ASHLEY ANNYEONG: May 2013

Damyang + Boseong

This past weekend was Buddha's birthday in Korea, which is basically the Buddhist equivalent of Easter. Choi suggested going to Boseong and Damyang, which were two places in Korea I really wanted to visit, so I naturally said YES! It was a power 2 day 1 night trip with lots of traveling but I'm really happy I got to experience these two towns.

After a 5-hour bus ride to Daejeon to meet Choi (normally takes 2!) and another hour and a half of driving, we finally arrived in Damyang, a city famous for bamboo.

First we went to Damyang Juknokwon (담양 죽녹원), a famous bamboo forest park where $3 lets you roam around along the trails and take as many pictures of the beautiful trees as your heart desires.

There were panda statues around in some areas. Many Korean parents were taking a ton of pictures of their kids with them. Of course, I waited in line too!

After leaving the bamboo park, we drove about 10 minutes to a famous sequoia road and walked around a bit. A lot of Korean movies, dramas, and music videos are filmed in this area. So much real, clean air. My lungs were very happy!

Damyang is famous for daetongbap and ddeokgalbi. I was obsessed with getting a chance to eat real daetongbap in Damyang after we studied it in my Korean class. Choi was more into ddeokgalbi so we ordered both. Daetongbap is rice and nuts steamed in bamboo. The bamboo cup can only be steamed one time so people who eat this food get to take their cup with them as a souvenir.

Daetongbap - bottom left.

So happy to finally be eating daetongbap. Ddeokgalbi in bottom right.

After a late dinner we hopped back into the car and drove another 2 hours to make it to Boseong.

We stayed at Golmangtae, a unique pension/bed&breakfast in Boseong where the rooms are made out of loess and look a bit like mushrooms.

The next day after checking out of our pension, we headed straight to the green tea fields. We were feeling peckish and decided to get the famous green tea ice cream right away.

The ice cream was better than anything I've found in Seoul but nothing beats the world-famous Hokkaido ice cream in Japan. Nonetheless, it was extremely delicious for only $1!

Then we started the trek up the tea fields. So refreshing and it wasn't too crammed with tourists.

The ocean in the background. The tea fields are right on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula.

There were vendors selling a lot of green tea products, the standard Korean street food, and even cute succulents. I bought green tea chocolate to share at work and Korean class this week, green tea incense for myself, green tea rice wine to drink with some girl friends, and postcards to send some special people back home.

On our way out of Boseong, we stopped at Yulpo Beach for a little rest and relaxation. A lot of the times in Korea the beaches are absolutely packed but there were hardly any people when we left. We sat for about 30 minutes just watching the water, not quite ready to leave all this quiet countryside behind.

Choi insisted on eating Beolgyeo cockles while we were in the area. Apparently its the Korean equivalent of going to Italy and not getting gelato, or something. There were hundreds of people waiting outside these restaurants at 3 in the afternoon. All the seafood restaurants are in the same area and are often featured on Korean travel shows. I was skeptical but it turned out to be quite good. Earlier in the day I posted a picture on Facebook of a cafe I thought my mom would love and thought it would be nice if she could have been there to experience it but sitting down at this restaurant made me think she would absolutely hate this, haha.

Cockles - edible bivalve clams.

After our big lunch we grabbed coffee to go and headed back to Daejeon, where I took a bus back to Seoul. It was a busy weekend but I experienced yet another cool part of Korea!

A map of where we went.

Seoul ---- Damyang --- Boseong

my Korean learning journey

I remember the first time I learned to speak a few words of Korean. I was back in Sioux Falls, spending a few weeks at my sister's house. I used her iPad to download Talk to Me in Korean lessons and learned how to make simple sentences such as "My name is Ashley" and "Where is the bathroom" before I left. Gosh, I was so lost when I first arrived at the airport. After experiencing the frustration of attempting to learn Japanese without a proper class, I enrolled in a Korean night class at Seoul National University also before I left, which was a little risky considering I didn't have any idea of where in Seoul I would be living and I also didn't even know where the university was in relation to other parts of the city.

So there I was fall of 2011 fresh off the boat in my Korean class, still adjusting to the fact that I am in a foreign country, responsible for teaching 500+ students a week, and trying to learn Korean. It was tiring, it was exhausting, and I really sacrificed my free time that I could have used to get to know some people who were here, but hands down it was a really good choice. Why? Because the class started from the basics - how to read and pronounce Hangul (the Korean alphabet) properly, I learned about all those small little verb irregularity rules that I rely on every day even as I am learning more advanced grammar. I've had more than a handful of individuals tell me I have almost native-like pronunciation and handwriting, which I attribute to the fact that I took a real class with homework, quizzes, and role plays almost immediately after arriving.

