In China, they have a saying: "Don't put your winter clothes away until Tomb Sweeping Day". This may seem like a really obscure guidleine to follow when changing over your wardrobes for the seasons, but without fail it proved correct for both my Springs in China.
Last week, the weather in Korea was absolutely spectacular: mid teens throughout the week. I was tempted to have my winter coat dry-cleaned and sent back to Canada, but then something in the back of my head told me to keep it around for a bit alonger.
This year, Tomb Sweeping Day (QingMing Jie) falls on April 4th. Sure enough, despite the spectacular weather we'd been having, this Sunday it rained and cooled off enough for me to need my winter coat again this week. Chinese wisdom strikes true again! Mark the 4th on your calendar and don't put your warm woolies away until then!
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This week I've been doing station activities with my students where they rotate through 4 different stations during thier class. There is a listening exercise, a speaking exercise, a vocabulary development exercise and finally a writing exercise which is supposed to bring all the skills together. In the last station, I instructed the students to put their finished writing in an envelope so that it could be corrected and I could write some feedabck on it. This seemed like a brilliant idea to me, until I looked at the stack of papers on my desk and rememebered I have approximately 780 students. Right. Spotted yesterday, on the line 7 metro from Taereung to Suraksan in full rush hour train-car squishiness: Although it's not officially Spring here in Korea, the weather would make you guess otherwise. The last couple of weeks have been absolutely beautiful, with daytime temperatures floating around the +10 mark, and this weeks forecast expecting a high of +17 by Thursday! How happy am I?!?! The new school year in Korea started on March 3rd, but the week leading up to that I took another 5 days of holiday leave, and stayed in Seoul to explore things that are a little closer to home. The War Memorial Museum had an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so I finally paid it a visit, but find that I need to go back to really do it justice. Even in the couple of hours I spent there, I only managed to get through the outdoor exhibits, the Dead Sea Scrolls special exhibit and the first floor historical war exhibits, where I finally found out what a Turtle Boat is! The famous Turtle Boat, complements of Yi Sun Shin. Another beautiful day during that week of holidays, Sara, Richard and I decided to hop on the Seoul metro for 2 hours and head to Suwon and it's famous Folk Village. You just can't come to Korea and not see a Folk Village! Being the middle of the week, we were close to the only ones there, so it made for a nice, quiet outing. It was definitely Spring-y with the clear blue sky, the heat of the sun, the snow and ice melting, and all the farm animals copulating. Kid you not, we interrupted a ridiculous number of mating attempts that day. I managed to get quite the look from a goat at one point after coming around the corner and bursting out in laughter, scaring off his partner. Oops.
...Kimchi pots!! We spent the later part of that day hiking up a hill in the middle of the city to walk around the walls of the Hwaseong fortress. Really spectacular, and it offered some amazing 360 degree views of the city. And that pretty much brings us up to date other than this past week I returned to school and so far, it seems things may go a lot smoother than the last 6 months. I have three new co-teachers, half of my students have moved up to high-school and I am trying some new things in my lessons which have so far proven good for behavior management and keeping the students on task. In my current job, I generally manage the success of the day/week by the number of times I have been told to 'Go f*** myself'. So far this week: 0 . An absolute record. Hopefully this is the start of a new beginning and not just them going easy on me because it's the first week :) Lianne, Sara, Me and Kyle - Shanghai 2006 Let me introduce you to my friend Kyle. If you've ever had a conversation with me lasting longer than 5 minutes, Kyle has undoubtedly been mentioned at least once. Although realistically, he's probably even made it into conversations under 5 minutes. And usually the dialogue follows something similar to this: Generally, I'm not a big fan of surprises. I tend to react a little strongly, turning into a over-emotional bubbling fountain of tears who looses all ability to form words let alone comprehensible statements of thanks (ask Jen and Jeff - they witnessed this first hand after super-surprising me at Christmas). That said, I was pretty thrilled at the surprise I received today... Just as I was hitting the 'publish' button on the previous blog post, my doorbell rang. Opening the door, I found a man on my threshold holding a package addressed from my brother in Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada. And it was heavy! Sunday marked my two-year anniversary of being overseas and this was the first surprise package I've received so I was pretty stoked. Inside, a care package of Timmie's products with an awesome new mug to drink them from. My brother was pretty cool to start with, but he just bumped his coolness factor by an infinite amount. One of two things will happen with my new treats: I am in the middle of moving desks this week as everyone gets organized for the students to come back on March 3rd for the new school year. In all this chaos, I tend to check both desks daily for anything people may have left for me in my absence. Today I came in and found two new teacher’s resource books on my desk from the district. Distributed to all teachers in the district, they are supposed to help spice up our lessons and add to our treasure chest of ideas. Always on the lookout for activities to get my kids motivated, I flipped through the first book, Elementary Communication Games, as I checked my email. Skimming through the activities I noticed the standard introductory English themes: directions, food, feelings, housing…and then just as I was about to close the book for a more thorough examination later, something caught my eye in an activity called “Chit-Chat”. It's been about 10 days since I returned from holidays in Shanghai and Thailand and am only now getting around to posting the last few pictures on my Flickr account. You can access them either by clicking on the photos tab of this page or by clicking here. The photos aren't organized into a set like pictures have been previously because I have apparently run out of sets and need to upgrade to a "Pro" account for some ridiculous amount of money. Right now I am just happy that they're floating around on the web somewhere, but realistically we all know how the disorganization will break me down eventually :) Enjoy the photos! "You've got like 9 degrees, 2 masters and 4 certs. You're the most educated vagabond I know". When traveling to the tropical beaches of Thailand, what better souvenir to bring back than a stone mortar and pestle. |
Recently Updated...03.25 - Two posts! About Me...Out and about in the world, teaching others and educating myself. Stuff I Like...Traveling. Cuddling a cat. New toothbrushes. Friends. Socks of the Joanne Younes variety. The smell of sun-dried laundry. Baking. Archives
March 2008
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