School Pictures

Daniel and I had a nice weekend, but, as usual, it passed too quickly. On Saturday evening, we went to the band teacher's apartment for wine and cheese, which was lovely, and then went with her and another teacher to Itaewon, the "American" part of Seoul (next to the army base). When we left the metro station, it felt like we were no longer in Korea--there were signs that I could read and people speaking a language I could understand. :) Daniel met up with five other male teachers and the three of us ladies met up with three other female teachers for our respective guys' and girls' nights. It was a lot of fun! The girls went to an Italian restaurant for dinner and a Belgian restaurant for drinks, and the guys went bar-hopping. There were so many ethnic restaurants in Itaewon (including a couple of Turkish kebab places), so I'm looking forward to going back! But the atmosphere there (especially in the crowded bar where we met up with the guys) was a little weird--it reminded me of college parties. When we returned to school today, we discovered that H1N1 is a big threat right now. One 7th grader was diagnosed with the flu, so his sister (one of my students) is also quarantined for the week; if they have two more cases of H1N1 within a seven day period, the school will need to close for the week. At school this morning, they checked everyone's (including the teachers') temperatures with ear thermometers and encouraged everyone to use hand sanitizer. If school closes, we still have to assign homework--my students were most seriously displeased. :) Here are some pictures that I took at APIS this afternoon:


The back of Daniel's classroom.


The front of Daniel's classroom.


The back of my classroom.


The front of my classroom.


From another angle.


One of the school buses.


The school (Daniel and I are on the 4th floor).

In Which Daniel, Having Eaten Three Tuna Melts and Working on his Third Hoegaarden, Reflects on his Experiences as a Teacher Thus Far

First let me say this: the tuna melts alone would have been sufficient reason to marry [NAME REDACTED TO MAKE IT MORE DIFFICULT FOR STUDENTS TO STUMBLE UPON THIS BLOG BY GOOGLING MY WIFE'S NAME]. As it was, I don't think I ever had one of her tuna melts before we were married, so it turned out to be just icing on the cake after all.

It's Friday evening, a quarter to eight; it will probably be well after eight by the time I post this. Leslie and I have finished supper. I washed enough bowls and spoons for both of us to have ice cream; it turned out we didn't have much left, so Leslie finished it off. She's watching Amélie as we both sit in the living room. I'm glad it's the weekend.

We've now been teaching for two weeks. I'd like to think I'm beginning to get the hang of it. Certainly, I haven't had any moments as awkward as the time on the first day when I ran out of things to do a good fifteen minutes before social studies class ended and told my class, "well...I don't have anything for you to do...so you can sit quietly in your desks until the bell rings...actually...you might as well be working...uhh...answer questions 1-3 on page 12." That was the low point so far. Although I don't think any of my creative writing students were too impressed with my idea of going through the first page or so of "The Landlady" by Roald Dahl, with all the paragraph separations taken out, to try and decide what would have made good paragraph divisions. I'm learning, I guess.

The secret of teaching, if I understand my mentor Nathan correctly, is not to run out of things to do. That does seem to be a hard part about it for me. My tendency towards disorganization is another Achilles' heel (can one have more than one Achilles' heel?). Another one (now I have three heels, apparently, all of them vulnerable to attack from Trojan archers) is my tendency not to explain minor (or major) details that are obvious to me, but not necessarily to anyone else, certainly not to eighth graders who do not have English as their first language.

I have been a little distressed so far by the number of kids who don't turn their homework in. I think it's partially my tendency to project myself onto my students: when three or four of my students don't turn their homework in, I get to wondering if I didn't make it clear enough that it was to be turned in. The fact that I have all the same kids each day, but have some of them for English Language Arts and some for social studies on an alternating basis, doesn't exactly help me keep things straight, either. I'm sure things will improve as the year goes on, I get more into the rhythm, I get more things in my gradebook, and missing a single homework assignment isn't quite so fatal for a student's grade in my class.

In English Language Arts, we've been reading "Flowers for Algernon" this past week. In social studies, we've been studying the basics of geography. I gave them their first project, which was to create their own country, draw a map of it, and answer questions about it based on the Five Themes of Geography. This drew a wide range of responses, from the disappointingly mundane to the wildly imaginative; one young man created an underwater country in a post-global-warming future world, inhabited by one hundred forty million mermaids, half of whom are scientists and half of whom are engineers. Grading those projects will be my main task this weekend.

