after a long day off... (No Blood No Tears)

It seems like ages since I blogged, but of course, it’s only been two days. As a side note, Microsoft Word is trying to tell me that ‘blogged’ isn’t a word, but obviously it’s the past tense of the equally dubious verb ‘to blog,’ duh. The list of suggestions for other words I might have simply been misspelling is humorous, and includes bogged, slogged, and my personal favorite: flogged. Speaking of flogging, I finally got rid of my host kids for five minutes—they were hanging out in my room for about a half an hour, just sitting on my bed and beating each other up. Again, Stacey was cute. I was making my reward tickets, and she just wanted to help me, so she stacked the tickets as I finished them and handed me a new blank one every time I finished. Cute.

Let’s see… I feel like yesterday must have been momentous, but I can’t seem to remember what happened. Oh yeah. Most importantly, I was restless about 6:15am yesterday and today morning, so I *gasp!* went jogging, which makes, in case you were counting, four days in a row. I was actually planning on skipping every third day, but I was in the mood yesterday (Wednesday), and I figure I’ll probably miss a few days, so I might as well build up as much as I can. Both days I went for about 35 minutes, and actually jogged about 15 of those, but I’m definitely getting a workout—I’m soaked in sweat when I get back, and my leg muscles have been a little sore the past few days. I haven’t yet suddenly and inexplicably become skinny, but I’m sure that will happen tomorrow. Maybe next week.

Yesterday I taught four lessons in a row at NMS (two 2nd grade classes and two 1st grade classes). They actually went surprisingly well. Most of the kids seemed really into the reward system (tickets and candy), so the smartest 5 or 6 kids in the class raised their hands every time. It may have encouraged participation from quite a few students who wouldn’t otherwise have volunteered, too, but I’m still hard-pressed to get the quiet/slow/shy students talking. And after school, we had our party in Gwangju to celebrate the principal moving to a different school. On the menu… law fish! (That’s raw fish, by the way.) Now, I was really dreading this meal. The principal, apparently, loves raw fish, and so does my co-teacher, although she confided in me that many of the other teachers don’t like it. I was feeling pretty hesitant, but the side dishes we started with were pretty good. A kind of apple salad, and peaches, which I promptly filled up on, knowing what was to come. And it basically got progressively scarier from there. The servers just kept bringing plate after plate of weird seafood stuff, but up to a point it was all cooked, (as my co-teacher reassured me). I felt compelled to nibble at least a bite of most things, but then… disaster struck. The next plate was not only law, but still alive.

My stomach literally churned. Granted, I suppose they weren’t technically alive. It was pieces of severed octopus tentacle, but by some sick twist of nature, they still writhed, throbbed, and pulsated on the plate. I’ve probably never been so disgusted in my life. The teachers at my table nearly died laughing at the look on my face. Needless to say, I didn’t partake in that particular dish, and I lost my appetite for a little while. I did eat some small crab/lobster like animal. I had to rip its head off and break into its exoskeleton, which is a.) too much work for too little flavor, and b.) gross. I think what I don’t like about seafood, aside from the taste, is that it still resembles its original form too much. Perhaps if hamburger patties were cow-shaped, they might gross me out too. But they don’t. Not the way living, breathing tentacles do. Aside from that, it was a pretty okay night. I felt a little awkward not ever knowing what people were saying, but they made some valiant efforts to translate for me and include me on a couple of occasions, and I filled up on fruit.

Oh man, I forgot an amazing story from earlier in the day. I have a confession to make: I often lie about things for the sake of simplicity, particularly when it comes to communication in a foreign language, and today I got caught up in a lie that I’m sure will make my life awkward in some way in the next year. So I’m sitting in the teacher’s office working on my lesson when one of the teachers comes over and says, “Brittany, please… come.” I can’t remember his name, but he has an adorable comb-over, and he’s never really talked to me before, so I obliged and went over to his desk. On his computer was Google Earth, focused on Florida. We had a nice laugh over “yep, that’s where I live,” and then he started zooming in, getting eventually to city zoom, so I pointed out Cape Coral. And he continued to zoom in, and said “Which one is your house?” He didn’t, however, have the street names setting turned on, so I could pick out the Caloosahatchee, but because of my lack of directional ability, I had basically no idea where my house was.

