email

<--Namdaemun gate

Subject: RE: Cold In Korea

Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2008 01:39:08

dear mom and dad,

so i finally had my meeting and signed on with my job for another year. hooray! it's still very cold here. boo. i'll be in the same office, keeping the same apt, so im pretty content overall.

it looks like i wont be home for a while. there've been a lot of changes at work and im not too comfortable about asking for time off now, especially since i just resigned. ideally i'd like to be home for all of february for black history month (you know!) but we'll see what happens. i'll of course keep emailing in the meanwhile.

i still dont have internet! but one of my coworkers is leaving to go back home to canada and he has graciously offered to sell me his computer. i know for sure it will work in my place, since he's using it for internet at his place right now. so we'll see that that goes as well.

what goes on under namdaemun

did you hear that Namdaemun here in seoul burned down? Namdaemun is a historic gate that was designated the number one national treasure of South Korea, it was over 600 years old, i saw it on airang news. turns out the guy who did it was a 67 korean man, he'd been convicted of arson before. he said he hated society, or something, and that's why he did it. unfortunately i didnt get to visit before the fire, but i heard plans to rebuild are in the works. hey, i read that the canal market in camdon suffered a fire recently as well! is it shitty of me to say that im glad i got to go there before it burned? *blush* i heard no one was hurt, so, ya know...

we're in the last week of this term now and the kids are begging for candy and pizza and parties, all of which i decline. i'd love to reward them, but it's against the rules and for the better b/c im sure they'd go crazy with "last day" excitement. my class yesterday that usually gets all A's on the test got B's and C's yesterday b/c they didnt study. i told them all that i had planned pizza and movies for class that day, but would cancel since their grades were so poor. they were really sad and whined a lot. now that was shitty of me... funny to me, too, but pretty shitty... ha!!!!!

im finishing up teaching an abridged version of "call of the wild" by jack london. it's really interesting teaching it w/curtis in the class b/c he is a fan of dog meat. i'll be at the board breaking down sentences:

me: what does the book say about Buck the dog? What kind of dog is he? which of our vocabulary words are they using?
kids reading from the text: Aggressive!
me: yes, that's right. what does that mean? How else can we describe Buck? what are some other words for "aggressive?"
kids: Mean! Like to fight! Strong!
curtis: Delicious!
entire class laughs.
students beg to know if i've eaten dog meat.