A month and a half in review

Well, this blog is starting to look something like my journal, after every 3 months I write 10 pages trying to catch up on all the things that happened. I'll try to be better!
The time has gone by so fast! September flew by and this month is doing the same. It has been a fun, busy and educational month and a half.
School
It has taken a lot of getting used to and making adjustments, but it is going really well! I love my students more every day and I think they are pretty much adapted to me. At first I think it was really hard for them because Dokcheon has never had a teacher that doesn't speak Korean. My students would come up to me and ask questions are just start talking and all I could say was "Hongul bola" or "I don't know Korean." Because they are so young I don't think they understood that really, as much as I want to understand them, can't do so, they would get frustrated or worse look so sad which made me sad. But we've gotten used to each other now and found different ways of communicating.
One of my favorite things that happens now is something I like to call "da la hey po se oh." This is roughly how you pronounce the phrase "repeat after me" which I use quite frequently in class. Now my students like to find me before and after class and teach me a little bit of Korean. It's so funny because they say the phrase exactly like I do in class and then make me pronounce different words in Korean, usually followed by laughter because I can't say it right!
My third graders still give me a headache most days but even they are getting a little better and the other day they even bombared me with like 30 origami boats and animals. Guess they kinda like me after all. :)
Chuseok
The first week of October Korea celebrated Chuseok, comparable to Korean Thanksgiving. At church there is a girl my age named Hye Sun, she is awesome and she speaks english! We have become pretty good friends and her mom invited me to celebrate Chuseok with them. The Elders also came and it was great! There was so much food, some of it very good, some of it...interesting, but it was cool because it was all traditional dishes. They explained that Chuseok is for remembering ancestors and really when they described different things families do, it was kind of like Memorial Day as well. Later that night Hye Sun told me to come back to watch the light show they do on the beach. I'm glad we went, it was pretty cool and they did a special number with a traditional song and images for the holiday.
Jinju Lantern Festival
A little while ago I went with my friends Katie and Megan to the Lantern Festival in a city called Jinju. It was a lot of fun! Jinju has a gigantic old fortress and was the sight of some important battle against Japan hundreds of years ago. The fortress and museum alone where pretty cool but all the lanterns made it even better! They go all out for this festival, seriously there were probably thousands of lanterns all of the place! Some represented important artifacts, some the different animals for each year, you know year of the dragon type thing, some were promoting diffent places and events. We got there in the afternoon and walked around the fortress for a bit and there were a lot of people but not bad. Once it was dark and the lanterns lit up, the place was nuts! There were soooo many people, it was hard to get anywhere. At one point we had to cross the bridge to get to the side we hadn't been to yet and we held on to each others bags so we wouldn't get seperated. It probably took us 30 minutes to cross the  bridge, and once we got down to the venders it was just as congested. We finally decided to go back and then realized we had a problem.
None of us thought this festival would be such a huge thing with so many people, so we didn't think to reserve a hotel room. We started to walk down the street right along the river/festival and there were tons of hotels...all sold out. Not even the jimjilbangs had room. Needless to say we started to get a little worried. Finally, at the very end of the street there was a big hotel that wanted 160,000 won for a twin bed. We started to think we would just have to find some nice benches and hope it wasn't to cold that night. Not too worry, we had a better idea of going back toward the bus station about 15 minutes from the festival and see if there were hotels there. We finally found one! And it had a bed! I will never complain about any mattress every again, believe me anything is better than wood floor!
The next day we went back to the fortress, it was nice and not many people were there so we got to see some of what we had missed including the museum and a 3D movie about the battle that happened there.
Temple Trip
I finally got to go to the Temple last weekend! I have not been since I left Logan so it was wonderful to be there! It looks a lot like the Temple in Lima, which brought back so many awesome memories! We left Mokpo at 3:30 am and got to Seoul around 9:30ish, I of course was out the entire way! We were able to do to sessions and then we had a little extra time. I was wandering around and found a building behind the temple that said bookstore. I walked in, heard the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and saw the shelves full of Preach my Gospel and scriptures, and no joke, I started to cry! Sometimes I am so sentimental, but I miss working at Deseret Book! Mostly I miss the awesome people I work with, but it felt so good to be in that familiar place! Afterwards, I found out that upstairs they have a family history center so I went and did some work there for about an hour before we left. It was such a great trip and I think next time I will stay overnight and visit a few more places around Seoul while I'm there. Apparently the Temple here has sleeping accomadations which I've never heard of, but I think it's great so maybe I'll try it out next time!
Good Old Mokpo
I really love the city I live in! I thought it was about the same size as Salt Lake City, but I looked it up and actually Mokpo is bigger. Probably not bigger than all of Salt Lake County though. Anyway, Mokpo is not a huge city for Korea, but it has enough to do and it's pretty here. After I get home from school most days I go on a walk to explore what's around and every day I found some new part of town. There are quite a few other english teachers that live here as well so it's nice to get together with them and visit different places. A while ago Katie, Nancy, and I went to Mt. Yuldalson, which is a pretty large mountain in Mokpo. We climbed up to the monument there and took pictures bc the view was pretty, but then we realized you could climb higher. So we did, and so you could againg go higher, so we did. It was so funny bc we kept getting to another stopping place and even though we had not planned on hiking that day we thought we might as well keep going since we were already there! We reached the top right as the sun was setting and it was sooo pretty! We could see the ocean and the whole city backed by mountains. It's moments like that I wish I had a camera that could actually do justice to a scene like that!
Anyway, I have made some great friends here, which also makes all the difference! I love our ward, they are so kind to me, and I got a calling! I get to teach the primary kids songs in enlish! There are not very many of them but they are super cute and I love singing with them! Also, I've been able to help the Elders teach a few people in english and that has been really great!
I think you're probably done reading by now so I will post some pictures! I hope you are well and happy! One of my favorite quotes:"You don't find the happy life, you make it!" Sis. Hinkley Love you!