Leslie, of course, is thriving; she's so good at anything she puts her hand to, and is really a born teacher. I think I'm improving too. Both of us are getting more and more used to living in Korea. But I don't know if either of us could do this for the rest of our lives! (Well...Leslie probably could. But I don't know about me!)

Some pictures

We had lots of fun at the Seoul Philharmonic concert--they were really good! The performing arts center where they played, the Seoul Arts Center, was beautiful, and we had a great time with the band teacher and enjoyed meeting her husband. Yesterday, we slept in, did two loads of laundry (our laundry machine did not drain properly the first time we used it, so we had to wait two weeks for the mechanic to come fix it), and cleaned the apartment. In the evening, we went to a party at another teacher's apartment. It took us an hour to get there, since he lives with his wife in south-eastern Seoul, but we had a fun time (and got home even later than the night before). We just finished eating pancakes for brunch (thanks to our Bisquick mix), after talking to a couple of our friends on skype. :) Here are a few pictures from the last couple days...


Daniel opening a can of tuna with a knife and a cutting board; we have no can opener and really wanted to eat tuna melts.

The result. :)

The Seoul Arts Center.

The performance hall.

People outside before the concert.

The hall again.

And again. Inside, it reminded me of a cross between the Disney concert hall in L.A. and the Sydney Opera House.

Our apartment--the living room.

The kitchen.

My desk and the ironing board (you can see our washing machine on the other side of the window).

Daniel's desk and our dining room table.

Diana Nightingale! She's not here with us, but I thought this picture was too cute not to put up. :)

In which Daniel and Leslie collapse from exhaustion

Hi family and friends! We're sorry it's been a while since our last update. We survived our first week of school! It seemed like today would never come. :) Overall, I think our experiences have been very positive. We spent twelve hours at school, and some more time at home, last Saturday and Sunday trying to get ready. I filled out a week-long lesson plan for each of my classes to turn in to the Secondary School Principal on Monday, which was helpful the rest of the week for reminding me what I wanted to do each day. I have the first two periods free every morning, which has been useful preparation time. Third period, I teach 9th and 10th Creative Writing every day. I only have five kids in the class and they all seem to be good students. They're pretty quiet, though; I have to work to get them to participate most of the time. There are no standards or requirements for creative writing, since it's a new class this year, which all secondary students are required to take, unless they're ESL (in which case they go to ESL class). This means that I have a lot of freedom and almost no guidance, which can be good and bad. I had my students write a narrative about one of their earliest memories of school this week, and they worked on it in class and at home, while we talked about creating vivid openings, using transition words, peer-editing, and proofreading. They're turning in final drafts to me on Monday, so I look forward to seeing what their writing is like.

This year, the school is using a block schedule (A and B days). On A days, I teach 3rd through 8th period straight, with a break for lunch between the 4th and 5th periods--it's pretty brutal. I teach Modern World History to the two ninth grade sections in a row. I like the students in both classes, but I noticed from the first day how different their class dynamics are. The first group (with 12 kids) has a bunch of bright students in it and, as a whole, the class is quite talkative. The second group (with ten kids) has a few students who obviously have more trouble with English, but they're calmer than the first class and still participate when I ask them to. We covered the legacy of the Greeks and Romans and the monotheistic religions this week. The hardest part so far has been trying to fill an hour and a half block for each class whenever I see them. I've tried to vary the class time by doing different activities--bellwork (work for the students to do when they come into class), partner activities, and lectures--and I think I'm starting to get the hang of figuring out how long it will take them to do something. I've also learned that I have to wait a few minutes after discussing a slide on powerpoint, so the students have enough time to write them down (especially the ESL kids). I hadn't made a powerpoint since middle school, but I've gotten used to it again, and have made one (short or long) for each class every day of the week. I love the smartboard! It can save whatever I write on the board into the powerpoint itself, and I can easily move between showing them a video on the internet and back to a slide. My sixth graders especially love the smartboard, because I let them take turns writing words on the board during our grammar exercises. To return to the ninth graders, I also have one section of them for my homeroom, so I've had to discuss some homeroom business with them each time I've seen them. I only have three boys in each class, so I think that makes my job easier; the girls on the whole seem like they're good students and a couple of them smile at me while I'm teaching. :)

