Owned by the Korean ATM

So after finally getting paid, my coteacher was nice enough to go to my bank with me to show me how to pay my bills with the ATM machine. (Korea is super nice in that everyone pays all their bills through the ATM. Takes like a sec and bam, instant payment.) Well, the process turns out to be super easy. This ATM, however, is a special ATM that's different from the normal cash withdrawal ATMS and is only available in Korean.

I basically memorized which buttons and in what order to push, so no problem. But my sweet coteacher, worrying that I would be confused next time, actually introduced me to one the Korean staff at the bank. (There's staff that stands around these ATMs to help old people work the machines, lol.) So the person she picked doesn't speak English, but she told him my situation and asked him to remember what I looked like so next time I come in, he'll know what to do, LOL. (My coteacher's uber cute, and she constantly worries whether I can handle living in Korea)

Here comes the really funny/sad part of my ramble. After we paid my bills, we were heading back to the school. I mentioned how I was suprised my phone bill actually ended up to be less than what I remember her telling me at the store. I thought that I had just lucked out in that the phone company made a mistake. She asked to see my bill, and it turned out it was less because the bill wasn't mine!!!

It was addressed to me, but it was a bill for the previous tenant. So I actually ended up paying someone else's bill! Then my coteacher, bless her heart, asks me in all sincerity why I didn't read it and just paid it. Cuz the entire bill was in Korean and I couldn't understand it, lol!!!

I felt SO silly! In the end, everything turned out to be okay because my coteacher called the phone company and got them to reimburse me. But for someone who's been so independent the past few years, I kinda feel like I've gone back to being like a child. So utterly dependedent on my coteacher for so many different aspects of my day-to-day life...

My First Paycheck ^__^

I just got my first paycheck today!! (For some of you, you might find this blurb a bit silly, so sorry in advance for all you folks.) But it's such a great feeling openinig your paystub to find out how much you've made for all your work, lol. :P

Granted, I've worked at SC, and I've had odd jobs here and there (lol) but it's not the same. This is my first full-time job, and to get paid knowing that I don't have any major expenses to pay, it's a good feeling! :D So with that said, I can't wait to have some fun with this!!! ^__^

My First Guest is...

...Ning!!!

I'm so excited! He's coming in tonight and chilling for the weekend before he starts teaching himself in China.

I've been really lucky to meet a lot of great people here so far, and it's been so much fun getting to know them, but I still miss my SC peeps a lot! It's just not the same. So, I'm UBER excited about Ning coming, and I've already got the whole itinerary planned. I only wished that I could've taken a day off work, but unfortunately, the school won't even let me leave early (even during my "planning" periods where I basically just sit in front of my comp!) : / Oh wells, will just have to make do with the weekend! Yay! :D

My First Korean Concert --- with Big Bang and Super Junior!!

This weekend, I went to my first concert in Korea: the Asia Song Festival. The festival featured Big Bang, Super Junior, Girls Generation (3 of the 4 biggest pop star groups in Korea. If you walk around anywhere here, you'll hear their music coming from every which direction), and other various artists from around Asia. I don't know how they did it, but the entire concert was free and open to the public. You just had to go online and download a ticket. So of course, I didn't miss out. The show was awesome, but getting into the show was quite an adventure...

First, was getting the tickets. Luckily, there was an English version to ASF's website with a special section for foreigners to reserve tickets. Unfortunately, we had missed the deadline to get through the English site, so I had to register through the Korean site, lol. Luckily, my friend who I was going with speaks Korean, so she walked me through it. No problem.

The fun part, though, was that ASF's English site said that the downloaded ticket wasn't an actual ticket. It needed to be exchanged the day of the show for real tickets, and the ticket exchange opened at noon. (The concert started at 6:00) My friend and I figured if we lined up at 10, we'd be able to get tickets for good seats.

So, we meet up at 10 on Sat. We go to line up, but there's a million different lines. We try to ask the staff which line we need to be in, but no one seems to know what's going on. We finally decide on the "Foreigner ticket exchange" line. After an hour of sitting in the blazing sun, though, we realize that our ticket print-outs look different from the people around us, and then we figure out that we've actually be lining up in the wrong line!!

So we move over to the right line, and after another hour of waiting, the staff starts to come. We think, finally, we can exchange tickets and go home for a few hours. The staff, however, divides us into sections from our print-outs. Soon, I start getting the feeling that we're actually in line to go in...

Unfortunately, I turned out to be right. It was 12:30 by the time we figured this out, and the people around us were waiting to be let into the stadium. The concert doesn't even start for another 5 and a half hours!! So after waiting in line for over 2 hours, my friend and I decide to leave and just come back nearer to the show.

