Teacher’s meeting in Gwangju

November 21, 2008

We got almost a free day off the other day in order to go to a huge teacher’s meeting in Gwangju. Everyone was required to go, so all of the schools had to allow all of us to have at least part of Friday off, but most of us got the whole day off. They split the meeting into two halves, one three-hour meeting starting at 9 am for the Elementary teachers, and one three-hour meeting starting at 1 pm for the Primary, or middle and high school teachers.

Since I am Elementary, and it takes about an hour to take the bus from Mokpo to Gwangju, Cody and I decided to head out to Gwangju the night before so that we could hang out with other people who got there early, and have a better chance at a cheap room at The Windmill Motel there. The Windmill is a really nice Love motel (and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what that means, like what a cheap Motel 6 is used for, but way nicer) that all the Waygooks (Foreigners) use when they stay in Gwangju because it’s kept really clean and many of the rooms have nice showers or bathtubs, and it’s also central to where we like to shop and eat there.

When we arrived, we went and had some really good marinated pork Galbi (Galbi is either grilled or pan-fried meat, either alone or with veggies, served with rice and typically wrapped in Lettuce leaves). We then had a few drinks, but called it a night relatively early due to the meeting the next day.

The meeting itself was fairly unproductive. It gave us some ideas of games for the classroom and discipline, but otherwise it was a run of the mill meeting where they served bad coffee, green tea, and a ton of mandarin oranges.

After the meeting, the organizers gave each of us “lunch” which consisted of a heavily-frosted doughnut, and one piece of “vegetarian” pizza toast. First, what they consider as pizza in this case consists of cheese, and a ton of mayonnaise and ketchup piled on top, with a piece of ham shoved in the middle. For some reason, Koreans don’t consider ham as a meat, so they threw some in the pizza toast as sevice-eu. Korean seems to like service-eu, and usually I do too, because it means you get extras thrown into your purchase all the time, but in this case it was not wanted.

After the meeting, we spent the next two night partying with friends we hadn’t seen in awhile, going to a friend’s surprise party, and shopping. I was able to pick up some Christmas presents and have an all around great time.