Well, I don't hate his leather pants...

First of all, I AM OBSESSED WITH THIS SONG:

If you do one thing today, let it be watch this music video and listen to this song. It's awesome.

It's just a really fun song and I love the video. It's catchy as hell and always stuck in my head. Whenever they use English in these songs and it's wrong (shut your tongue????) I just think, “Oh. You tried so hard.” Then I enjoy the song anyway.

So I have been pretty busy with orientation and getting to my school for the first week, and I have pretty spotty internet connections, so it has been difficult to do a lot of things. You don't realize how much you use the internet until you don't have 24-hour access to it.

Anyway, orientation was great. I met a ton of great people and learned a lot of valuable information. It was a fairly typical orientation, if a bit longer than normal ones. I felt like I was in college again!

After orientation, we took a bus back up to Seoul to find out where we were place. My coteacher had a sign and flowers for me, and there was great surprise at my lack of bags. As we drove to the school, I was asked a million questions (do I like Korean food? What's my favorite? Do I like Kpop? Which group? Who is my favorite? Do I cook? How old am ? Etc...) for most of the ride. I spent a lot of the day at the school, and the 6^th grade teachers took me out for shabu (I think???) which is where they put a pot of broth on the table and you cook your food in it and it is awesome. Fancy Korean food tends to have a lot of cooking by yourself I guess?? I did not take any pictures of my food as I usually do since I did not want to look crazy on the first lunch with coworkers. The teachers were very concerned about me, asking if I was okay with communal food (I am), if we did this in America (we don't), if I needed a fork (I didn't), and if I liked the food (I did). One of the teachers told me I was good with chopsticks but I hold them like a first grader. I'll take it!

We hung out for a while then went back to the school while a service cleaned my apartment for me. My office is in my 5^th/6^th grade classroom, so it's pretty private. Just me and my coteacher. Sometimes we go to the Subject Teacher's room (for lunch and if there is camp or something in our room) and I sit with some of the other teachers. Most of the teachers here are pretty young and/or have enough English knowledge to ask me basic questions, so I feel pretty included as far as these place go. Still, sometimes they are all talking and laughing and I sadly sit there and smile because I know something is funny but I can't understand anything. That's probably the hardest part for me; I love being around people but I am not actually communicating very much. I feel very isolated and lonely, and I don't want to bother my coteacher by asking her what everyone is saying every 5 seconds. Alas, I will get used to it. I talk to myself a lot since I have no one near my level of English to speak to.

I hate to be that guy who keeps bragging about my apartment, but it's awesome. Tina's friend Lauren and her boyfriend helped me move (he's Korean and has a car.... gonna keep him around....) my stuff from Tina's apartment to mine, and everyone agrees that we are all pretty lucky when it comes to placements. There were some horror stories out there, but my school seems to really want me to be happy, so I feel like I'm being interrogated sometimes with all of the inquiries into my health, happiness, and well-being. My apartment is awesome. It is a 15 minute walk to my school. There are tons of little places around my building that are worth exploring. I love it.

Pictures of my apartment:

Basically my apartment is spacious, awesome, and in a great area. I'm absurdly lucky to have this situation in Seoul.

Though many of my EPIK peers are deskwarming for a bit before teaching, I got to dive right in... sort of. My 3^rd/4^th grade coteacher won't be back until December (I think?) and the new teacher who is going to be my coteacher until then didn't arrive til Friday, so I haven't met my younger kids. I will also be observing her class initially (again, I think??), especially because next weekend is a long holiday weekend. I did an intro lesson with my 5^th/6^th graders where we played a game: I asked questions about me and they had to guess the answer. It involved talking, running, and learning about me without me just spouting a ton of English at them. I showed off a bit of my Korean skills, and I made the students promise me that I would work hard to learn Korean if they worked hard to learn English. Most of them applauded me and seemed enthusiastic about English, but we'll see how long that lasts. My coteacher was concerned about their level of English, but they seemed to understand a lot of what I said. I only needed translations on a few areas, and more for 5^th than 6^th. I am excited to work with my students more.

I had a dinner with all the teachers at my school on Friday. We had to say goodbye to the old Vice Principal, and welcome the new Vice Principal, the new teacher (who will be my coteacher for a while), and welcome me. I impressed everyone with my 3 Korean phrases (thanks, EPIK orientation!) and also with my ability to drink soju/take shots. It's pretty traditional to have a lot of soju at these things, and once I was polite and drank the whole shot that one of the important people gave me, suddenly everyone wanted to see how the non-Korean drank soju. Apparently I am a true Korean. Yay! I was not happy about this later when the soju caught up to me, but I had a fun night. There are a lot of younger teachers at school (by young I mean under 30 I think...) and we played a game called “Ask Francesca what age she thinks everyone is.” I cannot tell the ages at all here (I like to say I play the game “14 or 40?”), so I told everyone I thought they were 26. They all found this amusing and I think I charmed them with my lowballing of ages (unless I knew what age they were because of prior information given to me by my insider friend) and because I stayed out with them the whole time they were out. I am the youngest person at my school (which did not surprise me) and also since I am a foreigner everything I do to try and embrace their culture is well met.

