I owe it all to LeVar Burton...

It all started, years ago, with a little song that went like this:

"Butterfly in the sky....I can go twice as high...take a look, it's in a book, Reading Rainbow...I can go anywhere..."

It seems as though my anywhere is South Korea!  Sorry, I know this is cheesy, but it is official--I (Leslie) am going to be the Elementary Librarian at Gyeonggi Suwon International School (GSIS)!!  Click on the name to go to the school's website if you want to see more.

I am so thrilled about this job!  In my four years of teaching experience, I have found the most satisfaction in teaching children to read and getting kids excited about books, and I am soo excited to get to do this as a school librarian!  I am wanting to start working on my school library certification as well, so hopefully I can work that into my schedule and eventually be certified so that I will have a better chance of doing this as a career when we eventually return to the U.S. to live.  Oh yeah, the school requires a 2 year contract, so we will for sure be living in South Korea for at least 2 more years.  Start making plans to come visit us!! :)

We will be moving to the city of Suwon, which is the capital city of our province, Gyeonggi-do, and has a population of around a million.  It is a cool historic city which actually has the original fortress wall intact, Hwaseong Fortress, but of course the city has spread past the original wall.  Suwon is the home to one of the World Cup soccer stadiums, and the Suwon Bluewings soccer team, which is great because we love to go to the games here.  Suwon is also where galbi, my favorite Korean meal, originated.  That is the barbecue-style meal where you cook the meat on a grill at your table and make lettuce wraps with rice and other veggies and stuff.  I am excited that we'll be living in galbi-land!  haha  I could seriously eat galbi every day and be happy.

So, I don't have all of the official details yet with start dates, etc. but the principal is supposed to get back with me at the beginning of next week (they've been on a week-long winter vacation this week) with all that.  Like I have mentioned in a previous post, the international schools are on a westernized calendar and curriculum, so it will be very similar to teaching in an American school, just without many American kids!  School starts in August and goes through June, and I think they have a good 7 week summer vacation, as well as a 3 week Christmas break, and other breaks throughout the school year (winter break, spring break, Chuseok--Korean Thanksgiving).  So, it will give me more vacation time and hopefully more time to travel!

So, now, you are probably wondering about Michael. :)  At this point we are hoping that he can also get a job at GSIS.  The principal had talked to me at one point about a full-time substitute job that Michael could possibly fill, and he said the administrators are going to discuss that next week.  We have also heard that they are going to have some Bible openings, as it is also a Christian school, so he has put in his application if any jobs open up there.  So, we are praying that one of these will work out so that we can both work there and have the same schedules, vacations, etc.  We're just trusting that God will take care of it for us! 

We'll update as we know more and will hopefully be planning our summer vacation to the US pretty soon here!  I want to thank you again for all of your prayers and to ask you to keep them coming for Michael!  

~Leslie

Friday Night Fun on Korean TV

So, we were flipping through the channels late last night while we were waiting for the most recent episodes of Lost to download, and we came across this show.  It was so stinking adorable that I decided I needed to get my camera and video it.  These have to be some of the cutest kids I have EVER seen!  Korea has a ton of shows like this, with kids singing and dancing.  Many times it is little girls dressed skankily with tons of makeup on, doing provocative dances, but this time they were just your typical all-around cute little kids.  I think this was the All-Stars or the finals of whatever this show is called.  Anyway, watch it and enjoy.  Even though most of the time we have no idea what they are saying, it is amusing anyway.  I think the guy with the blue ball cap on looks like a Korean Tiger Woods. hehe  Also, there is a black stripe that showed up across the screen on my camera (our TV is not that bad), but I still think you can get the general idea. 

Here's another, shorter video of the kids singing on their own.  Talk about cute!  We just couldn't stop watching!!  I love the girl with the long hair!  And, check out the little boy rapping to "Axel F!"

Another interview...

Just a quick update: 

We had an interview with an international school in Seoul this morning and it went really well! They have a few openings in the elementary school (K, 2nd and 5th) and a position as a MS/HS Bible teacher along with a few ESL classes. I told them I would be most interested in 2nd grade. We met with the principal, who is a very sweet Korean lady, the elementary head teacher and the chaplain (who are actually married to each other). We felt very comfortable there and the school seems like such a good environment—they have small class sizes and it seems to be a kind of a close-knit community, where we would really enjoy teaching. The principal called me after the interview to let me know that she had spoken with her boss and there are a few issues with visas since Michael is not a certified teacher and does not have 2 years of experience, but they have a couple of ways to work it out, which might involve him getting a certificate through ACSI. She did say that if things work out with that, that they would like to send us contracts! So, now we have to make a decision! Haha, Well, I am supposed to hear from the first school I interviewed with sometime this week hopefully and if that works out as well, then we will have to choose between the two schools. So, we are praying that God will just make it clear to us which way to go. Both schools seem to have a lot of positive points, so I think we would be happy at either place. We are trying to think long-term here, because we may end up staying in Korea for a while if that’s what the Lord tells us to do! So anyway, please pray for us, that we will have a clear direction from the Lord and make the right decisions in this process. The thought of having 2 job offers is a blessing considering the economy right now, so I know we are very blessed! Thanks for praying!!
~Leslie

