Bungee Jump

I went bungee jumping about a week ago..it was great!  The initial jump off of the bridge was a little terrifying, but after that everything just went to pure adrenaline, I highly recommend everyone to try it..I though having my ankles all wrapped up would be painful when the cord pulls on you but I didn't notice it all, during or after the jump.  I made some interesting noises as well....

We also went on a pretty tame white water rafting trip before hand.  About 20 or 30 seconds of rapids every ten or 15 minutes so nothing too thrilling.  The scenery was amazing in the valley though.  A lot of high rocks faces on either side of the river, with a good amount of waterfalls going over them into the river and with tons of trees on tops.  At one point there was 2 or 3 water falls on each side of the river as we went down this one stretch, all we needed was the music and I would of assumed we were heading int o Jurassic Park!..

We started a new semester in September, and I'm quickly arriving at my 3 month mark.  Time is flying by, it's really unbelievable.  I'll get all new classes (or just almost all new) so I'll be learning a bunch of new names and have to reaffirm myself to a new group of students that you cannot BS with Corey Teacher!  I'll post about my trip to Busan sometime later!

Taebaek / Busan

Almost a month since I've written on this, but a lots been happening.  I'm having a blast here in Korea now, seeing some great places and meeting some great people as well.  Teaching is going well.  I still make mistakes here and there, but I'll just chalk that up to the loose style of training I received.  (45 minutes of observing a class the first day was it!)  But the kids are pretty cool.  Today I mentioned to most of my classes that we will be ending the semester next week and they'd most likely be getting new teachers.  I was pleasantly surprised when most of (repeat MOST) of my students all booed my departure!  So as long as the kiddos are liking me I'm happy with the job I'm doing.  Oh and that they learn some English from me as well, of course...

So I went to Taebaek Mountain for a two day trip on my summer vacation at the end of July.  In the future for a long vacation like that I hope to do something much more adventurous, like leaving the country for somewhere.  I've heard Taiwan is amazing so I can put that on the to do list next to the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, Hong Kong, etc etc.

But Taebaek was still a lot of fun, I went with a foreign travel group called Adventure Korea.  It's about 3 hours east of Seoul, not too far from Pyeongchang, where the 2018 Winter Olympics will be here in Korea.  It's a ski area, but we went to a cave that's the highest cave elevation wise in Korea.  I found the cave to be different whereas back home, everything in the cave would dedicated to preserving the cave.  Here, there was a steel walkway through the entire cave that you walked on, and many rooms had pools dug in with water fountains and colored lights giving little water shows all the time.

Later that night we went to a "Cool Cinema Festival".  It had been raining all day and threatening to rain again so there was not many people there for what was set up to be a huge production.  Maybe 600 hundred people there?? Anyways we had no idea but before the movie played was the opening ceremony with about 2 hours of different kpop bands playing.  Kpop is Korean pop music, and it kind of dominates Southeast Asia and especially Korea.  Girl and boy bands.  Let's just say the first 20 minutes was hilarious, the next hour and half of it was a little too much.  My kids all love this stuff, and I think Koreans of all ages will listen to it..I think at least.  The names of these bands were like siSTARS and Dalmation Doggy Dog....I'm not making that up...

warning: turn your volume way down before playing this...

So that made for an adventurous night.  After all that was a movie (Source Code).  The stage was set up at the bottom of a bunch of ski runs, during the winter its a big ski resort area.  Here's some pics of the whole night.

Our hotel on top of the ski slopes through the heavy fog.

Sistars hahaha....lots of lip synching

they love kpop! 

The next day was a bright and early wake up to hike Taebaek Mountain, about a 3 hour hike up and down.  The views were promised to be incredible...but guess what??  There was fog everywhere, and it rolled in just as we got to the top!!!

Luckily the fog broke a little at times...

In front one of the Cheonje-dan that's on the top of some of the peaks.    There altars for offering to heaven, and there were a number of Koreans saying prayers here.

