(Simon) White Day

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Dear Blog Readers,
Our 30th week in South Korea and our 30th Korean Update blog. Surprisingly, we’ve had over 4500 views of our blogs whilst we’ve been here so thanks for being a part of our adventure especially to the die-hard toilet reading fans (you know who you are.) The weather is turning and spring is finally upon us.

First on the agenda this week was celebrating White Day. A day named after me can only mean one thing – love and affection. In Korea, 14th February is Valentine’s Day for girlfriends to give presents to boys and 14th March is White Day to either return the favour, or to dump the girlfriend within the month to avoid having to follow the niceties. I, of course, followed suit and bought a few presents for Laura and helped the Korean economy cash in on the day of my namesake.

The Girl’s High School was equally as ridiculous this week as it was last week. The lessons were fine, but my co-teacher thought it would be a good idea to have a walk around the school at lunch so that the students could practice ‘informal’ conversation outside of the classroom. I can only describe the said event as a piece of meat being flung into the den of a group of very hungry adolescent lions. One girl even took her lollipop out of her mouth and wanted me to have it. What?! I was also asked what my blood type was which was quite weird. I’m worried that they are trying to get some sort of genetic profile together so that by the end of the semester a clone of me just walks through the doors and takes over my classes.

Literally just as I finished writing the above paragraph, Michelle sends a text through. It’s a picture message which says, “look what I’ve just been handed…” which has a covert picture of me taken in class on a girl’s mobile phone. I should probably notify the authorities immediately.

Word has also spread to the boy’s school. Strangely, their friends are at the girl’s middle school…which I don’t even teach at. Some of them are also worried about Laura. They haven’t seen her on the mean streets of Boeun for a while so their stalkerish nature forced them to enquire. I reassured them that she was still alive and well.

A website I use quite regularly is www.waygook.org. It was great for lesson ideas and PPTs that could be manipulated to make really cool games for the classes. I use the past tense for good reason. Recently, the website seems to have been flooded with…well…I’m trying to think of a suitable adjectives…pathetic, facetious individuals. It just seems like people are adding really good lessons and then it’s being instantly responded by people haranguing the poor individual for misplacing a comma, or even worse, spelling a word wrong!!! Are any other waygooker’s agreeing with me on this? Please leave a comment at the bottom. Maybe it’s just me…

Anyway, in a similarly frustrating mood, the slipper boxes have once again been a cause for incident this week. We have new boxes with our name tags on so that if any of the students hate us, they can localise their hatred by planting something in our shoes for a nice surprise on the way home. Also, my feet are so big that my shoes have to be placed diagonally across to fit into them. Luckily, my frustration has been dissipated recently because some of the third graders have plucked up the confidence to come and chat to me in the teachers room at lunch time. Not only do we get to chat and improve their English, normally one or two of them give me a massage whilst we chat. A win-win situation in my opinion.

Laura’s endeavour to buy everything available on GMarket has progressed well this week. Unfortunately, this means she has to try on the clothes, then ask me, “Does it look good?” – has anybody in the history of the world ever said, “No.” to this question? This is then followed by some ‘amazing’ facts about the price and the varying colours that are available. Luckily, I’ve now managed to rope Michelle into coming over prior to any GMarket try-outs are to be worn so that she can give her opinion from now on. Phew!

I’d been looking forward to Friday night all week. It’s not just that it’s the end of the week, it was that Chef Chris was rustling up another one of his specials. This week was an amazing chicken pasta dish which was really good with non-sweet garlic bread. We then went out to norraebang afterwards. We wanted to frequent the new norraebanging place which has replaced our ‘usual’ but they were wanting to charge a fortune. The joke was on them though because it was completely empty. Once we found a place we got straight into it. Geoff’s debut was superb and rightly scored the maximum. We expected nothing less considering he’s been here for a couple of years and he was singing in front of some seasoned professionals. This was followed by a superb ‘Boom Boom (Pow)’ by Chris and Betty. The 100’s kept coming with birthday girl, Stephanie, and Chris phenomenally doing ‘Baby Got Back’ without missing a word. Stephanie still pretends to look at the screen when she does it as if she actually needs to ‘remember’ the words. Birthday girl 2, Julie, and I decided three 100’s in a row can now be given the bowling term, a ‘turkey’.

Yesterday, Yuni, Laura, Carrie and I went to Cheongju to see Sunny and catch up. Sunny has started her new school and it was great to see her again. We got a bite to eat at a buffet restaurant which was awesome. We even got fajita’s for the first time in seven months! We then went to see The King’s Speech at the cinema which was great. On the way to the cinema, we were teaching Yuni and Carrie swear words in English. If you’ve seen the film – when he is trying to overcome his stammer by swearing was absolutely hilarious considering what we’d been teaching them beforehand. If you haven’t seen the film then do so and you can have a chuckle at the previous sentence.

Finally, a quick mention about the tragic events in Japan. There are so many blogs out there so I think it’s been well covered about how everybody is feeling on this side of the world. Thanks to everybody from home who has messaged in to check that we’re alright and spare a thought for the people in that beautiful country.

Tink and Laura

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Photos

Sunset
Sunset over Boeun.

Samnyeong Samsong
The view from the top.

Warning Sign
Probably saying, "Do not, under any circumstances, try climbing up this wall..."

Exercise
Laura's exercise regime just gets even more ridiculous.