Well I have been here over 10 days now, the time has flown bye. The first few days of school were hard. I was jet lagged and there were a lot of new procedures and policies to learn. Teaching has been a challenge so far, but most of the students have a good basic understanding of English so it has been manageable. I teach writing and speaking/listening classes. The school is like an office building in the US, it has around 10 classrooms that vary in size but the largest will hold maybe 15 kids. I am going to try and figure out how to add pics to this blog soon, so you may be able to see what I'm talking about. My biggest complaint to date is that they don't turn on the air conditioning until people complain, but at least we have air and when it gets real hot they will have it on all the time. The kids are just like kids in the US, some are nice others are rotten. In general they seem more respectful of teachers than in the US but there are exceptions. I think I have been received fairly well by them, they seem to listen and do what I say most of the time. They listen more than the Special Ed kids I worked with in the US for sure. The curriculum that we use is fairly straight forward and with a few exceptions the text books are pretty easy to teach and straight forward for the kids to follow. I am glad that I signed on with a school that has a set curriculum and lesson plans, I would not be happy if I had to create my own right now. The school is in the middle of a commercial section of town, their are hundreds of stores,restaurants,schools,churches and Bars(called Hofs) within a 10 minute walk from the school. There are not any American chains within walking distance but there is a McDonald's and a Pizza Hut within a 5 minute cab ride.(I haven't been to either yet) There is a Lotteria (pronounced La Teria, I probably spelled it wrong but that's close),a Korean version of McDonald's about 100 feet away and also my 2 favorite restaurants to date, Suk Bong and a Korean Sushi Place with a name that's in Korean which I don't know and couldn't spell even if I did. The Suk Bong is a sandwich shop which makes egg sandwiches, its two pieces of toasted white bread, scrambled egg, cheese and toppings of your choice with a sweet sauce and hot sauce, its delicious. The Korean Sushi place makes Sushi Rolls, only there larger and contain cooked meats and fish instead of raw meats. It's not actually sushi but that's how we foreigners refer to it. Besides teaching I have gone out to several restaurants and Hofs. I went to VIP's an American style buffet place that's in downtown Gumi, its a lot fancier than a buffet place in the US, think Olive Garden Quality in a buffet and that should give you an idea, not great but sufficient. I also have been to a Korean Sashimi restaurant twice now, this does serve actual raw fish, its real Sashimi. I went to a place that they give you meat and you cook it yourself on flat top grills built into your table, since I'm an ovo/lacto/pesco(eggs,milk,fish in Latin) vegetarian I didn't eat the meat, but I was there and I got a veggie soup. Yesterday was a national holiday here in Korea, it was Buddha's Birthday, so we had the day off. 3 of my fellow teachers and I went to Daegu(the capital of the province I'm in) It's a large city with over a million people, its about a 25 minute train ride or drive away. We saw a Baseball Game, the Samsung Lions (my provinces team) verse SK(not sure what it means), the Lions won in a slug fest 9-6. Then we went to a commercial electronics store street that has around 50 electronics store next to each other, I bought an Olympus Digital Camera, it was about $80 dollars cheaper than in the US I figure and it included a free case, 1 gigabyte memory card and 2 batteries. I would say I saved around $125 US in total buying the camera in Korea. After that we went to Subway for subs and then to the movies to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie. The movie was the same cost as the US and subway was like $1 more expensive. The Baseball game was $8 for good seats and beers were only $2 per can and they give you the can unopened, which in Cleveland, where I'm from would mean that opposing players and bad officials would probably be stoned to death by full cans of beer, but Koreans are less violent than pissed off clevelanders.
