Catching up...

I haven't blogged for a few days, so I'll try to fill everybody in on my last few days.

Over the weekend about 15-20 of the GEPIK teachers from UW met up in Hongdae, a region of Seoul, and stayed for the weekend at a hostel.  A good time was had by all, too much of one for some, as we explored a little slice of Seoul.

Needless to say after not getting much sleep over the weekend, I struggled to get back into the school routine.  However, it was pretty painless as I still had introductions with my Monday and Tuesday classes.

Wednesday though brought with it something new - my first real lesson. It went pretty well as I taught the students about frequency adverbs - having them talk about how often people do different things.  We'll see how it goes the rest of the week with some of my less talkative classes.

Being an English teacher in Korea requires, strike that, no, it demands flexibility.  Friday I didn't have a class because my head teacher was demonstrating lessons to teachers from other schools.  No problem, except that he failed to inform me in advance.  Tuesday, a misunderstanding had my ready for my last class, only to find out it was canceled due to a Korean speaking contest.  And today, the teacher tried to explain something to me about how the school was set to get a bunch of money for next year and bureaucrats were here to watch class.  So I thought what she asked me was to let her teach the class, but she never showed up.  So I just went on with class as normal, not really knowing what's going on.  In Korea, you have to be ready for anything.

Last night also was a good night because I met maybe my only fluent, native English speaking neighbor.  We went out to eat samgyeopsal, a Korean grilled pork belly dish.  He also showed me how to get to E-Mart (think Korean Super Wal-Mart) on the bus.  Mostly it was just nice to hang out and get to know another English speaker in what sometimes can be a very isolated world.