And the Winner Is....

Some readers will remember that I posted a contest in my mascot series where I asked my loyal readers to suggest what the mascot might be saying. I waited about a month now, and I had three entries. I consider that pretty good actually, so thanks to everyone who entered.

Anyway, since it's been about a month, I may as well just pick a winner since there most likely aren't going to be any more entries. Lets go ahead and recap all of the entries:

Entry 1: "I'm singing and playing air guitar while I bathe in this soup, so I'm sure you'll like it."

Entry 2: "If you can eat me in one spoonful without choking, I will sing you the most awesome song with backup played upon my own bones!"

Entry 3: "Oh, you know you cannot resist the sweet meat song! *wink*"

First of all, these are all great entries. I do have to say that the third one is my favorite, though. I like how succinct it is and the phrase 'sweet meat song' has a ring to it. That's right, number three, you are the winner!

One problem, who are you? This submission was entered anonymously, so obviously I can't be sure who did it. I promised a prize to the winner, and I do intend to deliver. The other two entries, I'll try to get you something the next time I am home anyway.

Once again, thanks for entering, and I'll try to put up another mascot post soon.

Halloween Time

So Halloween is almost here, and so far it has seemed like the biggest holiday at my school. My boss actually put the Halloween decorations about three weeks ago. Since he did that, I decided I would go ahead and start teaching Halloween related topics. I started with Halloween vocabulary, Halloween word unscrambling and coloring, and my favorite activity I have done: 'My Halloween Costume.' This is where I hand out a sheet of paper with an outline of a body on it, and let them go to town drawing their ideal Halloween costumes.

The blank body

In one of my classes of 7 year olds, the kids drew only zombies and witches. There were some really good ones, so I went ahead and picked some winners from my classes.

Jerry, age 8, who still has no idea how to spell his name. I like to call this 'The Metrosexual Vampire'.

Brian, age 10. This is just a really sweet looking vampire. I love the armor.

Euris, Age 7. This might be just a drawing of a girl in a dress with a hat. I liked the bright colors and that she's really happy.

Noah, age 7. This is the class that did only zombies and witches. I liked the extra arms and the weapons.

Alex, age 9. I like the coloring and the extra arms and stuff.

David, age 9. I just really like the little bat thing that hangs out with the demon.

Now, here is the clear loser of all the classes:

Daniel, age 10. His drawing is a teacher and it's not very nice.

I Don't Care

A very massive part of mainstream Korean culture is what's lovingly (and sometimes not lovingly) called K-pop. This is the overproduced pop music that nearly all Korean's love, it seems. Each song has it's own dance routine, and every Korean will learn and know these moves. Any age.

These songs are also a strange mix of English and Korean, where the choruses are generally in English and most of the verses are in Korean. I'm guessing that this is at least party due to the difference between the languages where English words can be more easily drawn out. Some of the syllables can last almost forever, take for example any Michael Bolton song. I'm sure that in addition to this, the inclusion of English words increases the marketability overseas.

One example of K-pop and the hybridization English and Korean is this song by 2NE1, a manufactured Korean girl group. This song is about girls getting hurt by their player boyfriends, so they have to act like they don't care. Somehow I've heard this song about a thousand times and I'm not really sick of it yet. I'm pretty sure there's something wrong with me.

Museum of Korean War Stuff and Junk

So as this title implies, I made it to The War Memorial of Korea, in Seoul. Truthfully, I didn't take a lot out of it, so that explains why I called it "Museum of Korean War Stuff''.

As for the junk, I figured I would stray off topic and talk about how much my job has improved just this week. So I got a new student in one of my regular classes, and her parents put her in some additional private classes. Luckily, my boss put me on for teaching her, which meant that he would have to relieve me of a few other classes. Somehow he did about the best thing possible. One of her classes is scheduled during my most hated class, which is with middle school kids, so I don't teach that anymore. YES. I was also given Friday mornings off. NO FRIDAY MORNING. And all I have extra is one on one lessons with a student who actually wants to learn. Wow.

