About Andrew Tisue

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Jinyeong-ri, South Korea
After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, I made the decision to move to South Korea with my girlfriend Amanda, so we could experience a completely foreign culture and country while enabling us to reflect on our recent education, and make plans for our future.

Saturday, May 21, 2011

Class photos

This past week our school created a "cafe" website (http://cafe.daum.net/unijinyoung); basically a free-blog style website in order to post photos of our students as well as school information. And guess who got to be the photographer! Check out what some of our students (and us) look like below:

Andrew, Amanda, Glen, Iris.

Roy and Leo behind him.

From left: Chloe, Robin, Leo, Sally in the Red 1 class.

Kevin standing and speaking during a speaking test.

Emma, the daughter of our former landlord.

Peter, who's actually Kang's nephew.

Jack is our youngest student at 5 years old. This is his attempt at posing with a "peace sign" and his STICKER PAGE!

Luke is talented for his age; here he is doing CR (comprehension review) on the computer, led by Iris.

James, Steven, and John (just to the left) are three of our older students and can be seen here actually enjoying doing their sentence writing homework!

Amanda teaching two of our younger students some new vocabulary.

Me giving Ally a speaking test on: "Where is he? He is in the library."

Ben and Logan filling in their student books.

Josh with Noah behind him writing in their books.

Amanda teaching Cole, Jessica, and Kayla, three mid-level students. 

Me teaching Eva: "Do you see a mosquito? Yes, I see 9 mosquitoes." 

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Yellow Dust

Yellow dust, Asian dust, whatever you want to call it, it's nasty stuff. What's Yellow Dust you say? Well, basically what happens is jet stream winds pick up all sorts of crap like desert sand, dirt, pollen and pollution from places like China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan and then carry it east and dump it all over places like Korea and Japan. Our director warned us a while back when it first began; it's a seasonal thing that occurs every spring. Since then it hasn't really been an issue, but today was a pretty ugly day. I check a couple websites (Korea Meteorological Administration / airkorea.or.kr) often to see what the levels are and this is what they showed today:

Each colored line represents a different city across South Korea.
Notice all the red dots, and then take a look at the chart at the bottom.
 They say that levels above 400 parts (ug/m3 whatever that means) are dangerous: outdoor activities for children, elderly and people with respiratory issues is PROHIBITED. Of course, we still saw people on the streets, and even children, including one of our students playing in the park today... Sighhh..

I took these photos from the roof of our school around 6:45pm:

At first I thought that was the moon above the building, then I realized it was the sun...




There's not much we can do to protect ourselves from the dust, except to limit our time outdoors and when we do go outside wear these awesome masks we bought:

Pororo is a really popular cartoon for little kids :)