Our first meeting at school after the new year was entertaining. Our director started out by saying that we are having this meeting because she wanted to celebrate a new year, introduce our new head teacher (Claire) and announce that she bought a new car. We asked her if she bought everyone a new car and she said, "no, but we can all go for a ride sometime!"
On Mondays I now have a period off in which I typically hang out with one of the Korean teachers, Sunny. Sunny is appropriately named, as her personally is nothing short of sunny and bright. She asked me what I was doing on the weekend and I said that Dave and I may go to a movie but we don't know what's playing. She helped me out and looked up the movies at the local cinema. The first one she said was, "Cat Wearing Shoes." I was confused. I asked her, "Cat Wearing Shoes?! I've never heard of that movie before!" It took me a few moments to realize that what she meant was "Puss in Boots!" hahahaha I thought it was very cute.
On Friday morning, around 7:50 AM we woke up to incessant ringing of our doorbell. Ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong. It was our doorman from our apartment complex speaking in none other than, Korean. Of course we couldn't understand him and he couldn't understand us when we said,"We don't speak Korean" 100 times. We eventually heard the word "key" and realized that he wanted us to give him a key to our apartment. We made this inference due to the fact for the past week or so we have been woken up early with the sound of nail guns, hammering and banging in the surrounding apartments along. To accompany that, there were also weird intercom announcements that could be heard throughout the building (almost like someone is staring outside using a megaphone). From those strange sounds we figured they must be redoing something in every apartment. We told the Korean man that we wern't giving him our key. Who knows when they would come in and try to work on our apartment?! What felt like 15 min later, we eventually got him to leave our apartment but not before he tried to bring wood and supplies in our apartment by hand motions. We also refused. We mimed/ wrote on a piece of paper to call our director at 12:00 (we didn't want him to wake her up at such an hour).
We went to work that day and asked our director about the incident and if she had gotten a call. She didn't, so she called them. Turns out, we were right, they are doing construction on our apartment, and we needed to give our doorman our key. We also decided that that would be a good time to learn how to say, 'I don't speak Korean" in Korean (We probably should have learned that 3 months ago).
After work we went to his little office that looks surprisingly similar to a bedroom, equipped with a make shift bed, a TV and a huge digital clock. We wanted to know when they would be coming to our apartment. Again, after a mixture of pointing at clocks and calendars and writing out times and dates we thought we had an agreement that they would come on Saturday at 12:00 PM.
We went out that night, and boy what a night that was. We ended up meeting up with Kirsten, Keegan and Tia to bond over working at E. Bo Young Talking Club over a few drinks. We met one of Kirsten and Keegan's Korean co-workers, Oakman and Tia's director Randy who is a party animal to say the least. After that night we realized that we work at the most conservative E. Bo Young's.
It was a very late night but it was okay, the construction workers were not coming unit 12 o'clock the next day....or so we thought. At around 8 AM we hear a key opening our door. No knock, just attempting to come in....at 8 AM on a Saturday! Um, where exactly did they thing we were? Luckily we have a second latch on the door so they couldn't' come in.
On Saturday night I got invited to a girls game night at my friend Miranda's apartment. It was full of movie popcorn, half baked cookies (my favorite), Dutch Blitz (my new favorite game), and tons of girl chatter.
On Sunday night we decided to switch up our usual Pizza School night and go to Nanta 5000 pizza. We love pizza night for 2 reasons: A.) we love pizza and B.) we love watching this crazy Korean TV show. We don't quite understand the concept or what is going on. The show seems to be based around 10 guys who just hang out and do silly things together. The live in the same room and travel around. They pull pranks on each other and usually have some sort of a made up game in which they complete. My favorite is pop-up-video style of commentary they use. It's flashy and colorful. I can't tell what it says, but the Korean's around us seem to laugh at it. Its just really ridiculous.
The story doesn't stop here....Dave was about 90% of the way through eating the entire pizza to himself. (They are not very big pizzas) and he looks at me and asks, "is this a rock that I found in my pizza?!" and my instant response was, "don't make a scene." He was mad but I just thought, "Hey, this is Korea. Nothing makes sense" Also, in my justification, he was 90% of the way through. The would have thought we were scam artist trying to get a free pizza.
