Travel Log Korea from the begining and onward
Currently in South Korea.... Join the list by mailing korea@saradevil.com .
| It's very very cold in Korea. Or at least it has
been. The very very cold has made working more exciting then usual. The exciting bit is when we came to school on Tuesday to discover that the bathroom had frozen over. This in and of itself my not have been much of an event, if it had not been suddenly realize that the entire water and sewer system for the building had in fact frozen over. Now this is exciting, because kids are kids everywhere, and well adults are, too. Most of us are in the office for better than eight hours a day and not having a functional toliet can make things difficult. For the first day I ran across the way to the Loteria, until the toliet froze over there too. Since then we have all been going to the toilet at Ding Ding Dang, the school across the street that seems to have been spared the freezing incident. It seems that the reason for the freezing of the toliets is quite similiar to the reason behind the roofs leaking during monsoon season and flooding the office. The building, though brand new, is very poorly constructed. This does not seem to be to uncommon a practice in Korea. Buildings go up very quickly, and there does not seem to be a very strict standard of building or many inspectors coming around to check that all the rules and regulations are followed. My fellow teachers have a very bad heating problem, as the heat leaks straight out of their apartments through windows that do not insulate at all. Jason has a very annoying problem with his bathroom which has also frozen over. He had a very interesting take on this, though, as he reports that he is currently using it as a walk in freezer. Among other interesting building habits are elevators that do not have any kind of motion detector. If you happen to have your hand, or even your whole body in an elevator when it has chosen to shut you will find yourself quite quickly squished. Most of the elevators have a stop bar but by the time you hit the bar you've already recieved a fairly good bite from the closing doors. I learned very quickly that the elevators were out to get me, but I still have trouble figuring out which button to push to keep the doors from crushing me. My apartment seems to have been spared from the fairly shoddy construction, it's well insulated and in fact most days I don't have the heat on at all. The apartments here are heated through the floors usually, and I find that it makes my apartment too warm to have the heat set above 22 c (about 71 f). Other excitment this week includes Mr. Kim discussing creating a book based on all the worksheets and what not that I have put together for the books we are currently using. Apparently I did get a promotion, but what I have been promoted too is still in the air. I am trying to figure it out myself, but have decided it will all become clear eventually. In the meantime I have a dok-bu-ki date tonight with one of my students. She discovered that I liked dok-bu-ki and has since then asked me a couple of times to go out with her to eat. This is all interesting and strange because she is part of my Junior High School class with a poor English speaking skill, so it often makes for fairly akward conversation, or no conversation at all, but she keeps asking me. This weekend should prove to be exciting as it holds a trip to Seo-sun.... Cheers, Sara |