Every day during the last period, I see my sixth grade creative writing class. I enjoy having them at the end of the day, but because they're funny and troublesome, it takes a little more energy for me to keep them in line. I have five kids (as of today); I had four the rest of the week. Three of them are boys--they all have different temperaments, but one is more troublesome than the others. The girl I've had in my class the rest of the week is very sweet, smart, and pretty quiet. I read her description of her family today (their homework assignment for yesterday), and it was very well written. She spent three and a half years in America (kindergarten through third grade), so her English is quite good. She apparently loves to write, so I hope I can encourage that love (she told me she wants to be a kindergarten teacher and a famous writer like William Shakespeare or Mark Twain when she grows up). A couple of the boys don't seem to have much interest in writing, but the other one seems to like it. I've been showing them the School House Rock videos (a favorite from my childhood) for the parts of speech that we've discussed. We started with adjectives and that's their favorite video so far. They asked me yesterday if we can keep watching them. :) We also did a Harry Potter writing activity that I borrowed from my mom yesterday--they really enjoyed it (the boys especially).

On B days, I only teach 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 8th periods and supervise a study hall during 4th period. During 5th and 6th period, I see my U.S. History students (fifteen of them, six of whom are boys). I have a few students who seem to know quite a bit about U.S. history, and some who know almost nothing. I'm having them memorize the states and capitals (test next Friday), because a few of them couldn't identify a single state, and I think it will be helpful when we start discussing places in the U.S. (One of the boys has already memorized all of the states and capitals, only one day after I assigned it--I'm impressed.) I love U.S. history and feel more comfortable teaching it, but it's harder to get my students in this class to participate. I read the paragraphs that they wrote yesterday, and almost all of them had major grammatical issues (a couple didn't), and I can tell that a few of them need more time to write down notes during the lecture. I'm hoping we'll have fun eventually!

Daniel and I have been at school for at least nine hours every day. We usually arrive around 7:40 am and leave some time after five. We come home exhausted, take a short break, then I have usually made dinner (salmon fillets, tuna melts, ravioli...) and Daniel has done the dishes. Then we rest for a little while before preparing for the following day (doing the reading, making powerpoints, etc.), and we're usually in bed between 10:30 and 11 pm (which feels like an hour too late) and wake up at 6:30 am (which feels way too early). Yesterday, we had our first Korean lesson with one of the Korean teachers. It was fun and a bit frustrating, since we have a bunch of rules to learn while trying to figure out the alphabet. I learned how to spell my name! I have to add an "uh" sound after the "s" because you have to have a consonant and then a vowel in order to make up a letter. We got our visas and alien registration cards this week, so we could set up our bank accounts today and will soon be able to get cell phones. We're still enjoying getting to know the other teachers! They're really nice, and I feel supported, even if I only see them briefly in the morning and at lunch. Daniel and I are leaving in twenty minutes to get dinner and go see the Seoul Philharmonic with the band teacher (who's very sweet and from the Bay area). Her husband is a trumpeter in the orchestra (from Illinois originally), and he got us tickets half-off (25,000 won--a little less than $25). We're really excited (they're playing Ravel, Debussy, and Bartok), but we're a little afraid that we'll fall asleep during the concert, since we're so exhausted. :) We love and miss you!

In Which Leslie Surprises Daniel by Encouraging Him to Buy Large Quantities of Australian Grain-Fed Steak

I know that I have gotten over my jet lag.  The reason I know this is that I have recently been having trouble going to sleep at night.  For the first week or so, I would conk out within about five minutes of lying down.  Now, the Korean mattress on which we sleep — which was designed by and for a people who have only recently, and by no means universally, adopted the Western fashion of sleeping in a bed,  and who for thousands of years previously were perfectly well accustomed to sleeping on a hard floor — is no longer quite as inviting when I lie down at night to go to sleep.  I was awake until at least 3:00 last night (this morning?).  So I've been tired today, and will probably go to bed earlier tonight, and hopefully sleep better tonight and into the future, for reasons that will shortly be disclosed.