We found this really cool temple area tucked into the moutain side.  Unfortunately none of these photos do justice just  to how cool this area was.  It was being remodeled, but there was a service going on in kind of make shift temple nearby, so hearing the service while peaking around was really cool.

But yea so the trip was fun and cool.  A great way to get out of the city and have some fresh air and nature around me again.  I went up to a nearby mall and department store called New Core, which gives a great view of my neighborhood...here's a panoramic view of my little slice of Bucheon, Korea:

                                                                                                                                                                              My School ^                 ^U-Plex Mall and Hyundai Department Store    ^YMCA          ^My home
Just follow those arrows up to the first building and you'll be able to tell.  A little park is in the foreground, just more of something other than concrete to walk through on my way over to anything by New Core. 

  Alrighty well these take way too long to write, but soon I'll tell about Busan and show some pictures, and put my video up of me bungee jumping and some of the things I saw that day while white water rafting.  Hope all is well back home, miss you all!

MUD FEST

Things are really starting to come together for me here in Bucheon.  I'm enjoying myself and meeting more and more people each week.  Definitely comfortable in my surroundings now.  The job is pretty easy now that I've been in it for almost two months, which means one thing of course:  time to start traveling!  Let's start with a mud festival, what else?...

We look deceivingly clean here, but since we're in the "prison" we're constantly being splashed with buckets of mud from behind.  

 About a week ago, the continuous rain of the monsoon season finally ceased, and luckily, it stopped in the middle of the day on Saturday while I was in Boryeong.  It's about a 2 hour drive south of Seoul, and for nine days in the summer it's home to largest mud festival in the world.  I went on a trip organized by Rhythm and Booze, the local expat bar that's about a block from where I live.  We had a full busload of people, so about 40, including several teachers from my school and lots of other foreigners that lived around Bucheon.  We left Friday night at 11pm (have to wait until all of us get out of work) and we got into Boryeong at about 2am.  The hotel was called Drama hotel and was right on the beach.  The name could of predicted some of the events that would later unfold that night, mainly one person in the room who had too much soju (a Korean liquor, think vodka without as much of a bite to it) and decided the floor of the hotel was a good place to get sick.  But aside from that, it was a fun weekend.  We went to the rooftop of the hotel when we got there on Friday night, and had a Korean BBQ with plenty of drinks to go around.  Korean BBQ is basically fat pieces of pork that are grilled on top of a charcoal grill.  You take the piece of meat after it's cooked, dip into some hot sauces, then throw it, rice and maybe some kimchi (korean dish, kinda like cabbage) and roll it up inside some lettuce.  It's pretty damn tasty!  Of course hell would break lose at each table as eventually the grease would catch on fire, creating an inferno that occasionally would catch the wooden picnic tables on fire as well.  But anyways, we all survived.  At around 5am we figured we might as well stay up and watch the sun rise, only to realize at 6am that it was still really overcast, and that the sun was out already and it was just another dreary, sky full of clouds kind of day.

Improvised dance party on the beach to wash off the mud.

Korean kids getting their mud on at the stations.  And yes, it did come out of all my clothes luckily.

The next day we headed down to the main part of the festival, which had stations where you'd begin to cover yourself in the mud.  From there you'd go into the main part that had a lot of inflatable rides that become 10x more fun once the ride and yourself is covered in mud.  The had mud pits with everyone wrestling and such, and pools to clean off in or just make a mess.  In the pool we caught the attention of many by racing from one side to another (it was maybe 2 and half or 3 feet deep).  Unfortunately for all the photographers who decided to get a picture of us running towards the end, we all we diving for the edge of the pool areas to win the race, and ended up covering several nice looking cameras with water.  Stupid foreigners! ha.  The whole festival started in the 90's to promote the mud that's found by the coast of Boryeong, and used for its natural benefits in a bunch of different cosmetics.  Anyways, they have a few stages with bands playing, and a beautiful beach right which the festival is set up along.  The rain stopped mid Saturday afternoon, which allowed us to be able to watch the fireworks for the opening weekend on the beach, and sit and drink on the beach all evening.  I have to say it's pretty funny but I've definitely seen more sunrises in Korea than sun sets.  Monday to Friday I'm at the school teaching during sunset, and when the bars never close and the nightlife is never ends hear, I constantly find myself getting back to my apartment at 6 or 7am after a night out...and I really have no complaints about it!

