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| Little Zoey making crazy eyes for the camera. |
Hello again,
It's been a while and I apologize, but I've got some good pictures here, so hopefully that'll make up for my absence. September starts a new session, or a new semester at ECC, and with it comes all new classes. At the end of August kids are all tested for speaking / writing / grammar / listening, and are arranged into classes according their age and ability (and above all according to when the parent wants their kid to be in ECC and class availability ($$$) [which results in sometimes huge discrepancies in students abilities within a class {and makes my job a lot harder.}]) I've an all new schedule, but since I've been to ECC for a while now I usually know 9 out of every 10 new kids I get. I wanted to take pictures of all my classes, as I've really so few of any older students and you must get the idea that I'm some kind of preschool teacher, but the older a student gets the less willing they are to have their pictures taken. So, I have a new batch of youngins' for you today. I'm going to try and get some older kids sometimes soon, but I may have to bribe them. It would just be nice to be able to show the range of students I teach.
I drew a bit of a short straw on the schedules for this semester, which in my case means I work a bit later than others most days, but I don't mind too badly. My classes are mostly pretty good, and I have some breaks in my schedule that allow me to go to the gym upstairs in between some of them.
The two big upcoming items in life are Tylor's arrival next week, hopefully Thursday but possibly Friday, and then our ensuing vacation. If you want to check out the itinerary for the vacation if you'd like, but otherwise I won't talk about it until I get back and post some pictures.
The itinerary is at www.adventurekorea.com , just click the big picture at the top that says Ullengdo / Dokdo, and scroll down for an hourly schedule.
Lately we've been having some quiet weekends, a few beer or some wine at the park downstairs in the rain, and I'm not complaining. Brendan always has his girlfriend over and it's been the three of us chilling. Yesterday (Saturday night) involved Uno and wine. I feel I should probably take it easy until Tylor arrives, for I fear some sort of calm before the storm situation.
Speaking of rain, we're in the midst of a late monsoon season, and it rains all day 2 out of every 3 days. The rain makes it cooler during the night and I love it. I've been trying to convince Brendan to come out and play mud soccer but so far he's been unwilling. We went out once a long time ago and had a blast but it just doesn't seem like fun until you're out therein lies the problem.
Eating a bit better these days, a Korean girl at work named Lucy showed me a website where you can order vegan Korean food, and it ships to you in a day. I think it's meant for the Buddhist monks, but in any case it's a goldmine, the food is great. Soy burgers / vegetable dumplings, and tons of other stuff.
We went out to an indian restaurant and ate curry with samosas yesterday afternoon. The place is about 20 minutes on subway to get to, and that's probably a good thing else I'd be spending half my paycheque on chana masala. The only thing I've been missing lately is hummous...the only place here you can buy chickpeas is at a foreign food market thats about an hour and a half away. Next time I'm out that way I might as well just buy 10 cans of chick peas and have enough for the rest of my stay.
I've been recording a lot too, but not much worth putting up. There's one song I wrote about a sad robot, and something I'm fooling around with that might eventually be a song, I'll put those up anyway.
That's it for now.. enjoy the pictures. We leave for vacation (about a week) next Saturday, but I'll give you a small post before then to let you know how everything went with Tylor and anything else that comes to mind.
Bye for now,
Jason.
Bye for now,
Jason.
P.S. Forgot to mention it, but the students in these pictures speak no English yet, and mostly we've been going over facial features since I got them. They've got eyes nose and mouth down by now, but some of them are still struggling with ears. Two of the kids didn't have English names when I got them, and the little girl just below this text I named Zoey. Cheers.
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