Adventures from around the World

Monday arrived. We had until 10am to pack before we had to meet the co-teachers.  I felt like I was a puppy in a pet store, waiting to be picked…it was a little disconcerting when nobody picks you L.  But as it turns out, my co-teacher was a little late so I didn’t get to meet her until the end of the closing ceremony.  It was only for a moment, and all she did was apologise for being late, but I knew instantly that things would be good.  Soo is bright and bubbly.  She laughs a lot, is quite young, and speaks excellent English.  She actually studied in Vancouver for 6 months and then took the train to Toronto, stopping at all the major cities along the way.  After lunch she and my vice-principal, who is also very nice but who speaks very little English, drove me to Mokpo, about an hour and a half from Gwangju.  Soo and I talked the whole time, it was wonderful.  The VP said that I looked smart J.  We arrived at the school, which is huge; there are 1000 students and ~35-40 per class.  The school was built 8 years ago, and though it seems like the facilities are beautiful and up-to-date, I was told that it is an old school.  The only downside is that there is no A/C.  This is actually a large downside, you see I don’t know if I have mentioned the heat, but it is hot and humid (think 30degrees plus 50% humidity = perma-sweat – I am sweating from places I didn’t know could sweat). So that should be fun to work in.  However, the teacher’s lounge IS air conditioned and since I will be spending about half my working week there, I should be alright.  Let me tell you a few things about the school:
I will be teaching grades 3-6, grades 3 and 4 once per week, grades 5 and 6 twice per week.
This amounts to 20 hours per week
I switch between two co-teachers every other week, so I only see the students once or twice every two weeks.
I teach from a CD-rom so my lessons are basically planned for me (score)
School doesn’t start until the 31st so I have a few days to just chill
The other teachers are very nice, there is a mix of young and old, but everyone is friendly
Once I saw the school, we went and applied for my alien registration card (immigration) and I was taken to my apartment…I was told that the principal was busy so I had to wait until Tuesday to meet him. 
I moved into my new apartment and it is fantastic.  It is very small, I will be frank with you there, but it is new clean and just enough space for me.  I have never lived entirely on my own so if it was too big I feared I would have felt very alone.  There was a girl living here before me and she left me a wonderful amount of stuff: an iron, bicycle, hair drier, DVDs, books, a scale, and a plethora of little things that I cannot remember entirely.  The bike is really cool, its pink and white and it is really ghetto.  It also has a basket in front and a carrying rack on the back.  This made my first trip to the e-mart pretty easy…..the e-mart is like walmart, in that it sells everything! But it is actually more of a super market (its where Koreans do most of their shopping) with clothes, toys, electronics, appliances, homewears, cosmetics…..its a pretty crazy place.  Now let me explain grocery shopping to you because it is not exactly like what we have at home.  Now I don’t know if you are like me, but I love sample day in the grocery store.  You get to stroll through the isles and casually eat and drink one or two things along the way…fantastic I would say.  Here it is ALWAYS sample day…but its not one or two items there is nearly one per isle, a few in produce and some in meat.  Now these are not casual tasting….oh no!  The sample people yell and really try and convince you to buy the product….it is really crazy….but once you get over the yelling you realise that you can actually eat an entire meal here…EVERYDAY!!! I mean why buy anything? I ended up spending a couple of hours in e-mart before heading home for the night. Heading home was interesting, I can see e-mart from my apartment and it only took a couple of minutes to bike there….but somehow I managed to get lost on the way back.  I took a slightly different root back to the apartment and I turned too soon, so after wandering into a bunch of apartment buildings that weren’t mine, and circling the block a few times I finally found the place, put away the groceries/things that I had bought, and settled in for a movie before bed.

Here is a layout of my apartment: