We had a great time blasting around Southeast Asia when we left South Korea. We toured through four countries in about three weeks. In the video, we start out in South Korea at The Welton School, then quickly leave. Next, we tear through Thailand, hang out in the mountains of Laos, tour Halong Bay and take a motorcycle tour in Vietnam, and finally end up in Cambodia. Angkor Wat was really amazing and where we took most of the pictures.

If you haven’t pressed play yet, or even if you have, I recommend going to the high-quality version on YouTube.com, hitting the full-screen button and cranking up the speakers! Also, because of the nature of the video, I recommend watching it twice to really enjoy all the shots.

This video was made from piling every single one of our 1,250 photos into iMovie. The inspiration for the video came during a long bus ride while I was looking through pictures on our digital camera. I held down the next button and watched all the pictures fly by, and thought it would make a pretty good video. Don’t worry, we will still post more galleries and blog entries to keep you entertained for a while longer. Thanks for stopping by!

Happy 4th of July everyone! Here is a video compilation of a bunch of old footage from my students at The Welton School, in Seoul, South Korea. Thought you might enjoy seeing inside the orderly Korean classroom. The video starts off with my morning class (Miami class) and ends with some pictures of my afternoon class (Seattle class). An interesting thing to remember is that none of these kids are over six years old. I have way too much footage of these darn silly kids!

The highlight of this birthday party for me was when the cake ran out. For several reasons, but mainly because my student Kevin decided he hadn’t had enough. He ran around looking for kids who were momentarily distracted from their cake so he could plop down snag a bite and be gone again by the time the looked back. I watched him do this to about ten different kids. It was too cute to tell him to stop and I was done teaching him for the day, so I didn’t care how much sugar he consumed.

One of the students I teach right after lunch apparently had too much cake at this birthday party. That or Language Arts just really makes him ill. Either way my afternoon was not pleasant.

The birthday party was chaos, as usual, but it made for some great photos. Check them out on our Welton School Birthday Party photo album.

One thing I was not able to capture enough of is the princess dresses. Some of my kindergarten girls go all out. They have huge dresses, that they wear with light-up heels, plastic jewelry, and the lastest craze to hit my class... red lipstick. This was not something they got from me, but my little five year old girls break out the mirrors and lipstick every chance they get. I will go to the bathroom and come back to four little red-faced clowns. When I ask who brought the lipstick, they look at me with pouted lips and blank stares. I can’t help but laugh.

The boys love to wear Konglish t-shirts, funny hats, and  Burberry. The boys never know what their shirts say but they will proudly take a photo when we ask.

The most infamous of fashion victims at Welton is one of my favorite students, Tights McGee. Tights McGee, also known as Philip to some, was given his name because he wears tights...everyday. Now you might be thinking, “That’s weird for a boy to wear tights under his pants or shorts.” This is where you would be mistaken, you see, he wears tights in lieu of pants or shorts. His shirts tend to be rather short as well and never match the usually striped tights. As you can see in the picture on the right, he chose brown and tan striped tights to pair (his favorite pair) with the bright blue Welton polo. To make this situation even better, Tights never likes to sit nicely in his chair with his feet towards the floor. Rather, he perches up, feet on chair, leaning on the table, behind pressed towards the sky. It’s really hard to not laugh while telling him to please sit down. He is a cute little boy but I hope this fashion is only a phase and that his mother will realize it really isn’t a good look to carry on into Elementary School.

Please check out more photos of Tights and other fashionable students in the photo gallery.

We discovered this video a few weeks ago on the internets. It was a huge hit in the office at work! We don't know these guys, or really even know much about where Geumchon is. But we thought we'd give these guys some cyber props and let you enjoy their hip-hop tribute to expatriate life in South Korea.

Of course, the video goes over a lot more smoothly if you've experienced the intricacies of living in South Korea as a waygook (foreigner/haole). With that in mind, I've provided translation of the hip-hoppery.

Written by Christian Zonts. The EV Boyz are Christian Zonts, Mike Nance, and Brian Peterson. Lyrics jacked from Lofbomm.com. If one were so inclined, one could Digg this!