Now, I’m not sure why I did it, really. But he was so expectant, and I doubted my ability to explain how big Cape Coral is, and how it all looks the same, so it’d be really hard for me to find my house. So instead I just scanned for a house on the corner, pointed to it, and said “my house.” So then he started calling other teachers over to look, and zoomed in, and we discovered that the house I’d randomly chosen was pretty big (3 stories, plus a pool), which led Mr. Comb-over to proclaim… “You’re lichy!” (That’s ‘you’re rich,’ for those of you who don’t speak Konglish.) Awkward. So I assured them I wasn’t rich, that my house wasn’t as nice as it appeared, and then watched in mute horror and amusement as he placed a virtual pushpin over my house and labeled it “camp teacher.” But I suppose that’s a good thing, because if he asked me to find it again, I couldn’t. For the rest of the day, random staff members would say “Miss Camp, I heard you are lichy.” And when everyone was pretty drunk at dinner, they all decided they would visit me on vacation next year. So sorry Mom, but we’ll have to move. Again, I can’t really explain why I (technically) lied. It just happened.

Yesterday I also received an amusing email from the coordinator of a certain scholarship board named after a certain former U.S. Senator whose last initial is F, which I will quote here briefly: “We have received some disturbing complaints from our American counterparts about the nigh rampant blogging of our ETAs.” The email warned us about including such “traceable information” as the names of our schools or students in our blogs, because they were concerned about our school staff members (or students) finding them. It warned that our schools may not want us writing about them, good or bad things, and that a simple remark misinterpreted could “irreparably damage the relationship with the school,” who could in turn make our year miserable. In conclusion, it warned that we should dissociate our blogs immediately with the name of that particular scholarship we’re on (opposite of empty [full]/opposite of dim [bright]). And finally, we were assured that a ‘blogging policy’ would be forthcoming.

Meghan and I spent nearly half an hour tonight over pizza trying to decode this cryptic message. I mean, I guess I can understand that we maybe shouldn’t put our school’s name in our blogs. Well, no, I don’t really understand it. Because there’s no way anyway at my school (maybe one co-teacher is the exception) who could even begin to read my blog. They don’t know English well enough to do so. And why would they be looking for it? My students, possibly, might be half-curious enough, but they especially couldn’t read any of it. And why dissociate from Emptydim (my new name for this scholarship)? In the past, they seemed to use ETA blogs as selling points and references for us. Now we’re being encouraged to watch what we say or dissociate completely? Was this really never a problem before? Or are we just a particularly negative group of bloggers?

It’s all very perplexing to me. So you probably haven’t noticed, but that’s why I’ve removed all references to my school names, as well as my address, which I’ll send out by email, and changed the title of my blog. I’m just not going to go back and remove all references to ETA or Emptydim (a more apt name anyway, I think)—that’s too much work.

Anyway, today I taught at DMS, and it went really well. I absolutely love my co-teacher. I complained to her about the way they were making me teach at NMS, and she understood and sympathized, and agreed to let me have more freedom in lesson planning. Plus, she’s super-smart, able to translate my directions as I give them, and helpful without taking over. It’s basically ideal. I’m not exactly completely prepared for tomorrow’s lessons, but it’s only 11:49pm. I can get up early!

And finally, tonight’s movie review: No Blood, No Tears. I give No Blood, No Tears 5 Bs, solely because Jeong Jae-Yeong, my Korean heartthrob, is the lead male character. And it’s a pretty enjoyable movie too. It’s another gangstery film, and JJY plays a gangstery jerk who beats up his girlfriend. He seems, however, to be the protagonist, and the movie reveals that he was probably not always a jerk. Thus, I became too invested in his character to be satisfied with the ending, which I won’t reveal. It was cinematographically interesting, as it seemed that the director just wanted to use every trick in the book, but I guess it worked. There were a lot of fun fight scenes with JJY. Reason number 346 that Korea is great: Because of the national obsession with Taekwondo, it’s entirely believable to me that everyone in Korea knows TKD, and is ready to use it in everyday situations, on a daily basis. As often happens with Korean movies, I can’t tell if the plot was incomprehensible just because it was, or because something was lost in translation. Meghan and I agree that this movie had a few too many characters to keep straight, and we somehow missed something big that might have made the ending make sense, but it didn’t diminish my enjoyment of it, as my enjoyment of it was derived from staring at JJY. I don’t need to understand Korean. JJY is the language of love.

One more thing: I gave my students an email address and encouraged them to send me emails to practice English, and I received my first email today. :) Cute.

Take care!