Incommunicado in Korea

Hi everyone!

Wow, it has been just ages since I lest sent something to you about what we are up to on this side.

There is a simple reason for this - there's not much going on.

The last really exciting thing we did was go to China, and since then it has pretty much just been work, work, work, work. Well..... lots of time spent at work.

Now, I can't remember what I told you about China, so let me know if I haven't waxed lyrical about that to you yet, and I'll send along an extensive, footnoted essay on our trip (with illustrations!).

At the moment the weather is turning to winter. It's not the gradual change that I'm used to in SA. In SA you sort of stop one day and go "Hey, didn't it used to be a little warmer?" and then you realise it's mid-winter. And two weeks later it's hot again.

The daytime temperatures here have started dipping below 20 degrees, and I've been trying to explain to my co-workers that in SA this IS winter. Not the run-up to, opening act of winter. They don't believe me. I can't say we're looking forward to winter. We're going to do some serious clothes shopping tomorrow in a larger town near Seoul, since the town we're in has what you might call an exclusive selection. And we're going to have fork-out a wad of cash for our winter wardrobe. The shopping here is not cheap.

We did get a small taste of winter when we arrived in February. It had snowed quite heavily the day before our flight landed, and apparently the temperatures had dipped to -20 degrees or something. It was cold! So I have an inkling what to expect for the next three or four months. Three or four months of winter! I still can't get my head around that.

But, there is one thing that is pretty cool here. Most houses have something called ondol, which is essentially an underfloor system of hot water pipes. Most of the houses have gas water heaters instead of geysers, so you only heat the water when you want to use it. This system is used to heat the water in the pipes under the floor, and before you know it the house is toasty-varm. Last night we used it for the first time this since March, and it was great. I actually started sweating.

Enough about the weather. According to the Korean English textbooks, the reason English-speakers talk about the weather is because in England the weather is so bad that when there is good weather it needs to be talked about. The Koreans don't talk about the weather because in Korea the weather is always good. Or so they would have me believe...

So let's talk about work instead.

Carin and I are having incredibly different experiences at our schools, which is interesting to observe. Carin managed to get her own classroom (which was recently renovated), and she has developed her own syllabus to work with. She's doing a bang-up good job with kids who are not academically inclined. She has a great bunch of co-teachers. I'm super jealous. But she is working really hard, and has tons of classes to do. At my school I essentially work as an assistant for my Korean co-teachers, and we change classrooms every lesson. There isn't any dedicated English classroom, which is a bit disappointing. I'd love to have a room which I could decorate with English posters and words, and enforce an "English-only" policy. Apparently the school will set aside a dedicated English classroom next year, so I'll be missing out on that.

The students at my school are doing exam prep at the moment, as they have mid-term exams next week. So I have some time to write emails and catch-up on my admin. Most of my lessons have been expropriated by my co-teachers to finish the exam work. Much seat-warming is being done by me. Next week as well. But after that the local education office will be holding an English festival, so I'll be pretty busy with that, and then we have a VERY long stretch until the December exams. So I'm savouring my free time now. Gives me a chance to put together some more materials.

Our plans for travelling next year are coming along quite nicely. We'll be visiting Tokyo in January some time. It's VERY expensive, so we can only afford to go for four or five days. But we have a very full schedule of places to visit, and we're really looking forward to it. I think we're even going to fit some sumo fights in there. At the moment it looks like we'll be leaving Korea roundabout 1 March 2009, but we'll be making some stopovers in SE Asia before we get back to SA. Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Cambodia - here we come! It's strange, but it works out cheaper to bum around SE Asia for a month than to spend the same time in SA.

We'll be back in SA from about 2 April until near the end of April. That's the plan for the moment. Let us know if anyone else will be in SA at that time.

At the moment we're both craving some variety in our diet. The basic meals here revolve around kimchi (pickled cabbage with chilli) and rice. Occasionally it's rice and kimchi. We've managed to make some decent meals at home from ingredients available here, but sometimes you want a proper restaurant meal. The restaurants here tend to offer generally the same food - soups, rice, kimchi, fried pork/chicken fillets, and rice rolls. What I wouldn't give for a proper farmhouse breakfast...with decent coffee.....hmmmm

The restaurants here also don't really have any atmosphere. It's like eating every meal in a school cafeteria. Flourescent lights are de riguer, and forget about getting service if you aren't willing to shout "Come here!" Seriously. If you don't then no-one will help you. Forget about saying please or anything. You just shout "Come here!", in Korean, which is "Yogi-yo!" Best shouted at high-volume across a crowded room. We have found some places that offer "Western" food, but even these don't have much atmosphere. "Western" food translates to pizza, hamburgers and pasta. And "pasta" actually means spaghetti. So forget about choosing what pasta you want. You have a choice between spaghetti, spaghetti and spaghetti.

The contrast between our cultures is very interesting to observe and experience. Back in SA we'd make an evening of going out to a restaurant. Grab some good food (starters, main, and then dessert), preferably with a bottle of wine and some good conversation. The eating IS the evening out. Here the restaurant is more the starting point before you go drinking somewhere else. This seems to be why the restaurants don't have so much atmosphere, since they are not much of an entertainment venue themselves. We miss the eating-out culture back home.

I think I'll leave this installment here. Don't want to bore you guys with too many details. I'm going to be taking some more photos this weekend, and I'll send a link to these along.

We'd love to hear how it's going with everyone. Please send this along to everyone who doesn't have email or internet access.

T