Food #11 Bakery

I'm not sure how interesting this is for y'all but when you haven't seen western style desserts for a while this stuff looks pretty tasty. The prices are also pretty expensive too for people living here. Their fresh baked french bread is so good. I think this place is owned by people from S.K.

Food #10 Breakfast

This post is for a friend who would always defend the fact that there is such a thing as Chinese breakfast. I never argued either way as I was clueless. Anyways these appear to be typical breakfast foods, at least in my city, such as rice in water(juk), bread and wonton pie.

Tumen

Another hot spot to visit near my area is the city of Tumen. It is a city that borders NK. Not only that but there is a bridge that connects the two countries that you are allowed to cross about a third of the way. On the other side of the bridge is a very small town that apparently doesn't have anyone who permanently resides there. You see a few people just moping about not doing much.

The last pic is me and some summer volunteers blending in with the local scenery. I think we were amusing to a few children hanging out close by.

Baek Du San (Changbai Mountain)

If you reside where I do, most everyone visits a place called Baek Du San. It is the world's highest elevation volcanic crater lake. Half of the lake is within China and the other half is in NK. The lake waters flow out into a very nice waterfall. I visited the mountain in July with the summer volunteers.

This area, as I was told, is spoken of as the birthplace of Korean civilization.

Once you get to the mountain area you have the option of hiking up steps to get to the lake. You get to see the waterfall as you walk up the steps. The other option is to take a jeep, which I like to call the "jeep-o-death", that roars you to the top of the mountain overlooking the lake. The jeep driver goes as fast as possible with wheels screeching all the way. I chose the jeep cause my legs were too tired.

















They got funny signs all over China with funny translations. As you can also see everyone ignores them as well.

The Marathon Continues

I haven't posted in a good long while, sorry about that. I meant to post at the beginning of the semester but things got crazy so fast I neglected to do so.


Here's an update with what happened in the summer.

I had a study in August with a couple of folks from downtown. I wrote about them earlier. We in all met about 3 times. I would have liked to have met about 3 more times but there were some scheduling issues and such. Although our study time was short I met with my male student several times outside of class and he was very helpful in helping me take care of shopping and chores I needed to take care of downtown. When he gets back in town next month I may be able to resume our study.

During the summer I was able to travel to Beijing and visit a friend I've known since junior high. He had tickets to the games and room for me at his place so I got to see the games and the city on a nice little budget. I'll post pics of those later.

The week before classes all the new teachers came in to get oriented and such. All the freshmen came in too. For about 4 to 5 weeks they have military training so you see a bunch of students walking around wearing camo uniforms. The nice thing about this semester is that due to training all the classes for freshman are postponed for a week. It's like having an extra week of vacation for those classes.


The autumn semester began the first monday of september with me having 3 English conversation classes like last semester. Then I had 2 elementary class and 1 intermediate class. Now it's vice versa and I have one elementary class and two intermediate classes. In all I have 77 students. It was really quite funny when I met my freshman class. Some students had just gotten a new Korean name from the school so they weren't used to hearing it. At first I would call the roll and maybe no one would answer, maybe the wrong person or maybe two students would answer. I thought my pronunciation was really bad or something but it was just them not being used to the Korean version of their Chinese name. (The Chinese version of my Korean name is Guo You Zhen by the way. I don't know the tones. The Russian speaking students said my name in Russian is pronounced "Zjhen-ya." I still like my name pronounced in French the best, "Oo-zjhen." It's hard to type the sounds accurately.)

I thought I would be getting things done faster and more efficiently this semester but I find myself still working late a lot of days. I feel like all I do is work, sleep and eat. I think I am grading faster and such but now that I know a little more I'm also doing more. Plus the material is from the first half of our teaching books so it's still new to me. I guess it takes 1 to 2 years to really settle in. My leader here said his first year here was ok for him but it was like a steam roller slowly coming up from behind. If you slow down any you'll get flattened. At the very least I'm glad I don't have to take care of all the shopping & utilities set up craziness of last semester.

Midterms for my classes are coming up in a few days already. I can't believe how fast things are going. There are so many extracurricular things I wish I could have spent a lot more time doing such as working out, playing the guitar, reading, studying Korean/Chinese, having lunch with old students and such. I'm just now beginning to touch base again in seeing how the Uzbek/Russian students are doing in their walk. I hope to make my rounds again and see how they are all doing. There is conflict between certain members of this group so I yarp that things will be at peace between them. They also may be spending a bit too much time at the PC room downtown so I hope they can curb this if it affects their studies.

I am again doing a friday night study for the SK students. The prep time is a lot quicker since I already have the material ready but the students just aren't showing up. I've had a couple of new members come for two weeks in a row but I don't know if they will be consistently coming as of yet. One student from last semester is the only one to have come to the last two meetings so me and my co-leader have had impromptu studies/discussions with him. She gets us rolling by picking some hymns to sing, I pick a passage to discuss on the spot and we end with yarping for eachother. Not a bad time at all, but I was hoping for at least one non-C to come this semester and learn about J. (I deviated from the planned material these last two weeks since we covered it already with him last semester.)

I am considering another semester here but I don't know if I can handle this same load again. It would be nice to just have two classes of one level to teach but in our office you have to be flexible to take on anything so I couldn't really ask for that. There are other teaching options such as the school down the street for the K-12 MK students or the evening classes for the more professional types. Plus I need to consider finances. I need much advice and yarps in this area.

Goals
By the end of the semester I hope I will have met with all the Russian speaking students 1 to 2 times. In addition, I hope I can find at least one student to do a one on one study with, like the one I did in the summer.

Yarp
Please keep on rootin for all the things I've spoken of in Eugene CA. That would be great. Also my personality is such that whenever someone says something to me I internalize it to think about later. If it's something less than positive I really feel like I agonize over it way too much. I think it ruins my peace and my view of people. Please yarp that no power, from me or outside of me, would separate me from the comfort I find in J.

I miss you all please keep sending your messages and such. I really appreciate them. Thanks especially to those of you who sent me those care packages. You know who you are so thanks a bunch!

Food #9 Chuar

I haven't posted in a while so I thought I'd kick it off with some pictures of one of my favorite places to eat. These are grilled kebobs originating from Xinjiang province of western China. It's called chuar.

This first pic is of a ch-ch I showed in my presentation back home. It's near the chuar place. You can also eat noodles, rice and even french bread with honey here.