Children's Day/Teachers' Day

There are a number of days celebrating groups of people in May, including Children's Day on May 5th and Teachers' Day on the 15th. Children's Day is a national holiday, so we get the day off. Not so with Teachers' Day. We had a party on the 4th for the kids. Last year I got them all little gifts to butter them up for Teachers' Day, and I got quite a few gifts then, and the year before, when I just had generous students (or rather, students with generous mothers).

This year I totally forgot about my own holiday, but luckily I was feeling nice and got them all little gifts anyway. I bought a huge supply of Simpsons mechanical pencils and pens, along with stickers and little notebooks and such. Not one kid, not a single kid, even the good ones, said thank you. Unbelievable. I even shouted "You're welcome" to one class as they left, but those little bastards just filed out as usual, ignoring me. I think it might be because I let them choose their gifts this year. Last year I gave each kid a different gift with a name tag on it (which of course made them all dislike their gifts and want to trade in for another one). I figured if I got more than I needed this year and let them choose, most kids would end up with something they liked. But instead of being grateful for the choice, they just concentrated on fighting over who chose first and who got what someone else wanted, as kids are wont to do. The whole experience was not worth my forty bucks.

Wendy, Louie, Flora


Normally I wouldn't include a picture in which two of the three kids were looking away, but Louie looks so comically haggard.


Becky, Sarah (asker of infinite questions), Sherry, Julie, Helen, Daniel


and John. John's really funny, but he can't speak English for shit, even compared to the low level English the others speak.




Major, Alex, Carlo, Julie, Amy


Olivia, Edwin



Chris (in the back, looks just like Asian Toby Maguire), Alex, Corey (back), Steven



Jane, Kelly


James, I think that's Leo back there, Chris, Alex


My gifts did not improve my gift-gettery for Teachers' Day. It was a pretty abysmal catch, actually. Even some of my students who have given me gifts at every occasion didn't get me anything. But I did get a few nice things.

One of the Alexes got me a skin care kit, Julie got me some chocolates, Andrew's mom brought in ice cream sandwiches for the class and gave me a carnation candle, Daniel's mom made me a carnation pen (carnations are the traditional gift for this holiday), and Danny's mom (always reliable for a good gift) sent over a box of three roll cakes. I'm actually cursing the roll cakes, though. I'm trying to lower my sugar intake, so cake is about the last thing I need. I brought one of them in to work to share with everyone, and I might bring another. I'm slowly working through the first one on my own.

Taiwan

Well, I didn't make it to Taiwan, as I was supposed to do this long weekend. I was so busy planning for other things, like my student aid for school, student visa, and my next vacation, that finding transportation to the airport kind of got put on the back burner.

My initial plan was to get a bus right to the airport, but apparently only one bus goes from Ulsan in the morning, and it was already full, probably had been for a few days. My second option was to take a bus to the Seoul Express Bus Terminal, then take the subway, or if I really needed to hurry, a taxi to the airport. But with Buddha's birthday traffic, the trip took six hours, and I didn't get to Seoul until an hour before my flight. I had estimated the subway trip to be about 90 minutes, and a taxi ride probably close to an hour with traffic. So I had to go to a PC room to contact the hotel on Skype. I got charged for a full night for canceling the day of. I won't know what's going to happen with my flight payment until tomorrow when the travel agency opens. I'm hoping I can just reschedule the flight and go for a slightly longer trip in August, after my contract ends.

Anyway, a friend of mine was hanging out in Seoul, so I saw him for a while, and we had some Japanese pub food and chicken on a stick. Later I found a cheapish motel for the night, and went shopping the next day before heading home. I went to Insadong and saw a bunch of art exhibits and looked at/bought traditional Korean stuff. Then I hopped on the subway to get to the bus station and head home. A rain that has been forecast to last at least ten days started just as I got on the bus. Today I saw How to Train Your Dragon in 3D. So it was a pretty decent weekend, except for incurring fees.


