Strawberry Season in February

I can't express to you the intense disappointment I experienced when we decided to come to Korea in May, knowing full well that we would be missing one of my most treasured times of the year...strawberry season! For those who know me, strawberries are my hands-down favourite food. I've been a fan since...I can't remember. Self-control knows no boundaries during this season and I've been known to make myself literally sick.
Blake and I recently discovered that Korea's strawberry season is in February-March! I can't express how excited I am to be hitting Korea's season now and then Canada's season when we come home in June. What more could a girl ask for?! I have seriously considered this ESL thing in Korea for a good deal longer if it means I get fresh strawberries two times a year instead of one!

Friends

I've been looking through previous posts of our time in Korea and I realized that I haven't really shared much about the friend situation while being here. I hope you don't mind me taking a bit of space to share.
This morning I began a Beth Moore bible study with some girls whom I have really grown to love while being here. Blake and I weren't really sure what to expect for friends when we embarked on this journey, but God has definitely brought some amazing people into our lives who have encouraged and strengthened us.
The study I have started is called Living Beyond Yourself and is all about the fruit of the Spirit. For those who don't know me well, I'm a huge fan of the ministry of Beth Moore and have grown so much under her teaching.
As I sat there this morning surrounded by friends listening to the sermon, I was really struck by how random it is for all us girls to be sitting together, desiring to grow in knowledge and love for God...in South Korea. Each one of us came to Korea for our different reasons, yet God has orchestrated the situation so that we could come together, far from home to learn and be encouraged by one another.
One of the closest friends I have here is Beth. She is teaching at a Christian International school and is finishing up her second year. Our schedules are completely opposite so we don't see her much throughout the week, but we hang on weekends when we have the chance. Beth has some strangely similar tendencies to my mom and Blake especially sees Beth as a younger version of Sue Covert. Now I know that saying someone has similarities to a mother-in-law isn't always a positive thing, but Blake absolutely loves my mom so it's a good thing. Over Christmas we were feeling very homesick and really wanting to have some reminders of home. Beth made us some cookies as a Christmas present and we almost cried when we opened them because they were the same ginger crinkles that my mom always makes. Definitely a taste of home! This picture is from when we went to the Jinju Lantern Festival together. I am directly behind Beth and the other girls are close friends- both named Heather.

Blake has been extremely blessed by a solid group of guys as well, but I'll save that for a future post...or maybe he'll post it for himself. Here are some photos of us hanging with some of our favourite people in Korea.

Oops Follow-Up

I've had a few requests for the consequences of my mistake regarding the boy who was absent the other day. For those who missed the beginning of the story click here.

CheeWon came into class -moving quite slow. They other 11 year old boys (who are quite hilarious I must add) were walking behind him giggling because of their privileged information thanks to their horrible teacher. I gave them the most evil teacher eye I could muster and they caught my drift and shut their mouths for a few minutes.

I began checking the kids homework and this is the time where I spend some one on one time with each student and ask them some personal questions. How are you, how was your week, etc... When CheeWon's turn came, I thought I'd be safer sticking with, 'how was your week?' To this he responded, 'horrible!' At this point I would normally respond with a 'why,' but I clearly did not want to go there today. Instead I asked him in reference to his week, 'is IT going to get better?' He clearly thought 'it' was in reference to something else as he looked at me with a horrified expression and said, 'you know???'
Stifled laughter is occuring now in the room. Fumbling, I quickly responded with a, 'your week CheeWon, is your week going to get better?!' Feeling assured that I was uninformed about his 'week,' he contentedly returned to his seat to wait for the lesson.
Ironically enough, the material for the class was focused on surgeries and medicine. My job is to encourage the kids to talk and connect their own experiences with the material, so they were supposed to share about times they've had an operation or been to the hospital. Clearly not the direction I wanted to take this day.
The boys are continuing to find the situation hilarious and so I steered the conversation more towards the girls and filled the empty spaces with blabberings of my tonsils being removed and my ankle getting fixed. Very stressful trying to divert attention!
Then, after all my effort to gloss over the awkward situation, CheeWon raises his hand and says that he just had surgery on a place very important to a boy. The room then explodes in laughter and then the stress was gone- the word was out! Everyone knew because HE had shared the information. (wink wink)
I didn't have the heart to tell him everyone already knew.

Adam's Wedding

Our co-worker Adam got married to a Korean girl last week. Their wedding was not a traditional Korean wedding, but it was quite a different experience for us. To start off with, Koreans do their wedding pictures a month or so before the wedding. They sometimes then send out the invitations with the wedding pictures in them. They also do their wedding pictures in many different outfits. The bride can change her dress 8 times so she can have pictures in different outfits- almost like a fashion show! When we arrived at the hall, everyone was there to welcome the guests, including the bride. The hall is full of balloons and they also usually have dry ice. When the guests are seated, the parents walk down the aisle with a spotlight on them and everyone claps. The bride and groom then walk down together with the spotlight and everyone claps. I should interject at this point to mention the fact that it doesn't seem to be a social crime to come in late to a wedding or to answer your cell phone during the ceremony. People are still walking into the hall as the ceremony continues and they walk right up to the front for good seats. The service lasts about 15-20 minutes with the couple saying nothing to each other aside from 'yes.' They don't say vows! Apparently this is the reason why many countries don't recognize Korean marriages as legal.
There are staff in black with ear pieces in their ears constantly adjusting the brides veil and dress as the ceremony goes on. The staff stand on either side of Adam and his wife and make them bow to their parents, each other, the audience, etc.. constantly manipulating their bodies to show them what to do. The staff in black also have make-up for Adam's wife and they do touch ups when they're at the front! After this, they turn around to face the audience and blow out a candle, an almost fake cake is brought to the front and they cut it together, but the cake has already been cut from another wedding that happened earlier that day and it's then put away for the next wedding. Keep in mind that Koreans are still coming in late- even though the wedding is over!


