Monday, September 27, 2010

Update on my knee

The update with my knee: I saw a knee specialist today and he narrowed it down to cellulitis or suprapatella tendinitis. I had an x-ray done to my knee to verify that nothing was wrong with my bones. I was prescribed 4 pills a day, 3 times a day, for 3 days. I also had physical therapy done. They massaged gel on my knee with this metal thing that was painful for 5 min, then put a big hot pad on for about 20 min, and finished with electroshock or electropulses (not sure, but something with electricity) using 4 suction-like cups around my knee cap. I have to do this therapy for the next 3 days, and by the end of it, if my knee isn't better, I have to get an MRI. I'm suppose to keep my knee straight, and not move as much as possible. That will be difficult to do! We don't have health insurance right now, but it's still pretty cheap to get medical help. My doctor visit, x-rays, and physical therapy cost 27,150 won, which is probably about $25. The physical therapy will probably cost about $10 each visit for the next three days. Also, my prescription cost about $8. All of these expenses were without insurance. So, just imagine how cheap it would be WITH insurance! Anyway, keep checking back at this post for updates on my knee. No worries everybody, I will be fine! I have God on my side :)

**UPDATE
The doctor said it's healing just fine. I have a little bit of recovery to go, but I can start bending my a little bit more each day. I am already able to walk almost normal :) I won't walk long distances just yet, and definitely no running. All the swelling is gone, and there is just a smidgen of discoloration left. I no longer have to go to physical therapy if I don't want to. The doctor did say that I will probably experience some pain due to moving it again, so he suggested I go to therapy every couple of days. I will probably go when I feel like it :) Therapy costs 13,300 won (about $13), and taxi ride round trip is about $6. So needless to say, therapy is not a necessity, therefore I won't be going often, if at all anymore. The doctor never said exactly what it was, but according to the research Jeremy did, most likely it was tendonitis. Praise God that I'm cured :)

**UPDATE
Well, technically my is all better except for the fact that I still can't kneel down on my knee cap. Nothing bothers my knee until I try putting  my weight on my knee cap. Everyone whom I've talked all say that's not good and I should get it looked at. The problem is, the doctor is going to tell me to get an MRI, as that is the next step he would take. Unfortunately, with insurance, the MRI will cost 400,000 - 500,000 won. We don't have insurance yet, so I can't do the MRI. We should get insurance in a couple of weeks if everything goes well. I just pray that in the mean time, I am not doing anymore damage to my knee!

Friday, September 24, 2010

Second injury

My poor knee! I have no idea how this happened. I literally woke up early Thursday morning to it hurting. The doctor said he "thinks" it's an infection inside my knee. If it doesn't go away in 3 days, I have to go see a specialist. I have to take 3 pills 3 times a day and 1 pill twice a day for 3 days. There is redness all around my knee, and I recently discovered a darker spot right on my knee cap. Praying that it goes away soon!

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Korean Cultural lesson

We finally found a class that teaches Korean to English speakers at church.  We had been looking online for  University classes but they were going to cost us a thousand dollars each, the church classes are free :).  The class had been going on for a month, so we are going to have to catch up.  The teacher is more than willing to come early before class to help us learn the basics of the language, which will help a lot.  So pretty soon we will finally be able to order off the menu in restaurants, rather than pointing at pictures and praying it doesn't burn our taste buds off.

Our first class on Sunday was really tough since we barely know the alphabet and the class was already able to do dialogue with each other, but we will get there soon enough. The teacher of the class wants us not only to understand the language but also the culture of Korea and to help with that she planned a field trip for the next day.  The field trip was to Namsangol traditional village, we took a few friends from church along with us (A.P. and Dennis). The village is a replica of a Choson period village and has areas to learn about Korean life during the Choson period.  The group decided to go to a traditional tea ceremony and learn about proper etiquette, much to the chagrin of Cathleen. After the boring Tea Party we stayed to watch an exciting traditional music festival, which had some drums and dancing. 

