On the lookout for new and exciting blogs

I just went through my blog roll on the side, and deleted about 10 blogs that either had stopped updating or that were no longer relevant to living in Korea/ Internationally. Does anyone have a recommendation for an interesting blog that the world should be reading? There are too many blogs out there that deal with the ordinary, I'm looking for something that goes a little beyond. Or even something ordinary that is written really well, like Lee's Korea Blog. Any recommendations out there? It doesn't have to be about Korea necessarily, but at least pertains to travel/ living abroad etc.

My school in Georgia

This was my school. It was a small village school in Akhelsopeli just a 10 minute marshutka ride outside of Zugdidi where I was living. It is a very small village. I don't know the population but you can judge the size considering that we only had about 100 students in the whole school from grades 1-12, and some of those students even come from the city to study out here for various reasons. This made teaching nice, with class sizes between 5-12 students.

The school is in the process of being remodeled, but it's clear it's still a while away from being considered one of the "renovated" schools where some other volunteers work.  here are two hallways in the school. One recently painted, the other one desperately in need of a paint job. Windows have been replaced in the whole building and there is a computer lab (where internet is intermittent at best and painfully slow) which works when the school has power... though, sometimes there is no power. One renovation I would like to see is getting new blackboards. We could only use one kind of chalk on our boards, most chalk would just scrape across the board without making a mark, and blackboards in other classrooms are in much worse condition.

I thought the fact that our school had a bell, an actual, manually rung bell was kinda cool. But, obviously hand ringing the bell can cause a lot of problems as one might imagine. Sometimes the bell might get rung by naughty students at the wrong time, or sometimes someone would ring it early and I wasn't able to finish the lesson... or someone would ring it late and I had too much time to kill waiting for the bell to ring. At some point while I was there, an electric bell was installed. Unfortunately, you still had to manually ring it, so I didn't really get the point. But worse than that was the fact that it was so quiet you often couldn't hear it ring... and of course when the power was out they'd still have to go and ring the manual bell anyway. I think the whole electric bell system was a bit of a waste of money... that could have gone to a new blackboard instead for one classroom.

Here is my classroom with my 6th grade students. I was lucky that we had our own "English Classroom" because most TLG teachers in other schools had to move from class to class and couldn't decorate their classrooms.

In the photo below you can (kind of) see some of the decorations I made for the classroom. The first thing I did was make question words with Georgian translations because they struggle a lot with question words since they never hear them from the Georgian teachers and never use them since answering questions never involve using them. My last week at the school I made the ones above. I don't know if you can read them, but they are common classroom phrases like "May I go to the bathroom?", "I don't have my homework." and "How do you say ________ in English?". These phrases were a terrible enigma to my students who especially struggled with the "How do you spell ______?" phrase. As I tested them on this, they would respond with sounds rather than letters, "How do you spell 'hat'" they would respond "Huh-ah-tuh" instead of "H-A-T". I tried very hard to enforce the use of letter names rather than sounds for these sort of activities, but many still never learned them.

Below is our wood stove. This, ironically, was not set up until a week or two before I left Georgia and since it warmed up in December after a bitterly cold and rainy November, we only ever lit it twice. If it's not freezing, it's better left unlit since the wood often fills the classroom with smoke and it is a huge distraction for the students who are always trying to maintain the fire with more wood and paper.

 

  

This is English World 3, a British English McMillan textbook. The quality of this series is quite good, unfortunately the older, supposedly more advanced students get cheated because they don't have the experience to get into the higher levels. This book is the third in the series, and is used by our 6th grade students. It assumes they know things like past tense and a whole lot of vocabulary. We spent 3 months on the review chapter and we were only able to get to chapter 1 by my last week of teaching there. I seriously hope that they don't try to finish this book off in the spring, some students in the class don't even know the alphabet or are just learning to read basic words, and this is what they're going to be expected to do in a few weeks. 

