Scheduling

February and March are a time for schedule changing in private language academies (hagwons) in Korea, because children change grade levels in school at the beginning of March. I've been trying to wrap my head around this crazy Korean public school yearly schedule. They begin their new grade in March, then they go to school straight through spring and most of summer. They may have a few national holidays off, if they land on weekdays (Korea doesn't have any holidays that adjust to Monday, like we have), and I'm not sure if they have any week-long holidays. Maybe. Then they get August off, and I think part of July, for summer break. Then they go back until January, when they get that whole month off. Then they go for four more weeks in February, and over the course of a weekend, change grades again.

This boggles my mind. Having been so used to having fully two and a half months of buffer between grades, when I could rest, read, and grow, I couldn't imagine having to move to a harder grade over the course of a weekend. And it confuses me that they give kids a month off in January. Why not February, to give them a break between grades? Or why not even December, because Christianity is, surprisingly, the prevalent religion in this country. It seems to me, knowing how kids "check out" for a while after long vacations and before they leave a grade, that February is probably a wasted month in terms of kids' attention spans and lesson retention. Then again, this is Korea. School is the only life a child will ever know in this country.

Speaking of that, I may have mentioned before that during these summer and winter "vacations," children don't actually get any time off. Just because public school (or private) goes on vacation, doesn't mean the hagwons do. Many children to go three, four, five, maybe more hagwons a day, and at least at English hagwons, will have two or three classes each day. When vacation rolls around, hagwons seize the opportunity to drum up business and make more money by having "English camp." Actually, the two public school teachers I've talked to in Korea had to do English camp, too, so I guess even the public schools don't really close down during breaks (and many of them make the teachers sit there all day and do nothing, because the contract requires them to be there).

English camp is easy, but kind of annoying for hagwon teachers. For public school teachers, they are just continuing to work a few hours a day while most of the kids are at hagwons, or maybe even on vacation with their families (it does happen, and they have wicked nice vacations from what I hear). They do things like read books, have cooking classes, play games, or do other activities while speaking English. At a hagwon, though, we have our full day plus English camp. We just read extremely simplified versions of classic stories and do questions and vocabulary worksheets together. I didn't have to do this last August for some reason. Mingyu (vice principal) said that it was because Heather thought I didn't want to do it, but I don't know where she would get that impression, when we never talked about it. Also, why would she cancel the whole program just because of me? Mingyu is Not of This Earth.

But this January, most of the teachers had a class in the morning. The Korean teachers had two. Poor them. Before I left for my winter vacation to Vietnam, Heather told me that my class may have to be canceled, since only three children had registered so far. While I was in Vietnam, she left for Los Angeles with a group of 10-15 (I think) students to do another kind of English camp, where the students do homestays and attend American elementary school. With Heather gone, there was no one with it enough to call me ahead and tell me my class was in fact canceled. So I got there three hours early for nothing. What a drag.

I thought I was going to lose all that overtime pay I was looking forward to, but luckily we had just gotten a new teacher. She had the worst starting schedule ever. She got to Korea two days before Christmas, observed classes for one day, got Christmas off with the rest of us, taught one day, then got a week's vacation and had nothing to do and no one to show her around, since I was in Vietnam and Leon was in Seoul. Then she started her second day with nine classes. After the first week, she was so wiped out that we agreed that I would take her morning class. I don't know why Heather or Mingyu just didn't give me her class when they canceled mine. It doesn't make sense to bombard a new teacher with all that information, plus an overfull schedule.

Our work day starts around 1:00, when we prepare for our classes, and the first classes start at 1:40. English camp had classes at 10:00 and 11:00. I don't know why this is. Knowing that the kids have the whole morning and early afternoon off by default, and knowing that it would be impossible to try to coordinate classes so kids can go to all their hagwons that have extra classes during vacation, I don't see how it's possible that they chose such an inconvenient time for the teachers. Why not have the classes at 11 and 12, so we don't have to sit around and wait two and a half hours for our first class to start? I asked Mingyu this recently, when we were having a meeting about how ridiculously heavy our schedules are, but he didn't have an answer for me, as usual. Mingyu's a good guy, and tries hard... just inept. I'm looking forward to when Heather comes back from the US, so she can get this place back in order. Just one more month.

