Teacher Dinner Tradition

Last Wednesday I joined the complete faculty of teachers here for a staff dinner, which functioned as a good-bye party for a teacher who was leaving the school. Teacher dinners, or "Hwoe Sik", are somewhat legendary here amongst foreigners, and let me tell you why.

First of all, the Native English Teacher, NET, usually gets, if they are lucky, 24 hours notice of this dinner being planned. Often you are told the day of, around lunch time, and are expected to be able to join. More often than not, these dinners take place in some of Mokpo's finest creepy seafood restaurants, where the serve the local delicacy of live octopus (as in tentacles still moving and sticking to your mouth), or stinky skate soup.

Side note regarding ocotopus eating: The stats are not completely clear, but it is suspected there are an average of 6 deaths annually from consuming live octopus, and then basically suffocating as it clings to your throat. Also, just within this past year, Korean news stations began reporting that eating the heads of octopus "may not" be healthy for you, since they contain large amounts of heavy metals. See: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2010/10/29/octopus-head-war-pits-korean-health-officials-against-fishermen/

So needless to say, throughout the pregnancy I have been asking ahead of time what the menu for the dinners would be. Several times it was some variety of nasty seafood fare, so I politely excused myself, using the safetly of my baby as the reason. "In the west, we believe that eating seafood while pregnant can lead to allergies, so I think I better not come..."

However, this time we were going for meat, some good old fashion beef on a grill. That, I can handle. I was also given several days notice for once, which was a surprise, considering the way things are normally done so last minute here, especially when i'm involved! Another example: Monday morning, 8:20am, having just arrived at my desk, looking like shit due to a cold I picked up over the weekend, "Oh Shanna, I'm so sorry, I forgot to tell you today is teacher photo day for the school yearbook. We will have our pictures taken in 10 minutes." Fantastic.

Back to the meat.

Teacher dinners are extremely important in Korea, to show your fidelity to your school and your "oneness" with all the teachers. It is essential to have a feeling of belonging and togetherness in the workplace, and dinners serve to foster these happy feelings, since employees are overworked and get next to no time off. Case in point, most high school teachers are at school from 7:30 am until 10pm daily, work Saturdays and get usually less than a week of paid time off each year. As a foreigner, it is difficult to truly understand the importance of these dinners, but we try to play along.

So we went to a very nice beef barbeque restaurant, where you purchase your cuts of meat from the deli counter, very high quality stuff, and then eat it however you like it cooked.

                                  View of our table when we enter the room. Tons of side dishes.

Looking down the long room of tables for our staff members, all completely covered in side dishes and drinks. The girl on the left throwing the V-sign is the one who was leaving. She was a temporary teacher, filling in for the history teacher who had left on some kind of medical leave. The students crowded around her desk, gave her gifts and cried on her last day!
The men usually like to eat that first tray of beef, in the middle of the picture, just as is, raw. The women mostly like to turn on the grills and start cooking it.  Luckily I was sitting with three other women who did not care for raw beef, so we starting grilling!

Yep, that's a big chunk of beef fat to grease up the grill and make the flavour better. Koreans do not shy away from eating fatty meat.
A beautiful discovery in Korea: the many uses of the kitchen scissors. Koreans brilliantly have been using scissors for cutting meat for ages. How I never thought of that before baffles me; so simple yet highly effective!

The science teacher, who sits beside me in the office, demonstrates how to hold the meat with the tongs in one hand while using the scissors to cut it into bite size pieces in the other hand. These small pieces are then dipped in sesame oil or a hot pepper sauce, topped with garlic slices and onions and wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Pop that bad boy in your mouth, and you've got Korean bbq delighting your flavour buds!

The other important part of Teacher dinners, or any meal out with friends, family or business colleagues, is drink pouring. This is the penultimate way to show your respect and mutual friendship feelings. Generally speaking, the younger (females) pour for the oldest members of the group. There is a whole culture around how to give and receive drinks, that I won't go into too much, because there is simply too much to say and it's complicated. Placement of the hands is significant as well. Essentially, you pour a drink for someone to show respect and then they return the favour to show they appreciate the gesture and respect you, too. In the picture below, taken at a terrible angle, my co-teacher Moon Gu Seul, the youngest female satff member, pours beer using two hands for the Vice-Principal who is sitting beside her. The poor girl got fairly drunk at this dinner because the Vice-P kept requesting drinks with her, and she couldn't refuse. He offered me a shot glass of soju at one point, as well, but luckily the teachers around me quickly stepped in to explain I couldn't drink while expecting.

