So we’ve got a lot to mention. Here goes:
1) The big announcement is that we are now Gepik Representatives for Bucheon City. What does this mean? A few things: one, if you have any questions about dealing with your school, please contact us! We’ll do our best to answer your questions or direct you to the higher powers that can solve the problem for you. We’re here to help! If you don’t live in Bucheon, we can direct you to your local rep who lives close to you. As well, this means that next week, (April 6th-9th) we will be working at the Gepik Orientation for Middle and High School Students. We’ll be helping out at the workshops and we’re also giving a presentation on Classroom Management. Yes, we will be up on stage for two hours talking about classroom management. If you’re going to be there, then please be nice to us! We’re nervous!

As for the website, there are a few updates as well:

1) We drew on our website. See the pictures all around? Yeah. Martina likes to doodle. The wider your window, the more doodles you’ll see.

2) Sorry for the delay in videos. We’ve been either working on our Gepik Orientation Presentation or trying to remodel the site into something more usable. We’ve had issues with the Movies and ESL Resources page, so we remade them from scratch.
Now EVERY ONE OF OUR VIDEOS EVER is available on YouTube, and the YouTube links are available on our Movies Page. A lot of people prefer YouTube over QuickTime, so we made every video available. The few we haven’t made available are of ones specifically of our students. Even though our schools have given us permission to upload the movies, we still want to refrain from putting some of those videos up.

3) The ESL Resources page now has more to offer. You can browse our lesson plans by tags, rather than just School Levels. If you’re looking for games, click on the games tag; handouts? Click on the handouts tag. As well, every lesson that has a Powerpoint presentation is updated, so that you can preview a movie of the Powerpoint to see if you want to download it or not. All lessons come in both Mac and PC formats.

4) As well, since we’re not web-coding wizards, this took a lot longer than it should have taken any competent human being. We’re worried that there might be some bugs. Feel free to tell us if you find any. We won’t take offense, honest! We’ll be mighty thankful!

Finally, now that the boring stuff is out of the way, we’ve got more fun videos in the works, so check the post above to see what a class is like in a Korean Middle School for starters!

For the original post on Eat Your Kimchi Version 3.0, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

Winter hasn’t officially kicked in yet, but it’s starting to get mighty cold. The leaves on all of the trees are almost all off, and Martina’s out looking for a new winter jacket (we couldn’t pack ours from Canada because they take up too much space). Before this Winter kicks in, though, we have thoroughly enjoyed Fall in Bucheon. Jung-Ang Park, which we have shown you many times before, unleashed mountains of leaves all over the ground. Spudgy had a great time running through these leaves, and Martina loved taking pictures of them. We’ve compiled a bunch of these pictures together into one gallery, just so you can see what Autumn in Bucheon is like. Click the picture above to see the gallery, or click here to see Autumn in Bucheon.

For the original post on The End of Bucheon’s Autumn, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

**Note: this post is now over two years old. Jens Lekman isn’t coming to Korea now. Sorry!**

The two of us are pretty big music buffs, and we’ve been a little upset that we haven’t been able to attend any concerts here in Korea. Luckily, we stumbled upon a concert that we’re sure to attend: We don’t know how many of you are Indie Music fans, but Jens Lekman is coming to Hongdae on November 29th. Here’s what we know, from Last.fm:
Who: Jens Lekman
What: Playing Music
Where: Ssamie Space, Hongdae, South Korea
When: Saturday, November 29th, ???PM
Why: Because he’s awesome.

The cost of admission we don’t know. Supposedly we’re just supposed to pay at the door instead of buying tickets. If anyone plans on going leave a comment or contact us. We don’t know much more about the event because we just found out about it today. If anyone else has more information, let us know. Otherwise, we’ll keep those of you interested up to date whenever we find more information about this, and we’ll surely post videos of the concert after we’ve gone.

For the original post on Upcoming Jens Lekman Concert in Korea, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

After many hours of difficult work, the ESL Resources section is finally up and ready to go. We have compiled our lesson plans and materials, so that you could use them yourselves. We painfully discovered that finding resources online can be very difficult, as we have to sort through a lot of material before we find something useful for our specific classes. What we have here as a result is much of the materials we have used in teaching our classes, from the Powerpoints to the Handouts to the YouTube clips. The public board is supposed to be teaching a uniform curriculum, as all of the textbooks should be teaching the same content in the same week. And so – all of you current or potential GEPIK teachers – the week that you’re teaching Comparative Adjectives to your second graders or Emotions and Gestures to your first graders, you should surely find something here of use to you.

The materials are free to download, in both Mac and PC versions. Only the Public Middle School section is up right now, but Martina’s High School section should be up soon as well. Some materials from our Extra Classes are up as well, which are not as strictly textbook-based as the other materials. These lessons can be used in classes of 2-20, and can be used for any level. Let us know if these materials are of any use to you, or Contact Us if there’s anything you need us to clarify.

