It is Fall...

At least it was for maybe a week, about 6 weeks ago... I had finished work on a Friday and stopped at the grocery store for some dinner and when I can out of the store it smelled like fall. When I looked around I realized that there were old brown leaves all over the ground. This was at the end of November, so I didn't really expect anything and all of a sudden the season had changed.

The next day I met up with my dear old friend Patrick and two newer Korean friends for a nice day of hiking. The colors weren't nearly as beautiful as they are at home during fall, but I'm sure in Minnesota at this time the only colors are white and brown. It was still a nice change of scenery from the usual summer foliage. We went to a mountain that I had climbed twice before. After taking the subway about an hour and walking to the base of a mountain, there is a cable car/gondola thing that you can ride to to the top of the mountain. From there we cross over three or so other peaks and then finally make it to Geumjeongsan which is the tallest mountain in Busan. Jangsan, the Mt. by my house is about 670m and this one is just over 800 meters. If you are not a math major it is a difference of about 130 meters which makes it about 20% taller than Jangsan. It also feels more like a mountain when you are at the top. It is much rockier and has steeper cliffs going down. The view, like that on the top of Jangsan, is quite spectacular. In the one attached photo (3rd from top) , the haze in the distance is Haeundae beach and the sea, and the large mountain in the distance on the left is Jangsan. From the vantage point of the photo, my apartment is behind that mountain.

There are two photos that I took at the top of a feral cat. There were two cats just hanging out at the top of the mountain. It is 800m and can get windy and cold, but I guess they like it. Some of the hikers would throw them food and they fought over it, so maybe it isn't the best place to settle down, but they seem to be getting by.

These mountains make a fun hike because there is an old "fortress" that you can walk along. I think it was initially built around 1700. The length is about 17 Km and the area inside the walls is about 8.2 square Km. The walls range from about 1.5 m. to 3 m. The most impressive part are the ornate gates. There are 3 main gates that have been reconstructed in the fortress. As impressive as they are now, one can only imagine how great they must have looked 300 years ago. It is referred to as a fortress, but "stone wall" might be more accurate. Whatever the structure is called, it is impressive and can make for some cool pictures.

Jangsan

As


I mentioned in a previous post, I live just outside the Jangsan subway station. The station is named for the eponymous nearby mountain. San is Korean for "mountain" and jang is Korean for "really awesome". It is about a half hour walk to the park at the base of the mountain and maybe a 2-3 hour hike to the top. The first time I tried to climb it was when my mom and sister visited. It was really hot and humid and we didn't bring enough water so we had to climb back down before we were able to reach the summit. We did get far enough to have an amazing view of the sea and my neighborhood, but at the top you can see over to the other side of the mountain and look at the expansive city of Busan surrounded by mountains in addition to the previously mentioned vista of the sea.















































As you can tell from the pictures, the top of the mountain is a great place to take grad photos.

Jisan Valley Rock Music Festival

Korean School children get about a month off from school in the summer. In America, summer vacation is a joyous time of playing outside, going to the beach, going to camp, taking a family trip, and best of all: NO HOMEWORK!!! Korea is a little bit different. Not going to school does mean more time for all of the things I mentioned as it seems like many of my students go on trips and visit the beach during the summer. However, it also means they have more time to go to their academies so all of the schools have "intensive periods" where the students come in earlier and stay longer. As I am a teacher at such a school I have increased hours and classes. Instead of starting work at 2pm and working until 9pm, I now work from 9am-7pm and have an 80 minute lunch break.

