Shakespeare Lessons

I'm sad I didn't think to take more photos of these lessons. Over the course of about 2 months (7ish lessons) I read A Midsummer Night's Dream with my six 5th grade classes. It was an idea from my co-teacher, who'd heard of a competition being run by the British Council to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday (or death-day, depending on how you want to look at it.)

Every lesson, we'd review the previous part of the story from the lesson before (except for the first lesson, where we learnt all of the weird and wonderful names we'd see) and then read the next "chapter". Now obviously, I can't get a mixed level class of 10-11 year old Korean kids to just read the original Shakespearean English, so I made a sort of animated Powerpoint storybook for each Act (although to save time a lot of them were of merged).

I figured that, since Shakespeare's plays are all intended to be seen as performative art, it would probably make it a lot easier on my students if they had more visuals than text to get the meaning across.

What really helped me with this is my awesome co-teacher. Even though I'd simplified the script to within an inch of its life, to have it make any sense to most of the class it still ended up a little complex. So once I'd read out each page or sentence, she'd ask questions to check their understanding, or just directly translate if it was still too hard. We'd fill in any cultural gaps together and answer questions after each slide.

Chuseok | Osaka Day 5

This is going to be a pretty short post, but it's a nice way to tie up the Chuseok posts, right?

On day 5, there wasn't really much time to do anything other than head to the airport and head home. Unlike the UK though, you don't have to turn up a million hours before your scheduled flight, so we still had the slight luxury of a lie in and a relaxed check of all our bags.

We bought breakfast while waiting for the airport train and I had to take a photo because it so perfectly captures mine and Nick's different ideas of how a good breakfast should be. (For clarity, his is sausage and egg on white bread, while mine is a chocolate waffle encasing chocolate mousse and a sort of chocolate jelly.)

I spotted this really cool work of art, made of old Osaka rail ticket stubs. It was taller than me, so it's a pretty impressive exhibit, as there were 3 or 4 different images there to look at.

Incheon from above. Really pretty!

Aha. Before leaving, we'd been told "get to the airport early! It's crazy during chuseok, you'll be queuing for hours!". When we arrived, we'd scoffed. Queues? What queues? Arriving in Japan, we had the same reaction. Leaving? Same again.

Then we arrived back in Incheon.

The immigration queues.

As Nick said when we got home, I think we were actually queuing at immigration for longer than we were on the plane to GET to Korea.

Small side note before I end this post, to any new or aspiring GETs (why are you reading this?), you don't need a multi-entry visa. Don't waste your money. Once you've been in Korea for something like 2 months, as long as you have your ARC with you (which you should) you can pass through immigration totally fine on a single-entry. We were so worried, but plenty of people said they only use a single-entry E-2, and they were right. Woohoo!

The Korvia Summer BBQ!

Woo, it's been a while! In fairness, this is the longest-running and most consistent blog I think I've ever had (and, being a child of the internet, I've had a LOT of blogs...) so I'm not going to lie, I'm quite proud. It probably helps that my life is a lot more interesting now. Let's face it, "I went to a palace" is much better than "I slept for 13 hours then went on Tumblr" ;)

ANYWAY. Quite a few weeks ago now, Nick and I went to the Korvia BBQ. For the uninformed, Korvia is the recruitment agency we used to get our jobs in Korea. It's a great agency, with kind and caring staff and I don't think I'll ever be able to stop singing their praises. 

One of the many great things they do for their recruits is they hold a party or barbecue when the weather is good, to give teachers old and new a chance to mingle and meet some fellow English speakers. It's really nice when you're far away from home with very little in the way of home comforts. I'm quite lucky, because every day I come home to my own little slice of England, but for many people, especially those in more rural areas, I can imagine the homesickness can hit hard.

So, after doing some shopping in the morning (we wanted to buy a "thank you and happy birthday!" present for our lovely recruiter, Daisy) we hopped onto the subway and headed off for Yatap. Annoyingly, we had to take quite a convoluted route there, which meant that we ended up taking the same amount of time as some people that came from much, much further away! However, the subway here is very comfortable so I'm not complaining too much.

When we arrived in the right area, we found some helpful posters dotted around, and slowly the sound of very non-Korean voices drifted over. Yaaay~

Pictured above: the aforementioned sign, my plate piled high with lovely lovely food, and the obligatory photo of Nick eating and wishing I was doing something other than taking terrible photos.

The Obligatory "Room Tour"

Two blog posts in one day? Crazy talk! Sorry about that though.
I said I'd give a little photo-tour of our officetel at some point, so while I was testing out my new phone I thought I'd combine the two.

Firstly, the living room:

Look at that giant window. Aw yeah. So really this place is pretty much open-plan. It makes 20-30sq.ft. feel that bit bigger. Every little bit of space gets used, so that wardrobe is pretty big, and each segment under the stairs is actually a cupboard.

