A Weekend to Remember...

This weekend we planned to just have a relaxing weekend. We thought maybe we would check out a movie and get a few necessities for our upcoming trip to Bali. Well, relaxing would probably be the last word used to describe our weekend.

Friday went much as any other Friday would have gone. We left school and came home to catch an episode of Law and Order, before heading to Masan to have dinner and catch a movie. While enjoying a little SVU, we got a phone call from one of our friends (Yes, we do have friends!), inviting us to an open mic night of sorts at a Korean coffee shop. Our friend Lindsey was going to be reading some poetry from a famous Korean poet that is from the same area we live in. The poetry reading was pretty cool, the poems were read in both Korean and English. They even had the echo going in the background with music playing. It was pretty entertaining. We assumed that this was going to be a pretty chill experience (I mean how crazy can "open mic" nights get?), but we were wrong! After the readings, a man with a guitar took the mic and sang what we assumed to be a popular Korean song because the people in this cafe started going crazy. I mean hands were waving, shouts were given, and people were dancing away. We loved it! After our open mic night, the organizers of the open mic night took us all out for Korean barbeque and soju. What is soju you ask? Soju is the national drink of Korea. It's a potent liquor, made of sweet potatoes, and Koreans love it. It's served in shot glasses and you take it like it's a shot. These Koreans are hard core! After our dinner, we went with our friends to a couple bars.

And then it was Saturday. After some much needed sleeping in, we headed to Changwon to meet up with our friends. We didn't have any plans for the night, just to meet up with our fellow waeguks (that's what we're called here, it means foreigners). We had a nice dinner then went and had drinks at a quaint little bar. Any ideas what we did next? Well bowling of course. We never expected to be bowling in Korea, but we had a lot of fun! Just in case you wanted to know, Stephanie beat Shawn hands down, with a score of 134 to Shawn's 93. After our experience with bowling, our Korean friends decided that it was time for us to be broken in to the world of "noraebongs." Noraebong literally translated means "singing room", which is exactly right. You rent a personal room where you and your friends can enjoy a few drinks and sing to your heart's content. We had an amazing time here! We treated our friends to a little early 90's rock, singing Mr. Big's "just to be with you." Steph decided to following this up with a little Britney Spears, which the Koreans loved!! Side note, most of the music that is popular here sounds like the days when N'Sync and Britney dominated the charts. So, of course they loved all of that music. We even did a little duet with our two Korean friends of the only Korean song we know, they sung the Korean part and we did the English...what a cultural exchange. Feast your eyes on the selection of photos from our first noraebong experience.

This picture pretty much sums up the insanity that is Noraebong.

Steph and Shawn rockin' Mr. Big

How'd that get in there?

So let's just start by saying that if it wasn't for us getting to eat lunch at our school everyday, we would probably starve, but lately our lunches have been interesting. Everyday for lunch we have rice, some kind of soup, kimchi, and then usually some other side dish. Unfortunately, none of the windows in our school have screens, and little critters have been jumping in to our soup. For example, the other day there was a whole entire crab in our soup. But crabs aren't the only things that jump into our soup. Fish, whole entire fish, bones and everything, seem to get in there to. And one day, we had half a crab, half a fish, and a couple prawns thrown in the soup. How are these things getting in there? Needless to say, it's exciting digging into our soup because we never know what we're going to find...literally.

Run-ins with religion

Steph has had a couple of run-ins lately that have been quite interesting. Read below to find out more about them.

• So some of you may be familiar with Stephanie's past run-ins with the Jehovah Witnesses. She was often frequented by them at her house in Rochester, much to her disdain. They often left magazines and other pamphlets for her weekly. No matter what she did, they wouldn't leave her alone. Well, once she left Rochester, she thought all her troubles were behind her....she was wrong. One day, her and Shawn were in E-Mart because it was time for Shawn's bi-monthly haircut (yeah, not exaggerating!). Steph was out roaming the aisles, waiting for Shawn to be done, when two girls came up to her. Now this isn't something rare, people often run up to us to say hi and hear us speak English, so Steph decided to be nice and play along. They were pretty good at speaking English, a nice change of pace, so Steph thought the conversation was going pretty well. We were chatting about the basic things that most people try to speak to us about, where we were from, how long have we been here, did we like Korean food, etc, when BAM! One of the girls pulls out, you guessed it, a Watch Tower (for those of you who don't know, that is the Jehovah's Witness magazine). All of a sudden her English became exceptionally good as she started preaching about her religion and Steph's eternal soul (perfect setting, don't you think?). Steph tried telling them that she was Methodist and wasn't interested, but those words, oddly enough, were not in their vocabulary. Luckily, Shawn was done with his haircut and came to the rescue. But who would've thought that the Jehovah's Witnesses would follow Steph all the way to Korea.
  

