After eating dinner last night at a restaurant near my school, as we got up to pay the bill, the owner of the place walked up to David and handed him two brown paper bags. Inside each of them was a pair of socks. Apparently it was a parting gift of some sort. A bit strange, but hey, I really needed socks so I'll take it. The floor of this restaurant was also just rocks and there were small trees all over the place. I felt like I was in the rain forest. The food was cooked on a huge black stone at the table. I don't particularly like that, the fact that you are expected to cook your own food at the table at almost every restaurant. If I really wanted to cook my own food, I would have went to the supermarket, bought the ingredients and whipped something up at home. It's that the point of going to a restaurant? So you don't have to cook your own meal? Really, though, we never end up cooking anything, anyway, because we just sit there staring at the food as it starts burning and the Koreans then realize we're morons and need some serious help. Once the natives remedy that situation and it's time to actually eat the stuff, things get quite barbaric. Koreans don't exactly have table manners. Generally they pile a lot of stuff, rice pork kimchi whatever, onto a leaf or piece of lettuce, roll it all up into a ball and then shove it into their mouths. I kind of enjoy it, but my mom would be disgusted. Also, know how it's rude to slurp your drink at the table when you're finished? Here, it's obviously a good thing. It means you really enjoyed the drink. Right.

I've been teaching a ton of classes this week because we're still waiting for Robert, the new old American guy, to get his visa stuff in order. So I've just been playing a lot of card games. None of the kids use the proper names for Aces, Kings, Queens or Jacks and I hate it. They just say A, K, Q, or J. I don't have many rules during game time, but I have established the refer to the cards correctly rule. The kids favorite card game is basically Uno, except they call it One Card. Whenever I try to play with them, I'm confused within 30 seconds. I think half the cards mean reverse, skip or spin around on your head. They always yell at me when I don't know whose turn it is. The thing about One Card is some of the kids are real assholes and they insist on yelling One Card a half second before someone actually has One Card. So then that person who was about to have one card draws about five cards and of course, the game never ends. I have yet to win a game.

Since it's a new semester, all the kids want to change their English names. And that would just make me crazy. I finally got every one's name down a few weeks ago. The attendance sheet is all in Korean at the beginning of the semester so I had to pass it around in my middle school class so the kids could write in their English names. And though I explicitly told them they could not change their names, many of them attempted to. Hestia changed her name to Mermaid, probably because she had a Little Mermaid eraser. Another girl wants to be called "Jan-n". I don't even know how to pronounce that. And then there's my favorite: Paris Hilton. I might even let that girl keep the name, only cause she's new to my class so I didn't know her name anyway. But I think I'd feel way too dirty and creepy calling a 12 year old girl Paris Hilton. There's probably laws against that.

Bender and I are locked in for a trip to Shanghai, China over the Christmas weekend. We're gonna be cutting it close though. Since we only have the Monday off, we're trying to stretch the vacation as much as possible so our return flight won't get into Seoul until 11:50 on Tuesday morning. Since Bender needs to be at work at 1:30 and me at 2 and the bus ride from the airport to our jobs is taking no less than an hour and half, yeah, no way we're making it. But sometimes you gotta cut some corners if you ever want to get a chance to breathe over here. We haven't booked a hotel yet, but I might try to get Bender to agree to sharing a king size bed. We practically sleep together every weekend, anyway.

Robert seems like a cool old guy, but he's also got a bit of a creepy edge. At dinner tonight, he said one of his favorite things about Korea was the girl. Ok, fair enough. But then he kept talking...the reason he likes the girls is because they are always exposing their feet. I think his words were "they were those thongs on their feet." Alright, I just met you, let's keep the foot fetish talk to a minimum, at least for the first few weeks.

In some ways, my work ethic here is the same as it was back home. I come to work, I fool around on the Internet all day and avoid work until I am absolutely forced to do it. Now that I don't really have a boss, I don't even pretend to be doing work in between classes. Sometimes I feel bad because the Korean teachers always seem to be making up tests or preparing for classes, but then I remember, I really don't care. Today I was watching "Saw II" during one of my breaks. I get the minimum amount of work done, I go to class, they kids have some fun, learn a bit and that's that. Although David mentioned tonight that we have to work on some Saturdays to make up for holidays and with that, I almost blew a fuse. So we get off for Christmas Day and then I need to come in the next Saturday to make up those classes? Hell, that doesn't seem like a holiday at all. Things got a little dicey in the office, but then I realized I might have been scaring the new guy too much, so I dropped it. But that's just not gonna fly. I know how much Koreans love to work, but personally, I enjoy having a life sometimes.

I think Bender might be dead again. He hasn't responded to my emails and he didn't pick up his phone when I tried to call him tonight. He's such a little bitch sometimes.

(Photos- top- a view of the city from a mountain, and Bender pretending to squeeze one out)