On Sunday I went to a fantastic park that Mr Beak told me about. It was only one train station north of Osan, and it only cost a dollar to get in. It took me two and a half leisurely hours to walk around and included plenty of themed gardens, like a topiary garden, hedge maze, bonsai garden, fernery, tropical house, insect house, and even a small art gallery. I went primarily to see the autumn leaves, and I wasn’t disappointed! The weather was sunny and warm, and I had a very nice time!
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| Some of the trees were really amazing. |
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| I think these were supposed to be birds. |
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| The whole park was very pretty. |
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| And they let you cross the streams on stepping stones! |
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| Some of the leaves very very vivid. |
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| This is some sort of ferm/moss garden. |
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| It was a beautiful day. |
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| I loved this bonsai's shape. |
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| All the shades! |
Then I came back to Osan to do my grocery shopping. I went to E-Mart because they have both guinea pigs and a Baskin Robbins. I had a new flavor – Peanut Rocket – which was lumps of chocolate coated peanut butter in vanilla ice cream. It was amazing.
Work has been very slow. I’ve taken to reading free ebooks on my work computer. I’ve got Pride and Prejudice lined up, but right now I’m reading ‘How to Analyze People on Sight’… it was one of the most popular downloads, so I got it out of interest. It was written in 1921, and is pretty hilarious at points. Memorable lines include:
“Because it is difficult to turn their heads, extremely fat people seldom are aware of what goes on behind them”
And:
“By the time Chubby gets into the parlor and passes a few of her sunny remarks the wheels are oiled for the evening and they don't run down till the last plump guest has said good night. So it is no wonder that fat people spend almost every evening at a party. They get so many more invitations than the rest of us!”.
It’s political incorrectness and insistence that you can tell everything about a person from their body type, and that this is 100% irrefutable scientific fact. Make for fun reading. They did have one good thing to say:
“Human life faces the same alternatives that confront all other forms of life—of adapting itself to the conditions under which it must live or becoming extinct. … you can move from your city or state or country to another, but after all that is not much of an advantage. For though you may improve your situation slightly you will still find that in any civilized country the main elements of your problem are the same” (Benedict and Benedict, 1921).
Well, I’m not sure I have a ‘problem’, but certainly, I am exactly the same person with the same struggles and worries in Korea as I was in NZ. I have a somewhat insatiable need to be planning for ‘the next dream’, and am always somewhat discontent with what I have, thinking I will be happy if I can just get to what is around the corner. Korea was what was ‘around the corner’ for so long, and now that I am here, I can see it’s just another place for my same old habits to play out J Haha, not all that surprising, really. However, one of my big things about coming to Korea was hoping to meet some new people.. Now, there is nothing wrong with my friends at home, they are great! But, travelling and meeting new people sounded so good. However – where are they? I thought there’d be tons of expats here, all keen to get together and make new friends. I’ve found it a little trickier than that so far, especially living just a tad too far from Seoul. I have not exhausted my options yet, though. I will keep trying.
So, I need to work on making friends and being happy with what I have. Sadly, my brain keeps coming up with an awesome new plan each week, all of which I actually want to do. Perhaps I need to work on being happy with what I have, but also working towards what I want to do. This is uber tough, because the working towards things almost always carries an added bonus of ‘I’ll be happier when I get there’. Isn’t that why we do things in the first place? To make ourselves happy?
Anywho, my current new fad is an awesome 28 day trip I found on the Intrepid travel website that goes from Cairo, Egypt, to Istanbul, Turkey. Both are places I’ve wanted to visit for a while. I’m thinking if I can stay in Korea a few months more, budget and save, then I can go to the Middle East for a month. It will be spring by then, so I’ll have had all the snow and stuff in Korea, and probably be ready for some Egyptian sun J.
Also, I want guinea pigs. Not right now, obviously, but sometime once I settle down.
