Wednesdays

Everyone always complains about "Mondays". "Monday this, Monday that", personally I love Monadays because it means I get to see my three favorite classes at my main school. Wednesdays are the day of horrors for me not because of something anyones done or the way kids act, I have one class on Wednesday, and it's at 9am. I sit around in the office from 9:40 until 5pm in a mind-numbing state of boreodm and all I can do is look at my computer screen and do nothing. This stinks.

The Bet

So here I am sitting in South Korea, 7:16pm on a Tuesday night. Listining to a group called Wonder Girls and their single "Nobody". I have 5 weeks to learn it. I have a group of kids that are gonna sing a Backstreet Boys song on the 17th of December it's "As long as you love me". The songs are about comperable in terms of duration, you will not be able to say the same thing about the level of embarassment between the two performers. I take on this challange not because it is easy but because it is difficult, I think this is a worthy cause if it will encourage the kids to speak or in this case sing more English.

Another thing probably not balanced is the actual lyrics of the songs. You may not know this but uhh the Backstreet Boys never really realeased a Korean single. Not a single word of it. Whereas every popular song here has at least one english word or sound that is familiar to English speakers in it. Add in the fact that the word is probably repeated 1000000 times in the song and it becomes slightly easier to sing. My method for learning it is to look at romanized lyrics since I still cannot really read Korean yet. The second part of this evil plan is to listen to the song over and over while reading those very same lyrics. Like I said the song is so loaded with English that if I can learn it quick enough I want to learn a second song, also I want to learn "He's singing in Korean" from The Colbert Report cause that's a classy song to sing to 5th and 6th graders

Still here

66 Days in and here comes the crazy. Tomorrow is my birthday (hooray) birthdays are the one time of year when it should be all about you right? Sure why not. Well my crazy has arrived in that I made a face book group only 4 others said they would come whateve's it's just facebook not everone checks their stuff all the time plus it's in Seoul and next week is Halloween I get it. I get it i get it. So now here I sit on the eve of my birthday and I want to go to Seoul but no one else will be there tonight and I don't want to just spend a night in Seoul alone so now I don;t know what to do because the plan was go up tomorrow morning but now I really don't know what to do or when too go and I've told 2 people who still say they are going that I may go up tonight but that would be really depressing and also I can't cancel the hostel reservation I made for 5 people so now I'm going to pay for 4 people and have the brave soul who is still maybe probably coming with me and staying with me(2 others also) pay for himself cause he didn't come to pay for their way and I made the reservation but anyway I can't cancel because they don't speak english and now they won't answer the phone when I call so I just have to eat it. Don't you just love it when a plan comes together.

The Week

Today was the Principals birthday. I was sitting at the computer when my co-teacher asked if I wanted to do something with them later in the afternoon and I said "sure" because I'm literally dying to do some things with the co-workers. So she said pizza, I was fine with that, sounds fun. So Koreans are big into puzzle and games and we do this thing with a maze and numbers and at the bottom exposed to you are numbers. An amount you will pay. 10000, 5000, 2000. A couple of "free" spaces and maybe even a 1000 spot or 2. I picked number 7 cause it only went to 9 and at my other school my number is 7 as in Teacher: "I to 7"; Students: "Bernard!"

So I think "finally" cause my school is so big that 1.) Too many teachers to get together, 2.) Many of the teachers live in Daejeon which is about a 20 minute ride to the east and closest side of the city and it's a pretty big city. 3.) Many of the teachers are older, married and may have kids. Like there are probably 55-80 staff and teachers I would say 90 percent of them have families. I can really only positively identify one person other than myself. I only know about her cause a week after I paid my gas bill for the first time, she had to pay her gas bill for the first time and asked my co-teacher for help. My coteacher turned to me and said "Bernard how long did it take you to pay your bill?" "5 minutes" Then she looked back at her and was just like walk to the bank it's easy. (edit: everything with banking is easy here, you know how I pay rent, I take my bank book or ATM card put it in the machine and there is a "transfer" option. Hit that select the bank put in the persons account number and the amount confirm and take a receipt. Unbelievable)

Anyway I find out that this is actually for cake and pizza for the Principal. I like the guy don't get me wrong but you know tell me what we are doing. 1) I can keep a secret, 2) I don't speak Korean and he doesn't really speak a lot of English so I couldn't tell him if I tried. Anyway, I only taught 6 classes this week at Samyang because it was big time test week. The kids took test in Math, Korean, English, Music and some other thing that my favorite student counldn't remember the English name for. She said she did good in everything except the one she couldn't remember otherwise she said it was good. I think I'm going to leave it at that because it ends with a student who gave me a thumbs up and a smile before she left.