Some of the group in front of one of the many inflatables.

A little different but just like the parks in the city, Koreans will bring tents and set them up for the day right on the beach..

It was so good to get out of the city and get in the ocean there.  The water felt great once you dived in, and the fresh sea breeze was refreshing all weekend.  Now that I got out I want to keep exploring Korea, the drive back on Sunday showed me how beautiful the country side is.  This weekend is my summer vacation (yep, I have Friday July 29th off until Tuesday August 2nd, some summer break!).  On Saturday and Sunday I'm heading to Gangwon-Do and the Taebaek mountain area with a tour company that takes foreigners (mainly English teachers) on trips around Korea.  The other days I might find some touristy things to do and continue to explore Seoul.  Hoping to have a lot of fun, meet a lot of people, and to share the experience with all of you.  Here's a picture of Taebaek mountain area that I found online:

Very excited for this indeed!

Reading Town Honor's Ville (my school's name)

Sorry about taking so long to post, I'm going to try and do a better job of it! I wanted to tell you about my school and teaching now that I'm a month into it.  I'm an English teacher a hogwon, which is a private academy that teaches English courses to students, with the intention of making them fluent readers and speakers of the language.  I teach students that are about 8-13 years old.  Most of them start at the regular Reading Town which is on the floor above my school.  The teacher 4-8 year olds.  After my school, they go to the floor below us, called Avalon Glide, where the continue to study the language, and start studying science and math in English as well.  It's a huge industry in South Korea, proven in that South Korea is one of the largest investors in private education.  The kids at my school with take 2 or 3 classes in the afternoon or evening.  A class period lasts 45 minutes with a 5 minutes break.  This is in addition to the regular schools they go to earlier in the day.  We have 5 native teachers (including me) and right now 5 korean teachers, but I know they are looking for 2 more korean teachers!

There's three type of classes I teach.  Book reading, comprehension, and speech/essay:

1) Book reading is where we take a month in class to read book.  I assign reading, we discuss it, and they also have workbooks to go through.  It's a lot of repetition to make sure EVERY student has a strong grasp of the book, its vocabulary, what it means, etc.  We meet 3 times a week, and one of those days we go to Learning Gate (the library).  Here, they each pick 2 smaller books to read on their own and write a "Mini-Book Report".  I then pick a big book to read, and they have to read then write a "Big Book Report" on the book that I grade, and they also have an online test they do at home on the big book.  Every week we go to the library and get new books and such.  Most of my classes are book reading classes.

2)Comprehension is for some of the older students, and its just what it sounds like.  They read articles in a book, and then we talk about what it means and such.  Each unit has an articles and a workbook area associated with it, we do one unit a class and after 6 classes, we take a test on the previous units.

3) Essay/Speech is where the students practice their writing skills, correctly building complete sentences and such.  There's an emphasis on the kids reading out loud and writing their own essays and giving presentations. A lot of the instruction is on useful expressions and such to make a continuously flowing and long responses.

So those are my classes!  I have about 32 lessons a week right now,  and I see the same students MWF and different students TR.  Here's some pictures of my school of one of my classes!

I get to school at 1pm, and my first class of the day starts at 3:40.  These are the youngest kids I teach, and luckily I only have 5.  It's also one of my favorite classes, but I'll admit, they behave much better than some of the other young classes the other teachers have (lucky me!).