• As you may have read in our last post, we recently attended the Cherry Blossom Festival in Jinhae. One thing we left out was when we decided to climb almost 400 stairs up to a museum/tower at the top of this big hill. About 150 stairs into the hike, there were some Buddhists sitting around at a landing. Steph and Shawn quietly attempted to walk right past them. But that wasn't going to happen. Once Steph was passed, one of the Buddist started to yell things at her, in Korean of course. Steph obviously had no idea what she was saying and tried to keep on walking up the stairs. But this Buddhist lady was NOT going to let her go. She proceeded to chase Steph up the stairs, continually shouting things at her. What a spectacle this was! Everyone else climbing the stairs parted way to let this chase proceed. Since this Buddhist lady was considerably older than Steph, she tired out after about 100 stairs. So Steph took advantage of this opportunity and kept right on climbing, but could still hear the inklings of someone shouting at her from the stairs below.

So, you tell me, is God trying to tell me something?

Cherry Blossoms and...

So this past weekend (yes we are a little behind on our posts!) we went to Jinhae, which every April has a Cherry Blossom Festival. It is a beautiful site to see, with Cherry Blossoms as far as the eye can see, so we thought we better check it out.

Before we loaded the bus to Jinhae, we thought we would stop and get some Starbucks first. Bad idea. With the Starbucks in our hand, we got on the bus, only to find it extremely packed with people, standing room only. So with only one hand available, we had to try to hang on for dear life. Now this is not some calm relaxing bus ride. This was about a half hour of constant slamming on the brakes and swerving in and out of lanes. And with only one hand to hang on, it was nearly impossible to try to stay on your feet. If there is one thing I've noticed about Korea so far, it is the driving. They are some of the worst drivers I have seen, and bus drivers rank right up at the top of the list. But luckily, we made it in one piece.

It was definitely worth the trip. The cherry blossoms were in full bloom and looked amazing. But there was one thing that really made our trip...scroll down to find out!

Corn Dogs!!

Saved by the bell...

So what consumes all our time here besides countless Law and Order reruns? School, of course. School is where we spend 9-5, Monday through Friday. After working 12-hour days/nights/weekends as nurses, this schedule was hard to get used to at first, but we're starting to get the hang of it .

We teach at Chilwon Elementary School in the English Activity Town. We teach a range of students from 3rd to 6th grades, and once a month we get the privilege of being visited by the 1st and 2nd graders. The English Activity Town is actually a pretty revolutionary method for teaching a foreign language (at least in theory). The idea behind this place is that it's a portion of the school (the 3rd floor) that is not supposed to be considered Korea at all. The students are supposed to treat the Activity Town as if it were America. The primary language to be spoken on this floor is English, with only support Korean.

The English Activity Town is comprised of 4 rooms and a teachers' workroom. One room is a large activity room complete with state of the art computer linked television technology (for displaying digital teaching materials). One room is a classroom and two of the rooms are intended as role playing scenario sets. One room includes a post office, museum, market, and a home setting. The other room consists of an airport, and immigration office, a restaurant, and a bank. One of the major goals of the English Activity Town is to teach the children practical English for real life scenarios. These rooms facilitate this learning. For example, the first four weeks are spent learning an airport scenario (wish we would've learned this in Chinese before we left!). Below are some pictures of the English Activity Town.

This is the entrance to our school

This is the entrance to the English Activity Town

This is a mural of Minneapolis on the wall in the Activity Town.
Kind of random, right? It helps us feel at home.

