A little Seoul trip

Hey there!
Sorry I haven't posted anything in a while. These last few weeks have been crazy busy! Just a little update: Our major TaLK orientation is over(finally!) and now I am at my province orientation until Wednesday. Basically we are practice teaching tomorrow, Tuesday we will visit a school and go on a field trip of some sort, Wednesday my principal and mentor teacher will come to pick me up. They will take me to my school and then my apartment, and then I'm on my own I guess. Maybe I should be more nervous for that but honestly I'm so excited! The orientation has had good info, but I'm ready to be there and teaching and exploring!
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was my little excursion to Seoul. Last weekend TaLK took all the scholars to Seoul to see one of the most popular live shows called Nanta.

 

 The show was really fun! It is about 4 chefs who are trying to get a wedding feast prepared in an hour. They make all sorts of music with the cooking utensils, the dance, do Tae kwon do and actually make korean food. It was pretty impressive! After that my friend Megan and I decided to stay the night and do some exploring. We had a list of museums we wanted to make it too...that didn't really happen, but we found some really awesome places, figured out the subway system on our own, and had some pretty interesting experiences!

We started out by finding a dessert we'd both been wanting to try called binsu. It is shaved ice with red beans, rice cakes and a scoop of ice cream. Sounds gross you say? Wrong. It's so yummy! As you can see these things were gigantic but we almost got through all of it.

This is Seoul(Namsung)Tower. It is at the top of a mountain and we get the most amazing view of Seoul at the very top. Unfortunately it was rainy and foggy the day we went...

but we decided to hike up there anyway. My shoes were soaked so I opted for bare feet, luckily they had a really nice, and beautiful trail.

Finally we made it! Well sort of. We took this picture with Katie and Inez before they went back left and Megan and I decided to keep going all the way to the top. I'm so glad we did!

This was my favorite part of Seoul Tower. All around the fences at the very top there are locks and keychains with messages on them. It is an old tradition that couples climb up and put a lock on together symbolizing that their love is locked in time(I think that's the phrase used on the sign.) Anyway, there were locks there that were pretty old and so many messages, most of them written in Korean, but I just thought that was really cool!

 

Ah yes, and the view was amazing at the very top! Unfortunatly my pictures were not. Here is one I took on the way back down that turned out a little better. When we were at the top I realized that this city is gigantic, which made me all the more excited to explore it!

After quite a while we made it back down and had no idea where we were since we had taken a different path down. But we stumbled into a pretty cool area with lots of fountains and huge rocks with Korean writing. It was very pretty and probably some kind of historic place but I really have no idea. And then we just started walking. I mean we kindof knew where we wanted to get to but we just walked and walked and hoped we were going the right direction.

And we were! This is were I say HA! to all of you that just love the Doniphan Watertower story, I'm better at directions than you think! :) This is Myondong a huge shopping district. By the time we got there it was about 8ish, and we hadn't eaten anything but that binsu. Needless to say we were starving! So what did we do?

Well, we ate the best Korean food I have had so far! We found this restaurant that didn't look like anything special but smelled amazing. It was so fun too! They gave us little aprons, started the burner at our table and poured in chicken bulgogi and I bunch of vegetables and we cooked it. It was so so good! Of course they also brought us some Kimchi, which went untouched, and some pickled radishes. New discovery: I like pickled radishes, who would have guessed?! So I look exhausted in this picture because I was.

Which brings me to this place. Siloam Jimjilbong. This picture doesn't do justice to the freaky display of gnome and animal figures they have out front. Finally after figuring out the subways, and walking, and walking, and walking, around 11pm we wound up here. Here's what I thought it was: a really cheap place were you rent a mat and sleep in the same room as a bunch of other people. Here's what it really is: all of the above but it is also a sauna like place. Boy did I experience some culture shock here. We paid and they gave us our pajamas and pointed us to the women's locker room. We walked in and there were just a lot of naked women walking all over the place. Basically in the basement of these Jimjilbongs they have a bunch of different comunal baths, but to go down you have to completly undress in the locker room and walk down a couple flights of stairs. For them its just normal, for me not so much. I washed off with some wipes and washed my hair in the sink. Many women tapped me and said "Showa" pointing to the stairs. I just smiled and kept washing my hair.

