Kimchi and Hite

FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL! FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!!!!!!

Now that the excitement is gone, I can commence the raconteuring.

So today was my first day of teaching and oh boy it was strange. My biggest class has 7 kids in it, and almost all the kids speak great(ish) english! My only concern is making class last as long as it can. I didn't really get any class training because we only have an hour prep-time, so Kim spent the entire time helping me just to find all the right books and materials. I pretty much taught 6 classes blind on my first day. The first 2 were pretty bad, but by my third class (social studies! we learned about thanksgiving and Marting Luther King, Jr. Oh, and I had to explain racism to the class who had never even heard about this idea... oh you innocent koreans...) I was on a roll with a smooth system going and kids that were interested in my subjects!!! YAY!!! I did have one strange class that I'm gonna have to work hard on. This class only has one girl in it named Minji, she's incredibly quick to learn and I'm teaching her phonics. The problem is that she's so damn quick to learn that we BLASTED through about 2 hours worth of teaching material in 30 minutes... Luckily I had an ace up my sleeve and played a phonics board game with her on the board that she liked, but it'll be hard to make more games up since she barely speaks english. Eh, I'll work on more material and see if I can't get Sue to help me get a korean direction sheet made up for some games...

I also guess this would be a good time to talk about who I live with here. So across the hall from me, being one of my tour guides, is Chris. He works at a different location in a different city. Next door to me is Kim, my other tour guide, she teaches math(?) at Kim's academy with me, but right now she's trying to leave Korea to get back home and take care of some things. She wants to leave by next week, but it's cool to have met her as she's pretty knowledgeable about the area. Down the hall is a Korean dude who's name I can't spell who drives the buses for our school. I haven't met him yet, but Chris says he's pretty chill. So next up is Sue, our Korean teacher. She doesn't live here with us because (duh) she's Korean and lives in her own apartment. She has an incredible obsession with food and knows pretty much every restaurant around town it seems like. She's also incredibly nice and everyone has told me to go to her if I have a problem or need something translated. Also not living with us is a married couple Jenna and Superman (dude looks EXACTLY like Clark Kent, I'm not joking, so everyone calls him this). They're a very interesting couple, Jenna being a seminary student and Superman being a (from what I'm told) pretty amazing musician. They've lived all over from what it sounds like, most recently being New Zealand and Kansas.

So after work I went out and had my first real Korean meal. Unfortunately I can't read Korean yet so I can't actually tell you the name of it. But it was a cook-your-own meat dish (Sue did all the cooking like a crazy BBQ master) that you wrapped up in a lettuce leaf with roasted garlic, red bean paste, kimchi, peppers, and rice. OH MY GOD it was amazing. It was such a quick meal that it almost felt like a feeding frenzy with everyone eating as fast as Sue could cook it on the tiny 6" grill that we had.

After dinner we split up with Jenna, Superman, and Sue and walked a few blocks down to Emart. This is like the Korean version of Target, only its more bad-ass-er. It had pretty much everything you could need. I got me some frosted flakes, milk (no idea what the milk fat is, but I'm guessing less than 2%) and some instant coffee. Oh, yeah, that reminds me, Koreans don't really use drip coffee at all apparently. It's almost all instant and its almost all WAY too sugary from what I'm told. Knowing this I got some caramel macchiato instant coffee to try and hide the sugary taste and it actually turned out not too bad.

On the way home we tried one more time to win this damn RC car from a vending machine game and Chris just BARELY missed the damn thing by less than half a centimeter... But we got some snacks from the corner store (Fanta apple fizzy smoothies are the shiznit, yo!) and went back upstairs to crash. Plans for tomorrow? Go check out a bike store with Chris, a supermarket/hardware store with Kim, and then wander around in the evening as I'll be on my own!