Here are pictures from one of the exhibits. I felt weird taking pictures of people's paintings, but other people were taking pictures of these shoes, so I figured I'd share. Here's the website:

http://www.ibluedot.co.kr/1/index.asp














On my way out, a parade was beginning, as part of the Traditional Ceremonies Reenactment deal that was going on. There were some tea ceremony setups, too, but I didn't see those.

Le Weekend

This weekend I went to Home Plus for some canned food and stopped at the park on the way back. I was watching some families by one of the ponds and realized I was sitting like twenty feet from a friend of mine. So I went over and we continued watching the pond together. This family was trying to get a baseball out of the water, which Sam told me had been purposely thrown in by the like ten-year-old daughter (what a bitch, we both said). The baseball was no more than three or four feet away from the shore, but the dad was trying to get it in the most retarded ways ever. He was using this kids' bat to try and reach it, but it was too far out, so he started trying to move the stagnant water in a way that created some minor current to push the ball toward him, but that wasn't very effective. The whole time I'm looking at one of his sons, who's wearing sandals with no socks--really, just one sandal--and I'm thinking, why the hell doesn't he just walk in and get it? I knew why, though. The water had some yellow dust in it that we get from China every spring, and Koreans are obsessive about anything being dirty, or getting dirty. Even though there is a footwashing station nearby (really? In a park?), they still wouldn't sully themselves for a ball.

The father finally got sort of savvy and changed his current method to bring the ball in from the side, and it eventually worked, except that he just kept moving the water, even when the ball got into reach with the bat itself. When they finally got the ball I saw him still doing the same batting of the water, and I found out why that kid only had one sandal on. I bet his sister had thrown that in the water, too.

We watched similar things happen three or four other times, too, with other baseballs and soccer balls. One guy was really smart and used the life preserver to get his ball when he lost it nearer the middle of the pond, and another one just waited on the little bridge for the water to push his soccer ball to within reach of him. That took several minutes. The life preserver method would have been faster, but he didn't think of it.

And then of course there were the obligatory family photo ops. On any given day you can count hundreds of people at the park with huge professional cameras and tripods, taking all sorts of ridiculous photos. Today there was a really cute family with the mother wearing a dress that looked like it was made with a quilt, and a toddling daughter with a matching dress, and they both had these bright green shoes on. The walked back and forth across the bridge as the father took pictures. I joked that any father would take up photography just to be able to stay 50 feet away from his family for the whole day.

In Class

This week one of my classes came back from six weeks off, during which time they were studying for a middle school midterm exams, which is a major deal. Even the elementary school midterm requires the kids to study for a few hours a day for several weeks. The middle school kids have to take time off from learning just to study full time for this thing.

I asked the kids how they did (only two of them at this point; not sure where the other two are), and the girl said she didn't want to tell me her score. I asked if she did badly, and she said well, her rank in the school was pretty good--third out of like 2-300 students--but she was disappointed with her score. I figured it was one of those tests where everyone does badly, and on the bell curve, the highest scores are still abysmal. So I said, was it below 70, and she laughed and figured that it would be okay to tell me. She got a 95. PerCENT? I asked incredulously. Yeah, she said. I told her to loosen up.

Yesterday a kid came into class and said, don't ask me for my homework. I asked why, and he said his mom got to it (this is Gyu-ho, a kid whose home life seems, from what he tells me, somewhat tragic, possibly bordering on what would qualify him to be removed from home in the States). I asked what happened and he said he got a test back with a bad grade and his mom ripped up a couple of his notebooks and his math books and told him, there, study like that. I asked why the hell she did that, and he elaborated that she screamed at him that she spends a bunch of money for him to get A's, so he can get into a good high school, and he doesn't do it. I asked him what his grade was and he said a B. I told him that his mom is psycho and to tell her I said to take a chill pill.

Finally, today one of my cute little first graders said, I eat ice cream, but I'm still hot! Then I laughed, and he milked it for a while. He said the same thing again, except with ten ice creams, then, When I'm hot at home, I put off my shirt. It's okay to do it at home, because no one sees. The tiny kids in this class speak better than the majority of the rest of my classes. It's kind of silly and sad.

