Meet The Folks

        I used to have this dream where I was standing in front of a crowd and everyone was laughing at me.  I didn’t have any idea who the people were or what was so funny, but I knew it had something to do with me.  Before I could ever make sense of things, though, I’d always wake up.  At the time, I brushed it off as meaningless and unimportant.  Now, I’m starting to think it was a prophecy.
        A few days ago, we had parent-teacher conferences at our school.  I was kinda concerned about this because 1. I had no idea what to expect and 2. I knew almost nobody in my town spoke English.  So I went into the meeting room that night, and about thirty or forty parents were there, along with all the teachers.  The principal and VP started in on this giant lecture (all in Korean, of course), which meant I got to zone out for an hour.  But out of the blue, somebody started calling my name.  “No-AH.  No-AH.”  The head teacher motioned me up to the front.  I walked up to the little stage and stood right next to the VP.  She said something, and the entire crowd cracked up.  I stood there smiling and (I’m sure) looking incredibly uncomfortable.
        “No-AH.  Introduction,” said the head teacher.
        “Umm…” I said.  “My name’s Noah Pearlstone.  I am from America….I mean…USA.  This is my first time in Korea.  I’m very happy to be here.”  Everyone applauded, and then the VP said one more thing, and the whole crowd was laughing again.  I went back to my seat feeling pretty embarrassed.  Only later did I find out that she’d said, “We like Noah because he is tall and handsome.”
        The rest of the conference was a little on the uncomfortable side, too.  Some of the parents had students in my classes, so it was nice to meet them.  But the thing was, they'd always introduce themselves and then say their child's Korean name.  I had given all the kids English names on the first day (and never learned their Korean ones) so I had no idea who they were talking about.  Sample conversation:
        Other teacher: “This is Min Soo Kim’s parent.”
        Parent:  *smiles, waits*
        Me:  “Oh wow!  Very good student!  Very good!”
        And that scene repeated itself for the rest of the night.

        But what are the students actually like?  They’re wild and full of energy and they have two-second attention spans.  Basically, they’re just normal kids.  Teaching them has been challenging at times, but it’s always a lot of fun, too.  I have three classes: 1st and 2nd grade, 3rd and 4th, and 5th and 6th.  1st and 2nd know the alphabet and that’s pretty much it.  3-6th are all on about the same level- they have decent vocabularies, but they have no idea how to string sentences together.  I have a classroom assistant to help with the younger kids, but for the older ones I’m on my own.  At the beginning of the term, I also got to design my own curriculum and I make all my own lesson plans, so I can do whatever I want, more or less.  It’s actually a little bit more work, but it’s nice to have that freedom.
        I’ve also gotten to know some of the other people at my school outside of my classes.  There’s one other younger teacher here who can speak English, and he’s become my pretty good friend- we’ve gone out for dinner a bunch of times (often for pizza), and I’ll stop and talk to him when I see him at school.  Well, I guess his 3rd graders saw us talking and got curious about me, so they started asking him questions.  At some point, he must’ve mentioned that we ate pizza together, because the next day twenty-five 3rd graders swarmed me.  They had this crazed look in their eyes, too.
        “YOU LIKE PI-JA?!!” they all screamed.
        “Yes, yes, I like pizza.”
        “PI-JA!!!!!!!”
        “Yeah, pizza’s good.”
        “PI-JAAAAAAAA!!!”
        And then they ran away laughing and yelling.

My grade 1 and 2 students.   They're adorable.

My grades 5 and 6.  It's a little blurry because they're never standing still.

     
        After a month of teaching here, I still have only good things to say about my school, the people I've met, and my experience in general.  Like I told everyone at the conference, I’m just happy to be here.  It’s been like a dream come…
        Oh, give me a break.  I’m not that corny.

Easy On The Eyes

        Reading is hard.  You have to decode a language, process the information, and then (hopefully) find some meaning in it.  Honestly, it sounds terrible.  I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.  Now looking at pictures...that's a little bit easier.  So anyway, here are some of my favorite pictures from these past couple months that haven't made it into my other posts.  Of course, there'll be more words (and headaches!) coming soon.

This is Boseong, the land of green tea.

And here are the green tea fields.  No kidding, that's the first umbrella I've ever had.  

Watching from the woods.  Not creepy at all...

An old lady working the fields.

An old tractor working the fields.

I guess the point is there are lots of fields.

My classroom.  Smile, everybody!

You don't really see this in American schools.

In Jangheung, the closest city-ish place to me (forty minutes by bus).  Around fifty thousand people live here.

