As you can see in the picture of the bathroom, Korean bathrooms don't have bathtubs. The shower head is connected to the wall of the bathroom and the whole bathroom is your tub. There are drains in the floor of the bathroom. I kinda like it because that means I won't have to ever clean my bathroom! The downfall is that the bathroom floor is wet for a good hour or so after you shower. I've shown my apartment to multiple people and they all say that my apartment is really clean and better than theirs. I'm pretty happy about it! I still need to buy some stuff and figure out the garbage system. I just have a big pile of garbage and recycling that has been sitting on my floor for a week!
The other day I was sitting in the parking lot of my apartment building and the landlady walks over to me and starts trying to talk to me in Korean. I don't know what she is trying to say but then she points and grabs my hand. I pick up all of my banjo stuff thinking that she is kicking me out of the parking lot. I follow her and we go into the building and pass the first floor (where I live) so i figure maybe she is taking me to her office to sign some papers or something. We walk up four flights of stairs and then I realize that she is taking me to the roof. We walk out the door and she leads me to a picnic table with benches and an umbrella. She shows me that I can play my banjo up here and she shows me how to put up and down the umbrella. The view from the roof is amazing. Here is a video:
K. So now I'm going to talk about school. After my co-teacher shows me my apartment she tells me that we are going to our school to meet the head-teacher, principal and vice principal. I'm really nervous because I've heard that the principals are usually old, stern men that are very traditional and you need to make a good impression so that they like you and make your life easier. We head over to the school and I realize that my house is about a 7 minute walk to the school, which is awesome. I am led into the principals office where he, the vice principal, head teacher and my co-teacher are all sitting. Throughout the whole meeting I make sure that I have a huge smile on my face and that I'm outgoing and try and make them laugh. At orientation they told us that Koreans don't like awkward silences and that you should just keep talking all the time. So that's what I did. I think the principals really liked me because they were laughing and smiling and asking me questions. One of my co-teachers told me that since I've been at the school the principals have been a lot nicer haha. I ask my co-teacher about the school and she tells me that it is very small compared to other schools and that there are only about 320 students. Many of my friends teach at elementary schools with one to two thousand students! Because my school is so small I will teach 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th grade classes and I will see each class twice a week. I will also have 4 special classes that will only have about 10 students and I have more freedom to teach whatever I want during these. Since my contract says that I have to teach 22 forty minute classes I will also have to teach 2 teacher classes a week. This means that the teachers and principals have to come to my class twice a week after school and I have to give them an English lesson! This is the part I'm most nervous about! I have two co-teachers. One I work with everyday and the other also works at another school and only comes to ours on Wednesdays and Fridays. My co-teachers tell me that we will each teach 20 minutes of every class and help the other during their 20 minutes if they need it. With seeing each class twice a week, having special classes and teacher classes I will have to plan 16 lessons a week! Most of my friends do 4-6 lessons a week and have to teach the same lesson like 6 times a week. My school is also right at the base of Apsan Mountain and because of this there are Buddhist temples all around. Here is a picture of my school, Namdok Elementary.
As I said earlier, I have 2 co-teachers but so far I have only mentioned one. My other co-teacher's English name is Emily. She is also tiny (like the majority of Korean women) and super cute. She's 38 years old and has 2 kids. Did I mention that she is freakin awesome? She speaks English really well and has worked with other foreign teachers before when she worked in a hagwon (private English academy) and she understands everything that we have to do because she has done it all before. This is how awesome she is: last Saturday she invited me to go with her family to Woobangland which is the biggest amusement park in Daegu. Her husband bought us all wristbands so that we could go on any ride and we spent the whole afternoon there riding rollercoasters. Well, her husband felt bad because no one besides me wanted to go on the rollercoasters so he went on one with me and was terrified and almost threw up! I felt really bad after that and told him he didn't have to go on any more. After Woobangland they took us all out to dinner to eat a really yummy fish dish. The fish was pollock in an amazing spicy chili sauce. Surrounding the fish was pieces of pig (?) intestines and very large fish eggs. Sounds interesting right? It was actually delicious! I have loved almost every dish that I have eaten here so far. Our school lunches are amazing! The other day they served hard boiled quail eggs with pieces of pork in a yummy sauce. I think I like quail eggs better than chicken eggs! Anyway, this past week she invited me and a foreign English teacher that works at her other school to the Daegu International Jazz Festival. It was a very classy evening and I think the tickets were pretty expensive. I need to figure out a way to
repay her. Emily is also an amazing teacher. She is really good with kids and does fun activities to keep the kids interested. Many of the teachers here strictly teach the textbook (which is not very good to say the least) but she supplements the book with better materials. I think it will be really fun to teach with her.