This song has gotten frequent spins and laughs in our Welton School teacher's lounge. We really appreciate these guys' wit and skill at writing catchy tunes.

I never had a desire to try kimchi before. My sister, Deverie, often had kimchi in the fridge at home but I never considered it. When I came to South Korea about five months ago, I officially tried it with some galbi and loved it.

Megan and I eat kimchi everyday at the Welton School and we love it. The best thing about kimchi is that it goes with everything. I can have my kimchi mixed with tuna fish or just put some on top of rice and mix it up with other sides. I can throw some thick chunks of kimchi cabbage on the galbi hot plate to cook it, or, I can eat it cold. There are also many different kinds of kimchi, including some made with scallions or cucumbers.

Needless to say, I am hooked on kimchi for life. But to get the full experience, Megan, her mom, and I spent an hour or so touring the Traditional Kimchi Museum in Coex Mall. We learned a lot of interesting things!:

1. Kimchi is traditionally made by bundling the components (heads of cabbage, other vegetables and chili powder) in a jar and burying it in the ground to keep a steady temperature for fermentation. In a traditional village you can see hay structures made to keep the ground dry.

2. The chili powder that is so prevalent in kimchi (and shows up in many more Korean dishes) was actually introduced to Korean culture after the time of Columbus. Traders first brought chili peppers over from Mexico.

3. Kimchi contains vitamin A and C, and minerals calcium, phosphorus and iron. Kimchi has very few calories and lots of dietary fibers, making it good for diets while facilitating metabolism. Kimchi has abundant antioxidants, anti-carcinogens and is very good for your body. Particularly your digestive system. I thought that eating so much spicy Korean food would have a disastrous effect on flatulence. Quite the opposite.

4. Kimchi has a very strong smell. Many officetels, (including our first one) come equipped with a kimchi refrigerator so that the rest of your food does not smell like kimchi.

5. When taking photographs, South Koreans often use the word "kimchi" the same way English speakers would say the word "cheese".

After gaining some awesome knowledge of kimchi, we had a small, private tasting and left our mark in the Guestbook. (Something lurking readers are always encouraged to do.)See our incredibly interesting pictures of lacquered kimchi in more detail in our photo galleries!

As we arrived at a beautiful (never thought I would use this word to describe something in Korea) park with a large lake in the middle, all the teachers quickly took notice of a bungee jumping platform high above the lake. We did attempt to go bungee jumping at the end of our picnic but it was closed for lunch. We have already planned to go back next weekend so stay tuned for that tale. The park was already swarming with school children, soon to be extremely jealous school children, when we arrived. We unloaded the buses and quickly found some shade. As soon as we found our spot, all the kids opened their backpacks and  whipped out individual plastic mats, juice boxes, sushi rolls, cookies, chips, and on and on. These kids are serious picnicing pros. They chowed down their goodies and were anxiously awaiting the much anticipated water fight.

We put a raincoat on every student and made the unfortunate mistake of thinking we wouldn’t need one ourselves. The kids looked like little Ghostbusters with their water gun backpacks and protective coats. Everyone lined up to fill up their waterpacks. Once full, the mayhem began. Teachers were the first to be soaked. Of course we were given water guns a third the size of the students, so we were constantly running to reload. I have never seen these kids have so much fun. The poor children from the other schools suddenly didn’t think jump roping or hula hooping was very fun. They all stared at our students and wanted to join in the fun. Luckily our students wanted them to join in too, kind of. Several of our students were seen spraying unarmed onlookers. My little Kevin even took it upon himself to share the fun with all the bikers in the park. He stood on the biking trail, spraying anyone that rode past.

The water fight lasted for quite sometime. We were all drenched by the end of the day. The unplanned English lesson of the day was getting the kids to say “Say hello to my little friend” before firing the water gun. We found it hilarious, but I’m not sure how the director felt when we lined the students up for a group photo and we had several little Al Pacinos posing for a photo op.

The field trip was a great end to the week and probably the most fun we have had with our students.

Enjoy the photo album from our second field trip.

There are many ways to geotag. Some involve owning a camera that costs more than a family sedan. Some involve bringing an extra GPS device with you while you take pictures. But I am very lazy, so I did some research and found the very easiest way for anyone to geotag digital photos.