At the end of the dinner, bolstered by all the beer and soju flwoing frrely, several of the male teachers got brave and tried out some English skills on myself and the other English teachers. One man started singing to the Principal, another man was getting uncomfortably close to a young woman, basically confessing his love to her, and some time after I left the parry, a bunch of them went off to a singing room together. Oh yes, my Vice-P, well into his drinks at this point with all the "respect" in the room, insisted on going out with Joe at some point, to drink together and speak English. All in all a pretty normal outcome for a good teacher dinner.  

Making chocolate truffles!

This weekend I spent a good deal of time making some wonderfully delicious chocolate covered treats. The process was really long but that was mostly because I kept running out of supplies, and needing to go back to the store. I also learned that white chocolate is really hard to work with; too bad it's so expensive here!


First order of business was cooking pumpkin for the first time ever. I lucked out at the grocery store and found some pre-cut and peeled chunks of pumpkin, which was great because that saved a lot of time taking all the goop out from a fresh pumpkin. Next was an adventure in pureeing said pumpkin. I have splash marks all over my kitchen back splash and my shirt!

From there I went on to mixing up three sets of truffles, a pumpkin spice, an egg-free cookie dough, and an oreo cream cheese. By the end of the weekend, here's what I produced:

                                            Gingersnap Pumpkin Truffle

                     White and Dark Chocolate-Covered Oreo Cream Cheese Truffles
                                       (I think the white ones look awesome!)

             And finally, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles, as yet undecorated.

Of course I have by now sampled them all and they are fabulous! I really like the richness of the oreo truffle, and the spices of the pumpkin truffle. And you can never go wrong with a good old cookie dough treat!

That's what I call a good weekend! We made it even better by joining a couple of our friends for a hearty meal at the meat buffet restaurant for dinner on Sunday. In this place you cook all your own food at grills on your table, so the buffet is all raw meats and side dishes. You just choose what you want (pork, beef, seafood, chicken...) and take it to your table to cook as you desire. Then you can fill up on all your favourite Korean side dishes like noodles, dumplings, kimchi, lettuce mushrooms and garlic, etc. All this for the bargain price of only around $12. If you ever come to Korea, we'll stop in there for a good meal. As an added bonus, they have free ice cream for dessert!

Next up on my list to get done later this month are Christmas cookies. I think I'll enlist some help from my friends on those, since standing up for a long time gets uncomfortable. Plus, then I get to share my treats, which I think is the best part! This year's Christmas cookie list consists of gingerbread men, candy canes, and Christmas shapes sugar cookies. I'll post some pictures when they get done.

(recipes and instructions for the truffles will be added soon)

Oops, it's been awhile.

I cannot stress enough the extent to which time seems to be flying at light speed by us. It takes 10 months to make a baby but no one told us it would be the shortest-feeling year of our lives! As I write, I am into my 31^st week and the baby is progressing very well. This is probably correlated to how I feel worse and worse with each day that goes by. Nothing serious, just the regular aches and pains and movement difficulties. It’s pretty tough to go from being a totally independent person to needing lots of help for even simple things like picking up the socks I drop on the floor.

So, what have we been busy with the last month? Since our last post, regarding the university entrance exam, our weekends have been packed with all kinds to do! First, we had an impromptu weekend trip to Seoul, to spend time with our good friend Neil. He recently finished up teaching in Mokpo and returned to Canada. Coincidentally, not long after he went home he was back again to visit, since his family was travelling around Asia to visit family. It was great to meet up with him and have some fun shopping and dining in Seoul.

The timing was actually perfect for me to go up again, since I had outgrown all of my pants. I was excited to do some final maternity wear shopping in the big city. That is until I got there and started looking around. I went to both of the major shopping districts and in the end I found ONE pair of pants that fit around the bulge and didn’t cut off my blood circulation. One. How is that possible? I’m not even that big, just average size, really. Out of lack of pants frustration, I decided that the only logical solution was to buy more shirts. My thinking was that if I had to wear the same pair of pants every day, I would at least have enough shirts to alternate between.

