Visiting Roger

On the twenty-sixth 정원 and I started the day with a trip to the laundry mat. Afterwards, we stopped back at mom's to unload the laundry and to brush Dolly. Next, we drove out to Roger's house. This was a bit of an experience for 정원. Roger has all sorts of ducks, geese, and chickens running around his property, as well as a pony.

After some time there, we went up to Roger's parent's house. Unfortunately, the camera lens fogged up inside and all of the pictures turned out blurry. It was pretty late as we drove back to drop off Roger and headed home.

The Big Day

This was 정원's first American style Christmas. Usually in Korea just one or two presents are given. Even then, the presents are usually something needed, and not something wanted. We had a great time opening our gifts with Mom and Kenny. Enough to pretty well drain the battery in the camera.

Later, Mom and I went to my grandmother's house. We didn't spend too much time there and only about half of the family showed up. I spent most of the time there talking to my uncle's new wife about Korea.

Back at home I helped Kenny assemble his present, a portable fireplace/grill. Afterwards we relaxed and enjoyed our time together.

Christmas Eve was an eventful day around the house. We had blueberry pancakes before taking Dolly out for her morning walk. Then, after it warmed up, I took 정원 out to show her how to shoot a BB gun. After she learned how to sight down the barrel we went around back and she tried shooting the .410 shotgun. She hit her target (a board) both times. We went in because it started sprinkling and Kenny's oldest son showed up with his family to open their gifts. We wound down the evening by opening a gift for Christmas Eve, and then went to sleep like excited children.

During all of this we found time to decorate and to hang our stockings, as well as, decorating pine cones with glitter.

The Day Before the Day Before Christmas

Busy, busy around Seoul. On the twenty-third we we had a relaxing day. We woke up to coffeecake. 정원 and I had to go into town to pick up a few things. It took longer than expected and we didn't get back home until sunset.

Around the House

We spent the next day around Mom's house. We started the day off by feeding the goats and walking Dolly before breakfast, our usual morning chores. Then after it warmed up we went to the "shed" on the back of Mom's land to clear off some shelves that she was worried about. The shed is really an old mobile home and most of the pasteboard is rotting from exposure and age. We cleared off the shelves and I went through my old books (mostly stored in an old upright freezer) to find some to bring back. Unfortunately (in a way), we had too many Christmas goodies for me to bring back all of the books I selected. I actually only brought back two of the books.

While we were out there 정원 picked out some old glass and ceramic pieces (one of which gave the Albany Airport security team fits) and I dug up my old cooler full of old photos (circa 1995~2000) for 저원 to look through.

The weather was so nice we spent most of the day in sweatshirts. While we were outside Mom was inside working on pies. She baked two coconut pies and two pecan pies. Is it any wonder that I gained two kilos while at home?

Shopping in Albany

On day 3 I took 정원 into town for some shopping. On the way there I stopped at a field and asked a farmer if I could get some cotton for my wife, and in normal Georgian style he said, "Sure, grab all ya want!" I took a twig from a plant and then went on into Albany. We took a detour through Doublegate and Darton College to show 정원 the other side of Albany and where I started my college life.

Next we went to the mall. The pet store, Pets N Pals, in the mall sells goats. I love Georgia. We shopped at a few stores and finished up our shopping with a supper from Cracker Barrel.

Unfortunately, Mom stayed home warm and cozy while we were out. She really hates shopping so it was understandable. Once we got home we had relaxed a while before bed.

We were still jet lagged, and for the second night in a row, we woke up at 4am. This time we didn't really fight it and spent a couple of hours wrapping presents.

First Full Day

We woke up early Sunday morning to dump cake. Mom doesn't like to make dump cake because it isn't very pretty. However, how can a cake with cherries and pineapple be resisted? I showed Jungwon around Mom's property then we took a trip out to Kitty's Flea Market. Afterwards we grabbed a quick meal at Taco Bell, then we went on to Winn Dixie. Back at home I let 정원 try sugar cane, and then we fed Jimmy and Rosie that evening.

Been a While

To say it's been a while would be an understatement. Some really exciting things have happened during the past year, I just haven't been online enough to really write about them. Recently, however, I took 정원 to meet my parents. We were there from December nineteenth until January second. I'll do a post for each day that we were there to help sort out the pictures.

We took a bus to Incheon at six in the morning. By the time we went through security and finished all of the paperwork we didn't have much time look around the duty free shops.

The flight took about thirteen hours from Incheon to Atlanta. We then waited about another six hours (much of the time was taken up by going through more security, customs, and finding the correct concourse) for a flight to Albany. I definitely wasn't in any shape to drive from Atlanta to Albany during the holidays, so the wait was worth it.

