Our First Day

So here’s the update from the first day of school. To begin with, we are very tired right now, and we want to go to sleep, so this will have to be short. Korean schools are very odd compared to Canadian schools. What you see in this picture is Simon’s schedule. Every blue box is a class I have to teach. I have 23 classes to teach per week. I teach 40 students per class. I see each class only once a week. That means that every week I teach 23 x 40 = 920 students...EVERY WEEK. I thought I might be able to memorize their names if I tried really hard, since Korean names are so odd to me. Now I know there’s no chance in hell of memorizing nearly 1000 of them.

Here’s the plus side, and it’s a great, great plus. I have to make only two lesson plans per week, one for each level I teach, but I have to teach it 11-12 times. As well, classes are only 45 minutes long, so if I run out of material in class the wait won’t be as excruciating.

There’s a lot more to write about, but we’ll have to save it for tomorrow.

Jet Lag

Right now it’s 5:45 AM, and I’m completely awake. That might be because I went to sleep at 8PM last night. So, yeah, we’re not fully adjusted to the time-shift yet. I feel as if I’m adjusted, but the problem is that Martina isn’t anywhere close to being in Korea Time, so she’s sleeping all the time, and making me go to sleep as well. We start teaching our very first Koren class in three hours. Wish us luck.

Seng Bulgogi

We tried something for the second time today called Seng Bulgogi. We tried it for the first time yesterday and it was so awesome that we had to come back today to try it again, only this time with a video camera taping the whole thing. You should check out the video or just view the korean food pictures if you want to see more of Martina’s awesome food photography.

Cause for Alarm

We just had a scary experience. Martina was napping and I was trying to figure out how to unlock the number pad for our front door. The doors here are different, in that we don't have the traditional jagged metal to unlock our door. Here we have a magnet, as in the picture above, that we fit into a slot on the outside of our door. Blue lights flash if this is the right key (I'm not joking about this) and the door unlocks itself. Once you close the door, it automatically locks itself after three seconds.

Back to the story - I was trying to get to the number pad on this door (I don't know what the pad is for. I was just told to change my code by Martina's co-teacher) when I pushed a button that I thought would do the job. Instead, it set off a high pitch siren, like a car alarm. We fiddled around with it for a few minutes before Martina, rudely awoken by the siren, knocked on our neighbor's door to ask for help. He told us we need the key to stop the wailing of the alarm. Once we did that, we chatted for a few minutes outside our apartment doors, though the chatting consisted of no more than two ideas: where do you teach? My daughter goes to this school. We couldn't understand each other, and the man's daughter, who took English at her school, was too shy to help. She just stood at the front door and awkwardly stared.

Anyhow, we plan on showing you our place in video soon. We just need to charge the battery for the camera. It's dead, and we have only one plug adapter, which is charging too many other things instead.

Bucheon at Night

We took a few pictures of what Bucheon looks like at night. Here you’ll see our apartment at night, along with the flashing pretty lights of the streets of Bucheon. It’s not as small and quaint as we expected it to be. The pylons are there to block off all cars; on the weekends this street has nothing but bikes and roller blades and small dirt bikes running around on it, and families get together and relax at Jung-Ang park. We've compiled our pictures of Bucheon together, and plan on constantly updating the collection with new pictures whenever we can. To see the pictures of Bucheon at night, though, click here for our City of Bucheon Gallery. To see a movie of what Bucheon's like at night (very bright with many, many lights), click here to see Bucheon's Night Lights. We expect to be updating our Bucheon pictures regularly, so make sure to check our Korea photos page to see more pictures of our journey here in Korea and Bucheon.

Lubber Gruvs (I mean, Rubber Gloves)

It’d be great if we knew how to read Korean: Martina wanted rubber gloves for cleaning around the house. We went to Home Plus to buy some rubber gloves. When we got home, we realized that the package was just for a single-serving of rubber glove. So we went back to buy another package. Then we got two rubber gloves, but both for the right hand. Fantastic.

Rainy Days

Today Martina bought a new umbrella, and just in time. She’s been looking around for one for as long as we’ve been here, touching and testing many of them out. Korea has a big umbrella culture, since it rains throughout most of the year. In Canada we can get away with bad umbrellas - we get caught in the rain maybe once or twice a year, and if our umbrella sucks we gripe and grumble about it and promise ourselves to buy a new one next time. Then it doesn’t rain for a long time so we forget about buying a new umbrella until the next rainstorm hits.

Anyhow, we got caught in the rain, but right (and I mean RIGHT) after Martina bought the umbrella. Perfect timing. What she drew is a fairly accurate depiction. More pictures of it once we’re outside (it’s bad luck to open umbrellas indoors, after all).

Foreigners Interview

Yesterday we went to a coffee shop to work on the website. We got lost trying to find the place, and made a video of it, but after 20 minutes or so we found the place. The drinks at this coffee shop were weird, and we had to try them. Martina got a regular latte, because she’s too chicken to try something weird, and Simon got a black bean frappucino. It sounded gross, and it taste gross.

A few minutes into sitting down the guy who served us came up to our table with a heavily creased sheet of paper, full of questions. He told us he was in university, and for his project he needs to interview foreigners in English. He was very meek and timid, and asked us standard questions, like where we came from, what are we doing here, how long do we plan on staying, etc. By the end of it he walked away and came back with a bag full of cookies and a sticker on the back of them saying “for you.” What a deal! Talk for a few minutes and get free cookies! This is how life is supposed to be...

We Are Not Alone

A few days before we left for Korea, I (Simon) visited my old Korean boss to ask him about Bucheon. He told me, among other things, that Bucheon barely has any foreigners, as opposed to Seoul which is rife with ex-pats. For the first eight hours we were here in Bucheon, we thought he was right. Last night we changed our minds, though, as we saw maybe 10 or so foreigners walking around at night. I guess that makes sense, since we wouldn’t see them walking around during the day - - they probably have jobs, and aren’t freeloading like we are.

Shopping Malls

We’ve been shopping for the past five hours or so. We only went to four places: The Hyundai Mall, The Mall, The Sooooping (or something like that) Mall, and Home Plus. Click here to see the video of grocery shopping Home Plus.

The Hyundai Mall is ten stories tall and mirrors The Mall via a glass walkway. The tenth floor of both buildings has no shopping; it’s called a Sky Park, exposed to the sun and clouds, where you can sit and eat in a green grassy park. The top two floors of one of The Mall is a movie theatre. We’re not sure if the movies are in English and subtitled or wholly dubbed, and we don’t know enough Korean to ask anyone to clarify. We also made a video of the mall when we were walking home one day, so check it out as well.

The Sooooping mall has something called "Water Fun" on the seventh and eighth floors, but we never checked out what this was all about. The fifth floor is nothing but cellphones. Each giant floor is about the length and width of half of Sherway.

Home Plus was the best of them all. It’s a huge 24 hour grocery store, only one floor altogether, but it’s chaotic. It's chaotic for several reasons: first of all, the grocery carts have wheels that move 360 degrees, so you can move every direction smoothly and quickly, so you never know what way people are heading. Secondly, they have people giving out free samples at the end and beginning of every single aisle. So people are stopping/gathering at all the aisle ends. Thirdly, everywhere you go customer service reps are trying to sell you stuff. They wear these huge white knee-high boot covers that look like giant white leg warmers. They give out samples and try to get you to buy the deal of the week. We just don’t look them in the eye, and Simon is afraid that they’re swearing at us in Korean.