When we get back later that day, it's completely packed. Getting in was a madhouse. There were thousands of fangirls pushing and shoving to get in. Not fun... But when we do get in, we luckily get some great seats facing center to the stage! It was pretty high up, but much better seats than I expected for showing up so late.

I went with 3 other people: Jenny, TJ, and Dan. Jenny's like me in that she watches Korean dramas and knows the basic K-pop stars, so we had a blast!! The other two guys, however, had never heard of any of these groups before and were basically in it for the experience. We felt bad in the beginning, but after a few beers (which btw were in the funniest cups. The outside of these cups are printed to look like a glass with beer and foam in it, lol) and seeing the craziness of all the fangirls around them, I think they had an enjoyable time.

The concert itself was a lot of fun. ASF did absolutely a wonderful job. I still don't know how they managed to make it free. One funny thing to note is that it's meant to be a concert, but they randomly decided to throw in an awards show in between the performances. That was amusing.

The groups also performed really well. Each did 2 or 3 songs. Of course, Girls Generation did "Gee"; Super Junior did "Sorry Sorry"; and Big Bang did "Lies". I'm not gonna lie. When Big Band did "Lies", Jenny and I shared a super fangirl moment. We ran down all the way to the front of our section and just danced and sang to our hearts' content. It was way fun, and I'm sure Dan and TJ were super amused by us, lol :D

The stars...

Girls Generation

Super Junior

And of course... Big Bang

Food Adventures

As per requested, I will be posting tidbits and (more importantly) pics of my food adventures in Korea...


The other day, I was really craving seafood, so we decided to try out some sushi. Sushi here is kinda expensive but still cheaper than the States, so it's not bad. After wondering around for a bit, we decided on this nice conveyor belt sushi place. They had a nice selection, but it was a bit pricy. Overall, decent but not exceptional. One item worth mention, though, was their crab bake. They had this gorgeous crab bake with lots of cheese (a rarity here in Korea), corn, and the tiniest bit of crab. Yum...

My Favorite Class :D

Fridays are my longest days. I have to teach 6 hours instead of my normal 4, but I did luck out in that my favorite class is my last class of the week. So thankfully, I get to end on a good note after being exhausted from the week. They're so enthusiastic and fun that it makes my Fridays fun.

The downside of this though is that the kids are very perceptive, and they know when they're my favorites, which makes it much harder to get them to behave.

Take this one kid. He's so funny. Everything from the way he looks at you to the way he talks just makes you laugh. I try to make eye-contact with all the students when I'm talking, but I have to avoid his face sometimes because every time I look at his face, I just can't help but laugh. I try not to but I can't seem to help it. Unfortunately, not only does he know this but he also sits right in the front row, so he constantly tries to get my attention. And of course he doesn't take me seriously when I try to discipline him, but what can you do?

Worse though, is this other kid in the class. I don't know if he's the class leader or something, but he's very confident and he seems to be the popular kid of the class. He probably has the best English in the class, so I noticed him from the first time I taught this class because he was one of the few students who actually answered me. Later, I saw that he does Tae Kwon Do (he was play challenging his friends with some kickes and punches during break), so naturally, he became one of my favorites.

He participates a lot during the activities and even helps me sometimes when I have trouble communicating to the other students, but the unfortunate part though is that he can get quite rowdy. He knows he's smart and he knows his English is good, so when he gets bored with the slow pace of the class, he either talks with the people around him or he makes faces in his seat. (He even strikes an occasional pose, which I'm sure he thinks makes him look so cool.) I try to get him to behave, but he also knows that he's one of my favorites, so listens for like a second before goofing off again. Once when I was trying to get him to stop messing around with his neighbor today, he had the audacity to wink at me!! Here he is, this sixth grade kid, thinks he's just that cool! I didn't know what to do, but I couldn't help but laugh at his boldness.

So even though these kids don't take me seriously, they're super fun. Overall, they turned an exhausting morning into a fun Friday afternoon :D

A Stove Story

So after two weeks of eating out and not cooking, I decide it's time to break in my kitchen. (Just miss eating my own food) But being the complete nub that I am, it actually took me a whole 30 minutes to turn on my stove!! It was kinda ridiculous. Here's what happened....

I was all ready to cook and everything. So I turned the knob but all that happened was the clicking sound of the lighter lighting the stove. There was no fire :( Now back home in GA, our stove is old and the stove's lighter doesn't work, which means you have to get your own lighter to ignite the gas. So, (being the clever person that I am) I reason that this stove is the same.

I go to buy a lighter, but I still don't really know how to ask for things in Korean very well. I looked up "lighter" in my handy-dandy dictionary, and show up at the store to ask if they sell it. Of course, they don't understand me. I tried saying it several times and even showed them the dictionary entry, but still no. Finally, I was just so at a loss that I just blurted out "lighter". And they understood me!! They were like, "Oh! Light-ta!"

