Start of School and Birthday Shenanigans

Hello all!

It has been a busy couple of weeks with the stress of a new school year, and nothing as exciting as my trip to Japan happened so I'm a bit slow on my blog. Also last week I had dinner with a friend on Sunday night, which is my prime blogging time, and then was busy a lot so here I am now blogging to catch up on the last two weeks.

For fun just so everyone knows the struggle of my life:

Some mornings I wake up and my hair does this.

I shower at night and put my hair up and finish drying it in the morning since it takes too long to dry and I don't want to get up any earlier to let it dry, but there are a lot of variables that go into how it looks. How much product I use. How long after I showered did I put the product in. How long before I put my hair up. What's the air temp in my apartment. Did I toss and turn a lot or sleep straight. What part of the moon cycle is it. You know, that sort of thing.

So some mornings I have to struggle and tame it to look like this:

BAM. And some of my 6th grade girls told me I was beautiful.

Sometimes mornings are hard.

If you want to listen to one of my new favorite songs while you read, here is the wonderfully relaxing song from the drama I just finished, Kill Me, Heal Me:

I really liked Kill Me, Heal Me as a drama, but I found it a bit flashy and overhyped. Ji Sung, who is singing this song, is actually amazing and it's worth watching for his acting. This song breaks my heart though. In the show, Ji Sung has a bunch of different personalities because of a disorder, and when they start going away it's really sad. Watching him play all of the different personalities was a treat. A lot of the other plots in the drama were convoluted and like whhhaaaa???? but he was awesome. I did cry when one of my favorite personalities left. I prefer Hyde, Jekyll, Me, which deals with a similar concept, and has Hyun Bin, but still. Both are excellent.


Anyway, school started up again last week. I'm so happy that So Jung is still in grad school so she gets to be my 5th/6th coteacher again!!! Yay! It was really nice to be able to know what we were doing and look like a unified team in front of the new 6th graders, who had both of us last year. When I told them I would be coteaching with So Jung for all three of their classes (in 5th grade I only saw them 1 of 3 times), the excited looks on some of their faces were priceless. So cute!

I have a new coteacher for 3rd/4th grade, and she's great too! Her English name is Grace, and she's a little bit older than the other coteachers I've had thus far. She also got some certification in teaching English in English, which is great. She's really nice and was more nervous than I was about starting at the new school and meeting the students. She worked at a much bigger school before, so it's stressful for her now because she has to teach a bunch more subjects besides English to get all of her hours. Like she teaches social studies and some other class which includes woodworking (???) along with English, so when we coteach (for 3rd/4th grade I see them 1 of 2 times), I am entirely in charge of the lesson from beginning to end. It's a little daunting since all my other coteachers work on the lessons together or we split the lesson 50/50, but I make a lesson plan for her and we do message about it back and forth to make sure we're both sure about it.

I'm still teaching third grade, a thought which at first made me really excited but is now exhausting. This is the first time they have subject teachers, so they're a bit wild and unmanageable. Also, some of them have some English background if they went to hagwons, but many of them are fresh into English. It's really hard for me to simplify any more than I do, and I rely on my coteacher a lot. I just hope they calm down a bit and we can do some serious learning! I hope my coteacher knows I'm working hard and that we can work well together! We can do it!


On Friday last week, we had a staff dinner to welcome the new teachers. It was really fun! I got asked on 4 separate occasions if my hair is real. I forgot that it would come up again as I met new teachers. We went to a different restaurant than our normal one, which was nice. Both places are delicious so it was great. Grace came and sat with me since I'm the one she knows the most at the school, which is a shockingly weird position for me to be in. She also told me she was worried about fitting in, and at her old school there were so many teachers that they didn't get to know each other all that well. I feel like the system must be difficult and if you have to constantly switch schools that feeling will never go away. And I know a thing or two about feeling like I don't fit in at school, so I was happy to be a crutch. Since she has kids, she didn't stay long.

The rest of us were out until about 10 something, and we only stopped because one of the teachers fell asleep at the bar.

I got to sit with the young teachers, as always, and we had a blast. The highlight was discovering that Moon Jung, one of the 4th grade teachers, had also gone to the same Maid Cafe as I had in Tokyo. The exact same one. We shared our pictures and experiences and now we decided that I am Moon Jung's American soulmate. I also got to impress with my Korean comprehension and my ability to speak a sentence. All those classes are paying off. Also I may have inadvertently gotten all of the young teachers to try to set me up on blind dates with their friends. woo! When I finally got home, I got to have a long chat with So Jung on KakaoTalk as she made her way home (like an hour away) and she said she was lucky to have me as a coteacher. I cannot express how mutual the feeling is. I have no idea what I did to deserve my luck with my coworkers and situation, but thanks, Universe. Thank you so much.

One of the music teachers had her bday on March 13th, so we're going out to celebrate hers and mine next weekend. How lucky am I that my Korean coworkers want to have anything to do with me outside of school? I also get to show off Tina to them, which will be awesome and I am SO looking forward to it.


Speaking of birthdays, Saturday night was spent in Itaewon to celebrate some friends birthdays. We totally took over the bar and some Koreans were even taking pictures of us because of how large and ahem  loud our group can be. I don't usually go to Itaewon because I live so close to Hongdae and it's a bit inconvenient to get to for me, but it was so much fun! I'd love to spend more time there and see more of the lifestyle in a different part of Seoul.