There's two fairly confusing and intimidating things on the wall, one for the hot water and underfloor heating, and the other is our doorbell. It's meant to have a digital peephole for the front door, but it's seemingly broken except for the intercom, and occasionally the whole thing just decides to yell at us. I can only assume they're party political broadcasts, urgent news, and building maintenance updates.

There's also two big sofas (with throws on, for comfort, because nobody likes a sticky leather seat in 30C+ weather) and a table that I assume should be our dining table but instead gets used to hold most of the kitchen appliances.

월미도 | A Trip to Wolmido

Selfie Faux Pas Prevention Tip #1: Make sure you're zoomed out first.

Hello! Sorry for the ridiculous lack of posts about Korea! We don't have any internet set up in our officetel yet, so I can only get online at school, whereupon I'm usually (surprise surprise) working.

But here's a little post about one of the places we went to last week, to celebrate the final day of our 5 day weekend! You read that right. We were in school for 2 days, then it was Election Day so no work, then Founder's Day at my school (so I got the day off, alas Nick still had to work. I was very exciting and did housewife duties.) Finally it was Labour Day followed by the usual weekend, so that was a pretty great way to start our year in South Korea ;)

We decided to go to Wolmido, an island that is technically not an island, and home to Incheon Harbour. We got the subway there, which was just like any other subway, apart from the fact there's a lot more room, better aircon and ventilation, and better signage. Oh, and, it cost us about £1.50 return.

We'd already had a brief tour of Wolmi Island thanks to Nick's co-teachers, which is why we opted for it over the slightly more intimidating original plan of Seoul.

It's quite a walk from the station to the harbour, which is probably why most places suggest you get off a stop early and grab the bus the rest of the way. Although getting a bit lost probably didn't help us out much.

There's a lot of cute art on the walls in the area, all with lovely, deep, and sometimes just odd messages on them. It's a nice way of brightening up an area, as well as a good community project. I wish more places would do it!

We finally made it to where we were going (we had to skip past a park which I can only assume had deer inside, so we're definitely going back!) and the first thing we encountered was a pretty lively funfair! On one side were loads of rides, mostly overshadowed by the two huge, dangerous-looking and apparently famous pirate ship rides.

While on the other side were dozens of street food vendors, selling all kinds of weird and wonderful foods, from your standard sweets and ice cream all the way to, erm, dried and fried fish and seafood? I swear I saw just a giant tentacle hanging around in one stall.

Arriving in Korea!

So, the morning of May 26th arrived, and I was terrified. So many things had already been delayed and rejected, what if we fell at the final hurdle?

It was fine.

We arrived early, and thanks to our recruiter and the people at IMOE we were allowed to pick up in the morning rather than the afternoon. The lady behind the desk had our passports ready WITH VISAS as soon as we walked through the doors and I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I had to excuse myself to the bathroom before my makeup got wrecked.

Anyway, it was then a mad dash back to the subway, back to the airport, onto a plane, and off to Incheon. There was some faff with baggage (of course it was my suitcase that had to be searched) and with immigration (of course I wouldn't have the right information on my entry form) but THEN we found the man with a little sign saying "Nick and Marichelle" and we were off over the giant bridge, finally in Korea.

We were taken right to the Incheon City Hall and met Sarah from IMOE and got right down to signing contracts and setting up our bank accounts, which was a big relief considering we'd thought we'd have to set them up ourselves.

Embarrassingly, it took us far too long to realise that the people sat opposite us were in fact our head co-teachers.

Then, our co-teachers drove us straight to our new home! It's an officetel in Bupyeong, and it's wonderful. They kept apologising for it being so small but it's far bigger than I'd expected! It has a MEZZANINE!

It needed quite a bit of tidying and cleaning, and it took a while to get used to where everything was, how things worked and finding all the hidden cupboards, but it feels like ours now. There's aircon and a fan for the hot, hot summer, and an electric blanket and ondol (underfloor heating!) for the winter. A huge window with a lively view, and, most importantly...

A rice cooker.

I'll take some photos and do an officetel tour in another post. Just thought I'd put a little update and end to the Fukuoka blogs until then o/

Welcome! | いらっしゃいませ！| 어서오세요!

Hello!

Right, I'll try and keep this brief, considering most of you know me in real life (and thus should have a fair idea of what's going on with me at the moment), or have found me through a search (and thus should have the ability to read my little sidebar bio), haha.

Anyway, after what is fast becoming half a year of training, application, and stress, I am on my way to Incheon in South Korea, to teach English with my lovely boyfriend Nick (whose blog you can find here).

I've written a summary of how I came to have this job, but in the interest of shortness I've added a jump below (opens in a new tab). If you want to bail now, here's your chance! I won't judge you.