Encouragement

I know the last post was really long (I am long-winded sometimes, what can I say?), but I do have some good news!  I received an email this morning from the principal that I interviewed with last week about the librarian position, and he just wanted to give me some encouragement and let me know they were strongly and prayerfully considering me for the position.  He said they can't make any final decisions until he can talk with the headmaster (who is still out recruiting as far as I know), but he is hoping to let me know something next week.  I took that as good news.  Hopefully there will also be an available position there for Michael.  Either way, as I said before, I am confident God will lead where He wants us.

On the hunt...

The job hunt, that is! We've been in Korea for over 8 months now, working at hagwons, which are private, after-school academies for Korean kids to learn/practice English. We've enjoyed our jobs for the most part, but we are exploring our possibilities for new jobs after our contracts are up (first week of June). The hagwons have been good jobs, but they are pretty much run as businesses rather than schools. It can be frustrating as things change from day to day with complaints of parents, etc. They just try to please the parents because it is a very lucrative business and they want to keep as many students as possible. Honestly, though, these have been some of the easiest jobs that Michael and I have ever had, so we are not complaining about that! I don't even feel like I really teach at my job--I just give kids practice tests and then feedback and teach them how to do better on the TOEFL exam. It's kind of like SAT prep or something. Michael does more actual teaching than I do, since his students are younger and less fluent in English, but I do more correcting essays and such. Anyway, since I am an actual certified teacher, with a master's degree in education (to teach at a hagwon you just have to have a Bachelor's degree in any subject), there are a lot more options out there for me, and honestly we'd like to find jobs that would pay more, have better vacation time, housing, etc. since part of our motivation in being here is to save as much money as we can, while still being able to do a fair bit of traveling. With our current jobs, we get a total of 10 vacation days during the year, 5 of which were pre-chosen for us (and not all at the same time). So, we haven't had enough time to really leave the country for a good trip somewhere else. Hopefully that will change, though, if we get new jobs elsewhere!

The other options for teaching are public schools (teaching Korean students English, but you have 40+ kids in class and only see them once a week. Right now at our hagwons, our classes have 10-12 students and we see them about 2 or 3 days a week), universities (usually teaching lower level conversational English classes to college freshman, and most universities require teachers to have a master's degree), and international schools. These are generally on an American/western calendar/curriculum, and they teach all subjects in English, just like schools in the US. The difference is the students usually have to have a foreign passport (not Korean) to attend these schools because they are designed to serve the foreign community (meaning, non-Korean citizens). These usually require a teaching certificate in order to work at one.

The Korean school year starts in March and ends in Feb. but they often hire teachers to start in September because that is the start of their second semester. The universities also hire for both semesters starting in March and September, though the majority of jobs for both are open in March. Since our contracts aren't up until June, we can't apply for either of those types of jobs until probably July or August. Korean employers do not seem to hire very far in advance, plus most employees only have to give maybe 1 or 2 month's notice (not quite sure about that though, at least that's how it is for us). So, if we end up going this route, it will be a while before we will be able to apply or know anything, most likely.

On the other hand, the international schools try to hire early in the year. The school year usually runs Aug-June (like a US school) and most require a 2-yr contract. They seem to post their jobs in January and then hire by spring time. This is nice for people who are planners, like me! :) Anyway, since they are hiring now, we've been working on applying for jobs. Right now we are just applying for international Christian schools, though, since Michael does not have a teaching degree but a degree in Biblical studies. Ideally we would both get jobs at the same school so that we would have the same vacations and schedules. The one thing about the international schools, that most people have said, is that they require a lot more time and hard work. Of course, they are similar to teaching in the U.S., so that is kind of a given. However, they do pay a lot more (half of the salary is in $US, so no matter the exchange rate, we could be saving good money), and usually provide much nicer accommodations. They also observe the American holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas with decent vacations.