At the Jangheung market.  It was like three square blocks full of this.  I had no idea what I was doing there, and neither did this little girl.

The river that divides Jangheung.

And now we're in Seoul.  I think I was supposed to cross this street.  I chose to take a picture instead.

Seoul ice cream tower?

This is Wando, a small beach town in the south.  Met up with a bunch of my orientation group for a relaxing weekend.

We found a jellyfish!  Jellyfish look surprisingly disgusting.

Climbing a hill in Wando, on our way to a tower.

And here's the tower.  Fun fact: It's the 9th biggest building in the world.  OK, fine, it's actually only four stories tall.

                   

Take A Hike

        These past couple weeks have brought more typhoons, which has been mostly bad news for me.  Sure, I got to miss a day of school, but it also meant that at various times I’ve been without Internet, hot water, and power.  At first, I was just kinda bummed, but then I started thinking to myself- maybe it’s a sign.  Maybe this is some higher power’s way of telling me it’s time to get off my computer and start exploring Korea again.  It’s time to return to nature.  It’s time to go hiking.
        The thing is, I’m not exactly an “outdoorsy” person.  I’m happy to go out for a jog or something, but you won’t find me huddled around a campfire cooking a can of baked beans.  That’s because camping sounds like an activity for a homeless person.  Hiking is also something I would expect homeless people to do.  But me?  Probably not.  On the rare occasions that I have gone, I always have these nagging thoughts in my head: We’re climbing up just so we can go back down.  This makes no sense.  My legs hurt.  I’m hungry.  I’m tired.  It’s basically that on repeat.  So then what's the real reason I've gone hiking these past two weeks?  Because all my friends were doing it, of course.
        The first hike we went on was at a Buddhist temple outside Gwangju.  About five of us were there, and the first thing we noticed was how the Koreans were dressed.  They all have these bright neon hiking outfits, and they have enough gear with them to climb Everest.  I showed up in a t-shirt and shorts.  Anyway, we started climbing, and it wasn’t too bad.  We stopped about ten minutes in when we came to a stream, and decided to wade in.  It was only about 70° outside (21°C for all you foreigners!) so the water was pretty chilly.  The water also happened to be moving very fast, which meant I had about 6,000 instances of losing my balance and nearly getting swept away.  It was fun.

Trying not to die while also taking a picture.  Multitasking!  

        The Buddhist temple was about another fifteen minutes up, which wasn’t too bad either.  The temple was...alright.  The place had been burned down about twenty different times over history, so I think most of it was a reconstruction.  Just from looking at it, I could tell a lot of it wasn’t authentic.  I watch Pawn Stars, so I know a fake when I see it.

Outside the temple

And inside

        Anyhow, hike number two was in the city of Boseong.  Boseong is a smaller place, about 50,000 people, and it’s famous for green tea.  So this time we got a group of around ten to go hiking at some mountain.  And let me tell you, this was not our little half-hour Buddhist temple hike.  This was the Trail of Tears at a 45° angle.  Thanks to all that typhooning, the ground was also smooth and slick, which made it almost impossible to get a foothold.  About thirty minutes in, we passed by some Koreans who were stumbling down the mountain.  They said something to us, and a girl in our group who spoke Korean translated.  “One more hour to the top.  Very difficult.”  I’m pretty sure I started crying right then and there.
        And yet, we climbed on.  Eventually, I found a hiking stick (also known as a tree branch) and that helped quite a bit.  Still, I was pouring sweat, and we had to take a break about every ten minutes.  Our group ended up splitting in two, and I stuck with the slow group.  Finally, after what felt like a century, our group made it to the top.  I pulled out my camera and started taking pictures.
        “Wait,” someone said.  “Where’s everybody else?”
        “Look, they’re up there.”
        We looked over to see that the fast group was way higher and way up ahead, scaling some rock face.  So this wasn’t the top after all.
        “Do you want to keep going?” someone asked.
        It took me about 1/100th of a second before I said, “No.”  One other reasonable person agreed with me.  If I wanted to go any higher, I’d rent a freaking airplane.

        The way down was just as treacherous.  I was basically swinging from tree to tree and praying I wouldn’t fall.  I kept taking these really awkward steps which resulted in me rolling my ankle, stumbling, and catching myself.  If having good balance is being able to recover before you fall, then I have great balance.  Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that’s not the definition.
        In the end, I only fell once (on my butt, so it didn’t hurt) and had one really bad stumble where I hurt my knee and ankle.  Any time you can describe a weekend by saying, “Well, at least I didn’t get seriously injured,” you know you had a good time.
        Our third and final hike took place at the green tea fields.  That’s what Boseong’s famous for, so we figured we had to check it out.  The crops are on hills in rows and rows that wrap around the landscape.  I have to say, it looks really awesome.  Hiking it?  Not so awesome.
        It was a rainy day to begin with, but the second we started going up, it turned into a torrential downpour.  It wasn’t so much of a hike as a walk-up-a-thousand-steps, but the result was pretty much the same- I was exhausted.  This time, though, I actually made it to the top.