Monday night led me out to Hongdae again so that I could try some adventurous eating. This time on the menu? Chicken feet. Tina's coteacher Young Ah and her former coteacher Hae In and us twins went to get them. Tina's been cajoled to try them by Young Ah since like she got here, so it finally happened.

At first it looks normal enough.

I must admit, it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, We did get the boneless kind, so while they still had the 3 talons and foot shape-ish, it wasn't like an actual foot we had to tear apart. It was a bit spicy. but pretty good. The texture was weird. Chewy but that weird crunchy bit from all the joints. Overall, I don't get why you wouldn't just eat normal chicken.

But then you're like "Oh that is a foot."

It really was fun to try though. I will probably not go seek them out again on my own, but it was an experience.

Look at us smiling like we're not about to eat feet.

After our eventful dinner, Young Ah took us to a fortune teller because YOLO. She sat with me and translated while Hae In translated to Tina. Here's what we remember if you're interested:

Judging by my birthday and time, and the lines on my hands, I'm supposed to be pretty lucky. Fame and money sorts of things. I work hard and am smart, and I should go/stay abroad, I have high self confidence, I'm supposed to meet someone next year. People who stay around me are supposed to be lucky too. I apparently have a good energy. Hae In remembers it being similar to what was told to tina before, so it's a good sign.

Friendly reminder that I look like this in the morning. So basically, LINE UP FELLAS AMIRITE???

I love fortune things. I don't care how silly some people think they are, I believe in this kind of stuff and I think it's fun. It was really fun to hear and to have Young Ah get so excited to tell me things. I hope I can keep putting good energy into the universe so I can get good vibes back!!


The rest of the week was a blur of planning for lessons and teaching, plus finishing Kill Me, Heal Me, and having some intense episodes of Hyde, Jekyll, Me. And The Challenge, the shitty MTV reality show I refuse to stop watching.


Along came Saturday, 3/14. Pi Day! Here it's white day too, which occurs a month after Valentine's day. On V-day, girls give chocolate to the guys. On White Day, guys get the girls candy or whatever, so yeah. I got hella gifts.

Just kidding. Those "Choco Bean" things taste like straight up aspartame too.

I got a sucker from one of my 6th grade girls, 2 suckers from a couple of visiting 6th grade girls, and the bottle of Choco beans from the Japanese guy in my Korean class. Don't worry, he gave them to my teacher too, and to Tina since everyone knows about us and the third person in my class didn't show up, so he had an extra. Great haul.


Anyway, Saturday night we decided to celebrate mine and Tina's fourth 21st birthday since we don't ever get to do that together.

First we started off at easily our favorite restaurant in Seoul, as evidenced by the frequency with which we attend it: Gusto Taco. Tina and I met up with Sarah, Janell, and Lauren to begin the shenanigans.

Seriously, it's hella good. How good is it? HELLA.

Happy Hour Margaritas are half price, so though there were only 5 of us we decided the only responsible thing to do was to get an even number.

The margaritas are a bit strong so I took no pictures of the food, which is probably a crime to my generation.

After a delicious dinner we made our way to Mike's Cabin in Hongdae, a bar that I knew about from a reunion party and that I thought would be big enough to hold all of our friends from both our intakes.

It was so much fun! We all got to meet new people and reconnect with old friends. We learned that asking someone for a rubber in Australia means you're asking for an eraser. We found out that some of Tina's friends live in the same building in Gangnam as some of my friends. We had ice cream cake. We went to a noraebang and beasted out a stunning rendition of Part of Your World among other songs. We danced and ate and drank and chatted and had so much fun! It was definitely up there with birthday celebrations.

Here's to hoping 24 is as good to me as 23 was! And here's to more pictures!

Lace Twins! 

NoraeBANGIN'

The cutest ice cream cake

We lookin' so fly and are 'bouts to eat some CAKE

NOM NOM NOM

And this is easily my favorite picture of the evening. Tina is good at catching these moments.

All in all, it was an incredible weekend and birthday celebration, and it's not even my birthday yet! I'm so glad that my life journey has brought me here so that I can experience such joys like I have in the past couple of months. I'm so glad I finally got to spend my birthday with Tina again, and it just feels so awesome to have her with me on this amazing adventure.

Man am I getting all mushy. Like that ice cream cake after we went to town on it. Yum.

In Kpop news, I'm obsessed with this song and performance:

God bless the people who record some of these things. I hope you did not interrupt anyone else's viewing experience while doing so.

It's called "Out of Control" by Xia, and let me tell you his arms and hips are out of control. His real name is Kim Junsu, and I liked him because I heard him first doing Dracula. He's formerly of the group TVXQ, but is now in the group JYJ. He and 2 other members of the 5 member TVXQ sued SM Entertainment based on how ludicrously unfair their contracts and treatment were, and the legal battle went on for like 3 years. TVXQ is still a duo, and JYJ performs too, but SM has basically made it so that JYJ and its members can't perform on any of the major networks or the network can get sued or something like that, which is really part of the music culture here. It's all really convoluted to me, but also supremely interesting. JYJ and its members are still insanely popular without it, and XIa/Junsu's album "Flower" is doing really well.

And of course, my love Donghae and subunit partner Eunhyuk released an album and I fucking love it. Here's "Growing Pains."

Man, what a good weekend. I'm so stoked to celebrate my birthday tomorrow too. Here's to many more great weekends and birthdays!

Happy Birthday, Twins!

Stay well!