Sports Day!

I know it doesn't really count, but this is the speed I got from my school :o It's also not relevant to this blog post...Anyway, SPORTS DAY! :DThe day after the festival came Sports Day... And it was manic. I knew I was in for some trouble when I heard the blowing of horns and chanting as I wandered into school for the day at about 8:15am. In an almost tribal fashion each homeroom class had their own 'uniform' that the kids bought themselves, their own chants, warpaint, and rivals. Also, each class had their own section on the school playing ground to cheer on their team in, I presume to minimize fights. I chose to stick with my co-teacher's...

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My otherworldly net connection

Just because :) Go to www.speedtest.net and test to see how yours compares to my beast of a net connection here in Incheon, South Korea...

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School Festival!!

School festival day was a couple of weeks back now - I've just been too busy to whack up a blog about it... Well, let's say a mixture of lazy and busy. Anyway, the school festival is when each homeroom class ('tutor group' in the UK) sort out a theme for their homeroom and kids can go in and out of each room and check out what they're friends are up to. It was really fun :) Unfortunately, I couldn't really wander the classrooms myself as I had to do my own theme game! I called it 'Lee's Treasure Hunt' but the Korean teachers changed it to 'MISSION' 'cause apparently the student know what this means - you have to say it in a Korean accent though...

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Korea F1

This weekend just gone me, Sarah, Chris and Amy (two mates from England who came over for the race and a holiday) all went down to Mokpo to watch the F1. Took the KTX, which was hassle free, played Trivial Pursuit on the way down on Sarah's iPod touch and slept on the way back because it was gone midnight... We turned up at the race track after a great night at the hotel with the friendliest hotel manager in the world (he had a small Paris Baguette cake waiting for us when we turned up, gave us a lift to the shuttle bus AND when Sarah left her phone at the hotel he posted it to her a couple of days later... great bloke) at around 11am ready for...

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Sports day preliminaries

Turned up to class today (class 2-5) to find no bugger there and a load of kids shouting at me to go outside and watch the football. This took a while for them to get across because I initially thought that they were winding me up and their English was shocking. I also thought I might've got prior warning that I got to watch football instead of trawl through the textbook with the kids, but this is Korea after all and I've gotten used to it :PHere's a few pictures I shoddily took of the game:The kids, and even one of my co-teachers who was sitting next to me, were well keen about the game. My co-teacher kept like slapping me on the back when things...

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Cool Korea: Update

I haven't seen the show, but for all you One Piece fans out there (Sarah and Tea Leaf..) here is a particularly time consuming piece of graffiti that I found on one of my students desks:I asked the girl sitting behind it if she had done it and she sort of nodded sheepishly in that kind of 'I'm gonna be honest in the hope that my honesty saves me from punishment' way. Then I asked her if I could take a photo and her face beamed :)One of these days I might get around to teaching...

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Cool Korea, Part Three: Stargate and Gorillas

I found the extra pictures that I was going to use for this blog, so here I am writing it as the class I was supposed to teach got cancelled because of Sports Day preliminaries.Starting off with a mug. No, it's not a picture of myself... It's a mug that I was given in a restaurant months ago that I thought was, and still is, hilarious. I took 4 pictures of the mug from different angles.. Can you spot the odd one out?They aren't hiring thousands of native English teachers for nothing you know... I wouldn't be surprised if this mug was designed by a native English guy for his own amusement actually.Coolness rating: 8/10 - I cracked up.Koreans love...

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Cool Korea, Part Two: Student Stuff

Figured out how to transfer pictures. It was slightly tedious :/Part two of my little series on what I've called 'Cool Korea' (I've tried to make it sound professional but is basically whatever pictures I found on my camera phone that I deemed to be 'cool') is on things that my students have done and mostly centers around graffiti... :PMost of the graffiti I saw in my school in England seemed to focus around three things: someone is in love with someone else '4eva', anything to do with Pompey FC, and, last but not least, the standard drawings of a mans privates... Although I have found the same stuff in Korea (minus the stuff about Pompey, unfortunately...

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Cool Korea

I've been here around 8 months now and so I think it's about time I showed you some cool pictures I've taken since my arrival. Ok, they're not the most professional photos (they're semi-pro at best) but I think they're pretty cool anyway :PDuring my time in America, and the two hours I spent watching 'Bowling for Columbine', I learnt that you can buy a gun and ammunition in Walmart, just a few aisles down from the kiddy bikes. The Korean equivalent is that they sell martial arts equipment in Home Plus right next to the board games. It's not quite as mental as selling things that might later be kept as evidence from some kind of shopping mall...

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Second Birthday Away from England

23 years-old now and I'm starting to feel it.. It seems I can play computer games for only a couple of hours now before my eyes start to hurt and I can only eat half a birthday cake until minor belly flab begins to develop (and don't even mention the Paris Baguette egg tarts). Seriously though, if I wasn't with Sarah my birthday would've just passed me by. So here is an account of what my birthday this year was like (with pictures, of course):On my birthday I had gifts from three students who are in my after school class, Han Sol, In Hye, and Hye Jin. They gave me a Hershey's white chocolate bar with cookie bits in it and a box of cookies! When...

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Typhoon Kompasu

So Typhoon Kompasu (Japanese for 'compass' - basically 'compass' said in a Japanese accent) hit Korea Thursday morning. I had an afterschool class the previous day and I was asking the students when it will hit and they were all like 'oh, it's supposed to hit tomorrow afternoon'. They were wrong of course because we were woken up at 6 by the howling of winds and battering of rain on the window. We done well not to wake up sooner as all of my friends and co-workers seemed to get woken up at 4 or some other earlier time than us. The teacher who sits next to me in the office (don't know her name... apparently it takes more than 6 months to remember...

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DMZ

Finally made the trip up to the DMZ on the weekend with my girlfriend, Sarah. We had to go up there on Friday night pretty much straight after work (well it was straight after work for her... I still had time to enjoy a seafood buffet at a work's dinner. Lovely it was. Sarah was starving when I met her) because we had to be at Camp Kim in Seoul by 7am. So we stayed at a cheap place Sarah knew in Noksapyeong and we were off bright and early the next morning. We met my mate Andrew at Samgakji (the stop closest to Camp Kim), went down to the USO base, sat around for 20 minutes and we were on the coach and off by 7:30. Like clockwork.It took just...

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