Orientation

I finally made it back after three days of debauchery and mayhem at the teachers orientation. My orientation days were the last 3 days of the week, the elementary school went the first three days.

They sell alcohol at the teachers orientation in a convenience store located in the building. Shortly after arriving we were all herded into a large auditorium where we were informed that, Soju and Macoli would not be served.

Being all hopped up on Soju and Macoli the Elementary school teachers got so wild and out of control that they deemed it necessary to ban its sale, lest the other teachers also damage the facility.

People were pissed that their precious (and really cheap) booze would not be allowed, but beer was still available. Lots of beer was available, but it wasn't enough. Each nigh the native teachers bought so much beer that by the time the store closed the shelves were empty.

I dont understand why they thought that not making Korea's two favorite liquors available they would curb the NET's(native enrlish teachers) natural tendencies to drink massive quantities of alcohol and generally act like idiots.

Each night beer pong and other drinking games were played until the wee hours of the night. Each morning hordes of hung over sleep deprived zombies shuffled from one seminar to the next, mainlining coffee between sessions.

It was a lot of fun.

Book tour

So yesterday I was abducted. I had planned to go to Salsa lessons with my sister in law, but my co-teacher and the Head of the Englishee dept had other ideas.

Previously on Mr. Awesomecool's fantastic Voyage, I was given the responsibility of purchasing 2,000,000 won worth of Englishee books for the school(dont bother looking for a post, I did not write about it). As of yesterday I had done absolutely nothing about it. I had briefly checked out the esl cafe idea cook book, but that was it.

My co-teacher mentioned that she found an Englishee language book store, so Mr. Lee got all hot on that and scheduled us to go after classes on Wednesday. At first I was kind of psyched to go,I thought I might be able to pick up some books for myself and my kids. My enthusiasm quickly waned after we arrived.

It was an Enlishee Teaching bookstore, full of textbooks and all the useless lesson and learning books on tape and shit. Like a honey baked ham, my eyes quickly glazed over.

I tried to look for books that might be interesting to the students, and easy to read, but they were hard to come by. Sure the kids might like Harry Potter, but I had a hard time understanding what was going on in that book. JK Roweling being the crooked toothed Brit she is, chocked that thing full of Brit slang, and terms not used in the US, and that definitely would not be understood by Korean teens who read at a 3rd grade level. Everything I tried to pick up was "too differcurt" or "too herd" for my precious students.

My co teacher kept suggesting the most boring god awful books and books with cassette tapes (we dont even have a cassette player in the lab). "I tink da Student wourd rove to reern abert da piramird" But I dont tink so!

I wanted to get students Spongebob, the Simpsons, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Korean subtitles, but they only had Spongebob on video tape. Holy shit! Is it still 1990 over here? You cant even buy video tapes in the US anymore!

We ended up spending about 600,000 in the store, on nothing I wanted but as I learned from Asmith, I did not get involved in the Mongol bullshit. Every time they asked what I thought about something I just nodded and smiled. All I know is I wont be using any of the crap we bought yesterday.

Originally I guessed that the whole thing should take an hour and a half or so. We left around 3 pm, it took about 1/2 an hour to leave work. The drive to the bookstore took about 30 minutes or so. When we got there, we had to have tea first. We did not finish shopping until about 5:30pm, for some reason it took almost as long to actually buy the books. Afterwords we went to dinner, we drove around for about half an hour before finding a place(I will write more about that later). Dinner took about an hour, and then we had tea again. After dinner they drove me to a bus stop (another half an hour) and I finally got home about 9:15pm or so. The whole thing took over 6 hours, and I still have 1.2 million won to blow on books and DVDs. I think I will be ordering the rest online though.