Actually teaching 8 hours a day is pretty tiring, but overall my classes are better behaved than last term. The kids are now here for almost 4 hours as opposed to almost 3 hours and they seem pretty burnt out when it is time to teach the extra class. Anyway, the intensive period isn't fun, but I will get some overtime pay. It is also unfortunate that right when this new schedule started the weather got really hot and sunny, but we spend most of the sunlight hours at work, so trips to the beach happen after sundown or only on weekends.
(Making that more tolerable is the fact that the beach is incredibly crowded during the day and doesn't seem like it would be that great a time. I was at the beach at 3:30am last Friday and was amazed that it was still crowded. Not like it is during the day, but there wasn't enough space to throw a frisbee unless we went way down to one of the ends.) See attached photo of busy Haeundae Beach:

It worked out that halfway through the second week of the new schedule my school took a vacation and we got 3 days off! These days off corresponded to a music festival that takes place each summer outside of Seoul at a ski resort. It is a pretty big festival--maybe 30,000 attendees on the busy days--where both domestic and international bands play. This year, some of the bigger acts were: Muse, Belle and Sebastian, Pet Shop Boys, and Vampire Weekend. Last year, Oasis and Weezer played. Five of the other foreign English teachers I work with at my school decided to get camping passes and have 3 days of music and fun.

About a week before we were going to leave, we decided it might be a good idea to rent a car/van and drive up. The bus shuttle from Busan to the festival sold out and we were told that it would be possible to buy them in person at the time, but we would be unable to actually reserve them. We called around to some rental places and with the 6 of us, it ended up being about $70 each + gas, which was slightly more than the shuttle, but likely cheaper than taking KTX Train and buses to the venue, if the shuttle was unavailable. We were also able to bring more supplies like a cooler, chairs, food, etc.

The festival didn't officially start until Friday, but camping was open Thursday night and since none of us had to work we decided that it would be nice to get there early and relax. I had no interest in driving, but some people were eager to get back behind the wheel, so people took turns driving. Luckily, the ride was mostly uneventful.

There is a little bit of a difference in driving in Korea compared with America ( in addition to the crazy Korean drivers) because the police don't really pull over people for speeding on the freeway. Instead, they have these traffic cameras that road signs warn you of several kilometers prior to passing them. They are about every 10-15 kilometers, but I don't think there is much speed reducing enforcement in between them. We also had a GPS gizmo that would beep about a kilometer before we reached the cameras so I don't think we ended up getting any tickets. Maybe in a couple weeks we will get thousands of dollars of tickets, but I don't think so.

We got to the festival grounds before they had even opened the gates and had to wait around for a little while before we got our tickets. We trudged about a kilometer or so with all of our gear including a cooler full of liquids that was quite heavy. We rented 3 tents for the 6 of us for $30 each for all three nights. After putting up the tents we relaxed, drank some beer, and blew some bubbles. We spend about $50 on bubble makers which was a great investment! Shockingly, it did not rain the whole time we were there. I think it would have been welcome, however, because the temperature was well above 30 degrees C and even got up to about 38 at times. Needless to say, I was pretty much drenched in sweat the whole time. I think I had to drink about a gallon of water every day. It was a fun trip. I'll try to put up some photos when I acquire some. For now you can check out this "where's Jamie" on the website.


The link is to the festival site and has a bunch of pictures. If you are interested in seeing what the scene was like there just click on the numbers at the top to go to different pages and clicking the Korean letters will bring up a different album. I can try to post a couple here when I get them from my friends.

I'll try to post again soon!

oops!

I want to apologize to everyone--if there is actually anyone left out there--for not posting in such a long time. I have several poor excuses like my internet not working, my friends coming to visit me, my camera not working, being busy at work, being out hiking, or visiting friends in Seoul, but while these may seem like obstacles or impediments to posting, they are actually great topics to write about.

My mom and sister got worried so they decided to come visit me and see if I was still okay. We (royal we) had a great time, and I think my mother and sister enjoyed their stay as well. I am still without a camera, but should be able to find photos online of various sights until I get that situation figured out. I will make an honest effort to update regularly now and hope those of you who actually read what I write will enjoy hearing what I am doing and learn a little about my life in Korea.

Exciting weekend: Saturday in Jinhae

The cherry blossoms have been blooming for the past couple weeks. They are everywhere around Busan. The streets leading away from my apartment have them lining their edges and it really is very beautiful when I stop to enjoy the view. This whole area is actually quite spectacular as we are basically surrounded by mountains and there are beautiful beaches nearby.