The lone boy in the class Hayden didn't want his picture taken.  He's always hyper and having fun, but he crosses the line too much, so I have to yell at him.  This was right after he got yelled at, so he was sulking in the corner.  Irechez is on the left, she's really smart but new to the program, but she is getting confident and always has the right answer for me!  Jamie is in the back, she likes to answer questions or explain things by getting up and demonstrating, which hopefully will gradually turn into her using English to answer questions!  Kayla is second from the left, and is quite smart too but like to take control of the class sometimes.  Cindy is on the right, and if Hayden isn't being the class clown, she is.  Let's just say she doesn't like rules, and I'm guessing learning English isn't her favorite past time!

This is the face Irechez always makes when I ask who wants to read first?!  The young ones love reading, and the always want to be the one to start first haha.

I took this video of them reading...it was the day after they took a test on their previous book, and they knew I was making them read this book just because we had nothing to do, since the their semester was finishing that day too.  So needless to say, they weren't very cooperative!

So here's my school!  This is the entrance area where the front desk is.

Here's a classroom and the hallways through the area.  We have about 12 or 15 classrooms?  One of the is a lot larger, and wired for presentations and movies and such.

Here's the faculty work area.  All of our desk areas are on each wall, and the middle table will have food for us on Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, since none of us have a break during dinner time to go out a buy something on the street.

And here is my desk area!:

Nothing spectacular, but its works well!

I hope every has a great weekend and I'll post sooner than I did this time.  I have some fun things coming up that I will definitely share on this blog.  

One week down in Bucheon

None of this really hit me until I finally was waiting to board the 747 out of Los Angeles to Seoul, surrounded by a bunch of Koreans talking (surprise) Korean.  Then it REALLY hit me when we were flying up the west coast and I looked down at Alaska fading away as we went into the ocean, and realized that was the last time I was going to see America for a whole year!  Needless to say, 10 hours later as we were descending over Korea, I was questioning every reason I had for going to Korea and wondering what the hell I was doing.  All I wanted to  do was fast forward through the first week hoping that things would work themselves out.  And that's exactly what has happened.  I have long way to go before I'll be totally comfortable here, but I'm definitely enjoying myself and appreciating just how great of an opportunity this is.

I had a driver who spoke little English greet me at the airport and take me to my new home in Bucheon.  It's about a 30 minute train ride into Seoul, but its part of the metro area.  Driving from Bucheon to Seoul you wouldn't notice the end of one city and the beginning of another...Seoul is huge!  Addresses here in Korea are notoriously bad, I don't even know my address yet.  Neither did my driver, as we spent 20 minutes trying to get into apartment #312 in the building that turned out to be right next to my building.  Once we realized this, I was quickly shown to my place.  I'll have another blog post up on that later..

But my location here in Bucheon is great!  Everything I need is basically within 1 or 2 blocks of me.  My school is a 5 minute walk away, and between the school and I is the entertainment district of Bucheon.  Tons of restaurants, bars, shops, everything!  American food places near me include: Cold Stone, Dunkin' Donuts, Burger King, KFC, McDonald's, Starbucks, Baskin Robins, Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, Bennigan's, and even an Outback Steakhouse!  So comfort food is never too far away.  I haven't become too adventurous with the Korean food yet, but I'm slowly getting there.  But today (Sunday) I went out to Itaewon here in Seoul, which is near an American base and is a pretty big foreign district.  I went with Steve and his wife Cindy, two other native teachers at the school I teach at (much more on the school in another post later too).  I basically just browsed all the shops, keeping in mind what I saw so I can come back and grab it later when I need it.  They have an international grocery store with things you can't quite find in the local grocery stores.  After I decided to go on a tour of my neighborhood and take pictures to share.  So here goes:


So this is my apartment building,  Each square window area equals one apartment, to give you the idea of the size of my place.  Not huge but it's enough for one person.  I'm on the third floor, but my view is just looking at other windows on the inner courtyard.  So the windows are frosted for privacy.

The streets and walkways between my place and the mall (called U-Plex) and the Hyundai department store look like this.  Just a lot of restaurants and hangouts spots.  The blow up sign there is for one of the two foreigner bars right next to me.  A 100 yard walk for me, and yet I met people there that take about a 45 minute bus ride to get to it.

