Chrissy Renae

Well so far the holidays have been great. Christmas was really fun, and although I missed the traditions of home, it was fun to try something new as well. We had a couple of sleepovers and watched a lot of movies and ate a lot of random foods and opened  a lot of fun presents. Freddy and Jono showed up in Santa and Elf costumes, so at least we had visitors from the North Pole. Beenish and I bought all the boys awesome giant goldfish.. but our inability to read Korean directions led to the deaths of all 3 within the next several days. It was fun while it lasted but now we are fish murderers.

This week I’ve been trying to cram plan for English Camp, which is next week. I will have about 20 students all week for 3 hours a day, and the goal is to have a fun time but also learn a lot of English. There is no curriculum and no money in the budget so I’ve been trying to get creative. It should be interesting, I just hope the kids aren’t bored.

Other random tidbits from the past week:

• Clubbing in Hongdae. Again.
• My pipes froze so I didn’t have water for a couple days. That was awwwesome.
• There are only a few other teachers here every day so we get more actual chat time. Also we order food instead of eating from the cafeteria. YAY.
• I hate the cold. So so much. And I complain about it here more than I ever did in Utah. We realized that’s because we don’t have cars here, and instead we have to stand outside in the cold and wait for taxis and subways and busses. Cheap and environmentally friendly, but they leave out the part about potentially freezing to death.
• Beenish and I booked our tickets to THAILAND and VIETNAM for the last 2 weeks of January. So awesome for so many reasons.
• My daycare kids are still cute. Are you surprised?
• We went to Myeong Dong again last night for another shopping explosion. We just needed “one  new dress for New Years”… We should have known better.
• Sex and the City Marathon. Speaks for itself.
• Tonight we’re going to Seoul for fireworks, clubbing, and other various New Year’s celebrations. I can’t believe 2009 is over. And don’t think you got off quite that easily… I’m sure there will be an Ode to 2009 coming soon. It was a fabulous year, the kind you can’t possibly just overlook.
• This font is weird. I will never use it again. Promise.

The kids are now on vacation, but the school daycare is open so I still teach them for an hour every day. This week we’ve been focusing a little less on English and a little more on crafts…

By the way, this new program I’m using allows me to upload videos now, so keep your eyes peeled for much more cinematic entertainment from this point out. The two in this post are from some songs we learned today…

Monday was the last day of school, followed by a TEACHER RETREAT with all the employees at my school. We took off for the mountains of Pocheon and spent the day going out to eat for various meals and drinks, and had a planning workshop for next year. Unfortunately I don’t speak Korean so the workshop was very long and boring, but luckily the teachers next to me were bored too, and taught me funny Korean games while we pretended to vigorously take notes. Hopefully the principal didn’t notice…  I stayed up until 3am with my principal and a bunch of the male teachers talking important things like sports and politics, and then crashed on a pad on the floor in dorm style rooms. Surprisingly comfy, although I can’t imagine teachers in America evvver being OK with sleeping on the floor on a school field trip. Too spoiled, I guess.

In the morning we went to breakfast all together and then to Uijeongbu cinemas and saw Ninja Assassins, an American movie that stars the Korean pop star “Rain”. Goriest/bloodiest movie I have EVER seen. It could be considered awkward since I was with a bunch of co-workers…. but they seemed unphased.

The coolest part of the retreat was that it gave me the chance to actually get to talk to a lot of the other teachers and make some more friends. At dinner all of  us younger teachers sat together and chatted all night, and I realized many of them speak more English than I thought. At school we don’t really get to talk except a quick “hi, bye” in passing as I take over their classes when it’s English time. So I think this was a good intro for next year, and I can hopefully have some real friends at school now (aside from Sophia, Mrs. Kim, and Mr Che.)

(I just downloaded Windows Live Writer and am giving it a test run, so hopefully my blogs will get cooler now. The kids are on vacation for the next 6 weeks, but I still have to come to my office every day… so it looks like I have an abundance of spare time ahead of me. )

Because clearly I can’t be the girl with shopping discoveries THIS beautiful.

This country is so dangerous.

Well now that the rant is over with, I can proceed to tell you a little about my actual week. Since you were patient with the novel style entry last time, I will be kind and entertain your eyes with mostly pictures.

Monday

English Cafe with other local teachers

Tuesday

New cell phone fiasco, followed by my HAIR CLEANING. I went back to the hair place and they deep conditioned my hair for free. Basically they played with my hair and put in a bunch of weird cremes and told me I was beautiful a  hundred times. Can’t complain about any of those things.

