Alice In Wonderland Day

One day, I walked into my office and it was decorated like this:

and I was told I must leave my office. It was used for a photo session with the kids. I have no idea what this was about, my only clue is that the front office had a sign that said (phonetically) in Korean: Alice in Wonderland Day!

1 Year Story

On Saturday Amir and I went to a one-year-old's birthday party. In the States, this would mean cake at the baby's house and a few pictures taken by Grandma. In Korea, it's an Event.

The party was held on the top floor of a department store that rents out for events. The decor included marble, chandeliers, and gold wallpaper. Because babies love glamour! Amir and I stumbled towards various attendants until someone led us to the correct room and slapped a numbered sticker on our hand.

The one-year-old birthday party was a lot like the Korean wedding we went to in that there was a massive buffet. Unfortunately we already gorged ourselves on homemade falafel that day, but I managed to eat some fresh fruit. After gnoshing for a while, it was time for the slide show! There was a professional emcee narrating the events of Da Eun's life. She was so cute!

Then the baby came out in a tiny white wedding dress with her mom and dad. She had to choose from a box of items, each one representing a future path. There was a gavel for justice, a pencil for scholarship, a wallet for money...anyway, she chose the microphone, which means she will have talent! Yay! Then her parents walked her around the room, mic in hand.

Then the emcee started calling out numbers from the stickers we had on our hands. The people with the special numbers got a present! Amir didn't have a winning number, but they gave him a baby spoon and fork set because he's a foreigner.

We were pretty happy with that!

The whole thing lasted about an hour and a half, roughly the same as a Korean wedding. Also probably the longest amount of time Da Eun could go without crying, since she's a baby and everything.

Directions to the Big Alpha in Namdaemun Market

I recently searched very hard to find magnetic tape which I could attach to the back of my teaching materials in order to stick them to the whiteboard. After I finally found some at Office Max and brought it to school, I realized our whiteboards aren't magnetic. I didn't even know such a thing existed.

Anyway,I realized I had to buy my own magnetic whiteboard, and since my local 4-story daiso didn't carry them I was forced to journey to the alpha in namdaemun.

I googled "directions to Alpha namdaemun" and the first set of directions were from the local stitch n' bitch. Second result was a reference to the directions from the first site. Third result was a mormon blogger who explained that those directions are totally useless. The fourth result was Fat Girl in Seoul, who gave pretty good directions but counted the streets in a kind of bizarre way. So here's my take on how to get there:

Go out exit 5 of Hoehyeon station and go basically straight, the street will angle slightly right and you just follow that angle. It will be pretty obvious you are in the market, because there will be lots of decorations overhanging the street and no cars, plus tons of street food. Walk past 5 alleys/streets on your lefthand side. (I'm counting anything you could walk down as an alley). The sixth turn on your left will be the correct street. You will see this on your left:

And this on your right:

Walk down this street, and you will see a huge yellow sign on your right. That's the alpha!

Open until 8:00 every day except Sunday!

The selection is pretty good, but the focus is definitely on office supplies and not on children's toys or stationary. Also, there weren't earring backs, which I was really disappointed about.

Anyway, there is apparently no such thing as a small magnet board, but there is an option to buy a giant black magnet (90 cm by 60 cm) and foam board, and then glue the two together! So yeah, I made my own magnet board. Pretty, pretty crafty!

Faces of Insadong

I live right by Insadong, the traditional center of Seoul. It's really popular with old people and tourists. Protestors and performers love to set up on the main street and raise a ruckus.

There was a group of actors representing each country. This guy is the USA! Yep, that looks about right.

The elderly assert their right to wear Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-style bandanas on their heads.

Yesterday, there was a really intense protest with about a hundred handicapped people all together, and maybe two policemen for every protester. I'm not sure what it was about, although with my knowledge of Korean I ruled out colors, numbers, directions and ordering food. Anyway, there was a lot of yelling, and then a mentally disabled woman started trying to push herself out of her wheelchair and the police were holding her down, which really made everyone upset. I felt like the police weren't doing anything wrong, but just seeing all of the police with their shields and nightsticks controlling a group of disabled people didn't look good. I pushed my way in with the journalists and got some pictures.

