tales from Korea

The three week long winter camp is nearly at an end. It went by pretty quickly, a lot of feelings about the success of the camp I’ll keep firmly in my head and off the Internet. But, I can always talk about the great things that happened, and the greatest thing for me was my brilliant class. Each class was expected to have between 8-10 students, mine had 8 originally but two dropped out on the first day leaving me with a tidy six. The class bonded together very quickly – Three of the students are from the same school, two other girls are both aspiring artists with similar interests and took a liking to each other on the first day. The last boy kinda forced himself to fit in, I’m sure you can tell from the photo above which one he is.

Quotes

Some of my favourite quotes and things that happened during the camp:

“Teacher, don’t Vikings still exist?”
“Yes, that’s one reason I came to Korea, to escape the murder and pillage”.
“Ahh really teacher? Wow… like the pirates I read about in the news”.
“Young Mu – I’m joking! The Vikings were around about 1000 years ago!”

When writing about the movie Saving Private Ryan, one student wrote the directors name as Steven Smallbug.

“Teacher I love you, and I love your fashion”.

One of the students wrote ‘Paul is legend’ on the board.

“Teacher, are there blacks in Ireland?”

“Teacher – I know about RIA!”
“I think you mean IRA.”

When acting out a performance, one girl shouted at her ‘boyfriend’ [pointing at another girl] “You sleep?! You sleep?!”.

“Students, listen up, on a scale of one to ten, where would you rate this lesson?” [not my lesson!]

“0″, “-10″, “Boring”, ”1″, “Can’t rate – too horrible”, “바보”.

Give me 5 new years resolutions, one student is obsessed with GG:
1. Meet Girls Generation.
2. Hug Girls Generation.
3. Kiss Girls Generation.
4. Shake hands with Girls Generation.
5. Marry Girls Generation.

[Maybe more if I can remember...]

The camps end: The performance

On the last day of the camp is the ‘performance’ the students have been working on for 20 minutes a day. Three weeks to prepare something may sound like a lot but it really isn’t. I like my classes ambition, though. They chose to do something a little different, they wanted to do something Irish, since that’s where their teacher’s from. After showing a few scary videos of Irish dancing and Michael Flatly, we found a Ceili dance that’s relatively easy to perform. At this stage, they have it down pretty well. Well, they have the movement and pace of the dance, the footwork is more like skipping but still, I’m impressed. I’ll upload the video of the performance after Friday.

Update: The performance video.

They won first place!

In some ways it almost makes me sad to think of going back to the 28-35 sized classrooms in my own school when the new semester starts. The noise and discipline problems, seeing them once a week – you can’t really build any sort of relationship with the students. I got to know these six students better in this short time then any of the students in my own school. Hopefully I can change that a little when I go back for next semester.

You’ll be spoilt for choice when shopping in Korea, that is, as long as your size is pretty small and you have a similar build to a Korean. For men, I think it may be a little easier as some Korean men can be pretty big – comparable to a normal western man. But for everyone else, having a slightly oversized romp, being extra tall or having a wide chest can mean giving up on high street shopping and going instead for some specialist shopping in Itaewon.

I’m 178cm, pretty normal, I’m not a very big guy, but have quite wide shoulders and a wide chest – I am XL everywhere in Korea, and at that the XL barely fits. By the way, they don’t really have the American style XXL XXXL type sizes in Korean stores – XL is the biggest. For top sizes, I look for the Korean “105″ which is generally the biggest size, and it fits me just about. Pants, jeans ect are a little easier, you can get them pretty easily up to 36″ waist – but most of them have a fixed length (Or they just say ‘normal’ or ‘longer’). If you’re a rather tall fellow – you’ll probably have to head off to Itaewon. I know quite a few westerners who don’t really get any clothes in Korea, they have to haul it all from their home country.