Wednesday

Woke up to THIS, which reminded me to appreciate the good things and stop stressing about the complications

Also, my first date with a legit Korean. It was really fun. That’s all I’m saying about it on a public forum such as a blog.

Thursday

COSTCO!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s always one of my favorite places, but in Korea it just gets better. There are just some things I should just never have to go without (i.e. Fiber One bars, Kashi cereal, real cheese). Between the four of us (Jono, Freddy, Beenish, me) we spent almost $400 just on food. The reason I’m telling you that is so that you can try to imagine 4 foreigners carrying $400 worth of groceries through the streets of Seoul and then through a maze of a subway trek, and then trying to separate it all to our respective homes. Yeah, just imagine it. Didn’t cause a scene at all.

Friday

CHRISTMAS PARTY!!!!

Saturday

Sick morning (maybe I have the swine?? j/k. i’m fine.) Threw up off my balcony (embarassing). Slept most of the day.

Luckily I was better for the evening so I could hold up my plans with WOO-GIN. But first let me give you a brief recap on the story of the boy we like to call BEAUTIFUL KOREAN.

So one day Beenish and I were on the subway headed to a friend’s house, and we realized we were both staring at the same beautiful man sitting across from us.

Normally I am not so forward, but he was beautiful. I couldn’t help myself. Sooo I was like… uhhh can you speak english? AND HE CAN. And so we chatted and exchanged numbers and have been texting and finally got to hang out last night. I’m not like IN LOVE with the kid, because I think it’s weird to try to like someone you can barely communicate with. However, he sure is a pleasure for the eyes. He brought a friend too, so Beenish and I got to enjoy  a true Korean night on the town– kim bop, BBQ, norebong, and all.

Today

Christmas shopping in Uijeongbu. YAYYYY.

Ok that recap was exhausting, and it probably was for you too, so I’m never going to get that far behind again. Fin.

The bad news is that I’ve been really busy so haven’t updated in 6 days (how are you surviving??) but the good news is that I have internet in my house now!!! So it’s Sunday afternoon, and here I am sitting on my bedroom floor updating my blog. Dream come true.

From the beginning of this Korea decision, it seems like I’ve done evvverything the hard way. Most people got their placements within a matter of about two months and had relatively no hangups in getting here. My process took well over 6 months. It was all definitely a test of my patience, but I’m really glad it all worked out like it did, and I just kind of assumed it would all run smoothly once I got here. Except hellooooo it is ME and I can’t just do anything the easy way.

Last Saturday my cell phone (my beautiful, high tech, full of awesome gadgets cell phone) was stolen from a club in Hongdae. It was my fault for being so careless with it, but I was still frustrated that it just disappeared so quickly. On Tuesday Sophia took me back to the phone place to get a new one, and the whole experience was beyond frustrating. Clearly I can’t speak any Korean, so the guy was explaining everything to Sophia and gave me all these different options and different cost scenarios and then she would try to translate it to me and it was all just making NO sense and I was tired and I felt like my head was going to explode. It was by far the worst experience I’ve had since I got here. I was mad at myself for losing the phone, mad at the cell company for making it sooo complicated to replace a phone (do people just never lose their phones here? i don’t get it), and mad at the weather for being so freaking cold.

Luckily we got it all worked out and by the time I got home I was feeling much better… but of course the complications couldn’t stop there. Once we left they called and said there was a problem with my bank account so my phone couldn’t be activated yet. Soooo Wednesday I went to the bank to fix my account (they needed to add my alien registration card id number to the account so it would match the cell phone… or something. who knows. being a foreigner sucks.) and I did it all by myself! Sophia didn’t even come, yet I was able to find a clerk who spoke English and got me all set.

Friday the internet guy was scheduled to come in the afternoon, so I left school early and stopped by the atm on the way home to pull out the cash deposit I had to pay (another reason being a foreigner sucks). Buttttt of course– my atm card wouldn’t work. So I jumped into a taxi and raced across town backkk to the bank, and they had to reissue me a whole new atm card. AWESOME.

So the point of all of this whining and blabbing is to demonstrate that my tally now looks like this:

• 2nd month
• 3rd cell phone
• 2nd bank account
• 2nd atm card
• almost 2nd camera cuz i lost it for a day, but then found it in my friend’s fridge. weird…

Nope, can’t do ANYTHING the easy way. I’m hoping that this concludes the annoying “getting settled” part of moving to a foreign country, and that now I can just proceed as a normal person.

