We’re sorry for the sudden dearth of updates, but I have figured out the computer issue (a bad hard disk I installed earlier this year; that’s what I get for buying Western Digital!!) and we should be back in business soon. In the true spirit of MacGyver (get it?) I’ve managed to jerry-rig something so that the machine gets a few more heartbeats while we wait for the replacement parts to traverse the Pacific. Cross your fingers, people.

So, things are starting to calm down a bit here as we setting into a little routine and get adjusted to teaching and just living in a foreign place. We may never be completely comfortable, but I think there’s hope that someday we may be able to avoid situations such as:

• [Clerk, in Korean roughly translated:] Thank you for shopping at E-Mart, have a nice day!
• [me, in Korean poorly spoken:] Helllllooooo!

I had clearly meant to say “thank you” and/or “goodbye” but sometimes the most comfortable thing to do is say “hello” with the freaky, over-enthusiastic tone of meeting an old friend for the first time in years. I’m sure the locals appreciate the comic relief.

Things at school are progressing nicely, I should say. Katelyn’s managed to whip her kids into shape, but they still have a nagging tendency to fold everything—I mean everything, including books and plastic bags—into origami boats. It’s uncontrollable. Even now, they do it under the desk at break time, hoping they don’t get caught with a half-folded worksheet or cardboard folder.

The birthday party

Last Thursday was the monthly birthday party for kids who were born in September, and man was it crazy. Basically, they take the 90-ish kindergartners downstairs and make them sit still in lines for 20 minutes while the staff attempts to get photos of each birthday kid (decked out in airway-restricting party hats, no less) in front of a marvelous spread of cakes, fruits, and juice boxes. None of the kids smile, because this is not a particularly happy experience (“Smile, now! Hurry!”) and the other kids just get restless and pick on their teachers knowing full well there would be no immediate ramifications.

After all the birthdays have been fully photo-documented, my coworkers advised me to cover my ears, and I did it just in the nick of time. What followed was perhaps the loudest, foulest, most piercing rendition of “Happy Birthday” I have ever heard. Just imagine 90 kids ages 4-6 screaming incoherent English whilst completely ignoring any sense of melody. Hearing a jet engine would have been sweet relief to my ears.

After all the pomp and circumstance, they let the kids run wild, so we teachers pretty much get mauled with screaming children for 15 minutes until they go upstairs, get hopped up on cake, and we are expected to settle them down to write thoughtful birthday cards.

“Cooking” class

And that brings me to: cooking class. Every other Wednesday, after lunch, the kindies have “cooking” class, which basically consists of the TAs bringing in a tray with raw materials and us teachers trying to figure out what the hell we’re supposed to be making. Two weeks ago, it was “pizza” made from white bread, ketchup, and ham. Yum.

This week, it was song-pyun on the menu, which are essentially gooey rice cakes stuffed with a sugar and sesame seed powder. It’s pretty simple. Grab a dab of the warm, sticky rice flour, flatten it out, spoon in some stuffing, then fold and eat. My kids loved it and couldn’t get enough. Sanitation-wise, it was a nightmare.

Plastic gloves are provided, of course, but they’re only really clean for the first fistful of dough, after that the kids shove them in their mouths and put their slobbery hands right back into the communal bowl. The gloves are kid-sized, too, so it was quite a trying task for me to demonstrate folding one of these suckers in half when I only had use of three fingers. The kids had a ball, though, making and eating these things (they are quite tasty, in fact). One of my girls made up a whole plate and when I told her she couldn’t take them home in her pocket (!), she proceeded to shove them all in her mouth quite comically.

As I was wiping down the tables, one boy just couldn’t get enough. He started picking up crumbs from the table until he realized that it was much easier just to climb on top and give it a good lick (feet kicking in the air, no less!). I literally had to pry him off the table, kicking and screaming! If you’ve ever seen a kindergarten classroom, you know how gross that is—that table was loaded with crayon residue, glue, and heaps of spit and snot. Mmmm. Yum.