Ironically, the person who seemed the most out of control and crazy wasn't handicapped, a policemen, or even associated with the protest. She was just screaming horribly and walking down the street at a normal pace. Weird.

Field trip!

We went on a field trip last Wednesday. As a child, I remember these as being stressful but fun. I still feel the same way about them now. I found out we were going about five minutes before we left. I wasn't told where it was, so I felt really excited as our bus followed the signs to Children's Grand Park!...and disappointed as it turned into a parking lot for a different place immediately afterward. Anyway, that disappointment was short-lived because this was the best. place. for kids. ever. It was basically a warehouse of fun rooms for children, and we spent about 20 minutes in each one.

First we went to the glue and sand picture room, and I helped the kids write their names in English.

James was particularly proud of his shark picture.

Then we went to the sand room, featuring the finest, whitest sand ever. It also had a special place in the middle with a very thin layer of sand and an illuminated floor, so you could draw pictures and see them lit up.

Next came the grass room, which was totally incomprehensible. It involved a lot of doors opening up to show paintings and more doors. Maybe there was some kind of narrative, but it was lost on me. It was a good place for taking pictures of the students, though.

Then we went to a GIANT DRAGON MAZE JUMPING CASTLE!

For many children, this was actually terrifying. (Every child featured in this picture is crying.)

During this trip, I was casually ruminating about how different children are from adults, and how the things that once excited me (like GIANT DRAGON MAZE JUMPING CASTLEs) now make me kind of nauseated. But it all changed in the Dinosaur Digging Room!

The room was covered in the same fine white sand as we saw before, but beneath that sand were hundreds of dinosaur bones! The kids all got paintbrushes to work to uncover the dinosaurs. This brought back memories of all sorts for me, of digging holes to China and our second grade sleep-away field trip to dig up "dinosaur fossils." No one explicitly told us that the fossils were fake, and at the time I accepted my teachers at their word. Paleontologists needed the help of a schoolbus full of rowdy second-graders to find important dinosaur fossils, and I was there to help. I'm not sure at exactly what age I realized this was staged, but I was definitely in the double digits.

Seeing the kids uncover the dinosaurs, I started to get really curious. What kind of dinosaurs are hidden in this room? Are they placed at random, or if we uncovered it all would we see the skeletons in action poses, maybe fighting each other? I set to work with the 7-year-olds. I saw the tour guide kicking sand back over the dinosaur bones, and I glared at her.

We uncovered a head!

It was, necessarily, all downhill from there. All I had to teach in the afternoon was gym, which was about all the students could focus on, anyway. In brief, it was stressful, but fun.

A Comedy of Errors

Here’s an episode that would be remarkably annoying at home, but in my life here constitutes just another day:

I needed to go to a Citibank branch to send an international wire transfer to my home bank account. I googled “Citibank Seoul”, and found an address in Korean on maps not too far from my work. It said that they closed at 4:30, so right after work (4:00 PM) I hopped in a cab and gave the driver the address.

The taxi stopped where the building was supposed to be at about 4:08, and I rushed in only to realize that there was no security guard or directory of offices in this 40-story building. The only thing in the entryway was a touchpad where you write the floor you want to go to, and the screen shows a diagram that indicates which elevator you should take. Luckily, I had written the phone number of Citibank in my journal.

I’m a little shy to call in Korean, so I went outside and attacked random strangers by shouting “hello!” until someone was compliant enough to make a call for me. He told me that Citibank was on the eighth floor.

I went to the eighth floor, and Citibank clearly wasn’t there. I went to some ladies at another financial office, who didn’t have a building directory, so they called Citibank for me too. It turns out it was the 22nd floor. In Korean, 22nd sounds nothing like 8th. The first guy misheard in a big way.

I took the elevator up, and walked into the Citibank office. When I requested to transfer money home, the whole staff giggled. This is Citibank FINANCIAL, harharhar! I pretty much forced a woman completely fluent in English to write down an English help number for me. She did, and I left.

