Ok I think my enteritis is almost gone...yay! Yesterday I only had one student in my last class because they are all taking exams in their high schools...yuck.

Tomorrow I don't have to work! Yay! I think Ronald and I are gonna try to check out a hot springs spa...it's like 6,000 won and you can stay there for 15 hours without repaying...nice.

Ok off to work. Yesterday it was raining but the day before was beautiful. I hope it gets some consistency soon...

Boo.

I have enteritis. Stupid bacteria. Stupid food.

I finally went to the doctor yesterday after having bad/sharp stomach pains for around 4 days. What happened was I felt so terrible and Sora asked me what was wrong and I just broke down sobbing as if a family member had died. So she took me across the sidewalk to a shopping center that has an internal medicine clinic on the 4th floor and the doctor diagnosed me with enteritis, gave me a shot in the behind, and sent me on my way. Basically I can't eat anything but rice and steamed veggies. So I'm eating this pretty gross porridge thing they have here...it's basically watery rice and they add finely chopped veggies. Super bland. Just now I added some ketchup to give it some flavor...much better.

*sigh.

Cherry Blossoms

I didn't understand why everyone was making such a big deal out of the cherry blossoms blooming until I realized yesterday or today that they bloom and then the pink/white falls off and you're left with a normal green tree.

So hopefully this weekend I can catch sight of some cherry blossoms!

A dude came today and put up the curtains! They're orange, almost burnt orange, and they clash terrifically with the orange comforter. Nice.

Today and yesterday we gave our classes a speaking and writing test. Super boring and super awful. They can't speak OR write. *Sigh.

Last night Ronald and I tried two new restaurants and they were both busts. Bummer. Tonight we went and had Sangyupsa, Korean barbeque, and it was extremely expensive. Good, but way too pricey. Then we found a spa! Much like the Dragon Hill Spa I went to with Charis a while back, but less fancy. This costs 7,000 to get in, and I have no idea what all they have because we didn't pay. Downstairs where we found the spa there was also a place for bowling! In bowling alleys here, you can't drink. Strange. You can drink on the street, in the metro, in a taxi, but not in a bowling alley? Whatever...

Ok I'm tired so I'm going to bed now. Chao!

HomePlus

The discovery Ronald and I made about HomePlus: it has a good variety of things and a wider selection, but is much more expensive than E-Mart. We took two days to write down the prices of the different items we were eyeing and E-Mart definitely won. Except for the fact that HomePlus gave me a pepper grinder! For that I must never forsake it...

An exciting thing: I bought an internet subscription for a year (am I a grownup yet?) and now have my own cable and we are in the process of searching for a router.

Another exciting thing: Winter is leaving! It's getting warmer, though Seoul still has desert-like qualities of intense temperature drops at night. It also has the oh-so-endearing quality of perpetual gusty winds.

Another exciting thing: we're going on an island bike tour this weekend with Adventure Korea. I hope we meet some cool people

Yet another exciting thing: we bought curtains! They're orange, and the lady is going to install them on the 28th, who knows at what time...(now am I a grownup?). Basically I can't sleep past 6 30 am and have decided to finally remedy this situation.

Ok, one more and I swear I'm done: Tom, the bad boy in my basic class (7 years old) told his mom that he only wants to study with me and he wants to do it forever. ajaj...I felt appreciated...

Ok off to pack my bag for the weekend trip! Chao

Oh, and, they love spam here. They give it as gifts to each other.

Still haven't gotten used to looking up for places to go...I'm still looking at the ground level...must work on this.

E-Mart doesn't have pepper grinders.

Yet another week...

Work is the same, so I won't bore you with trivial details.

On the way home from work I stopped at Gubeundari to go to Home Plus. It's a British company I think and has a lot of TESCO stuff there. I think it's better than E-Mart, so I may be stopping there regularly. I bought quite a bit of stuff there that I've been wanting to get and I found chips and hot sauce! Yay! I need to go there again to get a pepper grinder because the pepper I bought at E-Mart didn't have a build in grinder like I thought it would! What am I supposed to do with pepper balls...so I think I'll stop by on my way home tomorrow after work.

