More Suprises

Hey everyone!

I’m still enjoying Korea. I think I’m getting used to being surprised and confused everyday. There is never a dull moment here, and it’s certainly never boring.

Within the last few weeks the entire office staff at our school has changed. One girl quit. Soon after the manager and another secretary were fired by the owner. Supposedly they were involved in stealing money from the school. So we are getting a bunch of new staff.

We also just got a new native English-speaking teacher. His name is Drew and he is from Canada. He arrived a few days ago with his girlfriend Andrea. For the last few days I’ve been showing them around and getting Drew accustomed to the ins-and-outs of teaching at our school.

Getting back to the topic of surprise and confusion, I had an interesting experience at the subway station today. Drew and I were waiting for a train to arrive at the station. After waiting an unusually long time I began to wonder if the train would come at all. Suddenly, an announcement began to play over an intercom, in Korean of course. Since neither Drew nor I can understand Korean we were baffled to see people begin to leave the station. Since a few people stayed behind to wait for the train we decided to wait as well. The announcement continued to play over the loudspeaker for ceveral minutes. Eventually we realized we would be late for work if we waited much longer and decided to get a cab home instead. We will probably never know what happened to the train that day. Maybe someone jumped the tracks. Who knows?!

I took Andrea and Drew out for supper. We had a traditional Korean food called Samgupsal. It’s a crazy dish that you cook yourself. You get a plate of pork sliced like fat bacon slices. You cook it in the centre of the table on a grill. After the meat is heated up you wrap it up in leaves and eat it! Usually people eat this food with kimchi, a spicy cabbage dish, and soju, Korea’s traditional alcohol of choice.

That’s it for now gang.