On Friday I completed my first full week of work teaching English. My first thoughts about work is that I do not love it, its not horrible but I do not love it. Most of the children are adorable and pretty much perfect. However I feel really bad for these kids, they are like little robots. I have asked all of my students what time they go to bed and the answers are all very similar, anywhere from 11:00PM-1:00AM. I am working at a Hagwon, which is a private after school English school. My kids who are 6-14 years old get up around 6:00 every morning, go to their regular school, come to the Hagwon for English lessons until 8:30 PM, and then some of them have music lessons, math lessons, or sports after that! When they finally get home they need to complete their regular school homework and English homework. What makes me even more sad is on Friday I asked all of them what they were doing for the weekend. Again most of the answers involved more lessons and doing homework. Kids in the US don't know how good they have it. Looking at these kids, who are always tired in my classes, I really wonder if it is worth it? Does pushing them this hard this young really give them enough of an advantage as an adult to make it worth it?
Anyway enough of feeling bad for the kids. This weekend I was able to do a little bit of exploring around Suji.
So this is Korea's trash collection. Yeah I am just as confused as you are. No one seems to know what the purple two blue things are for, however the maroon thing is where you put not recyclable trash. You pull open the door in the cylinder part, shut the door, pull the lever on the side, and your trash mysteriously disappears. So there is either huge caves of trash under these things or there is some sort of system of retrieving the trash. The second part that we do know about is recyclables. See the pile of stuff on the side of the big purple thing? You literally just dump recyclables on the ground, then a man with a truck comes along and picks them up by hand. These trash collecting sites are all over the city. I do not understand there has got to be an easier way.
Any Western food that Korea makes, is done in some crazy way. Nothing, including cakes, pastries, you name it can be just sweet or just savory. Everything must be both! I ordered this sandwich because it looked good in the picture, it was not. It was a tomato, cheese, and pesto panini, smothered in an entire bottle of honey.
Onto my exploring! The whole weekend was overcast which has been a nice reprieve to the crazy hot and humid days of the past week. As I said in my previous post Suji is a great city to raise families in and to retire in, or at least by Korean standards. The entire city is full of these giant apartment buildings. Living in one of these is my idea of hell. Growing up with a corn field behind my single family home, I cannot imagine having a childhood living in one of these. Each building is basically the same the only way to distinguish between them is by the number painted on the side.
The buildings are owned by major Korean companies, which are also painted on the side of the building. So a building will say Samsung 242. Apartments as far as the eye can see, There is a very nice river and river path that run through the city. I was very excited when I discovered the path and thought it would be the perfect place to run. So because I am not a fan of people watching me when I run I decided to go at 11:30 pm one night, expecting most people to be in bed. They weren't. There were hundreds of people walking along this path, including speed walking Korean grandmas and grandpas.
That is the one thing that I think I will struggle with the most here. There is no where that you can go where there are not other people. No quiet places for solitude. Everywhere is always crowded. You want to go grocery shopping? Well so do 2,000 of your closest neighbors. Want to get a table at starbucks( I only do this maybe 3 times a day, since I have not been able to get internet yet), good luck you will have to be sneaky and stealthy to grab one.
Since I do not have internet yet I have started the bad habit of going shopping, I really need to stop doing that.
Just in case you were wondering fresh forest toothpaste tastes nothing like I would expect a fresh forest to taste like. It does however taste like cough syrup.
There is a dollar tree like store, called Daiso, but with better stuff. If you came to my apartment you might think that a 6 year old lives there not a 23 years old. Just everything here is cute overload, like my hedgehog pencil case.
Or my whale clothespins,
My project for the weekend was replacing the paper on my windows. As I am in the basement apartment my windows are right at street level so I need to have something on them so people can't just look in. When I moved in there was super nasty mildew covered paper on the windows.
So what could be better than replacing it with horse paper?! I am just imagining the next teacher to live here being some super manly man and hating the pretty horse paper, but for now I smile every time I see it.
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