I had an interview last week with one int'l school for an elementary librarian position. This is honestly my dream job--getting to teach children but not having the same stresses and responsibilities of a classroom teacher, getting to encourage them to read great books and enjoy reading, and getting to help teachers with multimedia stuff that is hard to implement in the regular classroom. I have toyed over the last year with the possibility of getting another master's degree in Library/Media so I could be a school librarian, but don't really want to pay the money for another degree right now. So, having the chance to work as one without having to go back to school is very appealing to me! I felt like the interview went pretty well, but am still waiting to hear back from them, as they have had some administrators recruiting for several positions in the US and Canada over the past few weeks. Also, they do not know if there will be any Bible positions open for Michael to fill yet. We've heard hearsay from other teachers who work there, but nothing official has been posted yet. So, that is a possibility. We know that they do like to hire couples, especially if they're already living in Korea, because we've already adjusted to whatever culture shock there is to adjust to. haha

Also, this week I discovered two more schools with available positions. One has some elementary positions, grades 2 and 5, and some Bible classes (we are going there on Tuesday to talk with the principal about it) and the other has elementary grades 1-5 and an elementary Chaplain position. We are working on getting together the paperwork to send to the second school to hopefully get an interview as well.

So, we definitely have some options that we are praying about. We just really want to be where the Lord wants us, where He can use us most. If one of these schools works out, that would be awesome! But, we want to be open to other options if they don't. Please keep us in your prayers that we will be able to discern the Lord's will for us in this area.

We like living in Korea. We have some good friends and a great church full of ministry opportunities. We can lead a financially comfortable life here while being able to save much more than we ever could living in the U.S., which will be great for when we decide to start a family. We do have different stresses here, but overall life here for a foreigner is generally low-stress (as opposed to the extremely stressed-out Koreans), which is nice and is good for my health. We feel like we will be in Korea until God tells us to go. Honestly, this is the first time in my life as far back as Jr. high that I have not been extremely focused on the future instead of the present. I've realized that I have spent a lot of my life worrying about what is to come next, what's the next step, where will I go and what will I do, rather than living in the now. Kind of funny to say this, as this whole blog post is about what jobs will be next for us, but honestly, that is not on the forefront of my mind in all of this. I just feel like we are here in Korea and God will take care of the rest, and I am not worrying about it. It's a great feeling!

Oh, also...seeing as how whatever jobs we take will either start in Aug. or Sept., we will be returning home for at least a month or so in June/July to visit with family and friends! Depending on what happens with jobs, we will be working out an itinerary and will let you know when we will be where. All we know right now is we are flying straight to Denver for my dear friend Heidi's wedding on June 6th, and from there on out we are uncertain.

Have a great Valentine's Day weekend!
~Leslie

Happy Chinese New Year/Snowboarding

A couple of posts ago I said that I would post photos from our snowboarding trip over Chinese New Year, which is also called Lunar New year, or Seol-nal.  It was the last weekend in January this year, though usually it is in February.  Seol-nal is pretty much the biggest holiday of the year for Koreans, besides Chuseok, which is their Thanksgiving holiday in September.   Most everyone goes to visit their families and celebrate together, eating special foods.  This is also the holiday when they give gifts.  Actually, the children bow to their parents and their parents give them differing amounts of money.  One of my students got 500,000 won for bowing to their parents!  It is a 3-day holiday but this year it fell on a weekend, so we only got 2 work days off, but it did make for a decent little 4-day weekend.  Originally we had tried to plan a trip to Beijing, China to go sightseeing, but since it is such a big holiday, all the fares were hiked up, and it costs sooo much for US citizens ($130 US, pretty much any other country only costs $30) to just get a visitors visa to China, that we decided we'd try that another time, when it is warmer and hopefully a little less-crowded.  So instead, we opted to take a snowboarding trip with some friends from church.  It was definitely a weekend full of adventure and fun, as well as a *little* bit of frustration. :)

We got up early Saturday morning to catch a free shuttle to the ski resort.  We had to walk about 15 minutes or so to the bus stop where the free shuttle was to pick us up at 8:05.  Here are some photos of us walking in Suji to the bus stop, in the midst of a lot of snow coming down!

Here is Charmant, our Officetel (apartment building).

Pretty trees covered in snow.

Here are our friend Travis and Michael walking behind me.

Me, trying to keep my face warm/dry in the snow.

