May 3...Teaching Day 1

It is the first day of class. There are a lot of questions in my mind, I'm not sure exactly what to expect. My first couple of classes are really nice... I feel dumb because I'm not sure of what I'm doing in there, and I start re-thinking the whole teaching English in Korea (ignoring the fact that it's too late for me to think that way LOL) It's funny because we were supposed to only do introduction, but my students quickly said their names and then it was time to do something with them...

That wasn't the bad part... After that it was time for lunch. We still hadn't been able to get anything in regards to food so we decided that we would try and eat downstairs considering that we had eating there yesterday so maybe that would remember what we could and couldn't eat. My roommate and I head downstairs and we sit at one of the tables and we wait...and we wait...and we wait... and we wait some more. At first we thought well, you know it's a busy time of the day ( the place was completely full) So we waited some more... but still no one would even look at us. We had bought some English Korean books in Seoul, I had brought it with me to the store to see if I could show them just in case they couldn't understand. Finally I worked up the courage to ask someone being that it wasn't busy anymore and no one was looking at me. To make a long story short, the worker I went to ask was cleaning one of the tables she looked at me she looked at my book and she more or less pushed me out of the way! I was in shock... She motioned that I should go to the area where they made bi-bim bop, so I went but it wasn't any better. I went and sat down with my roommate and finally just got up and left... i was soo frustrated with my inability to communicate that I wanted to cry. We then went to the bakery and tried to by something but we ended up buying things that we couldn't even eat.

When we got upstairs the pastor of the institute was sitting and eating and he shared some of his lunch with us. I think just this past week I finally understood why the people didn't even look at us. 1) of course the language barrier, 2) I guess the norm here in Korea is that when u walk into the small restaurants you automatically call out what your going to have and then they bring it to you... we would've waited there forever...

Interesting things to learn on your first day... It was quite frustrating to say the least.

The next day we decided that we were pretty homesick so we went to Costco to see if we saw anything that would remind us of home. We saw many things that we wanted to buy. Then we went to buy pizza because we knew that the pizza was the same one that they make in the states. As we are inline... I say to my roommate... so how do we even order a pizza?!!! LOL!!

So as the line gets closer to the register, we still have no idea. Finally we see this couple of guys (yes they were a couple) and we asked them and they told us to say Cheese Pizza Han Pan and to make a circular motion with our hands. We ordered the pizza and then we saw that everyone else would move to another line (yes we felt like we were in a amusement park) obviously everyone else can ask if they order is done... could we.. nope... one of the workers took pity and she took our receipt on 2 occasions and she finally got our pizza for us... that sure lifted our moral for the day and actually it was on of the best things that had happened to us :)