Let me take a moment for a side note here. I love the convenience of travelling by subway in the big city. It’s fast, it’s cheap, it gets you pretty close to where you want to be. But it is FULL of stairs. Stairs quickly became my arch nemesis in the early days of pregnancy and they aren’t getting any easier. It’s no wonder that the young women of Seoul have such awesome legs because they spend so much time walking up and down all the stairs and through all the hallways of the subway system, in their huge high heels no less. For me it was something akin to a torturous death march.

And then you add the heat. Despite recent 20 degree, summer-like weather, the heat is on full blast over here since it is “winter” season. It’s a really frustrating part of life here, that air conditioning and heating are based on strict start and end dates which no longer match the actual weather patterns. Back in October, while I was still in shorts and t-shirts, my students were complaining of a chill in the classroom and wanted the heater on. Ha! Yeah, right. And in the summer it warms up quickly in May or June, but some schools won’t allow teachers to turn on the air until the end of July, when we are practically swimming to school in the humidity! Anyway, same deal in the subways. The heat is on, the cars are jammed packed full of passengers and this poor pregnant lady felt like passing out several times while in transit. At one point I was fanning myself with some papers to create a bit of cool air on my face, visibly sweating and almost panting, and the old woman beside me had the audacity to tap my shoulder, and gesture to stop doing it because it bothered her. Screw you, grandma! I doubt the little bit of air I created would do anything to damage that stupid severely tight perm of yours anyway, and don’t try to tell me it was cold.

Well despite the stairs and heat and rude grandmother, we had a very nice trip to Seoul, visiting our friend and having some excellent dining experiences! Breakfast as SuJi’s, a lovely western style restaurant famous for their deli, then lunch at an Irish pub (note to self, never order their shepherd’s pie again!), Quiznos, Korean diner, French style bakery for mini pies…. Oh, I love eating in Seoul!

And then we went back to work. Sigh. I love my job but I am really feeling tired of going there every day with this huge belly on me. And sitting for long periods at my desk is causing me more and more discomfort. Luckily the days are going by pretty quickly, I guess, and next week is already final exam time. That means this week I get to give study periods at my discretion, and sit at my desk to write my blog. J

So the next weekend was the 19^th and 20^th of November, which was when we had our American Thanksgiving potluck dinner. I spent pretty well the whole weekend cooking various dishes and it was well worth it! We had around 40 people in total come out with all kinds of foods, ranging from the cheapest takeout pizza in the city and a platter of ants on a log celery sticks, to gourmet quality sweet potato casserole and cranberry sausage stuffing. The desserts were really impressive, too; someone made an excellent berry topped cheesecake, another person brought along delicious chocolate truffles, and my pumpkin pie wasn’t too shabby if I do say so myself! All in all we had a wonderful feast and it was great to try out other people’s cooking.

We’ve got another potluck coming up in December, for Christmas, which all of us are looking forward to. We’ll be ordering a turkey for that one, so it will be even more special than Thanksgiving. I’m not sure what pricing back home is like for turkey but we’re going to pay around $70 for a 14 lb bird. I saw another place that was listing an Australian turkey at $99 for under 10 lbs I think. Turkey is not common here in the least, so we’ll pay dearly for that treat.

And finally, the last weekend of November was spent mostly at home, but busy busy, as we took care of all sorts of baby business. Saturday we cooked and cleaned the house to prepare for a meeting with our doula, Stacy, who is going to be my birth coach. This is essential since we’ve opted for a natural labour, with no meds if possible. Her job is to help me with relaxation and breathing techniques to get through the pain of delivering and keep me away from the drugs! At least that’s the plan; we’ll see how it goes when I get there! Sunday was spent doing a big purge of all the clutter in our house. Somehow Joe and I have become very good collectors of …. well, everything really, and it was starting to make me feel really stressed that we had so much junk everywhere. I should have taken before and after photos. After a few hours of sorting, we did a great job to weed out the garbage and gather items to send home for later, all to make space for the baby and her gear. It was a big relief to get rid of so much stuff and de-clutter my life. In the afternoon we had our very artistic and creative friend Becky come over to do a photo shoot with us for some belly pics. She took some really great photos of us together and I’ll add a couple here for a sneak preview. This will also give you an idea of the size of this massive belly.

So that brings us up to date with today, the last day of November! I really mean to keep adding smaller posts more often, but life is getting in the way right now. I’ll keep trying!

...pictures coming soon!

Thank God for Suneung aka SAT day!

