Sorry the lack of posts since I arrived in sunny Seoul - blogger was defaulting to Korean and it took me a bit of trial and (much) error to figure out how to find the English button. But it seems we're now a go...
Everything is going fine over here - classes are good, kids are amusing. Pretty attentive and eager to learn, at least compared to our lazy North American kids. After regular state school, nearly every student goes to a variety of private academies ("hagwons") for everything from English to math to science, and a lot of the kids also take taekwondo. The program director here was telling me that many kids as young as 7 are either at school or hagwons until midnight or even later! That may help to explain this.
Seoul itself is great. Weather's been beautiful so far - one day of rain and not one below about 5 degrees. Today it's sunny and 12. Just lovely. The Koreans are still cold, and the Aussie who just arrived last week is freezing his marbles off, but I'm going about jacketless and sitting on patios with my newspapers. Not as big a culture shock for me as it was for the other foreign teachers, having lived and worked in Toronto's Chinatown for a couple of years, but I'm having some difficulty with the language. Up to perhaps half a dozen phrases, enough to competently order my morning coffee and ask pardon when I run over those meandering ladies taking their sweet time on the sidewalk, but don't feel I'm progressing quickly enough, though the people I speak to are more amused that a round-eye can even spout a word or two than insulted that I'm butchering the language. Still haven't conquered the alphabet, which is two letters shorter than our own. Though it is amusing that I know I should be speaking something other than English so find myself lapsing into either French or German, which is really no help at all! Was learning some colours today, and couldn't for the life of me say the Korean word for red - it's roughly transliterated bal gang, only the initial letter sound is a cross between our 'b' and 'p' to make a sound that doesn't exist in English at all. Of course, the kids here have a hard time with several of our digraphs and plain old letters ('z' is a bit tricky - getting one of my early-year classes to say 'zipper' rather than 'jipper' took a while) so I don't feel so bad.
We had a long weekend the weekend before this one - both the Friday and Monday off - for Lunar New Year. Year of the Pig, it is now. No big celebrations, parades, fireworks or anything like that - that's still the calendar New Year. Lunar is mostly for leaving the city to visit family. Another holiday tomorrow - this time it's Independence Movement Day, commemorating the proclamation of a Korean Declaration of Independence from the occupying Japanese on March 1, 1919. The public reading in Seoul quickly turned into a huge procession, which the Japanese police attempted to suppress with their usual tact, killing 7,500 and wounding a further 16,000. To the Koreans' credit, it took the Japanese military nearly a year to finally put an end to the burgeoning movement. I think we're supposed to wear red, but don't quote me on that.
But I must get to back to - have a 2B writing class starting in ten minutes! Now that I think I've finally cracked the secret of how to get English on a Korean computer, should be posting with much greater frequency. Greater than 'never' won't be difficult to top.
Oh, and I'm not really sure what to write about, not really, so if you have any Korea questions you'd like me to address or find out more about, please leave them in the Comments.
Safe and sound and having fun. Miss you guys!
