Humidity and fan death

I've just got to get this out of the way. If I had to share one negative thing about my time so far in Korea, it's this: humidity. Oh, I complain regularly about the humid summers back in Nebraska, but that state's got nothing on Jeollanamdo, South Korea. The humidity is so thick, you could cut it like a knife going through a block of tofu. It hides the mountains in the mornings and evenings. My face has worn a perpetual sheen since I got off the plane in Incheon. I've given up on wearing makeup. I'm surprised that I haven't lost 20 lbs. already with the amount of sweat I've produced. My clothes always feel damp and every sheet of paper in my dorm room feels limp and soggy.

Okay, now that I've vented, I do have to say that "air con" as Koreans refer to it, is available in our classrooms and teachers lounge. Not in our camp dorm rooms, although each room is equipped with two oscillating fans mounted opposite one another near the ceiling. That's almost preferable to our situation at the Gwangju orientation center, where the dorm room air conditioners automatically turned off every morning at about 5 a.m. and didn't come back on until 8 p.m. This may have something to do with the collective Korean belief about fan death. Apparently it's true that Koreans believe one should never go to sleep with a fan running and windows closed or the sleeper will never wake up. One of our American orientation teachers explained that fan death serves as a cover-up for deaths by suicide or domestic abuse. Remaining family members will not be shamed, since fan death victims are not autopsied. So when your Korean hosts are simply watching out for you when they may sure you don't have air con or fans running at night.

In addition to the humidity hanging in the air, it's monsoon season here in South Korea. While still in Gwangju, we were warned that a typhoon was expected to hit our province, though we were quite a bit inland, so probably no danger. We've experienced a couple of rainy days and today was a whopper. Camp students and teachers were awakened at 5 a.m. with a torrential downpour, thunder and lightning. A good illustration for the Weather section teacher, but the rest of us were tired and grumpy this morning due to sleep deprivation. But at least the temperature outside dropped a few degrees!

Internet access at long last!

The biggest challenge since arriving in Korea has not been the food, or the language, or even the horribly hot and humid weather - it's been the lack of Internet access.

As I mentioned previously, at our training location near Gwangju there was no in-room access, only as computer lab shared by 50+ of we teachers. That made it difficult to spend much time online, to update this blog or my photo page, or to email family and friends. On Tuesday, we spent most of the day in travel mode, first taking a bus to Nuan, near the port city of Mokpo, to meet with the governor of the Jeollanamdo province, and then to travel on to the four English camps. We arrived late in the evening at the Damyang camp and although we were delighted to find that each teacher had been assigned their own room and that there were LAN connections, there was no Internet. After two days, that's changed and I now have online access in my room! Hallelujah!

There is still one small problem: finding time to spend online. Our teaching day goes from 7:40 am (breakfast) through 9:00 pm each day. And that's with no extended breaks. Pretty exhausting for those of us used to 8-hour work days and two days off a week. We'll be teaching at the elementary camp until the final day, August 1.

Photos on Flickr

I'm attempting to upload photos from two trips into the city of Gwangju on Flickr, so check my page for images:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/midwestkimchee/

Your mission, should you accept it

Internet access has been quite sporadic since I've been in Korea, since our training facility doesn't have in-room access and the computer lab contains just 3-4 PCs that are working. I hope this changes once we get to our camps, as we've been told that they have computer labs and possibly in-room LAN connections.

The last two days have been filled with orientation sessions led by mostly Canadian teachers here in the Jellanam-do province. Today, we travel to one of the camps, Damyang, which is just 20 miles north of our current location near Gwangju. This is the same camp to which I've been assigned, so I'll get a sneak preview. We'll be doing demonstrations of our assigned teaching sections to the orientation folks so that they can give us feed back. For the elementary camp, I'll be teaching a section called "Home Life" which includes dialogue and vocabulary on family members, jobs around the home, and rooms of the house. Two of our activities will be creating a family tree and student's design of their dream room. I'll be teaching this same 3-hour section twice a day for six days, each time to 14 students. I suspect I'll be a little shaky the first few sessions, pretty smooth the next couple of days, and deadly dull for the final days. We will be assigned to a Korean co-teacher who speaks English, but it's really our responsibility to run the show.

During the second camp, for middle schoolers (who I understand are as old as 17), I do not have a course assignment, but will be filling the role of activities coordinator, which means I will organize and be the host for daily evening events - quizzes, challenges, mini-Olympics and more. Although I won't be as busy during the school day, I'll have plenty on my hands as I recruit other teachers and explain the rules and schedule for our evening events.

It's a little daunting right now, but we still have a few days before camp begins . . .

Good morning from Gwangju

It's 6:30 a.m. in Gwangju, South Korea and I'm amazed that I'm awake. Yesterday (actually Tuesday AND Wednesday, due to the time difference) were long travel days. The Omalink shuttle picked me up at 5:45 a.m. (I had been awake since 4:30). Had an uneventful flight from Omaha to Chicago, and then joined the group of MU students at O'Hare for our 1:30 p.m. departure to Incheon-Seoul airport. Korean Air rocks - wonderful service and food. Lots of nice touches, like socks, eye masks, toothbrushs and paste in a nifty little neck holder. Hee hee. The Canadian woman sitting in my row was also traveling to teach at an English summer camp as well, but was doing it solo. Good to talk to her, as she's also a mom (of teenagers) and is wrapping up her Master's in education.

After arriving in Incheon at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday 7/16 (I lost a day!) we gathered our baggage (I dumped the Bison jerky I had brought as a gift, rather than suffer the wrath promised by warnings about bringing in meat and other agric. products), we boarded a bus with disco lights and purple curtains, beginning the four hour drive south to Gwangju. It was rainy and humid, but fun to watch the landscape pass by, until we hit Seoul and stop and go traffic. I swore I wouldn't sleep until reaching Gwangju, but the lull of bus zonked me out. Stopped halfway at a sort of bus stop/food court for dinner of udon noodles or bibimbap. Accidently bought peach flavored water ("ear Water" brand) instead of the straight stuff. Two more hours of travel in the dark and we arrived at our training institute.

More later, but I need a shower NOW.