Here is the "Market"

The "Airport"

The hallway or "Street"

The "Activity Room"

The place we call home

We're here! Finally we arrive at our new apartment, the Daeryung Apatu (that is the transliteration of the Korean word for apartment). It actually turns out to be pretty nice, with a few set backs of course...but hey, "we ain't payin' fo' it"!

Our apartment is a two bedroom, one bathroom. We also have a kitchen, living room, wash room and patio/drying room (more the latter than the former). Our entire apartment was furnished when we moved in. Granted, it is not all the best, but everything is really pretty good (we weren't expecting much and once again "we ain't payin' fo' it"). We were given a couch, TV, new refrigerator, washing machine (no dryer, but that is what the drying room is for right?), two beds, microwave, two desks, a kitchen table, two chairs, two dressers, a stove top and most important...our friend Cuckoo, the rice cooker (Yeah, without Cuckoo, we would starve). Here are a few pictures of our apartment.

Our living room (Many a Law and Order has been and will be watched here)


Steph's Room (The bigger room, of course)


The kitchen (Shawn chowin' down with Cuckoo)


Shawn's room (I'm sure he'll clean it later)


Our bathroom (what you can't see is our pink toilet)

All in all it's not too shabby of a place. Shawn, Steph, and Cuckoo are proud to call it home.

Are we there YET?

So any bets on how many other blog posts it will take for this ill-begotten journey to get to Korea? Well, before you post too high of a bid, we will satisfy your curiosity...we get there this time!!! (I know we could hardly believe it either).

OK, so the flight from Beijing to Busan, South Korea was really easy. We were both exhausted and emotionally drained. We were not able to sit by each other for this flight...which turned out to be good, we both needed some alone time to just unwind from the nightmare that is the Beijing airport (oh yeah and to mourn the loss of JP...you figure it out).

The Busan airport was a BREEZE! The people were friendly and courteous. Most of the workers here didn't speak English either, but unlike the Beijing employees, seemed to be competent in body language so communication was much easier. After clearing security we went to the baggage claim area to get our bags (ALL of them made it!) and filed for Steph's lost luggage. This could not have been easier. We actually spoke with a representative for Asiana Airlines, and she could not have been more helpful. When we told her of our situation, she simply said "No, problem" and helped us to fill out a claim sheet. With this out of the way, we were on our way to our new home...almost.

We left the baggage claim area and found Jay (our contact in Korea from World English Services) waiting for us. He was great, friendly and helpful. He waited while Shawn exchanged some money to get us by and then picked us up in his car (which our baggage barely fit in). We then were off to the Gyeongsangnam-do Office of Education to meet our employers. Did we mention that because of the FIASCO with Steph's luggage we had no chance to change and were still wearing the sweat pants we had been wearing for like two days (including our first attempt at leaving the country...grossed out? DEAL WITH IT, we did!). From this point on it had to be smooth sailing right? That is what we thought.

OK, so the next bump in our very bumpy road isn't that bad, but considering what we have been through it is pretty funny. Jay who was driving us, made a sharp turn to the right out of nowhere. Why you ask? He ran out of gas, that's right, he ran out of gas! Luckily we were close to a gas station. Jay told us he was so embarrassed and that he had never ran out of gas before...nice time to start huh? (P.S. we might be cursed). Well Jay ran to get gas from the gas station up the road and we had a good, long laugh.

Well, we made it through meeting our employers at the Office of Education (even though we looked like hell on wheels, and probably didn't smell that great). But we were on our way to our new home in Chilwon (that's the name of the town we live in).

To be continued...

The journey continues...

So let's pick up where we left off. Our flight was from LAX to Beijing, China. It was relatively uneventful compared to what we had already been through. There was one event that happened which seemed minor at the time. As Steph wheeled her carry-on luggage onto the plane, an Air China agent informed her she would have to check that piece of luggage because it was too wide. After fighting to keep the luggage with her, she decided it was "no big deal," and let him take the luggage.

The flight was long, boring, hot, and a little cramped (OK, maybe more than a little), but we finally landed in Beijing after the roughly 16 hour flight. The Beijing airport is an "experience," to put it lightly. From the moment we stepped off the plane, and boarded the bus that drove us to the terminal at the airport, we knew that this was going to be a challenge.

