Excuse me, Waiter? There's a fish in my soup.

Greetings...

Well, there certainly is a lot to catch-up on so pack a lunch, get comfortable and let’s get right to it.

Monday:

Got dressed in my nice suit and got picked up by my co-teacher, Mrs. Lee. She was generous enough to drive me to and from school for this first week. She politely declines my requests to take a picture of her to show you but I’m confident I’ll get a “yes” soon.

As we’re driving through some very narrow, crowded streets (“these have to be one-way streets,” I think to myself but I’m mistaken), she turns up this hill. Again, this is a very narrow strip of asphalt and there is a caterpillar of marching kids walking up it. I realize this is the “driveway” to the school and I ask Mrs. Lee, “Do I have to walk up this hill everyday?” She laughs and says yes. I’m telling you, from the four floors I have to walk up in my apartment building, the four floors walking up to our classroom and that monster hill leading up to the school, I’m going to slaughter the few calories I’ve been consuming (more on this in a minute).

We met the Principal, a semi-short man in his 50s. We sat in his office while he and Mrs. Lee chattered away. I don’t think he speaks a lick of English—although Robert’s theory is that this might simply be a display of Confucian hierarchy wherein he might in fact speak his fair share of English but withholds it in front of me to avoid revealing a weakness. The Vice-Principal is a much more agreeable fellow, always smiling, but, like his superior, makes no attempt at English in front of me.

This being the first day of school for the year, there’s a lot of administrative tasks to be performed—including introducing all the new teachers to the students. Apparently, many if not all public schools teachers are transferred to new schools every 4 or 5 years so there’s always new teachers to meet. We’re lead into a room that is set up as your typical student run broadcast room—two movie lights illuminating a “news desk” in front of a background with the school’s crest. The Principal stands in front of two tripod-ed DV cameras with a group of 4 young female students operating. He’s got a microphone and he’s doing his little Principal speech. I quickly realize that this video and audio is being piped into every room in the school and a very small wave of anxiety passes through me. Each new teacher gets an introduction, they stand in front of the cameras, bow and receive a flower in a fancy plastic sleeve. My turn arrives and the bow/flower ceremony goes off without a hitch. Thinking I’m done, I prepare to leave the room but they motion for me to stay. The Principal does so more chattering (no disrespect to the Korean language but I think “chattering” is an appropriate description) and then he holds the microphone out to me—oh boy. I stand in front of the cameras and introduce myself, where I’m from and that I’ll be teaching English (duh!). There’s a monitor in front of me so I can see myself standing there in my suit with a microphone and it reminds me of the recent X-mas video Dad and I made and I almost start laughing. Either there was a technical malfunction or they simply thought I didn’t talk long enough so they said, “Can you introduce yourself again?” Okay. I just said the same exact thing again because I couldn’t think of what else to say—my thinking was that those who could actually understand me would understand my predicament and those who couldn’t would just think I continued with more information about myself.

We didn’t see any students this day as it was a half-day/first day kinda thing. So, Mrs. Lee, Lucy and I just kinda hung out in our rooms until lunch. Lucy is also a new hire—she’s a Korean currently taking TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) courses at a nearby university. She’s basically our assistant but she’s also in charge of the English library which is one of THREE rooms we have at our disposal. I was told to either expect one room where the kids come to us everyday or we’d be traveling from classroom to classroom—I was hoping for our own room and I was granted 3! So, there’s a library room, a study room and the actual classroom (pics soon). Oh, and did I mention that I have a crush on Lucy? She’s married of course but exotic, cool and fascinating nonetheless.

We were told to expect some faculty dinners the first week but this first lunch was it. The Principal took us to a traditional style restaurant (sitting on the floor) and we knew what we were eating before we even arrived: fish soup. Unlike Rob, I really like seafood—granted, actual fish is low on that top ten list but I enjoy it all the same. If someone says, “Yeah, we’re having fish soup for lunch.” You might think some vegetables and tofu swimming in fish broth—this was not quite the case. It was literally fish soup—you could not simplify the description if you tried. There was 80% of a whole fish (including the head) submerged in broth. Oh boy. I usually pride myself on being open-minded when it comes to food—I’ll try just about everything once. But this instance really did challenge my will power. I quickly scanned all the little side dishes around to see if there was anything I could supplement this disastrous meal with—nope. One thing I’ve noticed about Korean food is that the side dishes are almost always the wild cards and if the main dish doesn’t do it for you, you’re pretty much screwed—just ask Rob. I waited to see how others were handling this fish predicament—when I saw Mrs. Lee take chunks of fish OUT of the soup bowl and put them on a small plate, I had a flash of hope. I did the same and it’s amazing how the situation changed—fish head under water vs. small piece of fish meat on plate are two very different things. Suddenly, this nightmare meal literally became palatable. Of course, I did have to scrape of the fish skin but once that was done the fish was actually pretty darn good—I ate most of it except the head of course. And the rice! It is truly a miracle that Koreans eat rice at every meal because if all else fails, the rice really does become the main dish and it’s thankfully filling.

