I’m back! I am not going to bother apologizing for my last disappearance or making any promises about my future promptness with the posting, but I do hold out vague expectations of myself to maintain this somewhat responsibly. To anyone new or returning, thanks for sticking it out.
The Return
My last post, in October of last year, immediately preceeded Father’s Night — a sort of comical dog-and-pony show that we prepared the children for for weeks by drilling them on silly 6 year old academic trivia and dances choreographed to within inches of their lives. It went well; I survived it; and spent another 5 months in Korea, with a brief trip home over Christmas, very happily. At the end of my contract, my friend Denise and I flew to China and rendezvous’d (how the holy fuck do you spell that word? Good thing this is not something my babies will ever need to know…) in Shanghai. We spent about 32 days wandering vaguely northward through the Shanghai near-burbs and then to Nanjing and Xi-an before ending with a week in Beijing. I could spend many hours and gigabytes of pictures talking about China [2.3 gigs, to be precise] so I’m going to skip it for now but if anyone is curious, leave me a comment; I’ll happily reminisce some other time!
I then flew back to the States, by way of 5 days in Seoul for a friend’s 30th birthday party, and toured the states for the better part of a long and lovely summer. When my brother and I started looking for jobs teaching abroad, Seoul seemed rather low on the list simply because I’d done it before, but after thinking over the offers we’d received in China and Indonesia, and getting no hooks bitten in Vietnam, we decided to come back to what I knew and loved. So here we are, back in downtown Seoul, teaching English to adorable babies and busily avoiding any thoughts of our future!
Arrival
We landed at Incheon Airport on October 5th at about 5:30pm. Clearing immigration and customs in a preposterous 17 minutes and getting our bags not long after, I called the new assistant manager at our school to tell him that we were on our way — evidently, as I’d been at PSA before, the principal had no inclination to send a car to pick us up and instead had someone meet us at Hamilton Hotel, not far from the school. Kris met us at the Hamilton and took us straight to the apartment, a fairly sweet two bedroom in Haebangchon with a big living room, a decent kitchenette [nothing like my washing-machine obstructed monstrosity of last year!] and several rooms whose purposes were obscure. More on that later. We looked around, said ‘Thanks,” and bid Kris adieu; before being informed that rather than the five days swine flu quarantine we’d been hoping for, or at least the one day vacation for Chuseok we’d been expecting, school actually began the next morning. So it was bedtime! And at 9am the next day, I met my new students — Dolphin Class!
[quick left to right: top row, Clara, Bio, Cho Young, Sean L, Michell, Sean B, June
bottom row, Angela, Yuna, Dash, Justin, Eric, Jenny]
Dolphin Class and Father’s Night
My students this year are level 7-3, which means that they are in their third and final year of English language pre/kindergarten. They will be starting elementary school in only five months, and are as near to fluent as it could possibly be reasonable to expect from six year old students whose English exposure has come only at school. I knew all but one of them last year in Orion and Mercury classes, and was super-excited to meet them, although a bit disappointed not to have my own students from Koala Class last year. They are spectacular! Not, perhaps, as incandescently cute as last years’ bunch, but fun to talk to, fun to play with, fun to teach, and finally I can understand what they say to each other!
I was excited as hell to begin, but from the beginning there were two notable obstacles to both easy incorporation into the classroom and my general sanity. The first was the history of the 2009 Dolphin Class; from March to October, the class had six consecutive foreign teachers and three assistants. One of the departing foreign teachers even pulled a Midnight Run, meaning that she departed with zero warning and left the class without even a planned substitute to help fill in the holes. Basically what this meant were that the students were disciplinarily mindfucked and their mothers were pissed as hell. To add to this was the fact that, as you might have surmised from the timing of my last post last year and this renewed attempt, Fathers’ Night was scheduled for 19 days from my arrival; exactly 15 days of class time to get to know the Dolphins, develop a level of personal and disciplinary comfort between us that would allow us to prepare for this huge presentation without friction, and do it all in such a way as to satisfy already furious, crazy Korean mothers whose expectations in the best of times rivaled those of Broadway musicals.
A tall order!
This is Dash. He is a baller, and an unholy hunk of muscle in a tiny baby body. He also seems more than slightly skeptical of me at this particular moment; bonding with six year olds while maniacally forcing them to memorize mountains of random speeches is unsurprisingly difficult.
The basic outline of the Fathers’ Night program was this;
-Introductory Message [memorized, of course] followed by a Dolphins are #1 Chant
-Song, Sunday Afternoon by Mecco. No need to abuse yourself figuring out what this is, but suffice it to say that you should not, in fact, forget the green umbrella.