These are all the girls from the 9th and 10th grade. One of them studied English really hard and could actually have a conversation. The rest... well, they were well intentioned and very sweet girls, but I think they just liked hanging around my classroom because I was a new and exciting alternative to anything else they could have been doing not because they were actually interested in the language.

Sometimes they would have soccer tournaments. On these days it was hard to get the kids to come to class and study, they were much more interested in watching the game or playing than coming up to class. The gym teacher never seemed to care if students were really supposed to be somewhere else when they were playing. 

This was a fall concert put on by the 1-3rd grades. Aren't they cute?

I hope this gives prospective TLG teachers some idea on what the conditions are like in schools in Georgia. Of course most schools are much bigger than mine. Some are renovated, many still are not. Everyone's experience is different, but this was my experience.

My house in Georgia

For those of you thinking of going to Georgia, I thought I'd post some photos from my home in Zugdidi, the capital of Samgrelo-Sventi region. My house is quite typical of many of the homes I've seen in this area. It's a two story house with an outdoor stairwell to the second floor. It has a small garden out front with a lemon tree and of course lots of grapes which I think pretty much every house in the country has standard growing in their front yard. There is a gate out front, of course, to keep out the animals, too. My family just moved into the house two years ago and they are still in the process of remodeling/ fixing up the house.

The above photo is our kitchen/dining/living room area. I don't have a close-up of the kitchen, but you can see it's fairly normal, with a refrigerator, sink, and washing machine. The one thing that it is conspicuously lacking, though is a stove. We cooked on either a gas canister on the floor or on the wood stove which they moved in once the weather started getting nippy. You can see them both in the photo below, gas canister on the left on the floor and of course, the wood stove on the right. This is quite typical in Georgian homes, though few people have some other modern conveniences like washing machines or refrigerators.

This is our dining room/entertaining room where we held most of our supras (feasts). The piano was a bit beat up and the keys were in a terrible state of repair and when the kids would mess around trying to play simple tunes I was sure that it was completely out of tune. It was not until we had a going away dinner when our school music teacher came over and started playing did I find out that it still works pretty darn well despite it's beat up appearance. The only bad thing about this room, and having supras in this room, is the fact that it's cut off from the main room where the heat is so it's always too chilly in this room. I guess that's why you're supposed to drink as much as you can at the feast, to keep warm! 

I was so relived to come to my house last October and find that, yes, I had an indoor bathroom... with a real toilet.. and a shower with hot water. As you can see, the bathroom is kind of under a constant state of construction, not unlike the rest of the house. My host family told me that my host father was a "craftsman" which later I came to find out that he remodles bathrooms for a living. Which is probably why my bathroom looks really nice... or what's been done so far. When they get some more money, they'll continue with the upgrades. 

My room was definitely the best room in the house. All new wallpaper, wardrobes, a desk which you can't see and a nice bed too. You can see my electric heater on next to the bed as well, that's how I had to heat my room, though I wasn't allowed to leave it on at night. Also not pictured are the huge windows to the left of the bed with beautiful floor length curtains. I was so surprised to walk into my room the first night, I felt like I had won the lottery. I haven't heard of anyone having as nice of a room as me.

This is our backyard.  Inside the shed, there is a fireplace which they would use to cook extra large things that wouldn't fit on one small gas canister and needed more heat than the wood stove which cooks things too slowly sometimes. There is also a room just for preserves. My host mother wasn't big on baking and cooking per se, but she was a champion at canning and preserving. She made her own pickles, preserved fruit, jams, and a variety of sauces which would consist of most of our meals. She'd make up a huge batch of food on the fireplace, then put it in jars and put it out in the shed. Whenever we ran out of food, all you had to do was go out here and pick out whatever you wanted from the huge selection of stuff.