The staff then ask people to come to the front for pictures. We were ushered to the front for the friend picture. They then chose a person to catch the bouquet of flowers and it's thrown many times to get the right picture with us clapping in the background, perfectly staged. The wedding party then walks down the aisle with the staff in black blowing out the candles and rolling up the carpet behind them- getting ready for the next wedding. Adam and his wife then change into the Korean wedding clothes while the guests go for dinner. The dinner guests eat from a buffet table and there are guests from many different weddings in the same place.There are no speeches and no formal plan for the dinner. Guests simply eat and leave (my dad would have absolutely loved it!). Adam and his wife eat in another room and do a special Korean ceremony with their parents where they bow and are blessed.



While drastically different from our own customs, it was a great day. It was drastically shorter than any other wedding I've been to. I'm afraid for my sister and her special day coming in June once my dad finds out how quick and fast weddings in Korea are! :)

Skiing at YongPyong Mountain

Lunar New Year is a huge celebration in Asian countries. Many schools shut down for a week so people can travel to be with their families. Our school graciously closed for a day so Blake and I could play. We decided to go skiing way up in the North.
Now I have a bit of a confession to make...I had never been skiing before. I've tried snowboarding, but never skiing. What true Canadian can say they learned how to ski in South Korea?! I'm a total fake!

Anyways...Blake and I got up at the insanely early hour of 3:30 to get on a tour bus that took us to a place that had snow. We rented gear for an insanely cheap price- Blake was mostly excited about the camo snowpants. The mountain we went to is called YongPyong Ski Resort. Because most English teachers in Korea have time off, the mountain was full of white faces and we could hear lots of English around us. I think we're going to have a hard time coming home and hearing so much English because it was a little bit of an overload that day. In some ways, it's kindof nice to not be able to understand the nonsense some people talk about. :)

Oops!

While I’m not proud of my Korean progress, I do like to show the kids the little I know when I have the opportunity. Apparently I’m getting a little too cocky with my students and had an embarrassing moment today in my Birdie class.

When a student is going to be absent for class, the office staff will usually write down the reason on the computer attendance record. Normally, the staff will simply write ‘private’, but sometimes they will state a non-private reason in Korean. The reasons are generally ‘sick,’ or ‘going to another class,’ so this is the chance where I try to showcase my knowledge of Korean pronunciation for the kids.

Today an unfamiliar Korean word popped up as a reason for a student being absent. (Keep in mind that private reasons are usually written as ‘private’ so I naively thought I was safe to read out the words). I confidently asked my students what ‘포경소술’ meant. There was an eruption of laughter in the class once they made sense of my butchered Korean- especially from my 11 year old boys. I managed to get one of the girls to tell me the meaning. Through giggles she whispered, ‘it's a boy operation’ to which I respond with a weak, ‘oh!’
Whoops! How do you carry on a class after that?!

I feel absolutely horrible! I told the entire class that “CheeWon” is absent because he’s getting circumcised! I think I’m a candidate for the worst teacher award! Granted, Koreans seem to be a little less concerned about personal, private information, so maybe it isn’t as big of a deal as my Western mind is making it out to be. I guess language learning will inevitably involve these awkward moments at times, but I feel bad that my students have to be the victims of my slow progress!

Language Laughs

It has been awhile since I've posted so I thought I would share some of my recent thoughts.
I am currently enrolled in an TEFL course (that's: Teaching English as a Foreign Language) and it requires me to reflect about the difficulties in learning another language.

I'm a little disappointed about the progress I have made in learning Korean. I guess I naively hoped that Blake and I would be fluent by the end of this year (hear the chuckle), but we are far from even competent in our language skills. Korean is a really hard language to learn! To start with, there are two languages within the one. There is a formal and informal way of speaking and the words are sometimes entirely different. Korean society is based on a Confucian system where age is extremely important. It is a horrible thing to address someone who is older than you in an informal way. To maintain sanity with our learning, Blake and I just try to learn the formal way of saying things so we seem polite, but it puts us in a position of hilarity when speaking to kids or people younger than us.

I have a fairly good grasp of the alphabet which is largely phonetic- thank goodness! I can't describe how incredible it felt when I finally figured out how to sound out the words and could read the signs around me. (I don't remember this experience when I was learning English so it was really cool!)

We have had some pretty hilarious moments while learning the sounds of words. Korean does not have a symbol for the word 'f' and consequently, many Koreans have difficulty pronouncing this sound. I was buying a muffin the other day at Paris Baguette and noticed the wording on the package (in Korean letters) spelled out 'muppin' instead of muffin.

The other quite hilarious situation had to do with Blake trying to get a cell phone. He was trying to communicate with the guy at the counter saying he wanted a phone. The sales guy seemed a little intimidated to be dealing with us and couldn't seem to figure out what we wanted. Blake finally hung his head in shame and said 'we want a pone.' The guy lit up and said, 'Ooooooh! a PONE!' I couldn't stop laughing at how defeated Blake looked when he called it a pone. We teach kids how to use correct English and call out the 'Konglish' (that's Korean and English words mashed together like 'sangu' for 'thank you') when we hear it. I bet our kids would love to know we make use of the Konglish outside of school.

In any case, we now have a new pone! :)

P.S. Less than 4 months!