Just waiting in front of the tea house
After the festival a couple of us went out to eat at this amazing pancake house in the middle of downtown Seoul called Butterfingers. We had to wait 40 minutes for a seat but it was well worth it. We had some death by chocolate pancakes with  two huge scoops of vanilla and Oreos 'n cream ice cream, and was topped off with an amazing amount of Chocolate syrup over everything.  We fought each other for every last bite of chocolate heaven that was on the plate. After our bellies were full we head back home but the night was still young.  So we went with AP and Dennis to a karaoke room and spent two hours singing at the top of our lungs, and for the record Jeremy did get the highest score of the night (I guess it was technically morning).  After that we hit the hay around three in the morning, Happy Chuseok.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Interesting...but not :)

Happy Chuseok! :) Our pile of diaries and book reports
We've been quite busy with school this last week and never really found energy to write a blog, sorry. A Korean holiday called Chuseok (pronounced chew-sock, their Thanksgiving) is next week, so we have Monday-Thursday off. We are going to use that time to hang out with some people and get caught up on the student diaries and book reports. Way to spend a holiday break. :) Today we are going to Itaewon with AP and Dennis (two people from church), and visiting a foreign market (there will be American food to buy!) and a used English book store. Yippee! On Wednesday, AP invited us to hang out again for Chuseok, so that will be fun! Also, sometime over break, our supervisor/co-worker Jaena wants to hang out. So hopefully all this hanging out with people will cancel out the boring time we spend on the diaries and book reports. :)

Last Tuesday, we tried to make it to AP and Dennis' for Bible Study. Yeah, that didn't work out so well. We thought we would ride our bike to their house instead of spending 5,000 won for a taxi ride. Thinking we knew where we were going, we headed out around 10 p.m. only to find ourselves calling AP at 10:30 or so asking which building they were in. We were in the wrong spot, so we pedaled off hoping to find the 500 apartments. At 11:00 we called it quits. We were lost in the next district over, but luckily we found the subway and followed that home. Maybe next Tuesday?? :D On our way home though, we ran into a Westerner who was more than pleased to see other Westerners. It was kind of an awkward introduction to someone new, but she was nice and doesn't live very far from us. Maybe soon we will hang out. Thursday, I had a student give me some traditional Korean food that is served on Chuseok. I thought it was good, but Jeremy didn't. One was a dessert made of sticky brown rice and almonds, the other, I'm not sure. It seemed like the outside was dough-like, not much flavor, and the middle.... I don't even know how to describe it. Maybe like the middle of a hard-boiled egg? It didn't have much flavor either. On Friday, a student gave me this tiny bottle that is a drink. It was very sweet tasting. You can buy them in the store daily. Also, our top boss bought us gifts: a set of seaweed wraps and a shampoo set. Apparently for Chuseok, they give gifts to people. To me, it's like Thanksgiving and Christmas put together with more emphasis on Thanksgiving :) I was able to buy a crochet hook here to start working on projects, but yarn is expensive here in Ansan. I also got needles to finish quilting the quilt I brought. I'm very excited to be doing my favorite hobbies! Jeremy just got a new computer game Starcraft, and he is very happy to be playing it. Things are looking up! :)
It will last us a lifetime :)

Saturday, September 11, 2010

Some pictures...

Night life in Ansan.
Our apartment. Jeremy is in the loft where our bed is. Bathroom and doorway right below loft.
The geographical center of Seoul.
Outside of Ansan, to Seoul. Beautiful forested areas.
Ansan Lake Park. Where we go to workout.
The subway before rush hour.
Korean bills and coins
Korean coins: 10, 50, 100, 500
Standing in living room. Kitchen in the back, bathroom, doorway,
and closets to the right down the short hallway.

Seoul Tower

Our first view. Hiked to the top unwillingly!

Partial view of Seoul. Ansan is behind the mountain.


