"NOTHING IMPORTANT SHOULD BE DECIDED AT 12:30 AT NIGHT....WHEN YOU'RE SOBER"

It's been awhile since I've written on here. If anyone cares I'm sorry.

I've had a darn good last couple of weeks. My friend Emily from St. Thomas came to visit on the 13th. We spent that first weekend down south (south of Seoul at least) with Krista. We went to Suwon on that Saturday. Suwon is a city south of Seoul. It has a neat palace, as well as a wall that goes around the older part of the city. It is an UNESCO World Heritage Sight. All the buildings inside the wall are shorter old buildings, then outside the wall are all the high rises. You can walk all along the wall. It pretty cool, and gives you a neat view of the city.

On Sunday we took her into Seoul. We checked out the area called Hongdae. I'd only been there at night so it was neat to see during the day. It's right by a big university, and they just have a bunch of little shops and such. We then went to Myeongdong and walked around there. One of the things that is different about Seoul compared to European cities is that there really isn't a lot to "see". Others may disagree with me, but its not like Rome, or Prague where you have a list of all these things to see. There are a few such things in Seoul, but for the most part "seeing" Seoul mostly involves walking around the different districts that are mostly full of different shops and restaurants. I think Seoul is more about experiencing, rather than seeing. Anyways, located in Myeongdong is the big Catholic Cathedral. As it was Sunday, Emily wanted to go to mass there. As the good Catholic girls Krista and I are we felt enough guilt to oblige our guest, and agreed to attend the Sunday evening mass. It was pretty neat though. I hadn't been to church since I'd gotten here, and its always interesting going to mass in a different country. I can now say I've experienced a French, Polish, and Korean Catholic Mass. One thing that was pretty funny was when they took up the collection. Instead of just passing around a basket through the pews you went up the aisle like communion and put your money in the basket. That way no one could skip out without being noticed. Your made to feel like a real jerk if you don't give money to the church.

Emily then spent the rest of the week with Krista, and joined me in Guri on Thursday night. I made sure her expectations of my place were low, so she wasn't freaked out by what she had to live in for the rest of the weekend. She actually said my place was nicer than she expected. We spent a few lovely nights sleeping together in my slightly larger than twin bed;)(I'm joking if you didn't get that, about lovely nights sleeping together, not about the size of the bed). It was nice for her to be able to see Krista's area and mine. Krista's is a much quieter, family area, while mine is bright and flashy, and there is much more going on. On Saturday we checked out N Seoul Tower. As the name suggests, its a tower on a small mountain in Seoul. You get a pretty good view from the top, and they had some guys performing some martial arts with swords and the like. It was neat to see.

We made sure to show her a typical Korean weekend night, complete with a Noraebang (Korean type karaoke, rent the room with a group, I wrote about in a previous blog), and she was on her way back to the good 'ol USA on Monday, after hopefully an enjoyable 12 days in Korea. It was great to have someone from home here to share my experience with.

I celebrated my three month anniversary last week. And by celebrate I mean, took notice of. It really is hard to believe I've been here three months already. What's even harder to believe is that I just bought peanut butter here for the first time yesterday. I really have no idea why I hadn't bought it till then. I will tell you though, that peanut butter and banana I ate for dinner was the best thing I'd tasted in awhile.

I think that's about all I have for updates.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!!!!!

"ALWAYS WANTED YOU TO BE THE WINNER"

I had to post this because I want to make sure I don't forget it:

Semi: Teacher, you are sky father.

(I knew she was trying to say something about how I am the smartest in the class and Ann is the second smartest)

Me: Sky father?

Henry: God

Semi: Yes teacher, you are God and she is your Jesus.

"YOUR COMMENTS AREN'T LONG ENOUGH. YOU NEED TO TELL THEM THEY ARE GREAT MORE."

Since I've never been good at coming up with titles (I'm almost positive every paper I wrote in college was entitled "The and then whatever the paper was about", i.e., "The Flat Tax", "The Book of Job", "The Electoral College") I've decided my blog titles will now be random quotes.  I may explain the quotes or I may just leave the what, where, when, why, and who up in the air.  You can come up with your own stories surrounding them if you want, or you can just ignore them, either one is fine.

Want to know the top five answers I received when I asked one of my middle school, female students to name some American singers and I would see if I had them on my IPod, and then play them during class?

1. Black Eyed Peas

2. Mariah Carey

3. Justin Timberlake

4. 3OH3

5. India.Arie

Lucky for her I did have 3 out of the 5.  If she had requested someone like Dean Martin, or Johnny Cash, or Sonny and Cher, instead of Mariah Carey and Justin Timberlake, then we would have been in luck.  

Want to know the top three reasons why a couple girls in one of my classes didn't like the book we just finished about a girl named Yoon who moves from Korea to America?

1. Yoon is ugly.

2. Yoon's mother looks like a man.

3. The pictures are bad.

Want to know the top five things I repeat the most I'm pretty sure?

1. Andy don't touch my basket.

2. Andy get off the floor and sit in your chair.  

3. YOUR CHAIR, ANDY!

4. Andy stop punching me.

5. ANDY DON'T TOUCH ME, GET A TISSUE!

In a 40 minute class on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I'm pretty sure I spend half the time yelling at Andy.

Want to know the top five things I've learned while being here?

