Recap

Heres a quick little recap of what my life has been like for the past 2 months.....I can't beleive it's only been two months....sigh

Our apartment is ok. We have two bedrooms, one of which we have turned into a living room (by "we", I really mean Al), a kitchen and bathroom. Fairly simple but much bigger than the single room apartments that the other teachers at our school, are renting. We found out on our first day here that we live in the ghetto. Our neighbourhood is pretty much filled with hardware stores and convenience stores and the odd junkyard now and again. There are more people sitting outside doing nothing than I have ever seen in my life, and I usually have to walk over 7 piles of puke on the major street outside our house to get to school. There are no other foreigners in our neighbourhood, so sometimes young kids point at us and grab their parents as we walk by. Luckily there are 3 other teachers living in the same complex as us, which makes the whole situation a little more bareable. Unluckily our bosses are also.... our landlords....and they live upstairs. Can make for some fairly awkward situations.

But we do have two new additions to our house, fish! I was talking with some of my students one day about pets and one girl said she had 15 fish. I later said I would like to get fish for my house. At the end of class, she taps me and says "teacher, I would like to give you my fish. I will ask my parents if i can give you two". Sure enough, the next class she shows up with 2 fish in a little jar. These are no cute goldfish or tropical fish, Im pretty sure she caught these in a river and they are meant to be eaten. But we have given them a good home so far, hopefully we dont kill them. Looking for names if anyone has any suggestions- their temporary names are "fillet-o" and "n'chips"....

-pic is of the outside of our apartment- a pretty dark and dingy alleyway. Al had a bad experience with the window across from us and a large half naked korean woman bending over.

School is alright. Im teaching kindergarden all morning. My classes consists of ten 3 -6 year olds. The way they count age here is very strange. When you are born you are automatically 1 yr old. And at New Years everyone becomes the next age. So if there was a baby born Dec. 31st, they would turn 1 at birth, and then 2 the next day, even though they were only 1 day old...?!?! Strange. In the afternoon I have older kids, for the most part (up to 12). This is apparently the age when they learn to be smart asses. I have one kid that answers "baby story" to ANY question I ask him...... Let me tell you, teachers appreciate the weekends MUCH more than students do. Kids are exhausting...

The food here is amazing for the most part- once you convey the fact that you dont want things so spicy as to lose all of your tastebuds ("little spice, little spice"). It is probably my favourite thing about Korea so far. You order meals for a group instead of each person getting their own thing, and then everyone just digs in. Also, most meals come with 4 or 5 side dishes of different things, an unbeleivable amount of food when you get a few meals to split. My absolute favourite Korean food is the BBQ. Each table in the restaurant has a grill in the middle of it. You cook your own meat and then wrap it in lettuce and add sauces, vegetables and rice to make a neat little taco. Although, the Koreans usually dont trust foreigners to cook their own food, so they come and do it for us. This has, more than once, resulted in me being hand fed by a korean woman- with no glove, and food litterally being shoved into my mouth....

-pic of korean BBQ

Western food is hard to find though, and grocery shopping is difficult since you cant read any labels. As far as the staple foods go- I have found milk that is an alright substitute for home but no cheese or bread. Bread is as white as it could be, no whole wheat, grain or anything. But there are a lot of bakeries (on almost every street corner), so good fresh bread is not hard to find. Cheese though is a different story. I have yet to find anything other than processed cheese and it costs about 4$ for 15 slices. Horrible. If anyone can find a way to send me some good cheese I will be eternally greatful.

Does this mascot look familiar to anyone?