Honestly everything else about living here has been amazing and flawless and I love lovvvve it, but maybe I just needed this week to shake things up a little and remind me not to take the good days for granted. Because this could be an awful experience, I could be homesick, I could have no friends, I could have a bad school and bad students, I could question my decision to come here. All of those things would be muchhh worse than having to get a 2nd phone and 2nd bank account, but none of them are problems at all! So despite the fact that this week has been super frustrating and stressful, I’ve never once questioned my decision to be here, and to me- that feeling of content is priceless!

This is how I look after I pull two all nighters in a row. HOT, right?!?

I’d give the weekend 5 out of 5 stars, but now it’s Monday and back to the grind. Luckily Mondays are full of all my favorite classes so it makes the day go by really fast.

Some highlights of the weekend included: house party at Werner’s, norebong til 6am, a big long run by the river, lunch at my favorite local Korean joint, Christmas dinner party in Seoul (Korean BBQ= so amazing), clubbingggg, new friends, sinking into my bed at 8am, homemade recovery soup all Sunday long.

I’ll skip all the boring details because I think I’m going to start getting repetitive in my weekend rundowns. They’re always fun, but they don’t really consist of a lot of variety. The pictures don’t have a lot of variety either (because I hang out with the same people nearly always) but I’ll share some of those anyways. Happy Monday!!!

This week my school schedule looked like this:

stalk me

And my free time looked (slash will look) like this:

Monday= English Cafe dinner/games with Korean teachers
Tuesday= Haircut in Uijeongbu
Wednesday= Shopping in Seoul
Thursday= watched a lot of Youtube vids with the boys, made some really delicious soup, cleaned my house
Friday= Seoul for a snowboarding competition? or maybe just staying local
Saturday=Christmas party in Seoulllll and another potential all nighter

There were no cancelled classes throughout the week, and my evenings were also unusually busy. Therefore there’s been a whole lot of hectic going on. I’m glad though- I’d rather stay busy than bored (aka Friday morning… look how empty it is!) so I will not complain.

Due to said schedule, you probably won’t hear from me again until Monday– do you think you can handle it??? (As a side note, I think it’s funny when I refer to people reading as “you” like I’m writing to one specific person. Does it make you feel special? Because it should.)

On a last, but very important note:

So the thing about Korea is that

1. The girls have perfect bodies

2. The girls wear perfect outfits every day

3. The girls wear heels evvverywhere

The thing about me is that

1. My body is..err.. not perfect

2. My outfits are a mess every day

3. I suck at heels

So I’ve been trying to work on all of those things a little bit because these cute little girls are very inspiring. And as mentioned before, the shopping here is to die for, so I’m trying to take advantage while I can.  (Being employed is really magical…and dangerous)

A very important step in my new attempt at being glamorous and not just a hippie bum was MY NEW HAIR. Sophia took me to this reallllly chic salon in Uijeongbu and I let them go crazy with the highlights and scissors. I was really nervous because of the language barrier issue and the i-have-light-hair-not-black-hair issue, but I was very happy with how it turned out. She even told me to come back next week for free “hair cleaning”, aka deep moisturizing, because “your hair is very very much damage.” I’d give the whole experience 5 stars, and now I feel very chic with my shorter straight blonde hair, over my longgg wavy dirty hair.

(please ignore my tired face. focus on the hair...)

I’m also trying to amp up the wardrobe a little bit, but I think it will be a drawn out process throughout the year. Beenish and I went nutso in Myeong Dong last night… so that was fun of course. Somehow we can’t bring ourselves to expand outside the Forever 21 bubble. But it’s cheap, and it’s beautiful, so how could we not love it?

spiderman,santa,subway... weird combo

meet myeong dong

that's my OOPS/ YAY face

This has been a bad week to not get enough sleep, because my kids are CRAZZZZY. Imagine the last week of school in June in America where it’s hot outside and everybody wants to be done with school and nothing worthwhile gets accomplished and you’re just counting down the seconds to the LAST minute of school. Well, the same concept translates to Korea, except that it’s December and instead of heat outside it’s pretty sparkly distracting SNOW and instead of being the excited student, I am the frazzled teacher.

So I’ve been trying to just roll with it and not let them get under my skin too much. Anybody who has skyped with me lately knows I’m not always very successful at it… Ha. We’ve resorted to a lot of youtube videos, silly role plays, and coloring projects this week. And pictures, because those make everyone happy.

the always-right-behind-me fan club

crazy, but allllways cute