Catching up on some old business: I finally found out how much those crazy chairs go for:
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| This price is the equivalent of roughly $2,200. But hey, it appears to be marked down so must be a steal! |
Since we're finally moving "out of winter" here (I won't quite go so far as to say "into spring") I'll post this picture of the most snow we ever got this year:
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| You can just about, but not quite, see the windows of my room on the second floor of the browner brick building in the distance on the left at the end of the shoveled path. My room is just behind the redder brick of the school building from here, which is the first floor of the middle school wing. We only got snow about 3-4 times at most over the winter and usually it didn't even stick. In fact, this is the only time I remember seeing any accumulation. Sure was cold sometimes, though! Nowadays it's getting up to the mid 50s (F) during the day but still down to freezing at night. Air quality is terrible most of the time, though, unfortunately. |
A couple weekends back I went into Seoul for a little look around and ended up hiking up a mountain in the north-west part of the city called Inwan. So since 'san' is the postfix meaning 'mountain' it's called Inwansan. The old Seoul city walls are visible for quite a bit of it. Even though the air was cool it was sunny and I worked up a sweat going partway up the mountain. I didn't have time to get all the way to the top so I'll save that for another trip. Instead I veered off to the side and discovered a interesting valley to hike down through which had a Buddhist temple built throughout it.
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| Walking along near the old city walls approaching Inwansan |
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| Strange that an area this unkempt could be pretty much in the center of Seoul. This is a view of the Buddhist temple grounds in the valley I would eventually hike down through but I didn't know that yet as I was still approaching. |
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| Another view of the old city walls. |
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| Getting ready to hike down through the temple valley back toward the rest of the city. |
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| The path down was a cool set of steps past small shrines and temples. |
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| I think this was a temple but I'm not sure. Definitely part of the greater temple complex. |
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| I haven't really seen any architecture or decoration like this anywhere else I've been so far. Everything else I've come across is very modern. This area almost reminded me of Thailand. |
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| And of course, at the bottom I found a map explaining where I'd been. At this point I was at the red lettering on the lower left side of the mountain picture. It must say 'You are here' in Korean. I pretty much went up the path defined by the dotted red line ascending from the lower left part of the picture until it dips away from the ridgeline just above the valley with all the purple markers which is where I descended. I'll definitely go back again and try to make it to the top sometime but I'd like to find a day when the visibility is better than awful to maximize the view reward. |
Last Thursday I led another field trip to a museum, but this time it was my 12th grade Environmental Science students going to the Geomdan Prehistory Museum in Geomdan, not too far away on the other side of the big canal north of here. Everything around here is recently developed, as I've mentioned, and this museum houses a bunch of artifacts they discovered as they were developing the area.
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| From left to right: Min (Min Hyeong), Minah, Jeff (Jonghwan), and Sean (Yoon Suk). Korean names are in parentheses but I call them by their English names. |
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| Bum Joon, for whom I wrote a recommendation and who got accepted into NYU to study sociology next year. |
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| This is Ga Eun for whom I also wrote a recommendation. She got accepted to CU Boulder but she's waiting to hear from U of Washington where she'd rather go. It would be fun if she went to Boulder though and met Owen! |
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| It's not that big a museum, and Seniors are pretty much over it this time of year (if indeed they were ever into it) so we left to enjoy a small snack (supposed to be a lunch packed for us by the school cafeteria) in a park adjacent to the museum but finding ourselves still hungry when we were done with that, and with time on our hands before we were scheduled to return to school, we decided to take a walk around the area and stop for burgers at the local Lotteria (equivalent to McDonald's). |
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| All seven (!) of my Environmental Science students for the year! It was fun hanging out with Seniors. Even though I couldn't understand anything they were saying they were just like seniors anywhere: making snide comments and laughing together cynically. Daniel (Chanhee) on the right closest to the camera is the only one I hadn't named yet. |
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| Riding the bus on the way back to school. |
We had our second round of parent-teacher conferences on Friday and we were encouraged to display some student work. Much of what we do is online as all the kids in middle school have Chromebooks and the seniors are required to have their own notebooks, so I devised an assignment just for the purpose of having something to put on the wall. Since we've started studying chemistry in 8th grade science I made each student (of whom I now have a total of 31 between to sections) make periodic table representations of two elements and then I posted them on the wall outside my classroom to make a big illustrated periodic table. This is not the kind of assignment I usually do since it seems more like busywork to me and I'm not sure how much the kids really learned from it but it served its purpose and as we approach the end of the year everyone (including myself) seems content to relax a little more and take it easy.
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| The reflection comes from the fact that I had to stand in the library and shoot the picture through the glass wall of the library in order to fit the whole table in one shot. |
Finally I close with a nice dinner in town yesterday to celebrate the birthday of Jacob S. (in the back of the first picture below holding his daughter). The dinner was at the Texas BBQ restaurant in Cheongna and it was my first time there but it won't be my last. It was great food at a reasonable price and they served beer!
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| Clockwise from lower left, seated around table: Linda (librarian), Lester (Chinese teacher and wine connoisseur), Tim (technology), Jitesh (PE), Peter (history teacher and bagpiper), Madeleine (First Program and wife of Peter), mother-in-law of birthday boy Jacob, who is a history teacher in HS; (now coming back on other side of table): wife of Jacob, John (HS Chem teacher), Jennifer (AP Calc teacher), and Aysem (Spanish teacher from Turkey, married to Tim across the table from her). |
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| Aysem with nutcrackers. I took this pic because it reminded me of Max and how we used to encourage him to collect nutcrackers. In fact, I think he had a larger version of both these, or at least the one on the left! |
That's my report for now. The week after this one I'll be in Vietnam for spring break, leaving early Saturday morning 3/25 and not returning until Sunday eve 4/2, after which I'll have to go back to work first thing the next morning. I'm not planning to take my laptop so I probably won't be posting anything about my Vietnam trip until the weekend of 4/8 at the earliest. Everyone stay well and have fun until then! -- Chris
