Cultural Experience: Jeju-do!

Wednesday morning I got up to get ready for my trip to Jeju. I had started packing a few days before because I was so excited. This turned out to be a good thing because one of the POE people had made a mistake and we had to meet 40 minutes earlier than we were told. I got the call just after I woke up and had to hurry to be there on time. It was about an hour trip to the Gunsan airport. We checked in at the airport and our pottery that we made at the Hanok Village was finally passed back.
There was a hurricane (actually just a normal thunderstorms but Koreans are quite dramatic) on Jeju so our plane was delayed for a few hours. We had sandwiches while waiting in the tiny airport. It was nice to see everybody again because I hadn't seen some people since the end of Jeonju orientation.
The actual flight to Jeju lasted 35~ minutes! I didn't have time to fall asleep.

The first thing I saw in Jeju was palm trees. Here's a pic of Lindsey with them. You can see that it was still overcast that first day but we were lucky to not have any rain.

















The first place we went was Dragon Head Rock or Yongdoam. The wind was intense, but we had a great time climbing the rocks along the shore.

 We went around one of the walls of rocks and found a fish market right there along the coast

 After that we went to Illusion road which is a road that apears to go uphill, but when the car's engine it turned off it moved along the road by itself UPHILL. Really the road has a slight downhill angle and it's just an illusion. Across from this is Loveland park. All the statues in the park are of an.....erotic nature. The museum is full of .... toys. It's interesting, but I'm not going to post many photos from there because of their upsetting? nature. All I'll say is that the arrows have very unique shapes for a park. These are the only innocent statues in the entire place.

We spent that night at a pension. I slept in a room with Brittany, Jenny, Becky and Ratna. We had some crazy conversations and had a strange conversation with the person who accidently texted my phone. The next morning we went to Mt. Sungsan or Sunrise Peak. It's quite a hike up. Ratna, Jenny and I went to the observation planform partway for photos then went down one of the alternate paths. There we found a huge rock with a little cave in it. We had a nice time in the sun watching the people hike by.

On the way back down the mountain we saw another path that took you down to the coast. This was one of the places where the women divers of Jeju work. They were selling live seafood. The Sea and rocks were gorgeous! We had a fun time talking to some of the other Koreans there. The mentor teachers who came with us and Rira were all there, but no other foreigners. We felt special that we'd found the Korean hot spot. I used the bathroom there and found this fun sign. I guess if you're used to squaty potties, you don't know how to use a seated toilet.

Next we went to the house that was used for filming one of the scenes in the Korean Drama All In. You have to pay to go inside so Jenny, Ratna and I just explored the tide pools along the shore. We found a starfish, snails, miniature horseshoe crabs and lots of empty sea shells.







Next we went to the Teddy Bear museum. There were different scenes made with the bears including the Titanic, Berlin wall falling, Snow White, Tarzan, a fashion show, historical figures and more. Another section had famous works of art, like the Mona Lisa or The Thinker, with bears replacing the humans.

Above is an historical Korean wedding with Teddy bears.

 Teddy Ghandi was more life-like than the wax figure at the 63 museum.

 Then we went to the Jeju botanical gardens. There were different rooms: Jungle, fruit tree, flower and water gardens. 

 We walked a short way to the nearby bridge which has figures of goddesses or muses of some kind on it. It was lined with stone carvings of the same figures. Upstream was a gorgeous waterfall that took a bit of hiking to get too.

 We got 1,000won pineapple slice on a stick. It was like a delicious Popsicle.

 Me and my Eastern Peeps at the Cheonjiyeon Falls.

I have a slight fear of waterfalls now because of my experience in Mexico so I was anxious when two of the guys jumped the fence and stood at the top of the fall. Since they weren't me, they didn't fall :)

The rest of the trip was talking all night with my roommates, sleeping, souvenir shopping, busing, chocolate buying, air-planing, eating in Gunsan, busing, taxiing and finally posting here! I'm exhausted from all my fun. I'm going to sleep for the whole weekend (or just part of it). I hope you like the photos. Jovenes Vamanos! Oh... wrong foreigners trip :)

Korean Students Have Strange Reactions to Eggs

First let me say I don't mean allergic reactions :)
 In all my classes this week we dyed Easter eggs (Not the Kindergarten class though of course because that would have been disastrous).


Do you know the first thing Korean kids do when you hand them an egg?

They spin it on the table to see if it's completely boiled.
Second, they ask you if they can eat it. I had already told them we would be coloring them with crayons and dye. How does that mean you can eat it as soon as I give it to you.

The dye went over well with all the classes but one of my second graders didn't even make it that far. She drew on hers a little with crayons and then started to eat it.
Whatever, I was aready busy enough with the other 10 kids.
With the fourth grade there was one boy who cracked his egg after leaving my classroom, but there were no other casualties until that first/second grade class. I told all the classes that if they insisted on eating the eggs they had to do it after they left my classroom, because I can't bear to see Easter eggs being eaten (it just seems wrong to me).
First and Second grade class though..... only one out of all the 11 eggs didn't get broken either on purpose or accident.
Wow, it was...... stressful and hilarious all at the same time. My kids are all camera shy except for the first/second graders so I snapped away like crazy with them today. I hope you enjoy looking at their eggs more than they seemed to.