Kids Are Stupid, but Funny

This happened like two months ago, but I finally got around to making the video about it just now. Enjoy Alia's First Video Blog:

Busan Aquarium

The Busan Aquarium is right on Haeundae Beach in Busan, and was the first thing we visited when we got there. We went for the full package: aquarium, glass-bottom boat ride, and 3-D simulator ride. The simulator made me pretty sore in the back for about a week, but the rest of the stuff was cool.

Here are some pics of the glass-bottom boat, which floats over the largest shark tank in Korea:

They let us feed the fish while on the boat:

This is the little arch that leads to the Seal Encounter:

And here's a seal:

Very Poisonous:

This is a totally suite leaf fish. There are a couple other fish in the tank, so I didn't even notice it at first:

The aquarium has this running theme of turning famous paintings into fish paintings. Here is the Shark Last Supper:

Me with the Birth of Shark Venus:

The Jellyfish Scream:

The only show we caught was a magic show in the big tank, where the magician incorporated the diver into his show:

The coral tanks always remind me of Lisa Frank folders from school:

Me and a big crab:

Feeding the eels:

Ah, the playful otter:

Jackass penguin:

Busan

The Lunar New Year is one of the biggest holidays in Korea, with it and the adjacent days considered part of the holiday. It was on a Monday this year, so we only had Monday and Tuesday off. Unfortunately, it doesn't involve massive parties, parades, and drinking like our New Year's Eve. All people do is go home to family and eat special food. I kept trying to find out if there would be anything interesting going on, but all the Koreans at work told me everything closes down and there are no holiday events. I told them they're boring and Korea doesn't know how to celebrate for shit.

I decided to just go to Busan, since it's only an hour away and I've been here a year without doing more than pass through it. It's the second biggest city in Korea and supposed to be pretty cool. I took a new friend I made who lives a few miles away from me. I figured even if nothing was open, we could at least find some bars and restaurants to go to, and check out the beach, one of the most famous and popular beaches in the country.

Here are a couple pics Haeundae Beach, which I found out broke a world record in 2006(?) for the most people on a beach at once:

It's too bad I never bothered to go there this summer. I'll have to get there in June before I go back home. There were a number of people on the beach, flying kites, walking, and smoking, despite not being able to swim.

Here is Haeundae market, where you can get a variety of Korean foods and stuff:

We looked around for a place to stay, and there were a LOT, but I got sucked in by the motel that looked like a castle, Zeus Motel:

I didn't take a picture of our room, but it was quite nice. It had two king size beds (or maybe queen, I don't know), two bathrooms, a big tv, water cooler, and toiletries, and it was only 50,000 won. The woman didn't speak any English, so we had some trouble checking in, and also got a surprise later in the evening. When she gave us the key, she called two young men over to explain to us about the heat, but they didn't speak any English, either. She ended up using like five English words and I supplied a bunch of my Korean to show that I understood and to help her along.

Unfortunately, I kind of misunderstood what she was saying. She said the boiler turned on from 9 to 1, and I verified with "ondol," the word for floor heating, and she said yes. So I assumed she meant that the heat was on from 9pm to 1am, which seemed fine. Usually the floor heat is pretty effective and a room stays warm for quite a long time after it's been heated for a few hours. However, when we got home at midnightish (yeah, that's kind of early, but we'd had a long day), there was no heat on and no hot water. I realized what she was actually saying was that the heat and hot water turned on from 9am to 1pm, and we should take our showers then. Considering that they called us at 11:40 the next morning to say checkout was at noon, it seems kind of stupid to keep the heat on until 1:00, and to bother telling us that. I think that this kind of thing is the only major problem with traveling in Korea. You never know exactly what you're going to get in a lodging establishment, because there don't seem to be any standards.

Because there was no heat at night, there were plenty of blankets provided in a big armoire. I slept with eight. I was still a little cold. I'd forgotten my jammies.