  The millions of steps!
At the very top of the mountain!!
We went to Seoul today to go do some tourist stuff. Our destination was to go to Namsan Park to see the botanical garden and the mini zoo. Well, we saw neither. :) Instead, we found ourselves walking up a steep hill trying to find Namsan Park. When we saw the entrance to the Children's park, we figured that wasn't it, and kept walking....further up the steep hill. We were sweating so bad, it was ridiculous! It was very obvious we haven't lived in Korea long. When the Namsan Public Library came to view, we decided to go that direction to see what we could see. We found more stairs to climb. :( We kept on pushing, hoping to find something cool to see. We saw more statues, men playing checkers, rocks with Chinese writing, and another building. We headed back to the road to try to discover more things. We came upon a wannabe waterfall, but it was just run-off coming down a fancy architectural display. :) I wanted to take a picture, but as Jeremy was walking towards a sign, a Korean man asked us, IN ENGLISH, if we were going up the mountain. I was like, "uh...", and Jeremy was all for it. The Korean pretty much led the way making us follow him. Found out he had lived in California for some time (explains the English). He told us it would take 30 minutes to get to the top. I thought I was going to die! It was very pretty though! Certainly beat taking the cable car up, despite the millions of steps and me wearing flip-flops. We finally made it and it was pretty neat seeing the sights from the top. We head back down, which turned out to be almost just as hard. We even passed a pregnant woman going up! Crazy! We head back to Seoul Station to go home dripping wet with sweat, literally. Good thing the subway ride was only just about an hour long. I'm sure we smelled. :) Oh well, it was fun!

Thursday, September 9, 2010

6th graders...

Yesterday was a tough day for both of us; more so for Jeremy though. Just about everday we have atleast one 6th grade class. Everyone was once a 6th grader and knows how they can be. So as the ESL teacher for them, it's tough for us already because of a slight language barrier, but to add the typical 6th grade syndrome to the mix, makes teaching them even harder. Don't get me wrong, we have a couple 6th grade classes where the students actually do their homework and try to participate. But it's always those few classes that get under your skin that you dwell on, and yesterday was one of those days. Jeremy had two 6th grade classes back to back, and his last class was the worst of them. The poor guy looked so drained after class :( The whole situation just isn't good because it's late at night for us, the students have been in school all day long, and the powerpoints just don't have that spark to keep the students' interest for 50 minutes. We survive though, and so do the students. We just hope that soon all, or most of, the students will do their homework so that more will talk and participate in class.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Our first weekend

We are still getting used to being up so late and just how our daily schedule goes, so sorry about not posting a blog sooner. The weekend for us was pretty neat. Saturday we went to Seoul to meet a group of teachers who went through ESL Park (the recruiting business). Our subway ride took about 1 1/2 hours. We had to transfer trains in Sadong, which was really packed, and we actually got mixed up. We thought we were going the right way, but we finally figured out that we had to be on the opposite side of the tracks. That was an ordeal trying to figure out how to get to the opposite side! It wasn't easy but we made it. When we made it to Jamsil station, the train was really, really packed. We had to push people out of the way so we could get off before the doors closed! We met the group at Lotte World. It's a very big mall that apparently has a theme park in it somewhere. We only went to the third floor to visit the folk museum. It's just a museum about the Korean history. Then we had dinner, which was really expensive for the amount of food. We had to leave dinner early because we had another 1 1/2 hour train ride back, and we wanted to make it home before the subway shut down for the night. We made it with about a half hour to spare. We almost got lost trying to walk home, but we eventually figured out where we were and which way to go to get home. It was after midnight before we headed into bed. Whew! Then Sunday we went to the Dong-Sang church which has an English service. There were actually more Koreans in the service than I had expected! The pastor is Korean, but speaks pretty good English. The church is sort of Presbyterian, and follows the Westminster catechisms. We will go again to form a better opinion. After church we wanted to go to Costco in Seoul. Jeremy had researched it online, and found that it would take 2 hours to get there by bus. We got on the bus really easy, and we just had to wait out the ride. I took some pictures along the way and hopefully I will actually get around to posting some for you to see. We finally made it to Costco, and it was pouring down rain with thunder and lightning. Of course, being foreigners, we didn't bring umbrellas because it was sunny when we went to church. We survived being a little wet. Costco in Korea is much like the ones in the states, but this had two floors. All the food was downstairs, so you put your cart on an escalator that was actually magnetized to keep the carts from rolling down. Pretty weird :) In Jeremy's words "it's different". There were so many people there, it was a mad house. Especially near the samples!! You'd think these people hadn't eaten in a month! They were taking 2,3,4 samples each! I just wanted to get out of there because it was so hard to maneuver. We finally made it out with just enough stuff to fit in one Costco reusable bag and a smaller tote bag. We couldn't get too much because we had to carry it home and it would take at least 2 hours to get home. Actually, we had to wait over an hour for the correct bus number to come. It was not fun. We crossed the street 4 times hoping that we would be on the correct side of the street for the next bus to take us home. Finally, a bus came and we went home. It was after 6 when we made it home. For the rest of the night laundry was done, the Wii was played, and a movie was watched. Around 11 or so we hit the hay. Hopefully our future weekends will be packed like this weekend :)