If you use a PC, then God bless you. If you use a Mac, then you can download a very cool and very free program called Geotagger. Once installed, use Google Earth to surf to the location your pictures were taken. From iPhoto or the Finder, drag the photos directly over Geotagger and let go.

There is no Step 3. The GPS coordinates are non-destructively written to the picture file. Should you choose to upload the picture to a site such as Flickr of Panoramio, they will show up on interactive maps. You can even build Google Earth tours out of your pictures that whisks you over 3d terrain.

As of this writing, the Geotagger software is at version 1.2, and requires Mac OS X and Google Earth v4. Geotagger is made by Craig Stanton, a fellow from New Zealand who appreciates donations by thankful users.

Eventually, we will all have 3G iPhones which take photos and video and synchronize your approximate position into the metadata based on wireless triangulation. But until that time, we’ll have to settle for our little wonderful MacBooks that make it so easy … geez, someone needs to pay me for this stuff.

We arrived at the temple and sixty little red fleece vests piled out of the busses. One of my students, Kevin, is quite a handful. I had tried (emphasis on the tried) to implement the “buddy system” with my class, with me as Kevin’s buddy for fear of what he would do during this outing. It started out great, each student had their buddy in hand and I was doing “buddy checks” about every 2 minutes. As I tried to keep my eyes on the other children, Kevin, while holding my hand, managed to squat down pick up some rocks and start hurling them at the bus.

Once all the busses arrived, we headed up a hill. This was a steep hill for many of the teachers (some were extremely winded once we made it to the top and some even had to energize themselves by eating a donut during the climb), let alone for these  tiny kids. We made very few stops while ascending the hill. Once at the top every kid whipped out plastic picnic mats, plopped themselves down and enjoyed massive amount of snacks their moms had packed for them. Inevitably, once we hit the top of the hill Kevin (if you have not hear my Kevin stories yet, he is one of my favorite students but cannot manage to stay in his chair for more than 2 minutes at a time and cannot manage to make it a day at school without going the bathroom in his pants) had to go the bathroom. I frantically tried to get one of the Korean Teachers to watch my class so I could run with Kevin down the hill before he changed his mind about actually going to a bathroom facility and just went in his pants.

Once snack time had finished, a good 45 minutes later. It was time to head back down the hill. It hadn’t really crossed my mind while we were heading up this steep incline that the way down might be a bit more difficult. My little “buddies” started falling over left and right, two by two. Trying to stop slow down their momentum and their urge to start running was no easy task. My class had a bit of a hang up midway down when Rosie and Daniel (these are two of my students that need an entire blog entry of their own for me to explain their relationship, I never knew 5 year olds could be in love until I met these two) got into one of their notorious “lovers quarrels”. Daniel threw himself on the ground crying “Rosie doesn’t like me anymore and won’t hold my hand” as Rosie stands there, hands on hips, rolling her eyes (I kid you not). When I finally convinced Daniel life would go on, we preceded down the hill.

Once we reach the bottom, it was time for class photos before getting on the bus, and heading back to school. When we got back to school, all the teachers joked that we could have walked up and down any hill for this field trip. I don’t think my students would have noticed the difference, because the next day when I asked them what we say on our field trip, they told me what kind of snacks they ate.

Enjoy this photo album with all our pictures from the field trip.

About two weeks ago we hung out with our good friend Min Kim. We had not seen her since we did some summer sessions together at the University of Hawai‘i. Min was born in Seoul and made for an excellent tour guide around the city. We talked a lot about the intricacies of Korean life and how we all miss living on Oah’u.

Then on a whim we decided to try some sannakji 산낙지, or live squid! Watch the video to see how much we enjoyed it and how we are now hopeless addicts! Min also introduced us to a new kind of herbal soju, sansachun, which really helped wash down the tentacled fellows.

It was really great to meet Min in her home country and have a Korean friend! We hope to visit with her again soon!

NOTE

Many of our new videos are YouTube players. This means better performance and playback time for everyone. As well, click on the video at any time to go to YouTube.com and watch in Full Screen!