Why I can't join the <6 sleeping hours club.

Thank goodness it's Saturday.  The end has come to one of those long weeks - the kind that just make you want to crawl into bed and pull the blankets over your head ... even just for an hour.

It started out well enough.  I finished my long run on Monday fully pumped for the half marathon we've got coming up shortly (!) and walked home all happy.  Jon had made pasta for dinner, so I sat down to eat.  Then it started.

My appetite was sapped.  I, a person who really really likes a high-carb dinner, couldn't stomach more than a bite.  Nausea set in.  I curled up on the couch with Keedo, who knew something was wrong, and fell asleep for a few hours.  When I woke up I still wasn't hungry, but the nausea had subsided.  I ate a bland dinner of cereal and granola bars (which I'll eat any time of day), and passed out early - 9:30 or so.

Now, this meant that I got a good night's rest, but also meant that I'd not prepared for class the next day.  I woke up early, showered, and scrambled to work by 6am to google, print, photocopy and grade essays before my 6:40am class started.  The day went on as per usual, and Jon and I met up with some of his former students for a bite to eat after work.  A little bit of dongdongju (ice-cold Korean rice wine) on a weeknight never really hurt anyone, right?  We went home happy and satisfied after hearing some rollicking good stories from Fiona, a robust Korean woman with far too much personality to fit in here.

Out again for a drink (is this really Monday?) to meet Chi-ho, a friend we didn't expect to see after that night because we're leaving in just over a month.  We waited over an hour before we gave up on him and called it a night, jogged across the main street, ignoring a taxi driver motioning for us to stay on the median instead, and back to our flat.

Minus my wallet.

I went back to look for it no more than 20 minutes later, but the whole scene had already changed and the wallet was nowhere to be found.  That's when I realized that the taxi driver was trying to point it out to me, tell me that I'd dropped it.  So much for being able to tune out Seoul's millions ... serves me right.  From then on, for one reason or another, I got only 5 hours of sleep - this, for a girl who obviously needs closer to 7 or 8 to function properly.

On Thursday, I misplaced my glasses.  Friday morning, I thought I lost the gift certificate to Adidas I'd won after the race.  I forgot my cell at home one morning, and Keedo got at it.  Now, when I press 9, or text using 'prs', I get a question mark.  My feet have been soaking wet all week because of a few days of rain (morning until night) and I really just needed a recovery day.

The good news is that nobody used my cards before I cancelled them, but getting replacements will be a royal pain.  I'm bummed that I lost my wallet, a funky purple snakeskin single-fold (i.e. men's wallet) that I don't expect Club Monaco to carry again.  But mostly, I'm just a bit angry at myself for letting a few small things get to me so much.  I guess that's why I need to be babied a little - a full night's sleep for this one or all hell breaks loose.

Note: Since I initially wrote this post about 3 weeks ago, I have lost my cell phone, forgotten my glasses on my bedside table and had them chewed up by Keedo, temporarily misplaced my temporary wallet in the staff room at work, and become a bit of a laughing stock for it all.  I took the cell of a former coworker who left Korea in early June, locked the phone while trying to put it on vibrate and had to lie about ownership to get the cell unlocked.  The list goes on. This has been more than a wake-up call reminding me that I shouldn't go drinking twice on a weeknight and that I have a one of those rare patient and supportive boyfriends.  It has also helped me realize that this culture is just way too damn fast for me to keep up with.  I'm definitely looking forward to slowing down a little back in Canada when I return on July 7.

New Year's (Take Two) and Other Surprises

Well, I was hoping to split this into a few posts and make it look as though I had posted our events in a timely manner.  Instead, I've pretended to do so in two bursts of posting.  This is the second burst (for the first, see the two previous posts, below). Please forgive me if I am repeating myself a little.

Since New Year's, we've had a few interesting events.  I've been given a few more advanced classes (Pschool Intensive Program, or PIP classes) teaching reading and writing in addition to speaking and listening.  This means that I'm with the same group of students for either two or three hours each day of the week, and have actually begun to feel like a teacher.  At first, I felt torn in many different directions and spread a bit thin, covering three or four different activities in an hour rather than presenting one long activity like in the conversation classes (Speaking, Listening and Expression, or SLE classes).  Now, the SLE classes seem slow and monotonous in comparison.

