I miss variety

That is the one thing I really miss about America. There are a million stores selling a million brands of a million products. You could buy almost any type of fruit or vegetable year round, shop for clothing of any size and brand, or buy things online for incredibly cheap prices.

In Korea, not so much. Every town has the same cell phone stores, book stores, clock stores(they are really into clocks here)and bakeries and they are all selling the exact same products. You might find a little more variety at your e-mart or homepluses, but the bulk of what they sell is exactly the same as what everyone else is selling.

There are foreign markets in Seoul that sell some a lot of products that you cant get anywhere else, put the prices are high and the selection is limited.

There are places that sell foreign sized clothes, but the last pair of jeans I looked at were $150.00 and looked pretty shoddy. And forget about a good pair of running shoes. Unless you want a stylish pair of rocking elevator shoes.



Oh well, I least I can afford to buy shit over here. Back in the good old US all my money went to rent, food and heat.

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.