Sanity/Poverty

I rushed in to school today for a meeting about the upcoming Intensive Program - for some amount of time, there will be extra courses wherein students do extra work and teachers come in at 9:30 and teach for three extra hours and make arseloads of pay while sacrificing their sanity. I was all set to join in on that, but it turns out our head instructor had to choose between myself and another of the newbies, and I lost the coin toss. So instead, I think I'll do tae kwon do. I've had Amy, one of our Korean secretaries, looking for hap ki do classes around the area, but she says there aren't any... so I've got to bite the bullet (gods, I hate using cliches like that, but I'm not feeling creative enough at the moment to come up with something better) and pay the 100,000 won per month for an interesting but somewhat less useful sport. Ah, well.

It occurs to me that I haven't written anything about my classes or my students yet, but as they'll be turning off the Internet soon, I will have to put that off for later.

Yesterday I got a Christmas card from Hanna's mother, containing some photos, which was lovely to have... a happy reminder of Canada. I'm starting to make use of the scrap paper I've been liberating from the school's recycling piles, as well, and appear to have gotten into my old habit of drawing strange monsters... perhaps a result of Hanna's desire some time for a moat monster, so thanks to her once again.

It's a tough gig sometimes being a foreigner and not speaking the language. I went to three different SK Telecom stores, trying to get my pay-as-you-go phone (donated by Jen) registered and activated. All said that they couldn't help me and I had to go to a bigger store. One of the clerks, who spoke even less English than the rest, was good enough to call an interpretation service, and after more than a few hiccoughs we established what I wanted and that he couldn't help me, BUT (after a lot of Internet searching and attempts to figure out how he could write the info - I didn't know how to tell him that I could at the very least read Hangul) he gave me the address of the nearest store where I could get this done. Now I just need to figure out how to get there...

Final update: I now have a rice cooker, Cuckoo brand (the biggest brand of rice cookers in the country and probably quite reliable) used for 25,000 won, one hopes it's a bargain. Bought from some Polish woman who is lugging two very-young children along after her travelling-businessman husband while struggling to find them decent schools in all the places they have to temporarily live. She's here for nine more months, then possibly off somewhere else, possibly not, and not long ago they were in Malaysia. ...There's one reason I couldn't see myself having kids.

Sorry for the boring update. Soon enough I'll be off to a mountain village and eating dog meat with a far-off friend from training. Should be lots to talk about then. I'll save classroom anecdotes and discussion of the staff introduction party (three weeks into actually starting here) for next time.