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| Dehydrated cabbage used for kimchi |
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| Making kimchi |
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| Cookie decorating party |
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| Making strudel with the other foreign teachers |
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| Our strudel |
After an EPIK weekend in Korea (get
it, epic vs EPIK-English program in Korea) I was ready for another week of
school and actually pretty stoked because I didn’t have afterschool until the
next semester. LIFE IS SO MUCH BETTER WITHOUT AFTERSCHOOL. After school is so
hard because there is no coteacher and the kids go crazy. So this meant that I
would teach classes with Juny in the morning and then have the afternoon to
chill and do nothing. I was supposed to be planning lessons for the following
semester but that was so difficult because apparently they are changing the
English textbook and they don’t have them in yet.
Even though I didn’t have
afterschool there were still a lot of funny moments with the students. The 6th
graders were doing a unit called “You look like a Scotsman” where they were
learning the phrase, “You look like a XXX.”
Juny and I were eliciting the expression from them by making the
students say something about me or her. I got some things like “You look like
an American”, “You look like a girl” but the funniest and most insulting was “Julie
teacher-You look like a smurf!!” At first I didn’t know what that 6th
grade Ryan was saying and then when I fully understood him I was taken back. I
realized I was wearing a bright blue jacket but still. Immediately in my mind I
had the comeback “You look like a smurf because you’re short!” but of course I
couldn’t say anything and just laughed along with the kids. There are lots of
those cases where the kids say something to me and I so badly want to reply but
have to hold in it. Not sure why I do considering they won’t understand it
anyways. Sometimes though the other students will do it for me. For example in
the textbook there is a section that says “Say Hello to the rest of the world”
and introduces sayings from different cultures. In one particular section there
was a picture of a person from France saying “Bonjour.” Most of the kids just
ignore this section but Jacktonio #1 who is terrible at English but the cutest
and funniest 6th grader decides he is going to say Bonjour for most of
class. But his version wasn’t exactly Bonjour but “bon door.” He also has this
little lisp so him saying it over and over again got the whole class laughing.
He was so determined when he kept saying it to as if he was teaching the rest
of the class how to say Bonjour. It was fantastic!
Along with funny moments in the
sixth grade, I was really happy with the third grade too. Every day we ask them
the date, the day, the month and year and they never really care or know the
answer even though we ask them every day. However, I started this new thing
where I had a different student read different parts of the date ie one says
Monday, December 11th, 2013. At first they didn’t really enjoy it
but after two groups did it, more and more kids started volunteering to be
different parts. Now the kids love it and scream their parts. It’s really cute
and exciting!
So some cute, funny things happened
this week. Plus I was uber excited about the upcoming weekend. I had signed up
a couple of weeks ago to go up to Seoul for a kimchi making event. There are
multiple companies in Korea that offer activities for expats to do more “Korean-y”
things. So for $35 you could meet up with other Americans and foreigners and
learn how to make your own kimchi and bring home a 3 kg container with.
Originally there was going to be 4 of us from Jochiwon going up but Maggie got
sick so early on Saturday morning me and two other foriegners headed up to
Seoul and met up with other foriegners in the eastern part of Seoul across the
Han River. I had never been over to this area and it was ncie but a lot less
busy than downtown. It was freezing though and as soon as exited the station it
started snowing which would have been terrible since I had crappy shoes on but
I always think that cities look magical when it snows. In the end there was a total of about 15
people, most of whom were American English teachers.
We hopped on a bus and within 10
minutes or so landed at our location which was a gorgeous wooden building with
open windows allowing us to admire the trees and following snow surrounding the
building. Our guide told us a little about kimchi and how it is made. It is
made from a specific type of cabbage called baechu but there are a variety of
types of kimchi including radish kimchi, white kimchi, etc. It is not just a
stereotype that Koreans love kimchi because it literally is served at every
meal in some form or another and Koreans even have a separate refrigerator in
their house solely for all the kimchi they have and eat in the year. It’s kind
of mind boggling.
Basically all the ingredients in
kimchi smell in their own way and can stain your clothes so we all got suited
up with long gloves (it reminded me of the kind that people wear when they
stick their hand inside a cow, UMD anyone??) and aprons. To make kimchi you
first need to soak the baechu (cabbage) in salted water overnight which they
had already down for us. It becomes smaller and way more shriveled. Then you
need to make your sauce. The typical kimchi sauce will contain radish, green
onions, leeks, salted fish, ginger, garlic, Chili powder, sugar, aekjeot fish
sauce, salt and salted water. You basically mix all these together in varying
degrees until you have the right balance of sweet, salt and spice. I had no
idea what I wanted mine to taste like so our guide kept trying and helping.
Here again there was that cultural difference of being fed food. The guide had
no problem feeding each of us some radish and ingredients and would tell us to
feed her our concoctions. It was obvious that many of us Americans were a
little awkward with it but when in Korea… Anyways, after mixing together your
sauce you take a salted baechu head and basically rub and stuff the sauce into
it and presto, you have made kimchi. From there kimchi can be stored for an
extended period of time, the longer the more fermented it becomes with the taste
constantly changing. Korean families tend to know how long and how to store it
to achieve the best taste but I had no idea so as soon as I got home I just
stuffed that thing in the fridge (which proceeded to smell up my fridge and
apartment every time I opened the fridge!).
After kimchi making we all headed
out and my friends and I ended up getting a really nice dinner at Bennigans, an
American pub by Seoul Station. What was so funny was at the pub there were
various American paraphernalia around and where we sat there just so happened
to be a Maryland license plate and Redskins flag, lol. We all decided to head back to Jochiwon by
that point because there was a cookie decorating party at another friends house
that we wanted to attend.
A couple of weeks ago an American,
Stacy, decided that she wanted to have Christmas like parties to really get us
all in the mood and she planned a multitude of events including a Christmas decorating
party. She had made gingerbread and sugar cookie dough and we all took turns cutting
out the cookies and decorating them with sprinkles and icing. It was so
interesting because Koreans don’t really bake nor do many apartments have ovens
(they all instead just have stovetops) so all the Americans brought over their tiny
confectioners ovens. Here we are cooking like 3 cookies at a time on this little
sheets in like 4 ovens with various timers constantly going off and us trying
to figure out which oven is the right one. Not only did I really enjoy decorating cookies
and it got me more in the Christmas spirit but I had also really wanted to
continue with the Brice-Liptak tradition of making apple strudel every Christmas
and that we did. The day before I had made and beat the dough for what felt
like forever and cut up a billion apples. I was so nervous to make strudel
because no one else had done it before and I have never made the dough all
alone so was really unsure about the whole thing. But it ended up turning out wonderfully!
The dough stretched beautifully with some holes here and there but nothing that
wasn’t salvageable and everyone was majorly impressed by it. It was so amazing
to bring this tradition across the world! Of course I would have preferred to
be with my family in Grandma Molly’s basement but I can’t have everything. The
only problem (if you can call it that) was that it took forever to cook so we
didn’t even end up eating it until 11 at night and even then it probably could
have been in the oven a bit longer.
Overall I was really impressed with
our strudel making and glad that I got to still make apple strudel even though I
am so far from home.
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