Oh Pierce!

It’s finally Friday! Ah I am so tired today; I never realized how tiring teaching really is. I now have a new respect for all of my Elementary, Middle, High school and University teachers! Classes went well today, some were better than others. I really like Friday classes because we have class in one of the only “no shoes” classrooms!

After my day of teaching, I met up with a homeroom teacher at my school who was nice enough to take me to get my cell phone! We’ve been told that you really should have a Korean speaker with you when you go get a cell phone, because there is a big chance the place won’t speak English, and there is a lot of paperwork. So she was really nice and picked me up from my house and took me to a cell phone place. We spent quite a bit of time there, talking about the fees for the plan and the phone itself, but finally I decided on everything and we started with the paperwork. I even got to pick out a little cell phone charm for free, it was awesome! But then at the last minute, the guy noticed that my bank card number didn’t match my Alien Residency Card, which is what you need to get a cell phone in Korea. This was a huge bummer, and he wasn’t allowed to let me have the phone. I was bummed but my new friend told me that it was ok, she would take me on Monday to help me set up a bank account with my ARC and then after school we will go back to the phone place to get my phone. It was so nice of her to help me with this process, and also to offer to help me again on Monday.

So after the cell phone mishap, I told her I was meeting my friend at Home Plus at 8:30, so she dropped me off there and headed home. I went up to the food court where I was meeting Courtney and had a hard time finding her until a Korean man spotted me and said “Hello!” Now, I’m actually used to this by now; Korean people saying hi to me or asking me things in English just so they could speak English. So when he said hello to me, I said it back to him. And then he said, “are you looking for your friend?”, and I was really surprised because that was exactly what I was doing! He told me she’s sitting down at the food court, and directed me where she was sitting. I thanked the man and went down to sit with her and two other guys she was talking with. I told them how funny I thought it was that a strange Korean man assumed that an American girl was friends with the other random American girl in the Home Plus food court. It turns out, that man was Courtney’s co-teacher of sorts, and I had actually met him the other day when he dropped her off in my town. I felt really terrible because I didn’t recognize him, but I’ve met so many new people in the past two weeks, it’s hard to keep things straight sometimes!

Courtney was super pleases to see her lover Pierce Brosnan was in South Korea with us!

After I met up with her, we took the 130 bus to try to find the rock climbing gym in our town. We actually found it pretty quickly after we got off the bus, but for a while on the bus I was worried we made a mistake trying to find a place in the dark. It was really great finding it, but we didn't have time to actually climb that night because the buses stop running at 10:30 and it was already 10 pm. We started heading back to the bus stop but we decided to stop in the convenience store to get some water and food. I got a Kimbap Triangle which is really yummy. It is just a triangle of rice wrapped with seaweed, and it has a small amount of meat in the middle of the rice. Well I got one, and it was one of the spiciest things I’ve eaten since I’ve been here! It was actually kind of painful while I tried eating it at the bus stop. Once the bus came, we got on and drove home. When we got to my house, I plopped down on my bed and almost fell asleep in my clothes I was so tired!

This is Kimbap Triangle. Mine was super spicy, but the other flavors are really great!

Side thought:

• The churches here are really interesting. There are these LED crosses lit up high in the sky to indicate that there is a church there. They look like they should be in the movie “Romeo + Juliet” with Leo DiCaprio and Claire Danes.

Far in the distance is a lit up cross.

Clip from the movie for reference.

• So the light bulb in my shower blew out and it was too early in the morning to tell my landlord about it, and we couldn’t figure out how to take the fixture off to change it ourselves. So we left for the day, and accepted the fact that we would be showering in the dark for at least one night. So when we got home that night, I started taking a shower with the door open a tiny bit for light to get in. But after a minute or so, I closed it and closed my eyes and pictured I was some (even farther) far away place, taking a shower under the night sky. At some point I imagined I was right near some tropical beach, showering next to the loud waves and a clear sky, and the next minute I imagined I was somewhere in Africa, like Eliza Thornberry (you know, from the Nickelodeon show “The Wild Thornberrys”), taking a shower amongst the elephants and giraffes.