은재 and I's trip to 창덕궁

The week after our trip to 태안's Shrimp Festival, I was in Seoul for orientation.  I got off early on Friday, so 은재 and I decided to meet up.  She suggested seeing 창덕궁 palace.  I'd already seen one of the palaces in Seoul.  I hadn't realized at the time that there were four different ones.  Still, I thought it might be boring, but 은재 talked me into it, and I'm glad she did.  Unlike the previous palace I'd seen, in this one we were allowed into "the secret garden," which is the king's garden that traditionally could only be entered with the King's permission.  It was quite beautiful.

Afterwards, 은재 and I went to a historical area of Seoul and looked around, and the got coffee and honey bread at one if the local cafés.  All around a very worthwhile experience.

북한산 Hiking Trip

I went to 북한산 (Bukhansan Mountain), a mountain range on the North West side of Seoul, last Saturday with a meetup group.  I met some nice people, including an US Army Engineer, a Korean Civil Engineer who works in Seoul, a couple expats working for Samsung, and a few Korean teachers.  Check out the pictures.

Near this area there were some statues hidden in the rocks representing North Korean soldiers who had been hiding in these mountains in order to assassinate South Korea's then president 박충희 (Park Chung-hee) in 1968.  The assassins were discovered by a lone police officer who fought off the group of soldiers long enough to thwart their mission.  The police officer died in the unsuing combat, but the North Korean soldiers were captured.

Me at the summit where we ate lunch (well, I didn't bring one, but others shared there gimpap and jerky with me, so I was more than satiated).

On the way down, we cam across this Budhist Temple.

The 태안 Shrimp Festival

I figured out how to upload photos from my phone more easily (using the Google+ auto backup feature), so I'm going back through them and posting them for all to see!

On October 19th, 2013, a friend, 은재 (un-chay), I'd met from Seoul came down to 태안 (tay-an) to attend the 태안 shrimp festival with me and some of my other friends.  After she and her friend arrived in 태안, we ate a great multi-course meal at a Chinese restaurant, which Jackson, who speaks Manderin fluently, ordered for us.

We then proceeded to show 은재 and her friend, Stephanie, around 태안 before meeting up with the rest of our friends to head to the shrimp festival.  In the process, we came across a historical school building.  These can be found in many places in South Korea.  They were built hundreds of years ago by the government to expand education in South Korea, or so Jackson explained to me.  I don't remember too much about it beyond that.

After that, we met up with our other friends at the bus terminal (actually we were going to be late for the bus so we ran half way across 태안 with only a few minutes to spare) and headed to 안면도 (an-mi-on-doh), which is about 45 minutes away, for the shrimp festival.  Once we arrived, we first headed to the beach, where I took lots of great pictures.

After that, 은재 helped us good deal on freshly caught shrimp at one of the restaurants nearby.  These restaurants were all over the place.

So with that, we hurried back to 태안 so that 은재 and her friend could make it back to their bus on time.  After seeing them off, we went to one of the local cafés for 빙수 (bing-sue), which is shaved ice with different various kinds of sweet topings on top (the Oreo 빙수 is my favorite).  Two of the local teachers in our group are absolutely crazy about 빙수.  The café has writing all over the walls from various patrons (I guess the owners are okay with this).  As you can see in the third pic, Jackson decided to move into virgin territory.

"The Original"

"The Original" oddly specific category of food that makes sense only in Asia.  Wait, why is that in English?

Installing the English Language Pack for Office 2007

Like most teachers who come to Korea, you'll find that you're given a computer that has the Korean version of Windows installed.  Unless you speak Korean fluently, you'll find that this leads to a lot of stumbling around the user interface trying to figure out which button to click.

Fortunately, you can "fix" Microsoft Office so that its menus and buttons are in English.  Finding the proper install file can be hard to find because Microsoft has stopped distributing the file, but Digital River (a distribution partner of Microsoft) still has a copy available on their servers (see link below).  It was well worth the effort, as it saves me tons of time when I'm preparing worksheets and presentations for my lessons.

Here are the instructions:

1. Download the English Language Pack for Office 2007 at: http://msft-dnl.digitalrivercontent.net/msoffice/pub/X12-42421/X12-42421.exe
2. Run the downloaded program.
3. Open 시작 > 모든 프로그램 > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office 도구 > Microsoft Office 2007 언어 설정 (which translates to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office 2007 Language Settings)
4. Change the drop-down box on the first tab from 한국어 to English.
5. Click the left button on the bottom of the dialog to apply the changes.
6. Re-open Microsoft Office.  Congratulations!  You can now read the menus and buttons!