 These are the only photos I got of the sixth graders before they started hiding.

 Karen and Megan. To the right is Mari with her egg that never got dyed.





Betty and Drew.
Ace, Joe and Rob.
The lower three photos are Karen, Henry and Matt.

The actual dying process. Because we used brown eggs we left them in the dye for a long time to get darker.

Matt, Betty, Karen, Joe, Megan and Drew with their eggs

Megan peeling her egg. Oh, the humanity!!!

Last Sunday I went with Sab and his friend Sunni to Tapsa (temple) and the Maison (horse ear) mountains. It was lots of fun hiking and seeing the temple. We ate kim bap under a tree and got ice cream.

 On the hike up to the temple, I didn't expect the first thing I'd see to be this. Neither did Sab and Sunni. It was........ weird.
 Below is our kim bap lunch.

 Sunni and me in front of the shrines

 This white statue to the right is the monk who built all of the stacked stone shrines which Tapsa is famous for.

 It was so crowded because everyone was there to see the cherry blossoms. The flowers weren't actually bloomed this day. I think this weekend will be better. All the paper lanterns everywhere are for Bhudda's birthday which is in another week or so.

 On the right is a backpack tag I saw. It's one of Tom's favorite anime characters. I saw a lot of this.

 The cherry blossoms were in full bloom at Duckchi school though. When Sab took this photo, he said that it looked like he was in a foreign country because I was there. Ha..Ha..Ha. Cuz I don't get enough foreigner jokes already.

Sending packages thru the mail

My mom sent me a package from home. She sent it the 31st of March and it arrived the 5th of April. I was so happy to get chocolate bars, taco seasoning, mac and cheese mix, chocolate pudding mix, jello mix, Easter stickers, a fitted sheet, Airborn tablets,  chocolate chips and more. I had a blast opening it while talking to my mom on skype.
Wednesday was my day off so I took all my present for home and sent them from the post office. The box I got there cost 450W about 45 cents. I sent the package on the 6th and just learned that it arrived now on the 8th. I'm so excited for my family to get home so they can open it with me. Yay for express mail!
~Lisa

A Gunsan Birthday and a Daejon shopping trip

  Friday after school, my co-teacher dropped me off at the bus station to go to Gunsan. It was Becky's birthday party. The bus ride is about an hour. Becky sushi at first but the suchi place was full of GIs so we went for Chinese.There were seven of us: Kat, Amy, Jane, Chenny, Lindsey, Becky and I. Chenny and Jane (on the right) had a lot of fun reading the menu for us and picking out dishes. We ended up getting a family feast which is eight different dishes so we got to try a lot of different things. I found that I don't mind eating shrimp and jelly fish, but the octopus tentacles were a little too chewy for me.
(I had spent Thursday night making chocolate chip cookies in my toaster oven, which can only fit three cookies on a sheet. I also made Becky a beaded bracelet during my free time on Wednesday. She was quite happy to receive both.)
After the restaurant, we went to The Rock which is a popular bar for foreigners. Lindsey and I had just been talking about how we miss nachos earlier in the week, so we were so happy that the bar gives nachos as bar snacks. Lindsey and I ordered coladas together. Mine was pina and hers was strawberry. In other photo below is a pic of me with Becky, the birthday girl.

 After the bar we went to norebang. By that time there were 12 of us. I sang so much my voice started to leave again. Lindsey and I sang Thriller and Gives you Hell. We stayed there for two hours. It only cost 15,000 Won an hour ($15).
The book Sean is looking at is a list of the available songs in both English and Korean.

 This is what the wall of the norebang said. Sean, Lindsey and I couldn't figure out why it said, "A Hour Dreams come true". Later with the lights on we saw it said, "All our Dreams come true". We went back to The Rock for a while more and I watched several games of pool.
I spent that night at Kat's place.
The next morning, Monika, Sean, Lindsey, Chenny and I took a bus to Deajon to go to the Costco. We wanted to see what they had for Western food. We ended up going to a department store and a market before ending up at the Costco. I got a shirt for $5 at the underground (literally) market and some cute Disney stickers at the department store. We saw this cute puppy at the market. It loves Pendas!

At the Costco I got wheat bread, cheddar cheese, mastocholi noodles, alfredo sauce, green beans and mac and cheese. We saw this cream soup and tried to figure out was kind of cream it was. Sean decided it was cream of dog soup.
We had quite an adventure getting home. The train to Jeonju was longer and more expensive than taking the bus so we didn't do that. The taxi took us to the wrong bus station. Lindsey was able to get a bus to Kimje from there, but there weren't any to Jeonju or Gunsan. We got a taxi which took us to the correct bus station and had to wait almost an hour for the next bus. We happened to run into a TaLK scholar we knew at  the underground market earlier, in Daejon, and we met another one, Charlotte, at this bus station.
The bus back to Jeonju happened to stop near my house so I didn't have to go all the way to the Jeonju bus station and take a taxi, which meant I saved money. Yay! Unfortunately I had to carry my big box of groceries all around to the previous taxi and bus stations. Now I have some really good meals I can make myself. Hmmm, which to make first?
Hope everyone is having a great a weekend as I am!
~Lisa