store is in Itaewon.

Autumnal Pictures

Here are some pictures from a walk I took today on the hill behind my neighborhood up to the Buddhist temple. The leaves are starting to turn and it's really pretty! Three of the pictures are from the temple and the picture with the tiger statue is from the school.

Banking

One of the interesting things about living abroad is figuring out how to pay bills and get money! Most of my bills are taken out of my pay check directly, but I get my gas bill and phone bill in the mail, so I have to figure out how to pay those, which is tricky since the bills are in Korean! We have an ATM at school and the bills can be paid through the ATM. But wouldn't you know it, while it's in English when I need to get cash out, when I need to pay a bill, it only does it in Korean. Some folks have written out a flow chart with all the various steps (press the top right button, then press the middle green button, etc), but it seems like they missed a step or two, so it's tricker than I think it should be. When I got my first bill in September, I had to basically tackle another teacher to get some help! But this month I managed to figure out how to pay my gas bill...but I don't remember exactly what buttons I pushed! So hopefully I can figure it out again next time! This time I really couldn't figure out how to pay my phone bill, but I heard from another teacher that I could go to my local mini-mart to pay that. So I went down today to try it out. With my limited Korean, I set it on the counter, said "Hello", and smiled. And lo and behold, my bill got paid! It had a barcode on it, so the mini-mart lady just scanned it and I paid it.

Another interesting thing they do here is that you can transfer money into other people's accounts at the ATM. All you need is their bank name and account number, and then you just enter that info. and you can transfer money in. When I paid for a plane ticket a few weeks ago, I was able to just put the money into the travel agent's account...it's pretty slick! Another teacher was telling me that last year she was at Costco right before payday and so wanted to charge her stuff to her credit card since she didn't really have any money in her account. But of course, Costco doesn't take credit cards, but she didn't realize that until she had done all her shopping and was at the cashier. So they had to call the manager over to explain what was going on to her, so she said, then I'll just put my stuff back and come back after pay day. Well, the manager said, no no no, I'll just give you the money and then when you get paid, you can just tranfer the money you owe me in to my bank account. Can you imagine that happening at home?!

How my students see Americans

Hi all,

I've had some revealing glimpses into how Korean teenagers see America and Americans recently. In my 9th grade class, they were taking a test on the play 12 Angry Men and were given quotes that they had to identify who said the quote, the context of the quote, and what the author was trying to say was right and/or wrong with America through the character. One of the characters in the play, Juror #11, is an immigrant from Europe who moved to the US in 1941 to escape persecution. The quote I had on the test from #11 that they had to identify was "This is the reason I came here. I wanted to have the right to disagree.” One of my students said, "This is wrong to American society because people have the right to speak, but it makes the US look bad to other foreigners, because they think that its natural and okay to always have unpopular opinions." I thought this was a really interesting take on freedom of speech. At first I thought, "wait a minute, how in the world can she say freedom of speech is bad?" But then when I got to the end of the sentence, I could see where she was coming from, especially given Bush, the Iraq War, etc. I don't agree with her 100% (well, I do agree with her on Bush and Iraq!), but it is curious how something that I think most Americans consider super important can be seen as a huge negative to others.

Then, the other day I was using this new technique I learned called Chalk Talk (for you teachers out there, here's how it works. You put an open-ended question on the board. Give the kids a few minutes to think about it [I used the same question as their warm-up question] and then they start Chalk Talk. Basically, for 10 minutes, kids respond to the question only through writing on the board. The room should be silent during this because everyone is "talking" through writing. I put 4 markers up there so only 4 kids could come up at a time and let them go. It was awesome! At times, there was literally a line of kids waiting to come up and write. You end up with this multi-colored web of thoughts, opinions, questions, responses, etc up there. And, when I saw there were holes or things I really wanted to make sure were pointed out, I just went up and started jotting stuff down. The teacher who taught me Chalk Talk said that she has one student who will not speak in class ever, but she'll do Chalk Talk!). Anywho, the question was, "Besides someone who lives in America, what is an American?" Some of the responses were really interesting. One kid said that an American is someone who believes in freedom, but will not die for it. I asked him about that and he said that during WWII, Americans were willing to die for their country, but not now, which he's totally right about. Then another kid had just written "manners" on the board, so I asked him what he meant...were those good manners and bad manners? A bunch of kids ended up answering at the same time and some said Americans have good manners and some said they have bad manners! I asked them what kinds of things were good and they said that if you bump into someone in the US, the person you bumbed into will apologize to you. That's really different from here where you get bumped and shoved and pushed and knocked into all the time (rarely on purpose though) and there's hardly ever any sort of acknowledgment or apology or anything...there are just so many people here! So that got us on a conversation about bubbles and how Americans like their space! I didn't hear too many specifics about Americans' bad manners (maybe that were worried they'd offend me?), but loudness came up.

Speaking of being seen as rude, a few weeks ago I was riding the subway with another SIS teacher and we were talking, but not loudly, and this woman was so disgusted with us that she scolded us in front of everyone, looked at us like we were the most digusting thing she'd ever seen, and told us that she was going to have to change subway cars because we were so disruptive! As I've told a few other people, I try to be really conscious of not being the ugly American when I travel, but in this case, she was so obviously prejudiced against us because we were white and speaking English, that I didn't even feel guilty. There is some definite racism against Westerners here, especially Americans. I've noticed it mostly among the older people. It's not uncommon for there to be an empty seat next to me on the subway and have it be the absolute last one taken, I'm assuming because people don't want to sit next to someone who's white/foreign. I've heard from other teachers that they've been yelled at by bus and taxi drivers for speaking English. So far I haven't been too offended by it though. Korea is a country that's been taken over time and again by outside forces, so it makes some sense that they'd have negative views towards foreigners. It is interesting though... But then, I've also had Koreans be absolutely wonderful to me as well. When we first got here, a group of us went to a restaurant/bar with a band and the table next to us had a woman's who was celebrating her birthday. The band sang her happy birthday, so we sang along and then when her little cake came out, she gave our table 2/3 of it and thanked us profusely for helping her celebrate her birthday! And last week when I went hiking on the mountain, a Korean man and his father-in-law made sure that we were having a good time, seeing good stuff, etc. So, just like anywhere, you have your good and your bad!

All right, I'm off to the vegetable market. Have a great week!