So I took one class at Seoul National University, but decided I wouldn't enroll for the next semester because that was during winter vacation at the school where I worked and I wanted to travel. I self-studied the Level 2 books at home and watched a lot of Korean dramas on my laptop and when the next semester started I tested into level 3. I struggled a bit in the beginning with consolidating all of the information I had learned before on my own and actually producing sentences with the proper grammar was awkward and I often wasn't right on the first try. I also grew increasingly frustrated sitting in a class with a bunch of foreigners speaking bad, or at least not good, Korean. Our teacher had a degree in Korean education but then was using all these generic, standardized lesson plans. It got boring real fast. When the final exam came around, I struggled with remembering reported speech in my speaking interview: he said, she asked, she asked me to do this for somebody, she asked me to do this for her (all are different in Korean). Most students I talked to in this class decided that we were not going to continue with this program - good choice.

Level 3 at Seoul National University

So I finished in May and knew that since SNU's evening program ended at Level 4 and that I needed a break away from these university language school classes, I quit with no real direction about what I was going to do with my Korean studies. I knew at this point I would stay in Korea for another year but my last class at SNU was so dull that my focus on learning Korean was starting to wane. For about one month, I studied vocabulary on the subway every morning to school and that was that. I started to get sad and felt like I'd let myself go a bit (Type A personality is a curse). I really wanted to speak Korean well but was turned off for a bit by the thought of falling asleep with my eyes open in another class.

Flash forward to one day when out of sheer boredom I was scouring Craigslist and I found a listing for a Korean tutor advertising her services. She mentioned that she has 35 students including businessmen, teachers, and students and that she gives her pupils homework and gave a link to her FB page. I messaged her on FB, she gave me a free lesson. The trial lesson was really intense and I was sold. $35 an hour and I had a private Korean tutor.

Met my tutor one a week at Starbucks.

I worked with her from July of last year until this past March. We worked over those stubborn reported speech structures for over a month. I learned about 20 new vocabulary words a week but the ultimate value in those lessons was the focused speaking. It wasn't just free talk, because I'm not at an advanced level where that would be worthwhile. Instead, she would give me a context and hints about what grammar structure to use and have me make a sentence. If I made a mistake, she would give me hints and try one more time to pull the right sentence out of me. Then she wrote it down in my notebook and I had to memorize it for the next lesson. Over time, this solidified so much of what I had learned and my speaking ability came much closer than it was before to matching my reading and writing abilities.

Sample sentences I had to memorize. Note: I don't have cancer,just an example. ;)

I started to feel like I needed another classroom experience, a chance to be forced to learn tons of vocabulary and grammar even though I won't remember 100% of everything long-term. So that's where I am now, enrolled in Level 5 of Yonsei University's evening program. Still struggled with reported speech on this interview too! My first week at Yonsei we again went over it again and then learned reported speech contractions! It's like this little grammar evil that keeps creeping up on me. My class still has people that can't pronounce Korean properly - drives me crazy! Don't get me wrong. I love Japanese people to death! But since Korean grammar and Japanese grammar are quite similar, Japanese people just superimpose Korean words in their Japanese sentences while maintaining Japanese intonation and speed and it just sounds so not right. I'm pretty sure this is one of God's forms of punishment, having the loveliest Japanese girl ever in class who sounds 100% Japanese and 0% Korean. All in all, 10 hours a week of Korean class can hardly be described as really fun but I'm learning tons and my brain hurts a lot.

Learning some serious vocabulary at Yonsei

After I finish my semester at Yonsei in early June, I will go back to my tutor to further consolidate what I know and give me Korean some much needed one-on-one time.

So that's been my journey learning this language for basically the past 2 years. Woo, what a ride. It's been expensive and time-consuming but I'm not embarrassed at all about the fact that I speak Korean!

What do you think? Keep learning Korean or start Chinese? (1,000% joking on the last one. The next language I attempt to learn is going to be an easy European language, for real.)

This is so true for language learning, don't you think?^^

The Beginning of the End

I've started telling some students that I won't be coming back next semester. Here are some of the responses:

"Oh my god!!"

"Really?!"

But the most common reply was "Why?"

I've had the following conversation a handful of times every day.

Student: Teacher, you go back America?

Me: Yes...

Student: Why?

Me: I miss my family.

Student: Go home during summer vacation

Me: Summer vacation is only one week... That's too short. I haven't seen my mom in over a year.

Student: Oh my gosh (in a manner indicating complete shock)!! But don't go!!!

In one class I told the students who had arrived before the bell rang and a boy ran outside to tell his friends. Haha^^ Often while I am analyzing the foreign language teacher and student relationships and interactions I have here, I think about what I probably would have done if my situation was reversed. If my high school had a native Spanish teacher, I don't think we really would have cared that much about be the teacher. It's nice to feel special sometimes here in Korea because I'm a foreigner and a language teacher and think I might have made a cultural impact on the kids.

Every day students spend 10 minutes in their homeroom before school starts and last Friday they had to write English letters to anybody at the school. Here's one funny one I got.. :)

April Latergrams

Can't believe it's already May! April was a month of cherry blossoms, lots of bubble tea, a new haircut, studying, a day at the spa, and lots of hustling {read: accounting homework and emails}.