Happy Leap Day!

It's that special day that only comes once every four years: Leap Day!!  If you haven't yet, I recommend you watch the most recent episode of 30 Rock. You will understand when you watch it.

These last two weeks have been busy and a little ridiculous.

First, major drama.  The new teacher ran away.  She was here for one night and then didn't show up for training the next day.  According to her, things had been bad at home and then she got news after she arrived here and had to go home within 24 hours of arriving.  This seems kind of ridiculous.  Personally, I think she got freaked out and ran away.  We had a very panicked 24 hours at work trying to figure out what the heck to do.

In the process of dealing with the crisis, it was discovered that Yina is no longer coming to teach here.  Sad face.  She apparently got her dream job in the US and is not coming back to teach in Korea.  Excellent for her, sad news for me and the school.  We finally got a who taught over our month of winter intensive courses to come back and teach for a couple of months until we get a more permanent solution.

I have spent a lot of time prepping my class for graduation and I even had to write my own speech. If you know anything about my writing, you know that I am a huge procrastinator. I finally finished it the night before graduation.  Then my babies graduated.  They all did an excellent job with their speech during the ceremony.  I said my speech.  They said goodbye.  I cried a wee bit.  I will miss my little munchkins.

Today was Erik's last day of work.  Tiffany, the Korean teacher in charge of arts and crafts and punishment, is also leaving.  It's always weird when teachers leave and we get new ones.  It kind of throws off the whole atmosphere of the office.  He's not leaving Korea though, so he'll still be around occasionally which is nice.

I have the day off tomorrow, but I left work with the news that one of the students in my new kindergarten this year quit, leaving my class with only two people.  To open a class, there need to be three people enrolled in it.  So I'm freaking out.  I don't know what's going to happen our how it's going to be resolved.  I really want to have a kindergarten class this year.  I think it's in my contract that I'm supposed to have a kindergarten class.  In any case, there are two less kindergarten classes this year so we don't have as many extra classes to go around.  Even with the one that I'm supposed to have, I would still have five fewer class per week because of the lower class to teacher ratio.

I'm getting my hair did tomorrow.  Surprises to follow.

I have Valentine's Day Chocolate overload

It's that time of year again, when people show their love through consumerism.  Now don't get me wrong, I love chocolate, I just think it's stupid to designate one day a year to show you love someone.  It's really the greeting card companies' faults.  In Korea, Valentine's Day coincides with a holiday that they call Red Day.  On Red Day, girls are supposed to give gifts to the boys that they like.  One month later, on White Day, boys who got things from girls are supposed to give three times what the girl gave them if they reciprocate the feelings.  That leaves April 14th, Black Day, for all of those who didn't get presents to celebrate.  I assume this means eats lots of candy and cookies and cry into a gallon tub of ice cream as a group.

Will miracles never cease?  I stumbled upon a Popeye's chicken fairly close to my apartment.  I have never seen one of these in Korea and was completely dumbfounded.  I mean I can't even remember seeing a KFC (although I know they exist here) and KFC's parent company has pretty well invaded the market with Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.  Also, Korean's don't seem particularly partial to spicy, or at least foreign versions of spicy.

At this point, I am impatiently waiting to hear back from graduate schools.  I have a huge range of dates in which I could hear back from them and I'm pretty darn antsy.  I have all of my taxes done and I almost (stupid website) have my FAFSA completed so I am in the home stretch and have pretty much nothing left to do but wait.  Ugh, waiting.

I had a very eventful day last week.  It started with two of my kids hitting each other (which they know they are not supposed to do) and me taking them to the teacher's room because it had happened one too many times.  The kid who was doing the most hitting (who is also the kid who stole some stickers about a month ago and got caught) got in so much trouble that he had to go downstairs and talk to the principal and almost got sent home.  He then came back to class crying, which is something I have only seen him do twice, once because he got soap in his eye and once because he felt sick.  This all happened within the first 40 minutes of class.  Everything went pretty pleasantly for the next hour or so.  One of the girls was complaining that she was really hungry because she didn't like snack so she didn't eat it.  She was starting to look like people do when they're so hungry they can't function.  About ten minutes before lunch time, she proceeds to ralph all over her desk, sweater and tights.  Luckily, because she hadn't eaten anything for a while, it was mostly just liquid.  We got her cleaned up and she tried to eat a little bit of lunch, then went downstairs to sleep until her mom could pick her up.  Thankfully, the rest of the day went pretty normally.

It's almost the end of the school year.  My little kindergarten boogers are graduating in a week and a half and I'm getting pretty sad about it.  I'm not really a big crier, so I don't think that will be a problem, but only two of them are coming back to afternoon classes in March.  Have I mentioned that I have to make a speech at graduation  as well?  Yeah, still not done with that.  I am a major procrastinator.  A new American teacher is arriving on Wednesday as well.  She is going to replace Erik.  At the very least, this week won't be boring.
New person next week

The usual

One of my kindergartners has been out of school since our Lunar New Year's break.  It's going on three weeks now, and it's kind of ridiculous.  At first, she wasn't going to be back from her grandmother's house until three days after break was over, then it was ridiculously cold and she got to stay home and now I have no idea why she's not back yet.

I had a lovely food adventure last week. Erik and I went to the Chinese neighborhood in Seoul and got some very authentic Chinese food.  It was so authentic, in fact, that the menus were completely in Chinese with Korean subtitles and no one working there spoke English.  We ended up ordering the dishes from the blog post that he had found the restaurant from because we really had no idea what any of it was.  We had kung pow chicken wings, a spicy tofu thing, and their specialty, a beef noodle soup that had cilantro in it.  It was all quite delicious.  I have developed mad chopstick skill and was able to pick up the peanuts with the chicken wing without thinking too hard about it.

Porridge: the Korean version of oatmeal.  It's kind of the same consistency of baby food, but don't let that turn you off.  It might be slightly closer to grits.  It comes in tons of different flavors like pumpkin, pine nut, squid kimchi and beef and mushroom.  It's quite delicious.  It used to be quite elusive and I didn't quite know where to get it except the not as good kind you get in those little chef boyardee-esque containers.  I found out yesterday that there is a whole chain of restaurants that offer it for take out and there's one right around the corner from my apartment.

Unpleasant Noises

In general, my apartment is pretty sound proof, unless there is someone in the hall or you're in the bathroom.  In the bathroom, I can hear all lovely things from other people's apartments, from flushing toilets to people hocking loogies in the shower in the morning.  Most unusually, I regularly hear the person in the apartment above me puking their guts out.  This is at least on a daily basis and always at really odd times and it is quite disturbing.

Yesterday night I was awakened from my grandmotherly early bedtime by bloodcurdling screams outside my building.  This went on for at least 30 seconds.  I couldn't see anything out the window except more people looking out their windows to see what the heck was happening.  I found out from the other American teachers the next day that they could see two people talking and then heard some giggling after the screaming so apparently it was a domestic conflict and not really serious.  That and the police weren't called leads me to believe that it was someone doing something stupid, but it was still hella annoying and disturbing.

This week is turning out to be excruciatingly cold.  The high today was 15 degrees Fahrenheit.  This makes my twenty minute walk to work extremely unpleasant.  I could not feel my face when I arrived.  There is also a layer of ice on everything because it snowed really hard yesterday then melted a bit and made everything ridiculously slippery.

I started filing my taxes this week and it's making my brain hurt.  I need to have them done so that I can fill out my FASFA so I can have financial aid for grad school.  So many extra things for foreign income which I don't have to pay for anyway because I only have to pay those taxes in Korea.  GAH.