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Week 2 (March 6th to March 12th) |
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Monday March 7th 2005, Another crazy day! My kids are off the wall! They're just so unbelievably young, I'm not sure how to get them to learn anything at all. Also, nobody knows what's going on around here, so I'm just as much in the dark as the kids are most of the time. It's frustrating, because I feel like I don't have the right tools to teach them properly right now, when books that
they're supposed to use are arriving five minutes before class, and I'm being told how to teach my kids five minutes after class, and so on. I don't think I've ever been so tired in my life� these kids are just wearing me down. So tonight I just crashed--I went straight home and read a little and went to bed at 10 pm (extremely early for me-- I've noticed since I got here, I've been
getting up really early and going to bed really early-- maybe jet lag is good for me!).
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Tuesday and Wednesday (March 8th & 9th), brought more of the same-- really long stressful days that never seem to end. My Teddy Bear class is getting better, but my Panda class is still all over the place. Getting them to all sit down at the same time is a major,
major feat! Carey, Evan and Jason (my English co-teachers) say that this is the worst it's been, and that it will get so much easier,
but I'm not sure-- from where I stand, it doesn't look like there's much hope for the Panda class! Again, I've been totally exhausted
when I come home. My cable hasn't been hooked up yet, so when I go home, I read and listen to my discman. Usually, all us foreign
teachers get together on Wednesday and go tothe bar (in order to beat the mid-week hump!). But this week, we were all
too tired to even think about going out! I'm starting to get a little homesick, but not really in the way I expected.
Mostly I feel isolated�there aren't that many foreigners living in my suburb, andmost people don't speak very good English here, so
things that are normally very simple, like grocery shopping, or ordering fast food become incredibly complicated. Also, everyone is so busy right now that it's hard to get know anyone well-- we're all working so hard!
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Friday March 10th 2005, Finally my kids are settling down a little bit. Now I can get them to stay in the room at least, although there's a few that still don't understand the concept of sitting down. At least I'm down to a few choice troublemakers! After work today,
I went downtown to have dinner with Sylvia, Audrey (she's our secretary), Jason and Carey. We ate at this place called Minto-- it was very strange. It said that it had fusion food, so it was mostly Western style food. It was a really nice place, very well decorated,
yet they served drinks in paper cups-- very odd! The best part was, halfway through our meal, this dude dressed in a big Pinocchio
costume starts going around and greeting all of the diners! So surreal! We're in this nice restaurantthat employs Pinocchios to greet the guests! So of course we had to have our picture taken with Pinocchio on Audrey's camera phone. Korea is definitly a country
of contradictions-- on the one hand, Korea is incredibly advanced technologically, but then on the other hand, most bathrooms don't have shower stalls! (Koreans don't have bathtubs-- there's just a shower head and a drain in the middle of the bathroom floor,
so everything in the bathroom gets wet. They have these little plastic bathroom shoes to wear while the bathroom floor dries).
After dinner, we went to a movie. Fortunately for us Westerners, most Korean movie theatres show a lot ofWestern movies with Korean
subtititles-- this is great for us, because we still get to see the movie, and it's much cheaper to go to the movies here! Also, the
theatres are significantly cleaner! As a sidenote: I think I had a minor allergic reaction to something I ate today.
I'm not sure what, because I was careful and I asked about peanuts at dinner, but maybe there was too much soy in something
I ate. Anyway, it made me feel really sick, but I didn't want to break up the party, so I decided to just suck it up.
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