We slept in that day, found some breakfast and bought our train tickets back to Jochiwon and set off to explore for a few more hours. We found this awesome Hanock Village which is like old traditional Korean houses. They are really pretty and interesting to walk around there.

We took another little hike and just took it easy for a while. After that we went to a market, can't remember the name of it, and walked around for a while. It is the biggest outdoor market in Seoul, so it was fun, but that part was a lot like the markets everywhere in Peru, so it wasn't really anything new to me. Around 5pm we boarded our train and slept all the way back to Jochiwon. It was awesome exploring a little part of this huge city!

Big Kimchi?

Ok, last post of the night I promise!
A few of you have asked me if Korea is really called the Big Kimchi. Answer: I have no idea. Probably not. When I was creating this blog I felt like Kamille in Korea was too lame by itself. I got on Facebook on our Orientation page and some guy had posted about how excited he was to come to the Big Kimchi. So in a total lack of creativity I stole it from him. I'm thinking I may have to change this sub-title at some point because try as I may, I just do not like Kimchi.  Hope you all have a wonderful day!

Orientation Pictures

Group 4 and some other group that jumped in the picture. This is the only picutre of our group I can find on the website so far. We are in front of a huge Starbucks in downtown Seoul that is apparently very famous though why...I couldn't tell you.

These girls are awesome! None of us were very impressed with dinner one night so we went out for fried chicken, a very popular dish here. Apparently, Koreans think they invented fried chicken so its best to steer clear of the Colonel Sanders thing:) True story: I guess a previous American teacher really did get in a big arguement with his principal about this very subject. Silly people!

Where I live for now. Korea University Sejong Campus: named for the Emperor who invented Hangul, the Korean writing system.

The Day I Realized Learning Korean Was Not Optional

So a few days ago my friend Megan and I had one of those days were everything just sort of went wrong. We had train tickets to go to Seoul and stay overnight but we ended up being the last of 300 people to do the medical check so we missed our train. We were out a couple Won and a little bummed but there was a big peach festival going on just down from the university we are staying at. We went and walked around for a bit, saw some cool musical group that played electric keytars that shot fire from the ends and got a lot of free peach sample, which were delicious! Festivals are a pretty big part of Korean culture so it was fun going to my first one!


The streets were lined with tents like this all selling different peach products.

While we were there we met up with some other TaLK scholars who said they were going downtown. That's where Megan and I were going as well to get a refund for our return train ticket, so we walked with them. On the way, they all decided to go to a Norebong, which is like a Karaoke bar. Don't get me wrong, I love Karaoke and these places sound like tons of fun...except that people go more for the bar part and less for the singing. Long story short my friend decided she wanted to go for a while before we went to the train station, but by that time we had lost them and only knew which street they turned on. I couldn't just split from her because it was like 8:30 pm and for those of you who know me, I'm not the best with directions.
 So we found the street they turned on. We start looking at all the buildings looking for the one that says Norebong but they are all written in Hangul characters, not letters, which we don't know how to read. Finally we went into a store and I said Norebong while shrugging my shoulders. The man pointed out the window to the building we had just been staring at for a few minutes. I swear those huge neon music notes had not been there before! We both felt pretty dumb. So the first thing we learned about Norebongs is that they are all on the top floor of each building. We climbed five floors and walked in. I don't think either of us had thought of what we were going to say to try to find our group, because when the woman started talking to us in Korean we both looked at eachother like, oh crap. I asked if she spoke english, she didn't , so our conversation went something like this:

Kamille: We are looking(point to eyes) for Americans
Megan: Like us(pointing to both of us)
Lady: blank stare
Kamille(pointing down the hall) Americans singing?
Lady: Ah! Yeah!
We follow her down a hall full of doors. Second thing we learned about Norebongs: It is not a big open Karaoke room, they are individual rooms that your group books, hence all the doors. She opened one to an empty room, turned on the TV and handed me the microphone.
Kamille: No, no sorry. I don't want to sing. Looking for Americans(doing all sorts of weird gestures)
Megan: 10 americans(holding up her fingers)
Lady: blank stare
I hand her the microphone and give her a very sincere look of apology before saying thank you(one of the 2 phrases I know) and leaving.

