ARC Card and Whatever Shall We Do for Chuseok?

6:00 PM Today, me and the other new teachers went to Daejeon to the Office of Immigration to turn in our paperwork for Alien Registration Cards, which will allow us to have Korean bank accounts and...other stuff. I'm not even positive of what all the ARC enables you to do, but if you're residing here, not just vacationing, you have to have it.

My current issue is where to spend Chuseok. Chuseok is Korean Thanksgiving, meaning it's an autumn-time harvest holiday with a heavy emphasis on food, and you're practically required to spend it with family--all that's missing is cranberry dressing and football on TV, and you've got Thanksgiving. But. Everyone in Korea travels for Chuseok, so my town is going to empty out for the five days it takes to have the holiday and then the weekend. Not only is my residence going to be a semi-ghost town, it's going to be hard to travel anywhere myself, because all the trains to anywhere worth going to are standing-room only.

The time to book tickets for Chuseok vacation was roughly two weeks in the past--the morning I stepped on the plane for Korea! I had committed to going to the beach with a friend, then waffled, and now I'm going to back out altogether. I can't do a standing-room only ride for 90 minutes to get to a town where we might or might not get a decent hotel. But I really want to be adventurous; I want to try a trip, not knowing how it will go. So I'm hoping something else will come up for me for Chuseok, something not fraught with so many clear problems.

Lesson planned a lot today, for zombie stuff for my boys tomorrow. Took me an hour to download a thing that will put Korean subtitles on the American movie clip I have for them, but if it works out they will love it, and their engagement is what I'm going for.
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8:30 PM: Had dessert with one friend and dinner with another. Learned how to hold chicken with tongs in one hand, while using meat scissors to cut it with the other, then flipping it at the right time on the grill. Very good dinner...pictures forthcoming.

Patbinsu, long shot.

Patbingsu, close shot.

My friend and I have been wanting to try patbingsu for the longest because they serve it at our nearest coffee shop, and today we went for it. It's a minimum 2-person dessert, and might work best for three. It's milky-icy ice cream (the exact consistency of snow cream, if you've ever made homemade ice cream from snow). plus sugary red bean paste. Now, beans may not sound like prime dessert material, but I had had enough Japanese-influenced food before coming here to know that red beans can be really sweet. Our patbinsu also has these little cubes of...rice cake? A chewy little cube that doesn't have a taste of its own, covered in a sort of graham cracker powder.

It was really good. And there are other varieties to try, like coffee-bingsu and oreo-bingsu, so there's more dessert options in the future.

Dinner was at a chicken restaurant where you grill your own, and I learned that the little side-dish bowl of what I assumed was some kind nut is in fact a bowl of raw garlic. We cut and grilled our own chicken, dipped it in sauce, then wrapped it in lettuce leaves to eat.

Self-Cooking at the Restaurant Is Big, Here.

The little metallic bell-shaped thing in the picture above the chicken is a smoke vacuum. Hot coals under your food make for a lot of smoke ( as I learned when I sat downwind in a samgyeopsal restaurant), so you reach up toward the ceiling, pull down this little golden accordion thingy, and let it siphon away the smoke from your coals. Makes you feel like you earned your dinner; operating the vacuum pipe, the tongs and the meat scissors, then making your own mini-sandwiches and reaching across the table to seize small portions of side dishes with your chopsticks.

I can't say that this dinner-conversation stereotype is precisely true from what I've seen, but some people say that Koreans eat more and talk far less during restaurant meals than Americans do. If this is true, it's because the Koreans are too busy multi-tasking their way through the meal, while at American restaurants you can chat the whole way through, because the most strenuous activity you're performing is "open mouth, insert burger."

And after easily 2 hours of downloading various media players and experimenting with sound files, I have Korean subtitles for my English movie for the afterschool boys! Some teachers say that Korean subtitles are bad for the kids because they won't pay attention to the English words, but I personally picked up on plenty of small Korean phrases by listening to Korean TV shows while reading English subtitles. I'd read the English quickly, then guess at the Korean equivalent while waiting for the characters to finish speaking. I'd rather the kids know what's going on, and gradually train their ears to pick out the words. I've got a handout ready, and some ideas for how to pause the movie and keep them linguistically on-track with questions. We should have fun! Hee.

I didn't go to school today because of the trip to get the ARC card, and I missed teaching very badly.I think that's a standard extrovert trait; feeling a teensy bit drained because you haven't been around enough people in one day.

I'm reading in James, about faith and works and how important works are. Which is not a sermon I particularly need, because I have always found works to be easier than faith. Doing good stuff? Sign me up. I am an A-level student in good-stuff-doing. Trusting in Jesus and relying on God for everything? Now we enter D-minus territory... But early James also has some good verses about the power of words and how much trouble they can cause: "Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!" I want to use the best words when dealing with my students.