For the original post on ESL Lessons for Public School Teachers, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

We realize that a lot of what we say in this blog isn’t really useful for living or teaching in Bucheon, Korea; we just like to document all of the weird and exciting things that we find along the way. And so, to try to rectify this, we have set up an FAQ section that could potentially answer some of your questions with potentially useful information. This is still a work in progress, and we plan on continually updating the FAQ whenever we learn more stuff about this place. For now, it covers what we feel are the absolute basics and necessities for people who want to move to Korea. We plan on dedicating an entire section of the FAQ to Bucheon itself in the future as well, so stay tuned for that. For now, please feel free to contact us if you have any more questions you’d like for us to answer, and let us apologize in advance if anything we have said is grossly misinformed. We’re still new to this place, after all. The FAQ page is linked at the top of this page (and every other page) as well, and linked here as well, so check it out: Applying to and Living in Korea-FAQ

For the original post on Korean FAQ, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

One of the main reasons why we moved to Korea was to pay off our debts. Korea provides a very lucrative opportunity for the both of us as teachers, and – having double income and no kids – the deal seems so much sweeter for us than for others who are coming here alone. We’ve also been praising how cheap everything is here, how the Korean Buses and Subways do not cost even half of what they cost in Canada, and how Korean taxis are dirt cheap as well. Eating in restaurants is also very cheap, as 10 bucks without tip can easily feed two people.

The same can’t be said, however, for Korean Grocery Stores. We recently mailed Simon’s father a flyer from Home Plus, and had him compare the prices of similar items from a Canadian grocery store flyer released on the same day. The results that he found were quite surprising:

All Korean prices are roughly calculated as $1=1000 won. Now here’s where the disclaimers come in; neither of us are statisticians, so please don’t criticize us for the flaws in these charts. Yes, we know that every week a Nintendo Wii is not going to be on the grocery bill, and – yes – we know that we will eat more than just fruit during our stay here in Bucheon. In fact, at times it is cheaper to eat out than it is to buy groceries, carry them home, and then cook with them, and clean, and so forth. The Dok Bok Ki that we prepared a while ago cost more than the Dok Bok Ki on the streets. Prices fluctuate as well. The first week that we got here Watermelons cost $18 while now they are at around $12. Anyhow, all that we can say about these two charts is that, during this specific week, everything cost more in Korea, so it’s not all perfect here in Korea, though it still is really quite nice.

For the original post on Cost of Living in Korea, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

This past Saturday we went with Sasha to the National Museum of Korea in hopes of soaking up some Korean Culture. We promised her a fun day in Seoul for Saturday, and had lot planned out, including bus tours and street festivals. Unfortunately, it’s still Monsoon Season in Bucheon, so our plans were all but thrown out. Simon was exceptionally mopey, and just wanted to stay home and hide from the rain. Fortunately, Martina and Sasha insisted, so we replanned our day and decided it would be best to go to the Museum instead.

We ran into a bit of a snag along the way. We took the subway to Yongsan station and wanted to transfer over to another subway that took us to Icheon station, where the Museum was located. Unfortunately the subway to Icheon was part of a special train that we still don’t know how to take, so we were stuck at Yongsan station. Luckily for us (for Simon, especially), Yongsan is home to an eight-floor electronics market bonanza. Simon was lost in it for an hour or so, walking around and looking at electronics that he couldn’t buy (re: not yet, at least), while Sasha and Martina had a coffee and did a bit of shopping of their own for bags and such.

We finally decided to take a taxi to the museum instead, which only set us back a couple of bucks anyways, since taxis are so cheap here. We didn’t expect much from the museum, especially because of our first museum experience in the Gyeonggi Museum which was a little bit boring. We were pleasantly surprised. The architecture, to begin with, was breathtaking. We were also really happy with the contents of the museum itself, and not just its pretty design. The exhibits of Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and Vietnamese art and life were really interesting, and the Buddhism exhibit was really stunning. As well, we left the museum when the sun was beginning to set, and wandered around the museum’s garden, which was also stunning. Altogether, we really enjoyed the museum, and would definitely go there again. We took a lot of pictures of our day as well, so click on any of the pictures in this post to see our gallery, or check out our National Museum of Korea gallery here.

For the original post on National Museum of Korea, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

So, you want to learn to speak and read Korean? Well so do we! After living in Korea for just over two months, we’ve quickly developed the urge to understand the signs (and the menus) around us. We’re not experts yet, but here are some helpful hints we found for learning to read and speak Korean, also known as, Han-gu-go. The first thing we did was buy a really good phrasebook before we left Canada. It’s not one of those books that only has random phrases in it; it’s colour co-ordinated so we can flip to different sections easily. As well, it has a highly useful culinary reader. What really sold me on the lonely planet phrasebook (check out their website here, or just buy the book from Amazon directly) was that they explained the two different ways of saying “goodbye” in Korean, while other Korean phrasebooks we perused did not make or explain the distinctions.