Tea fields

Getting higher

At the top!

        After that, we headed inside for some lunch (green tea noodles, which were delicious) followed by a little tea party.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had green tea before, and it wasn’t bad.  I had some green tea ice cream to top it all off, which I’d describe as strangely decent.  Soon enough, it was time to leave and go back to my city.   I had to start the recovery process, after all.

A few more pics from the weekend.  Boseong at night.

        Now, I’m back in the peace and quiet of my own home.  So what have I taken away from all my hiking adventures?  Have I been transformed into an outdoorsman?  Did I gain a new appreciation for nature?  Not really.  I’m just glad the power’s back on.      

Tiny Monsters

        I always expect my first day at a new job to be a disaster.  What can I say?  I’m an optimistic guy.  It’s just that in my experience, I find that I’m completely clueless whenever I start something fresh.  Of course, that’s a pretty common situation to be in, and I’m sure a ton of people have had that new-job moment where they realize “I have no idea what I’m doing.”  It’s usually not a big deal, because in most instances you can blend into the background until you get the hang of it.  Problem is, as a teacher you’re thrown into the spotlight from the first minute.  And at the beginning of any job, your knowledge is so limited that you don’t even know what could go wrong.  The possibilities are endless, in a really bad way.
        But as it turned out, my first day went fine.  I was told I’d have the week to lesson plan, so on Monday I came up with some topics I wanted to teach and got started on an “About me” powerpoint.  I was feeling pretty good, but I definitely shouldn’t have been.  Because when the 2nd day rolled around, I started to learn about some of those “endless possibilities.”
        I got to school at my normal time and kept working on the curriculum.  Then at 2:15, the head English teacher walked into the room looking pretty pissed off.  He yelled something at the classroom assistant in Korean, reset the power to the room for some reason (deleting the “About me” presentation I’d been working on) and stormed out.  The assistant looked at me.
        “He said class start in five minutes,” she said.
        “What?”
        “I don’t understand,” she said.  “He say you have one week to lesson plan, but now he say class start.”
        She wasn’t the only one having trouble understanding.  “All the classes?  Today?”  I asked.
        She gave me a solemn nod, like she was diagnosing me with stage 4 cancer or something.   “Yes,” she said.
        I looked back at the computer, which was in the process of restarting.  I don’t really have a “panic mode,” but this was probably as close as I’ve ever gotten to it.  What the hell was I gonna do for the next three hours?  Talk about myself without a powerpoint?  There was a decent chance these kids wouldn’t understand anything without pictures to help.  Hmm…maybe nametags.  Yeah, nametags take thirty minutes, right?  (If we're charting this by the five stages of grief model, I think I was in denial here).  Somehow, though, I pulled myself back to a rational train of thought, and I remembered I had at least part of my presentation in my email.  I opened that up and found an eight slide powerpoint that ended with “I don’t like cheese.”  Really, I guess that’s as good a place to stop as any.
        A couple minutes later, the students started trickling in.  One girl came up to my desk and gave me a sideways stare.  Then she reached out and began touching my hair.  I wasn’t really sure what the protocol was on this, so I just sat still until she stopped.  All in all, about five more girls came in, at which point the assistant said I could start.  The girls sat down and mostly just stared at me with confused expressions.  Then they began shouting out rapid-fire questions in Korean, which the assistant fielded.  I stood there silently the whole time, no idea what was going on.  I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time.
        Anyway, I wasn’t really sure when to start, because more girls kept coming in every few minutes.  But eventually I opened up my powerpoint and went for it.  Surprisingly, even my abridged version took forever, as the students interrupted every few seconds with more questions (trust me, I was very thankful for this.)  No joke, the class actually ended before we even had time to make nametags.  So that wasn’t so bad.  I’m not sure if they know any English, but at least they seem like good kids.
        Then my 3rd and 4th graders came in.  The first two kids to wander in were a boy and a girl.  The girl immediately picked up a soccer ball and smashed the boy over the head with it.  It didn’t take me long to realize that these kids were not going to be like my 1st and 2nd graders.  About 15 of them filed in, and they were bouncing off the walls.  They weren’t wearing shoes and the floor was wooden, so they all did that run-really-fast-and-slide-for-a-few-feet thing.  Secretly, I wanted to join them, but I was an authority now.
        “Hey, no running,” I shouted.  “No running!”
        I could tell they understood by their expressions.  Of course, that didn’t stop them from completely ignoring me.  Finally- with the help of the assistant- I was able to get them all to sit in their seats long enough to go through my powerpoint.  They seemed halfway interested, but this time it didn’t even take ten minutes to finish.  OK, that was fine, we still had to do nametags.  I handed out a sheet of English names for them to choose from, and the kids started working on it.  But I noticed that some of them had gotten a little…creative.  One kid named himself “G.D.”  Another named himself “RB bag.”  (Was he going for Arby’s bag?  I really don’t know.)  Within ten minutes, they’d all finished, which meant they were back to punching each other and screaming and throwing paper airplanes.  Just great.
        I needed something to kill twenty minutes.  Some kind of game, but what?  I thought about all of my training during orientation, and of course I came up blank.  What did I play as a kid?  What games did I like?....uhhh…umm…Hangman!  I went up to the whiteboard, drew the gallows, and said, “Pick letter.  ABCDEFG…”  I’m not sure if they’d played before, but they figured it out instantly.  And that was how I spent the last twenty minutes of my class.
        Last class: my 5th and 6th graders.  One of the first girls to come in pointed at me, screamed “YOU CAME OUT OF THE TV!” and started running in circles.  Every few seconds, she’d scream the same thing again.   I could tell it was going to be a fun hour.  About fifteen students came into this class, and it was more of the same:  punching, slapping, screaming.  Let me take a second to clear up a little misconception here.  Before I left, a few different people told me something like, “Well, I bet these kids will be perfectly behaved.”  Uh, no.  For the most part, they’re psychotic.  Adorable, but psychotic.  Anyway, for the 5th and 6th graders, the powerpoint/nametag combo only lasted half the class, so I had another half to kill.  What’d I do?  What do you think?  Hangman, of course.  Hey, if it ain’t broke…
        At about 5, the kids left and I was finally able to take a deep breath and reflect.  What was I supposed to accomplish in my first day of teaching?  Set up class rules?  Nope.  Assess their English proficiency?  Not so much. 3rd-6th graders know the alphabet well enough to play Hangman.  That’s about all I’ve got.
        In the end, my voice was pretty much gone, and I was exhausted, and yet…I was still here.  The kids had gotten through it, too.  No tears were shed.  Nobody died.  Sure, there were technological problems, and yeah, the kids were a little bit insane.  But spite of everything that went wrong, I actually had a pretty fun time.  And I know it won’t be long before I get another shot at it.  

