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Week 3 (March 13th to March 19th) |
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Sunday March 13th 2005, It looks like we're starting a new tradition: Sunday dinner! In the afternoon, Carey and Sylvia
(they're dating) called to invite me to Carey's place for some homemade burritos. Carey's from California, so he misses Mexican food a lot. Anyway, the five of us had a good meal. Jason offered to make dinner next Sunday. When it's my turn, I'll have to order a pizza
or something! After dinner, we hit a noraebang. A noraebang is a karaoke room. Karaoke here is way more fun than in North America�
it's just you and your friends singing for each other in a small room. There's usually a bunch of microphones, so that lot's of people can sing along. Although I've always kind of turned up my nose at karaoke (I know, I'm a snob), I actually had quite a bit of fun! There were lots of Western songs to choose from, so I had a blast singing along. If you go to a noraebang with a Korean, you WILL be forced to sing. There's no escaping! Anyway, a good relaxing end to a really busy week-- I feel like I've gotten to know my co-workers a little better now.
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Monday March 14th 2005, Finally! Things are starting to settle into routine. My kids know what's going on now; I know
what's going on now; things are good! I am starting to get sick. I could feel it coming this weekend, but I thought I'd be able to fight it
off. So far, it's just my throat. In fact, I think that I might lose my voice if this keeps up. This means no singing for awhile, which sucks. At home, when I was sick, at least I still had my piano or my keyboard, so I could still play. Here I don't have
anything-- Sylvia is going to take me to some pawn shops to see if I can find a keyboard second hand.
There's a piano at the school (I get to teach music on Wednesdays), but I'm not really comfortable enough to practice there yet-- maybe in another week. But . . . my tv is finally working! I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of English programming-- they
just throw some Korean subtitles on it and voila! I've noticed that Koreans like a lot of movies and
music that we consider kind of hokey or cheesy in North America, so I've heard that there will be a lot of bad Westerns and cheesy reality shows (a la Paradise Hotel) on tv. It's a good thing that I don't watch much tv anyway!
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Wednesday March 16th 2005, OK, now I'm really sick. I have some weird throat infection, everything else is fine, but I
can barely talk! It's so hard to get my kids to listen when I can barely get a word out! What I really need is a day of silence, but that's not going to happen anytime soon, so again, I'm just going to suck it up. I'm going to ask Gina or Sylvia to take me to the doctors tomorrow-- apparently the treatment is the same for every problem-- three days of antibiotics! I know it's very common for foreigners to get sick here, but I figured I had another couple of weeks of good health before I went down. Oh well, at
least I'm not sneezing or stuffed up.
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Thursday March 17th 2005, I'm feeling a little better, so I think I'm going to skip the doctor. Today is St. Patrick's Day! Most Koreans don't know what that is, but Jason felt that it was important that we celebrate, so after work, Carey, Sylvia, Jason
and I went to Beer Cabin (The English names of bars and restaurants here can be really funny�Beer Palace, Athlete's Foot, Naughty Kid English Academy, etc. Also, there's always lots of funny spelling errors and grammatical errors in the English translations).
Jason had rented The Passion of the Christ, and I decided to check it out too. Funny . . . it didn't occur to either of us that the whole movie is in Aramaic . . . so instead of getting the English subtitles like we would in Canada, the English subtitles were replaced with Korean subtitles! Fortunately, there isn't much dialogue-- mostly just Jesus getting beat up, so it was pretty easy to figure
out what was going on.
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Friday March 18th 2005, Finally, the weekend! It's almost like being in high school again, looking forward so much to Friday. After work, a bunch of us went to Beer Cabin again-- we were very rowdy! As always, it became a rather random night-- Mike knew of a party in Apsan, a suburb south of Daegu, I think. So we hopped into a cab for twenty minutes and went to a day-after-
St. Patrick' Day party with a bunch of ex-pats�good times!
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Saturday March 19th 2005, This was my first afternoon downtown. Jason took me to the big shopping market. It was very
overwhelming-- tons and tons of people everywhere, lots of street vendors selling really cheap food, tons and tons of clothing, shoes and makeup stores�I can't wait until I get my first pay cheque! Daegu really is shopping heaven, because everything is so
much cheaper here-- no wonder the women are so well-dressed all the time. Jason also took me to the big bookstore and the big music store. Kyobo Books is Korea's answer to Chapters-- there's even a Starbucks inside. That's one thing I've been having trouble
finding-- real coffee! Most people drink instant, or they really water down brewed coffee. I suppose all in all, this is a good thing, since I'm not drinking very much coffee anymore. I didn't know I could function without caffeine . . .
After our shopping day, Sue (our school director) met us to take Jason and I to her son Tommy's cello recital. Parents here just love to go all out for their kids. All of the children had had their hair and makeup professionally done, the boys were all
wearing little tuxes with bowties and tails, and the girls were all wearing long princess dresses�all this for a beginner cello recital! After the recital,Sue took us to TGI Fridays with her family. I still can't believe how much people eat here-- there were
copious amounts of food on our table, and they just kept on asking for more! Even during lunch at school, most of the kids can eat more than I can-- as soon as they finish, one of the teachers will scoop more food
onto their plate. It's amazing that they can consume SO much and still be so tiny. However, Korean food is significantly healthier than American food-- if we ate like this in North America, the entire population would weigh 500 lbs! I feel like I need to practise
eating big meals to keep up . . .
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