Anyway, heres the war museum stuff. Like I said, I didn't really learn a lot from it, so it's mostly just a bunch of pictures. I went two weekends ago now with my friend Daniel who was actually in the military and served in the first Gulf War. By far the best part of the trip to Seoul that weekend was that we ate at both a Mexican and a Thai food restaurant. To me, those are the two best food countries in the world. We also ate at restaurants that did a super good job. Mexican was at 'South of the Border' at a mall, and the Thai was at Thai Orchid in Itaewon. Let me just say that Thai Orchid makes a coconut soup that might as well have come from Thailand. Wow.

So here's the museum anyway. The first thing we saw when approaching was this statue of two guys. Is it just me or does it look like two people making out? It's actually called 'The Statue of Brothers,' so thats a little bit insensitive to two brothers who were separated in North and South Korea. But come on, they are totally making out.

The outside of the museum I found a little bit more interesting than the inside. They had this ridiculous collection of war machinery, I think mostly from the Korea conflict (the one from MASH). They had just so many tanks, airplanes, cannons, and really everything. This is a fountain made from a mine.

This is an artsy shot of the 'Korean War Monument.'

Here's the front facade of the museum. It's surrounded by flags and then a giant set of steps leading to the door. I was also impressed by the giant green cantilevered overhang over the doorway. I forgot some stuff inside of a locker on the way out, and then made it to about the point where I took this picture before I realized it. There were about five minutes until the place closed, so I sprinted all the way up the steps to try to make it in time. I tried the doors and the first two I tried were locked. They had luckily left just one open, and I made it in time.

Here's some of the airplanes they have outside the museum, with Seoul Tower in the background.

Inside they had some impressive murals, this one with some Korean soldiers storming out of a helicopter. I call it "who farted inside the chopper?"

This is a replica of 'Fatman' himself. 'Littleboy was right next to it but it wasn't impressive enough to make it on the website.

So this was a seemingly random face cutout thing, and on a whim had Daniel take my picture in it. It turned out to be one of my favorite pictures of myself ever. I kind of feel like I should have been in the military because of this shot.

The historic section had this neat armor from the various dynasties throughout Korea's history.

Here's the sun setting on the Museum, ahhhh, what a day.

So overall it was a nice visit and definitely worth the three bucks. I was a little bit disappointed because there's barely even a mention of the U.S. and their involvement in the Korea conflict. There's giant section where they have a life-size model of somebody from each country that came to fight in the Korea conflict, and the U.S. didn't get any special treatment. Oh Well.

Korean Foot Volleyball

I was walking down this road today near a stream and some rice paddies, quite picturesque (see picture below). I ended up near a high school and discovered a sport completely new to me.

I walked near this high school's athletic field, and there were groups of 40 year old men standing around nets which were about waist high. They were also holding a ball which looked a lot like a volleyball. The game finally started, and it was incredibly interesting to watch.

I would call it a cross between volleyball and soccer, because it's like volleyball but you can't use your hands. The players have to use their feet, thighs, chests, and heads to keep the ball in the air, though it can bounce once, and send it back to the other side of the net.

These guys weren't the best to ever play the sport, each volley seemed to be at most two times over the net. I didn't watch for long, though, I felt like a voyeur because I was watching them and taking pictures from behind a tree outside of the field.

Some research tells me that this sport is called Sepak Takraw and originates in South East Asia. Traditionally, this ball is used:

So I'm guessing that the version I saw was a bit modernized. This sport looks super fun to me though because volleyball and soccer are two of my favorite sports to play, outside of baseball. I'm going to keep my eyes open for an opportunity to play.

Here's a video of some people playing that looks a lot like what I saw:

The Hidden Valley Ranch

So this post is actually about a valley next to my town, not the delicious salad dressing. Did I get anyone there? Ha. Lame.

One of the best things about living in my town is that we have mountains (actually more like hills) to the north, and there is a really beautiful valley in those mountains. I had found this valley on a route from my apartment a while ago and was planning to post about it, but two weekends ago my friend Daniel showed me more of the valley near his apartment. It's actually much bigger and better than I though.

I'll just get to the pictures since there's not much more to the story than that we walked around for a while.

On the way there were a few huge praying mantis' in the road, which are common in Korea. These are some of the coolest looking bugs I have ever seen, and this one allowed me to get nice and close for a photo.