                                                   This little guy is one of my favorites!

                                                               Cute first graders!

              One of my 6th grade girls that teach me all about Kpop, you know, Gangnam Style!

                     My "darling" 3rd graders that would not uncover their faces for a picture. They are    pretty funny sometimes though!

                                                At the top of Mt. Yuldalson at sunset.

                                               When the second graders steal your iPad

                                            When the first graders steal your iPad

                                Chuseok with the Choi family, Elder Allen and Elder Wixom

 At the lantern festival you could write you wish for the new year and make it part of the animal of your birth year. Year of the dragon baby, here's to hoping this wish comes true! :)

                                               Me, Katie and, Megan at the lantern tunnel

                                                      Huge lantern of a Hanock house

                                                                    Seoul Temple!

 My first grade girls like to draw me pictures that say, Kamille teacher I love you. Pretty much makes my day!

 Just thought this was funny, in a morbid way. I told my 1/2nd graders to draw a picture of them playing in their favorite weather. We have snowy, windy, sunny, and...rainy. But yes if you look closely one of the boys drew people getting hit by lightning in a rainstorm. When I pointed to the skull he just laughed and ran away.

 

The Longest Week of My Life

Hey there!
So this last week was crazy, exciting, exhausting, trying, and about a million other words I won't bore you with. So here is a basic breakdown of what happened after orientation. Oh and I have some pictures but the are on my iPad so I will try to upload them soon!

Wednesday: The day I left orientation and came to Mokpo.
My Principal and Yoon Jong-Il, my mentor teacher, came to pick me up. They were both pretty nice and luckily for me Yoon's english is ok so the hour and a half car ride was not unbearably akward like I thought it might be. We went to the school first. The first typhoon had just been the day before so the school was kindof a mess, trees down and some broken windows, and there were many people cleaning it up. I teach in 2 classrooms, one is sooooo small and they stick 14 first and second graders in there which makes it really hard to play games but I'll just have to make it work. The other room I teach in is bigger so that's nice and it has a whiteboard, which the other one does not. After seeing the rooms Yoon took me to the "office" he and I share. It is the storage room. No joke, it's packed with all the old excercise equipment, desks, instruments cabinets that no one uses anymore. I have a desk, no computer, and a few drawers. At first I felt bad for myself, then I thought whatever it will work, and I realized that I felt worse for Yoon. He is a real teacher but he is the newest and the youngest, he is 26, so it gets the brunt of all the work and apparently the crappy office too. Ironicaly that's also how he got stuck having to help me, poor guy!
Well, after that Yoon took me to my apartment. There is no elevator and luckily I live on the third floor bc my bags were soooo heavy! I felt aweful he wouldn't let me carry them up, but that was really nice of him. He showed me what button to push to turn on hot water and the floor heating and he also labeled every button on my washing machine  in english. The rest of the day he helped me get the internet started, get a phone, and start my alien registration process. He really isn't obligated to help me do any of that so I really appreciated all his help! Later that night we went to dinner with the rest of the staff. Apparently the principal I had met that morning was being transfered to a new school so this was his farewell dinner. The staff are pretty nice, some of them try to speak with me in english which is fun and the rest of them just smile at me.

