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Published: September 7th 2008
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The madness that was our Orientation
So from about the moment we got off the plane to the moment we left Seoul we were kept busy from about 9 to 9. Nonetheless we did make some good friends and got out of the dorms about 3 or 4 times. We were situated at Konkuk University, downtown Seoul. On the plane, Jonathan and I realized we were in dorms and would most likely be separated for the first week. After traveling for 30 hours this did make me sad but then I just wanted a bed any bed. Once we got the university we had to sign in and were given vital information by a speech, that was impossible to listen to considering our state. At least we were feed. We got into bed around midnight that night and had to be up around 7:30 so we could make breakfast and get to our first class. The second day was a full day of classes followed by a mandatory movie. The movie was a about the Korean war. It was a little over the top and extremely graphic. Not so much fun when you are still really jet lagged
and your stomach is not feeling so hot. I had to sneak out of this one. Th next day was one of the best ones we have had yet. We went to a Korean Folk Village. Which is the equivalent of a Korean Pioneer Village. It was very beautiful. There was also an amusement park with some fun and extremely lame rides. On this night we got some people together and our teacher and a couple of TA's and we went to a place called "Technomart" so people could get cameras and stuff. Jonathan looked at laptops but we couldn't find one. After Technomart we all went for food, where we had Korean barbecue, which was quite delicious. You cook a type of bacon in front of you with some veggies and kimchi and then you put everything together in some lettuce. I also tried Soju for my first time. It tasted worse than vodka but with less the alcohol, I was confused. The next day we had classes and then we had another mandatory movie. This one was pretty hillarious though, it was called "200 Pounds Beauty." It was about a ghost singer for a pop act who is
also a phone sex operator and weighs 200 pounds, who gets alot of plastic surgery and loses the weight to become a crazy beautiful lady.
On Tuesday we had another full day of classes and then a class meeting. Our teacher got to pick what he was going to do with us and he chose a music class because he is a high school music teacher. A couple of us decided that we didn't want to eat at the cafe because lets face it, it doesn't matter where you are in the world, cafeteria food sucks, well maybe not in France. So we ordered our food at around 5:20ish and of course it didn't arrive until 6:30, when our next class started. We finished our food and it was about 7pm. We knew if we walked over to the class it would take another 15 mins, meaning we would have missed just over half the class. So we decided to skip this one. You had to attend 90% of the lectures to pass oreintation and you have to pass orientation to keep your job. So we figured it would be fine. When some of our friends got back from
the class, they told us that our teacher got quite emotional, saying how special this experience was and that he was proud of us, etc. I can't believe the one class we missed was one of the best, but I suppose that is karma. So this night we finally got out on the town. It was awesome! The people from orientation were pretty hilarious. There was a guy from California named Brian who was dubbed "this guy."
The next day was the same with classes and another class meeting that was about lesson planing, because we didn't get enough of that during the day. This night was pretty low key compared to the previous one. The following day we met our POE(province of education) supervisor who FINALLY told us our placement in our province. Some people were pretty upset with their towns. We were also told our POE was only going to be our POE for that meeting because she was moving on to another job. I thought that was kinda funny. Korea is extremely unorganized. Picture something unorganized and multiply this by 10, seriously, it is still boggling my mind. I really would have assumed the opposite. We
went out again this night because it was our last one. It was another hilarious night. We had about 30 people when we started out and then we couldn't find a place that would take that many people. So after walking up a street, down another, back up that same street, then down left then back to where we started, we were left with about 10 of us. Fortunately the bar we ended up in was a favorite so there was already people there and many more ended up there as well. After to much flavored soju, I wasn't feeling so hot. We were all supposed to go to a nuribon (karaoke bar) but instead we sorta skipped off with two other peeps and went back to the dorms.
The next day we were off the the Chungnam office of education to meet our co teachers. Thus leading into our next week of crazyyness.
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