Korean kids will be kids after all

Tuesday:

So, Tuesday was the first day we actually met the kids. We see four different grades throughout the week: 3-4 sections of each grade (3^rd, 4^th, 5^th and 6^th). The periods last 40 minutes and then they run screaming down the hall like only kids can do back to their homeroom. I knew the kids were excited to meet me because Mrs. Lee said they had been asking about me for weeks prior to my arrival. Little did I know that I would be blowing minds right and left. The kids would come into the class, see me and react like they’ve NEVER seen anything like me before—probably because they hadn’t. Eyes would get wide as saucers (as wide as Korean eyes can get), mouths would drop open and exclamations like “Whoa!” or the Korean equivalent were very common. I enjoyed this process quite a bit and the best reactions came when all the students would already be seated and I come in from the study room so they all react at once. It was not like some other human walked in--it was almost like someone brought in the most exotic animal you could think of. Like a gigantic, brightly colored parrot or a freakin’ tiger or something. It was very funny. I would introduce myself, write some words and pictures and/or words on the white board to help them understand. “Do you have a girlfriend?” “Are you married?” “Do you like baseball?” “Why do Americans eat so much pizza and hamburgers?” were some of the most common questions. Sidenote: when I couldn’t answer the pizza/hamburger question, some other student said in Korean, “Because they’re delicious!” I couldn’t agree more.

Here are some highlights from the entire week of my interactions with the kids:

--They’re fascinated with my goatee—many boys would barely touch it and giggle—I forget that facial hair in this region is about as common as I am.

--At one point, two boys were fooling around. The smaller kid hit the bigger kid on the head with his softcover book. The bigger kid then responded by forcing the smaller kid’s head down and applying his entire weight through his pointed elbow as he dug it deep into the smaller kid’s back. My reaction was a mixture of concern and laughter—I didn’t actually laugh but this kind of behavior reminded me a lot of my own elementary days.

--Another, more serious moment of violence came in a different class. Our activity this week was to tear out the pages of their books that have all the materials needing to be cut out. As the whole class is frantically ripping their books apart (Note to self: don’t instruct 6^th graders to tear pages out of their books and expect them to do it with civility) I’m helping out at one group’s desks. Right there in front of me, two boys really got into it. The boy on the right hit the boy on the left in the chest—the boy on the left responded by swinging three really hard punches (horizontal windmill style) which landed in various places. Meanwhile, windmill boy is crying his eyes out in anger. This all happened in seconds—I stepped over there and broke them up. Mrs. Lee quickly came the rescue and took them both outside for a chat. I’m sure this kind of behavior is common almost everywhere in the world but when I noticed that these kids use utility knives instead of scissors to cut things, I realized that if things go bad here, it’ll be like a prison riot with hundreds of screaming Korean kids running around with knives. Powder keg, anyone?

--Some of these kids are really excited to speak English and you can find the one or two per class by listening to who is shouting out random sentences. One kid in the corner kept yelling, “What’s your name!” and “How old are you?!” As I was walking around helping kids tear out pages, one boy kept saying, “Im soopry, Im soopry!” I took a stab at what he was trying to say: “You’re surprised?” “Yes,” he said. “What are you surprised about?” He then plainly responded, “Your body is SO big!” I chuckled at this and confirmed, “Yes. Yes, it is.”

--About the 3^rd or 4^th day of the week, as Mrs. Lee and I were walking into school through the playground area, one girl amongst a group of girls, said, “Hello, Mr. Dunham!” Instant heart melt.

Lunch has been interesting. The teachers all pay the school to provide lunch everyday but there’s very little choice in what we eat. Of course, it’s all Korean food so, for them, it’s totally cool. For me, it’s like Fear Factor on a daily basis. Yesterday was especially interesting—one of the side dishes were these little sea creatures. I’m going to have to find a picture on the internet of what these things looked like but it was like I was suddenly on an alien spaceship in a sci-fi movie eating alien food. It was a white, soft “pocket” with tiny, purple octopus like tentacles blossoming out of it like flower petals. Oh boy. Thankfully, they were bite sized so all it took was a quick pop in the mouth without having to see what was inside. Surprisingly, these things had little to no taste and were just chewy like calamari so it wasn’t too bad. Looked worse than they tasted, that’s for sure.