While I was adjusting to these new classes, we got a piece of ... interesting news.  While we were at work, a pipe burst in the apartment above us, causing water to stream down our walls and onto my laptop.  Jon discovered this in the afternoon when he finished work (one of his classes was cancelled so he formally finishes work at 3pm).  I got the call at work at about 4.  My computer was fried, about one or two months after buying it.  And yes, because I made some stupidly impulsive decisions, it was already the second laptop I had bought since I arrived in Korea.

To make a long story short, we were moved back into our old studio for five days while they re-wallpapered our current place and fixed the flooring.  Keedo had been sent to a dog hotel overnight to make this move easier and to test out a place we've had in mind for him during our upcoming holidays.  During his overnight stay, the trainers noticed a bit of blood around his mouth, took him to our vet and found that he needed a tooth removed. Lets call this surgery number one.  Jon then took him back to the vet for a follow-up visit and the vet suggested that the other K-9 also be removed.  Surgery number two.  Keedo came home to a different apartment feeling drugged, woozy and a little bit abandoned.  All of this on the day before and during Jon's birthday.

Jon's birthday!

January 14 is his date, and it was celebrated with lots of food gifts and 'Happy Birthday' serenades from his students (especially the girls ;) ) and a pre-wrapped corporate gift from The School.  Turns out it was a ladies' perfume set - whoops!  For dinner, we went to a traditional Korean restaurant nearby with our close friends David and Richard (others were still working through dinner) and had some makkoli (Korean rice wine) and padjeon (a giant Korean pancake mixed with vegetables and slices of octopus - deelish!).  Then we all hurried off to bed to ready up for a big Thursday ... we'll continue to celebrate Jon's birthday this coming weekend.

A few days after Jon's big day, we moved back into our apartment to find they'd just cranked up the heat to dry the floorboards (heat comes through the floor in most Korean homes - AC from the ceiling.  Heat rises and cool air falls, right?  It just makes so much sense ...).  I got a new laptop identical to my old one within three days.  Keedo got new toys from the dog hotel and Jon got ... a year wiser.

So now it's the night of Friday the 22nd and we're resting up for the last day of a 14-day working streak.  We're a little pooped and would probably be grumpy, too, if it wasn't for our weekend plans.  We're going to Shanghai for the lunar new year.

It's been in the works for about a month now.  We got a great deal on the plane ticket, have our visas ready and secured travel insurance long ago.  We invited some friends to go with us, so there will be seven of us in all.  Jon got in touch with an old coworker, Ken, from the university he worked at in China to help us find a place to stay, and the plan is to meet up with Ken and take it from there.

We're pretty excited!  We'll be back on the evening of the 27th (and start work early on the 28th) so will have photos and stories to share in the near future.

Oh - one last thing.  For the first (real) time and maybe the last, it snowed!!!

More pictures!

Some more photos of the puppy and what we do during our short-short weekends!  That's right, we're working on Sundays this month, so this may be my our post until next Saturday.

Jon and pup in the evening - he's only this sweet when we've woken him from his mid-morning nap or just after he's fallen asleep after midnight.

He's rarely this sweet, really. This is a good one chosen from many, many pictures that didn't work out.

Can't you see it in his eyes?  This little guy wants to see the world!  And who are we to stop him?  That, or he doesn't want us to leave him here.  I guess we won't go to Japan next weekend after all ...

Visited the new Hard Rock in Itaewon this evening for dinner at the request of a student of mine (his English name is Larry) who works there part time.  We could see this neat drum display pretty clearly from our very cool table - which was actually an enormous couch stretching the length of a huge wall and jutting forward far enough for us to stretch our legs out comfortably.  It felt more like eating dinner in bed than at a restaurant, even when the mediocre American rock band started their set.

Larry and I near the stage, after a huuuuge dinner of protein on a bun (with fries on the side).  At Larry's recommendation, I ordered a delicious pulled-pork sandwich (the pork was Chilean) that had been tossed in a fruity syrup.  Jon ordered the famous Legend Burger - a massive bacon cheeseburger (beef was from New Zealand, not the US).  We then gave into temptation and topped off our meal with a brownie sundae - delicious, but not guilt-free: I still wonder if Larry will slot me into his mind as yet another greedy westerner.  Ah, it's tough to escape the stereotypes!

