Friday

Today is Friday and it's been raining off and on all day. I think that there aren't as many English classes on Fridays because a lot of the teachers don't seem to be here. Maybe there's a retreat or something. Aaaanyway I've been making powerpoints for my lessons which will probably start next week. My schedule exists now but it's in Korean so the head teacher said they'd give it to me once they have "organized" it. I haven't started teaching yet, although I did visit a class today to say hi. My co-teacher told me that the students have been very curious about me and when I asked to observe a class she told me that they were taking a test so there wouldn't be a lot to see. I stopped in before the test, said hi and answered some questions about myself. Every time I gave an answer they all went "OOOOOOOOOO". It was pretty funny. The girls were all sitting on one side and the boys on the other. I think half the time they went oooh the boys were mimicking the girls for a laugh. They keep asking me my height and I'm pretty sure they think I'm short. It's weird though because I am definitely just as tall or taller than most of the men here. After I answered some questions about myself I left them to take their class and headed back to the office. As soon as I had sat down the English teacher who has taken me to lunch at the cafeteria for the past two days arrived and told me it was time to go. I think his name is Mr. Sak but I could be wrong. Lunch was pretty good. It consisted of boneless fried fish, rice, soup, kimchi, and a little noodle salad thing. I feel very weird bout the fact that I'm the only person who doesn't brush their teeth after lunch. It's apparently a common cultural thing here. I'm not sure if I should start doing it or not. It'd be one thing if they did it in the bathroom but its like right in the office so they definitely know I'm not doing it. We'll see what I decide. After lunch my co-teacher finally gave me my new schedule. I will be teaching grades 1 & 3 on even weeks and grades 2 & 3 on odd weeks. Each period is going to be with a different English co-teacher and it looks like I'm going to also be teaching with the head teacher. After school Abbi came over and we walked around my neighborhood looking for a restaurant. I hadn't really looked around the area other than walking to my school and back, but it seemed pretty nice. Lots of small apartment buildings and restaurants. I also noticed a lot of stray cats and kittens walking around, rooting through the garbage. We saw a few BBQ places around, but ended up just walking into a little corner place. The woman obviously didn't speak any English and seemed to understand when I said two. After sitting for a little while, trying to decipher the menu, the woman came over with some jajangmyun. Jajangmyun is a Korean Chinese noodle dish, served with a black bean sauce. We had inadvertently gone for Chinese. I guess that when we walked in and said two whatever the woman said in response was "jajangmyun?" The food was pretty good, although not as filling as we thought it would be. We opted to walk around a bit and look for a convenience store. Luckily it turned out that there was a 7/11 right down the street from my apartment. We grabbed some cookies and ice cream, as well as a bag of shrimp flavored potato sticks. We then headed back to my apartment and ate snacks while trying to figure out how to set up my router. It turns out the instructions were all in Korean, however we managed to figure it out up to a point. I guess I'm going to have to ask the internet guy to come back and help me figure it out.