"Romeo's" 1st day at Young Seong MIddle

Monday the 30th was my first unofficial day at Young Seong Boys Middle. Paul picked me up at my apartment, I grabbed the small gifts I brought for the VP and co-teacher Ms. Lee, and off we went. We took the bus to school and I bombarded him with questions about what the school was like and what I should say to my co-workers upon meeting them. Apart from the basics, anyong haseyo (hello how are you), kamsa hamnida (thank you), and je ireum-eun Quinn imnida (my name is Quinn), Paul taught me a few phrases to help impress my future co-workers. I dropped bangap seumnida (nice to meet you) after, well, meeting people of course. It was amazing how high my stock flew after muttering a few poorly pronounced Korean words throughout the day!

Anyways, my day at the school started by meeting the Vice Principal. Korean schools place a lot of importance on internal hierarchy. The principal was absent so the VP was The Man at school. I gave him the fancy UW shot glass that I brought from home (lay off, I heard it was a good gift to bring) and got off on a good foot with the bossman. He spoke little to no English but managed to mutter with grin, "You...are...uhh...Romeo." We both laughed, me being confused and uncomfortable. "Do...you...uhhh...know why?" I looked at him with an awkward smile and blank eyes and shook my head no. "You...are...uhh...Romeo...because you have....uhh....Juliet! You are....loverman!" He then broke out laughing and I realized he somehow knew that I came to Korea with Julie. Throughout the day my co-workers would introduce themselves, welcome me, shake my hand, and ask me about Julie. I couldn't believe what I was witnessing. Shaking hands was supposed to be  taboo in the professional work environment, and we supposedly weren't allowed to ask co-workers about their social lives. Well, everyone shook my hand and everyone knew about Julie! Paul showed me around the school and periodically we ran into students. He would make them bow to me and say good morning/afternoon to their dismay. This process was rather comical. As we walked by classrooms, heads turned as the students laid eyes on their new English teacher. I felt like a gazelle walking by lion's den.

The room I'll be teaching in is super nice. It has a huge smart board, air conditioning, and each one of the 8 tables where students sit at has a built-in TV that comes out of the table at the push of a button. Crazy! The English room, oddly, is by far the nicest/biggest room in the building. And it's all mine! Kinda seems too good to be true actually...

Anyways, I had lunch with some of my coworkers and everyone was very nice. Kimchi, kimchi, and more kimchi! After lunch, the VP told Paul that he had a little somethin up his sleeve for me. He wanted Paul to ask me to conduct some sort of after-school English program. It would meet 2 days a week for an hour and a half after school, and I have complete freedom as what it would be. Paul was a little skeptical of my desire to work extra hours and to produce a lesson plan since I have never taught English before. After a long convo with Paul, I decided to do it! It's going to be called Sports English and I'm gonna play soccer, basketball, badminton, and, surprise surprise, table tennis with about 10-20 kids 2 days a week after school, somehow incorporating a little English here and there. They are gonna pay me an extra $100/week for an extra 3 hours of "work". Can you say cha ching!

Other highlights of the day include:
-our sweaty school techie calling me very handsome
-having only one "Western-style" toilet in school
-finding out a past English teacher was fired for downloading porn (insert joke here)
-multiple teachers brushing their teeth throughout the day in the staff lounge


That's all for now! First day of school starts tomorrow morning so I'm sure there will be funny stories to report.

Shop til you drop in Bundang

Day 3 included a little more exploring of our city. We headed to AK Plaza (formerly known as Samsung Plaza) to do a little shopping. We had no idea what to expect. It was a mega supermall full of all the usual suspects when it comes fancy European designers. And they were actually busy. The Louis Vuitton store had a line out the door with a bouncer. Louis Vuitton! A bouncer! Apparently Jules and I are easily excitable because no one else seemed half as astonished as us. After trespassing on the 20th floor of an unfinished apartment building to check out the sweet city panoramic view, singing "Hey Ya" in a private karaoke booth, and catching stares no matter where we went, we decided to call it a day by seeing Avatar 3D in the theater across the street from us. The Navi's language was subtitled in Korean. Lucky for me I had already seen Avatar. Not so lucky for Julie. The jet lag permitted me to sleep for 30 minutes or so. Good thing Avatar is 15 hours long...

