A Sweet Reunion

The highlight of my trip--all 7 months of it--is nothing more than the sweetest reunion with the sweetest girls I have ever met.

In 2005 I went to Vietnam to teach English for a summer with ELIC and it profoundly impacted the next 3 years of my life. These girls accepted me, loved me and inspired me to do more and live more. I went there thinking I was going to just "teach English" but instead I fell in love with Vietnam.

This photo consists of only 10 of my 15 girls. It was taken near the end of our time together. We went on a photo scavenger hunt and my class won! The prize was ice cream with the all the teachers--on us! It is probably my favorite memory from the whole trip.



And here they are (well, 5 of them anyway), three years later. L-R: Tra, Linh, Yen, Me, Nhung, and Linh. We spent the afternoon at Nhung's house, eating dinner and catching up on old times. But before dinner, we went for a walk in one of the new housing developments in the West Lake District. It's CRAZY nice!! Like a Californian suburb!



This is J and I with Nhung and her grandfather. He was the sweetest old man ever! And though he couldn't speak any English and our Vietnamese is non-existent, he still sat with us and tried to talk with us. And of course, chuckled a bit at Jeremy's lack of hair. hahaha. Even grandpa has more than him!!



Part of the fun was getting starfruit out of the tree in Nhung's backyard. It took a lot of skill, a good arm, a long metal poker, and a big basket. Lots of laughs!! But so worth the effort because fresh starfruit is yummy! Here Yen is cutting some up just before dinner.



Ngoc was in the kitchen helping make french fries and nem (spring rolls), though I can't say she made much progress--they barely left the pot before they hit our mouths!! Such a great cook! In the back is Nhung and her mother, the nem masters of the night!



The night was full of laughs and Jeremy had a good time seeing a REAL Vietnamese home, eating AUTHENTIC nem and experiencing TRUE Vietnamese hospitality. Here Jeremy tells Yen, Linh and Linh a joke while sneaking french fries from Ngoc.

On another night while I was in Hanoi, we met with some students at Pepperoni's to eat pizza and share our memories with... Will Rope! My old Vietnam teammate who is now teaching in Vietnam long term! He's been there July (I think) on a one year contract with ELIC's VTF program. What a treat to not only see my old students but to see them along with a fellow teacher!! It's truly amazing what that first trip to Vietnam did to us, our little team of 6. Will came back to teach for a year, Melia came back to teach for a year and I came back to visit (though seriously considered teaching there for a year at one point too). Needless to say, something special happened three years ago, something that has kept us coming back...



We also had time to visit my old school where the girls were going to college while I taught them. Now they are going to Hanoi University--one of the top schools in Vietnam--in pursuit of the teaching degrees. Some have gone directly to rural classrooms and weren't able to make to to the reunions (busy with work), but these girls sure had fun seeing their old stomping grounds. I think it had been two years since they last visited! Here Linh and Yen are laughing and pointing out that the skirts in the display photos keep getting shorter and shorter! hahaha.

Ngoc, Linh, Tra, and Yen: four of my best friends. I'm so grateful for the opportunity to see them again. When I left Hanoi more than three years ago, I refused to say goodbye through all the tears at the airport, and instead I promised to be back with a "See you later." I honestly didn't know if I would. Every part of me wanted to return but money and time are big hurdles to get over. I didn't know if I even could make it back. But I did. And here we are, us 5 girls, reunited after three years and an ocean between us, gathered in front of the school that brought us together the first time.

Seeing them again has assured me that all the love and friendship I found in Vietnam three years ago was real and that hard work pays off. I fundraised $3,000 in order to make that initial trip happen three years ago, and though surely their language has grown exponentially more without my help, I must say that I did get to play a major role in bringing passion to their lives. And in turn, these girls have brought passion into mine.

I love travel. I love Vietnam. I can't wait for the next trip back.

To see more photos from the reunion, click here.
To see more photos from my first trip to Vietnam, click here.
To see all my photos from Vietnam, click here.

The End is Near.

I never read, reply or repost these type of things but this one is a cut above the rest...

