Jeollabuk-do Trip - Day 1: Muju

Ahhh, time again to post pictures from our latest break! We very much look forward to our breaks because it means we get to travel again and experience this wonderful country we're currently living in.

After much consulting of our guidebook, questioning of coworkers and students, and talking between ourselves, we finally settled on the Jeolla-do region for our five-day term break. We really wanted to experience a more rural area of Korea, which is why we decided to try out the least-densely populated mid-west coast area. Jeolla-do is divided into two provinces, north and south (do means province, Jeollabuk-do is the north province and Jeollanam-do is the south province). We were originally thinking we'd just explore the whole of the Jeolla region, but as we were sitting in the train station waiting for our train we looked deeper into our non-Lonely Planet guidebook.* Then we found that the Jeolla region is actually pretty expansive (for Korea) and has quite a lot of interesting natural attractions. While we were trying to figure out all the things we wanted to do, we soon realized we wouldn't be able to do them all during our short break. So we concentrated on the northern province. We took the train to a "small" city called Jeonju and then did day trips from there to different national and provincial parks. We did a lot of bus traveling, but it was worth it to get out into nature a bit.

Thursday, March 1, the first day after arriving in Jeonju, we tried to go to Deogyusan National Park, but the timing of the two buses we had to take didn't work out quite as we'd hoped. The first bus brought us to a truly small town called Muju. A second bus was supposed to take us to the national park, but the next bus out of Muju would get to the park about half an hour before we'd have to turn around and come back to catch the last bus back to Jeonju. The man at the ticket counter told us there was also a shuttle we could try that might leave sooner than the next bus, so we followed his directions to a small hospital just behind the bus station and waited there with another young man. And we waited and waited and waited. And nothing happened. In all, we probably waited for close to an hour and a half before deciding it wasn't worth it (was almost time for the real bus to leave anyway...) so we actually just stayed in Muju. At first we were disappointed we didn't get to Deogyusan, but in the end, we really enjoyed the quiet and relaxing afternoon exploring the town. It was actually the first real small town we've been to here in Korea. We really liked knowing we could get pretty much everywhere in Muju just on foot without taking any public transportation. We spent a peaceful several hours looking around the town and taking pictures before catching an evening bus back to Jeonju.

The local form of tractor - reminds me of a garden tiller!

Jonathan overlooking the river (we waited for the shuttle by that hospital in the background...)

Muju's interesting bridge (the town probably had 5 or so bridges in total)

View from the bridge, looking up the river (click to view larger)

A really large church/school complex, especially for this small of a town!

A pavilion on a hill

There was a sort of really small park with some exercise machines and a bridge

Ali stretching... or compressing?

Looking out across the city

Pretty large statue on what might have been a Catholic church

Ali at play :)

A cool map we found that shows kilometers from Korea (click to view larger)

Jonathan capturing the shot below

An interesting dam that I hadn't seen before - it seems to be a tube of some sort with holes in it

Mirrored Mountains

Jonathan again capturing the picture below

Water and Sky

Jonathan once again caught in the act of photo-taking (see photo below for result)

Stepping-stone "bridge"

Posing for the picture!

Jonathan found some ice a little ways upstream, and it turned out to be solid enough to walk on!
He is right in the middle of the river here. Ali was scared to look...

Sunning

Sunset

Swan boats out of season

We weren't sure what this was commemorating, but it appears to be skis on a couple of mountains

We wandered into a sports complex - this is a soccer field with vine-covered bleachers

And a large stadium - called Firefly Gymnasium - with a canvas roof and many tennis courts in it

Lights at night

*Seriously, if you're ever going to travel somewhere and want to use a guidebook, get a Lonely Planet or Rough Guides one. We bought a Frommer's guidebook for cheap at a Borders when they were having all their going-out-of-business sales so we got it for really cheap, but we both agree that it's lacking compared to the Lonely Planet one we used last year in Tanzania.

For pictures and commentary about our other day trips in Jeollabuk-do, click the links below.
Day 2: Daedunsan
Day 3: Byeonsan Bando

Printed textbooks!!

Yesterday afternoon Dr. Yoon, the head of our new Department for Content Research and Development (or something like that), walked into our office with a bunch of textbooks. I thought nothing of it and continued to edit the printed-out pages in front of me. But Dr. Yoon called Robin, one of my Adult Textbook Office coworkers, over to the table in the corner where they talked for a few minutes. Then Robin came to get me and showed me the books laying in four neat piles on the table: the first-print copies of our Jeju Project! Robin was excited and she's seen textbooks she's helped create in print before. To say that I was excited was an understatement. I've only ever seen my writing in print in the Insight Magazine a couple times and on the news pages of the Southern Accent. And this is a little bit more official. I was kicking myself yesterday for not always carrying my camera around with me, but I brought it today and snapped a few pictures at my desk. I especially want to share them with Renee, my friend whose job I inherited when she left back to the U.S. in December. She helped the ATO with content for all three textbooks, two of the three workbooks, and did all the Jeju Island teacher's training. So without further ado, here you go, people. This is what our Jeju Project textbooks and auxiliary materials look like!