When I go shopping for clothes, I have a quick checklist which goes from the most important (Practicality) to the least important (Style). Pretty much everything I buy has to fulfil these criteria, but if one point weights heavily above the point below it, I may still get it. For example, if something was really damn comfortable, even if it was expensive, I’d probably get it. This may all sound a bit pretentious or something, but really it’s just my priority when buying clothes. Like most men, I couldn’t care, but I still have the inbuilt strict money sense from being a student for so long. Here’s the list:

• Practicality
• An item should have a purpose and be build well for that purpose, it should be practical and useful.
• Comfort
• It should be comfortable to wear and not cause any pain even with extended use*.
• Cost
• It should be reasonably priced – Build quality and materials equal to a fair price**.
• Style
• It should look good, and not just be made for a current fashion trend but be good for a while.

* This is why high heels fail the test (Obviously for girls!).
** Most designer labels you’re paying for the brand over the quality of the product hence that’s why i don’t buy any.

Yeah, you all know how anal I am.

The three shops I’m going to recommend which provide what I need with those requirements are Giordano, UNIQLO and Basic House. By the way, I’m not being sponsored, this is just my opinion.

Giordano is great for casual clothing, I like their simple but attractive styles. Their jumpers are neat: Round necks and hoodies, in a variety of colours so you can easily match to taste. They have some really high quality shirts too; a little pricey mind, but they’re really nice. I do wear some of the shirts for school, and none have ever shrunk in the wash. I’ve never bought any pants here, but I did buy a very nice long jacket that was on sale (-40%) because it was last seasons fashion.

UNIQLO is one of all my all round favourite shops – It’s actually a Japanese company. Check out their pants and jeans – they usually have some formal ones good for school and some casual ones good for outside school. They regularly run sale events and you can usually pick up a genuine bargain there. I’ve bought jumpers for school, great underwear, Thermal pants, Jeans and other things there. Very good prices for the quality, I’ve generally found. There is a huge UNIQLO in the 명동 (Myeongdong) shopping area.

Basic House is another good all rounder. They have a lot of clothes that are good for school wearing – cotton pants, ‘teacher’ style jumpers and a lot of decent shirts. I’ve found the quality to be a bit hit and miss, but it’s still a shop worth checking out. Prices are a bit odd too – Some things are very well priced while others seem arbitrarily high. Sometimes they have very fashionable clothes in one section and in the other they have very basic and generic universal styles.

There are a few other places worth checking out, but these three seem to be the best for western male teachers buying clothes in Korea, in my opinion.

During one meeting last year we were informed by one of the SMOE coordinators that the Gangdong district was going to make additional afternoon classes entitled “Arts and Sports”, and took the names of teachers that may be interested. When i though of the title, the first thing that jumped into my head was photography. “Hey there’s something I know about, it’s an art… I can teach that, right?”. Quite a few teachers signed up, each with their own ideas: Music, knitting, modelling, painting, etc (I didn’t see anyone offering to teach a sport). A few weeks went by and the title seemed to have changed to “Arts and Crafts camp”, it seemed that these extra classes were a first for the Gangdong area and they were altering the purpose of the classes as needed. Each school advertised the classes… but not surprisingly, numbers were low. After all, students have to go to the winter camp, most of them probably go to hagwons (Private learning institutes) and aren’t too enthusiastic about signing up for voluntary extra classes. My school seemed to fair better – with my co-teachers advertising the class, 4 students signed up.

We heard finally, the Gangdong office had decided that classes must have over 5 students to proceed – the final numbers came in, my class was the only one with over 5 students; in fact I was pleased to see that 7 had signed up – 3 students from other schools as well. I felt sorry for the other teachers, some classes had zero students. I feel it more a case of the schools doing a bad job of advertising the classes rather then the subject of the classes themselves. The classes were laid out as 3 classes per day, starting at 2pm, for 5 days (One week essentially – 15 classes in total). I made an overview of what the teaching schedule was like but it was a little stretched, to say the least. What should I do for 15 classes? It seemed a bit much. It ended up changing to 10 classes, which was great, so I decided to do them back to back and have it from 2pm – 3:30pm for the Monday to Friday.

I spent a while preparing for the lessons… Photography, what was I thinking? These are 1st and 2nd grade middle grade students (14 and 15 year old), can they handle this? I mean seriously, photography has some pretty dynamic scientific components with some very specific and uncommon vocabulary. How can I dumb it down though, and then expect them to take good photographs? I decided to just put in the essential information without dumbing it down and all, and though that real life demoing might peak their interest enough to try and remember [and use] the information. The schedule was set for the week, Monday and Tuesday would be classroom based – powerpoints, the history of Photography, the uses, etc, all the way into how photography works – how to take a good picture. Wednesday was half based in the classroom, the first part was just about composition – I tried to emphasise the importance. The second half of the class was them running around the school taking photographs of each other, trying to apply the information they learned during the last two days.