Today at school we had a lot of meetings.  First, we had a meeting for all the secondary school teachers, led by the secondary principal; then, a training session on how to put things for our students on the school's website, and how to use the school's grading program.  We then had an hour and a half to work in our classrooms before lunch.  I think my room is essentially ready for Day 1; the only thing left is to figure out how to give the kids their assigned seats.  (Maybe make a diagram on my computer and display it on the SmartBoard?  Leslie printed out papers with all her students' names on them, laminated them, and cut them up to put on their desks.)  I have been having a lot of helpful conversations and email exchanges on what to do with my classes, how to assign them journal writing, etc., with several of my colleagues.  My mentor this year will be Nathan, a fellow Minnesotan and the secondary ESL teacher, and he's been extremely helpful thus far; my neighbor across the hall, who had my eighth graders last year, Mo (French Canadian) has also been very helpful and willing to talk.

After lunch, we had a meeting on how to help our ESL students improve their skills, and then a bunch of us got on a bus to go shopping at Costco.  Yes, they have Costco in Korea!  Not in Minnesota, apparently, but in Korea, yes!  (UPDATE: They do have Costco in Minnesota.  I guess they didn't when Leslie lived in Edina.)  Leslie and I wanted to get a membership, but apparently we can't until we get our Alien Registration Card or whatever it's called.  Fortunately, anyone with a card is allowed to make two purchases in a visit...so Hye Sin, a fellow teacher of Korean parentage who has spent most of her life in London, used her card (well, actually it was someone else's card she was borrowing) to let us buy our stuff after she'd bought hers.

The trip was a little overwhelming.  We had a little over an hour, and a sizable shopping list, and a huge store to navigate.  And Costco is the kind of place where there's something to tempt you every 10 feet or so.  We spent a while agonizing over whether to buy a fairly thin $50 mattress pad to make our bed softer, or a really thick one that cost $250.  We finally decided to buy two of the thin mattress pads right before we checked out.  (Also — when I use the dollar sign, you should generally interpret it to mean "thousands of won."   A dollar is actually worth about 1240 won at the moment.)

We got all sorts of things — a swiffer to clean our floors; lots of ziplock bags; liquid hand soap; pillows; and lots and lots of food.  The food was down a floor from all the other stuff.  I took my shopping cart down an escalator ramp (slanted moving walkway?).  The wheels on the cart were designed so that they would get caught in the escalator slats and not roll down.  We got huge boxes of Kashi and Honey Nut Cheerios, a big box of Bisquick (yay pancakes!), Tim Tams (a favorite of Leslie's from Australia), frozen shrimp, frozen salmon, Hormel maple flavored bacon, salami, jumbo size containers of peanut butter and jelly, bagels, sandwich bread, ravioli...and steak.  Our colleague Meghan, an elementary ESL teacher and a real foodie, explained how she often stocked up on large amounts of meat at Costco, to put in her freezer and eat later.  In my young life, there are only two kinds of meat I've ever actually cooked, both of them in a frying pan: bacon and steak.  (Attempting to roast a sausage on a stick in a campfire while out camping as a Cub Scout doesn't count.)  So I figured I'd best avoid the pork tenderloin and the whole chickens.  (Besides, I'm the only meat eater in the household!)  In the large butcher's section, there was a sizable amount of steak.  The top sirloin seemed to be priced really well, about $14 for a fairly hefty package of two large and two rather smaller steaks.  I had thought I might get one or two steaks for myself.  Then, I was going to get one package... but when my dear wife, who professes to be disgusted by the sight of steak, but knows how much I love it,encouraged me to get three packages, I did not protest.  Now I should be set for quite a while.

We spent more money than we had intended to — we hadn't anticipated how many things we would want, and we didn't bring enough cash.  We were very fortunate that another colleague, a new arrival like us, had enough to lend us to cover everything.  It was a pretty major undertaking to get everybody's stuff back on the bus.  The bus ride was long; there was quite a bit of traffic.  We dropped off those with children first — the two other married couples among the new teachers have five children among them.  Little Søren, the son of the school's new chaplain, finally stopped hiding his face from me every time I looked at him and played peek-a-boo with me today.

