A Very Korean Thanksgiving... or two.

Since Thanksgiving was last weekend, a bunch of the Incheon English teachers from August EPIK program (sometimes aptly titled the Incheon family) got together and celebrated by having a feast of sorts at Bennigans. Now, Bennigans, as you may well know is all but out of business in the United States. However, Korea is probably single-handedly keeping Bennigans afloat via their financial support of this American "institution." Now, they don't have a whole lot of turkey (think a club sandwich with turkey on it), but they DO have pumpkin soup and mashed potatoes. Unfortunately, no gravy and no pumpkin pie. However, given the circumstances it will do. It was super fun and a big group of about 15 of us rolled into Bennigans and had a great time! I ate to my heart's content (chicken and green beans and mashed potatoes and pumpkin soup-- not too shabby for a foreign thanksgiving), and laughed and enjoyed good conversation with friends. It wasn't the same as being home for Thanksgiving, but honestly, I couldn't have asked for better circumstances for my first Thanksgiving away.

After going to Bennigans (which had a tree decorated for Christmas-- since they don't gauge Christmas season by Thanksgiving, they can bring out the decorations a touch earlier), we went to the underground near Bupyeong station and saw a Christmas tree and some wreaths that had been put up right in the center.

On Saturday, I went to Myeongdong for some shopping (as per usual). I got a white coat (omg, so cute, pictures coming soon) and a ring and pair of earrings. Afterwards, headed to Bekahs (also as per usual). At Bekah's, the frisbee group was having a big festive Thanksgiving dinner. Bekah had ordered (from the USO) Thanksgiving dinners complete with Turkeys, and enough stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberries and gravy to feed a small army. Plus, everyone brought a little something extra to share, so in addition there was mac&cheese(thanks Melly!), green bean casserole (a la Canadian Allie), amazing mashed potatoes (Carne), chocolate cake (beth), tiramisu (Julie) and lots of appetizers like cheese & crackers and veggie platters. Let me tell you what, it was AMAZING. I was so happy to be able to have a *real* Thanksgiving dinner and be with the people I am closest to here in Korea. Honestly though, I love the people I play frisbee with. Such a good, warm group and I feel like in 3 months I have melded right into the group and it's so wonderful. Here are some pictures from our big evening:These are the people who live in the apartment and hosted the Thanksgiving dinner. L to R: Bekah (go gators!), Dave & Beth

This is disc hotel. These are the people that live in this apartment, plus the people who live in this apartment on weekends.

This is most of the people who were at the Thanksgiving dinner. Note the adorable small children at the bottom. More on them later.

Oh captain, my captain. Chase, one of the Korean Team captains, teaches us how to model. For this I am thankful.

These boys are very thankful and very full.

I only posted this picture to show off my new ring. It is bling-tastic. If you can't see it, just click the image for a bigger size to show up. ^^

Korean boys first turkey! Junseok and Heejeong. They are SO MUCH FUN.

Ben (middle) is teaching Dave and Tweezy some trick with two wine corks. Ben is full of tricks. He rides a unicycle. He can juggle anything. He often juggles while unicycling. His mother is the only person in his immediate family that cannot simultaneously ride a unicycle and juggle. Fun facts, right?

We decided to allow two Korean boys (heejeong, left & Jihoon, right) pull the wishbone, since they naturally had never done it.

The kiddies. On the Right is Jihoon and Jae-eun's son, and to the left Aaron and Yoonee's son. THEY ARE SO CUTE OH.MY.GOD.

So after eating a ton of food, we all got ready to go out. And by we all got ready, I mean Bekah did my hair and make-up and made me look BEAUTIFUL. She also did Beth and Cat's eyes. And then we went out. Pictures of everyone on their way out:

Some of us. BUT, some of these people didn't go out *ahem, Bekah, Tweezy, Chase*

Me and Mark. A good picture of my eye make-up/hair. Also, Mark is Canadian but a really cool one.

The girls with sexy eye make-up headed out to King Club. Also, this is my new coat, which you can't see very well.

That's all for now folks. Coming up next: Seoul and my classroom Christmas'd out!

Thanksgiving and such

Well, things have been really really busy here. As I mentioned in my last post, I undertook the ridiculous task of cutting out roughly 3000 feather for my students hand turkeys. 15 headaches, 5 paper cuts, at least a dozen severe hand cramps, and many many hours of mindless cutting later, I have to say, it was worth it. My students created some amazing things, some hilarious things, and some just plain off-beat things. I'll post my favorites here.

First, some pictures from my classroom with hand turkey decorations. Mind you that this is with four or five piles of hand turkeys from my Friday classes not hung up.

There is still a full wall you cannot see, plus the backs of the two doors.

And some of my personal favorites:

Clearly, my students are adorable. I don't care that this turkey looks like a chicken and has chicken babies. It's just so darn cute.

Fo real, that turkey is FLYYYYYY.

