Our EPIK Life in Buyeo

This blog post is well overdue, and I’m a little worried about the daunting task ahead of me here. It’s been way too long, and way too much has happened since my last post. I’d love to be able to document all of the details, but so much happens each day that it would be impossible.

The Teaching:

The teaching has been great so far. We're teaching middle school, which here is grades 7 - 9. It's been fun so far, but we're really now just getting into the thick of it. I have a tricky little set-up though. We both teach at multiple school (Julia 3, me 4), but my situation is a bit more hectic. Julia teaches out of the standard textbook at all of her schools, so she'll be making 3 lessons per week on average. I have two schools that I teach from story books (right now it's Cat in the Hat and Big Fat Cat and the Mustard Pie). For those schools, we read a few pages and then I make up random activities and games to have them practice reading and using some language from the text. I can be pretty creative and do what I want here, but I also have to discuss the lessons with my co-teachers (I have 7 total). At another school (which is a 45 minute bus ride away) it's a totally different situation. I have no co-teacher, and I teach the same 11 students for 3 periods in a row. It's considered extra-curricular. I can do WHATEVER I want. Right now we're remaking the music Video for 'Friday' by Rebecca Black. An absolutely awful song, but it's hilarious, and pretty simple and the kids are digging it. These kids are great, and I know I’ll have a lot of fun with them this year. They chose to be in this class, so they're well behaved and motivated. At my 4th school, I teach from the textbook, so I'll likely be stealing Julia's lessons and tweaking for my class sizes. At my main school I have 11 classes per week, and then 3 at each of the others. I'm technically 2 short of where I should be (22) at the moment, but I'm okay with that. :) All in all though, the teaching is going well! We're both learning lots and just taking it all in as it comes. We have some pretty funny things that happen all the time. We’re told we’re handsome / pretty, have long noses, ‘special hair’ (Julia), I was told I have big muscles. The kids are hilarious. Classroom management is the trickiest at my main school because my class sizes are more than double my next largest (they’re ~32 – 35 each). We’re still working on perfecting our lesson planning and trying to become quicker at it, but it will take time to test things out in the classroom and see what works (in general and in our particular situations). This will all come with time though.

Everything Else

We finally got gym memberships. We’re at Gangnam fitness (yes, Gangnam). It’s not a huge gym, but it’s got the basics and isn’t terribly busy. So far so good. It’s about a 10 minute walk from home. Only drawback so far, which we found out this morning, is that they’re not open on Sundays. Very disappointing! Instead of working out, we walked about 17.5km.

Right across from where we live is Busosaeng Mountain. It’s amazing up there. It’s a big park with trails and monuments and all sorts of stuff. It’s not a hill, but not a mountain. You can walk to the top in about 30 minutes or less. There’s lots of trail to keep busy in there and we’ll be spending a lot of time in the park this year. 

We found that we can go out on the roof of our building. This excite us because we’ll bring some basic gym stuff out there and do workouts. We can bring stuff like a skipping rope, kettlebell, maybe even a box for box jumps, and get in workouts more conveniently. 

We got our bank account last week. We just need to figure out how to send money home to Canada. We do have mortgage payments to make still! We’re with NH Bank. 

We got cell phone plans this past week also, pumped for that! We’re with SKT. 

On Friday we had a couch delivered. We ordered and paid for it ourselves. Julia is sleeping on it until the mattress shows up. After 3 weeks of sleeping on the floor, our bed frame arrived on Saturday, but no mattress just yet. Hopefully in a few days. 

We have 3 restaurants that are our favourites. One we go to for Bibimbap, one for Ssambap and one for Wallamssam.  They already know us well at all of these establishments. Meals are $6, $7 and $12 respectively.

Next weekend will be our first weekend vacation of sorts. We’re going to Seoul. We’re going to meet up with another couple from Tennessee that we met at orientation and hang out with them for part of the weekend. At some point we’ll meet up with John (Julia’s cousin) also, if he’s available. 

Random points:

-        We love rice cakes. Here they are not diet food, they are dessert, and they are fantastic.

-        Non-Koreans are few and far between. We’ve seen 4 – 5 in 3 weeks. 

-        We get 4 English channels on TV: Euro-Sport, BBC Knowledge, Nat Geo Wild, History Channel

-        We’re ever so slowly learning the bus system around here. We need to bus to our other schools, so we take the busses 3 days a week. 

-        We found an amazing network of bike paths that, when joined, we can travel all over the country! I want to plan a long distance trip.

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