Since downtown Daegu is only a 25 minute commute and it is in a very central location we use it as a meeting place. Daegu has roughly 2.5 million people which is about the same size as Quito, Ecuador but Daegu's downtown is much bigger and way more bustling. Cars try and stay out of downtown because there is constantly big masses of people walking down the streets. There are so many restaurants and stores and Daegu is known as the fashion capital of Korea. The girls here are dressed to the T all the time and all of them wear high heels. I've heard that Korean women even wear high heels when they go hiking (I'm not even kidding)! It's pretty hard to look semi appropriate when all the women look so stylish all of the time. Not to mention they are all really thin and adorable! To say the least it has been really fun going downtown on the weekends!
Yesterday I met some friends downtown at a local ex-pat restaurant/bar for Sunday brunch. There aren't many places that serve authentic Western food so there are usually lots of foreigners at the Holy Grill. It is run by Canadians and features a selection of burgers, Tex-Mex and eggs-and-bacon breakfasts. After we ate brunch we walked around downtown and a girl we met the night before, Madeline, pointed out this cafe/spa that she had been to previously. This cafe is particularly special because it has little bath-tubs in the floor filled with tiny minnows. You pay \6,000 (around 5.50 USD) and you stick your feet in the tub and the little minnows attack your feet with their tiny mouths and eat off the dead skin from your feet. I can't even explain to you the feeling of 50 minnows nibbling your feet. It tickled so bad and was such a weird experience it took me about 5 minutes before I could even look in the water. Lara (a friend) and I were laughing so hard we were crying and we were probably the butt of many Korean jokes since the whole coffee shop was filled with Koreans enjoying coffee and bread. I'm sure we were being a little disruptive. So we had to sit with our feet in this minnow infested water for 15 minutes. To my embarrassment my feet must have had much more dry skin than anyone else because the fish were getting a feast of dead skin from my feet. There were so many more minnows eating mine than anyone elses. It was quite an experience!
When we were in orientation many people warned us about the personal questions that Koreans ask you right when they meet you. They told us that we would definitely be asked our age, if we are married or have a boyfriend and many other questions to determine our status. Older people have a higher status than younger people and there are different words for everything in Korean depending on if you are using formal language with an older person. I was introducing myself to one of my classes and a student raises his hand and asks, "Teacher, what's your blood type?" I laughed and thought this was a pretty funny question coming from a fourth-grader but i answered it anyways. After the fact I learned that Koreans believe that one's blood type says a lot about their personality. I don't know what O positives are like... Anyways, I don't find these questions too personal and I take it as a sort of game where I try to one-up the Korean by asking them even more questions than they ask me. So it just so happens that I have a very good looking co-worker who is 26 and took me on my first night here to get groceries and eat dinner. I was pretty curious about his relationship status so about an hour after meeting him I ask him, "Are you married?" He answers, "No." "Do you have a girlfriend?" "Yes." "How long have you been together?" "Five years." "Are you going to get married?" "Yes." "How did you meet her?" No answer. Either he didn't hear me or I totally won the Korean question game. So the next day I tell my co-teachers that I think my co-worker is really hot and that I wished he didn't have a girlfriend. I was also warned in orientation that you should not tell your co-teachers anything that you don't want the whole school to know about because Koreans like to gossip. I notice a week later that it seems like my hot co-worker is scared of me because he won't talk to me and doesn't look at me when I see him in the cafeteria. I tell my co-teacher this and she giggles and looks at my other co-teacher. I ask her what's so funny and I know what she's going to say. She says, "You remember the first day when you told me you thought he was cute?" I say yes. "Well that day I was talking to our co-worker and I told him that you thought he was really cute and you were sad that he had a girlfriend." I am so embarrassed that she told him that and now he's too scared to talk to me. Hopefully it's not awkward next time I have to talk to him!
Next weekend me and a few friends are going to Busan, which is on the coast, to see some friends from orientation. I guess you can see Japan from the beach on clear days. It should be a lot of fun!
Oh and in many public buildings they use squatter toilets. There are only squatter toilets in my school and they really scare me. I don't know how to use them properly and I don't particularly like them at all. Let's just say I have only gone to the bathroom once at school.
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