I’m also working on plans for the weekend. I’m going to go and explore the Hwaseong Fortress in Suwon, and because it’s so close, I’m going to put an invite on Facebook for anyone to come with me. I’ve but a few sort of ‘does anyone want to get together’ things on there, and the response rate has been low. Like only one person at a time. The person who responded to my last one sounded super unenthusiastic, and looked like a weirdo! I know that’s not fair, but they were also much older than me, married, and looked rather odd. Nothing ended up happening anyway, as they never replied to me. I’m thinking that perhaps a concrete invite might go down better – like meet here at this time and we’ll go do this. Give it a go, anyway – and if no one wants to come I can still go alone.
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Yesterday’s afterschool class, for which only three students turned up, was fun for me, but not particularly successful. I was teaching a lesson I’ve done before with a variety of students, of different levels and ages, and it’s always been a good one. We talk about crocodiles – an unusual subject that usually get people a bit interested, even if just because it’s a relief from talking about jobs, or foods, or whatever. So, the kids (all three of them) did get interested. They came up with some good stuff, and one even knew the word ‘reptile’. So then we moved on to discuss a poem. Students normally complain the poem is too hard because it has some tricky words like ‘treacherous’ and ‘guile’, but these words are easy to simplify, and the message of the poem is very simple “beware the crocodile, he’s a bit evil”. We got this far with much prodding from me. They’d tell me the right answer to my question, we’d go over it, then I’d ask them the same question, changed slightly, just to check understanding, and they’d have lost it again. Like, we all agreed the poem was about a nasty crocodile –they told me!- and discussed what words showed us this (‘crafty’, ‘dishonest’, etc.). Then, I’d ask, “so is this poem telling us crocodiles are nice or nasty?” And I’d get total blankness. Obviously, something was amiss – I am missing something here!
The next task was to copy the style and grammar of the poem, only to write it about nasty humans who kill crocodiles. We had a good discussion of how humans can hurt crocs – they came up with good ideas like hunt them for food, turn them into handbags, pollute their water, drive boats in the rivers, eat their fish. So, they were at least thinking in the right direction. Then it came time to write, they had multiple samples of both the original poem and other student’s work, but they choked. One kid did ok, and wrote a short poem, and the other two wouldn’t write a thing. I ask what was wrong and they told me they were stuck for words. I said it was ok to use a Korean to English dictionary if they were really stuck. One guy still did nothing… he just sat there looking helpless, even when the other guy tried to help him. The girl looked like she was really getting into it, until I realized she was just translating word for word from Korean. She ended up handing in this:
Beware the hate you human
Who swear to you the behind you don’t know.
You smile to above mentioned
There to not be deceived.
And the human is the smarter
So talk to other You are shortcoming.
Ever meeting and socialize to nice humans
and I’m you are come to best friend and
nice human.
You can kind of see where she’s coming from, but she clearly has no idea it makes no real sense in English. Did I aim this activity too high? I don’t think so. They just had to string a couple of sentences together about evil humans. Maybe more examples of correct language? I actually think the problem is that they are completely unaccustomed to independent language creation. In class they are always parroting or only slightly modifying existing examples. Maybe this is something to work on more rather than shy away from because it was difficult. Anyway, I’m attempting the same lesson with hell class this afternoon, only I’m going to make to writing a group activity rather than a singular one. I may need ice cream by the end of today :D
I just found out I don’t have to have a convo class with hell class on Friday this week, so that’s nice. I’ve got five hours of free time at work today, hence the long blog post. We’ve been learning the song ‘Angels’ by Robbie Williams in the 3rd grade class and they totally surprised me by asking if they could sing it! I thought we’d just got through the words, listen to it, fill in the gaps in their lyrics, listen again, blah blah, but they wanted to sing! So they did J. Mr Beak kind of indicated it would be my lesson, but again, I was just used as an accent model. Boo!
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Ok, so I taught hell class the lesson and it went great! I think they actually did better with the discussions than the higher level class!? Only four students came, but one girl was really on top of things and wrote a great poem. The others struggled big time with the writing, even though they had clear models to follow, but oh well. So, that was a nice end to a super boring day. I really 100% love teaching, but this job is driving me crazy. I spend all day doing nothing and then get to actually teach for less than an hour and a half four times a week. :(
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