Gajisan and Papermaking

Mingyu had told us that if we wanted to climb Mt. Gaji and still have time to get back for our 1:30 paper workshop, we'd have to leave around 8am. So we foreigners diligently set our alarms for 7am, to have time to get up, wash, put our bedding away, etc. before departing. Breakfast was a concern. He had said something about having snacks tomorrow for breakfast and I was worried I was going to have to climb a mountain for several hours with only chips and cookies in my stomach.

As usual, the plan went to hell. The Koreans didn't even start waking up until around 8, and that was just one or two of the kids, and maybe the grandparents. The rest weren't really up until well after we should have left, and then they told us that breakfast at the lodge didn't open until 10. Everyone kind of just dinked around until after 9, eating what snacks we had and drinking the omnipresent instant coffee with cream and sugar. Those of us who were up early were kind of pissed that we were wasting all that time, since it wasn't a good night's sleep. I, not surprisingly, didn't get any sleep beyond maybe dozing here and there for a little while.

Finally we left and drove to some other restaurant and had mushroom and beef soup with rice for breakfast. It was around 10:30 when we left the restaurant, so we had to choose not the climb an actual trail on the mountain (which is over a km high), but a steep concrete road that leads up to a temple. I think the whole trip up and down only took a couple hours. I was the only one who thought to bring a water bottle, but the temple had a spring at the top, so I refilled and everyone else used the shared ladle.




Almost immediately upon starting to use my camera, the battery ran out, because I didn't have time to fully charge it the morning we left. Thus all these pictures are the ones I've gotten so far from Emily and Moriah. Maybe I'll get more later.


Next was the workshop, so after a short break and checking out at the lodge, we drove back to the paper museum and had to wait outside for a while.


Jiho, Heather's son, and Jiseok, her nephew:


The monk gathered us all around--about 20 in total, I'd say, and explained the papermaking process. Heather translated, though much of it was clear from what she was showing us anyway.

These are the branches they strip to get fibers:


The fibers get torn off and then soaked in water for weeks. They start off big, and those fibers get used as a skeleton for the paper, as below:



Next some of the fibers go into different basins to soak, and are broken down into smaller fibers. In the water, they look like oatmeal, but you can mash them together and it feels more like cotton. We played with it a bit and made big cottonlike snowballs that were very dense.

One of the basins had a brown mixture, and the other white. I'm not sure if she used dye and/or bleach to get them that way, or if whatever else she did during the process that was lost in translation caused the color changes.


To make the paper, you put down a screen first, then lay out a bunch of the big fibers, unclumped, like in the picture above. Then you get buckets of the smaller stuff and start dumping it all around to fill it in. Next, you take a little bamboo blind, like below, and scoop a bunch of the little fibers up in it evenly. You slap it down on the base and carefully peel the bamboo off, and there is a square of wet paper left (if you do it right, and the paper doesn't come off with the bamboo).



We all did that a couple times, and eventually the huge sheet of would-be paper got so thick that she then instructed us all to put our handprints into it, for design.


It doesn't look like much, and it really isn't much. This wasn't an exercise in making art, like she does; just an exercise in the process. The sheet we made would take several days in the sun to dry.

Because the monk was so excited to have foreigners around, she let us all do two extra activities. One was to make smaller sheets of paper on window screens, which is what the picture way up above with the thick fibers is showing. The other was to use the bamboo squares to make our own sheets to take home. The others were kind of disgruntled about the favoritism, especially since those who were not in our group paid twice as much and got nothing. They didn't know that, probably, but Heather's daughter Kate was remarking on the unfairness.

Anyway, I didn't have time or the colors to get anything good. I just made a white sheet with a splash of brown at first. Then I noticed the brown shape looked like a mountain, so I took the thick fibers and used them to make a swirly sun, some birds, and a little flag at the peak. Then as the monk was showing us how we could fold the bamboo on the way home, she messed up my careful design and I had to fix it. Annoying other people.