In Albany we got the rental car, and went to Mom's house as quickly as possible. We showered and spent sometime with Mom before heading to bed exhausted.

Here are the pictures from Day 1:

Busy, Busy, and then some more Busy

     To say that we've been busy is an understatement. It started just before Jungwon's graduation from the SMU Tesol Program. We had a few weekends full of her final class projects which included a foreigner interview (guess who was the foreigner), a lot of typing, and very little sleep.
     Just before her graduation, after the projects were submitted, the celebrating began. We had a quadruple date with some of her old university friends. The night began with too much soju, and ended with a few hours of sleep before Jungwon and I took our promised trip to Suwon.
     Before we left Suwon, I asked Jungwon if she thought she would like to come back to visit. She answered with something akin to, "why would I come back here?". Yet, she was very excited to go back to our old haunts. We had lunch at D-Deli, went to visit the old elementary school, and then went to the fusion restaurant named Su. In between we took a break for a few hours to catch the Sex in the City movie, and we sat for a time in a park we used to visit during our lunches. It was a good time even if we were tired from the previous night of drinking.
     The next weekend was the celebratory weekend for Jungwon's Tesol program group, G9. We went out for wine, and then took a trip to Namsan. Visiting the mountain was very different at night, and they had even changed out the art work. The evening was more relaxed than the previous weekend, but we still stayed out late, and drank a good bit of wine.
     The next Thursday was Jungwon's SMU Tesol graduation. Her mom and sister were there so I was very nervous. After the graduation program, which was a bit different from any graduation I'd been to, we took lots of pictures, went out to eat, and then Jungwon and I joined her classmates at a nearby bar for a nightcap before heading our ways for the evening.
     The next day was a workshop day for my school. We took a trip out to Namisum. The island is absolutely gorgeous, but I was wary of the wild ostriches roaming about. Yes, I typed ostriches.

quadrupal date	Suwon Revisited
G9 does wine	grad

namiseom

Speaking of Cameras

     In my previous post I had mentioned my camera acting up. There have been times that it refused to focus, and on my birthday it totally locked up while I was trying to take a picture of Jungwon. I finally got it to unfreeze, and tried to reset its power, but it wouldn't come on for five minutes. I concluded that it was time to look for a new camera.
     I had read about the Samsung L210, and decided to check it out. I looked, and searched, and today I found a store that had some in stock. The main eye catcher for me is the dual stabilization that the L210 boasts about. The other features are nice, but the stabilization really helps out with darker pictures. Of course, even in darker light, the newer technology makes the pictures come out better anyways.
     The only downside that I have found with this camera is price discrepancies. In the U.S. it is being retailed for two hundred dollars, which would be a rough two hundred thousand won. In Korea, Samsung's home, you can't find the L210, instead you come across the VLUU L210. What is the difference? About one hundred fifty extra won, the letters VLUU stamped on the front, and what I appears to be a coupon for ordering prints online.
     Not only was this the day that I found the camera, but this weekend the store was having a huge sale and I was able to get it for two hundred eighty thousand won. Coupled with the two percent cash receipt tax return I was able to make myself feel a little better about paying the extra.
     After giving it a full charge I decided to test drive it tonight by taking pictures of local graffiti. These pictures were taken at night, with just street lamps and head lights, no flash! Clearly a step about the old clonker Nikon.

Graffiti L210

Birthday Came and Went

     Well, my birthday came and went without a hitch. It was actually pretty relaxed. I ran a couple of errands and rested while Jungwon took a midterm, then she took me out to interesting restaurant/bar/gallery named N To.
     N To is nicely decorated, a little dark, and not very popular. The lack of popularity is partly because it is in the basement of the building that houses the more well known School Food Lounge. People were sitting on the sidewalks waiting to get a table at School Food Lounge. Including ourselves, there were only three tables taken at N To.
     We ordered a wonderful "Apple and Brie Cheese Salad", and carbonara pasta. The pasta was good, and the salad was excellent.
     The art displayed around the place was mediocre with a splash of "oh that's nice" here and there. However, the interior decor more than made up for the flatly painted rectangles. The lighting was pretty cool, and I really liked the tables.
     If someone ever suggests that you go to School Food Lounge, while you're waiting for a table I suggest popping over to N To instead.
     Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of Jungwon that I think she'd want the world to see. She had been stressed because of the midterms and class projects for a few weeks, and just wasn't feeling photogenic, and I didn't have many chances to take pictures because my camera started to go crazy.