When I called the help line, there was no English option. Then I called the Korean Foreign Help line (02-1330!) and got the English number for Citibank from them.

I talked to the people on the Citibank English help line, and they told me I could send money home using online banking! However, I hadn’t logged in for a year (because multiple tellers told me you couldn’t make international transfers online) so I would have to come into a branch to renew my username and password. But every branch in the city closes at 4:00. I would have to go before work at 9:00.

The next morning, Amir took me to the real Citibank branch by my work. He dropped me at the station, and it was supposed to be 30-40 meters from exit 2. It wasn’t. I called the branch, and they said it was “behind the bakery”. There was nothing behind that bakery. I checked 3-4 times before changing my approach. I was once again yelling at every stranger I saw (in Korean) “Where is Citibank?” By “behind the baker”, they meant “on the same road as the bakery.” Uhh, thanks.

I got there, and got a new username and password. Then realized I can’t log on with a Macintosh computer, so I went to the teacher’s office to use the computer for personal business during work hours, because it was really getting down to the wire (haha) for my student loan due date. I had to install a bunch of protective software in Korean, which was basically me randomly clicking on buttons until I hit the magic combination. Then my login wouldn’t work, so I had to call the CitiBank English helpline again. It turns out they used my old Alien Registration Card number to set up my account, so they had to call the bank where I started my account to get that number. After I logged in, I had to call back because international wire transfers weren’t showing up as an option in the “Wire Transfers” section of the website. You actually have to click on “Global Business Center.” Of course.

BUT THEN I transferred the money! Hurray! And the exchange rate was favorable. The End.

The Unpopular Teacher

It has been hard to come to terms with it. Maybe my first clue was when I sashayed into a classroom full of 3-year-olds for the first time, smiled and said “Good morning!” A little girl looked up at me and screamed with what can only be described as pure horror. And that was just the beginning. Over the last three weeks it has been made clear to me that I am the most unpopular teacher.

When other teachers walk into the school in the morning, the children run up to them to hug them and greet them. When I come in, the kids by the door struggle to put on their school shoes faster to avoid any interaction whatsoever. Children seem to wander somewhat freely from room to room, with the exception of the English Room. The bravest kids will run to my window, scream “Hello!” and run away. This is a sign of daring behavior, a devil-may-care attitude that causes the rest of the class to giggle nervously every time the feat is performed.

There is an outgoing and somewhat oblivious 3-year-old that comes in on occasion and chats to herself in Korean while smearing her spit all over everything. “Yes, that’s a lion! Please don’t lick, hajima….jinja….okay, it’s yummy? Okay, yummy lion! L-l-lion!” I look forward to these visits.

I know I’m scary. I speak almost only English in class, and I’m strange looking. Compared to a bunch of beautiful Korean girls speaking to the kids in their native language, it’s no wonder there’s a stigma attached to my presence.

I didn’t care much, until I saw the TaeKwonDo teacher. He was in the gym with my favorite class, playing some kind of parachute game with the kids. Their faces were literally aglow with excitement and sheer happiness. Kids, why don’t you smile that way when you’re conjugating ‘to have’? Was my ‘who has the red marker’ game not equally great?

They’re talking and joking with him in the hallway. They’re fighting each other for his attention. Hey, there’s an adult down the hall who will listen to your jokes! And if you ask me if I’ll eat a dragon, I’ll say “yes!” That cracks you up, remember? Marina Teacher is cool, too!

As memories of popularity from my old job wear off, so does my enthusiasm for extracurricular interaction. I don’t bother the kids with simple questions or comments outside of class. If a kid screams at my door, I just offer a (condescending) smile and half-wave. I march into classrooms prepared to talk about ‘was’ and ‘is’, and I will take no nonsense. Including answering the favorite silly question of the five-year-olds, “Do you like hammer?” That’s. Not. Funny. We are here to learn the English. Now settle down and listen up. The unpopular teacher is talking.