New things and holiday plans

I realised I haven’t posted anything since kindy ended. I’m now working the ‘normal’ schedule (1.30-10pm) and it’s definitely better overall. I love having mornings free to sleep in, cook, draw, watch shows, browse, walk to work etc… I finished watching The Man From the Stars k-drama (which I fell in love with!) and I’m currently downloading The Heirs to watch on my iPad. Also my schedule lines up more with Rob’s now, so we get to see each other more.

March was a great month because we were all working under our contracted hours. I had 7 new classes to get used to but everything went quite well, mostly because I had two sanity breaks a day. Now that Sonia had gone back to America, I’ve picked up an extra tutor and an extra middle school class so I don’t have many breaks. We also have to start doing phone teaching which means calling our first couple of classes to teach them once a month. This is going to be very painful for me because some of my kids are so young they can barely sound out new words with their mouths. Their vocabulary is limited to ‘pencil’, ‘circle’, ‘book’ and ‘purple’, and I’m expected to have entire conversations with them about how their day has been.

These young classes are really stressful because they’re younger than the kindy kids and I can’t communicate with them at all. I go in and some of them just run around and scream at me in korean to give them money or candy the whole lesson. Luckily after 4 young classes in a row, I teach upper elementary and middle school. I like my older kids a lot more! We’ve both been very tired this first week of April, so we’re expecting more of the same until our contract ends in just under 5 months.

Anyway, we were planning on staying with our company if they wanted us, but now we’re thinking it will be much better to go home for a month or two to rest, and then come back to a new job in Seoul. Nothing is set in stone but this seems like a sensible idea, especially considering I haven’t had a holiday longer than a week since I started working 2 and a half years ago.

Also if we leave our company we get extra money: we get our bond back, flights back home and a whole months severance pay (which is around $2,200). We’re going to use this, along with our final months paycheck, to go on a 2-3 week holiday across Japan! (Hopefully).

We’ve also just booked flights to Hong Kong for 5 days in July! We’re very excited to see the super tall buildings and interesting crumbling old apartments, as well as shopping, eating and relaxing on beaches. Counting down, just 3.5 months to go :s

When we get back we’ll be heading straight into intensive month, and then our contract will be over.

We’re going to be in super savings mode for the next 4-5 months. The only Korea trip we have planned is to go to Busan with Pete and Jess (from Seoul), over the Buddha’s birthday holiday. Only a month away – will be a lot of fun!

Spring time

So winter is finally over in Korea. We’ve had nice spring temperatures for over a month now and haven’t had to use the heating for over 2 months. Our bills are finally starting to get very cheap again. We had a week at the end of march with very hot temperatures – around 20-24 degrees – but it’s settled back down to normal spring weather now. It should start heading into summer in May.

I love the cherry blossoms and the yellow sansayu blossoms which bloomed for a few weeks. The cherry blossoms are all starting to die now, but everything is turning green again which makes me happy. I was starting to get very sick of the gloomy grayness. We walk to work through the 518 park about once a week, so we get to see all the changes in the trees.

Seasonal food and drinks have been in cafés since spring started. I love the look of the thick strawberry smoothies. My favourite drinks are the (real) green grape ade from Holly’s and the cherry blossom white hot chocolate from Starbucks. Yum

We had planned on visiting a lot of blossom festival sites, but after visiting one we decided that was enough!
We went to the yellow sansayu blossom festival near Gurye, in a rural village about 1.5 hours from us. The bus from Gurye was fine, but the small rural bus we took was painful because we had to stand in the hot sweaty bus, while it sped around sharp corners. After a while we got stuck in the longest traffic jam I’ve ever seen, so we got out and walked for an hour to get to he festival site. At this point we realised that half of Korea was probably coming because this was the first spring festival on the calendar.

When we got to the site it was nothing like the tourism photos! We were promised tranquil scenes and traditional costumed performances, but instead there was a giant stage with b-grade Koop blaring, and far too many people gathered around a small paddock of trees, pushing and shoving to get the best selfies. We walked around for about half an hour, took some photos and then got out of there! Unfortunately we had to wait over an hour for the next bus to Gurye town, but luckily it was a lot quicker heading back.

It was a good experience but I don’t think we’ll be going to many more festivals in Korea!

The last few weekends we’ve decided to relax in Gwangju. We had BBQ and went to see the new 300 movie one weekend. The next weekend we saw Romeo + Juliet at the movies, hung out at Big Apple cafe, went shopping and ate pretzels and waffles downtown for 8 hours. In the evening we had Mexican, all you can drink cocktails and a bit of clubbing for Sonia’s farewell. This weekend we had BBQ again, saw The Grand Budapest hotel at Gwangjus independent cinema, and had Indian. Mmm lamb. It’s been quite a poor month because I bought an iPad just after we got paid, but we’ve still had heaps of fun!