home sweet home

so after 20 odd hours of flying, landing, getting off a plane in some random city that is not my final destination, going through customs, trying to convince the customs people that NO, the 15 odd gifts that i so foolishly wrapped and tried to take on the plane do not contain illicit drugs, porn, liquids or WMDs, getting back on yet another plane, taking gravol to knock me out, wavering in and out of consciousness amongst the sounds of screaming babies and crying toddlers, and headache, headache, headache....i am HOME. weird how i feel like i've left home at the same time. how is that possible?

anyways, the 6 hours that i've been home have so far been quite entertaining - my neice and nephews were quite willing to unwrap the WMDs - ur, i mean Winnie-the-Pooh (same-same) parcels, and that got the ball rolling for a exchanging presents blitz, which resulted in my family loving their mementos from Korea and me with some sweet new clothes from....get ready - Costco. yeah, my parents surely know where to shop for high-fashion merchandise - but really these clothes are actual kinda cool! i'll just have to avoid that "place drop" when someone compliments me - "hey, love the sweater, where'd you get it?" "oooh, in this fabulous little boutique in Canada called (with a French accent) "Cos-coo." You should go there some time. I bought this right after i went on a dog-sled through the exotic desserts of potato fields, during a crazy little maple-syrap festival they had going on. It truly was an adventure to remember."

so then I had a home-cooked meal by my mom and listen to my brother talk as if he was on drugs. or so i thought at first, seeing as he was going on and on about this documentary he saw on the internet about how 9/11 was a conspiracy because A) the twin towers were rigged with explosives that caused the collapse of the buildings, and B) all these reports have been hidden by the US government to scare the Americans into supporting the War on Terror. Now if you knew my brother, you would also assume that he was on drugs, because normally i am the conspiracy theorist in the family while everyone else quietly listens and politely attempts to change the subject to something other than politics. so this was fun for me - we watched these documentaries and swapped theories. And all of a sudden, i have a heap-loads more respect for my elder sibling. Oh, how America brings people together...

so now i'm wide awake while my family sleeps, and i'm gonna finish some marking. yes, for my school. yes, they same one that i finished working for yesterday, and who (wahoo!) paid me all my severance pay. i need to hand them in via email by Monday, as reports go out on Wednesday and i had no time to do so this past week. So why not take advantage of my delirously jet-legged frame of mind and give my kids their final comments? And if they end up sounding a little, um, odd, I mean, really, what can they do?

i loved this christmas

it all went so fast. on december 24th, 2006, 18 of us, armed with bagfulls of food, including my own homemade eggnog (a drink totally unheard of here), candy canes (again, sooooo difficult to find and thus totally appreciated), and everything needed for goodies, snacks and a full-course omelette breakfast, gifts, stockings, pillows, blankets, and games, cabbed it up to a beautiful dalmagi apartment (in the "posh" side of Busan) to have a sleepover. we laughed, we danced, we did secret santas, played dutch blitz, poker, and bible trivia (haha), built puzzles (ok they did - i have no patience for those horridly intricate things), took pictures, exchanged gifts, and played with our new toy guns and numchucks (ok that was the boys.) i was able to give my girls the photo albums that i made for them - wrapped in korean rice paper and completed with a hand-carved coaster i glued on top - and filled with memories from this year -numerous parties, nights out, norae-bongs (kareokee rooms), paintball, small group, exploring, and just hanging out and laughing and talking and playing. then we had a huge breakfast, napped, and went out for indian food (not exactly a chrismtas tradition but delicious enough for me!) the night was topped off by yet another (different) party in dalmagi. good times had by all. it was a phenomenal way to end my year here, and it made me really excited to come back again to everyone in March.
Though i AM super excited to come home!! 4 days!!

see more pics here!

typhoon surfin'

k, this pic was from about 2 months ago, where me and Aussie Nathan took advantage of a typhoon's waves and went for a little surf. We forgot our cameras, so we asked a kind Frenchman to take our picture with his camera and email them to us....and we just got them now, and with them come flooding back the memories of that epic stormy day...