Wayne BDay 2008

Hong Kong

     Plus One sent me to Hong Kong last week to get my E-2 visa. The reason that they send their teachers to Hong Kong is that it is supposed to be a one day process there. Yes it can be one day, but the policy is two days. Luckily the lady that works there has a heart of gold and she did mine in one day, and I was able to catch my flight.
     I had a working day to kill while I was waiting on my passport so I decided to kill it by going to see the largest-outdoor-bronze Buddha in the world. It was a good choice as it really did kill most of the day. I left the consulate at about ten in the morning, and I made it back just a tad after three. And that included taking a detour to look around Kowloon station.
     To get to the statue take the Tung Chung line on the Hong Kong subway system. You want to go all the way to Tung Chung, currently the last stop on the line. When you are exiting the station just follow the signs for Ngong Ping. The fare for the cable car was less than $100HK for a round trip.
     Just as a side note. The Incheon airport in Seoul is now trying to double as an art gallery. They had an interesting, though slightly annoying display of art by Nam June Paik set up on the first floor.

hongkong

Plus One

     I have officially started at my new job. It's amazing that I can work a "long" day at the school, eat supper, buy some necessities for the apartment, and still get home before seven. Coupled with the fact that the owner of the school keeps telling me not to rush or to try to go through the lessons in a certain amount of time, I am feeling mightily relaxed. The school has this crazy new idea of actually teaching the kids so that they learn, not to level them up in classes, sell books, or to feed the mommies' egos. The difference between this school and everywhere else that I have been is like night and day.
     The school has recently moved into a new building. They own the whole building, and it is very well designed. I personally wish I had one less window so that I could have more shelf space, but after the plastic wrapped window experience of POLY I will not complain at all. I am up on the third floor. I have my own room that I teach two and a half set of kids in. In the mornings I teach my prekindergarteners. These are children that are Korean age six (four to five years old by western counting). They are learning English at an alarming rate, and they are reluctantly relinquishing their dominance in our power struggle. Originally there were seven students, but we gained another student last week. I teach the same children from nine:thirty until three in the afternoon.
     After the prek'ers I swap to my first graders. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I teach what is dominantly a reading and conversation class. These students are a kick to work with because their English is very good, but this is their first hakwon experience outside of Kindergarten. They had very little concept of how to keep up with their homework, so I bought them a set of notebooks to write everything down in. These classes run from three:thirty until five, with a ten minute break near the middle. The Tuesday class is a mix of some of my reading students, and a couple of students from another reading class. The schedule is the same, but this time we study a north American science textbook and do a small experimenttowards the end of class. It is really fun, and I think I enjoy it as much as the children. On Thursdays I go home at three.

PlusOne

Fire Ants

     When I first looked around this neighborhood it was dark, and hideously cold outside. I did not know exactly where I was, I only had a faint map and address that I had printed off the internet. The streets were not brightly lit, and I stumble across this monstrosity of a graffitied building. I had a feeling that my new apartment was not going to be in an ideal neighborhood. I finally found the address, and half a block away I found a well lit and manicured area full of new wealth and vigor. "At least the neighborhood is only half bad." I thought.
     For the past couple of weeks that night stumbling about in the near dark and freezing temperatures had tainted my view of the southwestern part of my neighborhood. However, during the past few days I have attempted to acquaint myself with this area. Happily I can say that my first impressions were wrong. The graffiti was only to say that the building had been condemned. The streets are dark at night, but they are safe and the neighbors are friendly. There is a bit of revitalizing construction going near my building, and apparently money is being poured into the area's general vicinity to make it more akin to Seolaemeoeul, or Insadong. The more that I look around the neighborhood the more I get a feeling of the Fine Arts building back at GSW. There is a mix of design companies and other studios peppered about the general populace. Although it is not terribly visible, their mark is on the town.

Sinsa

It's that sort of...

     I was sitting in a coffee shop Sunday morning flipping through an art and design magazine. This is the sort of neighborhood that has coffee shops, and they are open on Sunday mornings. The coffee shop I went to is the sort of coffee shop that provides you with high-brow magazines. The magazine I picked was mostly about objects. Cars, daily planners, cellphones, furniture, anything that is ever used, even if it is only to decorate, was discussed in this periodical. There was a paragraph about the milk ajuma hand carts. It compared phones by Prada and Giorgio Armani. The magazine seemed to focus on the ideal of, "Form follows function" and added the clause, "and an important function is to look pretty". It was simply entitled Design. It is that sort of magazine.
     There was a particular shop that the magazine discussed. The photo spread showed a shop full of merchandise that looked a bit more low-brow. The items were of a modern pop-art theme. Toys, posters, and random odds and ends were the norm. The photos reminded me of "Juxtapoz" . The main item that I remembered from the write-up was a trophy mounted polar bear head that was wearing a pirate hat. It was that sort of shop. I remembered it specifically because it did not seem to fit the clean cut image of the magazine. It was that sort of photo spread.
     Yesterday, I was wandering around the less clean, more graffitied part of my new neighborhood. I was looking for an old furniture store that I had noticed a few nights before. I was heading in a general southwesterly direction when I saw a polar bear's head mounted on a wall inside of a shop. I stopped to gape for a moment because I began to notice other items from the magazine spread. It is that sort of neighborhood.

