빼빼로

Hi!

So this week was pretty normal, although it did involve a day off school. Woo! Tuesday night I went out to dinner with a bunch of the teachers which naturally turned into noraebanging until 1:30am. Luckily Wednesday was only a half day of school. Wednesday last week was also 빼빼로 (pepero) day. Pepero Day is sort of a fake holiday created by Lotte probably to boost sales. Lotte manufactures this snack called pepero that is these cookie sticks covered in chocolate. There's a bunch of different flavors. Its celebrated on November 11th because 4 of these pepero sticks looks like 11/11. Totally pointless. However it is tradition for couples to give each other boxes of pepero on this day, and its sort of like Valentine's Day for them. So of course my students who love me soooo much brought me tons of pepero. I ate like 3 boxes that day. But they're so good! I'll be sure to send some home soon.

Thursday was the big college entrance exam test so none of the students were in school. I didn't have to go to school either so I ventured down to Suwon to hang out with Sara and Rebecca who also had the day off. We got some yummy Korean BBQ and then downed 2 pitchers of beer at the bar across from Rebecca's apartment. Friday night I was an old lady and did more laundry and caught up on some reading and episodes of Glee. That is embarrassing to admit so moving on...

Saturday I went out with the usual group. We started off the night at our favorite hookah bar in Seoul and then moved onto the clubs from there.

Sara, Anna, Mark, Rebecca, & me :)

And that's all you're getting out of me for pictures...sorry. Some pictures just weren't meant for the public. We wanted to find somewhere to watch the Wisco/Michigan game (which started around 1am on this side of the world) but it was on Big Ten Network which unsurprisingly does not reach Seoul :( Thanks to technology though we were able to get the score as soon as the game was over. Wisco's win was cause for celebration and resulted in yet another night of being out until the sun came up.

My vacation time for January has been approved. I get the last 2 weeks of January off, which means that a trip to Thailand will be booked sometime in the next week or two. EEEEK. I'm pretty excited, in case you can't tell. Vacation will be paid (although it will use up half of my available vacation days but I don't really care). I've had some serious talks with my friends about staying for a 2nd year here. We may change our minds come contract renewal time...but for now its a definite possibility. Its just really hard to say no to the possibility of staying here longer. We have an amazing set up here - apartment paid for, airfare paid for, etc. We get paid way more money than we deserve for the amount of work we do - I mean really how hard is it to speak in your own language all day playing learning games with kids? And even though we spend 40 hours/week in school, we only spend around 20 hours actually teaching each week. We get paid more than most of the actual teachers in our schools. We could probably all be saving tons of money if we didn't have student loans and a poor conversion rate to the US Dollar. Also, even though we've been here for 3 months (can you believe it!!) we still live like we're tourists i.e. we drink like college freshman, travel on the weekends, and eat out most nights especially when we're all together. We like to joke that living in Korea is "easier than life" because I mean really...it is.

Obama will be here in Seoul in a few days. He's on his Asian tour right now, stopping in China today to have a town hall style meeting with a bunch of Chinese college students. Its a pretty big deal for these countries to have our President visit them. I'm excited to see the reaction to him here in Korea - he seems to have a fair amount of support from the people of this country. His speech in China, for those of you who didn't see it since it was the middle of the night for you, really hammered through the point that he doesn't believe information, especially on the internet, should be restricted. China is known to have websites like Twitter and Facebook blocked, among others - including important media sources, and he reinforced his idea (and probably most Americans' idea) that access to information can empower people and that criticism of government is a positive thing because it helps keep the government in check. To further cite the restriction of information in China - his speech was not broadcast on TV in China, as other former US president's visits have been, and his quote about having free flowing information was on a website in China for only 30 minutes before censors deleted it. The students in the audience were mostly handpicked by the government, and many of them are part of China's young Communist Youth League, many of them having questions fed to them. Freedom of speech is not something the Chinese enjoy the way we do in America - so hopefully his visit will encourage the government there to reevaluate some policies.

I'm planning a lesson on movies for my students. Thank God for Disney's Pixar for making adorable little short movies that don't have words. I'm using 3-5 of these short films to get the kids talking about movie vocabulary (animation, characters, music, plot, story, etc), and then I'll eventually discuss with them how to criticize a movie and then make their own DVD covers with lots of fabulous English words on it. Yay! I'm sure half the kids will sleep but movies always seems to keep kids awake. Classroom behavior both appalls and amazes me here. It shows a level of immaturity that I didn't think was possible in high school age children. Some kids are good, but others are just so terrible. And the teachers just accept it. I get the impression the attitude here is that if the kids aren't mature enough by high school to understand the importance of education then the teachers give up. Maybe I've forgotten what high school was like? College kids (generally) are more well behaved in class. Although when we weren't listening to the professors we were a little more subtle about it...doing the crossword or sudoku, checking facebook, texting, etc. We didn't just blatantly sleep or talk in class. Courtney...am I missing something? Are you high school kids as bad in the US as my kids are here?

Naturally I have my weekly dose of kpop for you all. Taeyang has a new song out. He's a bigger babe than ever in this one. Its called Wedding Dress. I think a version of the video w/ English subtitles is available on youtube, but essentially he's saying that the girl who is getting married should be marrying him. And that sometimes he gets excited when she fights with her boyfriend because it gives him hope she'll dump that other loser and marry him. But since she's not, he hopes she's happy with the other guy so he can forget about her. Basically he's whining because he was too scared to tell her how he really felt. Wahh. But the boy can dance!

Also I've stumbled upon this gem of a video called Where the Hell is Matt? If these few minutes of uninhibited silliness don't make you laugh or at least smile, then you are no fun and I can't help you. I think this was 2008's viral video of the year, it has almost 25 million hits on youtube. Make sure you check out his outtakes too :) Maybe one day there will be a Where the Hell is Amy video. Seeing places that I have been, am, or will hopefully go makes me want to make my own version. Make sure you watch for the DMZ (1:52) and Seoul (2:46) in the video!

"I haven't been everywhere, but its on my list." -- Susan Sontag