The bus we were on is too big to fit down the streets that lead to our apartment.  We had way too much stuff to walk with from where the bus left us, so the driver and the other remaining teacher, a Korean-American named Jee Young, helped us flag down a taxi.  We needed several trips to get everything inside.  Leslie made ravioli, and I made a steak.  Now we're sitting in the living room digesting our food, listening to Hem (thanks, Meredith!) and Camera Obscura (thanks, Sarah!).  I should iron a shirt for tomorrow — it's new student orientation day.  Leslie has already picked one out for me.  Then I should put the new mattress pads on our bed, and see if they help me get a better night's sleep tonight.  Good night from the future, everyone back home!

Ain't She Sweet?

To see pictures of the other members of the APIS faculty (including yours truly), click here.

Some Pictures from Today's Adventures (see Daniel's post)

The Changing of the Guard Ceremony


In front of the main gate with Susan


The king's throne



In front of the Pavilion

The Pavilion again


The amazing view


Where the king ate and slept


The ceiling in the king's living quarters

Daniel with the delicious Korean dessert


At the Korean/Japanese restaurant


Our apartment from the outside (we're on the second floor to the left of the entrance)

Daniel with our bag of soup ("tempura")

In Which Leslie and Daniel Do Some Touristy Stuff, After Which They Have an Adventure Dining Out

Leslie's former roommate Susan has been in Seoul this summer teaching at a hagwon.  (It is emblematic of the high value that Koreans place on education that they send their children to these hagwons during summers, weekends, and evenings, in addition to their regular hours of schooling).  Today we met Susan for the first time since we left Harvard, at one of the main tourist sites in Seoul — the former royal palace, Gyeongbokgung ("Palace Greatly Blessed by Heaven").  Our first real trip on the Seoul metro (I'm not counting a ride of one stop that we did with a couple veteran APIS teachers who were showing us how the system works) went off without a hitch.  The sun was really, dazzlingly, disorientingly bright when we stepped out from the subway, and the air was hot and humid.  Leslie and I caught the tail end of a changing-of-the-guard ceremony at the front gate of the palace, and went to buy our tickets.  Susan arrived just a couple minutes later.

We had agreed to meet at 3:00, which turned out to be good timing, because an English language tour was scheduled to begin at 3:30.  The tour guide turned out to be the same one that Susan had had on her previous visit to Gyeongbokgung two years ago.  We saw the ceremonial throne room, the room where the king conducted state business with his ministers, a pavilion (used only for state dinners) in the middle of an artificial lake, and the king and queen's living quarters (they lived separately, and neither the queen nor anyone else was allowed to sleep in the king's living quarters).  The palace is beautiful, and there are fine views of the mountains just to the north; in places, you can almost forget you're in the huge city of Seoul.  After we finished our tour, we went to the Gyeongbokgung café and ordered ourselves a traditional Korean dessert consisting of shaved ice, red bean, fruit, and mochi, topped with ice cream.  We went back to the subway, said goodbye to Susan when we changed lines, and returned home.

We arrived at Wolgye station ready for our "real" dinner.  I had suggested eating out, so we walked a short distance to the busy street near our apartment, and passed a number of restaurants.  We opened the door to one of them, decided it was too smoky, and walked on.  We walked into another one, where the woman informed us that she wasn't serving food (although it's possible that she might just have been indicating that she spoke no English; I have my doubts).  After peering into another restaurant, totally devoid of patrons on this particular Sunday evening, and attracting the attention of a young woman inside, Leslie and I decided to give it a try.

There were two Koreans in the restaurant, a man perhaps in his late twenties and the young woman who had seen us.  They had (virtually) no English.  We had (virtually) no Korean.  They offered us soju, a Korean alcoholic drink that tastes roughly like I imagine rubbing alcohol does, in which we were not interested; they offered us beer, in which I was somewhat more interested, although my wife was not.  I held up one finger, to indicate the number of beers we wanted.  They brought me a mug of beer and some munchies.  Then they let us be.  The man walked out the door.  Leslie and I conferred.  The Korean word for food, we were both pretty confident, was something like pabul.  We got the young woman's attention.  I said, "Food? Pabul?" and pantomimed spooning food into my mouth.  The young woman laughed and went outside to retrieve the man.  I repeated my performance for him.  There was a picture of a fish on the wall.  I pointed to it.  "Tuna," said the man, along with a fair bit of stuff in Korean.  Then he used the word sashimi.  (Leslie had already remarked that the restaurant seemed Japanese to her.  The large picture of a sake bottle on the wall next to our table is what first tipped her off.)  Leslie isn't a big fan of raw fish, so we hemmed and hawed.  The Koreans spoke some more Korean.  Then the man said "Tempura?"  We nodded.