When the classes started, I actually only had 6 students, one had dropped out due to sickness. It was more a little more convenient for making teams though, and I easily divided them into three pairs. I informed them of a competition that would take up all day Thursday in which we would go outside and shoot for the whole 1 and a half hour, the place was Garden5, just across the road from my school. On Friday we would be choosing and editing the photographs using Photoshop, their choices would be submitted and I would pick the winning team there and then. Friday was a day for criticism too – I explained how to give and take criticism, and how important it is in photography.

The competition:

I explained the students must submit a final 5 photographs, based on these requirements:

• Photograph One:
• Portrait, shallow depth of field.
• Photograph Two:
• Theme is “Circles”.
• Photograph Three:
• A building, deep depth of field.
• Photograph Four:
• Theme is “Moving people”.
• Photograph Five:
• A photograph of your choice.

Here are a few images of the students when we went out shooting on the competition day.

Some of the students creativity was just inspirational, I felt like I really got them thinking about how to use their own imagination and skill to try and capture something a normal person would never have thought to look at that way. Here are the images taken by the winning team:

I have to say, the class was an absolute success and I really enjoyed teaching it. I’ve never taught anybody photography before, I still have a lot to learn myself, but to get the elementary stuff across was still really useful for these aspiring students. It was such a good feeling to see them inspired, being creative, having fun and following me around like my own little photo posse, armed with SLRs slung over their shoulders.

The end of a year and start of a new one, usually things go out quietly… One year rolls into another one, you can’t tell the difference and almost forget that it happens until you sign something and write the year date wrong. More has happened in the last 10 days then has really happened in the rest of 2009. My brother and his girlfriend had a baby, just a few days before Christmas. Jayeon and I announced our engagement, and just a day after, Jessie, the family dog was taken ill and had to be put down.

A few days of absolute joy, surprise, laughing and cheering as well as inevitability, incredible sadness and loneliness.

Jayeon and I haven’t made any dates yet, but it’s likely we’ll be married here in the summer of 2010. We won’t have anything high-key, you know us.

I want to congratulate Mark and Lindsay again, and wish the best for them and their baby.

I will miss my dog, terribly; I wrote a small document (13.3MB) with some memories of her.

Looking forward to this year… So many great things planned.

Special meals are worth special trips. This particular trip was to the East coast of Korea, outside of Seoul in the Gyeonggi-do region close to the ever-growing city of Incheon. There is an area famous not just for its delicious shellfish, but also the manner in which you can get it: Unlimited and grilled on a BBQ. You wouldn’t think it was possible to get unlimited shellfish, this type of food is usually mighty expensive, but as we got to the main strip with the restaurants it started to make sense why it was being offered. The reputation of this particular area brings a lot of people over, and that means more restaurants setting up – competition is rife and they’ll go to great lengths to get your into their place.

Coming into the town there is a man, or a lady, standing outside each establishment trying to flag cars down and convince them to try their place over their neighbours’. Luckily for us, the choice had been made already as Jayeon’s mum had picked out a place that was recommended online. We parked and headed upstairs; the place was very simple, wooden tables with a hole cut out for the bucket of hot coals, plastic chairs and no décor on the walls. The staff handed us two rather unexpected (to me anyway) tools – Pairs of gloves and a large blue plastic bucket. What exactly am I suppose to do with these? I hope I don’t have to pick my meal out of a fish tank. Luckily that was not that case. The gloves are for handling the shells and the bucket for throwing them into.

