The last days and graduation

These are from the last day of afternoon classes for the school year. In Korea, the school year ends in February and begins in early March. On the last day of my afternoon classes we learned some party-related words and then played games.



Here we are playing musical chairs. It can get really competitive and the winner gets a sticker!


One of the things I like to do with the kids is what we call the "Door game." I ask them a question and if one of them answers it right they can go. Some students are more anxious to leave than others and those typically are among the first to leave. If we don't do the door game, most get pretty bent out of shape.


Now these two are an interesting pair. Both are intelligent but are the kind of girly girls who hide some little things in their hand and on their laps that they play with in class which I have to constantly have to confiscate until the end of class. They can be a lot of fun. The one of the right (Sam) is the surliest Korean kid I've ever met. There have been times in class where I will tell her to say something or answer a question and she responds in Korean with, "Look, you're in Korea and if you live here you need to learn and speak Korean. Got it?" Oh if she only knew... There was one time the two of them left class with a friend five minutes early to go to the bathroom without asking me. I was pretty upset because that day both of them were particularly misbehaved. They came back and I asked what happened and they said that all three of them had to really go to the bathroom. I kept them after class a few minutes, went to the white board and, while maintaining my no Korean to the children vow, wrote the word "lie" in Korean on the board and asked them, "did you do this to me?" They were shocked and immediately responded that they did not. They were better behaved for a while. The other girl in the picture is Rosie.


In this picture is me with Joony and Andy. Joony is one of those alpha-male types but still cries a lot. Andy enjoys getting bossed around by Joony. Both are very, very good at English. Joony will be going to an English speaking only school.

Graduation

Here's me giving my speech. I was planning on speaking first in English and then say a few sentences in Korean, but the principal explicitly told me right before I went up that I was to speak in English. So much for my plan on the last day to surprise them all and say that I knew everything they were saying in Korean for the past six months. I did use one Korean word (the word for elementary school) because they wouldn't know it and it was a central theme to the graduation of a kindergarten.



I was amazed by the formality of the event. It was nicer than my high school graduation! Well, I guess my past graduations didn't have random stuff piled up on top of the cabinets in the room it was held in. It's amazing how certain things in Korea are expected to have such a high level of professionalism whereas other things are completely ignored.


Standing up. They all received their "diplomas."

Now Jenna has a favorite six year old. His name is Solomon. I taught his older brother Addison. They both are borderline geniuses. Jenna loves Solomon and kidnaps him for minutes at a time and doesn't let him go. He's a cute one. He was having fun with Jenna holding him until I got the camera out. During the whole swine flu scare back in November, one of my classes that his brother Addison attended just had a couple students one day. We read books and one was called "What is it?" and is a story about some kids finding a salamander and learning what it was called. Addison, being the funny and clever kid he is, quickly noticed a similarity with his brother Solomon's name and renamed his brother "Solomander."



I don't know how many marriage proposals I got from this one. EVERY day for the first couple months we were here, she would come up to me and ask me to kiss her (in Korean) and say in English "you...me..." and then say marriage in Korean. She was cute, but too high maintenance for me. I think Jenna was a little jealous that the kids found me so attractive... The cute thing about her this day is that she did not smile and sadly came up to me requesting a picture together with her parents.


Lastly is a picture of Addison and Solomon. Addison is in the back. He's a fun kid and like I said, extremely intelligent. They are really cute together. Addison gave me one of his suckers from his candy bouquet after the photo. The school did a play "Beauty and the Beast" and Addison was the beast.

Sledding!

A few weeks ago our school took all of the soon-to-be-graduated eight year olds out for a fun-filled Friday. We left our school at 10 am and arrived at the sledding hill an hour later. I don't know exactly where it was, but figure it was somewhere on the northeastern side of Seoul.

We got there and went inside a large building adjacent to the hill where the kids put their bags. We attended a shadow puppet, bubble, and laser show for the first hour and then ate lunch. Following lunch the real fun began.

Above is a picture of the path you climbed up to get to the top. I was impressed that our school was having these young kids (most of which are six or seven in American age) going down such a long hill. The snow was really more like ice and you really got going fast on intertubes.