Another thing that we found really useful is this chart right here. Simon’s co-teacher gave it to him and explained it as well, or else it would not have made any sense at all to us. Going up and down the left sides are the korean consonants; going across the top are Korean vowels. It’s like a multiplication table. Essentially, Korean children memorize this table, and learn the Korean alpabet that way. It’s actually quite practical when you look at it. For example, the first row is “ga na da la ma ba sa, a ja cha ka ta pa ha”; another row would be “gu nu du lu mu bu so, u ju chu ku tu pu hu,” so on and so forth. Now, this is sung in the “twinkle twinkle little star” theme the same way our “abdefg” is sung, so it’s easy to memorize. What’s really cool about it is that the first half of the song is regular consonants, while the second half is aspirated consonants. If that doesn’t make sense to you, sing it out with your hand in front of your mouth. You’ll feel next to nothing when you sing “ga na da la ma ba sa,” but you’ll feel a lot more air against your hands when you sing “a ja cha ka ta pa ha.” Cool, eh? As well, the korean alphabet has letters that kinda make sense when you read them. For example, the g-sound and the k-sound are similar, only the k has you breathe out more air. So, in the Korean alphabet, the k is written out just like a g, only with an extra small mark. In the alphabet we see relationships between letters. You don’t see that in the English alphabet.

For the original post on How to Learn Korean, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

Today we took Spudgy to the vet to get him all fixed up. Last week the vet merely checked him over to see what we had to do for this week. And so, after the plan was set, Spudgy had a busy day set out for him today. He had hip x-rays, blood work, an eye exam (for his bad eye), his ear infection fixed, heartworm medicine, and vaccinations. We couldn’t get his teeth and gingivitis fixed today because it would have been too much to do for one day. We’re coming back next week for that. Then Spudgy should be 100%. We would have got most of this done last week, but we couldn’t. As you saw in the adoption video, Spudgy was shaking a lot because he was so scared. We took him into our home for a week and took good care of him, and made him far more comfortable around us. Today he was far less scared at the vet, though he got very scared near the end after having his eye prodded and his blood taken and his legs stretched out on an x-ray table, to name a few things that scared the poor little guy.

Anyhow, you can see just how comfortable the little guy is with us now in this video. We made a video to show how awesome the subways are here in Korea – way better than what we’re used to in Toronto. As well, we found some pretty awesome vending machines, so you’ll see those in the video as well.

The vet that we go to is a really great vet from what we heard. We’re just happy that he’s fluent in English. He understood us and we understood him, and so he explained everything that we needed to know about Spudgy to us. From the x-rays he took and the eye examination he gave his conclusion is that Spudgy was in a car accident. Spudgy’s hips were broken in a way that does not suggest abuse. And his left eye – his blind eye – was punctured, which rules out all but the cruellest animal abuse. His guess is that Spudgy was in a car accident, and the impact to the left of his hips and the left of his eye came from that accident. Spudgy’s eye is fine now – completely healed over, but scarred over as well, and so he can’t see out of it anymore. Nothing can be done for the eye now apart from giving him antibacterial eye drops twice a day.

As for the hip, if you check out the top of the page, you’ll see that where the arrow points to his broken hip a void, whereas on the other side the bone is solid. The vet said that we don’t have to worry about it; the bone there is not as important as the bone up top, which is all around solid. The rubbing femur head, though, might be a bit of an issue. It might cause him some soreness or pain, so if we see him limping or wincing we might have to give him painkillers for a while, but this would be later on when he’s older. For now, he’s trotting along happily. What we need to do is give him lots of exercise, because his hips are weak after the accident, and we need to build up some muscle around there.

The good news came when Spudgy’s bloodwork was done. If you click on the picture above you’ll see the results; bad numbers are in red, good numbers are in blue. And, as you can see, Spudgy’s got blue numbers across the board. As well, Spudgy has enough antibodies against all of the major Korean diseases for dogs, so all that Spudgy needed for vaccination was a couple of minor vaccinations (for rabies and such) and he was good to go. Even though he’s got a bad eye and bad hip he’s a healthy pup, and we’re really happy to hear that.

By the end of the visit Spudgy was pretty strung out, nervous and shaking. We took him on the subway and back home and he collapsed into an exhausted heap. We’ll update again next week once he gets his dental work done.

For the original post on Spudgy’s Car Accident, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!

It is monsoon season here in Bucheon, Korea, and so when the sun isn’t scalding then the rain is torrential. It’s big and relentless, and nothing like Canada’s PG version of Rain. Stand outside in normal clothes with nothing shielding you from the clouds and you’ll be soaked down to your underwears faster than you could eat an apple. It’s intimidating stepping outside in the hard rain, and its better just to watch it from your window.

That doesn’t stop a lot of people, though. We were cooped up in our apartment for far too long and Simon was become obnoxious with his whining and complaining. And so Martina dragged him out of the house and they went for a walk through the rain, which had softened by then. She took a lot of pictures of the rain, the clouds, the umbrellas, and the rainboots, and the puddles, and it makes for fun pictures. Click the picture above to see them, or just click on this link here right away.

For the original post on Monsoon Season in Bucheon, or for our kpop and Korean Food videos, check out our Korea blog!