Hi guys

Just wanted to let everyone know why I've been gone. My computer broke. *tear* but I'm back online now, so no biggy.

Nothing really interesting has happened anyway, well it has, but it's a long story. The climax of the teaching year was Wednesday. OMG PARENTS OBSERVATION DAY. Everyone freaked out, except me, I couldn't care less. For multiple reasons-one being I don't care what the school thinks of me, and two I'm confident enough in what I do I didn't change anything. But the work environment was high stress for a few weeks. Thursday we went drinking for lunch with our bosses to celebrate and one of the retard Board guys even wrote a mediocre speech in English to thank us. Whatever. I really don't like the school-it's a total sham. Love the kids though-they thought the day was as hilarious as I did. "Teacher! Usually the heat is off, but it's on today. WHY?!(wink wink)" "Teacher! Should I say I love your class? Will that make everyone happy?(har har)" Seriously, I love the kids. I feel like it's me and them VS. the stupid school. I think sometimes the homeroom teachers think I'm not serious enough, and I know a lot of the other secondary teachers(like music and chinese) teachers don't like me because the kids always talk to me in the hall and stuff-I play this cool version of stair-stickball with the boys. Again though, I care way more about what the kids think of me than the adults. The kids I like. The adults. Not to much.

Sunday was an awkward day. An old student of mine asked me to go to a "famous Jazz club" around 2:30. She said she was bringing a friend, and asked if Alex would come along too. Alex didn't want to go, but I talked him into it. I told him it'd just be a quick cup of coffee to placate some fairly nice Korean ladies. (They're in their early 40's). This student's English isn't so good either, so I knew it'd be a tough trip. Hopefully it'd be quick and her friends English would be better.
So we meet at the subway station and I ask where we're going. She says "Apukjong" You know..only AN HOUR AND A HALF AWAY. FOR COFFEE?? She says "oh no, not coffee. It's a famous restaurant. I have reservations for 7:00" It's 2:30!? So we get there, walk around some street, then she takes us to some modern art showing. It was like 5 pictures-that all sucked-and it was like a meeting of the pretentious club. That takes like 20 minutes. So now it's 4:30. Her friend still hasn't shown up, and we're sitting at a coffee shop buying $8 Lattes and speaking broken English, asking questions like
"Did you major in Literature in college?"
"No"
"Oh, what did you major in then?"
"Literature."
Sigh. Let's just call it frustrating and leave it at that.

Then her friend shows up, and her occupation is midly interesting-She works for a television station as a director of a travel show. She's been all over the world. Unfortunately the conversation went something like this:
"Oh, you've been to Tibet? How was it?"
"Beautiful and fun."
"Oh, ok. Well how about Madagascar? How was that?"
"Beautiful and fun...yeah...and hot."
...Man, it's practically like I've been there myself!

So anyway, after like 3 excruciating hours of that crap we get to this jazz bar, which is admittedly really nice...but the cheapest thing on the menu for dinner is $45.
Ugh. So I spent $75 for dinner(I DID have surf and turf, a nice class of wine-$18-and a tiny cup of gelato-$5. And it was probably the best meal I've had in Korea)
but basically what it turned out to be was, we were great accessories for the girls night out-I think. It's very hip to be seen with foreigners in places like that-especially much younger ones. So it was pretty embarrassing, pretty much a travesty of a day, and borderline kidnapping.

Worst of all, I felt so ashamed for telling Alex he didn't need more than $10 for a quick cup of coffee, and getting him into a 9 hour, $100, painful, fiasco that I now also owe him dinner this weekend.

Man. Korea. The crap you'll get into over here.