…a student left this note on my whiteboard:
It made me smile.
It’s black…it’s White
Or as J so sarcastically pointed out to me yesterday…it’s yellow and brown.
Anyway, yesterday afternoon, after a full day of procrastinating at my desk (all my classes got cancelled because the internet wasn’t working in the English Zone and we really needed them for the lesson), I decided I was in the mood to bake some cookies.
So here’s my attempt at black and white cookies…they turned out puffier than expected, but I think that’s mainly because I added too much flour than what was stated on the recipe.
Still, they turned out okay and J thought they were delicious.
Things that still make me laugh…
No wonder my students don’t know how to answer simple questions properly. Another example:
T: How are you?
S: It’s sunny.
………..okay….
I’m not sure what a ‘Summer Bitch Festival’ consists of, but I’m pretty sure it would a hell of an event to attend.
And look! A deer that runs a flower garden! How very Disney-esque. I wonder how the deer rates in terms of customer service…
Snow in Autumn…
Yep. The weather’s officially crazy. It’s only the second day of November (and it’s still technically Autumn) but it has now just started snowing. And I don’t mean a light drizzle of snow. I mean HUGE flakes dropping down like a freakin’ confetti machine.You probably can’t tell all that well from the pictures on here, but trust me, it’s snowing a lot.
J messaged me this morning to say that it was snowing and freezing in Donghae and I thought that maybe he had mistakenly written ‘Snow’ instead of ‘Rain’. But no sooner had I sent him a reply to ask if he had meant to write ’snow’ when it flakes started drifting down outside the office window.
I just stepped outside to prepare my English Zone for my first class today and it was FREEZING out there!…add to that no heating inside the English Zone and we’re definitely in for an interesting day, no doubt filled with screams of ‘Teacher! Cold!’ in class.
Craving Lasagna…
I made J drive me to Donghae today so we could have lunch at Pastario, a restaurant that specialises in pastas and pizzas. It’s the only place I know in this area that sells Lasagne and after watching an episode of Friends this morning where Joey attacked a whole dish of Lasagne by himself this morning, I was craving it badly.
I wish I could bake my own Lasagne here but they just don’t sell the pasta sheets anywhere here. I miss my vegetable Lasagne and I’d like for J to taste it too…but I guess I’ll have to wait for another time.
Then after lunch, we hit up Dunkin’ Donuts for some coffee and I ended up buying a small bag of icing sugar-coated munchkins. Not good since I’m actually on a diet, but eh…I’ll get back on track tomorrow. Hopefully it wont’ be raining anymore either cos I really want to go for a run.
This morning, while I was finishing up some work on my computer and J was waiting for me to finish so we could head to Donghae, I managed to sneak in a few shots of Kitty and Coco who had both decided to join us in the study room.
Kitty decided she wanted to take a nap inside one of the cupboards…
And Coco decided she would try and get some quality time with J…
Tiger was no where to be seen…I later found him curled up in his bed in my bedroom. I guess he wasn’t in the mood to be sociable.
The First Inkling of Christmas…
I ordered a cherry blossom tree online last week because I wanted some kind of (fake) plant to grace my apartment in some way. It came today, with Christmas lights included so J helped me set it up in the livingroom and Voila!
This week…
Swine flu fears escalated to the point where the school nurse started handing out disposable masks to the teachers and students. At first it was just for the third graders (that’s 12th grade to all you Aussies) and their teachers. Yesterday the third grade English teachers approached me at my desk before the start of our conversation class and one of them gave me a disposable mask to wear.
Needless to say, it’s still sitting on my desk, untouched.
This morning, however, a lot of the second and first graders (11th and 10th grade) were walking around the school wearing masks as well. Every time a student approached to talk to me, I really had difficulty trying to make out what they were saying.
I really should think about wearing the mask too. Too many students now with some kind of cold, coughing and sneezing everywhere. What’s worse is that they don’t know how to cover their mouths or noses when they cough and sneeze so the germs spread much quicker around here. Yuck.
And speaking of sick, one of the students fainted early this morning in between classes. We were all sitting at our desks in the staff room, preparing for the first period to start and suddenly a group of girls came screaming down the stairs and into the staff room. They were all speaking Korean so I couldn’t really understand what they were saying but most of the teachers in the staff room ran out and up the stairs. I stood outside the staffroom door, trying to see what was happening and a few seconds later, one of the male teachers came running down with the girl draped unconscious across his back. He must have taken her to the nurses’ office but I heard many of the other teachers asking afterwards if the girl had been dieting and had not been eating. But I don’t think that was the case. My co-teacher told me later that that girl had been suffering from a strong cold and her body was actually not very strong to begin with so she didn’t seem too surprised that the student had fainted.
Sometimes it amazes me how much these students will put up with. I can see many of them are sick but they won’t actually take the day off from school to rest at home. Instead, their parents and teachers will force them to come to school, go through a whole day of lessons and night study, then wonder why they’re falling asleep in class and not paying attention.
I feel sorry for them sometimes.
My Procrastination level…
…seems to go up everytime I have an assignment due.