1. I love Korean food, for the most part, but my bowels, unfortunately, do not.

2. Life would be a whole heck of a lot easier if I knew Korean.  Must try harder.

3. I'm decent at squatting.

4. Bob Seger is amazing, and I love him.

5. You live in a world of opposites when you work with kids.  Some days are awesome.  Some days are horrible.  Some times kids are cute, and sometimes they make you want to rip your hair out.  Some times kids will laugh at your antics, and some times they will just look at you blankly.  Some days you feel like you are really making progress, only to come back a day later and feel like you are trying to hammer a nail into a cement wall.  Some times kids are sweet, and some times they will give you brutal honesty.  The good part is that the positive outweighs the negative.  This job has its moments of total frustration, but every time I walk down the hallway and one of my kids comes running up to me smiling, wanting to tell me about their day and such, it makes it all worth it.  

"TEACHERS, BECAUSE OF FLU WE WILL NOW HAVE HALLOWEEN PARTY IN DECEMBER"

As I was falling asleep last night I was thinking about all these things I wanted to write on my blog.  I have since forgotten I think about all of them.  I think some of them might have been pretty insightful too.  Well maybe I will remember as I'm falling asleep tonight.  But then again I guess that won't help because I will just forget them all again tomorrow.  O'well.  Such is life.

• Our kinde classes were cancelled for the better part of last week because one of the kids got what they are calling the "new flu".  Still haven't quite figured out if this "new flu" is swine flu, or some other strain.  We now have to wear masks while we teach.  Yesturday our cute little supervisor JJ Teacher said, "Teachers, maybe you shouldn't plan Christmas vacation because we might not have it if the government decides to close schools."  Right...we only have two weeks of vacation a year and most of the people have already booked their flights.  I don't know how serious the government is about shutting schools down.  Koreans really freak out about this kind of stuff.  Parents are keeping their kids home.  The attendance in most of my classes is almost cut in half.  It's pretty nice.  Now instead of 8 screaming 9 years olds I only have 4 to deal with.

• One of the kids in my kinde class quit, and no one told me.  I had to find out by piecing together different conversations and making assumptions.  All I know is that it wasn't a bad breakup.  I think the kid just moved or something.  We had a pizza party in our class and then his dad bought pizza's for all the teachers a couple fridays ago so this is why I'm assuming he didn't quit because he didn't like the school so I guess that is good.  But now I only have 2 little kinde nuggets.  I'm going to miss Elvin and his beautiful perm.

• The other day I told one of the kids in a class of mine that I was going to punch him in the face if he didn't shut his mouth.  He deserved it trust me.  This is one of things I love about teaching in Korea.  You can say things like that, and not get fired.  You can give your kids hugs, and not get fired.  You can make a kid hold a chair above his head for ten minutes for misbehaving, and not get fired.  It's awesome.

• Sometimes my bathroom smells like some animal died, and is now decaying in the corner.  I don't know why.  This smell gets emitted from the bathroom area probably a few times a day.  Let me see if I can give you a mental picture of my bathroom...I have lived in some sort of gross places in my life.  Don't worry Mom, I'm not talking about our house.  I thought the place I lived in in Prague was pushing it, then I moved into employee housing for the Steamboat Springs Ski Resort.  I didn't think it would get worse than that.  Then I came here and took a look inside my bathroom.  Don't get me wrong.  I am pretty much perfectly happy in my apartment/room.  I have kind of become immune to living in not so clean of places.  The bathroom doesn't bother me that much...that is until that smell suddenly come creeping out, or I go to someone else's room and see how nice their bathroom is.  The foundation around my toilet is coming off so the toilet wobbles a little.  There are literally chunks of cement breaking off, and then like the remnants of glue and pieces of cement stuck to the floor around the toilet.  Also my knee touches the wall when I sit on the toilet, and I'm not tall by any means.  Just one knee touches though because the wall sorta juts in to go around a pipe or something.  Then when I was cleaning a couple weeks ago the seat part broke.  So now it is imperative to make sure the seat is straight on before you sit down.  There is no adjusting your sitting posture once you sit or else the seat will slide right off.  I tried to explain that to Emily before she used the toilet the other day.  Either she didn't understand, or she didn't pay attention.  She fell in.

• Celebrated Halloween on Saturday.  I went as grapes, so I pinned a bunch of purple balloons on myself.  We took the bus, and then subway into Seoul.  The Koreans got a pretty good kick out of us.  I think they knew what Halloween was, but they don't really celebrate it.  Some lady with no teeth started talking to Emily and I while we were on the subway.  I have no idea what she was saying.  I think she was probably making fun of us.

• Going hiking again this weekend!  I'm very excited.  Going to Seoraksan National Park.  It is supposed to be a pretty cool place.  We are going with a group called Adventure Korea.  They organize trips for foreigners.  I had to wire money from my bank account to theirs in order to pay for the trip.   You can just do this at ATM's.  So I thought I could maybe figure out how to do it myself.  Mind you it was all in Korean.  I thought I did pretty good until I got my receipt and realized I had transfered 990,000 won, roughly equal to $990, instead of 99,000 won.   It's ok though.  Crisis averted.  They are in the process of wiring the money back.

That's about all I have for now folks.  I hope you all are doing well.  Talk to ya later...

P.S. GO HAWKS!!!!!!!!!!!!