Useful Telephone Numbers

The people over at Korea4Expats have a nice article on useful phone numbers.

1330

Not be confused with 1337, Korea Travel Phone 1330 is the Tourist's 411. The Jeollanam-do hotline is 061-1337 and it provides live bilingual operators fluent in English, Japanese, and Chinese; more details are available. Pretty useful when interpreting bus, train and ferry schedules.

Teaching with Online Videos

Thanks to YouTube et al, creating a lesson around a video is one of the easiest and popular ways to teach kids esl. But getting the videos from the Internet into a more presentable form, like a Power Point file, requires a little bit of extra work, especially when your class room is state of the art, circa 1980. In some previous lessons I've used downloaded videos and figured out a process of getting videos from my home Internets into my classroom presentations.

Downloading Videos

If your school trusts you with a live Internet connection that directly spews into your classroom, you're in luck. Others end up with either no Internet or a crippling firewall that does not allow any fun at all. Downloading the videos to a CD (or whatever) at home and bringing it into the school side steps this problem completely.

Finding the video is straight forward but while some sites let you download the video directly, others aren't as generous. So far the easiest and most fail-safe way that I've found to download videos from the Internet is through DownloadHelper, an extension to FireFox. I'm already using FireFox and its other extensions so I'm partial to DownloadHelper in a keep it in the family kind of way, but there are some valid alternatives, like the web-based VideoDownloader site. But so far DownloadHelper has proven the most reliable thanks to the massive list of video sites that it has been tested against.

Playing Videos

Most of the videos on the net are in the flash video format (*.flv files) and there are tons of options for playing these files and you'll have to convince your school that it's okay to install at least one of them. I convinced my school to install K-lite by simply installing myself and not telling anybody about it. So far nobody has complained.

Now, K-lite is a Swiss army knife of video manipulation and is really intended for people who know about encoding and codecs and other computer geekness but it's super easy to install and use. There are multiple versions of K-Lite and the standard is a good entry point since it'll install the the FLV codec as well as Media Player Classic, a simple movie player that is free the bells and whistles featured in other applications.

Embedding Videos into Power Point Slides

Embedding flash videos in Power Point files creates a nice smooth transition from slide to video and back to slide. Embedding videos into Power Point slides is fairly common problem and easily solved by other people. Unfortunately most versions of Power Point do not support the *.flv file; they do, however, support embedding Windows media video format (*.wmv files). And quite fortunately, you can convert between one and the other thanks to the good people at media-convert.com.

Videos in Power Point are not really embedded, but linked. This means that if you want to share your presentation you'll need to be sure that you also share the video files and that they are placed in the same folder as the Power Point file.

Alternatives
There are some alternative methods to using videos but so far my favourite ones are the video tutorials done by reponzo01:

Connected to the Internet:

Not Connected to the Internet:

비금도

비금도 (Bigeumdo) is a fairly large vacation island that lies just outside of Mokpo in Sinan county's archipelago. Even though it is largely ignored by Mokponians who prefer Oedaldo, the island is arguably better thanks to its two large sand beaches 원평해수욕장 (Wonpyeong Beach) and 하누넘해수욕장 (Hanuneom Beach); the latter is used as a shooting location for the television show Spring Waltz while the former has a...

...falling sunset beyond the horizon is so beautiful that it makes you feel like fantasy melting into the sea.

A 50 minute high-speed ferry is available from Mokpo's Yeogaekseon ferry terminal to Bigeum's Sudae-ri (Sudae Wharf) and is operated by Namhae Express. If you can handle Korean credit card transactions you can also buy tickets online via Seomticket; if you can't, there's always the ticket counter inside the terminal. Regardless, a Mokpo to Bigemdo ticket will cost you 14900₩ and the return ticket (purchased locally at Sudae-ri) is 13350₩.

Mokpo to Bigeumdo	Bigeumdo to Mokpo
07:50	11:50
13:20	17:30

There is an alternative ferry that's cheaper at 6300₩, stops at Gasan-ri (the other wharf), but takes over 2 hours.

The island is large enough to have it's own fleet of taxis, bank branches and seaside resorts. On the Internet, the island is popular enough to have a slighted outdated official page in English, an entry on Tour2Korea, a nice map and, of course, the various blog entries and the photos.

The House Filled with Hapiness

행복이 가득한 집 (The House Filled with Happiness or more commonly known as the Happy House) is a 1930's Japanese colonial house transformed into a semi-luxurious restaurant cafe.

Information on the Internet is difficult to come by and so far all I've found is this review that talks about both the cafe and the neighbouring Mokpo Modern History Museum. The review is entirely in Korean, but it does have this useful line of information:

행복이 가득한 집 061-247-5887, 11:00~24:00, 차 5000원대, 식사 1만원대

Which roughly translates out to this:

Phone: 061-247-5887
Hours: 11:00 to 24:00
Prices: Tea 5000W & Meal 10000W

The food is an average mixed of western and Korean dishes, but most of the foreigners in Mokpo really dig the place for its cafe decor and its five dollar shakes.