Today Today Today

A couple of the kids in my second class on Tuesday decided to buy the rest of the class dukkbogi on a stick. Duk is a substance made from rice, I think, it comes in lots of different forms. On a stick it is just covered in a red sauce and you eat it kind of like a popsicle or a corn dog, I guess. As much as I love dukkbogi, eating it from a stick (never mind that it was delivered in a plastic bag) does not look very appetizing. The duk is very chewy substance, a chewy pasty log-like substance. All was quiet in class, for a moment, quiet except for the sound of the chewing, kids chewing a chewy food. Kids with colds because it is winter and they don’t wash their hands very often. Kids with colds and stuffed noses. Kids with plugged noses chewing chewy foods. I was setting up a game for them to play. I was writing out random words on the board: eating, food, loud, chewing, gross, noise. I don’t think any of the kids caught on to my subtle hints about how totally and completely disgusted I was with the sounds they were making.

Normally, I don’t let the kids eat in class. I tell them to put their food away, but I couldn’t really have them put this one away. It’s a street food. It is covered in sauce. So I let them eat. They ate pretty quickly, which is good, because I soon would have gone crazy with the eating noises they were making. This kind of chaos and anarchy ruled my day on Tuesday.

I met my folks, along with Jamie and Toban at 9:00 AM at their hotel. Usually, I have met them at 9:30 and apparently, this half hour makes all the difference. The subways were packed. It was stupid. I have recently become a subway reader and today, I had almost no room to hold my book and I was literally back-to-back with a man in a business suit. We had to kind of lean against each other stay balanced for most of the trip. At Ssangmun, my subway stop, I had to let the first train go by because the first train was too full, there was actually no more room, none. People were squished against a window. This train was closely followed by another that was considerably less full, but as the trip progressed down the line towards the centre of the city it just got more and more full. Then I had to transfer on to the orange line, along with a million other people. At first I was worried that I would have trouble wading through to the crowd to get off the train, but it seems that everybody else was also transferring at the orange line. We streamed out of the train and down the stairs. I guess that everybody takes the orange line in the other direction because I got a seat on the next train; I almost never get to sit.

Instead of the usual Starbucks morning, Dad decided to take us for a “real” breakfast. He had the brunch at Crown Hotel. It sounds fancy, but it’s not really. The breakfast wasn’t bad at all and there was rice and kimchi along with cereal, eggs, Korean pancakes, some dried fish, French fries, and something that was supposed to be coffee. After breakfast we headed towards Starbucks for some real coffee, but on the way I realized I had to get back to Ssangmun. There was supposed to be a teachers meeting and lunch at one of the other Kang Tae Woo branches. I was supposed to meet Sally at 11:30, so we could get to the lunch for sure by 12:00 and then there would be a foreign teachers meeting at 1:00.

I finished No Country for Old Men on the subway and listened to my iPod for the rest of the trip and subsequently have had Mates of State songs running through my head for the rest of day.

I got home and got as pretty as possible, knowing that I would hanging out with Mr. Kang Tae Woo himself and seeing all the Kang Tae Woo foreign teachers. When I got to Sally’s place, 11:30 on the dot (look at me, Punctual Patty for once) I got a text from Julia saying the meeting was cancelled and that we shouldn’t come. So, we decided to go for a walk to the Hollys coffee in Nowan. After we changed out of our pretty clothes and into more appropriate walking attire and headed out towards Nowan. It was a good we picked Nowan, because at about 12:30, I got a call from Sunny saying that we needed to get to the restaurant right now. The meeting was not cancelled and we need to come now! Good grief. Could we tried to be organized for once? So, after some discussion and a moment of panic, Sally called Justin, the dude who is in charge of the foreign teachers and said we didn’t have to come if w didn’t want to. However, neither of us really wanted to pass up a free lunch. So, Sally hailed a cab, while I called Sunny back. When we got in the cab, I shoved my cell phone into the taxi driver’s hand and Sunny explained where to go. The restaurant was in Nowan so we weren’t far away. However, all the teachers were dressed to the nines and I looked like a total slob, not to mention that I haven’t showered in a couple of days (Saturday night) and Mr. Kang Tae Woo was the first person which whom I accidentally made I contact.