So, we get to the intersection where the shuttle is supposed to pick us up.  The day before, YoungJun, one of the guys who came with us, reserved the shuttle for us online.  The website said that the shuttle would pick us up directly across the street from the entrance of the Suji E-Mart.  Well, its on a corner, and the entrance faces diagonally, so there were 3 possible areas that the shuttle could pick us up.  I wanted to be prepared and make sure we got to the correct corner, going the correct direction.  So, I got my Korean co-workers to look at the website with me and tell me where I needed to go.  Some of them knew which resort it was, and they drew me a little map, saying "you need to be either here, or here, going this direction," etc.  I was feeling good and prepared.  Well, we get to the intersection about 10 minutes early and go to the corner my co-workers told me.  We see a large bus across the street, going the completely opposite direction, and it says Hana on the side (which is a big tour agency, Hana Tours--hana means "one").  Well, we were heading to the Yangji Pine Resort, and it said a free shuttle, so I wasn't expecting a big bus.  Plus, it was not where my co-workers said it would be.  And, it was Lunar New Year, traffic is usually horrible, so we were expecting the shuttle to be late.  Michael suggested we go check to see if that was it, but I insisted that it was going the wrong direction, so we didn't just go check.  Oops.  It sat there until 8:05 and then drove off.  Five minutes later, my friend Kelsi texted me to say that she had just gotten on her shuttle in another city at 8:10, on time.  She said it was a huge bus, etc.  We realized that we had missed our free shuttle, and we had no idea how to get to the place, because the shuttle only runs once a day.  

I proceeded to get a little frustrated and upset.  You can't believe that, can you? :)  Luckily, Travis was with us to keep things light and less-upsetting.  I don't know about anyone else, but I can usually keep my cool a little easier if I am upset and someone else besides my family is with me.  If it is just me and Michael, though, I tend to get a little more upset.  I guess it's that level of comfort of being with your spouse that you can react in the way you really want to.  haha  Anyway, I did get upset because I felt like a huge idiot for insisting that we not check the bus to see where it was going.  Now, we had no idea what to do.  It was still snowing, mind you, and we were a good 20 min. walk from our apt.   I called my dear, sweet friend Jee Yeon, and she looked online for us and said we could take the subway to Seoul and from there take an Express Bus to Yangji, but the buses online showed that all the seats were booked for the day.  She said sometimes they will let you stand on those buses, so we decided to chance it.  We took the subway about an hour to Seoul, then got on a bus (they had seats!) to Yangji at 10:40.

Here is a photo from the bus ride up to Yangji.

The place is actually only about 40 mins. from where we live, but there are no direct buses from our area to there, so we had to go way out of the way to get the bus.  Oh well, it got us there anyway!  When we got to the resort, we met up with our friends John & Soyon, YoungJun (Soyon's brother), and Kelsi.  These are all friends from our church.  The rest had been snowboarding all morning, but we just decided to do half a day since we got there so much later.  Kelsi took a lot of good photos with her camera, so I have stolen most of these photos from her!  The cool thing is she got a lot of action shots, which is kind of fun.

Here's at the bottom, looking up at some of the slopes.  The bunny area is in the foreground.  We did some practice there first to figure out how to use the snowboards.

Me on the bunny slope.

Going up the ski lift.  These are seriously the death of me.  I have never been able to get off the lift very well.  This time, without fail, I would ALWAYS fall as soon as I got off, sometimes taking others down with me.  One time I twisted my entire leg around backwards (that hurt).  Although Michael did take out a small child on one of his turns, also.  haha

Kelsi and me.  It was her 23rd birthday (such a youngin'!), but she was kind of the little mother-hen.  She had been snowboarding before, but most of us hadn't (except John--he is a pro), so she would go up the lift with us and then make sure we all got down from the top okay before she would head down behind us.  It was cute.

I like this one.  Michael is sitting on the right, and I am sitting on the left.  This was near the beginning, when we were both falling quite a bit.  Actually, Michael was falling a lot.  I was making myself fall because I was squatting so much that my quads were killing me!  Haha, Michael couldn't stand the fact that I was actually a little better than him at something--for once in my life!

Here are YoungJun and Soyon--brother and sister.  They are both so sweet.  They were also very helpful on the trip as they are both fluent in Korean (though they grew up in Nigeria)!

Here is an action shot of me.  haha See how much I was squatting that first day?  I am very cautious, and as I told them, I DON'T have a need for speed!  So, I was keeping my balance.  It KILLED my legs later that night, though.  They hurt sooo bad that I couldn't sleep and they felt like they were on fire!  I told Michael, "I think this is what hell feels like."  It was pretty bad, I was crying quietly, so as not to wake anyone else up.  It's funny now, but at the time it was not!!

The ladies on the lift--Kelsi, Soyon, and Leslie.  

Poor Soyon fell and hurt her rib that day, so she was in a lot of pain.

Here are some cool scenic photos:

YoungJun.

