Soju...

Hey hey everyone out there in internet land. Let me first say yes, my luggage arrived safe and sound a little after midnight Sunday night. I was pretty excited about that. I think that I am pretty much over my jet lag at this point, and some friends from my school made sure of that, but we'll get to that later. It's been raining a lot the past few days, which is a real shame because all of these streets around here are beautiful and are just calling to my board. Although when I do take it out I will have to be very very careful of these crazy motorcyclists out here, even in the rain they are all over the place, and I do mean all over. They seem to follow no laws at all, screaming through red lights, hopping up on the sidewalk, weaving through the opposite lanes, its funny and scary at the same time. The cars are a little better, I've only seen two or three pop up onto the sidewalk so far...

I had my first day at the school yesterday and I can definitely say I had a really good first day. I am the only male teacher in the elementary age, but there are a few more in the middle school age. The only other native English speaker is a very sweet girl from England named Sarah, who has been over here teaching English for three years now. She is taking me to set up my bank account tomorrow and well, it's good to have someone I don't have to make awkward sign language at too.

It looks like I will have five classes a day, and six on Wednesdays. I am teaching mostly elementary classes and just one middle school classes a week. The kids are really funny and sweet, at least my first few classes were. They were all definitely raised to be respectful of their teachers, but they also have lots of energy which makes for a silly classtime. It is pretty weird to stand up in front of ten little Asian children who are all yelling Teacher! Teacher! if I ask a question or say something they don't understand. Anyway, I'll post more about these kids after I get to know them a little better.

This brings me to the end of the workday last night, I got home and changed and was all set to go down to a coffee shop and relax, maybe blog a bit or something, when I saw two math teachers from my school in the lobby of my building. They called to me and asked if I wanted to go get a drink with them. We went up to the second floor of my building which has a lot of shops, a dentist, a computer store, a hair and nail place, and a restaurant and probably a couple more. The girls names were, I think, Baong and Sung. They were also very impressed with my chopstick skills and my tolerance of spicy food, I however was not impressed with the Korean beer I had ordered, much too sweet for my taste. So after a couple of beers and a big plate of spicy tentacles, shrimp, muscles, and noodles the girls asked me if I had ever tried Soju before. Answering in the negative they immediately ordered us a bottle which was twelve or sixteen ounces i think. It tastes a little like sake, but they kept calling it Korean Tequila, with good reason I came to find out. Now keep in mind I was understanding about one out of every four or five words these girls were saying before the Soju arrived so things got a lot funnier after the first bottle was gone. Sung had a translator on her cell phone that they were trying to use, but that wasn't really helping much. After the second bottle disappeared, well, the grin was pretty stuck on my very red face. We walked outside and for some reason Baong bought me some ice cream. After that I walked them home and somehow stumbled back to my building and passed out.

So here I sit, twelve hours and a handful of Ibprofen later with a splitting headache, drinking green tea and thinking about going to buy a huge loaf of bread to rip into. This starting work at two thirty in the afternoon every day is going to be my downfall I think. Sarah has already said she wants to take me out to see the real Hanam (apparently the area around city hall isn't exactly thriving, comparatively, even though nothing seems to close around here) on Tuesday and then into Seoul on Friday, so we'll just see how that goes.

Take care everyone!