The Irish of the Orient
Life, love, and laughter in South Korea
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Archive for ‘December 2010’

I Love My New Job

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Posted on Friday, December 10, 2010 by Colleen

Remember when I worked at that hagwon in Seoul, and I was always stressed out, and doing work outside of school, and angry, and miserable because my boss was a see-you-next-tuesday? Well, my friend, those days are over, for I have moved to Jinju and started working in a public school!

I work at a middle school in Munsan (well, technically two middle schools), and there are 3 grades in the school. With the 1st and 2nd grades, there are 2 classes for each grade. With the 3rd graders, there are 3 classes. So that's a total of 7 classes in the whole school. I teach them each two times a week, Monday through Thursday. I usually have 3 or 4 classes a day. That's it. I teach about 3 or 4 hours total a day. Can you believe it? Classes are 45 minutes each. Each class has between 23-28 students, I can't remember the exact count.

I started working last Thursday, but I only had 2 classes, and on Friday I got the day off to move my stuff. So technically this was my first real week, even though I didn't teach much.The 1st and 2nd graders are having tests, so they have no class, and there were no classes in the afternoon. I taught maybe 4 classes the whole week. It's also close to winter break, so I don't even teach a book until the new term in February. The students are all really friendly, everyone says hi to me, and kids come to my classroom even if they don't have me yet. The classroom gets a little noisy sometimes, but my co-teacher, Mrs. Che, is in the room the whole time to keep them in line and help explain things to them in Korean. One thing that I found helps get them to do their work in class is to threaten to give them homework if they don't finish. They live in the country, so their English levels are different. A lot of the girls speak pretty well. I've only taught the 3rd graders though, since the others were having tests this week.

On Fridays I go to a different school in Geumgok, that school has a total of 31 students, in the whole school. There's one class for each grade, and the class size is 9-12. These students are really great, they are super friendly and active in the classroom. I teach them each once a day, plus two afternoon classes. The afternoon classes I teach without the co-teacher, and all we do is play games! My co-teacher at that school, Mrs. Gwon, is extremely friendly, and she speaks English very well.

At both of the schools I have my my own desk and computer which is nice. In Munsan I have my own classroom and the kids come there, but in Geumgok I go to the different classes. They are both pretty rural, but the schools are up to date. There is a huge TV screen in each room connected to the computer, plus the one in Munsan is touch screen.

The kids seem to like me a lot, I've been trying to do fun activities with them to keep them entertained in class. But I am really happy at these schools, I have so much free time during the day to work on my material, and the teachers and students area great. I really lucked out!



Trip to America

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Posted on Monday, December 6, 2010 by Colleen


So, in case you have been living in a box with no communication to the outside world, and thus had no idea, I just got back from a two week visit to America. I flew home on Thursday, November 11 and surprised my mom. She literally had no idea I was coming. I was going to surprise her and my grandparents, but due to a flight delay, I couldn’t make it in time for dinner. Instead I just showed up at the house (with Celeste, who drove me), knocked on the door at 10 o’clock at night, and shocked the hell out of her. For the first time in my life, my mom was actually speechless. She just stood there with the door cracked open, jaw just shy of the floor, for about a minute. Needless to say, when she finally regained her composure, she was ecstatic.

Oh, and incase that box you’ve been living in was located inside another box, I also brought Dexter home with me. Although he is a pain in the ass sometimes, I love him to death. Unfortunately Daniel hates him to death, if that’s even possibly. If you have any sort of knowledge of my prior cat ownership, you know that I can’t just abandon an innocent little animal in some god forsaken shelter where lord knows if they will live or die! So instead, I decided to immigrate Dexter into America. Let’s not talk about how expensive it all was, or how traumatizing it was, or obnoxious, or frustrating, or smelly it all was. Let’s just skip all that and pretend that I wasn’t standing at the door smelling exhausted and smelling like pee, okay?

Recently before I left Korea, I had a job lined up to start December first, so I planned to stay for Thanksgiving, but leave soon after that in order to give myself a few days to settle down in my new home of Jinju. It was a great two weeks though. I was pretty jet lagged for the first week or so, which usually doesn’t happen to me. But I was going to bed at 7 pm and waking up at 5 am, not really my cup of tea. I had a rental car though, which meant two things: one, I didn’t have to depend on other people picking my ass up to go places, or on waiting for my mom to come home with the van, and two, I was actually able to park (even parallel park!) my nice little rental car, without having the stress of parking my mom’s big boat of a van.

So I got to hang out with friends and family. To tell the truth I don’t have many friends in Oregon anymore. I mean, I have people I’ve known since elementary school, but we haven’t really kept in touch. But I got to see the love of my life (and future maid of honor!) Shayla, and I drove down to Salem to see Andrea, and we saw Harry Potter together. I hung out with my uncles Sean and Dan a few times, which is always a fun time. We went to one restaurant where the food servers were all drag queens. It was a place called Oasisba, and the food was amazing as were the appetizers and cocktails. If you’re a flaming homosexual, or you like to surround yourself with them, I highly encourage you to check this place out.

Also while I was in town, I was looking into wedding venue sites. As you know, Daniel and I are already married, but we never had the opportunity to celebrate with our friend and family. So when we return to America, we want to have a real wedding. I went to a few places with Shayla, a few with my mom, and a few by myself. I’m sure I’ll be posting the pictures soon to our wedding blog if you want to check it out here. I also went to the Bravo!Wedding Affair with my mom and Celeste. It was quite overwhelming, and filling. There were dresses and venues, caterers, DJs, musicians, photographers, wedding coordinators, décor specialists. And all of them had little booklets and business cards. By the time I was done I was hauling around 50 pounds of ads! It was a fun event, and I got some good ideas about things I would like to have at our wedding.

While I was home, Dexter adapted well. We kept him in my room for the first few days, because he was being dramatic and hissing at everything. But after the sedatives finally wore off, and he was able to explore the house, he started to fit in fine. He was still attached to me like a tumor though. Every time I sat down, he would be in my lap. When I went to bed, he was there. He would even cry when I went out into the garage to get something. He thoroughly enjoyed having such a big house to run around in, and other animals to follow around. Eventually he will be let loose into the great backyard, I’m sure he’ll be fighting with other cats and tearing birds out of the sky in no time! I’m gonna be pretty sad without him. It’s really nice to come home and having something waiting for you, even if that something it waiting to attack, lol.



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