-Theme Presentations — each Dolphin talked about one of the overarching themes we’ve discussed this year, including food and health, animals, earth and conservation and transportation
-Two games, one a sort of theme trivia game with a sticky velcro dart and a huge dart board and the other a game of ‘Memory’ matching world countries to their capitals and then having the students put flags onto a huge map of the world [that I made out of felt!]
[you know you like that articulation around the Chesapeake! i miiight have done a radical Canada-ectomy because there were way too many northern islands. sorry guys.]
-Song, A Whole New World obvi from Aladdin. This was a good song and it went over well but dear god getting the boys and girls’ overlapping entrances synchronized was a job for someone who doesn’t hate Disney songs…
-Poems for Dads written by the kids, and finally we’re done!
So anyway, three weeks pass absurdly quickly because I hardly teach; it’s just a lot of practicing, a lot of singing, some playing and a little bit of daily writing and oral language practice each day. Cutting to the chase, the actual night went utterly satisfactorily; apparently the mothers were, though generally furious with PSA, actually quite excited to have me as they knew me last year, and so expectations were not as unreachably high as had been suggested to me when I arrived. Now, some pictures of the event itself:
Empty, but almost there…
The tension heightens!
Nicole takes a quick break from MAKING MY LIFE INSANE to make a stupid face!
The wall outside our classroom. Looking good, yes? Indeed it does. However, it was also constructed in about 19 frantic insane minutes immediately before the fathers’ arrival when Nicole [see above] decided that the writing samples and artwork that my coteacher, Dominic, and I had put up were insufficient loveliness.
June and Clara looking awesome!
Yuna and Bio looking cute.
Jenny belting it out during her theme presentation on the Earth and conservation.
Michell, who is absolutely delightful when not on stage and frozen like a popsicle right now… and Sean L, known in better circles as That Demon Who Shall Not Be Named. If he makes it through the year without a trashcanning a week I’ll be shocked.
And finally, Sean B — smart as hell, and what a know-it-all, but a really good kid, closing things out with sports and the seasons.
Fathers’ Night went off without a hitch, and I’m still alive! Obstacle #1 is still a concern in my life, but as far as I can tell, the Dolphin parents are quite happy with my presence and style and won’t make too much of a fuss if we keep things on an even keel. Here’s to hoping…
And the rest of my time here!
As usual in this country, the majority of my time has been spent teaching, reading, or drinking. It’s been fun introducing Zach to the people and places I remembered the best, but I won’t write about them now, because most of them are debaucherous and I’ll save that for another time. We have, however, done some really cool things.
Last weekend we walked about 30km over Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday we started wandering vaguely, quite of our own accord, down towards the Han River, and ended up walking down through Itaewon to the river, around through Ichon along the Han River Park until we found the 63 building, and then back up through Ichon to Yongsan Family park and home before meeting some coworkers for galbi. Sunday we headed up through the mountain to Jongno and along Insadong, the best market for traditional Korean crafts, to the CheongGyeChong, the renovated stream that runs through downtown Seoul. We ended up hitting both Changdeokgung and Gyeongbukgung, the two major palace complexes downtown, and taking a lovely nap on some benches…
There are some stunningly beautiful places at both, including this summer residence and contemplative pool in the Secret Garden of Changdeokgung.
Best of all, we caught the changing of the guard at Gyeongbukgung! Who knew there were enough heavily bearded, 6’2″ Koreans to staff an entire palace guard…?
And this last weekend, we made our way about an hour and twenty minutes north to Bukhansan, the northern Shield Mountain of ancient Korea. Bukhansan is a huge national park by Korean standards, about 80 sq.kms, and contains three fairly stunning peaks; we climbed Baekundae, the highest of the three at about 890m.
On our way up there!
Looking an awful lot like fall from up here.
A little detour to a small temple and a lovely fortress gate, complete with dragon-bell.
It does not seem possible that that color actually exists!
This is the second-tallest peak in Bukhansan, Insubong. If you look closely, you can see dozens or hundreds of Koreans swarming the top; an impressive feat, as it is a sheer thumb of rock rising over 150m. They get decked out in harnesses and climb set lines like spiders; men, women, kids, and the elderly. It is astonishing. One ceases to question E.Asian longevity after visiting Korean public park areas.
And finally, a sort of anticlimactic shot from the near-top of Baekundae; unfortunately, given how stunningly beautiful the climb was, the air was just hazy enough to make long-shot scenic views pretty much impossible. Take my word, however, for the fact that Bukhansan is one of the more physically beautiful and astonishing places that I have been.
Good climbing, Zachary Teacher!
Much love to family and friends. Hope you’re all doing well!
