My first utility bill came in the mail yesterday: 36,000W for water, electricity, and I think the cleaning of something. I also have gas, internet, and my cell phone to pay. I was planning to allot 30,000W for my phone since we pay for each text and every 10 seconds of outgoing calls, but I think I overestimated because we don't have to pay for incoming text messages :D So for 6,000W I can send 300 texts. Not bad (the base monthly fee is 13,000).
I'm actually looking forward to sitting down and budgeting different things, but I'm notoriously bad at recording what I spend. I always estimated at home and generally was pretty accurate. Maybe it's all the extra 0's here, but doing the same has been hard. Of course, I'm also not used to having cash. And the fact that it looks like play money makes me not quite register that this is in fact real money that I'm spending.
My list of upcoming purchases is growing- a hand vacuum (spending 2 hours windexing my floors isn't something I want to do again), a (dry) mop- I'm bummed that Swiffer doesn't exist here, an electronic Korean-English dictionary, a new phone. meh. More stuff to fill the space in my apartment...
I searched for places in Daejeon to take Korean language classes, and based on what I found I determined it was a fail. Most of the times were during the work day, and many schedules were from a few years ago. If I had a good textbook or some workbooks, I could study on my own. Still looking.
Some teachers got me a stack of English resources for teacher training. I'm trying to adapt the material to something more immediately useful... like you see a foreigner in a store and you want to help. Here's some language to communicate!
Today I was trying to converse with some middle school students before class. I asked what "cute" is in Korean. They threw a bunch of words at me. After figuring out what cute was- I really don't know if I ever said it right, the people here typically laugh when I say something in Korean- I called all the boys cute. They SO swooned. Or laughed at me, I couldn't tell.
And the awkward moment of the day was one of the boys saying some awesome English in response to an assessment question:
"What do you want?"
"I want Megan's cell phone number!"
I said maybe later, I have to finish assessing the other students, and he kind of rolled around the floor for a while muttering "oooooh nooo." I don't think it's against policy as my teacher mentioned he got texts from students, but it's weird to me. Email, ok. Phone? kind of sketch.
I did get the genius idea though to start a penpal system between students who are interested. I was thinking that I could practice Korean on them and they could respond in English. First, I need access to a language resource so I could communicate somewhat intelligibly.
Next time I'll talk more about the students. I should. They're awesome. But all the students/campers I've ever had have been awesome.
No comments:
Post a Comment