Just in case you need some writing inspiration. Every year, English teachers from across the USA can submit their collections of actual analogies and metaphors found in high school essays. These excerpts are published each year to the amusement of teachers across the country. Here are last year's winners:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a Thigh Master.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. coli, and he was room temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife's infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn't.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you're on vacation in anothercity and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan's teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long, it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.

Recent Adventures

Live Octopus

Last night I went out for a farewell dinner with the language teachers from the girls school. The menu: sushi and live octopus. Koreans are well known for their appetite for live octopus. The stuff we had last night was cut up in small pieces (though they still moved) but many people eat whole baby octopus. There are consequences though: many people die every year from eating whole, live octopus because the octopus will unravel on it's way down, crawl it's way back up and bock air passage to your lungs. It's the one dish that will always fight back!

Anyhow, I gave it a try for the first time. It tasted like snot with the consistency of Ju-Ju Bees. Ick. Here's a video of my co-teacher Mrs. Shin trying live octopus for the first time too.



First Birthday

A couple weeks ago, Jeremy and I were invited to his co-worker's son's first birthday party (I mistakenly said earlier that it was the 100 day birthday--oops!). The first birthday is a big deal in Korea and this family, like so many others, rented a room at one of the numerous wedding halls in Korea. The party was held downstairs along with about 5 other first birthday parties in other rented rooms on the same floor. Each party shared food at a centrally located buffet 9which had GREAT food by the way!). The party was a little uneventful for the most part. You came in, ate, greeted the hosts, gave them your gifts, looked at baby pictures, and listened to the parents give a speech. The one big event--the part everyone goes for--is the futures game. In this game four items are placed before the child, each one representing a career, and the one the child picks up first is supposed to determine who/what he/she will be. The items are string to represent long life, a pencil to represent scholarly aptitude, a stethoscope to represent science, and money to represent wealth (obviously). All guests placed bets on what the child would choose before the ceremony began by placing their raffle ticket in a cup marked by each item. I chose the pencil and horray! The kid is going to be a scholar! The hosts later drew numbers from each cup and gave away prizes (which I didn't get any). It was pretty cool but the poor kid was really cranky because they kept changing his clothes throughout the party. One interesting side note: no cake was served. Strange. Birthdays just don't seem like birthdays without cake. There was one on the front table but no one ate it. I guess it was for show... Overall, I had a great time experiencing yet another fascinating aspect of Korean culture and meeting J's friends and co-workers for the first time. Good fun!

Taxi!

Last weekend Jeremy and I went out with some friends in Seoul for dinner and drinks to celebrate my recent acceptance to UQ. We all caught and shared a cab later back to Incheon and had what I'm sure will forever be my most memorable taxi ride. The first problem: it was raining like nuts and our driver was driving like nuts! With lots of standing water on the freeway, he was cruising at 150 km/h or 93.5 mi/h. Um, yeah. A little scary. The second problem: our driver didn't have GPS which is not a good sign in Korea (Koreans are terrible with directions and seem to need a GPS locator to find the bathroom in their own house!). We took the wrong exit in Incheon and had to stop another taxi driver to ask for directions. The third problem: on our way to Jeremy's house we got stuck in the Incheon red light district where our taxi driver was more than distracted--he was a few seconds short of picking up a prostitute! He slowed down to a near stop, oohing and ahhing at the scantily clad women walking up and down their brothel fronts. He even shouted hello to some of them! All of us were cracking up inside! I'm pretty sure he had never seen a hooker before and like most Koreans probably assumed this wasn't a problem in Korea. The fourth problem: we passed a group of gang members at one intersection and our driver was equally fascinated with them as he was with the hookers. This time he really did stop to say hello (the weird part was that despite his inability to communicate in English, he said this in English and not Korean). I was a little nervous--I remember running into some bad crowds in the U District a couple times... They paid us no heed though. The fifth problem: once he dropped off Jeremy and I, his next job was to drop of Lisa, Jeremy's newest co-worker. Lisa barely knows where she lives yet and doesn't have a cell phone. Jeremy and I didn't have the Korean skills to tell him where to take her. Oh, and this guy hardly had a clue where he was going or where he was. We ended up asking some other Koreans to tell him how to get to the nearest subway station to Lisa's house but even then each person in the small crowd that was forming had a different way of getting there. Talk about mass confusion!! Lisa doesn't have a cell phone so we never heard how her trip home went but I assume it went okay. If she hadn't shown up for work Monday morning I'm sure J would have said something!

