Dinner at Sue's

Pottery

After winter camps were over, one of our students invited all the teachers from camp to come visit her at her house. Her father is a famous potter who lives here in Sangju. Apparently he's ranked as one of the top 5 potters in Korea. We had tea and snacks with their family (grilled sweet potatoes and local dried persimmons,) got to see his studio and some of his famous show pieces (some of which are enormous and sell for upwards of $3000 a piece,) and even got to make some things of our own. He does this amazing pottery, his wife paints incredible intricate pictures and designs on some of his pieces, and they sell their work out of their home. Their daughter was one of our students at camp, and their son is in his third year of middle school. We were each able to make a pot of some sort on the wheel with a little- okay a LOT- of help. We also had the chance to make little rolled platters which we decorated with imprints of persimmon leaves since our town of Sangju is known for its dried persimmons. It made for a very fun afternoon and I'm excited to go back next month to pick up the pieces that we made.
After we were finished there, we went across the street to see the farm of one our Korean teachers from camp. Her husband is actually the farmer of the family. He grows persimmons for drying, a very rare kind of mushroom, and a rare and special root used in herbal medicine. Their daughter was home visiting this week- she's a first year teacher up in Seoul- and had been with us this week at camp and doing ceramics and playing ping-pong and all. Sue and her daughter made us dinner before we went back home. We had roast beef cooked right on the surface of the pot-bellied stove that warms the persimmon drying shed. It was yummy with grilled sweet potatoes, rice, grilled glutinous rice cake rods, cucumbers, and homemade duen jang- a paste made from fermented red soybeans and commonly served with beef and pork cooked in this style. Everything was fresh and local- the cucumbers had been picked that morning from an organic farm next door- and so incredibly good! And of course we finished off the meal with a little soju- a new kind for me flecked with bits of gold leaf and flavored with preserved plums- and some of the amazing dried persimmons from their farm. Such a great day! :)

Teachers

We all had a lot of extra time in the afternoons during break because we didn't have as much to plan for camp classes as with our normal lessons. It was nice getting a chance to rest some, but also to have time to hang out with the other teachers and see things that we hadn't done before. We had a few dinners out with Korean teachers for different reasons, we got to spend an afternoon playing yut-nori, and another playing ping-pong. I even got to go to my co-teachers house for lunch one day and meet his wife and brand new little baby girl- so cute! (My co-teacher is actually taking the picture, in the picture are me, his wife and daughter, and another teacher from our school.)

Talent Show...

Winter Camps

Three weeks of camps at English Town went by fairly quickly. A bit unorganized and frustrating at times, but the kids were adorable and more than made up for it and I had the chance to work with a number of Korean teachers from nearby elementary schools whom I had not met before. In my classes the kids learned how to make their own snow globes, how to make s'mores and sing campfire songs (when we couldn't get the ingredients for the chocolate chip cookies at the last minute,) spy games and how to write secret messages, American folk games including a really fun native American game that is very similar to the Korean folk game yut-nori, and an overview of the circulatory system. So, a scattered but interesting week. And I definitely learned a lesson on perspective... yeah, turns out that as much fun as kids have playing spies in America, it's bit more of an emotionally charged topic for some students this close to North Korea. Oops. Other teachers taught about nutrition, the five senses, photography, making puppets and putting on a puppet show, making cookies, and all kinds of other games and neat things. We were running around and all quite tired by the end, but I had a lot of fun seeing my students in a different setting and getting to meet many other students from neighboring schools. The talent shows at the end of each week were the most entertaining and I'm going to try to post some videos from them on here; sorry there's no sound on my camera. We also had the opportunity to be filmed while we were teaching and were shown for a few minutes on the Andong MBC news here. I've always heard that if you're a foreigner in Korea and stay here long enough you will end up on TV at some point, guess it was our turn now. :) We were able to watch the newscast here, but I haven't been able yet to figure out how to get hold of a copy to share. I'll post it if I can.

New Years Eve!

Happy New Years everyone!!! For New Years this year I had intended to go to Seoul to meet up with a friend from another town, but plans fell through at the last minute so I stayed in Sangju. Turns out that some other peoples plans had fallen through as well so we had a nice little outing here in town. I was able to meet up with Scott and Sarah who live right across the street from me but I somehow never seem to see. We went out for a nice sushi dinner and had about five different kinds of tuna along with miso soup, and a lovely corn relish, and some salads and different side dishes... a very good dinner and shockingly my first time out for sushi since I arrived in Korea! Then, after dinner, we walked over to a nearby bar and grill and met up with Jessica, Julian, and Simon and had some kiwi Soju punch while they finished their dinner. Their friend Ray who teaches in the TALK program here (similar to EPIK that I teach for, but aimed at undergrads and people who have only 2 years of college... they teach part time for 6 months to a year before returning to their universities) joined us as well and we all decided to turn the evening into a pub crawl through Sangju to ring in the New Year! A very fun night :) I didn't take any pictures, but will pass some along as others post theirs. Hope everyone had a fun New Year's Eve! And I've finally gotten my webcam to work, so anyone who has skype can find me at liss.dyer :D

Seong Dong winter camp

This week was my first week of teaching camps here in Korea. I have 4 weeks of camp straight through the winter break and then about a week or so before classes start back up again. (For 2 weeks, and then we have another week off for 'spring break'... in February!!!) This first week was great! It's the only week that I'll be teaching at my main school with my kids that I teach all the time, so it was nice being able to have them in classes that were a little more fun than their everyday schoolwork. We had a few classes that actually taught language and parts of speech and such, but then the rest were just fun classes taught in English to give them an immersion style language experience. We were able to do some hip hop dancing to learn directions and parts of the body, create and draw our own inventions, make s'mores and sing a campfire song, and even play a little with some trick photography- which I think was my favorite :) I had two days of classes with my 4th graders (about 15 of them) which went far better than I'd anticipated- I was a little nervous about having them for such a long stretch at a time- and then two days with my 5th graders (about 20 of them) who were a little slower to start than I would have guessed, but got into things by the end. Because of the timing of the school years here I wasn't able to do anything with my 6th graders, they'll be moving on to middle school now... new school year starts late February/early March following the Lunar New Year. I hope they all had as much fun this week as I had teaching them... wish I could do things like that with them more often :)