On Saturday, some of my friends heard of a cherry blossom festival in a small town nearby. We took the subway to a bus station and then rode for about an hour to the festival town. It was a little bit ironic to go to a cherry blossom festival when the blossoms were not yet at full bloom. I'm pretty sure that the trees outside my apartment had fuller blossoms than in this town we visited. Had we waited a week, the blossoms would have been much better, but there would have also have been tons more people. It was pretty crowded as it was, so I'm glad we went when we did. While the cherry blossoms weren't very spectacular, there was a huge market set up in the streets of the city. We wandered around for 2-3 hours and people shopped. They had everything you could imagine in the market. There were nice antiques, swords, cheap junk stuff you would find in a dollar store, textiles, sunglasses, clothes, and countless food vendors selling almost every food imaginable.

There was also a mountain with a tower on top that you could climb and get a pretty amazing view of the area. There was a funicular going to the top, but we took the stairs. I'm not sure how many steps it was, but I remember when we were about 1/5th of the way up seeing 150 and it is 152 steps up to my 9th floor apartment. Basically, there were a lot of steps. Three of my friends raced up. None of them made it to the top still running, but they did all make it very tired. After getting to the top and resting for a while, we climbed to the top of the tower, which was around 6-7 levels of balconies, I think. We couldn't go all the way up because the top was closed, but even from where we were the view was spectacular. I'm sure the only thing that could have made it better would have been more prevalent cherry blossoms. A view from high up of the sea, a town, islands, and mountains on a beautiful clear day is pretty amazing.

Korean School/Where I Work

School is quite intense in Korea. Most students will go to a public or private school at around 8 am. They get done in the early afternoon, maybe around 3 or so and then return home and do homework for a while. Several hours each evening are spent going to various extra academies, of which the most common are English academies or Hogwons. They get home around 9ish, just in time to work on their homework from school and the academies. They go to bed around 11. Wash, rinse and repeat. They also have Saturday classes most weekends at their schools. Remember, this is the typical schedule for the Elementary School students I work with. As they get older, the schedules only become more demanding. Every day when I ask the students how they are they say they are tired. I ask what their plans are for the weekend and they say they will be going to school and studying. It does sound like they normally have time to do something fun Saturday and Sunday afternoon/evening. I remember the days being pretty long and boring when I was in high-school, but I’m glad I didn’t have to grow up in Korea.

I am working at an English academy that teaches elementary students ranging from 3rd-6th grades. The academy is pretty large and one of many branches of a large chain that operates throughout Korea. We have 7 foreign (native English speaking) teachers on my elementary school floor, which I understand to be an extremely large number for a Korean English academy. Many hogwons are small independently owned and operated businesses that employ only one or maybe two foreign English teachers. They regularly spring up, run for a while, and if they are unsuccessful, the teachers are laid off and the school will eventually go out of business. The floor above us is the middle school branch of our school which employs another 4 foreign teachers. We are employed by either the middle school or the elementary school but teachers occasionally will have to sub on the other floor.

On my floor, English ability varies and most kids are grouped by ability into one of 3 main groups. These groups are each further divided into three additional groups for a total of 9 different class levels. In the highest levels, several of the students have lived in USA or Canada for a year or more and a couple kids have spent enough time there that they have no discernible accent. The lowest level students are just learning the language and can only understand the simplest sentences and vocabulary. I think teachers in these levels end up singing a lot of songs. Most of the students are somewhere in the middle. I just received my class assignments and I have 6 different sections in the middle range which I teach 3-4 times a week. Some of my coworkers were quite happy when they found out which classes I was taking from them because they have some behaviorally challenged students. I think I only have to teach the worst group on two days each week, so I think it will be okay.