Just because.

I'm blogging today not because I have much to say but because I just need to say something. If I don't, I may go crazy.

I'm at school and just had a rough first period. There's a girl in my class named Hippo and she's my biggest trouble maker out of both schools. She's obstinate, lazy, completely apathetic towards my class, snotty, and all around a pain. I don't know what to do with her. I've separated her from her friends (whom she could never stop talking to) and set her with a group of girls who work hard. However, instead of working, Hippo does nothing and tries to get another girl behind her off task. I found myself constantly trying to get her working today with absolutely no results. I can't motivate her with anything. She doesn't care about grades. She doesn't care about candy. She doesn't respond to punishment. The only thing she seems to excel at is frustrating me. And this happens every Wednesday. Every Wednesday I have her in class and every Wednesday I return to the office stressed out. I really wish she didn't affect me like this. I've got too many things to worry about right now. Having some bad students plaguing me as well just intensifies all those other troublesome things.

Plans for India are moving along. I've set a date to depart--September 4th--and I'm going to the embassy tomorrow to apply for my visa. I'm getting really excited and I've been reading a lot of my India travel guide, but I'm still scared to go alone. Why? This is so unlike me. Or maybe it isn't... I don't know anymore. Sometimes I seriously doubt whether I have enough courage to make this trip on my own. I'm really not as brave as you all might think. I'm only brave when I have to be, not when I want to be. And then I get to thinking and I tell myself, "Kortney, it's not Iraq. You'll be fine. There's nothing really dangerous about India." I think my biggest fear is going and finding myself alone the whole time. I don't want to be alone. I want to share every one of my adventures with someone. But maybe that's what this blog is for... Will you promise to comment on my posts? I need to know that someone is with me, if not in person, at least in thought.

I realized yesterday why so many Koreans struggle with pronunciation--they transliterate (is that a word?) everything from English to Korea (meaning they spell out English pronunciations in Korean). This causes some big problems because first, Korean is separated by syllables. Take for example my name: Kortney in English is only two syllables but Kortney 콜트니 in Korean is pronounced Kor-tuh-nee. Second, they add in certain symbols in order to make the word work in Korean. My name for example; instead of running the t and n together, they actually insert an uh sounding symbol between the two. Third, most Korean letters/symbols are not as flexible with sound as English letters. For example, the letter s has two sounds in English, s as in see and a combination sound with sh as in sheep. In Korean, there is only one s sound, that's sh. So when students try to say words like simple I often hear shimple instead. Make sense? You may need to study Korean in order to understand what I'm talking about.

Time for class! Be right back...

Hmm. Just finished my second class and I'm not sure what to say about it. Most girls did well and were really fun to work with but four girls refused to work; three of them stood in push-up position for 15 minutes; the fourth student followed the previous three but also did an additional 30 minutes for swearing at the Korean teacher. For the first time EVER I saw one of my co-teachers actually DO something to punish students without me initiating it. I hope my next and last class doesn't follow in the fashion of the first two...

I also just sent a fax to good ol' NU to request transcripts. Now THIS makes me angry. I had FIVE transcripts here in Korea and they have all disappeared--along with my iPod charger. What's up with that? It's not like I would have thrown them away. I never throw papers away. This seriously puts a kink in my UQ application process. It's going to take a lot longer to get my official transcript to UQ and longer for me to hear back. *Sigh* I'm not even really sure if the fax went through. I guess I'll have to call sometime tonight.

Funny side note: one of the ladies in the admin office is wearing a shirt that says "English Rocks" today.

You know what I need? A really good distraction. I need something to consume my thoughts and make me happy at the same time.

I'm going to go down town and get some passport photos. And eat lunch. Mmm. Yes, lunch.