Sally and I still though we had the teachers meeting at 1:00, so we shoveled delicious sushi from a fantastic buffet into our mouths. Just as we stood up to go, definitely already late, in walk Justin and all the foreign teachers. Apparently, things got mixed up for everybody. So we ate some more, enjoying the rest of the delights this lunch buffet had to offer. It was really very delicious. Full of Korean, Japanese, and Chinese food. There were also ice cream, fruit, cereal, salad, and many other fantastic things. I didn’t even nearly sample everything. There was way too much, way too much deliciousness. When we were almost done eating Mr. Park showed up, I guess he had to come late, he works too hard. So Sally and I got to hang out with Park a little bit. He always seems so lonely and sad when we see him. We decided that we need to take him out next week sometime.

After we had all filled our faces, the foreign teachers walked to the elementary school to have our meeting. The meeting wasn’t super useful, but it was good to see all the foreign teachers at once. I guess most of them did show up to the party the other night, which I will discuss in a later blog. It was good to seem them again, most of them anyway. There are a few that I would be ok with never seeing again. Kidding...kind of...not really.

After the meeting, Sally and I quickly went to Carolyn and Ryan’s apartment with Carolyn to get my Secret Santa gift. My gift was from a girl named Lisa whom I have never met. Strange. She gave me chocolate (expensive chocolate) and some illegal DVDs. The copyright laws are either pretty lax or non-existent because you can buy pirated DVDs all over the place. None were movies that I would choose for myself, but I will probably end of up watching them at some point. I think the cold winter evenings well be better spent inside.

We left Carolyn’s apartment and had to jump into a cab to get back to school for my four o’clock class, for which I was almost late. We just played two games that seem to be fun for the kids. My first class on Tuesday’s is s for fun speaking class. We just play games that involve English. There is one that play were I give them two cards, one emotion and one action, like sad and swimming. They have to act out both things and the rest of the class guesses what is on the cards. Sometimes they don’t want to act and just say the words in Korean. Little bastards.

After this class, I ran home and changed my clothes a bit, my jeans and my sweater were dirty. I also took the opportunity to check out a YouTube link that Sarah Kim sent me about the feud between Rain and Stephen Colbert. I was only vaguely aware of this, I think I have heard people talking about it before. I have never seen anything about it. I spent the rest of my break, watching videos of Colbert and some fan videos of Rain. I love fan videos. I wonder about the people who take the time to assemble all the pictures and then put them to music and then post it on YouTube. It is so strange to me. But I watch them so I guess that’s why they do it.

I ran back to school, in better clothes and thinking of Rain. Then I had the class that ate the dukkbogi. After them I had the middle class that refuses to speak to me. Today on the of boys told he didn’t have a pencil and was shocked that he could actually speak. I have never heard a single word come from his mouth, not even a Korean word. He has a very nice voice. He kind of looks like a younger version of Rain. I should tell him that. He would be so embarrassed. I should do it when there are lots of people around, normally there are only four kids in that class. Then I had a break, nothing exciting there, except that one of the mothers of a bad student brought a box of oranges or the staff to share. A really big box of oranges. I brought one for each of the students in my next class. We talked about oranges for awhile and how in Canada we call those kinds Christmas oranges because they popular around Christmas, when they are in season and cheap. Then we sat and played this “game” where I started with one word (orange) and the next person had to say a word that started with the last letter of my word and so on. It was their idea and we played for the rest of class, like forty minuets. It didn’t even get boring. On my last turn, the letter I had to use was “T”. I said The End! More then once, the kids had to tell me with what letter the word ended. I’m a bad speller, most of my students know that by now. They help me out when they can. Also, they all have better penmanship (Do people still use that word?) than I do. Even some of the youngest kids can write better than I can.

I had previously been told that New Year’s Eve would be a lax day with no classes and we would just have come in for a little bit. There are still no classes, but by a little bit apparently they meant six hours. I have to be at the school from one to seven on Wednesday, we don’t have six hours worth of work to do, that’s for sure. Anyway, I hope there are is food or something. It’s Sunny’s birthday and New Year’s Eve, there better be something that makes it worth it to be there for so long. I’ll bring my computer and my book. I hope the cute markers are there. Perhaps I'll actually talk to one of them.

Dee

December 30, 2008