These are pictures of my excursion into Seoul on Easter to buy some things. Mother wanted me to take a picture of the subway as she's never seen one. You should've seen the looks I got..."stupid foreigner." Oh well. Oh, and she also wanted a picture of me carrying all the stuff home. The best I could do was a picture of my reflection as the subway was passing. The fourth picture is something one of my phonics students drew. Apparently, my torso is 5cm and my legs are 100cm (2 inches and 4-5 feet, respectively)



















Sorry I haven't updated my blog in a while. I was busy and then I just got into the habit of not updating. Midterms were this past week so I had a lot of grading to do, and I had to do student comments. Basically, we have to write 4-6 sentences on each new student, each student who had been held back, and each student who had skipped a level. This is only our campus' second semester in existence so most of our students are new, which means I had over 70 comments to make. After I typed it all up it was just shy of being 10 pages long.

My Easter was nothing special, unfortunately, just went to church and then made a trip into Seoul to buy a few things from someone who's leaving the country soon. I got paid finally! Out payday is the 10th of every month. I had been living on about $450 since I moved here February 20th, and it was nice to not have to worry so much about money. My check was a little shorter than it'll usually be b/c they have to take out $400 over two months for a housing deposit.

I finally got homesick. About a week-and-a-half ago I was getting kinda depressed, and then I watched Benjamin Button, which is a sad movie and got me worse. I had a day or two of just feeling awful, missing everyone so much and wondering why I had left such great friends and family to teach little kids who can't even understand me. I don't remember exactly how I got out of that funk, but it only lasted a couple days and I love my job again, and my kids do understand me.

I've no segue for this story, so here it goes. Students in Korea respond to negative questions in the affirmative, which is very confusing. A negative question, in American English, is a question that assumes a negative answer. For example, I know the student doesn't have their book; I ask, "You don't have your book?" The assumed, known answer is that they don't have their book, and in America we would respond, "No, I don't." In Korea, they respond, "Yes," agreeing with the fact that they don't have their book. That little oddity has killed about 5 minutes of time in various classes of mine, and probably 5-10 brain cells of mine.

I was approached a few weeks ago by someone at church about teaching their youngest daughter private lessons in English. Doing so would be illegal because the government wouldn't get any taxes from it, and because Topia has an exclusivity clause in my contract stating that I am not allowed to receive monetary compensation from anyone for anything, other than Topia. I could get fired and deported for it. The thing is, most foreigners do it because it pays really well, and no one actually cares, not even your school. They just don't want it enterfering with the work you do for them. People may pay W50,000 ($40) an hour just to tutor a child, and usually "tutor" entails hanging out with the family and just speaking English. And, they usually want you for more than one hour at a time, making it very worth your time. However, it is illegal and I would have to hide it from everyone at work, so I declined. Instead, I suggested doing a language exchange, where they help me with Korean and I help them with English.

Yesterday, Saturday, was the first time we met. Peter, the father, picked me up from my apartment at 3.30 and drove me to his house, about 15 minutes away. We just hung out in his house with his youngest daughter until his wife got home and started cooking supper (that's right, I got Korean lessons and food, much better than $$). When she got everything cooking on the stove, we all went for a walk along the river, Peter, his wife and two daughters (8 and 11), and myself. His daughters were rollerblading and he brought an S-board <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEJJBYcTfLU>. It was his daughters and he had never tried it, but he actually did as well or better than I did, and I surf. After 30 minutes or so we made our way back to his house and ate supper of boolgogi, kimchi, barley rice, noodles, a traditional Korean Thanksgiving dessert which is basically sesame seeds and sugar inside balls made from powdered rice (much tastier than it sounds), fruit, yogurt, etc etc.

After supper Peter's daughters wanted to show me around their rooms and stuff. The older one plays piano and the younger plays violin, and they both played a little bit for me. They brought out two versions of the same children's book, one in English and one in Korean. They read the English one to me and I read the Korean one to them, though I didn't understand what I was reading. After that, Peter took me back to my apartment; it was about 8.30. That was it, that was the "lesson." Basically, just my presence forces them to speak English and that's what they want. And to think, they offered to pay me! Craziness.

Side note, up until we went on the walk Peter's oldest daughter, Diane, had been in her room studying. I figured she was being studious, but Peter told me today at church that he was really suprised to see her warm up to me because she has a disease. I felt really bad like maybe she had cancer or something and was going to die soon, though she looked healthy to me. He described her disease as thus: she complains about everything and is disrespectful. It suddently dawned on me that her "disease" was being a teenager, hahahaha! I told him in America we just call it "being a teenager," and apparently he thought that was funny b/c he told his wife and a couple of his friends.

Hopefully I'll get back in the habit of updating this thing, and call some of you guys. I haven't called anyone in over a week, sorry :(