We went to two bars in Busan, one that was only six weeks old and off to a good start, and this one, with a strange name. It's hard to see, but under the lower Thursday Party sign, it says Atom Store. We weren't really sure what that was supposed to mean:

Here's me inside Thursday Party drinking a hazelnut beer. It had a very odd taste. When I first took a sip, I didn't get anything, and thought, gee, what a light beer. Then I realized the straw was busted. Who drinks beer with a straw?

We had supper at a really nice Indian place that was great, but overpriced, even for Indian food. We only ate two meals in Busan, though, as we were there not much more than 24 hours, so we saved money the next day by ordering a cheap set menu at a Korean place. I had very little idea what I was ordering for us, but it turned out to be a big soup with lots of vegetables, squid, octopus, clams, and thinly sliced pork. It was quite good, and it was a lot of food. When we went through most of the soup, a guy came over and added rice and egg to it, plus more broth, so we really got our fill. That plus a bottle of soda was only 15,000 for the total bill.

I had wanted to go to a bathhouse in Busan. Leon told me about one he went to that's supposed to be the biggest in Asia, and there was another one I saw in the guidebook that is supposed to be quite nice, and is located right by Haeundae Beach. We didn't end up staying long enough to go to either one, though. I'll have to catch them another weekend. It's close enough to not be a big deal. I tell you, I'm going to miss these bathhouses when I go back to the states. They're wicked cool.

The first thing we did was go to the Busan Aquarium, but I've got a lot of pictures and video from that (which are probably basically the same as the pics and videos from the other two Korean aquaria I've visited, but you can suck it up), so I'll get to that next time.

Final Day in Vietnam

After my tour of the city, I checked into my hotel, rested for a bit, then went out for supper. I stopped at some Italian joint where I was seated next to an American who had clearly spent a lot of time in Vietnam. He started talking to me, and I found out he'd been married to a Vietnamese woman (then divorced on good terms), and that he came to Vietnam every chance he got. We talked for a while and he ended up buying my meal, suite. Then I think I just walked around a bit before going back to the hotel.

The next day I tried to walk to the zoo that we had tried to visit on the tour. At the time, it had been closed for some reason until 2:00, and we didn't get a chance to go back before I decided I was done. It didn't seem to far from the hotel, so I figured I'd take the map and just walk there, since I had until 9:00 before I had to take a taxi to the airport. I am usually really good at reading maps, but for some reason I had a helluva time reading the Ho Chi Minh map. I think it was because the language was so foreign to me. Despite using the same letters (plus a lot of accents), the names were so odd to me, that I couldn't keep them in my head, from looking at the street sign to finding them on the map. Plus I couldn't tell which way was north, so even if I found the street corner I was on, for some reason, I could never figure out which direction I was facing. I was kicking myself for forgetting my compass in my suitcase back at the hotel. I've never had the occasion to use that compass in the woods or the desert, but I always need it when I'm in the city.

I never found the zoo, but I did do a little shopping, ate some crocodile (I've had crocodile before, though, and I swear this was just chicken), and ended up sitting in the park near my hotel, watching a lot of people playing this game that's like hackey sack, but with a sort of shuttlecock. I was approached by one, then two, then three, then four or five, young people wanting to practice their English. So I ended up spending about two and a half hours just chatting with them, in particular a college girl who is learning English and French, and I think Japanese, too. It's funny how many people I ended up talking to in that city in two days, knowing how antisocial I am.

Later I went to this random restaurant for a light supper, since I had eaten a late lunch, and ordered some soup. It took forever for it to come, I think because they made it from scratch, but it may have been the best soup I've ever had. The food in Vietnam is phenomenal. It was a cream of chicken soup.

Then I went home. I was quite disappointed with the flight. There was much less leg room, no personal tv screens, and the big screen either didn't have sound, or my sound system was broken. All they had was CNN, anyway. But it was a smooth and quick flight. I got to Incheon airport shortly before the five hour morning bus to Ulsan left, and got home in the early afternoon. I was glad to get back. Vietnam was good, but it still left me a bit wanting. Korea feels very comfortable to me now.