Tidings of the Kim-chi variety

Hello everyone!

So it's been over a week since our last post. I still don't have pictures ready to post, but maybe soon I will.

Jindo is fantastic! We love our schools, our co-teachers, and the students are good so far. Sarah hasn't started teaching yet, but has been doing fun activities with her middle school while the students prepare for midterm exams. She is trying to put together clubs for students to be a part of in order to enhance their english skills. There are not a lot of opportunities here for students to go to hogwan's (like where Sarah and I worked last year) to improve their english. So we are trying to create our own ways of doing it. Sarah wants to do singing and exercising with her students, and hopefully they are up to it.

Last week we spent the whole time at our schools not teaching. It wasn't boring per se, because we talked with our co-teachers a lot and still spent some time with the students. We've found out a few things that are different here than last year.

1. The lunch is friggin sweet. Large portions, all healthy. And if you want more, you can just say "mani-yo". I for one am digging the spaghetti this week, and Sarah loves her kim-chi jiggae (kim-chi soup).

2. Classes are 45 minutes long. Basically, 20 teaching hours is 20, 45 minute sessions. 5 of those classes are teacher workshops, where we meet with the teachers, have conversation, debate topics, read articles, and maybe later watch movies and have cooking time.

3. Foreigners are very rare on the island. Sarah and I are just 2 of the 7 that are here. We met them all, and they are all pretty cool.

4. The landscape - since Jindo is not a big city like Gwangju, but rather an island with a bunch of small towns, there are many differences in what we see everyday. For example, on mondays, I take a ferry to another island to teach english, and on the way, I see many small islands and mountains and beaches. It's very pretty. Also, there is a place here on Jindo called Saebang. It's the place where you can go to see one of the world's most beautiful sunsets.

Today, we are moving into our new home. It's a house actually, very near Sarah's middle school (Jindo Middle School). It looks nice on the outside, but we won't know more until later today. Sarah's actually shopping with her principal right now. Very nice people indeed!

We got all of our stuff from Gwangju over the weekend from our old school. Hooray! I have dress clothes again! And we got to see a lot of friends there, and beat them in a poker game for 140,000 won.

We also got Yertle and Yoshi back. They are a little sick right now with eye infections, so we are taking very good care of them to make them all better. The vet says they should be ok in a week.

There was a live boxing match 2 nights ago. The Pacific-Asian Boxing Association put on a good show. The man from Korea knocked down the man from Thailand in the
5th round. It was pretty vicious. His sweat was being knocked off his face.
I only taught two classes today but they went over very well. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

We have our first 3 day weekend already. Some of our friends will be coming down to see us. So that in combination with us getting our place today will make for a good weekend!

More to come later. Hope all is well!

- The Harkins