Long Overdue...

Since I last wrote a legit blog entry, much as transpired.

First, from last Wednesday to Friday, I attended a teacher training / orientation for all of the public middle and high school foreign teachers in the Gyeonggi-do Province (all of the cities surrounding Seoul comprise their own province...sort of like a state, but a little different in ways that I'm not sure how to explain...).  At the orientation, we attended several sessions.  Some were presented by current teachers in GEPIK (this is the name of the program through which I teach) to give us ideas as to what to teach and games to play with our students.  Other programs clued us in to Korean culture tidbits while others gave advice on classroom management.  There were also sessions on speaking Korean, which I found quite helpful since the only words I have definitively learned so far are yes, hello. thank you, 1,000 won and without ham.  For a good portion of the orientation, we were split into small groups.  We taught demonstration lessons in partners.  This exercise gave me so many ideas as to how to teach!  Overall, I really learned a lot in those couple of days, both about how to teach and about myself.  I also met a couple of people that I will definitely meet up with in the future, so all in all, it was a great getaway!

On Friday, after I got back from orientation, I ventured to E-Mart to restock my fridge.  On the way back, I snapped this photo:

In the distance, you can see my school... sort of... on the hill.

I realized I had been neglecting to show the landscape of my surroundings.  From this picture, it looks like I live in the countryside to some extent.  What this picture neglects to show you is that just across the sidewalk from where I stood to take this picture is one of the busiest streets in town, bustling with road traffic, foot traffic and all sorts of businesses.  Gwangju is quite urbanized but because of mountains like the one in the picture, the city is very spread out rather than a concrete jungle like many of the newly developed cities.  I will try to take more pictures of the city to give you more of an idea of what it looks like here...

On Sunday, I met Diane, a friend from orientation, in Seoul.  We met at Coex Mall, which seemed to be Korea's answer to the Mall of America.  The mall houses an aquarium, movie theater (with IMAX!), the Kimchi Field Museum, and hundreds of stores and food vendors.  On the floor above all of this, there is a large conference center and Seoul's World Trade Center is also attached to the complex.  There are also a couple of swanky hotels and a casino.  It's a huge complex!  This was the first time I had been shopping for anything other than food in Korea, so it was really fun.  I bought a couple of books and a really good guidebook to Seoul and a couple of tops to wear to school.  Diane and I got hungry during lunch time and we ended up eating at T.G.I. Fridays!  Their menu was considerably smaller (only three pages!) but it was nice to have some legit American food for once.  We had boneless buffalo wings (my first in almost four years!  Chicken wings were the one thing I missed during my non-meat days!) which were served with greek tzatziki sauce instead of ranch or bleu cheese and a grilled chicken sandwich with bacon, Monterrey jack cheese, tomato and lettuce and french fries.  It was a treat!  We tried to see a movie in the huge movie theater, but we couldn't find any ticket machines in English and since we weren't too serious about seeing a movie, we didn't bother to ask anyone for help.  We also found the Kimchi Field Museum, but we weren't too jazzed on what it looked to entail after reading the description outside the entrance, so we decided not to spend the money to go in.

After a lengthy walk outside around the whole Coex complex, we ventured to Gangnam because Diane wanted to experience the infamous fish pedicure.  We stopped off at Lush (my favorite cosmetic / toiletry shop that sells all handmade goods) so I could stock up on my favorite items.  Right outside Lush was some sort of demonstration.  There was a man who looked to be dressed in a North Korean military uniform pointing a gun at a man's head who was kneeling on the ground wearing a black hood.  It looked to me to be some sort of attempt to bring awareness to the plight of North Korean refugees because there was a poster about the modern day underground railroad and other similar posters.  It was really harrowing to walk down the street and see a man pointing a gun at someone's head, especially in Gangnam, which is sometimes touted as Seoul's Rodeo Drive.  After this small dose of reality, we ventured on to the fish pedicure cafe.  After enjoying banana and strawberry smoothies and the complementary toast, we stuck our feet in the fish.  This time, we figured out that if you bring your feet closer to the surface, the fish follow, so I was able to get a couple of decent pictures of the fish.

They're just little guys...

You can sort of see how they swarm your feet...

This time, post pedicure, as I was wiping my feet off, I could see the skin they had eaten from my foot.  It sounds gross, but I would tell they had done work!  Such a cool experience!  I really want to try the big guys (which are goldfish size) now!

After the pedicures, we walked around Gangnam for awhile.  We walked up a street with a lot of coffee shops and restaurants.  At one point, we stopped and looked down a small street that was emitting good smells.  A woman noticed us looking in her restaurant's general direction and started yelling at us, trying to get us to come into her restaurant.  She was pretty aggressive and a little scary.  We walked quickly in the opposite direction.  Once we made it back to the main drag, we made a sweet discovery.  On the street, every block or so, there are these interactive kiosks called media poles.  You can read the news, play games or get directions to things in the neighborhood.  You can also, as Diane and I discovered, take pictures and decorate them photo booth style and then e-mail them to yourself!  The technology here astounds me.  Here is the piece of art we created:

I like the man in the background...

After our photo fun in Gangnam, we hopped the subway to Apgujeong which is a neighborhood with tree lined streets, fun boutiques, art galleries and restaurants.  Just as we made it to the area, it started to rain.  We walked and walked trying to find somewhere suitable to eat a small bite and seek shelter from the rain.  We finally settled on a place we kept seeing all day long in various areas:  a little cafe called A Twosome Place.  Under the name of the establishment, it always says "A Cake and Sandwich Place," so naturally, we figured we would get a sandwich and maybe a piece of cake.  We walked into the restaurant, put our stuff down and looked at the menu.  No sandwich in sight.  We were not pleased.  The weird thing about this restaurant is that there are pictures of sandwiches everywhere and they are fairly heavily advertised, but there is not one sandwich on the menu.  So. Weird.  Instead, we settled for bread bowls of baked potato and bacon soup and a slice of cookie and Gruyere cheesecake.  Both were very good.  After our excursion at a Twosome Place, we walked back to the subway, parted ways to reach our respective destinations and an hour and a half later, I was home.  Such a great day!