This week marks the single most important event in a high school student's life - SAT day. The results of this be all and end all test will essentially determine the rest of their lives. Korean universities are extremely competitively ranked and anything short of getting into the top ranked school, Seoul National, is considered failure. That may seem a bit extreme, andperhaps slightly exaggereated, but this is life in Korea. The system here is basically opposite what we are used to back home where moreorless anyone can go to any university, and then you just have to work your butt off to pass your courses and graduate. Here, you work like a dog throughout high school and then study until you are beyond zombie-state, to you can achieve as close to perfect on the SAT and be considered for the top three schools. Ask any student or their parents what their dream is, and they will undoubtedly respond with some version of "I want to attend the best university."

So how do they achieve this, you may ask, with thousands of students vying for those precious entrance offers fromt he best unis? It goes a little like this: Starting way back in early middle school, the students start studying hard to pass the high school entrance exam, and have their pick of the best high schools. Yes, they are also ranked. Then they start in the high school of their choice and their daily schedule is basically arricing at school around 7:30 am, regular classes 8:30 to 5:30, lunch and dinner at school, then mandatory self study and extra classes until about 10 or 11pm. At this time they can leave the school but they do not go home. Instead they will go to illegal nighttime academies for small group tutoring, until about 1:00am. Finally they can go home but often they will stay up studying until 3am, leaving maybe 3 hours for sleep. Saturday classes occur biweekly but once you get into third grade high school, the final year, they will attend every Saturday, and most Sundays, for more extra classes and self-study time. Don't ask me how the students even remember to brush their teeth everyday, because I have no idea. Sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture in some countries around the world...
A typical classroom scene:

Anyhow, Thursday November 10th is the designated nationwide SAT day this year. For foreign teachers, that means a day off! It also likely means a shortened work day on the day before, so the school can be prepared for the exam. Woo-hoo! I am very happy to get this bonus time off since I'm feeling more tired than usual this week. I do have a great deal of interest in this year's graduating class however, since I have taught them from their first year in high school. I also have a couple of my former hagwon (private academy) students here, from our first year in Korea. They are like a special project that you want to see through to the very end. Most foreign teachers do not see the third graders since they are too busy for conversation English class, but many of them still talk to me in the hallways or come visit me at my desk from time to time.
A typical Korean cheer akin to "you can do it":

So how to spend this bonus day and a half off? We'll kick things off with a fajita night with our friends, the Floridians Sean and Kelly. I'll just take a moment to explain that they are very awesome in many ways, including the fact that for this year's Halloween costume contest, Sean came in second place, for his very daring body suit, representing non other than the Y chromosone. LOL, priceless! 

Also avid fans of the "Song of Ice and Fire" fantasy novel series, Sean, Joe and I have some great times joking about the novel's jargon. Kelly needs to hurry up and read the series so she too can be included. For any of you who haven't read the series, it's pretty darn great! The TV show was well done as well.

Oh yes, I forgot that before the fajita night Joe and I will head over to the pension office to check on the state of our Korean pension. Luckily, when we leave the country, we will both be given our accumulated national pension for a total of four years, each! pension equals roughly one month's salary per year, so we'll have a nice sized payout by the time we come home. At this point we want to just make sure the proper amount is sitting in our account.

Up for tomorrow's day off - a visit to the birthing docotor. There are two main hospitals in town, and currently we are seeing a doctor for prenatal visits in one, but we are thinking the other hospital will ultimately be the place to go to deliver. The reason for this is that we hear the doctor over there is more oepn-minded to natural birth and slightly more western style of having babies. In general, due to lingering Confucian beliefs, the doctor is still very much in charge of you and will tell you how things will go down. This includes a heavy duty epidural that will pretty much knock you out, and simply lying flat on your back to pop that sucker out. That's if they don't go ahead and just schedule you for a c-section. And again, in general, Korean patients are happy to oblige and just follow what the doctor says.

In our opinion, those are very outdated methods, and we would liket o be a little more active in deciding what kind of experience we would like to have. It's kind of hippie-dippy, I know, but nevertheless, I want a say in what is done to my body. Therefore, we will go tomorrow to check out this other doctor, and see if he will work with some of our ideas. Basically what we want is a birth as natural as possible - no meds, no iv, no episiotomy, defintitely no c-section! We'll see wha twe can negotiate, knowing full well that we will have to be flexible. We're already thinking that for a second child, home-birth with a midwife might be a better option for us, but this is Korea and this is what we get!

