Making a New Friend

It's that time of the week again that everyone loves to enjoy...The weekend!

My second week of teaching in Korea is up and at the moment I am loving every second of it. First thing I had to deal with on Friday morning however was one of the kindergarteners parents coming to see how the school's new English teacher is perfoming! Considering she couldn't speak a word of English I'm not sure what she expected to learn! Having taught the kids for two weeks and having no training or barely been shown what to do I would have given it at least a month before I can start to work out what kind of things work and don't work in the classroom!

In my afternoon lessons I was in the mood for some more laid back approach as I can imagine that after a week of going to two schools five days a week the kids are tired so we did a few different things, I played Uno with all three of the classes which they seemed to enjoy and a couple of them I also did a worksheet with song lyrics from some music and the objective was to listen to the song and then try and fill in the words.
I read on an ESL website that it helps the kids pick up more vocab and they seemed to like not having to go through the book so I guess that was a bonus for them. They found it easier than their regular work too.

With work out of the way I spent a couple of hours trying to get the hot water in my room to work as the thermostat was being very tempremental. I'm glad I got someone to come look at it for me because the weather seems to have taken a turn for the worse today and yesterday as well! We also added a new English speaker to our small circle of friends (I guess now there's four or us it's a square actually!) Kevin had been in touch with a girl from Ireland called Marie who has been in Korea for two weeks and is working at a school with her as the only native speaker! She is lovely and like the rest of us very much enjoying her time in the country, I'm sure she's pretty glad to have made some new friends.

We introduced her to the pleasures of galbi at Ocha's and then headed to NOW! bar for a few drinks. Had a pretty entertaining night playing pool, darts and just chatting. Charlie posted a new world record high score on cut throat cricket on the electronic darts machine clocking in at 790 (the idea is to be as close to zero as possible). He did win the second game to his credit but then I stepped up and somehow managed to end the game by scoring zero after 16 rounds. Beginners luck I think considering I still don't really understand the rules of the game!

We decided to head home at about 3pm this week though Charlie didn't have to drop any Korean on the taxi driver this week! There was the usual hysterics in the back of the cab and even before we'd got in at Charlie decided he was going to try and drive by opening the cab drivers door and then climb in his seat. The guy just sat there motionless, probably very confused about what was going on. He then had a 30 minute rant about cheating as we dropped Marie off and then another 10 minute rant on the same subject as we made out way back to H-A-SO O-GA- R-RI!

Today we met up with our new friend and fourth muskateer again and headed to Yungsan to try and find the $150 PS3 deal that Charlie had heard about from someone. I went with the intention of buying a new hard drive but when I discovered that my card didn't want to work on an ATM i decided to sack that idea off. We got some lunch in a coffee shop and then headed to the electronics district and to a place called Techworld (I only discovered that when I went on the net as that wasn't originally where we planned to go). This place was literally six floors of computers, laptops, ipods and cameras, the same stuff again and again. We stopped on one of the floors which sells computer games but we dissapointed to find out that PS3's, Wii's and 360's were all their regular prices and probably weren't that great-a-deal after all!

We decided to take a walk up inside another electronics mall which was inside Yungsan station and quickly found that there were really just more ipods, more mobile phonees, more cameras and more laptops. Deciding to head up to the top floor however we got a tremendous shock, we followed the signs to a place called the 'e-sports stadium'. I figured that it might be some kind of arcade or something but then discovered it was something way more geeky.
Flicking through Korean television channels the other day I disvoved that there are two channels dedicated to the PC online game starcraft. Now I find playing video games fun, watching other people play them isn't quite as good, and spending time watching people playing them on the TV is not my idea of fun but apparently in Korea it's a big thing.

As it turns out, on the top floor of Yungsang Station is the TV studio for one of these channels! We walked into a crowd of easily 300 people watching two kids battle it out on an fantasy RPG game based in space!!!!! Not only were the kids given entrance like wrestlers of boxers, they take their gaming very seriously in Korea and apparently these kids play in a nation, yes nation, Starcraft league where teams of ten battle to become the champions. Silliest of all in this mocked up TV studio there were three guys in the middle giving the play-by-play about what was going on! I spent the next 15 minutes trying to work out what was going on and also laughing so hard about how I always thought I was a geek but compared to these kids, my video gaming habits are pretty regular!

After the excitement of people cheering, screaming and clapping at virtual violence and things being blown up on screen we decided to head back to Suwon for some normality (and dinner). The subway back was crowded as ever and I spent an hour holding on for dear life as you get pushed from pillar to post as Korean's try to fight their way on and off the train! It really was a relief when we got back to the station!
We found a restaurant just across from the station and had Pud-ah-jigeh (that's probably spelt horribly wrong!) which is basically like Korean stew with noodles, rice noodles, tofu and meat all mixed together! It doesn't sound very nice I know but when it's all mixed up together it is actually delicious!

We decided to retire back to Talkster after this for some R+R before another productive day doing very little tomorrow!