I wanted to go surfing, because I heard that Busan was the only city where you could really get decent waves in all of Korea. Being the seasoned surf chick that i am (hahahaha...I'm from Southern Ontario, people....haha), I thought it would be no problem for me to get back into it. After all, I learned how to surf in Maui of all places, which I think should make one automatically a pro surfer, or at least...good. And so I phoned my friend that I thought would also be good, basing it only on the fact that he is from The Land Down Under. Let me just say, as cool as we look in our snazzy wetsuits, we both proved to be an embarrassment to both the Golden Coast and the Golden Isle. Nathan got up once or twice for a 2 second ride and I got up...*sigh*....nil. Apparently, it's all about "timing" and being able to "read the ocean," both which, seemingly, I suck at. Ah well. I still had fun, and got a couple belly rides which I didn't want to ruin by attempting to stand up. It was still good to be out there in the water, floating around with my fellow wanna-be surfers and a few actual ones who were kind enough to let us know that "it just takes time." Apparently an intense desire to be cool and a closet full of surf clothes just doesn't cut it.

a fantabulous 3 day weekend, and i love korea again...

surprises! korea's full of 'em. like for instance, on thursday evening, my supervisor comes to my classroom and tells me that classes arecancelled for the next day. Cancelled! This was a major shock, because my hagwon closes for absolutely nothing usually. Like, we were open for Children's Day, Buddha's Birthday, and all other national holidays, and even during a crazy typhoon, which most hagwons were clossed for. And so what major catastrophe did we close so suddenly because of? The death of the prime minister? Nope. The sudden attack of North Korea? Ha - no, most Koreans are so completely unconcerned about that. We closed for the 2006 second annual APEC fireworks show. And yes, APEC was not even in Korea this year. But it was last year around this time, and so this, apparently, was good enough reason for Korea to drop an estimated 1.2 billion Won (approx. $1.4 million CAD) for a 30-minute, insanely overdramatic fireworks extravaganza.

Now you must understand, Koreans love their fireworks. Every Saturday night of the summer there is a show at the beach, just for the heck of it. Plus, there are adjijis (older korean men) selling various types and sizes down at the beach for anyone to buy and set off at any time throughout the year. It's a regular couple thing to do - the boy sets off fireworks and the girl giggles, or people aim fireworks at each other's feet to get them to DANCE (i don't recommend that though, the last time i did that i got some fortune-teller adjiji in the ear - he wasn't too impressed). So I've gotten quite desensitized to the awesomeness of fireworks...but man, this was a spectacle.... but I'm not talking about the actual fireworks....they were all amazing and such, but even more so, the PEOPLE were insane. 3 million people crowded around a little beach - up in trees, on tops of the rooves of coffee shops, apartment buildings, hotels, and trucks. I went on my motorbike, planning to meet friends there, and my cell phone didn't even work because of the amount of people and cellphones. So I ended up running into other lost foreigners to enjoy the show with, and took lots of pics. Notice the multitudes of cellphones being used as cameras...funny (koreans also love their cellphones).

But the craziest part of the evening was after the show was over, where i almost got stampeded to death....3 million people all trying to go in the same direction = ridiculousness. People's mere ruthlessness comes out in moments like these. I was shoved, pushed, tripped, poked, and prodded like cattle. At one moment, an ambulance drove by with a women inside who had been trampled on (yikes), and people were taking the opportunity to get through the crowd by running as fast as they could behind the ambulance, in the empty-pavement-wake it left behind....and then there was me on my motorbike trying to get home, weaving in and out the millions people who were walking in the middle of all the streets within a 5 mile radius of the beach...and joined with a train of about 5 other motorbikes, i managed to get home unharmed and without harming anyone... in about an hour (i live 20 normally from this beach). good fun. and that was only friday night...

saturday - PAINTBALL!! soooooooooo fun, i felt like i was a kid playing at camp....a group of about 15 of us got all dawled up in korean military camoflauge and played capture the flag in a beautiful forest off the coast of song jung beach, just 10 mins north of my apartment...see the pics here.

i had to leave early to go to work, as i'm teaching for 3 hours on saturdays now at my hagwon for overtime pay...but it was the BEST class ever - full of almost fluent, talkative, opinionated 15 year olds about the varying philosophies of education in the world - mainly US vs. Korean. Had a phenomenal talk centered around this quote:

"Don't let school get in the way of your education." (by some dead guy, probably)