So we started a blog.

After a serious attack of prenatal nesting urges, we spent literally months trying to figure out what to do with our growing family: Stay in Korea or go home asap? Well, as we enter my third trimester (which I began yesterday, November 5th!) , we have finally come to our decision. One final year in Kimchiland to prepare for the big move back to Canada, where with any luck at all we can ease into some nice career jobs instead of unemployment!

I know a lot of people will be disappointed by this news, especially since I was talking so excitedly about coming home, but ultimately it's the best decision for our family at this time. My school has finally given the go ahead on maternity leave and one more contract, and that was something we were really doubtful of for a long time, so it came as a bit of a surprise, honestly. It really seemed like they were going to prefer to kick me out and hire a new teacher, which has happened plenty of times before with expectant foreigners here. So when they offered me a job for next year we were a bit taken aback and had to quickly reevaluate our plans.

Obviously the prospect of staying one more year is a bit scary this time round, since we'll have baby to factor in. Our big concern right now is finding suitable care for her when I go back to work after a very brief maternity leave, compared to Canada. Korean Labour Law provides three months off, two paid and one unpaid. Luckily, because of the baby's timing, I will also get one month off ahead of maternity leave, from my contracted vacation days. So that gives me from January to April 24th at home. I'm sure it's going to be really tough to leave her when the time comes, so fingers crossed for finding a good babysitter or daycare!

The awesome thing about staying one more year is that we reached a compromise to deal with my nesting urges; I get to come home for a visit! So on March 29th I'll be headed up to Incheon airport to cross the Atlantic, again, baby in tow. I'm really REALLY looking forward to three weeks in Ontario to visit everyone and introduce the baby to all the family, and of course, do some shopping! What would a trip home be without going to the mall and stocking up on all our favourite treats? Despite his current large stash, Joe will be looking forward to Reese's peanut butter cups, and I've got a soft spot for cherry flavoured nibs and salt n vinegar chips! What's that? You want to invite baby and I over for a roast beef dinner? Well I'm sure I can fit it into my schedule, somewhere...!

But more seriously, there's a lot of baby junk I need to collect to bring over to Korea with me. Birthing in Korea is quite cheap, probably around $400 for my procedures and two night hospital stay. Clothing a baby and buying all the necessary gear, not so much. For the first few weeks Korean moms DO NOT leave the house. I mean, literally, their parents/in-laws/siblings do everything for them and they stay inside the whole time, with the heat blasting at unnatural temperatures. So this means their babies stay swaddled in blankets and thus there are no clothes to be found for newborns to approximately 4months old. Not even onesies. Then, as mom and baby reemerge into the world, they still stay swaddled for awhile and eventually transition into little outfits, which are very cute, but cost upwards of $50! For a baby! It's insane and I can't afford to buy stuff like that. So it is really important for our budget that I pick up enough cheap clothes (and other baby stuff) at home to last the baby a few months at least.

Anyway, I decided to start this blog to keep people up to date on what’s happening in our lives in Korea and with the baby. We’ll tell you about our experience with having a baby in Korea, teaching high school kids English, and our (now limited) adventures around the country. We promise to try harder than ever before to actually keep up with it this time, haha! So here’s baby update number one! 

Our visit to the doctor this past week included a glucose blood test, to make sure we don’t have diabetes or any iron deficiency, etc. All our results (which we received in about 10 minutes) were normal and the doctor was also able to determine that she does not have a harelip. That’s a relief considering I hadn’t even thought of that possibility! Through an ultra sound examination the doctor measured the baby and we were told that at this time she has a big head and a small body…LOL! I hope she’ll balance out a bit in the next few weeks. We have to go back again in another three weeks to check on things. Finally, the doctor really tried to get a good clear shot of the baby’s face for a 3D image, but the baby had her hands up in front of her head and refused to budge. We’ve already determined that we either have a shy kid on our hands or she’s demonstrating her stubborn side at a very young age. Watch out, Joe! Total cost of this visit was about $42; pretty good considering we don’t have OHIP coverage back home anymore. Mom is doing great, too, with only minor backache and heartburn to complain of, though I do keep having recurring dreams of tsunamis which the Internet tells me means I have a source of stress or great change in my life. Thanks Captain Obvious. 

Countdown: T minus 12 weeks!