Aren't they pretty! So I was planning to also use this blog post as a way to announce that we're officially finished the Jeju Project. This afternoon MJ, the manager of my section of the office, and Dr. Yoon went to a presentation to show the government the books. They came back happy with how it went, but MJ told Robin and me later that the government officials asked for one more addition (just the latest in a long line of additions they've requested...let's not forget this project was supposed to be done at the end of December when they suddenly asked for reading passages [featured above] to be added to the textbooks and workbooks, and teacher's manuals and student guides to be created for each of the three levels). So we're not done yet. Tomorrow we'll start the (hopefully) last part of the project, adding word lists to the back of all three textbooks. Maybe by next week we'll be done. But for now, I'm just happy to see the nearly finished products in print!

Final weekends of Term 1 All-Day Club

We're finally finishing up with the All-Day Club pictures from last term. The next-to-last Sabbath of the term, February 18, was really busy here at the Seoul Main Institute. We started with a teacher's Prayer Breakfast. We have Prayer Breakfast once a month at 8:30 on Sabbath morning. We usually sing some songs, someone presents a short talk, we prayer together in small groups, and then we eat breakfast together. Ellen usually makes pancakes and they're always great!

Jason, Ellen, Janice, Kevin, Dillon and Jonathan at Prayer Breakfast 

Cereal, pancakes and strawberries 

Ellen doesn't really want to hurt Dillon with a fork. Really, she doesn't.

After Prayer Breakfast we hurried upstairs to the church for Sabbath School. All-Day Club put on Sabbath School that weekend and the special music was all the All-Day Club members and teachers singing together. After that, one member, Stella, gave her testimony about getting baptized because of learning about Seventh-day Adventism through All-Day Club.

Stella giving her testimony and Jooch translating

Then we all dispersed to our separate Sabbath morning duties. Jonathan and I went to our Morning Clubs and then met back up again for church. In the afternoon we helped out with the Bible Video Club from 3-5 p.m. It was really fun because Pastor Caleb, the assistant director, had made up three games for us to complete. He put us into four groups of All-Day Club members with one foreign teacher in each group. For our first task we had to cut words out of newspapers and paste them onto blank sheets of paper to make a fairly extensive Bible verse. Next we played a Taboo-esque game where each team member had to describe a word that Pastor Caleb showed on the screen to the rest of their team and the team had to try to guess the correct words. Some where names of students or teachers and others were from the Bible. It was really close and by the time we were done that game the teams had very close scores. The final game was one the foreign teachers couldn't participate in. It was Korean riddles. In the end my team got really close to winning because of Gisele's great guessing, but Jonathan Lee's team finally beat us in the end. But we all had a really good time together. Right after that we rushed back to our apartment to change and then met back in front of the institute to go out to eat for a farewell to the leaving teachers. We went to a restaurant called Seven Springs that was several stops away on the subway. Yum, it was good, although trying to find vegetarian food proved to be a bit of a problem. We vegetarians just filled up on ice cream and floats, though, and all was fine. :)

Us in front of Seven Springs Restaurant

Then the next Friday afternoon, February 24, we went to Ashley's, a buffet restaurant, again with the All-Day Club members. It was a nice time together, especially since it would be one of the last times to see and spend time with some of the students.

Eating out at Ashley's restaurant

The guys - Jerry, Jonathan L., Koon & Jonathan G.

The girls - Ali, Angela & Elly (and a guy)

A game of "Rock, Scissors, Paper" (the Korean name for it) - Koreans use this game to decide all kinds of things

Waffle dessert

Ice cream dessert

Rudith, one of Jonathan's Level 2 students and a Half-Day Club member

Jennifer, another of Jonathan's Level 2 students and a Half-Day Club member

Vivaldi Park Ski Trip

Forgive us while we back up a bit to bring you a wintry post that we missed from back in January. On Sunday, January 29, we went to Vivaldi Park with the All-Day Club. We were up early and on the bus at 8:30 and left the campus about 15 or 20 minutes later. After a refreshing breakfast of kimbap we snoozed for most of the hour-and-a-half drive. (We would have looked out the windows but the bus was so dirty you couldn't see much of anything out the windows and soon after we started out the windows were all fogged over anyway.) Things were a bit muddled when we got to the ski resort and we stood around for awhile waiting for some people to bring the lift tickets. During that time we got numerous group pictures, but sadly the teacher who took most of the pictures on his iPhone accidentally had them deleted so I guess we'll never get to see those ones. Once we had our lift tickets we quickly rented ski gear and bought some ski gloves, then got our rentals. But by then pretty much everyone else from our group had already left and so we set out alone. We only ran into people from our group a couple times during the day, which was too bad. But we really enjoyed the bright sunshine and blue skies. The snow, although a bit icy, wasn't bad either. All in all, a great day on the slopes!

Waiting in the rentals area

View from the top of the mountain

Jonathan ready for a run

Going down

Posing for a picture

Now there's snow, now there's none...

After readjusting his boots

Waiting for the ski lift

We ran into Rudith and Jennifer in the lift line

And they took a picture of us

At the top again

It was a sunny day and we forgot to bring sunglasses...

An eight-seater chair - hugest we've ever seen

The gloves we bought were definitely worth it - our hands would have froze with just our thin cotton gloves

Skiers get ready on the left, snowboarders on the right

View from the other side of the peak

This person had an interesting backpack, which was also wearing a backpack...

Leftover kimbap for an afternoon snack on the trip back to Seoul