We tucked in to a load of different shellfish, some huge, some tiny. Some were salty, some were meaty, some had little taste and some too much. It was an interesting experience; again something Korea does well – making a shellfish meal a simple but delicious and no-frills experience. After we had stuffed ourselves silly, we took a walk down the harbour and market area, and I got too see the slightly darker side of this district. There was a pier lined with Spartan, vinyl cabins with smoke chimneys occupied by older independent fish merchants. There was a mark of desperation on many of their faces. Some chopped, piled and hacked all manner of fish and shells in a kind of solemn contemplation. We passed one woman who proclaimed she has had no sales that day, and begged to buy something. Jayeon’s mom paid 5000 won for some Oysters, she took her measuring cup and filled it to the brim, but continued to stack the overflowing cup and eventually poured it into the plastic bag. Her hands were scarred, worn, with thin fingers and blistered fingertips. She asked me to call her 할머니 (grandmother). The chimneys continued to bellow out an oaky scented smoke, which clung to our clothes for the rest of the day, constantly reminding me of the seeming dichotomy still relevant in Korea today – the division of the hidden traditional ways and the in your face modern capitalism.

The Korean market for phones is notoriously locked in. This seems to be the common viewpoint from the west, and one to a certain degree I agree with. From a Korean perspective, they’re simply proud of their domestic electronic giants and that by supporting their own market it will ultimately benefit their economy. I can’t really see how this can still be a worthy argument, especially considering that Samsung and LG are the second and third largest phone manufactures in the world. The number one is still Nokia, of course, but according to some Koreans I’ve talked to “Nokia came to Korea but just totally failed, no one was interested in their products”. I’m a bit sceptical of this, but no matter. Then the rumours of the iPhone came along, a popular Smartphone in the U.S. and Europe, it picked up the nickname ‘Next months phone’ because it has been constantly delayed for pretty much the last few years. Korean law has some nice regulations protecting the domestic market, but in fairness the government seems to be taking steps to loosen these regulations. When the iPhone passed the regulations just two months before, KT picked up the bandwagon and released the phone here just a few days ago. This is even after a release in China last year! The lone company who released it is KT (Korean telecom) and in my opinion, they made some smart choices about the hurried release. They could have accepted the Korean foreign phone failure attitude and just have directed the iPhone at a very niche market where they could have charged outlandish monthly charges they this segment would be willing to pay. But they released the phone with a heavy subsidy and several different pricing options marketed at a broader audience. The one ‘catch’ per-se, is the 24-month contract.

I never would have picked up an expensive Smartphone back home, for one simple reason: The chances of it being stolen are probably quite high. In Korea, this type of theft is extremely uncommon – most people have nice phones and with most phones being CDMA with no SIM card, stolen phones are essentially useless.

The iPhone cost W396,000 ($346) upfront with a W45,000 ($39) a month contract, this was my choice.

The slew of extremely useful features makes it for me, very much worth the money. I’m a happy man.

The first time at having a chance to visit a large comic convention came up today and I couldn’t resist jumping at the opportunity to head over and check it out. It was well worth going to; many people showed up in magnificent costumes and the convention itself, whilst being amateur, had a whole lot of talented artists displaying their goods. I would of liked to support the comic creators but of course the comics are in Korean.

Here is a selection of photographs from the convention:

Update: The name of the cafe has been changed to “My Attic – Homemade Sandwiches”. She told us many people said the title doesn’t make sense so she changed it. I also offered to help correct any English mistakes, she was happy!

Jayeon said to me once, “Ahh you’ll never find any sandwiches in Korea, what are you gonna’ do?”, “I’ll survive… I guess”. I do love a nice sandwich, they were pretty much my staple food back home, but Korean food is great so I wasn’t too concerned about not being able to eat any in Korea. Turns out of course, we’re living in Bundang – an area considered to be very posh and upmarket. This is quite the case, especially in the next town to Sunae, called Jongja, there is a long street which has loads of European terraced styled restaurants, sandwich bars and cafes. The prices of sandwiches are generally pretty steep though, so I never bothered looking too hard. But a little while ago, a new place opened right beside our building in Sunae. Its name in English reads “Little My’s Attic”. I was wondering first, was it supposed to be “My Little Attic?” Or maybe her name is ‘My’ and so it was suppose to be “My’s Little Attic?” I still don’t really know. But the name is not so important, the food on the other hand, is!

We instantly liked the style and décor of the place – bench style tables with assorted and unmatched chairs, hand drawn black line sketches on the walls. Creeper plants on the roof and ceiling. It’s a comfortable and well-put together little place, so we tried it one morning for breakfast. It’s now turned out to be our morning breakfast place every weekend.