Home

        When you first sign up for this program, they make it clear that you’re going to a rural area.  That’s just part of the deal.  But then you get to Korea and they put you up in college dorms with a couple hundred other people, take you to Seoul a couple times, and you forget all about it.  You start to adjust and you think, “So this is my life now.”  And then the rug gets swept out from under you.
        Of course, I knew it was coming, but it was still kind of surprising to finally arrive in my town and face the reality of it.  Still, my first impression: the place is gorgeous.  It’s a tiny town surrounded by giant green mountains on every side.  There’s a small river that runs through it.  And there are cows in my backyard.

The town square.  Just kidding.

My new best friend.

        I’m living right outside the elementary school in what’s called a “teacher house.”  It’s got a bedroom, a kitchen/dining room area, and a bathroom.  So while it is small, it’s definitely enough for me, and a little more than I was actually expecting.
     

My bedroom, which is basically a dorm room.

 

Dining room/Kitchen.  I went a little picture crazy in this post because I finally got my camera fixed.

Where I pretend to cook.

From the outside.  My house is the left half (number 8).
The surrounding brick wall got damaged in the recent typhoon.

        Since Daedeok (my town) is about two hours away from the nearest city (Gwangju), I think most teachers live in the teacher houses during the week and then go to their apartments in Gwangju on the weekends.  I’ll probably head up to the city most weekends as well, because there’s not a whole lot going on here.  I’d guess there are around a couple thousand people in the area, and the place basically shuts down at 7 pm.  Rural is definitely the right word for it.

Elementary school!

