What a Real Job is Like....

So things are not necessarily logical in Korea. Not at all really. Today, I had to come to work early, 9:15 a.m. to be exact. Why did I have to come to work early? I was supposed to have parent-teacher meetings. I showed up in a suit, heels and panty hose. I was trying to look professional for the parents. When I arrived, I was summoned to a meeting where I sat for over an hour. I have no idea what the meeting was about because it was all in Korean. At one point, everyone looked at me so I am pretty sure that they were talking about me, but who knows what it was about. In the end, I ended up saying exactly zero words, I was never introduced, and for all I know parents were telling my boss how much they either love/hate me. As usual, logic is completely lost in Korea....

There is a museum about kimchi, and I have been there. My kids laughed at me for it, and apparently everyone thinks it is a joke. No one actually GOES there, except Paco and I. I thought it was interesting....

Flower Death

I previously wrote about Fan Death (the Korean phenomenon that if you sleep in a room with the windows and doors shut and a fan on, you will die), but this week I learned about its sister phenomenon, Flower Death. A student informed me that if you have too many flowers in your room that they can kill you. According to my student, the flowers will suck up all of the oxygen and suffocate you with carbon dioxide. Apparently photosynthesis works backwards in Korea. Plants make convert oxygen to carbon dioxide in Korea, while the process is the exact opposite in the rest of the world. The scary thing is that she claims she learned this at science academy.

Maybe this is why Paco found seven beautiful orchids in the garbage closet. Maybe the flowers killed someone and really were meant to be thrown away. I'll keep you posted on Paco's health. Oh yeah, she also found a couch at the garbage, I wonder what that was doing there. Next I will hear about Couch Death...

Climbing Gym at Last!!!

After a few weeks of unsuccessful attempts at finding a climbing gym that is open, I swore "That's it!!! I am not climbing in Korea...." Somehow, we managed to get to a gym that was open this weekend. We almost didn't find it. We got on the bus going the wrong way and almost ended up in China. Eventually we found the gym and elicited that we wanted to climb. When asked if we wanted shoes, we relied that we already had some. Well, we sort of had shoes. Ton Sai did not treat our shoes so well. I got a hole and Paco's shoes were moldy beyond belief. They were so stiff that we throught they might crack in half when she tried to put them on. They didn't crack, but they didn't fit either. So then we had to go back to the guy and show him our destroyed shoes and ask for some to wear. He laughed pretty hard and I felt like an idiot as usual. Nevertheless, we got to boulder in a gym. It was awesome!!!

The Great Wall of Korea

OK, I haven't posted a blog in a while. I know. I think that there are things that I could be writing about, but I am drawing a blank. Perhaps this is because I am tired from hanging out with seven year old children. They can really wear you out. I turn around and Soobin is leaping on top of her desk, Andy is licking someone else's pencil, Angella is crying because one of the twins hit her back after she hit him, Ted is pretending to be a gorilla (his nickname in class is Mr. Gorilla), or they are all trying to poke me in the butt, which is some game kind of game in Korea. Today I got to carry a kid to the office who said he felt sick. Sometimes I teach class literally holding a kid up in each arm. These poor kids have no time to be actual kids because they have school, academy, music and sports. I have things that are mandatory for me to teach, so I don't get to have much playtime with them. Sometimes I wonder what the hell I am trying to do, but I am rewarded every so often with presents and compliments which encourages me to continue on. Enough with excuses for not blogging and down to what else I have been doing.

Last week I spent too much time in bars with the guys I work with, so when I woke up on Saturday I declared myself a non-drinker. Not because I was hung over or had a guy puke on me again (neither of those things happened), but because I decided that drinking here is riduculous and lame. I promptly went to the store and bought a couple of bottles of wine and stated "Since I am now a non-drinker, I have more time to do things like drink wine." Then I decided that I would have to ammend the non-drinker part to an occasional-drinker.

Paco and I went to E-Mart (the Korean equivalent of Wal-Mart) to buy toaster ovens. Of course, they were out of toaster ovens when we got there, but I managed to load myself up with plenty of household items, like a shaker to put salt in and a broom. The things that you normally don't think about needing. When we left E-Mart, we discovered that it was raining cats and dogs. Also, E-Mart is the most ridiculously impossible place to get a taxi so we stood in the rain for a looooong time. Here is the newest edition of the Korea:Is that for Real column so get ready for it. First, a stranger held his umbrella over me for about five minutes. Then another stranger picked up a pillow that had flown out of my box of crap, held his umbrella over me and walked us into a building where he called us a cab. Upon finding out that it would take forever to get a taxi to us, he offered to drive us home himself. I would just like to reiterate that I live in the third largest city in the world in case you have forgotten, and a complete stranger offered to take us home. We finally saw a taxi when he went to get his car, so we jumped in the taxi to save the poor stranger who tried to help the white girls and found himself stuck driving them home. People are so incedible here. Yesterday a stranger stopped to help us in the subway and walked us to our platform. This is a totally normal thing in Korea. People go out of their way to help you.

On Sunday, we went hiking with a Korean teacher from our school. So far in Asia, the hiking has been hit and miss so I wasn't really expecting a whole lot. I should have known better from seeing all of the hardcore hikers on the subway and walking around town. There are constantly people dressed in intense outdoor gear wandering the city. We ended up going on a six hour hike that was pretty strenuous. There were times when we were scrambling up steep rock faces, clinging to a wire railing for our lives. We also discovered the crowds of people hiking in Korea, which you are constantly immersed in. It was an experience alright. There were also a lot of climbers, which just made us more annoyed that everytime we try to go to a climbing gym it is closed.

I'm sure that I could write more, but I won't bore you with anything else for now....