Yobaseo?

It was very exciting for me on Thursday as I received 2 packages from my mom. Woo-hoo! Thanks, Mom! I now have normal bedsheets (very comfortable). My bed looks like a big candy since it's all pastels. The sheets are light blue and my comforter is light pink and light purple. At first I was worried the sheets wouldn't fit because they were for a queen bed. When I first moved in I thought my bed looked huge (my whole life up to this point has involved me sleeping in a twin bed)...and my contract said I'd be provided with a queen sized bed. But I must have slowly gotten used to the size, as now it doesn't seem big to me at all. So I was seriously doubting it being a queen, but the sheets fit fine, so no worries. Although I do think it's a bit smaller than a queen...but maybe it's just that the mattress is a lot less thick. Whatever. I also got some more candy, books, computer games, and magnets to spruce up my place. Nice! She sent it "normal paced" mail, so it took just shy of a month to arrive. But I guess she was told it'd take about 6 weeks, so it was ahead of schedule!

It's really getting cold here. Not Minnesota/Wisconsin cold, but cold. I'd say hovering right around freezing, getting a little below that at night and in the morning. I need to look into buying myself some mittens soon. Anyway, it's friggin' freezing at school. All the doors stay open at the school, so the hallways are pretty much the same temperature as outside. Each room has it's own gas heater. Well, ours wasn't working. Our room was super cold. The kids and us would wear our coats in class. Miss Lee (my co-teacher...who is actually Mrs. Lee since she's married but she's very adament on being called Miss) called to inquire about the heat, and I guess "it wasn't cold enough to turn on the gas." Ok...I guess it has to get to -3 degrees (celsius) for them to turn the heat on. That would be [checking google...I seriously check google 8,000 times a day. There was an article I read today about how many people use the internet for search engine purposes vs other features (like news and email) and the search engine usage is increasing], anyway, where was I? Oh, that would be just under 27 degrees fahrenheit. Wtf? That seems a little crazy to me, but what can I say? It was working today at one point, so we cranked that baby all the way up. It especially sucks because I wear sandals (not jandals...aka flip flops...more like the adidas kind, but much crappier) at school. You know, you have to wear different shoes inside than outside. I find it very annoying. I need to buy shoes for inside that cover my toes.

Anyway, this is why I hate this separate shoes policy: In theory, it makes sense. Don't track your dirty outside shoes all over the inside of a building. Keep it clean. Ok, I get that. But...the inside floor of the building is not cleaner than the ground outside. I might even go out on a limb and say it can be worse. Let me use the bathrooms as an example. The bathrooms at my school are nasty. All the toilets are squatters. I swear there's piss all over the floor. They are cleaned horribly. And they reek. Anyway, you walk in the bathroom once and your shoes no longer have any semblance of cleanliness, thereby making the whole shoe changing thing nothing other than an annoyance and waste of money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, tradition. Well, I can shit in a box and mark it tradition (I've got spare time), but that doesn't make it nice. Sorry about the altered Tommy Boy quote. Ok, sorry for the rant.

On Friday I went to another demo class (observing another English class at a different school). I guess it didn't go so well, but I didn't really notice. Again, taking some pressure off of when I do mine (December 9th). Also, on Thursday the 4th graders at my school had a talent show thing. All the classes have their own...they just do it in their classrooms. It lasted the whole morning. They decorate the classes with balloons and shit. All the moms come the day before to help set it up. The day of a bunch of people come to watch and they have food and the whole shabang. So Miss Lee had me walk around and peek into all the rooms and take pictures with her digital camera (we had to teach 5th graders at this time, but she let me skip out some to watch). But I just felt really bad whenever I'd pop my head in to watch. I'd come in when a kid's in the middle of performing and every single kid in the class will stop watching them and wave and point at me and yell, "Oh! Emily teacher!!! Hi!!!" Totally disrupting the performance. I'd have to keep shushing them and pointing for them to watch the performer. Then all the parents would stare at me to see what all the commotion was about. Kids would get out their cameras and start taking pictures of me. Seriously, this happened in every classroom. I felt really bad. On Friday it was the 5th grader's turn, and they did the same thing when I popped my head in. I have to say as a general observation that Koreans are not very respectful in performance situations like that (as an audience member). Actually, the same can be said for when they're at meetings. I should clarify that they're not respectful from an American's point of view...it must be fine in their culture. People don't listen or even pretend to listen, people talk on cell phones, etc. The first week I was here there were about 200 foreigners all attending this seminar at this resort place. We had to sit and listen to speeches and stuff. I personally thought many people (foreigners in the audience...but not anyone from the UW, of course) were rude, but I later heard that the Koreans there were amazed at the amount of attention everyone was giving the speakers. Huh. To each his own.

So today for whatever reason the teachers got to leave early to do...whatever. Something fun, I guess. So I went with my fellow 5th grade teachers to a movie. First time I went to a movie here! We went to 'The Brother's Grimm' (probably because of me). I didn't really like it. Btw, it's weird because the Korean subtitles are written vertically down the side of the screen. Not sure why, but there you go. And there are assigned seats, but it just confused me. And it wasn't crowded, so we just sat down somewhere. I also went to a bakery the other day and got some really good bread. I've seriously almost eaten an entire loaf in 2 days. Ok, so just over half a loaf, but still. It beats the piece of crap butter flavored bread I was getting earlier.

The other English teachers here are discussing Thanksgiving plans. We all want to get together and bring a food item to celebrate Thanksgiving. Although we're going to celebrate it on Sunday, not Thursday because of the travel involved. But we can't decide where to do it. Most people have tiny apartments that fit like 4 people. People with big apartments generally live way the hell out somewhere that's hard to get to. Plus, we want to go to someone's house who has an oven, but they are also few and far between. Honestly, it's like no one bakes anything here or something. So I don't know what will end up happening with that, but I'm sure I'll post an update after the fact.

Ok then, I think that's all for now. Although I do feel the urge to tell everyone that Encino Man was on today. How funny is that??