The young woman brought us a salad consisting of greens, bean sprouts, and raw fish.  (I initially thought that the fish was tomato.  Leslie said it didn't look like tomato.  I tried it, and I'm about 90% confident that she was right.)  Then our waitress brought us bowls and spoons, dishes of soy sauce with a dab of yellowish paste on the side, and a metal contraption with five holes in the top.  I examined said contraption closely, imagining that there might be some food hidden in it.  "Are they going to light it?" suggested Leslie, and I noticed a wick inside.  Satisfied that it was not at present a source of further nourishment, I set the contraption aside.  Shortly afterwards, the waitress came back to light it.  Flames came out of the holes.

Next, they brought us a steaming bowl of fish "tempura", which also included some kind of leafy, herby vegetable; long, thin mushrooms that we've seen several times at Korean restaurants (I had never seen them before I came to this country); some things that looked like rings of bread crusts; and (as we only discovered after eating for some time) a hard-boiled egg.  We tucked in.  There was a hole in the middle of the bowl, through which a flame from below frequently extended, making it hot work to reach in to the bowl with chopsticks.  They helpfully brought us forks, which we did not use.  The man came by and mixed the yellow paste into my soy sauce, grabbed a piece of fish from the bowl, dipped it into the mixture, and handed (or should I say chopsticked?) it off to me; he then went around and mixed Leslie's dish of soy sauce as well.  The young woman brought us two small cups each shaped like half an egg, and said some words we didn't understand as well as the word sake.  I drank most of mine and most of Leslie's, not wanting to leave them be in case they thought us rude, and not wanting to finish them off in case they brought us more.  I didn't like it at first, but the more I drank, the better it tasted.

After a while, the man came and offered to take away the bowl.  I wasn't done eating, but had no way of communicating that to him.  Leslie suggested that he might want to extinguish the flame.  I reached into the bowl for one more piece of fish, after which he removed the bowl.  He did not extinguish the flame, and we were left alone for a while.  Then he returned, with the bowl refilled.  We were both nearly full by this time.  We ate a little more, and Leslie expressed a wish of bringing it home.  I expressed my doubts about taking soup out of the restaurant, and suggested that she take charge of communicating her desire.  She countered that it was standard for Chinese restaurants in the U.S. to have styrofoam bowls with plastic covers to take soup out in.  We stopped eating and waited for them to notice us.  After five minutes or so, we took matters into our own hands.  "Excuse me?" I said.  Both of our hosts came to stand by our table.  I indicated our happiness with the meal by giving them a thumbs-up and rubbing my belly.  Then I told them that we wanted to take the soup home, which of course they did not understand.  I picked the bowl up off the heating lamp and drew it to myself.  I attempted to indicate the door.  They got the drift pretty quickly.  I thought the man was at first reluctant to comply with our request; but maybe he still didn't understand.  In any case, they took the bowl back into the kitchen, and shortly afterward we saw the young woman emerge with our soup in a plastic bag, which she triumphantly held up for us to see.  I gave her the thumbs-up.  When she brought it to our table, I made the universally recognized gesture of reaching for my wallet.  The man said a number in Korean, very slowly and clearly.  This failing, the young woman resorted to producing a 10,000 won bill and a 5,000 won bill and displaying them to us.  I pulled two such bills from my wallet and gave them to the man.  We stood up.  The man and I bowed to each other; Leslie and I said kam-sa-ham-nee-dah, which means thank you, and our hosts said the same.

As we were walking back to our apartment, Leslie asked if we should ever go back there again.  "Of course!" I responded.  "They are now our best Korean friends!"  Excepting, of course, our Korean colleagues and our Korean boss.