To make a very long story short we repeated this process at three other Norebongs before I finally said I was not climbing up to another one only to make someone else feel bad for not being able to understand us. I felt so dumb and I think for the first time I realized that this is a pretty serious problem I've got here. At least when I got to Peru I had a pretty good idea of how to speak and understand spanish thanks to my mom, but Korean is completly and totally foreign to me! Oh and just to make the night even better, by the time we decided to stop looking for them we tried to get back to the train station and got lost and then barely got there before the window closed. Also, even though it was late and dark, it was like 95 degrees outside and so humid. I should have taken a picture of us when we got back...it was pretty gross.
So some good that came from a not so great day: I got some really great exercise climbing stairs all night and I resolved when I got home to start learning this language. So far I've got the vowels down and I'm working on the consanants. It's tough, but I am determined to learn it because I am not going to live here for a year trying to communicate like that! Sorry for the long post, always feel free to skip over the boring parts!



First week of Orientation

Sorry I can't get any of the videos to upload, I'll keep working on that. It has been a long week here in Korea. In many ways this orientation process reminds me of being in the MTC, but believe me this is not as awesome as the MTC! This is pretty much the schedule each day. 7:30 breakfast 8:30am-8:00pm classes and our curfew is 11pm. Needless to say we are pretty busy. Luckily the classes are pretty interesting and helpful. So far we have had classes on teaching activities, curriculum, interacting with the staff, korean culture, korean history, just to name a few. We also have fun classes like fan making, painting and tae kwon do.  Here is a picture of my korean painting.

Ok, that's not really mine. That's the one the man teaching gave to us. Here is mine.

Yeah, I'll fit right in with elementary school art class. yikes

Anyway, so the classes are long but good and I'm learning a lot about the culture and history of Korea which is pretty cool. Also, I really am learning a ton about teaching. I kind of thought teaching little kids would be easy but I'm starting to realize there is a big challenge ahead and I'm pretty excited for it!

In front of "G" palace after a great day in Seoul

Opening Ceremony for 9th Generation TaLK Scholars

Hey there! I have quite a bit of catching up to do so I thought I would start with the opening ceremony we had on Tuesday. We are staying on the Korea University Sejong Campus in Jochiwon, so we are about 90 minutes south of Seoul. Tuesday morning we headed up to Seoul to the ministry of Education. They introduced all the Presidents and other important people(honestly that was pretty boring) but then they had an awesome show prepared for us. They wanted to introduce us to Korean culture so first we listened to a cute Korean Children's choir. Then we saw the Pangut. That was really interesting and consisted of four people, one playing a very weird sounding trumpet thing, two playing drums, and one guy who sort of did ribbon dancing with his head. It was really good and captivating to watch but kind of long and said weird trumpet thing got old pretty fast. Ok, then came the good part, the K Tigers. They are a professional teenage Tae kwon do group and they were amazing! I've never seen people jump/kick so high in my life! I'm going to try to post videos of all these things so hopefully it will work so you can see which one you like best!

After the ceremony we went to downtown Seoul and were dropped off at a famous palace that starts with a G but I still can't pronounce it. We broke into teams and began a picture scavenger hunt. They gave us about 11 famous places in downtown Seoul we had to find and take pictures at within about 2 hours. That was also really fun! I don't have any of our group photos but when someone sends me one I will post it on here. It was hilarious because there were about 300 of us in very attractive lime green t shirts wandering around trying to figure out where these places were. Luckily a guy in my group spoke Korean so we were able to get to all the places without getting too lost. It was a long, and extremely hot, but very fun day. A good way to get us all ready for classes!

Hello there! Well, I finally made it! I have been in Korea for almost a whole day now and so far I love it! Packing was terrible(maybe i'll post more about that later) but my flight was great. I was so tired I pretty much slept through all three flights! Real quick recap of yesterday: got off the flight and almost died from how hot and muggy it is here. Met some other TaLK scholars all of whom are very friendly. We took a bus that reminded me of Peruvian buses to our university, and the first thing we did was have dinner...side note: if there is a dish that looks like fried noodles in some sort of red sauce, chances are its dried squid. Not my favorite, but everything else was good. The rest of the night I got checked in, unpacked a little and went back to bed. Today a few of us are going to explore the city after lunch so that will be fun! I'll post more with pictures soon! Bye!

This is 3:00 am at the SLC airport ready to go. Thank goodness for Ty and Sarah who helped me pack and rearrange everything or I would have been in huge trouble!