There was also this junkyard on the way with this fence around it and some of the biggest spiders I have ever seen. Look a the markings on that guy. Does anybody know what type of spider this is?

This is a tunnel where we walk under a highway to get to the valley. The guy is Daniel.

This is basically what the valley looked like. Just farm after farm in this expansive, beautiful land.

Here is some kind of a lake in the valley. The tiny white objects are people.

This is just a photo I liked with some rice paddies in it.

So this is a giant rock face at the top of a hill. If you look closely, there is a roofline down and to the left from it just a little ways. My friend Daniel went up there a week later, and it turns out that it's actually a Buddhist temple up there. When he went there was a lady there and she served him some tea. I really want to go sometime.

Having something like this valley makes me glad to live in a town with at least a hint of easily accessible natural landscape to explore. I'll post again when I make it up to the temple.

More Paintings, Again

So it's been somewhat sparse here at Brad's Korean Adventures, huh? Sorry about that. I guess one of the main reasons for that is that not as many new things happen, so I don't have as much to write about. I do have a few posts to put up this week, and I'm going to try to do about 10 a month still (that's one every three days).

Things are going pretty well though, otherwise. I think I've gotten good enough at teaching now that I can walk into a class with no previous thought and pull enough out of my arse to kill 45 minutes. Wait, I'm not really sure if that makes me a good teacher or not. With my most dreaded class, this one called GS1 which is all 13 year olds, I have gotten to the point where if they don't participate in class, I just torture them. I try to come up with fun activities for them, e.g. general conversation or filling in lyrics to Beatle's songs, but they still just sit there with an apathetic look, resting their head's on their hands. That's why this week I said "OK, if no one will participate then I have a worksheet," and continued to pull out a terribly boring grammar worksheet I found on the internet. Take that, apathetic middle schoolers.

I did complete a painting, which is the reason for this post. It's another one where I just made a whole bunch of tiny triangles (there's one where I did this in Kelsey's apartment) and then I decided to try to do shading and make it look like an object.

Here are all of the tiny triangles. I'm not sure why I like to do this because it takes me about two days.

I proceeded to color in the shape of a hand which is from a photograph of my hand. I did this with a combination of five colors, a yellow, two oranges, and red, and a purplish red.

I didn't know what to do for the background, so I started with this outline around the hand which gets bigger and switches colors between purple and blue. I showed this picture to my friend Daniel on my camera and he was like "oh no, that ruins it. You have to do something out of focus like in a real photograph."

I then painted a black over it, but washed out with some water. Then I put some blue color, and then a little bit lighter blue color. I think it actually looks a little bit like rain or something, and that it actually looks really good. I'm totally happy with the way this turned out. It's on a canvas this time, one that I bought from a local store for only $4. I think it was an OK price for a 12x16 inch canvas.

I decided to throw in a bonus for this post. Here is the last painting I made before I came to Korea. It's a hand holding a guitar, obviously. I put this in because it's a little similar to the other hand one. It's painted on a grid of this kind of sail boat shaped pattern, and then it's my hand holding a C-chord. It might be my favorite painting I've done.

Fan Death Lives

Here in Korea, it's generally a very modern society. People have electricity, internet, well developed public transportation, and basically everything modern societies have in which to obtain information. Somehow though, this thing called fan death lives on. Fan death is this superstition where if people in Korea leave their fan on over night they have the possibility of passing away, due to the fan.

Your worst enemy?

I thought that this phenomenon of fan death had possibly started in the 70's or 80's and died off within the past few years due to the spread of access to information, but realized I was mistaken after a conversation with my boss last week. Here is how it went down:

Jay: I had to sleep on my sofa last night because it was too hot in my room and I didn't want to run the air conditioner.

Me: Why didn't you run a fan?

Jay: Oh, this is not a good idea.

Me: Why, do you mean fan death?

Jay: Oh yeah.

Me: You realize this is a superstition, right? A fairy tale?

Jay: Oh no, there is a scientific explanation.

Me: OK, what is it?

Jay: Well if you leave the fan on, it lowers your body temperature.

