Sunday, October 28, 2007

Japan imminent; no other news

Very little news since my last post. Japan is this Wednesday, we're leaving campus at noon on a bus for Busan, which is about two hours. Then a boat will take us from Pusan to Osaka overnight. The three days we'll see a lot of neat stuff, which I am sure I will post pictures of.

This weekend was neat, on Saturday I was very busy- at 10AM I headed off to the "International Student Love Feast" which was held by a local church in Pohang. They brought in a few busloads of students for the occasion. There was decent food(with.. gasp.. meat!), haircuts, and a free medical checkup. They took blood pressure(130/80), glucose(97), and did an ultrasound of my heart. The doctor said I had good heart wall muscle thickness, no abnormalities, which is good. They had a table covered in pill bottles and were handing out medication as they saw fit. I didn't get any, though several students I know got some for various ailments. I've heard that medicine in Korea is kind of a mixed bag, there are still some traditional Korean medications/treatments mixed in with the modern medicine. On the bright side, it's not as expensive as US healthcare.

I had to leave the love feast early to go teach. English camps sent a van for us we the van driver and I had trouble finding each other for a while and we ended up being about 20 minutes late. I missed most of the meeting, then I had to rush back to my room to get my materials and stuff for my first class. I was a bit late for my first class also. The three class periods went as usual, me teaching and the kids in various states of paying attention or maintaining blank stares. After the normal time, however, there was a 'harvest festival' which went for another three hours. This was to make up(in advance) for the classes we'd not be having this weekend due to festival.
We herded the kids out of the classrooms, across campus to the outdoor assembly area place. I had a crowd/line of 13 kids following me, which reminded me of that kids' book 'Make way for ducklings'. (While that is true, the first thing I thought of was leading hostages to safety in Counterstrike, because I had to keep looking behind me to make sure that they were still with me.) Once we had passed the near-riot-stage collected mass of children onto the staff there, my group of teachers headed off to another building commandeered for the purpose of entertaining the kids once their finished with their movie. The kids were split up into groups and sent to different stations. My station was the mummy station, which involved the kids racing each other in teams to make a mummy by wrapping someone up in ridiculous amounts of toilet paper. We made them clean up before we gave them candy. I had fun throwing handfuls of peppermints into a crowd of children. I'm pretty sure that one kid cussed me out in Korean after I refused to give him some more, though.

All in all, the night was tiring, though not difficult. I took one of the half-rolls of toilet paper and put it in the little bin that drinks fall into on one of the vending machines. I wonder how long it will stay there.

Today I got up to go to class(and a midterm) at 8AM like a good student, then class ended up being six minutes long. Mr. Laidback seems to value his unique test-giving style, from my experience and what I've heard. He gave us the option of working on the test during the class period, or making it a take home test, open book. The test would be more or less impossible to take during the class period. I'm glad that it's a take-home test, but he said that he had decided this last night- so why not email us last night and save us all the trouble of getting up for first period? It'd be just as easy to email us the test, since we're emailing it back anyway.

I got notice on Friday night from the international office that I had a package waiting for me at the post office. Unfortunately, they only emailed me right at the close of the day so I still don't have the package, because it was too late Friday to go get it and this morning is the next time they're open. I'll head out a few minutes early for my next class to pick it up. I anticipate it to be my sandals. Took long enough, they were sent the 3rd. I'm glad I'll have them for Japan!

My next post will be from Japan if we're lucky and have internet access(although we'll be in a hotel, so we ought to), or afterward if not. Over and out.

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