kamakazi

*** T-shirt of the day...on a sixth grader who hasn't any idea what the words mean when put together..."Join the Marines. Travel to exotic countries. Meet interesting, unique people and KILL THEM."

Taking a half a day yesterday with a cold that I could feel consuming my body, for some reason, when i Korea I get double as sick as I do in America. Waking up from my nap I found a pretty pink slip of paper on my car, in Korean of course, but figured it was a ticket of some sort. After picking up Alroy, Jin Shul his girlfriend kindly translated the contents for us

1.YOU DID NOT PAY YOUR AUTO TAX.
2. WE HAVE TAKEN YOUR FRONT LICENSE PLATE.
3. IN ORDER TO GET IT BACK YOU MUST COME AND PAY YOUR TAX WITH IN 24 HOURS.

And so, at lunch Daniel and I ventured to city hall, with a little help from a friend we paid the last 2 years worth of tax on our vehicle and reclaimed our plates!

And so, today I came in refreshed and ready for my day of no classes, "Test Day" as it read on my schedule. I had heard talk of an evaluation, but not knowing what it entailed, I just went about my day! As it turns out I WAS BEING EVALUATED in addition to the rest of the school....being curriculum, building, classrooms etc. At 11am I was told that I would be teaching a new lesson with a Korea teacher to demonstrate our abilities to work together and the teachers ability to speak English. The teacher turned up 10 minutes late, I think she was a bit more nervous then I was and everything went well.

My school is very different from the elementry school experience i had as a child.
1. Each morning the head teacher, a butt smoking...soju drinking man who cranks butts out the side door all day, gets on the speaker and says a long list of Korean things. There is however no silence in the classrooms, they talk and yell over him.
2. At 10am all of the students gather on the dirt pitch outside my window for morning excersies.
3. The baseball players, the only sport which I belive they offer here at school, wear their uniforms EVERY DAY! They sit in the back of class and are not expected to participate or have any knowledge at all. I have taken to calling each of them, there is one in each of my seven classes, "Mr. Baseball"...they think they are kings.
4. There are mirrors in each of the hallways, offices, bathrooms, libraries, corners...these people are VAIN!
5. They eat off of metal lunch trays with 5 round compartments:
kimchi, rice, meal of the day (i have seen pork, shrimp and onions ect.), dried fish and seaweed, fruit.
It has gotten increasingly more interesting.
6. Each of the classrooms at my school as well as my country school, (by country school I mean a school which is in the middle of no where with a small amount of students) has a large flat screen tv, a huge flatscreen!

Life is a little different over here!