The Wind is Blowin': Postcards

This summer has been a long and busy one so far. In Korea the kids get a month and a half off for summer vacation. Usually this starts from Middle-July to Late-August. However, during this break they have the option of attending summer camp at school for three different subjects (English, Math and Korean Language.) Most of the students parents push them into attending these camps as the parents push their kids (and I mean really push them) into having a better life than they did. This "pushing" by the parents exceeds anything we have in the US. Example: Students attend school from 8am-5pm usually. Then half of them go to private hogwons (or after school private tutoring schools) while the other half go home to study. Most of them study until 10 or 11 at night. If it exam week then they stay up till 1am at times cramming for the upcoming exam. Oh, and they go to school on Saturday as well. Yeah.....

Back to the topic at hand. This summer camp I worked with the students on very basic things. Reviewing the important aspects of English, like prepositions, adjectives, adverbs, etc, is vital to these kids. They may learn 20-30 new words every week but if their basic structure is off then all that accounts to nothing. On the last couple of days I had the students write postcards to some of my American friends in hope that they would develop a Pen-Pal relationship with some English speakers. I put up an add on facebook and had an overwhelming response to people wanting to receive a postcard! Delighted I went to the post office to send these postcards off last Friday.

Of course it wouldn't be Korea unless something went wrong. The postcards I bought already had postage included of 230Won. However to send them internationally I needed to of bought the 305Won ones. With both me not speaking Korean and the Korean lady not speaking English it made for a difficult time figuring this out. So when the revelation came to pass I went to buy the 305 ones but she didn't have any (I think.) She handed them back to me and said have a nice day. Confused I went to a few other post offices in the area to find out that almost no one HAS THE 305. You have to special order them I think.

Well it's a week later and I have run out of options. I am resorting to posting them on her and giving an address to send your responses too. It looks like I am going to have to A) Send them all home and then let my mom send them out or B) re-write them in letter format and send them that way. Either way is going to take some time so enjoy these for the time being.

If you want to write back you can just use my address and I can give them to the students. From there it is out of my hands and into you and his/hers.

When writing these letters know their English is good but not great. I would stray away from complex words and complex sentences. However if they don't understand something you write I will be the one to explain it to them so make sure you write clearly.

And if anyone wants to send me a gift with the letter I would kill for some Dill Pickles. Literally, Kill.

My Address:

South Korea, Gyeonggi-do,

Yeoncheon-gun, Jeongok-eup,

Jeongok-ri

450-1 #306 486-903

(Write it just like that. Confusing, I know)