Below is a picture of some of the kids just leaving the top. I was a little scared at first since I got moving so fast and I wasn't sure how well I would stop at the bottom. They set up a large inflatable pillow that would catch you if you couldn't slow down. The school always has a photographer they hire for all the important events. It's the same guy and of course he came along and actually went down on the sled with his expensive camera. You can guess what happened... He plowed into the pillow-thing at the bottom which tumbled him backwards onto his camera. A large portion of the camera came off. He freaked out and fortunately his camera was okay as the piece just snapped back on.


Sledding was a little frustrating. The guys at the time (Korean 20 somethings) started picking on our kids and saying they were too small even though many had spent over an hour on the slope. I got mad and yelled at them in Korean about the situation and they explained that they had a couple of kids not in our school get hurt and that they didn't want to have more kids get hurt as more adults had arrived on the hill. Only one of our students was at the top of the hill when I yelled in Korean at the guys (thus breaking my no Korean in front of the kids vow). He was so excited and surprised and immediately exclaimed that I was speaking Korean. No other kids where up there and I told him to keep in quiet. He hasn't spoken a word of Korean to me since, proving my point that even if Koreans know a white foreigner speaks Korean, they'll still speak English to them.


Snack time! Mmmm... I had a lot of fun. I got food from around 20-25 kids as I had no snack and they were more than willing to share some of their ample supply. These two boys are fun, but difficult in different ways. The one on the left has really improved his English over the past six months and it is so exciting to watch him go from no English to speaking in broken sentences. His name is Kevin and he reminds me of a teddy bear. The one on the right on the other hand... well, let's just say that his Hello Kitty lunch box sums up his personality. Both were a bit hard to have focus in class as Kevin would like to play hide and seek in the middle of class and the other (David) would like to draw bunnies with giant, shinny eyes all over his papers... Any way, the snack experience was a success and resulted in me discovering previously unknown delicious Korean snack foods.


Now this is Mina. She is so wonderful! Not once has she misbehaved or distracted others. I've never seen anything like it. The only problem she has is that English doesn't come very naturally to her with the exception of songs (and boy can she sing). She had some pronunciation problems, but I think that that is just because she lost all four of her front teeth at the same time, resulting in her inability to make f,v, th, and a variety of other sounds that require your front teeth. I took this picture of her because she was one of the kids that had a ball sledding and probably went up and down the big hill 30 or more times. She had her hood on the whole time and as you can see she was sweating like crazy (no, her head didn't get wet from the snow/ice!).

Just one more picture of the decent. One of the funny things that you can see in this picture is that in addition to the big pillow-barrier-catcher thing is that they had three guys at the bottom trying to prevent everyone from running into each other. I should have taken some videos of it because it was quite entertaining!

A visit to the toy museum on the most heavily fortified border in the world

The day before Christmas Eve our school went out to a toy museum located right on the border with North Korea. I was so shocked about how close we were! Literally right on the border! Any way, I'll write about that a little later. Now about the museum...

This picture pretty much sums up the atmosphere that came from the kids knowing geographically where the museum was. They were pretty tense about any signs of aggression from the north which were quickly addressed with swift action and intimidation.


The kids love the museum. It was a lot of fun for us to and it had a coffee shop that made the best hot chocolate we've ever tasted ANYWHERE!

Lots of legos. These ones I thought were pretty cool and I guess I would think they were even cooler if I liked legos.


Now this kid on the floor is something else. He's around six years old and has perfect pronunciation. One of the cutest kids ever. He liked the floor.


I admired the fine decorations of the bus we traveled to the museum in. I don't think the kids appreciated it as much as me.


So here's a picture of THE fence that separates the two countries. In this location the actual geopolitical border is the body of water in the distance and the land on the other side is North Korea. At this location when it is quiet you can hear announcements on loud speakers from the north to its citizens and military. I've never seen so much razor wire in my life! Too bad it was so hazy. We could still see buildings in North Korea which was pretty cool.

Snow, snow, and more snow!

We haven't updated the blog for sometime because of problems with our camera. With those resolved, here is a peek into some of the significant events during the break.

We went to several museums. One of which was the War Museum that was quite breathtaking. Outside the museum on the grounds we looked at all the rockets, planes, tanks, and artillery used during the Korean War.

Jenna was most excited about this one. Check out all the snow! People say it was the biggest snowfall in Korea in perhaps 100 years. Nearly a month later there are still a few piles left which have even survived a couple days of cold rain.