I'm having a hard time adjusting to the lack of independence, and to not knowing what's going on. My new coteacher lives near me (yay!!) and loves the area (YAY!!!), and she told me she thought I was very brave to come to Korea and to come out to the dinner even though I understand about 5% of what's going on. That made me feel a bit better, but those moments are often offset with frustrating ones. I figured out my way to Emart and bought more things for my apartment, but I can't explain to the security guard of my building that I cannot get my elevator key to work (I live on the 16^th floor...) and that a package addressed to my apartment is not something that I specifically ordered since I have only been here since Tuesday while he keeps saying things in Korean that I don't understand. My school schedule is weird and I still have to get my Alien Registration Card before I can deal with getting a phone or internet or anything I am used to having.

Thankfully I got to spend the rest of the weekend with Tina and among other English speakers. Tina and I met up with Lauren and went to see Dracula the Musical. I love Dracula. I love vampire stories. I love the music, set, characters, and costumes (Dracula wears leather pants for most of it ^___^) of this show. It is not a great musical. The plotline is essentially that Dracula gave up on living until he saw/met Mina, then he makes it his mission to make her his, but then he decides that he can't condemn her to his lifestyle and kind of gives up again. It is not a great nor compelling plot.

Also, unlike CATS, this musical WAS ALL IN KOREAN. I know a lot of the songs and I know the storyline, but sometimes when it's just one person singing a ballad onstage and I can't understand anything it's hard to pay attention. That being said, I FUCKING LOVE THIS SHOW. It's really incredible. The stage has several rotating parts, handsome men play Dracula and wear leather pants, the costumes are lovely (did I mention leather pants?), the score and songs are awesome, and all of the actors were reeeeeeeeeeally really good (especially when they work the leather pants) in the show.

Do yourself a favor and listen to this guy (pictured above and in the video below):

This is who we saw: Park Eun-Suk and oh my lord can this guy sing (and be in leather pants). He's technically the understudy, but he's awesome. Seriously, I could listen to this guy read my grocery list and be happy. I had this song on repeat all day. I love listening to Koreans sing, and this is an incredible performance. This is my favorite song in the show (English version here). While I am more of a fan of menacing, stalker, terrorizing Dracula's one-sided obsession with Mina, I love this love song where Dracula realizes the impact of loving her. It's the second to last song, and even though their “love story” makes no sense (Mina goes from marrying Jonathan Harker and being upset with Dracula for essentially murdering her best friend to being in love with him and his Dracula outfit and inviting him into her bedroom...?), this song is awesome and I totally ship them.

One of the big draws of this show was the main guy to play Dracula, Kim Junsu from the Kpop group JYJ. I like our guy's voice better, but this dude is awesome too (read: LEATHER PANTS). This is kind of long, but it's an awesome scene:

First, "Mina's Seduction"

"It's Over"

This scene features the moving set for a chase! It was fantastic to watch from the balcony. I think thy do a good job of showing how powerful Dracula is (use the force, Vlad) and the second video shows a cool view of the staging. The first video is just one of my favorite songs from the show (Mina sings "Please Don't Make Me Love You") and it's just cool staging.

Here's a cool scene early on in the show where Dracula decides he's going to be a fucking badass again instead of a decrepit old vampire-man and feeds off of Jonathan Harker (who has just been attacked by Dracula's brides), and has a great instance of quick change and leather pants. It's kind of hard to see the action, but the entire set is moving on 4 different circles while Jonathan tries to escape the castle. It is much more successful and makes more sense to me than the Dracula-being-chased-in-a-house scene.

There is a lot of sexual hugging in this show (some of the scenes were really controversial in the American version and some of it surprised me with the sexuality in the Korean version) and a lot of good shots of leather pants and sparkly costumes.

Seriously, everyone was incredible. I would recommend Dracula (with it's overly romantic and implausible, which is hard for a mythic fantasy story, plotline) to anyone. Especially if you are a sucker for wonderful music, awesome sets, beautiful voices, incredible costumes, and leather pants.

After the show we got some Indian food and I met Lauren's boyfriend, which was nice since I was enlisting him to move a hundred pounds of luggage. Afterwards, Tina and I met up with some of the most awesome people at orientation, and then skyped my parents while I stayed over at Tina's.

Sunday was a frustrating day of moving and completely fucking up my Itunes, but all of my things (except for the few things I forgot) are in my wonderful apartment. I'm just trying to take things day by day, but as I've almost been here for a month I feel like I am getting adjusted in some ways and am super not in others. Oh well. One day at a time.

Monday was full of me not doing much besides lesson planning and getting some immigration stuff done (thank god for my coteacher. She is an angel for taking me through the whole process even though she lives like over an hour away, has never done it before, and we were there until the office closed) for now, and hoping my internet connects for more than 5 seconds at a time. 

Thankfully, my new coteacher is about as lost as I am, since no one really knows what she's supposed to do either. I feel really useless sometimes at school, but we are all trying our best. We are all kind of in the same boat and are all working together to get things done. Fighting!! 

Hopefully I will have real internet and know more about my day to day proceedings soon enough!! See ya later, and may there always be handsome men singing while looking incredible in leather pants.