        Anyway, my first day here, my mentor teacher took me to dinner at a Korean BBQ place with some of the other guys at my school.  There was the gym teacher, the custodian, a sports coach, and me.  My mentor teacher was the only one who spoke English, and even he didn’t speak much.  Here's an example of a conversation I had with the coach:
        Coach:  "LA?"
        Me:  "Am I from LA?  I'm from Missouri."
        Coach:  *confused look*
        Me:  "I've been to LA."
        Coach:  *confused look*
        Me:  "LA good.  I like LA."
        Coach: *smiles, nods*
        So for the most part they just talked in Korean and poured me a bunch of drinks, which I'm not complaining about.  They were all really nice, and it was funny to see the dynamic between them without even understanding the language.  You could tell who the joker was, the responsible one, the quiet one, etc.  The joker, for example, kept pointing at me and saying “Meeester B” and laughing.  Then everybody else laughed, too.  I had no idea what he meant, but after a while, I gave up trying and just laughed along with them.  Only later did I learn that he had been saying “Mister Bean.”

I swear to God, I look nothing like him.

        The next day, I met the whole school staff.  I introduced myself, and when I said I was 25 (you add one for Korean age) all the female teachers started giggling.  I think I’m the youngest here by about three or four years.  Apparently I don’t look that young, though, so they were all kinda shocked.  In the US, people think I’m sixteen, but here, I look like I’m thirty.  There's no explaining it.
        Anyway, one of my favorite people so far has been the vice principal.  She doesn’t speak any English, which goes for most of the adults here.  The first time I walked in the room, she was shouting at the top of her lungs into the phone.
        “Oh,” said one of the younger teachers, “She’s just talking to principal.”
        So the VP definitely seems like a no-nonsense woman, but she’s also hilarious.  One time, she brought in ice cream for us, and we were sitting on the couches along with a couple younger female teachers.  The VP started talking in Korean to one of them, and then she pointed at me, and said, “handsome handsome,” along with the other teachers.  After that, she got one of the teachers to ask if I had a girlfriend.
“Uh…no.”
“Why?”
“Umm… I don’t know.”
Then the VP pointed at the fairly attractive teacher sitting next to me as if to say, “Well, how about her?”  Everyone cracked up.        
All in all, the people here have been incredibly nice to me.  I'm pretty sure they're worried that I’m going to die out here because I’m alone and I don’t know Korean.  As a result of this, they’ve gone out of their way to be kind, and really I think that’s something you can only find in small, tight-knit communities.  What more can I say?  I’m happy.

The Deadly Typhoon

        We knew we weren’t all going to make it out alive.  We were trapped in a desolate place, a place where danger presented itself at every turn.  It was a dark and scary time.  Wait, you thought I was talking about a typhoon?  Nope, just my second orientation.

        For this week long orientation, we were split up into our regions, so I was sent to the south with about forty others.  The place they chose for this orientation was definitely a little strange-we were camped out in the mountains at some business retreat in the middle of nowhere.  As far as I could see, it was the perfect setting for a murder mystery.  Forty people in a confined space…and then one by one, they start dying off.  We know someone here has to be the killer, but who?  The quiet Canadian?  The Australian who’s just a little too friendly?  Or maybe, just maybe, the Koreans in our group have teamed up to plot against us.  It explains why they’re always talking to each other in their secret language when we’re around.  Yes, this is what I think about when I’m really bored.

        Anyway, we were doing the standard go-to-lectures-all-day-do-nothing-at-night routine when word started to come in: there was going to be a typhoon.  The biggest typhoon to hit Korea in ten years.  Now, I’ll admit, I had no idea what a typhoon was.  Was it an Asian tornado?  A hurricane?  Would the sky open up and start raining bacon?  I hoped so, but I really didn’t know.  All they told us was that this typhoon was going to hit the south the hardest.  Whatever it was, it was coming for me. 

        The typhoon was scheduled to roll in at 3 AM, so naturally the night before we all hung out outside until midnight waiting for something crazy to happen.  By the time we went to bed, it was kinda windy and drizzling.  MADNESS, I TELL YOU.  So I went to sleep just like normal, but at some point in the middle of the night, I woke up to a CRACK CRACK CRACK sound at my window.  Was it Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston?  Who could say?  Honestly, in my sleepy state, I did think there was somebody outside knocking.  It seemed pretty weird, but I just did what I always do: I went back to sleep.

        I woke up the next morning to steady rain.  Only then did I realize that the sound had been the wind thrashing against the window.  Outside, tall trees had been split in two, and there was some minor property damage, as well.  So I’d survived my first typhoon by sleeping through it.  No surprise there.

 

This is not at all what it looked like.  I just googled typhoon.

                             

        In the end, the build-up and anticipation had been much bigger than the result, but that’s how life usually goes.  However, the area even further south had gotten the worst of it.  There had been fifteen or twenty deaths and much more damage.  As it turned out, my school was in the very deep south.  After we all said our final goodbyes, that’s where I headed next.