Boryeong Mud Festival

What can I say about the Boreyong Mud festival??? ... We went to a city about 2 hours north of Mokpo and when we got there we played in the mud!


I don't have much time to write so I'm cheating and here is what the net says about the festival:
The Boryeong Mud Festival is an annual festival which takes place during the summer in Boryeong, South Korea. The first Mud Festival was staged in 1998 and, by 2006, the festival attracted 1.5 million visitors to Boryeong. The mud is dug up near Boryeong, trucked to the Daecheon beach area, and dumped at a 'Mud Experience Land'.The mud is considered rich in minerals and used to manufacture cosmetics.


The town fathers and mothers discovered that the mud is more lucrative as a tourist attraction than using the muddy fields for agriculture.



Here are the photos:

Clean, and in our matching outfits.

Still clean...About to take a filthy plunge...

MUDDY!!! :)

Nice shorts Mr Clean!

After 2 days of fun in the mud (and the rain of course because it is still rainy season!) we have soft, healthy skin!

We are now off to teach a 5 day overnight camp in Geoksong ... more adventures to come!

ODDS and ENDS...

I've been neglecting my blog for a little while now and have a few odds and ends of things that I wanted to add to it, so on this last day of school while I sit alone in my classroom with no lesson planning or teaching to do, I thought I'd get to work on the blog!

Odds and ends from school:

My school was selected to be a study school for incorporating English speaking into the everyday lives of the kids. What this translated to was that the students had a list of sentences that they worked with every two weeks that had to be memorized and then presented in a dialog or in memorized speech form. I had to give an oral mark to each student every two weeks based on these sentences. I was really not involved in this project at all, which is a shame because I think I could have helped out in a few areas. For starters, in the beginning, no one ever asked me to proof read the sentences that the kids had to memorize. Many of them we grammatically incorrect or didn't make sense in the context in which they were being used. Towards the end of this semester my co-teacher caught on to this and had me proof read. I would have been happy to help come up with some of the topics and sentences though too if they would have let me be involved. I also would have been happy to help come up with the testing and marking methods as these made no sense at all and essentially marks were pre-determined for each students before they even spoke. I've learned though that I just have to shut up and go with the flow because in Korea they really aren't interested in "teaching" or "learning", they only want to memorize, pass the test, and never speak English again.

I did however get a kick out of this weeks sentences, and my co-teacher's sense of humour!

I do like lots of Korean foods, but I am constantly made fun of and of course open criticized because I pack my own lunch everyday rather than eat the cafeteria meal which consists of white rice and fish soup everyday!

These next two examples as to why my school should have me proof-read, are from the beginning of the semester when I had co-teacher Kim #2. He is the one who quit after 3 weeks because he had "hypochondria and melancholy" -- LOL!!!

This here is the "bellutin" board in my class where I hang student's work.

I also get lots of natural light in my classroom if I open the "blinder".

Odds and ends weekends:

Before rainy season started, we had a few great weekends at the beach with Jane and Andy out on Docho Island. The island isn't far from Mokpo, an hour on the fast ship, and two hours on the slow, car ferry. Milton and I usually opt for the slow ferry because it is a third of the price and the ride is much smoother ---no motion sickness for me even when I don't take gravol which is a huge accomplishment!

This is our boat:
The other reason we like the slow ship is because you can sit outside for the ride. The fast boat is kind of like a greyhound bus on water --- the seats are comfy but there is no fresh air and its really stuffy!

A quiet day at the beach! Andy made this nice parasol out of a broken umbrella and a bamboo stick. The pagodas on the beach are really nice, but you have to lay on the sand at the beach - that's what it's there for!

There were NO Koreans on the beach at this time. There are unwritten official rules of beach and sun exposure in Korea. Beach time does not start until school is out and rainy season is over. And ends once school starts again. This gives Koreans a one month window to enjoy the beautiful beaches! We were there in May and June which means we are "crazy waygooks"!

Updates from the Tampole apartment:

We had some plumbing done about two months ago. We had no hot water in the bathroom and it took three visits from plumbers and engineers (?!) to fix the problem. This is what the repair looks like:

This was a normal looking shower/bathtub before the repair, but we are now left with the pipes coming into the tub instead of behind it and holes where the faucets used to be. If you think this is bad though, you should see whats on the other side of that wall! The pipes were put in and left totally exposed in a side wall of our spare room/study. There are also exposed pipes on the balcony but at least they are tightly tucked up against the wall and are much less noticeable. We do have hot water now and amazing pressure! :)

And finally, it was a sad, sad day at the Tampole apartment a few weeks ago. Milton had to say goodbye to one of his most cherished possessions...

Dear Santa, a.k.a Mom, please send Milton a new dish mop for Christmas. :)

Rainy Season in Korea

Rainy season is upon us here in the ROK. WE have not seen the sun for more than about an hour in almost 2 weeks now. I've had to give up riding my bike to school as I cannot ride and hold my umbrella at the same time. I've been walking and taking cabs when the rain is more like a monsoon! I've learned that cab drivers will stop for foreigners only when the weather is nice. They like to make us suffer when we will get wet. I usually end up walking half way on the worst of days before a taxi will finally stop for me. Of course on these days, they like to add to my frustration by insisting that my Korean speaking skills have somehow reverted to non-comprehensible! Funny, I've never had a hard time before getting a cab driver to understand two words: Imeong Hakyo, the name of the village Imseong, and Hakyo means school. I've learned in the last two weeks its not even worth trying to add "elementary" to hakyo because that's just too hard for them to understand even though we are the ONLY school out here!!!

I decided to bring the camera to school with me yesterday to document the incredible amount of rain that falls in one night. There is only one road leading to and from my school and last week it was flooded, which was pretty surprising to me since the roads are raised at least a meter above the rice fields around it, and there are ditches at least a meter deep on either side of the road. After 5 minutes of repeatedly trying to direct the cab driver yesterday, he stopped on the road leading to me school, about 300 meters short of where i needed to be dropped off. There were cars lined up on the street but i couldn't see why. When I saw people getting out and taking their shoes off to start walking I realised that the road was flooded again. I begged the cab driver to keep driving as I was not about to walk through the filthy water in an area where I had seen a HUGE green snake last week (we're talking at least a meter and a half long and at least 2 inches in diameter! -yikes!). So the cab drove on and got me to my school which was just on the other side of the flooding. Here are the pictures I managed to take, along with some pictures I took this morning as the flooding has subsided.

This picture is a bit deceiving... the water isn't actually up to the windows of the cab but that is a field along side the road that is just completely flooded from the early morning rain.

The fence in the background is the entrance to my school. You can faintly see the principal and vice-principal, who were standing at the entrance to make sure all the kids got through the water safely to school.

Above: Here are some of the walkers and my cab going back into town.

Below: The same road today -- no rain last night!

This here that looks like a lake is normally rice fields. The red in the background is the post office that i usually go to to send pen pal letters home to Em. Normally, there is a sidewalk/path that runs along the telephone poles - you can see the end of the path that yesterday led right into the lake!

Below is a picture of the same field, taken today. There is still a lot of water in the fields but you can now see the tips of the rice plants.

This is the ditch along the side of the road beside my school. The perspective isn't great, but the ditch is still half full of water. The ditch is at least a meter deep and the rice fields are on a raised beds - like steps all the way up to the mountain.