The new week begins. We were expecting to have another 8 AM wake up due to the construction workers but we didn't. We hibernated unit the late hour of 10 AM (we are such bums). Work came and went, and when we got home we found our apartment completely turned upside down and we had new walls! It was very strange.
On Tuesday morning at around 11 AM, as we were just relaxing we got invaded again by some ajumas (older Korean ladies) who were wallpapering our new walls with hideous wallpaper. It was very nerve racking because they were standing on a high ladder looking as if they were going to fall at any minute. It was like she didn't want to move the ladder closer to where she needed to be so she would just stretch as far as she could. At one point a man was using the back of our couch as stepping stool. After they were finished they handed our key back to us with a half finished project in our apartment. We didn't know if they were finished (because nothing makes sense in Korea) or if they just made a mistake.
Well, they made a mistake in giving us back the key too early. In the middle of my class our director came into my room, "Liiiinndssseeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy, they are not finished with your apartment and they NEED to finish today. They have an emergency key, can they use it?!" I said of course they could. When we came back we found a brand new wall and windows in our apartment.
I also want to highlight that this construction work did not entail knocking down any walls or taking out any windows, but meerly putting a new wall in front of the old one, and putting a new set of windows in front of the old ones. So now, when we want to open our windows we need to open a 3 different sets to get some air. Not just panes...windows with locks.
On Tuesday morning at around 11 AM, as we were just relaxing we got invaded again by some ajumas (older Korean ladies) who were wallpapering our new walls with hideous wallpaper. It was very nerve racking because they were standing on a high ladder looking as if they were going to fall at any minute. It was like she didn't want to move the ladder closer to where she needed to be so she would just stretch as far as she could. At one point a man was using the back of our couch as stepping stool. After they were finished they handed our key back to us with a half finished project in our apartment. We didn't know if they were finished (because nothing makes sense in Korea) or if they just made a mistake.
Well, they made a mistake in giving us back the key too early. In the middle of my class our director came into my room, "Liiiinndssseeeeeeeeeyyyyyyy, they are not finished with your apartment and they NEED to finish today. They have an emergency key, can they use it?!" I said of course they could. When we came back we found a brand new wall and windows in our apartment.
I also want to highlight that this construction work did not entail knocking down any walls or taking out any windows, but meerly putting a new wall in front of the old one, and putting a new set of windows in front of the old ones. So now, when we want to open our windows we need to open a 3 different sets to get some air. Not just panes...windows with locks.
You can see in this picture that they just put a wall in front of our existing one
Don't fall!!!!
Ugly wallpaper
Oh, I'm wicked hot. Let me open the 3 windows to get some air!
Hyundai and Samsung make everything, even window locks
Random Stories:
In one of our dialogues they use the word "bro." I find this comical for a few different reasons. One being that who on earth thought that we should teach the Koreans the word bro? Who actually uses the word bro? LAX bros- yes. Jersey Shore cast-yes. Dog the bounty hunter- yes. Normal people-no. Case proven, but if you want further comedic relief from that awful choice of words I will lead you to the second funny part.... the voices they use on the dialogues are so wimpy. It sounds like an adult doing their worst impression of a sickly, wussy kid with a stuffy nose who uses far too my voice inflection for anyones good.
One day when I was sick, Dave took over 2 of my classes at Easy Academy. None of them had English names so Dave made up a bunch of very old people names for them. The next class some of them forgot them, but I continued the fun. Here is a list of the kids in my class; Bob, Ed, Edith, Joan (named after my crochet buddy in New Zealand), Elenore, Peggy (after my grandmother), Anne, and Billy. The kids love it, I love it, we are all happy campers!
We are still loving Korea and excited to do new things. We have Lunar New Year coming up this weekend, which for us, means a vacation. We get Monday and Tuesday off, making it a 4 day vacation. In Korea they celebrate Lunar New Year by spending a lot of time with their families and exchanging very expensive fruit. We won't be doing much for it because it is too cold to explore cities and we just feel like relaxing. We thought about going snowboarding but that seems too far fetched money wise, equipment wise, and more importantly safety wise. We all know what happened at Mt. Snow!
Much love,
Lindsey
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