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Week 4 - Y2 (Mar 26th to April 1st) |
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Sunday March 26th,Today I brought the rest of my stuff back to Seoul
with me-- thank god that's the last time for a long
time I'll be lugging a ridiculously heavy suitcase all
over Korea! (And thank god for the notion that Korean
men have that all girls are weak and incapable of
lifting anything that could be a little heavy . . .
this time they were right! I couldn't lift the damn
suitcase if I tried!) The only thing left in Daegu
now is my keyboard, which ironically is the only thing
I really wanted anyway . . . I'll have to wait another
two weeks, I suppose.
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Monday March 27th, This morning Kwon Hyun took me to get a new cell
phone. This turned out to be an infinitely
frustrating experience. First off, apparently nobody
makes just normal phones anymore-- they all have
cameras, and internet, and MP3 players, and all kinds
of crap that I didn't need or want. I ended up with a
camera phone anyway, cause they didn't have any plain
phones. Then, of course, we discovered that
foreigners cannot have phones in their own names.
(They realized this after they made fill out all the
paperwork). So Kwon Hyun, very generously put the
phone in his name for me. It's amazing how people
just totally go out on a limb for you here, all the
time. I will have to buy Kwon Hyun some kind of
thank-you gift.
Today at school, I saw the students who hadn't shown
up for their improv tests for private lessons. They
were suitably contrite, and understand that they
received 0, but there was one surprise for me: one of
my students (who is actually not a very good singer at
all, but she tries really hard, and obviously
practises everything I ask her to) had to have someone
come in to our lesson to translate for her--
apparently she was really worried about missing my
class, but she's already quite well known in the
entertainment business in Korea, and had to miss my
class because she had some broadcasting commitment! I
was kind of surprised by that, but moreover, she was
so worried about missing the test that she had tried
to call me the day before, but I had missed the call
and didn't have time to call her back. I guess her
career is kind of supposed to be a secret though; she
doesn't want other students to treat her differently.
I was blown away by this news!
In the evening, I went to see Kenji and Chang Hyun
(the bass professor) play a gig at All That Jazz.
They were nice enough to invite me to sit in, so I
sang with them for a set, which was kind of nice. I
realized later that that was the first time I had
played jazz with anyone else in more than a year!
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Wednesday March 28th, Most schools in Korea have something called an "MT
trip" at the beginning of the school year. This is
just kind of a retreat for all the students and
teachers. Usually they go to stay at a resort, and
I'm sure that there are activities planned for the
students. From Wednesday to Friday, we had ours!
Kenji, Chang Hyun and I met Jae at the school around
5pm to drive 4 and a half hours to the southwest coast
for the MT trip. It was nice-- the resort was
gorgeous, and being the only female professor, I had a
nice big room to myself. Then all the teachers met up
in one room, and ate a lot, and drank a lot. We
actually were pretty removed from the students, but a
few times, Kenji and I left the teachers to go check
out the student rooms. Of course, they're pretty
skilled drinkers too (we are in Korea after all), and
it was kind of fun having them cater to us, and clap
for us to sit down in their room. Korean students are
kind of weird: they have bizarre drinking games, and
in one room, they were trying to convince me to scat
(keep in mind that ALL of the students know who I am.
Being the only white girl around, plus teaching 150 of
them in my improv classes has made me a pretty
"popular" teacher. But what was nice about the trip
was that I got to know some of the other teachers a
little better.
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Saturday April 1st,
Today Jason came to visit from Pohang! He got in
around 2pm or so, so first off we headed to Itaewon to
find something to eat that he wouldn't be able to find
in Pohang. We ended up at a (very overpriced) Greek
restaurant, but since it was the first time I've had
Greek food in over a year, I certainly wasn't
complaining! We had kind of planned on doing some
touring, but it was pouring rain and miserable, so we
ended up going back to my apartment to chill out for a
little, before meeting up with my friend Caroline in
the evening. Caroline took us to this really great
bar in Hongdae-- it was very ambient, played good
music, had comfy low seats and lots of candles-- kind
of like somewhere I would have hung out in Toronto.
We also ended up meeting some more of Caroline's
friends there, which I was grateful for, because
hopefully all these meeting friends of friends will
introduce me to lots of people in Seoul!
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