Korea Day 2

It's now Saturday morning and we went for breakfast with our leader from Camp Korea. We went to an American style coffee place (like Starbuck's) and had coffee and a bagel. We had orientation day 1 at Korea University where we sat in a classroom and learned half of what we needed to know to teach. There are 10 of us who are teaching together at Korea University.

We teach 5 classes each day, two in the morning before lunch and three in the afternoon. In the morning we teach 'intensive ESL' where we introduce new vocabulary and practise reading, talking, and writing in English. The second class is reading circle where we all get a copy of a book and read together. I am not sure what we will be reading as we will get the books in a few days. During lunch, we take the students to the caf and we all get the same meal. We get a few minutes to play outside before returning to work. Apparently, Korean parents do not send their children to camp to play, they want only work to be done. In the afternoon, we have three classes of 'western school', which is supposed to be like a typical classroom in Canada. The third class is also vocabulary and practising English skills. The fourth class is improving the students abilities to speak in front of a group. The last class is working on debates. On the last class, the parents will come in and we will run a debate in our class. We arrive at work at 8:40am and the first class starts at 9:30. Classes are 50 minutes long with a 10 minute break at the end. We get to leave the class at break time and have a washroom break or a rest. Each class has a camp counselor who watches students during the breaks, helps at lunch and gets the students on the buses at the end of the day. My C.C. is Ashley and she is very sweet and hard working. During classes, she gets materials organized and helps with office work. We both write a small report (1 or 2 sentences) for each student at the end of the day. This goes home to the parents each night. Each class has 12 students.

At the end of orientation day 1, we had to move to our new accommodations. They are much nicer than the first night accommodations! We have our own bathroom, desk, closet, shelves and bed. The bed is a full single bed, the bed the first night was about one-half of a regular single bed. Koreans also seem to like really hard mattresses. After settling in, we met for dinner. We had Korean BBQ which I had never had before. It was delicious. You sit at a table with an element, like a coleman stove in it and they put a grill on this and bring you meat, onions, and garlic to cook. You throw it all on the grill and cook it. Above the grill, there is a vent to suck up the smoke and some of the heat. You get lettuce, onions in sauce, pickled white radishes and sauces to go with it. There is also kimchi, which consists of little side dishes which are served at the table and shared by everyone. An example is different vegetables like cabbage or bok choi in red chili sauce. This is the kick that goes with the meal. It is served on almost anything. Koreans enjoy very spicy food! You can see the grils and the stainless steel vents in the following pictures

After dinner we went to a nice little bar and had beer. The beer is quite light here but it is pretty cheap. Korean beer, that is, foreign beer is quite expensive ($6 - 12). It was great fun as they brought us a mini-keg (I called it an urn) with glasses. This cost about $15 and gave us each 2 small glasses of beer (there were about 10 of us). We shared about 4 of these. Joann seemed to quite like the beer - she had more than I have ever seen her drink. I think it was because our boss, David (Irish - pouring beer in this photo) teased her about nursing her first beer!