Note, this does NOT install a new copy of Microsoft Office.  It simply updates the existing copy of Microsoft Office to support additional languages in its User Interface.

I did all this before I decided to write this tutorial.  So, if I missed any steps, or if you get stuck, please let me know and I'll get it fixed.  I'm using Office 2007, but if anyone else figures out how to do this for the other versions of Office, please post on here for the benefit of anyone who stumbles on this post who is using those versions.

I hope this is helpful to someone!

The Perils Of Language

Much of second language acquisition is about taking risks.  You'll have a hard time mastering a language if you're afraid to experiment and improvise when your not sure how to say something.  This unfortunately means that sometimes be misunderstood, but when you learn what your mistake was, it'll very likely to stick.  Furthermore, its exhilirating when you are understood, even more so if you're told that you said it "correctly" (i.e., the meaning was clear and sounded natural).  So, experimenting not only creates verry effective opportunities for learning, it can be very motivating by showing you that you are learning and you can use what you're learning.

The mistakes you make can often be comical, so long as they don't result in a serious miscommunication.  An example of a "mistake" I made occured a few weeks ago.  I was chatting with one of my coworkers via text message.  He teaches Korean Literature and is one of the most fluent English speakers in the school (he reads English newspapers on a regular basis).  I was giving him my new phone number (having a smartphone in Korea makes life much easier, by the way).  He asked me to save his number.  I wanted to tell him that I had done it, so I replied "끝내요" (goon-nay-yo) with is the present tense, polite, informal form of the verb "to finish."  He asked me what I meant, so I explained that I meant that I had "finished" saving his number.  Then I asked if I had said it wrong.  He replied that 끝내요 means that "the relationship is finished."  I was mortified, especially because he's one of the teachers that I've become closest to among my coworkers (see my previous post here).  He hadn't taken offense, thankfully.  He knew he hadn't understood me.  He just said "It won't be easy for you to adjust to korean word cheer up" (sic).

I realized later that I should have used the word 하다 (ha-da), which essentially means "to do."  Using the past tense 했어요 (hay-seo-yo), instead of the present tense 해요 (hay-yo), would also have made it clearer.

Unfortunately, the idea that its okay to make mistakes is one of the hardest lessons to teach my students.  Americans, and I suspect people from most cultures, have a hard time grappling with the fact that making mistakes is a natural part of learning and growing.  But, in Korea that fear of making a mistakes is magnified many times over.  Making mistakes is often considered shameful, and so Korean students feel that anything they say in English, especially if its in front of their peers, has to be "right."  So, it can be quite hard to get them to say anything at all.

My Coworkers In Korea

Working with your co-workers in Korea is tricky business.  They're good and gracious people, but with divergent expectations arising from our differing cultural backgrounds combined with the language barrier, opportunities for misunderstandings abound.  There are some interactions I've had with my coworkers in the past that still completely baffle me.  But, I consider myself fortunate that I work at a good school, which has dealth with three other Guest English Teachers (GETs) before me.

This week, the co-worker I share a desk in the teacher's office told me that I should say goodbye to her every day and that it hurt her that I didn't say goodbye to her when I left for home in the evenings.  Normally, I might have laughed at such a comment, but I could tell from her tone and her expression that she was quite serious.  Aside from the fact that saying goodbye isn't something really all that seriously in the US, I spend most of my time in the classroom, as I don't have a computer in the office and so I can't get much work done there.  So, I've only had a handful of conversations with this co-workers, so it never would have occured to me that she might be offended by my not saying goodbye to her each evening.  Furthermore, I make it a point to say hello to everyone the first time I see them everyday, as this is something I was told by my predecessor was important.  The thing is, as a GET, the terms of my contract are set by the government and is different from that of my coworkers, and so my workday ends an hour earlier that of the other teachers.  This is often a point of enmity between the GET and their coworkers.  In fact, I had to point out this in the terms of my contract to my head Co-Teacher when she tried to keep me until 5:30 pm.  For this reason, I often hesitated to say goodbye to people on my way out (except for my boss, the Vice Principal) as I felt like I was "rubbing it in" that I got to leave early.  Most of my coworkers also probably don't realize that I do a lot of class prep at home, as I use Keynote on my Mac to create my presentations.

So, another lesson learned the hard way.  I felt bad about hurting this co-worker's feelings, as it surely was not my intent.  Despite minor faux pas like these, I'm on good terms with pretty much everyone in the office, I think.  In any case, I'm finally buying a laptop this weekend so I can work in the teacher's office and wont have to do any work from home anymore.  Even though its a little silly for me to buy more own laptop that will be used mostly for work, I think it will be a worthwhile investment.