Makin' friends, learnin' stuff, shabu shabu

It’s been one week! Wow. We don’t have the interwebs in the apartment they have us in until we move into Johnny and Amanda’s place, so my communication has been limited. But hopefully we will be able to make that move by next weekend. As for what has happened this past week, phooowf! I shall tell you. This week Ben and I shadowed Amanda and Johnny for all their classes. It’s a training period, so it has been a lot of information, and a lot of me asking Amanda one million questions. When she leaves I will be taking over about 12 classes. They range in size from three kids to thirteen kids. They are divided by level but the age range in each class is only about two years. But I am teaching from 7 to about 15 year olds. The most confusing thing is the curriculum. There are textbooks, workbooks, and supplementary material. For me the biggest challenge has been getting my head around what classes use what books and how often and all that jazz. But its pretty exciting stuff! I won’t actually teach a class until this Friday, but I have lead games in the classrooms, given speaking tests, and been introduced to most of the kids I will be teaching. They seem fun. Because the Korean school system is so hardcore (students attend regular school 8-2ish, and then often go to up six afterschool Hagwons like the ECC where I work) they are pretty fried and don’t get a lot of social time. This makes classroom management a little more difficult then I expected it would be. But I won’t really know how that’s going to go for me until I am in control of the classroom as opposed to watching someone else’s classroom. This Saturday we were required to go to the once a year training seminar that happened to fall the weekend after we got here. I wasn’t wildly pleased about that, but the information was actually really helpful and the guy who was presenting had been a teacher and had a lot of really good advice. The other teachers at are school are all really fun people! There are three other foreign couples (excluding Johnny and Amanda who leave Thursday). We have been taken out to fried chicken (apparently its a thing) by Joel and Jessica who have been at the school for over a year. And we spent a lot of time with the other two couples last night but I will get to that. There is also a large staff of Korean teachers, who seem like very nice people and who we will work pretty closely with as they teach our students either before or after the foreign teachers to deal with phonics and grammar. Alright, so before we left we received an invitation from Dan, who works with the recruiting agency thing, to go out to dinner with all of the new teachers in Gwangju. So last night we went to the downtown area with Cheryl and Nathaniel to have shabu shabu. WOW BOY, let me tell you about shabu shabu. You take your shoes off as soon as you walk into the restaruant, and you sit at low tables on the floor. Built into each table is a burner with a big ole pot on it. In the pot is a spicy broth that gets heated up once you are seated. They bring out a plate of giant mushrooms, srouts, cilantro, and a bunch of other stuff and that goes in and cooks. Then they bring out a plate of thin sliced beef that goes into the broth and cooks. AND THEN YOU EAT IT TILL YOU EXPLODE. Well, actually, once you have eaten that down to the appropriate size they bring out fat delicious noodles that go into the pot. Then they bring out rice. It was delicious. Whilst we were at dinner we made friends! We sat across from a couple who had both been in Korea for a couple years before. We actually started talking because we are going to buy a phone from Chelsea. Her boyfriend Luke works waaaaay north a couple miles from the DMZ but she lives a couple minutes from us. We talked with them for all of dinner. Turns out they have similarly nerdy interests to us and there was much talk of Doctor Who and Firefly. Long story short, Chelsea is coming over tonight to drink wine with us and play dominion. We are making friends! Bahaha. It also didn’t take us long to realize we are really lucky as far as the foreign staff of our school goes. There’s more of us then is usual, and we ended up clicking really well with everyone we came with! Besides Cheryl and Nathaniel there is Kezia and Jack. They met and started dating last year while both working at different schools in Gwangju. The six of us ended up spending the rest of the evening together. We had a LOT of fun with them. We went to two other bars with them and met a friend of Kezia’s named Kat who is really delightful as well. She is on her second year back too. There was pool playing, beer drinking, dancing, all sorts of fun stuff. We both came back to the apartment feeling really really good about getting to know the people who are here with us! We also all arrived within two months of each other so we are all going to be here pretty much the same time! It’s exciting stuff. There is a big expat community here and it seems to be good people.