ANYWAY!
Last week was our first full week of teaching and it wasn't too brutal. Neither of us are morning people so it's going to take some time to adjust to our new schedule, but it is really nice for us both be home before 5:00 every day. Plus, my students are so damn cute. I've never taught little little kids before but they just want to hold your hand and color and stuff. Check out the kid in the picture above. Even my icy heart thinks he's adorable. His big toothless smile is the perfect compliment to my coffee in the morning.My kids are first-year students, so their English level is pretty low, but they are learning really fast and the stuff they come up with can be pretty funny. We had a birthday party for one of the students on Friday (her mother, father and the maid showed up... these kids are set) and another teacher also named Sean came into the room for a minute. One of my kids, Max, asked him his name and how old he was and after Sean told him, Max said "oh, my Shawn is 28". I'm his Shawn LOL!
Melodie's job is going well too. At first her classrooms were the same third-world style rooms that we used to have at Heng Yee, but she had been promised that a new English classroom would be ready for her soon. Standards were admittedly low but when she walked into her classroom on Monday she was shocked to see a projector, DVD player, computer and a smart board (!) for her to use. There's no giant slide, but it still sounds great.
On Tuesday, our BFF Shanda visited us in Gangnam for supper at a galbi place and fruity sojus and fried chicken at Garten Beer. Garten Beer has these great tables that have refrigerated cup holders that keep your drink nice and icy. We used to go to the one in Suwon all the time and I was happy to see that it's a chain store.
It was a great night until some white bullshit started falling from the sky. This was supposed to be MY YEAR WITHOUT SNOW so screw you, Korea for messing stuff up. Mel was all "just enjoy it, it's probably the only time we'll get to see snow all year" but I was pretty close to throwing a tantrum.
On Friday night after work we went out for galbi with the staff at my school. After the meal we went to a bar across the road where we were joined by a couple of Korean guys that had followed us there from the galbi place. One of the guys (who decided that the best place to find a reputable English tutor for his 6-year old was at a bar) told us that his friend had just gotten a big bonus that day and suddenly two big bottles of Canadian Club and two pitchers of beer arrive at our table. Minutes later I look over and this P.Diddy of Gangnam is hunched over sick with his head in his lap. He remained like that for the rest of the evening, so I don't think he had too much fun that night. Thanks for the drinks, though :POn Saturday around 11am someone rang our doorbell, but since nobody in this country even knows where we live we just ignored it until the third or fourth ring when we went downstairs to check it out. Mel's ARC arrived, only 4 days after she applied for it! Without an ARC you can't set up phone, internet, cable or any services that make life livable, so getting this card was awesome.
We immediately went out in search of cell phones. We thought the best thing to do would be to buy a phone and then choose a calling plan, like you would at home, but when we were quoted nearly 700,000 won ($700/CAN) for 2 phones we went with plan B. A guy at work had given me a map to a used phone place in Itaewon and, man, I am so glad that we went there. The guy who worked at the place was a super nice man who spoke fluent English and let us play with all of his phones before choosing one each. Mel chose a blingy, girly phone and I went with a really thin one I could just throw in my pocket. We're on pay as you go plans and all together the two phones, charger, extra battery and 2 months worth of time were $240. Not too bad. We could have gone with even cheaper phones but we went with the ones we liked. Plus, we got to choose our own phone numbers so we both chose our parents old phone numbers (2623 and 9283) as our new numbers.
After we got our phones we went for Thai food at Thai Garden (it was o-k-a-y, nowhere near as good as the Taiwanese places we'd loved) and then we went to Roofers to see Shanda perform in A Night At Shakespeare. The place was packed, the wine was good, and Shanda was bloody so it was a good night.Also on Saturday, it finally happened: I tried to order something in Chinese. In Korea. I know the languages sound nothing alike, but I spent so long studying Chinese that I keep mixing it up with my Korean. So at Beard Papa I pointed to the cream puff I wanted and said "ee-ga" ("one" in Chinese). Shocked at what I'd just done, my face turned red and I exclaimed "hana!" ("one" in Korean). In perfect, unaccented English the cashier looks at me and asks, "you want one? what kind of filling do you want?"
In related news, we're looking into taking some Korean classes. They can't start soon enough.
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