I can’t concentrate. I’ve had my word file open all morning (figuring I’d do my essay today since I only have 1 class for the whole day) and I’ve managed to only write about 200 words. Why? Because everytime I figure out a sentence to put in the essay, my brain immediately sends off a message to the rest of my body that I’ve accomplished enough for that particular time period and need a “break”. So I surf, look up other sites, have a snack, look up more sites, do research for other things, talk to other teachers…THEN finally get back to writing again. Once I have another sentence down..the vicious cycle starts up again.
I’m not a person that can concentrate on simply one task. I HAVE TO multitask. My brain starts snoozing if I just focus on one thing. I don’t know if it’s something wrong with me or if other people have this problem. I know my boyfriend/fiance dosn’t have this problem because I’m constantly amazed at his ability to focus on a task–to the point where he’ll get frustrated if I even so much as ask him a question while he’s focusing. It’s funny cos sometimes we’ll be studying/working in the same room, he’ll be bent over the desk, writing furiously in his book or typing out things on his laptop, and there on the other side, is me, with music blaring from my lap top, one hand playing with my cats who have jumped on the table, while the other hand switches between chatting to friends online, writing an essay, highlighting pages in my book and surfing miscellaneous sites.
Why can’t I concentrate??
On a side note, I think I might pop over to HomePlus after work and do a bit of shopping. I’ve been inspired by some pictures i saw online today (while I was trying to write my essay) on cottage -style rooms. I think my apartment needs more candles or something.
Comic #3
Living in such a small city, it’s not very often you’d come across another foreigner here. Although there are, of course, a few of us public school teachers around (and maybe some hagwon teachers too, but I’m not sure). In the space of a week, I’d say I’d be lucky to come across one foreigner. When I go to Donghae, it’s a little bit different because there’s a growing Russian community there and sometimes, it’s easy enough to mistake them for English-speaking foreigners. But besides that, we are a rare breed here.
Still, with my Asian appearance, I’m more likely to blend in with the crowd but I have been mistaken for Vietnamese, Aborigine, European and a whole host of other countries I would not have said I shared physical similarities with. But whatever.
So what happens when we see other foreigners on the street? It is, indeed, one of those awkward moments unless, of course, you happen to know that foreigner. Usually there’s a lot of eye-contact avoidance, especially when I’m not in the mood to be sociable. If my mood is okay, I’ll offer a smile but keep on walking. Hey, it’s not like I would do anything any differently if I was back home. I don’t see the need to change my habits just because I’m in an entirely different country.
It does get a bit embarrasing though when I’m out walking with J and we come across some foreigners. He’ll usually nudge me and whisper (not so quietly either) “hey, look! It’s your friend!”. I reply by elbowing him sharply in the ribs or pinching him really hard somewhere where it’ll hurt. But still, he doesn’t seem to get the message. He did this constantly last year when we went on our snowboarding trip. There were foreigners everywhere so you can imagine what I had to put up with from him that whole time.
It’s not that I don’t like socialising with the other foreigners here, but when an opportunity presents itself for me to meet or hang out with other foreigners, I always ask myself, “Would I normally hang out with them if I were back home?” If the answer’s no, then I keep it on a strictly need-to meet basis and just mind my own business. Just because there aren’t many of us here, doesn’t mean we have to start changing who we are.
Lazy Sunday
I should be doing my uni assignment right now. It’s due in a week, but all I’ve managed to do this entire weekend was go through the readings with a highlighter. Somehow that makes me feel as though I’ve accomplished something.
I woke up at 10am today, feeling crap. My nose has just stopped running long enough for me to be able to breathe for a few minutes without opening my mouth, and I’m still in my pajamas. My babies–and by this, I mean my cats–are in my bedroom, sleeping soundly. They don’t seem to want to venture outside the bedroom door. Can’t say I blame them. Today seems to be an ideal day for staying in bed and just sleeping it all off. Nothing is on tv and I can’t even muster up the energy to put in a DVD to watch.
Last night, J and I went out to dinner at this new restaurant down Millenium Road. The place there is nice, and there’s a cafe on the ground floor that I love to go to (their cereal shake is to die for!) but I have to say, the restaurant left me feeling a little disappointed. Koreans have this thing of trying to copy European style dining by trying to serve you appetisers before your main course. I say copy, because the appetisers they give(usually some kind of soup and salad) are usually very disappointing and fall flat of actually doing anything but kill your appetite.
Yesterday we go some kind of creamy mushroom soup (which only filled a quarter of a very small bowl mind you–why bother to give us soup at all if you’re going to be stingy about it) which turned out to be only lukewarm. And their salad was a pile of lettuce leaves and shredded cabbage topped with some kind of pink mayo dressing. The dressing was waaaay too sweet and tasted like I was eating honey on top of my salad. Yuck. Then came my main, which was pork cutlet. The cutlet was a good size–couldn’t complain there–but the other things on the plate made me think they were trying to severely ration their food. 2 small pieces of tater tots, four pieces of kidney beans, a piece of broccoli and one small baby carrot. Seriously??
I have yet to find a good restaurant that serves decent European food here in Samcheok. The closest I’ve come to is the Terra Rosa restaurant out in Gangneung.
*sigh*