When Jayeon and I order something we always order two different things and then usually split the food 50/50, sometimes we even prefer each other’s food and swap it. It’s a fairly normal Korean thing to order something for yourself but it’s rarely just for ‘you’. The first time we ordered, we got the “My’s Club” – a cold sandwich and a hot one called the “Philly steak”. They were so damn delicious; not just a good attempt from a Korean place to recreate a sandwich, but it beats many places I bought sandwiches back in Ireland. When you order a sandwich you can also get a drink – Iced tea, Iced coffee (Or hot coffee) or a soft drink for an extra W1,500. This means the total cost for a sandwich and drink is about W10,000 (About 9 dollars). Yes, that’s expensive food for Korea, but let me tell you – it’s really worth it. We would also recommend the “Manhattan”, another great sandwich.

So it’s possible to still have the occasional western food that is really good, even better that you can find an indie cafe like this and not have to rely on American sandwich chains. Go Korea!

This is a video of what a Korean Norae (Song 노래) bang (room 방) looks and sounds like. The Korean song room is a much loved past time, I took a video a little while back but never managed to post about it, so here ya go. I’m not singing here at all… I’m so bad compared to Jayeon and her family who all seem to be naturally good singers. Stars: Jayeon, her mom and Myung-gi – her brother.

I never really knew much about what Korean music was like before I met Jayeon. She introduced me to one artist, Yang Bang Ean. The man himself is almost unheard of in Korea, but he had a turbulent upbringing and his talent ended up shining more so in Japan where he still probably has more fans then in Korea. His father was from Jeju Island and his mother was from North Korea – he was a North Korean citizen during much of his childhood before leaving the régime and moving to Japan. He lived most of his early life there before claiming his South Korean heritage and getting citizenship, soon after he moved back to live and work as a full time composer.

The first time I heard his music, I knew it was something extraordinary. How this guy is not more famous is an absolute tragedy, and at the same time a wonderful gift. A gift in the sense that he’s not so famous that you can’t get near him, and if he was discovered mainstream commercial interests may push his musical style in a different direction. I like him just the way he is. Jayeon and I attended his Evolution 2009 10th anniversary concert in Sejong Grand Theatre just last week. Jayeon, being part of the official fan club claimed VIP tickets at a very reasonable discount. We sat in the second row from the front, barely a few meters from the grand piano in which he took his place for most of the show. The show itself was pretty wonderful, two of my favourite songs were played. I sat back and fixated on the music, shivers running down my back and down my arms, my neck stiff in concentration. I think most many people were really enjoying the show, but the latter half did lose momentum. Many people including myself were disappointed in the heavy overplay of his new album which was just released the week before. I guess that’s to be expected, but the lack of tracks from my favourite album Pan-O-Rama was pretty disheartening.

After the concert, and after most people left, he walked down from the front-tiered steps into the main lobby to greet the 50 or so fans that stuck the wait after the show to see if he’d appear. Immediately he was embraced in a locking hug from an enthusiastic young Japanese woman, followed by another girl who lunged at him with a large box of Krispy Kreme donuts. He seemed a little overwhelmed by all the attention, and tried to get out of there pretty fast. A quick pat on the head of his Japanese fans was enough to make them swoon. I decided to get in there and say something before he managed to get out the back door. Lunging somewhat between people I touched his shoulder, he turned around and I think looked a little startled at a westerner being there, but, we shook hands. I said, rather simply “Thank you very much”, and he repeated the sentiment back to me. I was thinking, what short sentences might be appropriate, and what can he understand, so I blurted out the most common short thing to say. I was slightly humbled by the experience.

His music, I’m not enough of an expert to start writing too much about what exactly the rhythms, flows and nuances of each of his albums are, but let’s say his music is quite different throughout each album but still keeps a consistent, familiar sound. Here are a few tracks to listen to, they’ll do all the necessary talking – I hope you enjoy.

Just remember, don’t spread the word too much, I want to be able to shake his hand again.

Yang Bang Ean – Flowers of K / Yang Bang Ean – Mint Academy / Yang Bang Ean – Dream Railroad