Today was a Tuesday like no other.
As usual, I got to work about 10 minutes late. I went straight to the computer in the corner furthest away from the director’s office. He came in to make copies of something and told me they had a meeting and wanted me to attend.
Usually their meetings are all in Korean so I opt out of them. But when I actually get invited, that means they’ll speak mostly English. But there’s still no point in me being there ever.
This meeting was about what my director wants to do for the “summer intensives”. This is my understanding of what those are…
The kids are out of school for some portion of that time so any schooling they do is extra. And during this extra time, the private English schools (and probably other schools) do their thing a little differently too.
From what I understood, I’ll be teaching kids in the mornings and adults in the evenings. I frowned up immediately but realized I had no choice so I blew it off. Then I remembered that he’d probably change his mind in the next few days anyway. And the schedule isn’t set at all so I started thinking about what I was going to eat for lunch.
After a little while, they started talking about the same thing but exclusively in Korean. After a few minutes of that, I decided I’d had enough and went to get something to eat. I came back with 10 minutes left before teaching time and decided to read a book until then.
I had a pretty normal day of “teaching”. I taught four classes today. One class consisted of 10 minutes of throwing a small bouncy ball around the room at the kids and them throwing it back at me, 10 minutes of them doing the homework that they had a week to do, 25 minutes of rushing through the lesson, finished off with 5 minutes left for the real teacher to do her thing. That’s about an average day for that class.
Work was finished and I had made a commitment with the receptionist at my job. I was supposed to go with her to meet her piano teacher. The whole situation was really odd to me and I didn’t know why she wanted to meet me. But I figured why not.
I talked to one of the other teachers and asked her if she knew anything about it. She said she’d ask the receptionist for me.
The deal was basically that the receptionist tells her piano teacher about me all the time. The piano teacher said she hasn’t met too many nice foreigners and wanted to meet me. It’s funny because they said she wanted to “see me”. Which I could’ve taken to mean she just wanted to look at me and see what a nice foreigner looks like and that would be the end. But maybe that’s just something I would do. If I say I want to see someone, then I probably just want to look at them. But when I worked at the post office, a guy told me he wanted to see me when he really meant something a bit more troublesome than just looking!
Sooooooo I get there and it’s a bit awkward. Two girls are there already playing two different pianos at the same time. It was pretty cool to listen to and they were both great at it. The teacher talked to me for a while in her extremely basic English while the receptionist translated a bit here and there. She ordered pizza for us and made awkward conversation while we waited for it to arrive. It was interesting and somewhat painful at the same time.
When the pizza got there, one of the girls stopped playing the piano and joined us in the bumbling section. She spoke English really well and translated a lot for me. The situation became a lot less uncomfortable but I was still left wondering why I was there.
They asked me what my hobbies were. I told them I like taking pictures. The lady said the kids can make cameras out of paper and draw a picture on another piece of paper. They put that paper inside of the paper camera and take a fake picture. I had no idea what she was talking about so she showed us how to make one. That was about 15 minutes of fun which was better than the grand total of zero minutes of fun before that.
After a while, I realized that I was invited just so the lady could meet me since she heard so many nice things about me. They called me handsome and said I had a nice face shape. The piano teacher said I looked like someone from a children’s show. The first thing I thought of was Little Bill; I’m not sure why.
But it was another one of those “only in Korea” experiences which are generally nice depending on how you look at them. Or, depending on how bad it was, how much time has passed since it’s happened.
Anyway, I’m putting up the penis forest pictures in about 10 hours and hopefully some beach pictures or more Hong Kong pictures about 24 hours from now.
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I do so enjoy your blog/notes!!
LOL at Little Bill….my little cousin loves that show
why are you always late?
Thank you Lola!!! I rambled so much in that one but I figured one day, I’d want to look back on that and laugh.
I’ve never seen little bill but I saw a picture of him the day before and he popped right into my head! Then I thought of the Boondocks but figured that didn’t make it to Korea.
I’m always late because I get there at 1 but don’t have to do anything until 2:30 (on the two days that I actually teach). I figure I can save myself 10 minutes of sitting there. And it’s a 5 minute walk from my box so I usually leave a bit after 1.
I love how something might bother you for a moment, but you shrug it off, realizing, TIK (This Is Korea), and immediately switch thoughts to foooooood.
Food is really one of the few things that actually matter here.