Transitions...

     I am in a state of transition. It is a bit like being a minnow in tapioca pudding. Friday was my last day at Sungdong POLY, and I am now finishing up the last hurdles of the new visa process, and should hopefully begin teaching at PlusOne by the beginning of March.
     Why the change? Well, I'm still searching for a school with integrity. POLY quickly proved itself to not be such a school. I am not going to get into details here, but from the moment I turned in my notice (over a month ago) I have felt a weight off of my shoulders.
     On the other hand, PlusOne is proving itself to be an awesome school. Everything that I have seen shows a relaxed atmosphere with more devotion to teaching the children rather than making a quick buck from the parents.
     I am not putting up any PlusOne pictures just yet. I have another week and a half of down time, so I should be able to catch up on my back log of blogs. Instead enjoy my farewell photo essay of POLY.

**I apologize in advance if I have misspelled anyone's name**




ByBye POLY

Namdaemun:RIP

     It's amazing how the destruction of a site that I barely visited can affect me so strongly. The people around me today (namely at the hakwon) have expressed little emotion towards the event, but just hearing about it, and later seeing the pictures that accompanied the Associated Press Article has left me feeling a bit hollow. I can only assume that this is because I consider Korea as my home, and Namdaemun (남대문) was an important cultural treasure.
     Unfortunatly the only pictures I ever took of the gate was on a cell phone, before I purchased my digital camera. Even more unfortanatly I was never able to transfer the pictures from the phone onto my computer, and are now gone for good. This has just given me the conviction to always carry my charged camera, and to take pictures of everywhere that I go.

Ringing in the New Year

     Happy 2008, everyone! The end of 2007 was fairly eventful for me. On the 15th Jungwon and I had an action packed day. It started off with ring shopping at Insadong and Chungro 3Ga. This was followed up by some coffee at the Insadong Starbucks, and then meeting Sarah and Michael. The four of us then went to a ceramics party that Jungwon's friend was catering, and then on to some fancy building back on Chungro 3Ga that had a fancy sky lounge.
     During the ring shopping Jungwon and I started at an artsy jewelry shop in Insadong. They had some lovely rings, but Jungwon wanted to check out the well known jewelry shops along Chungro 3Ga. So we walked there and I immediately didn't like the shops. Imagine a room full of greasy men that could very well be used car salesmen only instead of trying to sell fenderless Pintos, they're tying to pass along cheaply stamped out gold foil rings. It was obvious we weren't going to find anything there.
     So Jungwon and I meandered around, and we broached some cultural differences that we hadn't fully noticed before. I had to explain that engagement rings are for the woman, and that they are typically worn on the finger along with the marriage band. Jungwon explained that I should have a ring too (I'm not sure if this is a Korean thing, or a Jungwon thing), and with her bashfulness of her hands, they may very well be the only rings we buy.
     We also decided that we both really liked one of the specific designs back at the first shop in Insadong. We soon found ourselves back in the shop being measured and jittery with excitement.
     The rings are two tone, white and pink gold. There are four stones set along either edge (see the pictures) of each ring. The gold is unfortunately rather soft (as gold should be), and Jungwon insisted on cubic instead of real diamonds. "Can you tell the difference?" She asked. I, of course, had to admit that I couldn't. The delivery from the workshop was delayed due to the Christmas orders, but we finally picked them up on the 29th. Unfortunatly my ring was a bit larger than I was confortable with. I could just imagine it slipping off if I was to ever go swimming. So Monday I returned to the shop to get it resized, and I'm hoping it will be ready sometime in the next few days.
     Still, Jungwon and I consider ourselves officially engaged. There aren't any dates set, and I'm not sure anything will happen anytime in the next year. Just rest assured that when the weddings bells do ring, they will probably ring twice, once for each homeland so don't be afraid that you'll be missing anything.

RingShopping

Sarah and Mike Last Fling

rings

One Year

     Today is our one year anniversary!
     That is all.

Where to begin?

     It's been a long month. Dad has come and gone from Korea, Jungwon and I went to Namsan, and of course there was Halloween at the school. I'll keep the text short, and let the pictures do the talking.

Namsan	Halloween	Dad