Of Garbage Bags and Grocery Stores

This afternoon, with our food supply dwindling (and our milk totally depleted, having sat out of the refrigerator for the duration of our retreat and soured), Leslie and I set out on a grocery expedition.  But first, Leslie carefully sorted through all the refuse we've accumulated so far into two bags.  Neither of us really understand the garbage sorting system here, but you have to dispose of food waste separately from other kinds of waste, and stuff that can be burned from stuff that can't be burned, and probably some other stuff too.  We didn't have any food waste yet to speak of (we had eaten exactly three meals in the apartment, none of which included anything besides cereal and peanut butter and jelly on toast), but there's a fair bit of other kinds of waste that have accumulated as we've moved in.  Once Leslie had filled two bags with different kinds of trash, we left in search of a place to dispose of it.  When we found our apartment complex's trash disposal area, we discovered that everything was behind a locked gate except for the food waste bins (and yes, I opened all five of them to make sure they were all for food waste).  Crestfallen, we retraced our steps to the apartment and left the bags there.  Hopefully we'll be able to dispose of them on Monday.

We then set out to buy food.  There are several grocery stores in our vicinity.  The other teachers in Wolgye district have nicknames for them.  We first looked through "Ricky's."  It probably would have been sufficient for our immediate needs, but we wanted to look further.  We took a pedestrian underpass to get past a busy thoroughfare and headed for "Antoine's."  It's right next to a store called Paris Baguette that sells a variety of baked goods.  We stepped in there first and got a loaf of "Italian" bread (it turned out to be very good, sort of like challah) and cheesecake for dessert.  At Antoine's we were able to buy eggs, onions, and "cheddar" cheese for our early dinner tonight, along with milk, yogurt, Concord grapes, spaghetti, and a bigger frying pan than the one already in our apartment.  It was one of the weirder grocery shopping experiences I've ever had, because someone ("Antoine"?) was talking over the store intercom for almost the entire time, apparently talking with someone outside the store who would occasionally yell back at him from the doorway.  I was glad when we finally got out of there.  We crossed back under the road and went to pick up some extra garbage bags at still another grocery store, before finally getting back to our apartment, where I turned up the AC and poured myself a glass of cold water before I began to prepare our eggs.

Back from Retreat

Hi everyone! Thanks for all of the comments so far! Daniel and I just returned from our three-day retreat with APIS to Korea's southern coast, across the water from Namhae. We stayed at a pension with a gorgeous view (see above), but it wasn't quite large enough for all of us, so in my room, we had five women and only one bed (the rest of us slept on blankets on the floor). It was much cooler down there, which was very refreshing after Seoul's humidity. We ate traditional Korean food at every meal; my favorite dish was a pumpkin/squash porridge that we had for breakfast this morning. We had been told that it would take four to six hours to get to the retreat location, but we were actually on the road for closer to nine hours on Wednesday. This was partly due to the fact that we took a detour by stopping in Jeonju for lunch to eat Bibimbap (see below), which was delicious. We also visited the beautiful King's Pavilion, on a hill above the city.





The Korean countryside was beautiful (once you get ouside of Seoul)!! We saw mountains covered in lush forests (for almost the entire drive), rice fields, and rivers. During our rest stop, we tried a specialty of the region, "walnut cakes." They were shaped like a walnut and had a thin fried layer on the outside and hot red beans on the inside--delicious! The retreat was fun for the most part; we had a lot of meetings, but they were constructive and were intended to help us become a better team. It was fun to get to know the new and old teachers--they are all so nice, interesting, and intelligent. We're really looking forward to working with them! Most of the teachers are in their 20s or 30s, and they have a lot of energy and passion for their work. (And we met a man from Minnesota and a man from the St. Louis area!) At the end of our session yesterday, we climbed to the top of the mountain we were on and had an even more amazing view (I unfortunately didn't have my camera with me), and I later played volleyball with most of the guys and a few of the girls (and even though I hadn't played it in six years, I still managed to do a few good serves and several decent passes). :) Before we went to sleep last night, I shared some wine with a few of the returning teachers on our porch. We were supposed to go on a boat ride and visit the beach this afternoon, but it unfortunately started raining very hard during breakfast. Since it didn't look like it was going to clear up, we decided to leave early (after lunch instead of tomorrow morning), so we returned to Seoul (this time in about six hours) and had dinner at a seafood buffet restaurant. We're hoping to finish unpacking, buy groceries, become familiar with our neighborhood, and frantically read our textbooks this weekend. We hope you're all doing well!

