yes, when I say foot baseball, I mean kickball

Friday afternoons are packed, but I really enjoy them because the last class periods are just fun for me. It's the extra stuff added to my schedule. With my 2 students in the extra English review class, a 3rd student was added. I made a model of today's project: basic info. My name is... I am -- years old... I like... But they seemed to enjoy it. The girls had fun with the stickers, and I was impressed to see the vocabulary they pulled out to list things they like. The boy has less English, but he said he likes computers and drew a picture of one. He also drew a picture of a tree, drew an arrow from it and wrote "sky." He either could think that tree is sky in English, or he was pointing to the blue background... either way, I let it go. During teacher training, we talked about culture differences in the restaurant and they were surprised about the tipping amount you should do in American restaurants. They were also surprised that it's considered rude to yell across the restaurant for your server. Haha, it's nice that we can do that here, and man, do I love those table buzzers! 

Okay, most of these pictures are coming from the kick ball tournament day my school and 3 surrounding schools held a couple of weeks ago. The faculties came out and played a mini tournament- my school lost the first round. We ended with a jump rope contest. That was a really crazy interesting afternoon. Tables were set up for food and alcohol. The fact that alcohol is allowed on school grounds and also stored in the cafeteria kitchens still shocks me. In my head an alarm goes off: "Protect the students! Shield them from this debauchery!" 


Aside from the alcohol there was an entire meal laid out- dried squid, kimchi (which I dropped on my running shoes :( ), soup, nuts, fruit, pork. One of the teachers from John's old school recognized me, so he pulled me aside to tell me how John "teaches with all his heart and that he's a very kind and big hearted person." Really sweet stuff. I said that John missed the school, which he appreciated, and then he poured me makeolly or however you spell it- Korean rice wine. buuuuh. 


My co-teacher and another teacher from my school announced for the kickball and jump rope. I wish I understood Korean, because I know they were funny, and from my language barrier side, they went well together as a comedic pair. 


Midterms are coming up in a week. I mean, crazy! School years are wrapping up now at home, but we're just coming on halfway through the first semester. Next month is the time for contracts to be resigned. I've been stressing about that lately. I'm really thankful for the teacher who sits next to me in the office- she's friendly, comes to teacher training, and we talk a little during the day. Some of the new younger teachers say hi, and it means a lot to me when last semester sometimes I'd go all day without talking to anyone beyond the morning and evening greetings. Plus, knowing a little more Korean has tremendously helped. Especially with students. 


From my fluent student, I learned that the face toucher is obsessed with some other teacher's face, too- so I don't feel so singled out (in a good way!) She's cute and bizarre, and she makes life more interesting. She apparently is making up words to describe people's faces, mine being bungy kungy, another's bangy pangy. Today she sent me a text, but Google translate claims it said "now touch your face," which would be really weird if it didn't actually means something like "I will touch your face"... I ended the conversation with a "no, but have a nice weekend!" 

An interesting thing that happened today was a man was introduced to me in the office. He explained that he's in a society re-entrance program, in the high school level but not really a student, just a participant. He said there's something wrong with his retinas which was been going on for 10 years, but he hopes to see me again to practice English. It took me a minute to kind of figure out what was going on, but it'd be cool to see him again, though I don't see the high school class he's been assigned to. Maybe something will change, who knows. 


And for the moment of the day where I just didn't get it was a high school 1st grader (the 27 year old who is beautiful) waved me over and said "my right face hair, what do you think?" (in english more broken but I can't remember). It looked like a hurricane swept through half of his hair, and it was like that in person, but he showed me a picture he took of himself on his phone. 


Back to Seoul tomorrow. I'm armed with proper directions of how to get to where I want to go. :D