We talked about WHY they all feel its necessary in korea to get only 3-5 hours of sleep a night and do NOTHING but study between the ages of 4-25, with NO vacation time and NO extra-curriculars and NO life outside of the monotonous cycle of school, hagwon, study, bed, school, hagwon, study, bed.....we talked about the PURPOSES of education - to train for life - and how the most important things are learned outside of school - like in friendships, making mistakes and learning from them, and in just living life and enjoying it....i got them thinking, i think, and we had a great convo about it....for the first time in a while i felt completely rewarded as an educator, as someone who opens minds ever so slightly to think a bit out of the box. a great way to spend a saturday evening!

sunday - church in the am, dancing with the most precious little korean girls in the world...and aubrey, too, of course :)....and THEN...hung out with the coolest people in the world all day in a beautiful apartment over looking the ocean, and went exploring on my motorbike with my new friends sacha and kevin....we raced, we went down random roads, we avoided seriously ridiculous long lines of traffic by driving on the sidewalks....way fun....and perfect weather for it - it's still very fall here!

good weather, good fun, good education, good friends...and just like that...i'm on a korea high again....(quick, ma, take a picture!!)

-J.

new pics!!

go here!

how living in korea makes me feel better about myself

1. it doesn't take much to make me feel like the funniest person in the world. like for instance - i drive a motorcycle. and i'm a girl. and i have blonde hair. OH MY GOD - LOOK AT HER!!! SHE'S DRIVING A MOTORCYCLE!!! AND SHE'S A GIRL!!! AND SHE HAS BLONDE HAIR!!!! THAT IS SOOOO FUNNY!!!! LET'S LAUGH AND STARE AND POINT TO SHOW OUR AMUSEMENT!!!!! awesome. also, taxi drivers and starbucks servers and the like find it humourous whenever i speak any korean. i KNOW - it's SO funny!!! she knows how to say "please turn left here!" wow!

2. i am constantly feeling respected as a woman. like everywhere i go, people are telling me, "oh, so beautiful! so beautiful!" in the same breath that they ask me if i am a prostitute. well not in so many words, but they ask me if i'm russian, which here means, "so how much?" oh, plus there's the little matter of me teaching all the younger classes because i'm a woman. because naturally, women are better with younger kids, and older kids respect men more. even though our male teacher is a qualified elementary school teacher and i'm a qualified high school teacher. it's just so logical. and not sexist at all. (hehe, she said "sex!" quick! pretend we don't know what she means! play the language barrier card!")

3. i consistently feel validated as a serious educator. like for instance today, my supervisor told me that there have been complaints that i am not working through the textbooks fast enough. k, so my TEN YEAR OLD children who go to school from 9am-11pm are supposed to go through 8 pages a day, and that's only for MY class. then they've got 2 other classes to do homework for, in which they have to memorize like 100 vocab words, which they will forget by the end of the hour after the test and which they will never know how to use in a proper sentence. and THEN they've got to do their homework for Science Hagwon (academy), Computer Hagwon, and Math Hagwon. Yet I should be giving them more homework. Because piling on more work and showing the parents they've finished 400 pages in 6 weeks is totally the point of education. COMPRENDING something? RETAINING information? Actually being able to have a free-flowing conversation? What's all that? Complain! That darn teacher isn't pushing my child hard enough! He's actually ENJOYING her class!!!

4. the number 4 has always been my lucky number. it's my birthday (January 4) and has always been my sports number on teams and such. here the korean word for 4 is the same word for "death." some buildings don't have the floor number 4, they change it to "F," because nobody, apparently, wants to live on the floor of death (can't figure out why). also, when i wanted to get my phone, and they asked me what number i wanted, i said "4444" and they gasped and said no! i guess they figured it would go over well - "call me! 010- 4572- death-death-death-death." perfect.

5. i feel the love from my students. little truth-telling weasels they are. "teacher! today shirt so ugly!" "teacher, what is THAT?" (pointing to a large red zit on my face). "teacher! you look like alien with 1000 babies in your stomach!" "teacher! you sick? you look sick." "teacher! that black sweater makes you look like witch!" just what every girl wants to hear. now excuse me while i go slit my wrists.


ah korea.....gotta love it.


J.