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Typhoon Kompasu

As you may have heard on the news typhoon Kompasu hit Korea last night.  The typhoon came right over us last night.  With wind speeds around 80 mph it is no surprise that we had a hard time sleeping.  The fortunate thing is that it hit at night, sooner than expected, so that most sane people were inside rather than trying to brave their way to work.  In Ansan no one was killed but there were a few giant neon signs that fell to the ground.  The next morning was eerily calm and clear and people were bustling around as if nothing had happened. 

Firsts

Okay, so it's been awhile since we've posted because we are still settling in. We finally moved into our apartment today which has taken some load off because now we can unpack and feel at home. Yesterday was our first teaching day. Whew! Glad that hump is over!! For both of us it was a learning day. We messed up a lot, but hey, who can blame us. Two days of a crash course training can't prepare you for everything. The kids are actually pretty forgiving. Since they don't really know the language, they just sit there and go along with whatever we do and say :) When the day was over, we were glad. Not because it was bad, but because we actually made it through and it wasn't as bad as we thought it was. All that stressing for no reason. Today was our second day, and though we still made mistakes, it was a little easier. I can see now why it will be so easy to teach once we get the hang of it. It's all pretty much repetition. By the end of a week, we will have taught about 23-24 classes, but only about 7-8 lessons which are repeated throughout the week. So you can see there isn't much work to be done to prepare for the classes. Everyone is friendly for sure, but not many go out of their way to communicate with us. We just need to give it more time :) For "dinner" tonight (we technically eat dinner at the school, but we get hungry after work because we don't like a lot of the food provided), we decided to try to go to a restaurant that Sean and Erin took us to. We thought we could just point to the picture on the menu and we would be okay. Yeah, right!! We've figured out that anything red is going to be spicy. We must have forgotten that tonight, because our dish was so spicy hot that I had to ask for a box to go!! After about 5 or 6 pieces of chicken, we just couldn't handle it anymore. Thank God that Erin and Sean left us their phrase book! Jeremy had me ask for a box, but we weren't sure if we should say 'to take away' or 'box'. So I brought the book up to a gentleman in the place and pointed to the Korean characters, then proceeded to butcher how to say it in Korean. :D He figured out what I was saying, but then I had to figure out what he said after that! He wanted to take our food and box it himself. Okay, that's fine! :D We had also asked for water in the beginning, and boy was that funny! The word for water is 'mul', but we didn't know how to pronounce it. C'mon, a three letter word people! After saying it about 5 different ways, the lady finally got it. Nice! So, in the end, we were able to successfully order food, water, and get a box to go, but we were unsuccessful at choosing the right food to enjoy! :D Oh the experiences! They just keep piling up :)