This was my street in Georgia. Nothing really worth mentioning except that if you notice the yellow pipes that run about 3 meters or so above the ground on either side of the street are gas lines. Never seen above ground gas lines before. My host mother dreams of getting her house connected to gas, but I think the hook-up fee runs around $1,000 USD if I understood correctly. That's more than the monthly income for the whole family. Not to mention the cost of buying new appliances that run on gas as well...

In this last photo, you can see a delivery of firewood that arrived from my host mother's parents who live in the village. There was a whole party of men who came by two weeks later with a chain saw to cut it all up and move it off the street and into the back yard. No one seems to mind that people store firewood in the middle of the street, or at least not on our small side street with little traffic.

I hope this gives you some idea of what my life was like this fall. Some families have very nice, modern houses, some families still live the village life with outhouses water heaters that require chopping wood and building a fire to use. My house I think was somewhere in between these two, but part of the experience of living in Georgia is living in a Georgian home and getting a good look into how another culture lives their daily life. I hope this is useful for those who are planning on going to Georgia!

Good Article!

Hey all, I'm coming back to Korea later this week (and on Korean Air for the first time in my life... soooo psyched). In the meantime, I found this article, it seems to be making it's way around facebook. It's great just for the photography, but I feel inspired to travel more around Korea once spring comes after reading this article!

http://www.cnngo.com/seoul/visit/50-beautiful-places-visit-korea-873093

Hopefully I have more time this week to update about my travels in Turkey and one or two more posts about Korea before I get inundated with Korean stuff again. 

Problems with Blogger: Feedback, please

Hi all, sorry for the lack of posts, I've got lots to write, but I haven't had my computer to make proper updates (left it in O'Hare airport...oops...). But, as I'm using other peoples computers in the past week I'm realizing that the blog isn't loading properly on a lot of different browsers, and on my mom's old computer it even causes the computer to freeze as it loads. I'm not sure what's causing this problem, but if you have any feedback please let me know. Is the sidebar loading properly? Right now using Internet Explorer it is appearing under the blog instead of on the side. Is it freezing your computer? (you might not be able to comment if it is though! Send me an email- smileyjkl (at) hotmail (dot) com.)

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this problem? I've changed the background and moved the sidebar to the opposite side to see if things get any better, but so far, I can't see any difference. Is the blog loading properly on your computer? What browser are you using? Please give me your feedback!

Life updates

Just wanted to say a few things. I'm updating from my iPod so sorry for that. Firstly I'm traveling in Turkey at the moment so don't expect any posts for a while. Secondly I'm spending new years with my host family and then heading back to America on Jan 3rd. I'll be in Boston for 10 days and then I should be hopping on a plane to come back to Korea! Just signed a contract and got my visa issuance number from YBM sisa. I'm not looking forward to the split schedule but I can't wait to teach adults! I'm compleatly burnt out from childen at the moment. And I can't wait to be back in my apartment. I can't wait for ondol heating.... I may sleep on my yo (floor mat) for a week just because I can. And obviously I can't wait to see the boyfriend... He's been so paitently waiting for me to return. My first plan when I get back? Using my amazing yongpyong + Alpensia ski pass that the boyfriend fought so hard for meto get when they announced the special edition pass when he olympics were anounced last summer. See you all soon in 대한민국

Whirlwind tour of Tbilisi

 Samtavro Church in Mtskheta

After my first bus ride to from Tbilisi to my city I swore I wouldn’t go back again until it was time to go back to America. Six torturous hours in an uncomfortable bus with poor ventilation made me think that there was nothing to see in Tbilisi that was worth doing that again. But since then of course, I have found better modes of transport and I’ve found myself in transit in Tbilisi 3 or 4 times since the beginning of November. While I’ve come to know the bus stations quite well because I’m always going from here to there passing through Tbilisi, I hadn’t gotten a chance to explore the city since my first week in Georgia during our orientation (and even then, I only got out into the city a few times for just a few hours).  Finally this weekend a chance to really see the city came up, my best travel mate was leaving for America. I spent the day with her and another friend exploring the city, got to say my goodbyes on Saturday night, then had one more day on Sunday to see even more. Taking night trains there and back maximized our time so we had two full days to explore.