For Christmas we decided to celebrate by getting a cake! We got it from our local bakery just a minute or two away from our apartment. It was decorated quite nicely and tasted like many of the Korean cakes...much less sweet than our American counterparts... Oh, and Santa isn't a part of the cake and is instead a decoration on our refrigerator. The Christmas Tree looks a little more excited than I was, but believe me I was plenty excited about our Christmas Cake.



So it snowed on Christmas Day and we went out to the park near our house. It only snowed like half a centimeter but a pair of Korean teenage girls were able to make two miniature snowmen. Notice how Korean snowman only have one ball for the body and one for the head, unlike their three-ball American cousins. I guess it's like one and two hump camels.


I love the arms! I'm not sure what that yellowish-brown thing is on the one on the right's head. We approached the snowmen right after the girls finished making them. They were in the middle of jumping up and down and giggling wildly about how cute these two were. You get an idea of the size from the wood panels of the bench they're on.

Here is Matt enjoying the snow. It doesn't usually snow like this in Korea often.


Here's our refrigerator. Jenna decorated it to give our room a festive feel. The decorations were made in our school with the kids as we talked about Christmas.

Hiking and Fall Colors

So we haven't written anything for a while... There has not been anything too amazing to report about. Everyday we just work in the daytime and come home and relax until we go to bed. We got ourselves in a good routine and eat a lot of delicious food...

Something we have done lately is hiking. We did three hikes over the past few weeks. The first one to report on happened near where we live. We went on a bus over to an area we had never gone to before and went hiking up one of the ridges to Bukhan San (북한산). I didn't know exactly where I was going and I think Jenna figured that out quickly. We eventually found a trail though.

As you can see it began up a pretty steep hillside. A little creepy... It reminded me of that staircase that Sam and Frodo climbed in the Return of the King. Parts of the stairs were carved into the granite hillside.

After ascending to the ridge line, we hiked up the ridge.



We got to the top after going up some pretty steep rock outcroppings. We saw a guy walk by us up this trail that did it all barefooted!

Here's the top. The city in the distance is about one-tenth of the city of Seoul.



And the journey back down...

Hike Two

Our second hike to report on occurred the day before Ch'useok (추석), or Korean Thanksgiving. We went to an old area of mine when I served as a missionary in the Korea Seoul West Mission called Geumch'eon (금천). There is a mountain I would hike at on my preparation days as a missionary that I enjoyed a lot. It was one of my favorite mountains I hiked in Korea as a missionary. We also met a coworker of ours named Mihye (미혜) who lives nearby this mountain.

At the bottom there is a Buddhist temple. Here's a picture of us next to one of the buildings where you can see a tree with its leaves changing color.


We climbed the mountain pretty quickly. You take a bus half way up the mountain until the apartment buildings stop and then hike up the rest of the way.

Here's Jenna proud of her hiking achievement.


A view of where the apartments meet the forested hillside.


Here's Mihye with Jenna atop the mountain with Seoul in the background. It was a bit smoggy that day...


We got the great idea to do this as well.



I don't know who the guy is in the picture, but I wanted to get a picture of what the top of the mountain looked like with Seoul in the background. This is still one of my favorite places in Korea...


After the hike we went to go get some food in the area. We then went to Mokdong for a movie and had burgers afterward with American friends.

Hike Three

Our most recent hike was last Saturday. It rained very heavily the night before and it was cold and clear the following day. We went over by Dobong San (도봉산) and hiked up one of the ridges. The beginning of the hike was kind of up and down, and the trees were pretty green still.


After hiking up the ridge a ways, we came across countless graves. These graves are maintained by the families of those who died that are buried up here. Most of these graves are pretty old. They are very distinct due to the mound that rests on top of the coffin. The picture below could quite be the best photograph I've ever taken...


A bit of a view...


Here's Jenna. Doesn't she look happy?


Here's me, equally as happy to be up here.


Here's a view of the northernmost tip of Seoul

This is Bukhan San off in the distance...one of the largest mountains in the area. The first hike we did was up one of the ridges about half way up the main mountain.

Now this mountain is Dobong San. We tried climbing to the top of it on our first hike in Korea...the one where we were pressed upon by the masses... No crowds on this side of the mountain that day.

Pretty, pretty, pretty...


The fall colors are starting to get more brilliant. Fall is the best season in Korea.