Weekended out!

I survived my first full week of teaching and spent a fantastic weekend visiting new people and places all over Korea :)

Let's start with the teaching part.

I work with mostly elementary school kids, and they're really really adorable. But they're absolutely exhausting, especially since I have so many different classes and so many kids' names to learn in the next two weeks. It will definitely take me a little time to get used to this whole working world thing. These kids just have so much energy it makes me feel old! They're fun though, and I already have most of my classes talking to me, which is really a big part of my whole job as a foreign teacher, so I think I'll get the hang of teaching pretty quickly.

The kids say the funniest things, so I've decided to keep a list of my personal favorites, updated weekly...

Top five student lines of the week:
5. Student: "Teacher, your voice is so high it's distracting!"
4. Student: "Teacher, you're making my life miserable."
Me: "Good, you're making my life miserable."
3. Student: "Rain is the greatest artist ever."
Me: "Really, Rain's better than Michael Jackson?"
Student: "Yeah!"
Me: "Better than the Beatles?"
Student: (thinks for a minute) "It's a tie."
** I promise I will do my best to make her see the error of her ways**
2. Student: "I wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy..."
1.
**Paper about what they would do if they won the lottery, "Sixth, I buy Eric, and make he my slave. He do many thing. He buy food. He massage me, he wash dishes, he clean rooms, he throw balls and I catch it and he do homework (mine)."

Good times at school. On to the weekend...

Thursday night I went to trivia night at a local bar. Even though I was a little worthless (we're talking I knew maybe two or three answers tops), we won! Yay team! Will definitely be going back in the near future :)

Friday night I met up with my lovely friend Zooms and some of her Korea crew in Seoul and headed out to Daegu. I finally got to spend some quality time on the public transportation system and got hit on by some random older men getting off the train. Awesome. Business cards are a kind of a big deal here and older guys are pretty willing to give them out to cute foreign girls, so after Zooms found me and saved me from the awkwardness that was this man, we decided to start a contest to see who can collect the most business cards over the next year. It's settled, August 6, 2011, someone's winning a hot fudge sunday :)

Daegu itself was fantastic and I'm very excited to go back! Obviously I forgot to bring my camera (along with my chapstick, contact solution, hair ties, extra cash, you know the basic things to remember when traveling around in Korea...), but it was a really fun city! Lots of restaurants, bars, neon lights, typical Korea. We went to this one place that specializes in a game called BilliBow, basically bowling with a pool stick, and I was persuaded to give it a try. Now I'm terrible at bowling, and I'm even worse at pool, but I definitely scored around 120 and won! :)

Saturday we met up with some crew people and did lunch at a western restaurant in Daegu. After lunch we headed back to the train station and hopped on a train to Busan, a major city on the far southeast corner of the country. We got in pretty late and were originally planning to go to this big music festival on the beach, but after seeing the masses and masses of people already there, we decided to head to a western bar instead. We were up in the 14th floor or this building looking out over the beach, and I swear these beach-goers were still sitting there at two in the morning even though the music was long over. Crazy.

Sunday morning we met up with peeps again and did lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Busan. Apparently avacados are a rare find in Korea, so we all loaded up on our guacamole and oh it was delicious! After lunch we decided to go sit on the beach, but it was so hot and sticky and smelly and crowded and gross that we stayed for maybe fifteen minutes tops. It was so weird, the water was roped off after just a couple meters, so there was really no way to go swimming at all so everyone was sitting under these rows of umbrellas trying to stay out of the sun. We're going to try visiting again once the tourist season is over, so I'll be back in Busan sometime in September (and will maybe remember my camera then!!). We went on an extended search for air conditioning, did second lunch at an adorable Italian place a little ways out of town, and took the KTX train back into Seoul. Whew.

I'm so glad I got the chance to see some of Korea outside Bucheon finally, and had a really fantastic weekend. But oh gosh am I worn out! Time to catch up on some zzz's before starting this all over again...

- Christine -