I'm pumped!

Last night when I got home from dinner my neighbours were in the elevator with me. The first four floors of my building (I think) are academy floors, English is taught on the first and second floor, Math and maybe another suject are taught on the third and fourth. My apartment and one other apartment are on the fifth floor. I had just set up to check my email and there was a knock at my door, my sweet neighbour Mrs. Cheung came to introduce herself and brought me a bag of apples - she is very sweet! Now I feel even more safe living here!

Every Monday we have a staff meeting at 1:30, today was my first one. I sat in a classroom with Mr. Kim and the six Korean teachers while they bantered back and forth in Korean - I couldn't help but think that there were so many other things that I could have been doing... I guess immersing myself in the language was good at least. I later asked if there was anything important that I should know "one student is unhappy because the classes are boring" isn't school like that for every child? "Mr. Kim wants everyone to go out for dinner on Friday". "Hahahah that's it??? I could have slept another hour".

Teaching was great today I am excited to be learning the students names... I am even moer excited to shop for (and have) workbooks for my classes... my god I am running out of material. Today I gave my older classes spelling tests and then had them make up sentences with each one of the words - it was great: "I want to book" "I threw the cucumber at the trash can" "I want to be marker" "When I grow up I want to be bag". Poor kids, a lot of the time I am not even sure what they are trying to say but we can generally figure it out together.

After work I called Michelle to see if her and Ally wanted to meet up for dinner, Ally was out with other friends but Michelle and I decided to meet up anyways. This was intersting because neither of us had been out without any Korean people yet. We decided to walk and meet at the restaurant that we had gone to the night before since we both had some idea where it was... but not really. We made it though! It was only about a 20-30 minute walk from my place which is lovely! Michelle showed me around the area a bit. The went to eat, we managed to order a pitcher of meaktchu and some BBQ chicken, it was not bad at all. It was nice! Michelle is great she is from Wisconsin, she majored in French and Teaching ESL so she offered to give me some of the resources that she brought from home to use in my classes. I was pumped! After dinner to a convinience store and bought some more beer, then went to her place to hang out and she gave me a binder full of material... can't wait to use it. Around 3:00 she walked me half way home. The walk was so nice there is this one stretch of my walk that has so may trees, it makes for very nice shade during the day! I feel so good about this, now I feel like I can get anywhere!

Man I have never seen so many older women drinking beer, this stuff is way more common than water. Ah and Soju - you can get a bottle of it in the Supermarket for less than 1000won ($1.00).

Wow, it's 4:21am... I'm going to bed.

Wish you were here!!