Opps! It has been awhile!

Obviously I'm not very good at this blogging thing but I hope to fix that now. After talking to my friend Vicki back home yesterday, she helped motivate me. My goal was to write about everything and as each day passed my list of things to write got to be so big that I started to get overwhelmed. So thanks to her advice, I am going to try to post what I'm doing now. Thanks Vicki!

I just got home from my Thanksgiving dinner with 25 other foreign teachers at a steak restaurant. It was delicious but I did miss the turkey, mashed potatoes, and pie! Apparently, it is very rare to find turkey anywhere and if you are lucky to find it at Costco, it is really expensive. Plus no one I know has an oven! We discussed how we could cook a turkey in a toaster oven. We were all surprised that everyone showed up to dinner also because we were all together last night for some friends goodbye party and many of us did not get home until after dawn! It was a great dinner with wonderful company and definitely amusing seeing all of our beautiful faces the day after a long night.

Things here are going well. I am really enjoying the experience of immersing  myself in the culture. I have been trying to learn some Korean because not many of the people in my area speak English, even at the school I work at only 2 of the 5 Korean teachers speak English well. It has been challenging but fun. I live above a chicken restaurant about a 5 minute walk from my school but my neighborhood is a suburb of Daejon and downtown is about a 30 minute bus ride. It isn't bad and actually I think its better for me because if I lived downtown I would be broke!

I am the only foreign teacher at my school, which so far hasn't been too bad. I was confused the first day because I was shuffled from classroom to classroom, which I thought was weird because I thought I was going to have my own classroom and that I would be only be teaching kindergarten. Come to find out that I would be teaching 12 different classes throughout the day for times anywhere between 10, 20, 25, and 50 minutes. What? This seems weird and how is this going to work? That is the way the system is set up.I actually really enjoy it because it makes my day go by fast, I don't get bored and it keeps me on my toes. But it is overwhelming to think that I teach 175 students! Thank goodness I don't have to grade papers! The other nice thing is that the school provides us dinner every night, so I have been able to try most of the Korean dishes. Gotta say though that my favorite is the BBQ and shabu shabu (Shabu-shabu means “swish-swish,” referring to the swishing action when you cook a very thin slice of beef in hot water. It is cooked and eaten at the table.)

I know there is much more to share but I want to keep these short. Please feel free to post questions or what you wanna know and I will try to answer them as soon as possible.

Until next time,

Happy Thanksgiving