Thursday morning I woke up and went to Insadong and walked barefoot and handed out flyers with two other girls and then I went to work. Boy did my feet hurt! And I was only barefoot for like 3 hours! I can't imagine...

Friday after work I stopped off to pick up a book and a bottle of wine that I bought from a guy on Craigslist. That night I went out to a bar with Pete, my co-worker that I go to Korean class with, and we hung out there and I caught the metro home.

Saturday I woke up and went to meet a dude at a metro station to pick up a toaster oven I bought from him for 20,000 won. So now I have a toaster oven...yay! I want to get a microwave, a blender, and a rice cooker, but the rice cookers here are so expensive! I just want what Meg has from Target that's $15 but they don't ship internationally. Sad day. Anyways, then I met Pete and his friend Mike to grab a drink before Korean class. Well, instead of grabbing a drink we went to a market by Jogno 5-ga...it was really neat. It was inside, but there were no doors really. Sort of like a covered market. In the center of it were a bunch of little stands that you could eat at. I want to go back and explore more! There were also a lot of foreign products there and I found out that they have my perfume there! Yay! The bottle of Jack was still too expensive though, so I didn't get it. Basically, Pete and I skipped class and then walked around with Mike. It was pretty crazy around that area because you could buy whatever you wanted, but it would literally be like 3 blocks of stores selling purely stools or lamps. Very random. Then we saw the puppies and kitties part. I had to leave the store because I almost cried...I thought it was sad to see the kitties there. They seemed to be too young to be away from their mothers and there was one in a store we passed that looked like it had literally been driven crazy from being in the cage. Really sad.

Then we went to eat at samgyupsa which is the thing where you cook your own meat on the grill that's in the center of your table. They put a bucket of coals in a hole in the table and then the grill over it. They replace the grill whenever it gets too dirty. We drank something that I can't remember the name of, but it was rice wine. The same stuff I had with Charis and her friend on the night before Easter. After that we went to a bar called Beer Market that had a good variety of beer and we sat at the table with beer in the middle. There's a hole in the middle of the table where they put different beer and ice so you just take out the one you want to drink. After that we went to a bar by Mike's apartment and hung out there. We played darts and some Koreans sang karaoke. A lot of the songs were sung by the Filipino bartender. Apparently a ton of them come to Korea on entertainment visas and sing in bars and stuff. We slept at Mike's on the futon and this morning we went to Smoothie King and then came back home. I immediately took a shower and I cleaned a bit. I need to organize some stuff and correct the kids' essays, so I'm out!

To see

some pics

Saturday, the day before Easter

So on Saturday I met up with Andy and we went to go meet Charis and her two friends, Forest and Paige. We met them at the Gangnam station and went to a café nearby (called something like Book and Café) and ordered coffee and Dr. Fish. So we drank our coffee and then it was time for doctor fish....first the guy rinses off your feet.

Then you stick your feet in the pool (here's me and Andy in the "extreme" pool...these were some big ones).

This cost 2,ooo won and it was supposed to be for only 15 minutes, but we were there longer because it wasn't crowded. Basically these fish just eat the dead skin off your feet (so I understand).

Here was an artsy shot of a fish poking its head out:

After that we walked to the pancake restaurant (Butterfinger's) and put our names down for a reservation. We had an hour to kill, so we went to an enormous bookstore nearby. I bought 3 books (including The Little Prince, which I've already finished and loved) and then we went back to eat. The food was amazing. Then I met Pete at Korean class at 4:oo (1,000 won again) and after that went out to a restaurant with the teacher and him and a girl from another class. There I had sushi and then went out to where Charis lives because we had decided earlier that I was just gonna crash at her place so I could go to church with her and Paige the next morning. So I went out there and met her and we brought down the extra mattress Paige and Forest had, and were chatting when her neighbor/coworker/friend knocked on the door. He'd been celebrating someone's birthday but had left early and wanted to hang out. So we chatted for a while and then finally made it out to get some dinner around 11 pm. He took us to an authentic Korean place...pretty cool. They give you a metal teapot filled with fermented rice wine (not bad, actually) and some Koreans joined our table so we sat and ate and chatted.

