im running out of ways to say 'i love korea'

another week vanishes as we continue to help shape the fragile, innocent, sugar addicted minds of the children here in Juk Byeon, South Korea. The week gone had a few firsts for Kate and I in our teaching adventure; Kate made a disobedient student stand next to her and sing one of the educational songs that the kids are taught. I made a disobedient student get the hell out of my classroom for the remaining half of the lesson. Yup, we have been reading up on the concepts of tough love and public humiliation. Seems to be working too....

Naughty little kids aside, the vast majority of the students are a pleasure to teach, since they all have so many questions about pretty much anything, from me and my history, to the topic being taught and some of it's finer points. Fair to say that a lot of them lack the ability to actually ask the question that is eating at them, but thanks to our Korean-born English co-teacher we manage to translate and hopefully educate along the way.

Culturally, Korea is very different from our beloved Oz. Im sure we will cover a few random examples of it over the next year, but to begin with, the children here see teachers more as friends than mentors. They will run up to you in the street and follow you around to see what you are doing, high five you in the hall at school, offer you chewing gum, try and beat you up, and generally treat you like one of their buddies. It is really nice, and helps you immediately feel accepted by the class and the community.

Having said all that, you gotta love the weekend!

Last weekend we escaped to temple located in the mountains about 30kms from where we live and soaked up some Buddhist style serenity. The name of the temple is Buryeong Sa where Sa means temple in Korean anyway. The highlight of the temple (on paper) is meant to be the reflection on the lake of a buddha-shaped rock situated on a ridge to the west of the temple. We brought our compass and still couldnt see anything worth making a fuss over in that regard. Our personal highlight was the intense, silent, isolated feeling we had walking the couple of kms from the empty bus stop to the temple along the mountain road, and the intricately carved and painted rooftops of the temple buildings. (personal highlight - I lost my sunglasses along the road to the temple... and FOUND them on the way back. yeah, THAT'S how isolated the place was.)

on sunday the weather was even more perfect than the saturday, so we decided to find the local coastline and see what it had to offer. first we found a rocky bay with a lighthouse and a few nice little inlets full of seaweed and crustaceans. From there we headed 10 minutes north on foot to the local (perfect) beach. we had no idea this place even existed, since it is set just back from the main road, but it is a stone's throw from our place (a small stone thrown by an outfielder maybe, but still) and it is just amazing. white sand, occasional big black rocks, and gentle surf. yep, we just sat down and soaked up some sun for a while.

Nice weekend.

but wait till you find out what we end up doing this weekend...
till then!
//Brendan


*nerd update* for those who care/understand/bother to scroll this far down a post: this week we had a 100mbit internet connection installed IN OUR APARTMENT... um, yeah, like that means i basically can download a movie (to which i have legal entitlement obviously) in a bit under 113 seconds (depending on the size of the movie)... */nerd update*