What Have I Done

Hey folks,
I'm still in my place and haven't been kicked out yet. I'm writing from school and this is my first real week of education. Last week I just had to introduce myself 17 times so this is when I learn how to teach. It's going to be a long period of trial and error, probably for the next month, as I figure out what works and what doesn't. 7th grade gets to learn about vacations, 8th learns about women in sports, and 9th learns the joys of saving energy. I'll start class by going over a few concepts with them, asking them questions about the unit and then we'll read a dialogue together. We'll alternate sentences because I think it'll help their reading/listening and reading/speaking. Maybe I'll change it, who knows. I figure that'll take around 20 minutes. That means I have another 25 minutes to kill.

I've got four back up games for that. One is called World Cup game, I write a short phrase on the board, then ask them to get into pairs and find words in the phrase, so "world cup game has": worm, lace, rue, etc. After a few minutes, I write another phrase on the board. Next, basically a spelling bee, boys against girls, two people come up to the board and I give them a word and whoever spells it fastest, that team gets a point. Then if I had a ball or a wadded up piece of paper, it's the catch and answer game, you ask a question, toss the wad and whoever catches it has to answer the question, then they ask a question and that person answers. Finally: phrase hangman, just hangman with a phrase. It'll get them to think about grammatically correct phrases and word order when they try and guess what it is. These are placeholders for when I actually figure out how to teach. It's not busy work, but it's not really a lesson. I need to figure that out yet.

Had a good weekend. I met Danny and Tane at nine at a Starbucks in Nampo-dong. Let's see, what did we do? We went drinking, but the specifics are lost to me at this point. I'm really tired this morning and haven't been sleeping well. I got maybe 5 hours last night and I have a bad habit of waking up at 4:00 am thinking, "Shit! I'm late for school." Only to realize that I'm really tired and have to go back to bed. So, I need to build a circadian rhythm. Time zone changes are a bitch. One body of research I've seen says that you can never truly adjust to a change. That your body becomes hard wired to an area and you're stuck with it. I hope not for my sake.

Bit of a tangent there, so Saturday I had to come in for a short class. I got here at 10:30 and taught until 12:10. I just had the kids write down their schedule and then read it. I don't think they liked it one bit. Then I met danny for lunch as he lives like 3 blocks away from my school. We wandered a bit, craved some pizza but didn't want to pay $20-30 for one, so we settled on a nice Korean place. We put our shoes in cubby hole and went and sat down on the floor. I made a crib sheet for different foods so that I might have some sense of what I'm eating but it's so difficult. Looking at the English translation/ingredients and then trying to read the Hanguel alphabet for an exact match is so time consuming that we rely solely on pictures and point to sustain ourselves.

Oh, I just recalled what we did Friday. We went to a "Beer Mart" called the Cool club. No bozos allowed. Walked up to the second floor and it was a hip little establishment that was sort of like a grocery store. You'd walk over to the cooler or rack of snacks, pay and then go sit at a table. It had a good atmosphere and great beer selection. I had some Duvel, Danny a pale ale (which he hated), and Tane had some Warsteiner. We chilled here and then left to an Incan bar. By that, I mean the motif was 1400 Peru. Stone carvings, spears, foliage, except filled with Koreans. We got two bottles of Soju and 1700 cc's of Hite (piss water). We talked a lot about Palin but I'm not going to do that at the moment because that'll take to long.

Anyway, back to Saturday. Still with me? Good. After I finished lunch with danny it started to rain. Our mission was to find some cheap imported booze. Target numero uno was the Duty Free shop at the Busan Ferry Terminal. We walked, took a bus, and after more walking found it. Turns out you have to have a ferry ticket to buy non-taxed goods. Blast. So we asked information for the Lotte department store. Think a mall, but instead of different shops, the areas are separated into brands. We took the subway there and walked to the underground entrance. The area was set up like a Renaissance fountain. Cherubs spitting water, the ceiling painted as the sky, and a bunch of Greek gods presiding over a pool. Redic. After walking through the 11 floors, we found no booze. I bought some lime juice, hot sauce, and a iced latte. Danny got some peanut butter, whole grain pasta, and a coffee. We then knew of one more place. We'd heard whispers of a back alley booze store located near the Jagalchi market. We knew that area and went in search. We wandered around for a long time and were running down the clock. We were to meet Tane at 6:00 at Hadan, near his house. It was now 5:40. After backtracking several times and moving in circles we finally found the booze stand. Hundreds of bottles of cognac, whiskey, brandy, and vodka were put on display. Everything was expensive. I grabbed an $18 bottle gin, danny agonized over $30-40 bottles of whiskey and left empty handed which he would regret later that evening. His goal is amass a collection, sort of like Pokemon. He'll catch these brutes, and then line them up in his home to fight boredom and holidays when they rear their ugly heads. I joked that his goal was to just sit in an easy chair on Sundays, pour himself a "neat" glass of scotch and just lay around with his shirt off and trousers unbuttoned.

We met Tane and wandered around in his wasteland for a long time. We couldn't find any restaurants that had pictures or English, so we went back to Nampo-dong. We had a big plate of seafood rice and squid pancakes. Then we went to a high class bar and had shitty cocktails. I was fiending for a G&T, but instead got the stumbly-wumbly version of diet sprite, maybe gin, and a lemon. Sad. Then went to Noreabang (kareoke) and sang our hearts out. We took some pulls of gin and and drank 3 more bottles of Soju. After singing all the Radiohead songs we knew, I was ready to go home. It was around 12:00, but they wanted to go to Haendae beach, the youth paradise. The place was 40 minutes away by subway. So at 2am, when it was time to turn in I would have an hour commute of multiple transfers on subway lines, a bus, and walking. I laughed at them and went home. Talking to them the next day, they said it was not worth it. There was a bazillion kids there and they saw a bunch of westerners, but that was all.

Yesterday I watched The Fog of War, ate Ramen, and played Knights of the Old Republic II. It was a good day. Now I need to go to class soon. Wish me luck.