It will be nice to start teaching and get to get to know my classes. For the last couple weeks I have just been filling in for teachers in random classes. One of the teachers was on vacation upstairs, so I was subbing for half of her classes and the bosses didn’t want me to start teaching my actual classes because they thought the students would get confused if the teachers kept changing. I got a lot of practice with different classes and abilities which was a nice way to ease my way into teaching. I feel that the most difficult part of teaching is just getting to know the students and their individual abilities and how strict you need to be as a teacher. It will also be nice to have a more regular routine, both on a daily basis, and also in each class as the books are somewhat standardized so that each class can be similarly structured. It was a little chaotic trying to figure out what I was going to be teaching when I was in a different place with a different class and different books most days.

This past weekend I was able to go to Haeundae Beach with my friends Pat (a high school friend from Duluth who lives nearby in Busan) and Aaron (one of my coworkers who works in the middle school). We played Frisbee for an hour or so and then jumped into the sea. The water was pretty cold, but both Pat and I agreed it wasn’t much colder than the average summer day on Park Point swimming in Lake Superior. After we walked around a nearby park on the coast for a while, we met up with some more of my coworkers and went to “Russia Town” for dinner. One of the elementary school teachers at my school was born in St. Petersburg and moved to Boston when he was 9. He is fluent in Russian so he found us a restaurant, ordered our food in Russian, and was able to speak to the waitress (owner?) about whatever it is Russians like to chat about. I had never had borsch but it was delicious. All of the Korean food I have had is pretty amazing too, but I’ll write about that another time.

Where I live

If you are like me prior to planning this excursion, your knowledge of Korean geography may not be very expansive, so I thought I would post a couple of maps on here just to make it easier to know my whereabouts. The first map is of Korea and Busan is labeled in the southeast corner. It is pretty close to Japan and about as far from Seoul as one can be while still being in Korea. The population is about 3.6 million makes it, by far, the largest city in which I have lived.

The second map is of the Busan Subway. I live on the far right side of the map right next to the Jangsan subway stop. If walk out of the front door of my building I come to an entrance to this subway stop before I even reach the first corner. Although I have not yet ventured very far via subway, I anticipate this close proximity to the subway will be nice. It has already been helpful when traveling home by taxi as all of the drivers know after I attempt to say "Jangsan" or the more polite "Jangsan yuk ka chuseyo" that I am trying to go to the Jangsan Station. It is also to live at the end of the line for a novice rider of the subway as I can't really head the wrong way. All of the signs are written in both Korean and English, so it is pretty user friendly overall for someone with no Korean ability.

Two stops down the line is the "Haeundae" stop. Haeundae Beach is probably the most famous beach in Korea. It only takes about 15 minutes to walk there from my apartment. I think it is swim-able from May to September. While I have yet to visit, I expect I will spend plenty of time there once it warms up a little more. Save July and August when Korean people go to the beach in drovesI don't think it is really too crowded.

This past Saturday, I was looking for some cleaning supplies. On advice from some of my colleagues, I went to E-Mart. I think this store is the Korean equivalent of Walmart or any other big box retailer. I didn't really know what to expect, but since it was only about a 10 minute walk I figured I'd give it a try. When I got to the store, there were people everywhere coming out and going in. It was a very large store with pretty much anything you could want available. I quickly found some mops and thought I was in the right general location. After almost buying a scouring brush, I found some sponges and a broom/dustpan set in a nearby aisle. Now all I needed was soap and I thought I could find it nearby. I looked everywhere, but couldn't find it. I found children's toys, school supplies, electronics, appliances, clothes, cookware, car wax, but no soap. Imagine going to a disorganized Target that is on 4 different levels and not being able to read any of the signs. After wandering around for about 45 minutes I finally found some downstairs in the grocery store. It was incredibly hot in the store; I'm guessing due to the number of people shopping on a Saturday afternoon. I probably looked a little shady because I was walking around the same areas for so long with my jacket tied around my waist, and I was worried there would be some weird checkout or something I would miss and they would think I was trying to shoplift. It all worked out and my bathroom and kitchen are now clean. Also, thanks to all the time I spent unintentionally "exploring" E-mart, I should know where to find most anything I might need in the future.

*note* I have a several pictures I have taken of my building and elsewhere in the city but am currently having problems uploading them. They should be up soon.