It took a day or two to dry, and came out not very interestingly. The brown dried quite light, and the designs got lost in the white, even though I dumped some brown on them, so the whole result was disappointing. I remember making paper similarly in middle school art class and being much more satisfied with the result. This was pretty fun, though, and a good way to spend a nice afternoon.



As an aside, Miker made a tic-tac-toe design on his paper, and actually played the game with Kate, putting X's and O's on there with the thick fibers. The game ended in stalemate. Miker joked he would use the other side to write a to-do list or something.

Gajisan Trip

This weekend Heather took the teachers on a trip the nearby Mount Gaji, allegedly to include a work meeting, but mostly as kind of a pick-me-up and bonding weekend, blah blah. Originally all the teachers were supposed to go, but at the last minute we found out that only the foreign teachers would be going. Heather said all the other teachers had "appointments," as they call them here, and she brought her children, parents, and niece and nephew instead. I was pleased; I much prefer Heather's family to any of the Korean teachers.

We were supposed to meet at 10am, but plans changed as always, and we met for pizza at 1:30. I was okay with that. I hate getting up early.

We drove west to the outskirts of Ulsan and stopped first at a paper museum. This chick monk runs it and handmakes natural paper there. Apparently she's pretty renowned and has traveled around the world with her designs. I think her name is Young Dam.




I took a few shots inside, but strangely it wasn't until Miker started taking pictures that the guide told us no pictures.




We were very lucky to go there that day, as the next day would be a once-a-year papermaking workshop that we could attend. I think because there were so many of us and because four of us were foreigners, we got a deal and paid 10,000 won instead of 20. Some of us made an additional donation toward her work, though.

Next we went to our accommodations. I'm not sure what to call it. It's not really a hotel, just a few buildings with bedless rooms, with bathroom, kitchenette, tv, fridge, and an armoire full of bedding for the floor. The rooms were quite nice, though. I was impressed.


A balcony ran around the whole building. The back overlooked a little stream.


This epitomizes Emily and me.


According to our printed schedule, the first thing we were supposed to do was visit nearby Woonmoon Temple, then have a meeting about the school and teaching, then have a barbecue, but the schedule pretty much went out the window. I decided since this sort-of-spring-but-mostly-still-winter decided precisely on May 1 to become summer that I would go wade in the stream.











Mingyu's son Jiseok was being very funny and cute, as always. He wanted to get in the water, but was aware of the dangers, so he had this safety line that he was holding onto, which was just a long piece of velcro, I think, already attached to the ground among the rocks. He kept adding things to it, like sticks and rods, to make it longer. He also collected a plethora of trash along the bank to play with. Gross.



After we played in the water for a little while, we were called up for food, which Heather's parents had been preparing in the meantime. According to Korean outdoor barbecue tradition, it was small pieces of pork on the grill, with an assortment of leaves, cucumber, and peppers, plus the perfunctory red pepper sauce that I avoid. There were also butter rolls, which was nice. Not to mention a whole huge box full of salty snacks and snack cakes. Oh, and since Heather's father was there, we all had to drink soju. He loves drinking with the teachers.

Somehow the conversation was steered towards people fitting large amounts of food in their mouths, and I ended up showing Miker how I could fit two of the Moon Pie-like cakes in my mouth.









Next I played hide and seek with Jiseok, and I outwitted him every time. He was amazed. One time I had hidden for a while, then while he was away, went back to where everyone was drinking and talking, and sat at the picnic table. He came by with his sister and cousin, and didn't even see me, just kept looking for like five more minutes. Bwah ha ha. We also played chase and I swung him around and stuff. I needed the exercise after pizza and barbecue and snacks.

Drinking continued late into the night, until we were all abed--the four foreigners in one room, and the nine members of Heather's family in another room the same size. I don't know how they managed it, but I do know that families often all pile up in one bed here, so they probably had two or three similar piles on the floor.

The next day we were slated to go hiking in the morning, then on to the papermaking before going home.