Birthday

I had quite good birthday today, for the most part. This morning I slept in and chatted with some of you people, which was nice. At school I received many gifts including rice cakes (sweetened gooey rice concoctions which taste considerably better than the preceding description would have you believe), Belgian chocolates, cookies, school supplies for my Korean class (I really should practice writing Korean, and the notebooks I got today should help), a tasty bread-cheesecake something or other, and a paper airplane from one of my kindergarteners. My kindy class sang happy birthday to me and ended the song by making hearts with their hands and saying "I love you Landon Teacher!" I am totally going soft in my old age because I found this adorable.

The nadir of the day was when I was giving a test to a class of older kids. This involves taking them out of the room one at a time for an oral quiz while the other students do the written part. I made the mistake of going out of earshot, and the kids left in the room tore up each other's paper tests and literally got in a full-out fight. Ukk. This class has consistently been the worst behaved, so I should have known better than to leave them even for a few minutes, but this was way worse than what I expected. We can't really do a whole lot to punish them, but ripping up someone else's test is definitely grounds for in-school suspension in my book (I am such an academic and nerd for this to be the part that appalls me rather than the physical fight).

After school I met up with other teachers for Korean class and we had the best Korean Barbecue that I have had thus far. Mmmm, barbecue. At class I felt like Korean was starting to click for me, which is a great feeling. The only other time I've had it was with German in Germany. I now have a rough idea on how to decline verbs and know the infinitive of basic verbs, which gives me a much better picture of the structure of the language. At class they also had a birthday cake for someone with a birthday in about ten days, so I got to share that too. The only bad part about Korean class is that the Pakistani and German and Chinese people make me feel stupid because they are learning their third language (or more) by being taught in their second language (or more), English, yet they are better at it even given that huge handicapp.

On the way home I got another birthday gift in the form of the subway system correcting their English grammar (!). They now say "the door is closing" instead of "the door is close", the latter of which had been driving me a little crazy every time I heard it. After dropping off perishable gifts at my apartment I met up with most of the other foreign teachers at The West Wing bar and hof ('hof' is Korean for 'bar', so it basically says 'bar and bar'. Also, the logo says 'sense 2002' instead of 'since 2002.' The logo is generally fantastic: it is the presidential seal except that the eagle is holding hops and forks instead of olive leaves and arrow.) Hanging out was great. We toasted America on this historic inauguration day (well, sort of, given the time zone difference), semi-planned a movie night, talked about relationship stuff, and other fun things. I'm really enjoying my fellow teachers. I was worried at first because I am so used to Reedies that it is like I'm not socialized properly and have weird expectations of people, like that they have some side interest of totally useless but bizarre and interesting information that they will spout out for hours to anyone who will listen. However, they seem genuinely happy to hear me spout off about obscure things like how the movie Hero as an example of brilliant subtle Chinese propaganda and other useless information, and they have interesting commentary to add even though they themselves mostly lack the weird trivia because they mostly studied things that can, you know, get you jobs. I'm deeply looking forward to hiking and chatting with Bo this weekend, and to our 'family dinners' and other social events with the family in general.

To sum up: I am really happy in Korea so far and had an excellent birthday.