Me: Isn't that why they invented blankets? I leave my fan on all night, do you think that's a bad idea?

Jay: Oh yeah, you really shouldn't do that.

This more or less is how the conversation happened, and I'm pretty sure my boss still believes in fan death. Let's keep in mind he is well educated, having studied for graduate degrees in the U.S.

It's funny reading how Wikipedia describes some of the beliefs as to how fan death works. One explanation is that the fan creates a vortex and sucks all of the air out of the room, creating a vacuum. Another is that the fan chops all of the oxygen molecules, leaving us with no breathable air. "Oh no, my fan has killed all of my precious oxygen! Why fan! Why!" Having a college degree....strike that....a high school diploma, I find all of these very laughable.

Let's move on, Korea. Fans are our friends. I just wish I could read mine to figure out how to turn it off without unplugging it.

Why Not, More Chusok Pictures

So my boss asked me to take pictures with my camera for him, and I ended up taking about 180 of them. I figure I can post just a few more of them up here since I skipped a lot of the cutest ones.

Thomas, somehow dressed just like Aladdin

I think his name is Martin, but I'm not sure. He started at our school about a month ago and would cry all morning. I was actually able to stop him from crying when I taught him how to do a high five and distracted him from thinking about his mother.

Lucy, she talks pretty much all class

Gloria

Barbie, one of my favorites

Lyn

Iris

Cindy, one of my favorites

Amy, she started a month or so ago. When she first started she would just sit in class and stare at me like I was crazy. She eventually warmed up.

Semi fixing Gemma's hair

Isabel, with Joo sneaking into her shot

Joo, working it for the camera

Chusok Party

So as everybody who reads this blog knows (or lives in Korea), this weekend was Chusok, one of the biggest holidays of the year in Korea. Since it fell on Saturday, my school took Friday off and Thursday was mostly Chusok activities. I made the decision to stay out until about 4:00 Wednesday night since I didn't have to teach in the morning. Let's just say I wasn't looking or feeling my best, so I was fortunate that all I had to do was take pictures, and didn't have any pictures taken of me.

Speaking of pictures, I'm going to tell the story of our Chusok festivities with the Kindergardeners through some photos.

So every one of the children dressed up in some fancy traditional Korean outfits. All of them were just ridiculously bright colors. The girls wore little dresses and the boys wore outfits that looked like what Aladdin wears.

7 year olds David, Chris, Alyssa, Brian, and Jenny

More 7 year olds Michael, Catherine, Barbie, Euris, Dorothy, and Monica

One of the activities was to put down two floor mats and have the kids sit back to back with legs out. They then tried to push with their feet and hands to send the other kid forward off of the mat. It's like backwards sumo wresting in a way.

7 year olds David and Ryan

Cindy vs. Isabel

Another activity was to have the kids arm wrestle. I'm not really sure if this is actually a Korean tradition. I always associate arm wresting with fat, sweaty middle-aged truckers with thick forearms.

I don't really know these two kids because I don't teach them

The kids then played a game where they had to throw these darts into a box. The darts were made of two chopsticks taped together and then a felt cone on one end and a traditional looking tail made out of felt. This game was fun to watch because some of the kids are so uncoordinated.

Gloria lining up her shot

I'm not sure of this girl's name because I don't teach her

The next thing they did was took these things that looked like bicycle streams with a weight attached to them and threw them up in the air and kicked them. Non of the pictures of this turned out because they were moving so much. It was cute when they just put them on their heads.

Euris with a nice mop top

The next thing that happened was the two female teachers in the room sat down on chairs and let the kids throw the toys into their dresses.

Semi teacher and Kelly teacher

With one of the groups Kelly teacher sat all of the kids down and told them a story for about twenty minutes or so. She is an excellent story teller, and held the kids attention for the entire time. I couldn't understand a single word she said.

One of the final activities was to teach the children how to bow, so here is Joo. Joo is Kelly teacher's daughter.

Next was a game where all of the girls sat down next to each other, like below, and then they have to close their eyes and the boys come and sit down behind them and I'm not even really sure what happens after that or why any of it happens. None of these events were really explained to me. Oops.

Daisy, Lyn, Isabel, and Joo, some sassy little girls