Thoughts on not being new, loosing my Enlish, batting cages, and GyeongJu

I'm not the new guy any more.  Teagan, a new teacher from Philadelphia came this weekend.  He lives just below me and he's going to make a good addition to the school.  But it's taking a bit of a mental shift on my part to understand that I'm not the new guy any more.  Tonight I took him to "HomePlus" (the big grocery/everything store), and I realize that it wasn't too long ago that I was in his shoes.  I enjoyed being the new guy.  I could get away with being ignorant.  But now it's been 2 months, and though that wouldn't seem all that long before I came, for some reason it's a great deal of time here.  But anyway, change happens, and that's good.  We're actually loosing Alan teacher in a couple of weeks.  Alan is Korean-American, and he speaks both English and Korean.  He's been very helpful and wonderful to have as a friend.  He's also a good guy.  So it'll be sad to see him go.  But that will bring another teacher in his place, and that's exciting.

An interesting change in myself that I've noticed is my fluxuating English skills.  Now, you would think that being an English teacher would have a positive affect on my understanding of my native language.  While that is true to some degree - there are a lot of English grammar rules I'm learning, that I'd never thought about - in other ways my English abilities have also plunged dramatically.  I was a bad speller to start with, but ever since being in Korea I've become downright terrible.  I'm continuously questioning how to spell words, and it's not uncommon for me to tell my students how a word is spelt when I'm quite sure that I've spelt it wrong.  I've even had to rely on my Korean teacher to tell help me out at times.  Pretty bad eh?

On another note, a recent Pohanic discovery for me has been a sweet-awesome batting cage on the roof of the downtown arcade.  I'm not a big baseball guy but having the chance to take full swings at baseballs is pretty liberating.  It reminds me of my younger days playing pitch-and-hit with Peter.  I've never actually been to a batting cage before, but I've always assumed that the balls are always delivered at the same speed to the same spot.  That's not true for this place; you never know where the balls going to be, which I like.  So I'm excited to potentially make going to the batting cage a weekly routine.

This past weekend, Dan, Sheila, Natasha and I went to Gyeong-Ju.  Gyeong-Ju is the ancient capital of the Silla dynasty (57 BC - 935 AD according to wikipedia).  There's lots to see there so we'll have to go back to see it all.  One place we did see was the Numuli park.  It's a park with all these ancient burial mounds (Numuli) of Silla kings and leaders (see previous blog for Korean burial practices).  It was really cool to walk through a park with these large mounds all over the place.  We all thought it would be an awesome park to actually play in and go sledding in during the winter.  Unfortunately there are ancient kings buried underneath you and it would be somewhat disrespectful to use their grave sites as sledding slopes.  Also, I ate my first persimmon there.  We snatched a couple off a tree (which was probably also disrespectfully but they're pretty great).
We also went to the Bulguksa Temple which is the site of a very old Buddhist temple.  The temple has been largely rebuilt I think, but I always enjoy being in place that has a long history.  Here are some pictures:

So these aren't small unnoticeable mounds.  It's amazing to think about how much work it must have taken to make all of them.  They're mostly all rock.

Sweet eh?

This pond was outside Bulguksa.  In it were the largest Koi fish I've ever seen.

A very old pagoda. I don't know the posing couple.

Outside one of the temples is this spot with all these flat rocks where people have made a bunch of tiny rock cairns.  I made one too.

Who said Koreans have no creativity?

I didn't get any pictures of the temple buildings because there were a lot of people and they requested that you not take pictures of the inside of the buildings.  But this is a picture of the intricate wood work of the roofs.  It's crazy to think that people built and painted these roofs.

Thanks for reading.

 Michael