So, there’s a lot of new things going on. Most of this post was writtena while ago, so I’ll try to identify what happened where. GO:
Little Things:
Korean classes: I can now get through exchanges at the Family Mart in broken Korean. I’ll probably take another class soon, but things are bustlin’ right now!
Stuff To Do:
I was beginning to go nuts, because when you get out of work at 4:30 pm and you stay up irrationally late, you run out of things to do pretty quickly. So here’s the stuff I’m trying out now:
Mina
I was volunteering as a mentor/tutor for a girl named Mina. She’s from a muti-cultural family (her mother is Chinese), which is a pretty rough* spot to be in Korea, and the YMCA decided we’d be a decent match. She’s a fifth-grader, and a little bit of a pisser. We started to get along though even though she clearly finds me to be a bit of a hassle. I think I’m taking a semester off from Mina, though I may go back in a little bit.
Sports
I’d really been struggling with finding an entertaining way to get off my ass, but I may have found the beginning of an answer. I’ve taken up with a bunch of folks who play gaelic football once a week, which has been really fun. The Asian Gaelic Games in Seoul (well, Suwon) are coming up, which are sure to be totally crazy (over 50 football/hurling/other teams, I almost feel hungover already) will be congregating. Also, in winter I’ve been thinking of taking up boxing.
Theatre
There’s an ex-pat theatre troupe in town, and I am currently stage managing a production of A Streetcar Named Desire that’s going up this weekend! We’re holding it in a classroom, which makes the tech kind of insane, but I think it’s gonna come out really well.
*(As an example: In 2009, a survey of elementary and middle school students in Gyeonggi-do (and this is Seoul… the most liberal and multicultural part of Korea BY FAR) revealed that only 5 in 10 students believe they could be friends with a multicultural child (this is the PC term of choice here), and 1 in 10 believes that they could never be friends with such a child. Check out .
BIG Things:
Careers and Grownuptitude:
It looks like I’m gonna be here another year.
The D of Ed for the city of Daegu is offered to essentially pay for/pay a bunch of us to take a 180-hour TESOL course run by the SIT people. It’s a a $3000 course, and in order to take it, I have to hang for another year, so I’m doing that. The way I figure it: this way, I can pay down more debt and return (triumphantly) to the US with two years of teaching experience and my sweet-ass TESOL cert (the stuff of JOBS (I hope)). I may have even made some headway on the whole “career” question, which is like a whole ‘nother animal.
–Today, after school, I’m gonna try to wander around and take pictures of the neighborhood. I promise more pictures soon, in typical fashion I’ve been slackin’