First stop was actually to head out of Tbilisi, to the neighboring town of Mtskheta, the old capital of Georiga. Now it’s just a small pleasant city with lots of important churches. We didn’t have time to get into the mountains to find the most famous churches and monasteries, but we got to see two major sights in town, Samtavro church and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral.

 Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral was the most important cathedral in Georgia during medieval times and several kings and church patriarchs have been buried here. Beautiful, original murals in here date back to the 17^th century.

Murals in Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

 Murals in Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

After roaming around Mtskheta for about 2 hours hitting up these two churches and all the souvenir stands picking up Christmas presents to bring home, we headed back to Tbilisi without any problems.

 Soviet medallions at the Dry Bridge Market

From there we went back to the Dry Bridge Market, the first place I discovered by accident in Tbilisi back after I first arrived. We all did a little shopping here, there are so many great things to buy here.

 Old photos at the Dry Bridge Market

Next it was time for lunch. Unfortunately, in Georgia, it can be hard to find a big variety of cheap eats. Generally we wind up eating some form of Khachapuri (bread with cheese) or Lobiani (bread with beans) because these are the cheapest. The selection of Khachapuris and Lobianis depend on the city and the restaurant, but here we found something we’d never tried before, Khachapuri with boiled egg inside. We were happy with the results and three of these plus three teas came to a grand total of 10 Lari ($7 USD). 

 Khachapuri filled with cheese and boiled eggs

From there it was on to Sameba, the biggest and newest cathedral in Georgia. Construction finished in just 2004, it is absolutely massive and can be spotted from afar from most places in the city. While this church is quite impressive to look at from the outside, inside it lacks the charm of the older churches and their beautiful old murals. Walls inside are mostly bare except for the various icons hanging on the walls. 

 Me at Sameba Cathedral

 After that, we spent some time with some friends of friends and then headed off for dinner. I hoped to find a place that had Georgian dancing for my buddy’s last night in Georgia, but we were unsuccessful. But, we did wind up with a nice (expensive) meal of Khinkali (Georgian dumplings) with salad and cheese in a fancy restaurant on the outskirts of town.

The next morning we leisurely got up and out of our hostel and headed to Narikala fortress. It was fun to climb the ruins of the fortress up to the top for the spectacular, bird’s eye view of the city. 

 Church in Narikala Fortress

 View from Narikala Fortress

 Side street near Didube Station

From there we headed to the market near Didube station to buy some Chorchkhela (grape and nut thing that is hard to understand until you see and taste it) for gifts. The market is fun to walk through, there’s lots to see, it’s not a touristy place at all. It really shocked some friends of mine who aren’t used to seeing markets where they come from. I’m used to it from living in Hwanghak-dong in Seoul.

 In the market at Didube Station

 Small, Medium, Large and Titanic!

Dinner was something I’ve been wanting to eat for a month. Adjaruli Khachapuri, which I personally like to call "boat Khajapuri". Traditionally it is served with cheese, egg and butter, but we tried another variation too, filled with cheese and vegetables. Really, this is the ‘small’ size for 6.80 Lari, but I think this could easily fill two hungry people. I don’t want to think how big the  ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘Titanic’ sizes would be…

 The expensive sulfur baths, from outside

Last stop for the night was the sulfur baths. I love going to the jjimjilbangs in Korea and I was hoping for a similar experience. There were two options. Paying (relatively) lots of money for a private bath, or going to the public bath for 2 lari. Just like in Korea you must take off all your clothes to go in, but unlike Korea, there's no baths in this bathhouse, just showers and a sauna (as far as I could find at least...)

 The cheap sulfur baths

After this, we were finished and we headed back to the train station to go back to our city. But, Tbilisi is a great place to wonder around and I look forward to my next chance to wander the city streets.