Food
It’s been two weeks since we arrived in Suwon-city and we are still in the transitioning phase. If we didn’t have to eat, it would be a mostly pleasurable experience. And it’s not even the Korean cuisine that’s the problem – I’ve had several tasty dishes that I could almost identify – but rather our lack of vocabulary to order successfully in a restaurant without a picture menu. Our main dietary staples come from the small bakery across the street where we can point and see a clear price. There’s the hot dog in a sweet roll that’s become a once-or-twice-a-weeker. Then there’s the pizza with pickles embedded in the crust that was less of a keeper. There seems to be a strange desire to add pickles to the most un-pickle-friendly food imaginable.
Luckily, the school serves a free lunch which means I get some authentic non-hot dog Korean food. (Although we did have a Korean corn dog at lunch the other day. My Korean co-workers offered me the last of it, probably figuring the American would appreciate the hot dog more than them.) Many times, the food is so hot that my lips are burning by the end of the meal. Almost every day we have kimchi, that fermented cabbage with hot pepper dish that is absolutely ubiquitous here. And I actually kind of like it, but my poor lips suffer after the fact. The principal watches me as I eat some days and chides me teasingly (at least I hope teasingly) for not finishing the last two kernels of my bap (that is, rice. Just showing off one of the four Korean words I know).
The Kids
I was mostly worried about making the jump from teaching small classes of upper intermediate engineers and managers in the business world to large groups of young kids in a public school with the absolute lowest level of English. But so far, it’s been quite fun. We sing and play games – which I often did with my adult classes anyways. Some of the kids are whip-smart and so eager to learn. Others are a bit cloddish. It’s finding the balance between the curious ones and the not-so-curious in a class of 25-30 students that’s the hardest. I’d love to just cherry-pick the good ones and have one class with them. They could learn so much so quickly and be on their way to fluency by the time they’re teenagers.
When I first got here, I felt a bit like Jesus. Some students just stared at me, like they’d never seen anything like me before. Some of them touched the hair on my arm and said “whoa!” (Apparently, Asian women have completely bald arms.) Some have crowded around me at my desk, said “Hello! How are you?” and then just stare, seemingly having exhausted their English vocabulary. They ask me to speak Korean, which I still know so little of, then say “Very good!” or shriek with laughter as I spit out an “Anyeong haseyo.” Several classes have asked me to “Sign! Sign!” their English books with my autograph. Surreal.
Some are already my favorites. One little girl, Song-ee comes to me after class and tries to teach me Korean. We point at things and I say the word in English, she repeats it and she tells me the Korean word which I can never remember. She brought her little group of friends, Jungye-on, Aram and Candy-Boy (that’s what he says his name is!) too and now they clean my room every afternoon and put on little puppet shows in the mini-theater in my class. They’re downright adoptable.
The School
From what I’ve heard from my co-teachers and other native English teachers from other schools, I hit the jackpot at Go-Hyun Elementary. The classes are beautiful, and the school even won an award for being so. My own classroom is palatial. There’s ten round little desks, a white board that slides to reveal an enormous wide-screen TV, which is hooked into my computer. All of our lessons are multi-media with a CD-Rom and a magic pen that acts like a mouse on the TV. Instead of running to my computer to click “next,” I use the magic pen on the huge TV and it does it for me. I don’t know how, so magic is my best guess.
My room has so many fun materials for the kids. There’s the little puppet theater mentioned above. In the back of the room, it’s partitioned into another two small rooms, a “department store” and a “restaurant.” The restaurant has a small table, chairs, a menu and even a display case of plastic food. The store has a cash register and lots of stuff to buy – hot chocolate, plastic fruits, Campbell’s Soup cans, candy, umbrellas, and the works. There’s a bookcase filled with fun children’s books, including all seven Harry Potters in the original English. (Score! Now I can re-read them all!) I would go crazy as a kid in a class like that.
Well, I meant this to be a short article about my first impressions, but there’s been a lot to write about. More to come soon…