John & Soyon.

Here came YoungJun, proud of himself for something.  

He put up his hands in victory!  Next thing we knew, he was flat on his face. hehe

Ah, here was Michael's stance for most of the first day.  He was a little frustrated because it wasn't as easy for him as he thought it would be.  He just kept going straight down and extremely fast, so he would flip over and hurt himself.  The 2nd day he even took out 5 poles from the fence.  haha  He finally got the hang of it, though, and by the end of the trip was leaving me in the dust...er, snow.

We were exhausted the first day, and we found a minbak to stay in above a ski rental place.  We all 7 stayed in the room and we brought lots of food to eat, so we made tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwiches the first night.  It was yummy.  Then I think we went to bed at like 8:30, we were all sooo tired!  The next day we slept in until about 10:30 (well, we didn't really sleep all that well--the floor was sooo hard!  But we didn't get up until then) and decided to just do another half-day lift ticket.  John & Soyon made us pancakes for breakfast which was mashisoyo (delicious).  Soyon decided to take the day off from snowboarding since her rib was so sore, and she went to the spa for the day to relax while we hit the slopes again.

Soyon, with her tree branch in her hat.

John, looking like a lumberjack.

Kelsi and I, ready for another day!

We got to the top of the slope, and boarded down this first little hill.  I fell, and realized that my arms were soo sore from the day before, that I could NOT lift myself up!  It was pitiful!!  Michael finally succeeded in helping me up, and I was good to go from then on.

What a sweet husband.

There we go, down the slope!  

This was my first ever trip all the way down without falling once!  

I was pretty proud. 

Being cute.

Michael and Travis, a little tired.  

I think this was after Travis ate it big time and hurt his shoulder.

Sitting at the top of the slope...wasting tiiiime....

Kelsi, the adorable photographer, and mother-hen! :)

All in all, it was a successful second day of snowboarding.  I got tired and quit a little early while they went a few more times.  It was definitely something I would like to do again sometime.  I honestly enjoyed it MUCH more than skiing.  I felt more in control of what I was doing than I ever felt skiing.  And I am a control-freak, so that means I like it!  haha  But as I said, I am not a person who has the "need for speed," so skiing always freaked me out whenever I went in high school.  I fell a lot less on a snowboard.

Michael enjoying a pizza dog or something.  

He went to the restroom and came back with this.

We spent a second night on the hard floor of the minbak, but it only cost us about $10 a person per night, so it was cheap.  We made spaghetti and garlic bread the second night for dinner, and played some Skip-bo.  We also used a lot of Icy-Hot and I was not in nearly as much pain as the first night.  YoungJun also entertained us all with his muscles that he didn't know he had.  haha

The next morning, John, Soyon, and YoungJun headed out at like 5 am to meet up with their family for Seolnal in Seoul.  The rest of us slept late and took our time getting around.  It was nice.  We headed down to the bus stop to wait for this bus that we discovered would take us to Suwon, and then we could take a bus from Suwon back to Suji.

Here was a cute little snowman that we liked. 

It had chopsticks for the arms and a bucket hat.

This says "Hol-Een-Won Mart," which is Konglish for "Hole In One Mart."

Travis and Michael waiting for bus 10 to take us to Suwon.  

We waited for about 25 minutes for this bus, but we didn't mind. We knew where it was heading. We should have asked the bus driver. We hopped on it and rode for about 40 minutes...

And ended up here, at the end of the line, with a bunch of other 10 buses!

We rode the bus 40 minutes in the WRONG DIRECTION!  This bus, I didn't mention, had a long route anyway.  When we first got on, we were like, man, we're going to be riding this thing for like an hour and a half!  Little did we know...and all we had to do was ask the bus driver when we first got on if it was heading to Suwon Station.  Ahh!  Another bus fiasco!  I had another little mini-meltdown, but by this point, you had to admit that it was funny.

Here we are waiting in the cold for the next bus to leave, eating Pringles.

We FINALLY got back on the bus, heading the right direction, and had to ride it for close to 2 hrs.  But, we made it home safely, and had a great time. Thankfully, Travis ate all of his dried squid BEFORE we got back on the bus, so we didn't have to smell it!!!

So, it was a fun weekend.  We got to hang out with some people that we hadn't spent much time with before, and had a great time.  We also got to see this guy, who I think made the trip worth it just to be able to see this:
It was a onesie type outfit for grownups, like those kids pajamas that have the legs built it, that was designed like a giraffe.  This guy was having a grand old time on the slopes.  We saw several other "animals" on the hill, but I think this guy was my favorite.  Ahh, Korea.