Here We Are

We are now nearing the end of our first full day in Korea.  We landed at 6 pm Seoul time yesterday, and finally got to our apartment at 11, after somewhat more than 24 hours of travel.  We woke up at 7 this morning to be picked up at 7:45.  We were taken to school for breakfast and an introductory meeting in the faculty lounge.  We got to see our classrooms — they are close to one another on the fourth floor.  We got packets of information, including our schedules.  (Leslie is lucky enough not to have any class for the first two hours of every day.)

At 9:00 we went to a medical clinic to have our height, weight, chest size (?!), vision, hearing, and blood pressure checked; blood test performed, chest x-ray taken, etc., all of which was a necessary step in getting our work visas.  Then back to school for lunch and more orientation.  We went shopping at E-Mart (basically a Korean Wal-Mart/supermarket).  None of the staff we encountered spoke enough English to be helpful, so navigating everything and finding what we needed was somewhat difficult.  But we did get such necessaries as a laundry hamper, a mattress pad (they like their beds extra-firm here in Korea, apparently), laundry detergent (a saleslady put a lot of effort into selling us some fabric softener as well, which was awkward because at first we didn't know what it was, and then we had a hard time convincing her that we didn't need it), and a few other things.  We also got some milk.

Then we went back to our apartment, where I took a hard-earned nap and Leslie stayed awake to make sure we didn't miss the bus when it came to pick us up for dinner (my intention of waking up when Leslie asked me to so she also could take a nap unfortunately came to naught).  We had a shabu dinner with the other new staff: each of us had our own little pot of water on a burner and was served a plate of vegetables and a plate of raw strips of thinly sliced beef to cook in said pot of water.  Each of us had a little bowl of sauce to dip the meat and vegetables in.  It was a good meal.

We are now back in our apartment.  It's very nice: there is a master bedroom and two smaller bedrooms, which do not have beds in them right now, but desks instead.  (I guess they will function as studies for us.)  There is a living room area with an air conditioner about the size and shape of a grandfather clock, a fairly well-stocked kitchen, a washing machine, a bathroom with a shower and one without, and a porch with a rack on it for drying our clothes.  The floors are wooden, except for the bathrooms and the entryway, which are tile and are about three inches lower than the rest of the floor.  (Since Koreans traditionally eat and sleep on their floors, I understand that they tend to be very careful about keeping them clean, and I take this to be the reason for having such a clear demarcation between areas where outdoor shoes/bathroom shoes are to be worn, and where they are not.)  We currently have no hot water (UPDATE: apparently someone came while we were gone and turned it on for us); we also unfortunately forgot to buy an alarm clock at E-Mart, and so we had probably better get to bed soon or we run the risk of oversleeping tomorrow.  We leave on Wednesday for a four-day retreat at a "pension" somewhere in the southern part of the country.

First impressions of Seoul (or at any rate of Wolgye 2-dong, the area where we are living): There's a surprising amount of greenery here considering how densely populated this city is.  Lots of trees, shrubs, vines, and even bits of parkland tucked in here and there.  Except on the main thoroughfares, there are often no sidewalks, and pedestrians mingle with bicycle and automobile traffic.  There are huge apartment buildings everywhere, often in groups of five or ten virtually identical structures.  It's kind of hot and pretty humid (apparently it's necessary to take precautions against mold in the summer).  There are big mountains right outside the city, which can often be seen while driving around.  We have been informed that not only do we need to keep recyclables separate from other trash, but also need to keep food waste separate from other waste.

Tomorrow, more orientation.  We also get our pictures taken for the school's website and brochure.  I therefore need to pick out a shirt and tie (hopefully there will be a shirt somewhere in my luggage that will be presentable without my having to iron it, but if it comes to that I do have an iron and an ironing board, and have been taught in the not-too-terribly-distant past how to iron a shirt).  And, as I mentioned earlier, I should go to bed soon, because the bus will arrive for us in eleven hours, we have no alarm clock, and we are both very tired and very jet-lagged.  Good night!