The Weekend
The next day another typhoon came around so I stayed in my apartment, did lesson plans, scrubbed mold off everything in the kitchen and bathroom and slept, or tried to sleep. When I opened the bag that had my bedding there were only three blankets and two pillows, all of which smelled less than nice, and I thought "where's the bed part?" I know I wouldn't have a mattress but I thought there was supposed to be some sort of pad for support. Nope. So for almost a week I just slept on top of 3 thin blankets and in the morning I could hardly move. Thank goodness for the missionaries!
I found the missionaries, Elder Wixom and Elder Yoon and they were so helpful to me! I met them at a bus stop and they took me to the church and showed me how to get back. Elder Wixom also showed me a store were you can buy a "yo" or bed mat. Holy cow what a huge difference! I went to church on Sunday and the members are very nice! There are quite a few who speak english and translated for me. The asked me to join the choir as they are the musical number for stake conference coming up, and this Saturday they are going to Seoul to go to the Temple! It actually works out awesome bc next Sunday the english speaking singles in Seoul are getting together to watch the devotional with Elder Holland, so I think I will stay overnight so I can go to that.
Anyway, one of the families that invited the missionaries over for dinner also invited me, they made homemade pizza and curry(interesting combo) but it was so good. They taught me how to play a traditional Korean game with four sticks that reminded me a lot of Sorry.  We had a good time and I'm so glad to be able to go to church! Not being able to go for a month was horrible!

School Starts
Monday was the first day of school and before I even made it to my office, a big group of students all gasped and then ran to me and started asking me questions in Korean. I just smiled and said hello, hello, hello, because each of them wanted their chance to say hi. I got them back in their classroom, not sure where the teacher was, and went to my office to get ready for class. During my classes I had them make namecards, and pick english names which they really liked, and I showed them a powerpoint about me. When I said I was from america, in almost every class someone shouted "Obama!" They love him here.
The rest of the week went well. My 1st and 2nd graders are adorable. The can get a little loud but when I hold up the warning card the quiet down bc the want  a sticker on their sticker chart. I love my 5th and 6th grade class! There are only 10 of them and they listen and want to learn english so we have had a good time. And then there's my 3rd and 4th graders. Hmm, what can I say about them? They are crazy! There are almost 30 of them and no matter how many times I try the "no sticker for today" aproach they don't care. Thursday was the worst. I was going to teach them vowels, simple easy, I had games and a video. We did absolutly nothing bc the class was so wild. One of the boys got up on a cupboard and bodyslammed another boy. Yoon went back to stop them and they body slammed him. Meanwhile I was trying to keep the attention of the other students by playing "Boom chicka boom" it didn't work bc it was so loud they couldn't hear what I was saying for them to repeat. So I said sit down. Some of them did and some didn't and we waited for the last five minutes of class to be over.
Ugh. As I told my mom, I was having thoughts of becoming a teacher when i get back. I think I will stick with publishing. Don't get me wrong, besides that one class I really enjoyed this week and I know things will get easier and better as the year goes on. But I don't think I can see myself doing this my whole life! Kudos to you teachers! I get home and I am literally exhausted!

Odds and Ends
So here are just a few interesting, funny things to wrap up this post. As I'm out walking I have more than once felt someone pull my hair. I turn and sure enough someone is touching me, sometimes kids, sometimes adults. Apparently here it is good luck if you touch blonde hair, too bad they don't know it's semi-fake. Well, I hope it brings them luck anyway!
I have never been so nervous to take out my trash! Apparently the garbage system is really complex here and we have to buy a certain color trash bag and not only that but you can't put food waste in that trash bag. Food waste has to go in some big communal trash can, that I have yet to find. Anyway, at orientation more than one person told us to do the trash right bc they get really upset and have even been known to come and throw your trash back at you. Ughh, that seems a little extreme, but ok. So yesterday for the first time I took my trash out very discreetly. I'm still not sure where I am supposed to put it, so I saw a big pile of trash across the street, slinked behind cars, dropped it and walked very quickly away. So far no trash in my face.
Last but not least the worst meal I have ever had in front of me. On Friday we went to lunch and as we sat down Yoon pointed to my soup and told me what it was. I very audibly gasped and all the teachers asked Yoon what was wrong. He was baffled. For any of you who know me, you may no that I don't like dogs, in fact there are some dogs aka ones that pass my knee that I loathe. They scare me, they stink and some of them slobber way too much. I'm sorry to my friends that are dog lovers, but my loathing for dogs hit a new level on Friday when I found out I had eat one. I kid you not. First week of school ends with Dog Soup. I have eaten so nasty things in my travels. But I have rarely wanted to gag like I did looking at that soup. The teachers favorite pass time at lunch is to watch me eat. Almost everyday they clap for me I guess when they feel I picked up something really well with my chopsticks. No pressure right? Anyway, I told Yoon I could not eat this soup. He asked why and I explained dogs are pets to us and that I just really did not want to eat this soup. So he ate it for me. It's a local favorite in Dokcheon, great.

Well, I love you all and hope things back home are great! Have a wonderful week!

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!