Sunday morning we met Paige and headed over to the church across the street. After some searching we followed some other white people to what we correctly assumed was the English service. It was on the 10th floor and they had a projector, band, stadium seating, etc. This church was humongous, but anyways, we attended the service (part of it was some weird/really bad and boring interpretive dancing that made no sense) and then I headed back home. On the way to the metro I picked up some mandu (dumplings) and accidentally bought 8 instead of 2. So I'll be taking those to work tomorrow for lunch...

When I got home I was dismayed to find that my free internet had vanished. The network I'd been stealing from is gone. So I'm down at Holly's Coffee a the bottom of my building. I'll have to ask about internet tomorrow and a package that didn't get delivered...*sigh. I didn't want to have to pay for internet. Hopefully I'll be able to find something cheap. I need the internet because every Sunday the students submit essays online. These can only be accessed via Internet Explorer (only the worst browser known to man which Korea seems to prioritize) so I have to use my parallels every time.

Also, I signed up for internet banking with Woori bank and you have to use Internet Explorer. I downloaded the security software, but it still was giving me an error message after I had entered my password to login, so I called the help line. They basically had me reinstall all of the programs but it still didn't work. So their "expert" advice was to try a different computer. Awesome. I'll just have to use Paposo's when he gets here...fome.

I made Korean flashcards. We shall see...

You know something's wrong when...

I saw a couple today. His purse was cuter.

Class

On Saturday I went to Korean class with Pete, a co-worker. We went to the level zero class (this is 3 classes long) and we can't go to the level one class until May. I guess really we could go, but that would mean we were going in in the middle of the course (it's 10 classes long). You pay 1,000 won at the end of the class which basically just covers the cost of the paper copies. We came to the third class, so we were a bit slower than some, but we plan to go until we can hop up to level 1.

Tomorrow I'm going to meet with Andy again. We're gonna go to lunch and after that I'm heading to class. At night I'm meeting Charis to go to an apparently amazing pancake place that her friends are obsessed with.

Today was really nice and sunny though the wind definitely makes it rather chilly. Today I went to school then picked up some things at E-Mart (potatoes, fabric softener, towels. was going to get some Jack or champagne, but it's outrageously expensive....$50 for a fifth, $20 for the cheapest sparkling wine) and another random store, picked up a pizza (not too delicious) for dinner, and headed home.

Tomorrow is the 3rd which means I have to write a number outside my door that corresponds to my gas usage for the month. Sora told me today that my health insurance should be coming soon. I have my phone, so I'm pretty much set.

The Korean education system is pretty crazy. Elementary school is the same as ours, where the kids can play and learn, etc. But once they hit middle school, it is all work and no play. They go to middle school around age 14 I believe. Every day (including Saturdays) they go to school and then usually go to 3 or 4 academies after. I work at an English one. So the kids might have gone to a math one and a science one before coming to mine. So it's pretty hard to get them to do their homework because they're so unbelievably busy. A lot of the older ones don't even want to be attending class, but come because their parents force them to. Pretty much when they hit high school they stop coming because they have too much schoolwork. At the end of high school you have to pass this huge exam that basically tells you where you are going to go to college. From what I hear, college is sort of a joke and they don't really have to do much. So they climax in high school basically. Pretty much everyone I've talked to hates the system but Andy tells me that the man in charge will be there for a while. Well, I hope they figure it out...

Today Nhi showed me the stationary store, basically Office Depot but Korean style. It makes me want to paint! They had tons of great stuff there, but art is way too expensive of a hobby. So I'm banning myself from that place in order to not go bankrupt.

I think I'm going to try to go to Japan in September. Korean Thanksgiving is in September and it's really the only substancial break I get. Mainly I just get random days throughout the week which really sucks because it means I can't really go anywhere. Oh well. If I save enough money I can just go after I finish the year's contract.