Teaching, Learning, and Running the World: Day 109: New Jobs(ish)

It's been a while since we posted, an a lot has happened in the meantime. The weekend after our ski trip, we went to Busan to get trained for Chungdahm, which is the main (higher English level) curriculum of the company we work for. For the spring term, which started this past week, they're changing the schedule at our branch and with the changes they need us to teach a couple of Chungdahm classes in addition to the April (younger kids) ones we normally teach. They crammed a week's worth of training into 5 hours, which left us feeling rather unprepared.

This past week was both the first week of the new Chungdahm term, which meant we started our new classes, and also the last week of the winter April term, which meant we also still had all of our old classes. We had a ton of work this past week. On top of it all, I (Steven) got nailed with a pretty ferocious cold that hung on through the entire week. Fortunately, we survived the week and Sarah hasn't shown signs of getting sick (knock on wood).

By Saturday I was feeling better, and in the morning we went with a small group to Jisindo, literally earth-heart-island, but also known as Camellia Island for its distinctive flora. It is a part of the national park that encompasses a lot of the south part of Geoje, as well as many of the surrounding islands/ocean. We took a ferry to the island, where we hiked around for a while. There were a lot of beautiful rocky cliffs that reminded us a lot of Acadia National Park in Maine. There were also quite a few remnants of the Japanese occupation of the island from when the Japanese Empire controlled Korea and parts of China. We didn't see as many flowers as we had expected, but the ones we did see were beautiful.

This is the town where the ferry dock was, as seen from the back of the boat on the way to Jisindo. The water was an incredibly striking color.

This was the location of an enormous Japanese gun. The pit was probably 4 feet deep.

This used to be a landing strip for Japanese supply planes coming to the island.

This was the base for a searchlight, and also served as a bunker of sorts.

We really enjoyed both the history and the nature on the island. A highlight was definitely following a less-than-official path that led out onto the rocks along the shore and climbing around on them for a while. (That's where the last 3 pictures are.)

Today we went to church and then just chilled the rest of the day. The infamous Yellow Dust has arrived here, which sucks for running, since the air quality (at least today) was pretty bad. Hopefully we can stay healthy going forward. This coming week should be good with new April classes and our second week with our new Chungdahm students.

Just for fun, here are a few bits of Engrish that Sarah has collected over the past couple of days.