Entering China is not an easy thing to do, especially without a visa (actually, it's NOT possible without a visa). After being pushed from line to line in the immigration office, we were finally ushered to the right place, or so we thought. Where we were taken was to a security checkpoint for connecting international flights, not to the baggage claim area (where we needed to be). The other side of security was a wonderland of duty-free shops and advertisements for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. **Side note: If you haven't seen the mascots for the 2008 Olympics, stop reading and google now, it's pretty creepy, especially when your surrounded by them. Anyway, the real challenge developed when we realized we needed to find someone who could help us that actually spoke English (p.s. this never happened). All we knew is that we had one hour to get Steph's bag and board the plane, all without leaving the security area (because we didn't have a visa to get back through). To sum this situation up, we're on the inside of the security area, Steph's bag is on the outside, and there is seemingly no way for the two to meet.

Following many broken English conversations, our options were: miss our flight (again) and continue trying to rescue the bag from captivity or get on the plane and count the bag as a POW with no chance of rescue. Let's just say condolences were in order for a grieving Stephanie. So what's in the bag that makes it so important? 1. SHOES (what could be more important) 2. James Patterson (a close second) and 3. dress clothes to change into after we landed in Korea to meet our employers (first impressions are everything in Korea). We boarded the plane with only one casualty, but yet again we were on our way to Korea.

to be continued...

So it begins...

The morning dawns on March 16th, a day we have been anticipating. That night we are to fly out of Minneapolis to venture to South Korea and begin our adventure. The day was a frantic one. Between last minute packing and last minute good-byes with good friends and family we barely had time to breathe. But once we were at the airport, through security and sitting pretty in our First Class seats we thought all of our troubles were behind us...little did we know.

A few FREE drinks later, our First Class experience came to an end and we were thrown back into the hectic world of LAX (LA airport, for those of you who don't know). While running the gauntlet of people in the international terminal trying to find the Korean Air ticket counter we both had a sense of foreboding, who could have known what it meant for us. When we arrived at the Korean Air ticket counter we were greeted with smiles and kind words. We were nicely asked for our passports and Steph proudly presented hers to the ticket agent. Meanwhile, Shawn was frantically searching his carry-on bag for his passport, to no avail. *Important note to this story- Shawn's passport was last sighted on the plane from Minneapolis to LAX. Again I repeat ON the plane.

--OK, we're going to shorten this long tragic story up for you folks. Shawn had to make a mad dash to the Northwest ticket counter to report the lost passport, only to be greeted with rude glances and short responses from the less than friendly ticket agents. He was told to go to the baggage claim area and report his passport. After running to the baggage claim (Yeah, not kidding RUNNING), again nothing was found but rude uninterested employees (one actually told him he was "Stupid" for losing his passport, like he needed to be told). **Scene Change- Korean Air ticket counter** Steph is waiting alone with seven bags of luggage and no idea what is going on. OK, back to the story. The Northwest people were clearly not going to find the passport so we started planning our next move. After calling our recruiter (who INSISTED that Steph board the plane alone) we had some hard decisions to make. After a few tears we decided to stay in LA and try to get a new passport. We then had the joy of trying to find a hotel in LA at 02:00 AM using only a phone book from a pay phone outside the airport.

The next chapter of this story begins in the magical and wondrous world of Inglewood, CA (yes, that was sarcasm). We arrived at the hotel at almost 03:00 AM welcomed by a surly desk attendant and some ladies with pretty, clear high heeled shoes standing on the corner...maybe they were there to welcome us, why else would they be out so late? After only about three hours of sleep we wake up to horror of our situation. Many, many calls later (all to government agencies) we are frustrated and hopeless about our situation. Shawn, at the end of his rope decides to do what he does best...call his mom. Finally, some results! The airline had called her at about 04:00 AM (central time) to let her know that they had found Shawn's passport on the plane (we left her number because...oh yeah we have no cell phones this entire time!). The next thing we do is book new flights to Korea, we are on our way once again!

To be continued...