This is a small park right next to me.  More of just a nice place to walk through on your way to the main street.  Across the way in the background you can see another mall and department store.  There's a water park on top of it, and to the right you can kind of see the green netting on the roof.  That's the driving range.  Golf courses are very expensive here, so everyone just goes to driving ranges with nets or video golf places are everywhere too.

Looking back the other way, you can see the Hyundai department store.  Its 8 or 9 stories, and the U-Plex next to it is about 6 stories tall with a movie theater on top.  If Hyundai sounds familiar, it should.  It's the same company that makes the cars in America, but they make everything here.  Department stores, escalators, cars, appliances, glasses...etc.  EVERYTHING!

This is a picture on the walkway between the mall and the department store, to give you more of an idea of the entertainment district that splits my apartment tower from the department store.

And just on the other side of the department store and across the street is my school.  It's the green sign on the building about 5 floors up, with the RT (Reading Town) to the left of the green writing (might be too hard to see).

Here's a picture of E-Mart, one of two grocery stores right by me.  Notice it looks just like a parking garage?  The ground level and 3 basement levels below it are the grocery store, the rest is the parking for it about it!

A bout two more block from here is Bucheon's city hall, the big white building.  This is a huge outdoor inflated movie screen, and there's banners everywhere advertising Bucheon's International film festival in July, so that's something I have to check out!

Across from this a good sized park.  It's exactly 1 mile around if you run the path that goes around the perimeter.  Here's a bunch of pictures from there.  It was Sunday so some of the streets were closed down for the kids  (and enthusiastic parents) to ride bikes and four wheel toys cars that can be rented.  There's an amphitheater in the park, little ponds, and lots of recreation things.  A lot of Koreans bring tents (kinda weird) and set up for the day in the park, and many more just bring a blanket for picnics.  Lots of delivery scooters will zoom through it as well as people call up places to deliver right to the park.

So today's been a long day and I'm pretty exhausted.  I was able to load up on some used books in Itaewon so I'm going to read a little then get to bed and get ready for my first 5 days work week.  Last Monday was Korea's Memorial Day, so my first day of work was paid vacation!  I'll get back on here soon to tell all about my job and the kids I teach!  My internet still hasn't been set up at my apartment and its going to be a little while before that happens.  Once it does I'll be able to call with Skype and such.  Until then I have to be in a coffee shop.  Sometimes I get a wireless connection in my place but it comes in and out.  I miss everyone a lot already, but I had a great first week and I'm looking forward to many more of them!  Feel free to email me, Facebook me, or do anything necessary to get in touch with me!  

corey1gallagher@yahoo.com

www.facebook.com/coreygall

Long time coming, next up, South Korea..

I can't believe it's been almost six months since I stepped off the mv Explorer in San Diego, wrapping up the most adventurous and incredible semester of my life.  It was an incredible experience that I was blessed to be a part of, and I have more thoughts on it coming.  I've been busy working two jobs for the past few months while waiting to begin another adventure entirely...teaching English to 8 - 13 year olds at a school in Bucheon, just south of Seoul, South Korea!  However, for something that is just around the corner (May 26th I fly out) and such a huge undertaking, I know very little about what I'm getting myself into!  So much like Semester at Sea, a lot of what I need to know will come to me once the adventure already begins.  I imagine once I'm over there I'll have a lot more time to reflect and write about my experience with Semester at Sea, and of course to update all on my adventures in and around South Korea!

My flight leaves to Chicago from Detroit at 6:54am today (June 4, 2011).  From Chicago I travel to LA, and from LA I will arrive in Seoul at 6:30pm local time on Sunday, June 5 (or 4:30am Saturday Eastern time).  I'll be there for the next year, and will use this blog to keep all updated!  But unlike Semester at Sea, I'll have full internet access, so of course I'll be on Facebook and Skype quite often.  I already miss everyone and I haven't even left the states, but I'm very excited for this opportunity, so I just have to keep focusing on that excitement.  Once my internet is up and running at my apartment in South Korea, be ready to hear from me!