Until next week: cheerio!

Just testing a new Post method

Please ignore this post!  Thank you!

Korean Food Culture and the Unnamed One

So, the first month here at The School has finally come to an end. It was hectic and confusing with more to learn in a short period of time than I've ever experienced, both during and outside of work.

Like I might have mentioned, the challenges began on the first day, when we taught 7 hours of class after our brief training: sitting in on 2 hours of classes taught by new teachers. We picked up where substitute teachers had left off, found out days later that we needed to have completed a syllabus within three days and submitted it to our managers, that we needed a name tag (and still don't have one) and just winged it from beginning to end. Over the month, we've learned that most teachers wing it in SLE (Speaking, Listeneing, Expression) classes, because there is no homework to assign and because there are few lesson plans to complete (The School recommends working out of the textbook). But at first, we had put a lot of pressure on ourselves.

After settling into our routine a bit, we've voluntarily thrown a wrench into the works. We've rescued / adopted / begun fostering a puppy. The funny thing is that to explain our reasoning, I have to start with Korea's food culture.

Korea's food culture has changed dramatically since the country began to develop rapidly in the 1980s. Nowadays, young Koreans eat yougurt for breakfast, a sandwich or spicy chicken dish for lunch (often with rice, of course), and something similar for dinner. And always with kimchi, a spicy appetizer of pickled cabbage. Costco is busy, the E-Mart department store used to be owned by Wal-Mart, Starbucks is absolutely everywhere (although declining sales have caused it to shut some stores) and pizza is a big hit. Jon and I have even found some of our favourites - a certain kind of granola, a specific type of yougurt - more available in shops here than at home.

But not all Koreans have changed their dietary habits. We sampled dried minnows in E-Mart last weekend, I knawed on chicken neck when out to dinner with a student, and I've begun to realize that kimchi is omnipresent. Universally linked to celebration, some foods are eaten at a certain time of year. This past week, from July 28 to 30, marked the three hottest days of the year. The appropriate food for this fest? Dog. Mixed breed only, please.

Conveniently, we met our little mutt on the first day of this festival. One month old and weighing under 800g, he had been brought into one of Jon's classes in a plastic bag by Kiddo, a student. Puppy had been a gift between a couple he knew. The couple soonafter broke up and Kiddo was charged with finding a home for the little guy. Not exactly an animal person, Kiddo was en route from picking him up and on his way to the gym, where he was going to put the pup in a locker while he worked out. Yikes!

So, after class, Jon brought Kiddo and the pup to our apartment. He handed me the puppy, all smiles, and asked me a few times, "What do you think?" I was confused until Kiddo walked into the kitchen with a food dish and some kibble. Clearly, we were keeping him.

We have since done all the new-parent things: taking lots of pictures, telling all our students about it, and waking up in the night to calm the crying little guy. We've also realized some constraints that we face - work being far from the most major concern. With broken up shifts, our jobs are actually quite good for this sort of situation, with one or two hours between 3-hour teaching blocks. Neither should our desire to travel be a problem: with lots of teachers living nearby and some sorely missing their own animals, we have volunteer dog-sitters. There are also pet hotels nearby which, although a bit expensive, might be a great option for when we take a longer vacation.

Now that both his body and his voice have begun to grow (within days we've seen lots of change) our most major concern is our living quarters, and whether this is suitable for an energetic dog.

Living in a nice little studio apartment, we have a lot of space for a little pup. By the time he is full-grown, our flat will be relatively small. We have yet to find whether we can keep an animal in the building, although students have suggested that quiet pets are tolerated. I'm not so certain that we'll qualify.

So now we have to make a difficult decision - and soon. Option 1: we find him a home with a dog-friendly family very quickly so that he can adjust to a new living situation at a young age. We will be lonely without him, but free to move around and keep our cash from the pet hotels. Option 2: we follow through with our commitment to keep the dog and stick close to home (for the mostpart). We get a barking collar for him to reduce his barking while we're at work, and bring him home with us to Canada, which should be no problem - $30 plus proof of rabies shots in English is all we need.

Will let you know what we choose to do ... advice and recommendations are welcome!!!