Another interesting lunch story: for lunch, they always wheel in this cart that has everything on it. I grabbed my tray and started loading it up—I see this side dish that looks like stiff, kinda dark cabbage. I sit down and start eating. I always start with some rice or tofu to get me prepared for the wild card side dishes. I took a chopstick full of this cabbage stuff and popped it in my mouth. Crunchy. Strong seafood taste. Uh oh. I tentatively continued to chew and swallow. When no one was looking, I took a closer look at this cabbage and discovered it was not cabbage at all but very tiny, skinny, whole fish. Anchovies might suffice as an equivalent. If I had known what I was getting into, I might have handled it better but the surprise factor made this stuff gross and, needless to say, my chopsticks did not wander over to that corner of the tray again.

Everything you've read so far was typed into a Word document as my official internet has yet to be installed in my apartment. Yes, it's getting frustrating over here. Every once in a while, I'll be able to leech off some random unsecured wireless signal which is how I'm rolling at the moment.

I'm also sick! The past two days I've had a medium achy feeling. I've been drinking green tea, popping Tylenol and chewing STRAWBERRY flavored Vitamin C. In other words, I have but only a little bit of energy to finish this monster blog.

Quick story from last night: So, as I just mentioned, I've been sick the past two days but not sick enough to justify staying in bed with nothing to do. Rob has been needing some things and there is this great store called E-Mart that has just about everything. I finally figured out how to get to one so we went! We got some stuff and we both got haircuts at this salon WITHIN the E-Mart. The haircuts cost less than $10 which is awesome. Anyways, it's dinner time when I leave Rob's place. Side side note: my only entertainment so far is to watch whatever I've got downloaded on my iTunes. This isn't much so I went through it really quickly. Rob offered to let me use his internet because my limited access internet barely works and downloading videos is not very practical. I set my laptop at his place and downloaded both Season 5s of LOST and The Office...sweet. So I'm coming home that night, lugging my heavy ass laptop AND a big bag of E-Mart stuff. Rob mentioned he was going to try Pizza Hut for dinner and that sounded like a great idea but I just wanted to go home. By my apartment, there's this place called Mr. Pizza which I've been meaning to try. I got my personal pizza to go and kept walking home. Once at home, I set the computer back up, started catching up on the LOST episodes I've been missing and eating a very delicious Hawaiian pizza. If you know me at all, you know that these are the ingredients for a heavenly night: pizza, movie (or a cool ass show like LOST), boxers and bed. For the moment, my sickness was barely noticeable. Along with the pizza, they gave me a tiny plastic bag with parmesan, chili flakes and...a small container with bread and butter pickle chips swimming in pickle juice. (They gave us these pickles when we had pizza last weekend too...it must be a thing). So, I eat the pizza and peel open these pickles. I eat the pickles but I leave the juice in the little container, which I placed on my desk behind my laptop. Can you see where this is going? Later in the night, with the lights off, I get the brilliant idea to take the computer off my desk and put it on the bed in front of me--the angle just wasn't right. I slowly slide the computer towards me and something falls off the desk and splashes on the floor...yep, the pickle juice. This was the last thing that needed to happen and it really did take "heaven points" away from the previous 2 hours. I jumped up, turned on the light, cursed myself for forgetting about the pickle juice on my desk and cursed the Koreans for deciding that pickles and pizza are a good combo. Of course, when I got the light on and saw the damage, it looked like the juice made a direct hit onto the top of my laptop case which will now smell like Vlasic for months.

New Pictures!

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=114820&albumId=3394484

New Videos!

http://www.youtube.com/solertia33

I can't seem to upload my "here's my apartment" video but I'll work on it.

Also, one REALLY quick last story because this blog has literally taken hours to post. I got a doorbell installed and it's wireless which is convenient but there's something screwy with the radio signals because when you push my button it rings in my apartment AND the apartment across the hall (and vice versa). Luckily, that guy apparently works long hours and I doubt I'll have any visitors so I don't think it'll be a problem.

I'm sorry for the unnecessary length of this blog and I'll try to keep 'em shorter next time.

I hope you're all well.

Stay tuned...

Love and Green Tea,

Brent