This is 100% typical. Click on the picture to see a bigger version, but if you look, it is essentially a shrine to YG Family which is the entertainment company that owns BigBang and 2ne1. Also, note the appropriate use of gobble gobble gobble, which I taught them!! Also, the words on the body of the turkey are the names of the members of BigBang: GD(or G-Dragon), T.O.P., D-light (a.k.a Daesung [who is the least popular]), Victory (or Seung-Ri who is the cutest little guy in the world), and my personal favorite Sun (a.k.a. Taeyang a.k.a. Young Bae, which is his real name, and omg, watch this video [complete with English subs] and tell me you don't want to eat him up)







These two girls clearly understood that on Thanksgiving we eat this bird we were creating. I think they were feeling compassionate for the poor guys, and made them sad. The one on the right's caption is, "I'm eat" So her grammar isn't perfect, but you get the idea.

Clearly, this student simply didn't understand the premise. It's not halloween. It could be some abstract work, though. Something about the surreal realization that your senses, your very being is light as a feather and floating on the wind like spirits in the night.

This is one of my favorites. My student said to me, "teacher? Have to turkey? I turkey no." And I said, well, that's kind of the point. And she said, "Teacher, indian" and promptly made this. So creative and still related to the holiday, even in its moderately derogatory characterization of native peoples.

Turkeys in love. Or should I say chickens in love? This was a big problem with my students. Turkeys don't really exist here, so they weren't 100% sure what they were drawing. Women and men are the arrows.

"Not chicken. I'm turkey." That just about sums it up, although I'd like to point out the oddly shaped egg in the bottom left corner.

So, that was my week. Details about my Thanksgiving dinner(s) coming soon.

I'll leave you with these tidbits:
1. On Sunday I got really mad at an old lady because she bowed me in the head while I was sleeping on the subway so that she could put her hand precisely where my head was resting in a peaceful slumber. There were about 2 dozen other locations she could have equally comfortably rested her hand,but she clearly saw that my spot was the most comfortable and decided she had to have it.
2. Today I raked in the goodies. I got 2 boxes of ddeok (korean rice cakes, which unfortunately I'm quite picky about), 2 bottles of juice (grape and orange) AND a coffee from a student complete with a note that reads: "Allison Teacher~ I love you with hearts and more of these: ~~

xoxo
A

Good Morning Korea

Just woke up here. It was supposed to maybe snow last night, but it didn't. It DID snow a couple nights ago, though. I didn't see the snow falling, but I saw snow on the ground, which was awesomely cool! I am up early for no apparent reason except that my body has clearly adjusted to getting up at 6:45 a.m. everyday. So, yeah.

I've been cutting out feathers this morning. It's been a busy day already. So, this week is Thanksgiving, obviously. In Korea, of course, they don't celebrate this holiday and so I wanted to introduce it to my students. And I though, gee, what better way than to make hand turkeys? It's the classic Thanksgiving art project and my students LOVE to do arts and crafts. So, I'm going to do a powerpoint about Thanksgiving for 10 minutes, and dedicate the other 35 minutes to hand turkeys. I figure it will take 10-15 minutes to make five I'm thankful for ___________ sentences, and then 20 minutes for everything else, the assembly of hand turkeys. I had considered having the students cut out their own feathers, but I assure, that would have taken 20 minutes of the class just to draw and cut so they would never be finished at the end of class. So, I thought, I'll just cut out feathers. I printed out several pages of feathers (I'm not good enough to free hand them) and started cutting. After about 72 feathers (I printed 72 of each color in the first round) I did the calculations, and it suddenly struck me that I have to cut out roughly 3000 feathers. Now here I am at just over 300, 10% done, and I think I'm going to kill myself. haha. My over-ambition is biting in the butt yet again.

As an aside, I'm going to a wedding this afternoon for one of my coworkers. I'm really looking forward to it, even though my co-teacher has warned me that it's not very interesting and it's really really short (30 minutes + eating and you go home)

Also, yesterday sucked. Well, yesterday was awesome, but the after school hours SUCKED.I got out of school early (my coteacher wanted to go somewhere, and I had a bill to pay, so I was cool with her using me as an excuse to get out early). Last time I had this bill to pay, I went to work on a day off (founders day of my school) and paid. This time, however, I got to the bank too close to closing time and they wouldn't do it. Luckily, my bill can be paid at other places, like the SHOW store. Show is the company that provides my phone service, and they are a subsidiary of the company that provides my internet service, which is what my bill was for. So I go to the Show store about 10 minute walk from the bank and give them my bill and my debit card. She asked for my Alien Registration Card, which is normal. I give it to her, and then after some typing, she says to me (in Korean) something along the lines of, your ARC card doesn't match you account information. Do you have another id number? At which point I realized I needed my passport because it is what I used to open my bank account, not my ARC. Unfortunately I didn't have my passport, and could only remember the first half of the numbers. So, I couldn't pay my bill. This was really frustrating. Supposedly I can pay it at the convenience store, which I will try today, but if that doesn't work, I'm going to rip my hair out and scream. And probably cry.

So yeah. That's that. Now it's time to focus on cutting out more paper feathers.

xoxo
A