July Recap

Some stuff I missed…

-School is ridiculous: I teach 8 classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and 4 classes on Tuesday and Thursday. This includes 4 classes of Wake Up! 6B (2 twice a week and 2 thrice a week), 2 classes of Wake Up! 5B (1 twice a week and 1 thrice a week), 1 class of Wake Up! 2A (twice a week), and1 class each of Carnival 5, Odyssey 3B and 4B and CNN (each three times a week), and one class of Vocabulary (twice a week), and one class of art (once a week). Confusing? You have no idea. And this was only before summer camp started (July 23rd, and it’s still going…), which meant another 2 classes (one reading and one writing) every day. That’s 10 classes on M-W-F, which basically means a 12 hour day. But somehow this still equals less classes then I’m supposed to teach, somehow, so I don’t make any overtime pay… I don’t remember this from the contract.

-The kids are ridiculous: They’re… Not that smart. Also, a lot of them think I’m Tom, the teacher who taught them before me, As in they never noticed he left. Keep in mind that I look nothing like Tom. He’s in his later 20s, and he’s British. Many of my classes have 12 kids, when the majority of the other classes have about 6. The only thing I really like about them is sometimes they say stupid things, and I laugh at them. Examples: There’s this poster of farm animals on the wall of one classroom, but instead of chicken it says cock, so there are endless variations: “I eat cock all the time,” “I don’t like the taste of cock” … Luckily I still find this funny. Another day I was teaching action words, jump, talk, etc. We got to CLAP, and I said it and clapped my hands, and asked them to repeat. Asians often have trouble differentiating between L and R sounds (they have the same symbol in Korean), so I got a room full of kids clapping and shouting “CRAP CRAP.” Finally, there’s this one sort of fat kid, and his Koean name is Chun Ki Bum.

-The weather… is ridiculous: It is SO HOT all the time, but the real killer is the humidity. It never goes down. Even when it rains, which is a lot, since summer is monsoon season, it still feels like it’s about 10 000 degrees.

-Movie theatres… Guess what? Ridiculous. We tried to see Lady Chatterley. Lordy, what an ordeal. We didn’t want to try to explain to a person what we wanted, so we attempted to work a machine to get tickets. First we had to figure out which one was Lady Chatterley in Korean letters. Then I couldn’t figure out the time in 24-hour military time. Then we got through that and though we were getting tickets, but it asked us… Something. Still don’t know. So then we got in the line to talk to a person. But it turns out you need to have a number to wait in that line. So we went to the line for the numbers and waited. Got a number. And then waited in the other line. And got our tickets without too much trouble. Except: its reserved seating at theatres in Korea, and the seats we wanted we reserved on the machine, even though we didn’t get tickets. Thankfully the 2.5 hour French drama isn’t that popular.

-Itaewon: not that ridiculous, it’s actually pretty cool. We went to Itaewon for Canada Day, because there’s a Canadian tavern, where we didn’t go, in the end. It’s called “the most exotic place in Seoul,” because it’s… not exotic at all. To us. It’s where a lot of foreign people live, and it’s a pretty cool part of the city. We saw a guy wearing a Canadian flag, and (I assume) nothing else. Good to know he’s here giving Korean people a horrible, horrible impression of Canadians.

-Food: sometimes ridiculous, sometimes pretty good. Other than the obvious (noodles that move) there is some weird food stuff. Pizza, for example, has potato on it, and corn. And it’s served with pickles. And at Pizza School, a regular sized pizza is 5000 won, but at Pizza Hut, a personal pizza is like 23000 won! WTF!! On the good side, though, there’s a really strange abundance of fried chicken. EVERYWHERE sells it. It’s so popular here, yet everyone is so thin. It’s no fair. There are also a lot of restaurants where you grill meat right on your table top, it’s quite delicious. And super cheap. And there’s a really delicious bean paste that is much more delicious than it sounds. And SO much garlic. South Korea is the #1 consumer of garlic in the whole world! Smelly!

-Shopping: yeah… pretty ridiculous. The “department stores” here are, on average, 12 stories tall. Stores like Lotte have a grocery store on one (or more) floors, department stores on several floors, restauramts on some floors, etc. Doota, on the other hand is 12 floors of pretty much all clothes (and one weird dollar store section – 1000won, as the case may be), and its pretty amazing. Then there’s the Technomart. The first few stores is sporting good, clothes, LUSH (!), and some other stuff. Then the next 9 or so are ALL electronics. There’s an entire floor of nothing but cell phones, and it’s huge and amazing and terrifying. There’s a floor of cameras, a floor of vacuums and fans, etc, etc. It’s pretty overwhelming.


Wow… It has been quite a month!