A Series of Unfortunate Events

So Wednesday wasn't the best day I've had in Korea so far. Wednesdays are going to be my long day because I have 5 classes that day in addition to a teacher class after school (that starts next week). So it was a long day, and some things happened that weren't great. Let's start with the fact that I have 2 different times on Wednesday where I teach a culture class to one level of students then I teach some of the same kinds in a mixed level textbook class. Confusing! I got it right the first time, but the second time I did that I got the classes mixed up. I started teaching culture to the textbook kids and textbook stuff to the culture kids!!! The teacher in one of the classes stopped me, so I recovered from that one, but I was so stupid!

Today, I realized that the special needs program seems to be similar to that at my middle and high school in that special needs kids have their own classes some of the time, and the other part of the time, they have classes with the rest of the students. I accidentally called on a few children that had special needs, and the other students then had to figure out how to tell me. They got the point across though. Gianni and I had a conversation later about this, and it's funny that because he went to private school he never had special needs kids in his class. Still, he's great with kids with disabilities from all his work at Perkins. Just an interesting difference there. Also, the Korean special needs students don't have aids with them in class the way a special needs student at the schools I went to would have had.

Good thing though: we had bibimbap for lunch! I love bibimbap, and it was pretty good. The sound was pretty good yesterday too. I believe it was a tofu thing. Wednesday is special lunch day also, so we got yogurt with lunch as well. I asked Niall about the woman who comes around with snacks, and he told me that she was giving me samples. He signed up to have a few thousand won taken from his pay check to get snacks from her everyday. I really want to do that!

Anyway, then after school I went home, and my coteacher said the internet guys were coming over to try to fix the internet. While I waited for them I tried to cook dinner. I have a pot and a pan, and I was trying to cook some chicken in the pan. I put some olive oil in the pan, turned on the burner, looked away for literally 1 second, and the bottom and sides of the pan got burnt! I don't think it was the olive oil burning. I think it's just a crappy pan. UGH! So I made the chicken anyway and ate it...kind of...but I probably shouldn't have.

I forget if I said or not, but I thought the internet in Korea was supposed to be really fast, and my internet is soooo slow. I figured I needed to just pay for a wifi upgrade, but it was still really slow after I did that. The technicians came over and worked on it for like an hour. They told me that the wifi in my building is slow and that it would be better if I used the ethernet, but they couldn't even get the ethernet to work for a while. When it finally did start working, it does seem to work faster, but still not as fast as I expected. So now I think I'm paying for an upgrade on wifi and having to use the ethernet cable. Whatever! They left me an extra long ethernet so that I can move my laptop around the apartment. I'm still not totally happy with the internet, but whatever. At least it's a little better.

Because the technicians were working, we weren't able to leave to go to Traveler's for quiz night until later. We, luckily, arrived just on time and registered for the quiz. Gianni did a great job on the first movie category, and then we did really terribly on the other two sections. But WE WON A BEER CHALLENGE!!! We had to write an epitaph of a cartoon character, and I came up with the idea to write "Here lies Bart Simpson" as many times as we could fit on the paper. If you know the Simpsons, you know that at the beginning of the episode Bart is always writing lines on the chalk board, so I was trying to be a little witty. :) We won a free pitcher of beer and shared it with some of the other people from our orientation who showed up. There were a bunch more people this week, and we got to see our friend Sian. Last night, I signed Sian, Maria, Matthew, Gianni, and I up as a team for a photo scavenger hunt on Saturday afternoon, which should be a lot of fun. After all the confusion and mishaps of the day, it was a nice end to an evening. ugh, what a day.