Settled in

I really do not know what to say right now. It may seem dumd but I really don't know what to talk about. School has been fun, but so has everything else. It's interesting to be here since I was writing so much before but now I'm just into it now. But alas my birthday and halloween are on the way. There are always things to complain about and I promise you that I will find them

Return of the Countdown Clock!!!!!

Or the debut of the countup clock. I'm not counting down to anyhting just trying to keep in mind how many days I've been away from home as I said in the last post, blah, blah, blah read it yourself.

Make your own Countdown Clocks

Also as this is posted I'm sleeping now. Just wanted to see if those of you on the East coast are paying attention.

Sill kickin in the Honeymoon

I think that it's safe to say that I'm still sitting in the "Honeymoon Phase" of my stay in Korea. They say that it is off different length for everyone and I've been here about 7 weeks and working for a month and 4 days. I think that keeping things in perspective helps to extend this period. I Hope that this extends and is such a soft time for me that I never hit the anger stage.

I would like to point out that I do miss home everyday that I'm away. I miss my family and friends, a bunch and each for different reasons. I miss that I can't go home and have my mom ask me how it was and then tell her it was ok or just "meh" when it probably really sucked. I miss my nieces and nephews even though they fight me tooth and nail on everything. My sisters, brother and brothers-in-law because they are the people who I know will always act in support from the beginning, not that mom won't just it takes her time to warm up to an idea this big.

My friends, oh how I miss thee. Jackie, I miss showing up to Jacks, sitting down and watching you and all those other weirdos sing while I keep saying "I can't find a song" or whatever lie I can think of. Phil, I miss talking about what films suck, what we should see and how we would change the movie industry. Joe, I miss you buying hot dogs from the vendors at 2:10am on Sunday mornings, you are also excellent conversation. Bob, Adam, Grant, Zach, Kaitlin, Anner anyone and everyone else I miss you. Even if I hate you I miss you, I wish I could hate you here but I have other stuff to do. So eat it jerk.

Anyway, as I may have mentioned earlier, I'm still having a good time and the job is still fun a month into it and I can cope.

Seoul, now with photos

So I'm not saying that this is some sort of message or how the weekend went. This was in the I'Park Mall at Yongsan Station in Seoul. It's a fantastical place and this was a fantastical piece of "Fake Art". When I saw the sign which I didn't take a picture of I laughed. Now that I see it I think "Hmmm if you make it, how can it be fake." Then I look at this picture that I took



Good clean fun. I think not. T-rex attacks on the Metro lines in Seoul kill 350 people a month. Won't you give me money so I can stop this prehistoric menace.

So we walked around and got to take these pictures with the camera I bought this last weekend and I think they are pretty sweet. But lets look at some more amazing technology that we saw for sale. OMG!!! Pikachu N64, I'll take 5. I don't know how much it was because I knew that no matter how little they were asking I wouldn't buy it unless they or someone nearby had GoldenEye... Luckily no one did.



This is the sunset we saw as we were walking out of the electronics market we were there for a long long time. Anyway it looks nice and so here it is.


We went to N. Seoul Tower which really isn't in north Seoul. So it's very confusing. It's on top of one of the big hills in Seoul of which there are like 5-8 I guess. For the most part these hills are totally pristine. They don't build into or up them so the City has a lot of green space which is nice and I'd like to explore more. Anyway that's a wire man next to the tower. They have 5 of them there but this is the only one who is standing up the others are lying down.


This is just what all the exit signs on Korea look like. I don't know why but I imagine that this little green man is moving faster then the man in Americas exit signs.(when there is one)


This is just a section of Seoul. Those of you who have been to Seoul tower know that it's just to damn big. Like any modern city, it would have been cool if this was built a was away but it's still very neat. Also very high.


This is the Cheonggyecheon. It's a 6k(3+mile) long stream that runs through downtown Seoul. It was just rebuilt 4-5 years ago after having been destroyed and covered for transit space.


I didn't know it but they have rapids in Seoul, that's pretty extreme. It's a very peaceful place not that Seoul has the loudness and hustle and bustle of an American city but this was extra relaxing setting.


What stream would be complete without fountains. They really do add something to the environment without taking away from the natural setting that we were in. I think I'll go back and walk it all myself if I have to but one way or another I'll cover the full 6k.

OK that was Seoul this weekend. Maybe I'll have some more mountain pictures from Okcheon by next weekend's end.