So after 15 minutes, I finally buy my lighter and go back to my apartment. I try my stove again, this time with the lighter, and still it doesn't work. At this point, I have no idea why the stove isn't lighting. I'm starting be afraid that it's broken.

I go down to search for my building maintanence guy to ask for help. When I find him, I try to tell him that my stove doesn't work. Again, I looked up "stove" in my dictionary before finding him. He doesn't understand. Again, I show him the dicitonary entry, and that doesn't help either. Finally, I'm not really sure how, but somehow, the term "gas range" came up. I can't believe it. He didn't understand "stove", but he knew "gas range".

So he gets his tools and we go to my stove. The first thing he does is turns this little knob somewhere along the pipes on the wall, and he lights the stove. OMG!!! Apparently everyone, even other teachers in my program, knows you have turn on the gas. No one told me!! And so, the mechanic spends the next five minutes explaining to me how to light the stove, all the while thinking I"m an idiot. : /

Moral of the story: if you're ever in Korea, and your stove doesn't work, make sure you turn on your gas switch!

Life without an Identity Sucks :(

I finally understand the trouble international students at SC (and elsewhere) must go through to get a US social security number, to set up US accounts, etc., and I have to say, props to them. I never realized how much hassle it was until now.

So in Korea, if you're a foreigner, everything revolves around an Alien Registration Card (ARC). You need it to open Korean bank accounts, to set up internet, to register for a phone, etc. It takes about two weeks for them to process your paperwork and give you an ARC, so until that time, you basically can't do anything important.

I applied for an ARC as soon as I had the chance, but I'm still waiting for it. Until I get it, I can't get the money that my school owes me, and I can't get a cell phone number even though I got a cell phone from a friend last week. Luckily, my co-teacher was nice enough to set up internet under her ID, so I'm not completely stuck in the dark ages. But currently, my Korean cell phone is just sitting on my nightstand mocking me. :(

Pop Stars in My Own Classroom...

So today, we did a warm-up activity where we played clips of popular Korean pop songs, and they had to practice saying whose song it was. I expected the kids to enjoy this and thought the girls would sing along. But it turns out that the two kids who enjoyed this activity the most were two skinny little boys. Not only did they lip-sync to the songs but they also danced it to. They did all the hand motions from the music videos. But they only did this for the girl-group songs; they completely ignored the boy bands. It was really funny...

Mexican Birthday Dinner in Korea???

I'm super lucky to have an awesome co-teacher. (A co-teacher is a local English teacher at the school who serves as your liason to your school. He/She basically is the one who can make your year wonderful or miserable.) I super lucked out with my co-teacher. She's been helping me take care of my apartment, showing me how to take the bus, and basically, setting up my ID and accounts for me. She's SO sweet.

She noticed on my application that my birthday was Friday, so she wanted to take me out to dinner. Earlier in the week, we had talked about checking out Itaewon together (Itaewon is basically the foreigners district of Seoul. It's like you're not even in Korea anymore cuz it's so different and everyone speaks almost perfect English there) Neither of us had ever been, so on Friday, she asked me if I wanted to go. Of course, I say yes, and she tells me to pick a place online.

When I asked her what kind of food she wants to eat, though, she says she's never had Mexican before and really wanted to have Mexican. Uh-oh! Korea is known for having expensive but terrible Mexican food! She really wanted to try it though, so I found a Mexican place in Itaewon. A taco, enchilada, and this tiny burrito ended up costing $30, and it was terrible! It was like going to a fancy-looking Taco Bell.

But my co-teacher was cute; she was so interested in Mexican food, that it just made the dinner wonderful. So I ended up having Mexican for my birthday dinner this year all the way in Korea, and while the food was awful, it turned out to be such a fun night with my co-teacher ~^__^~

What NOT to do when teaching a class...

So last week, we did introductions. I had the students draw about themselves and then they presented it in front of the classroom. Most where the typical, "my favorite food/color is...", "I like/don't like...", stuff about their families, etc.

But on Friday, this one student came up. There were lots of drawings on his paper. One of them, though, was of a guy getting shot in the head, and he said, "I like headshots" (He also write the finger and F* you on the page next to that.) It was so different from everyone else, and I was just so surprised by the way he said it, that I got into one of my laughing fits. I tried to hold it in, but I just couldn't stop laughing! I was even starting to tear up. It was so bad that I had to go into my office and my co-teacher had to take over. So afterward for the rest of the period, the class didn't take me seriously at all cuz of that. Whenever they'd talk and I'd try to discipline them, they would just make me laugh. It was so bad...