Day 2 - Blood Test! and Seoul with new UW friends

Alright I'll try and keep the rest of these posts on the short side. One thing I forgot to expand on was my temporary apartment. As we walked in to the keyless apartment (you open it with a numeric password, pretty tight since I've lost keys before), Paul says "Oh yeah by the way, you don't have any furniture." Excellent. There is no bed, no desk, no toilet paper. Nothing. After pondering for a while, he tells me he'll get me a pillow and some blankets. "No problem!" he jokingly says, "I'm sure you did this all the time in South America right?" Lucky for me, Julie's apartment is on the floor below mine. My apartment is actually really nice, huge separate bedroom, fancy toilet with lotsa buttons, many windows, big kitchen. Onry probrem is that there's no furniture. I'm getting moved to my new apartment tomorrow (Wednesday) but it's gonna be way smaller. Boo. But it's gonna have furniture! Booyakasha!

So Day 2 started with our required medical check-up complete with blood test. Blood test! Balls. If anyone knows me (5 people including parents),  I hate giving blood. Call me what you will. After psyching myself about it for an hour, push came to shove. I asked the blood dude if he had any of those numbing pads  I've been hearing about. He laughed and tied the rubber band around my arm. Couldn't tell if he laughed because he didn't speak any English or if he was laughing at the pale, sweaty American wuss sitting at his chair. Either way he found it amusing. I survived to tell the story so I guess it wasn't too bad.

Julie and I spent the rest of the day walking around Seoul with her co-teacher Ms. Yoo, Ms. Yoo's friend Minyoung, and Minyung's new American friend Chip. Minyoung went to grad school at the UW and Chip was actually an Econ professor at, you guessed it, UW-Madison! He is now teaching Econ at a university in Seoul. We had a great time walking around with them. We walked around the Gyeongbok Palace and had chicken bolgogi for lunch. Oh and Julie got called a Carifornia Girl on the street in broken English. It was a wonderful-yet-rainy day!

하루 1

Groggy, grumpy, and gross, I finally landed the 13-hour flight from O'Hare to Incheon. The flight included all the standard amenities: on-call cocktail waitressing, personal TVs, digital shopping, and cookie cutter super models-cum-flight attendants. After picking up two 50-lb suitcases from baggage claim, we said hello Korea! and goodbye to each other, just like that (Other than Julie, who's in my city of Seongnam with me, I've still yet to see any other Wisco kid since meeting with my co-teacher). But anyways where was I? Korean Air, Incheon Airport, extreme exhaustion, saying goodbye, ah yes! The co-teacher. My co-teacher was in the airport along with Julie's waiting to pick us up. My English co-teacher, mind you, doesn't speak a lick of English. Yes you read that right. Any time I tried saying something to her she deferred me to Julie's co-teacher to respond. Hoh boy. To be honest it didn't really bother me. The SK gov't wasn't spending millions of dollars on English teachers if the current ones were already experts. Makes sense. Our teachers proceded to take Julie and I on a 1-hour taxi ride to our district of Bundang, in the Seongnam city limits. During the ride my co-teacher hands me her Korean version of the iPhone and says "other teacher from school." I take the phone, say hello, and I hear "Herro...can...you...unduhstand...my...Engrish." Trying to be as polite as possible, I encouragingly say yes. The voice then says, "Nah I'm just kidding. What's up man I'm Paul, I'm in charge of the foreign English teachers at your school." Cue: sigh of relief. Since I'm as new to this whole blog thing as kimchi is spicy, I'm gonna try and paraphrase the rest of Day 1 since you're undoubtedly getting bored if you're still reading this. Anyways, we met up with Paul, he showed me my temporary apartment, and Ms. Yu (Julie's co-teacher), Ms. Lee (mine), Paul (also my co-teacher I think?), Julie, and I ate out at a Korean-Chinese restaurant. We ordered enough food for a North Korean village (hehe) and called it a night after 24 consecutive hours of no sleep. Day 1 in Korea: Great success!

Korazy in Korea!

I've been in SK for about 5 days and between severe procrastination, travel ADD, shoddy Internet, and sheer laziness, I'm JUST getting around to the blog I vowed to create days before I left. So with no further adieu, the highlights from days 1-5!

PS Please excuse the  lack of photos, I'm currently camera-less :/