And Every Minute Colder

Time is flying by as it's the last full week of November. How fast the minutes fly away. and every minute colder! We're going to see Les Mis in December so I'm stoked. 

The weeks have been hectic lately and it's hard to keep up. This is the first day I've had to chill in a long time, it feels like, and it wasn't even that chill. Man, everything is so packed! 

Last Monday I took a break from my usual Monday activities of doing nothing to hang out with Namho. We got samgyeopsal (pork belly) and went to a cat cafe, and it was awesome. Here are a million pictures of cats. 

Me, in my natural habitat

Namho bonding with the babyyyy

I love this cat

who eventually came on his lap.

Look at his little stumpy legs!

I got one! He was on me for like an hour.

<3

He kept falling asleep sitting like this.

So cute.

I really needed some cat time. It's been cold and rainy a lot here, and my students have been difficult, so it was a nice way to relax.

Tuesday was normal. I can't remember anything of note.

Wednesday after work it was raining again, but Namho and I met to go to the Seoul Lantern Festival. I had gone to the festival in Jinju last year, which is more famous and big, but I wanted to go again. It was cold and rainy but it did not disappoint!

Jongymyo Shrine, which I visited with Tina and Ronnie 

There were some pretty lit up bridges so we took some photos together.

This goof

It was really hard to work with the lighting.

Namho kept insisting on pictures of me despite the lighting.

He was like "WOW YOU LOOK SO BEAUTIFUL" then showed me this picture. -_-

Walking along the stream

Pics with lanterns

Hearts

Pic-ception

The American one was Mt. Rushmore. I asked Namho if he knew what that was and he was like "No."

We got chimaek (chicken and beer) and went on our way home.

On Thursday I switched my classes around since my favorite 6th grade class had earned enough points in their homeroom to have a cooking day. When their homeroom teacher told them if they had it first period they would miss English, they reportedly all yelled NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO and demanded a different solution like switching periods. As a result, I had them after lunch, which is usually a disastrous time to teach classes but was fine since they are amazing perfect angel 6th graders, unlike my other classes.

Since English was the class where they got the last point, they brought us food.

They made sandwiches

And rolls, and rice mixed with different things. It was awesome. 

My 6th graders are a bit difficult, but this one class is my favorite of all the classes I teach. They're really funny and try to speak English to me no matter what. They're very innocent' It almost balances out my average class and my terrible class. Almost.

On Friday I had Korean class and I had to stop for the book, so Tina and I bummed around the bookstore and found this gem:

Totally avoiding copyright infringement  

"Oedipus the King" with the pronunciation "Oh-Ee-Dee-Poo-Seu" which I found funny since they tried to account for all the letters in the name, but the word isn't from English so it's a bit difficult 

After Korean class I met up with Namho for some hot cocoa and went home.

Saturday I went to Tina's and managed to be on the 7612 alone! In my area the bus is less crowded but once it gets to Hongdae it picks up.

I live for this

Yeah, empty bus! 

We met up with Lauren in the afternoon and saw the last Hunger Games movie: Mockingjay Part II. I am not a fan of the way Mockingjay ends, and the way the movies were split made it hard to care about the characters. I still found it pretty entertaining, though. 

After, we got some pasta and wine, and some cake. It's always nice to see Lauren. After relaxing and dissecting the movie, we went home. Normally I would go with Tina, but I had a special event the next day.

I got to go to my first Korean wedding!

Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.................... Wait.

It would have been more exciting if I had actually known the people. It was for the principal's son. My principal wrote the invitation greeting in English to me. Normally I am not expected to go to these things, but since she made the effort I was roped in.

I wore normal clothes as if I was teaching. The ceremony started at 2, so I met So Jung and got there at 1:30.

We went to greet the principal and give our monetary gift. Weirdly, they were opening the envelopes and writing down the money amount as soon as you gave it, which was weird (even to the Koreans. So Jung assured me repeatedly that that was weird.) and everyone laughed because I wrote my name in Korean which takes a million years longer than everyone else (my family and first name combined is 8 syllables where most Korean names have 3... my first name alone is 5...) and you can tell I'm not Korean either way.

Afterwords, we saw the bride briefly - just saw, she was recording a message to her husband in a glass room we could look into. 

I asked a million questions and got to tell a lot of the differences. Like so:

They took their wedding pics already, with many different dresses. They bride and groom decide on the dress together. Some Wedding halls rent out dresses. Regardless of where they get it, most Korean brides rent dresses. 

It was pretty!

Then we went to eat.

Seriously. I saw exactly 0% of the ceremony. We just went to the buffet and everyone stuffed their faces for an hour since we had to give a monetary gift so why not.

My coworkers got to witness some normal occurrences in my life, such as people I don't know saying/shouting "HELLO" at me and women coming and touching my hair and saying "oh so pretty!" without me knowing them or without asking me to do so. So that was fun to let them see some of my life. Ha....

My second plate was all the best. Orange chicken, Pizza, duck with my favorite honey mustard sauce (seriously, Korean HM sauce is amazing), fried sweet potatoe, and kimchi mandu. I was so stuffed.

 There were like 4 other weddings happening at the same time, so it was kind of crazy. Everyone agrees that it's weird we all had to be there. Weddings here are like a whole family affair. I personally don't want all of my mom's staff at my wedding, but there we all were at the principal's son's wedding. The ceremony is more intimate and for immediate family and friends. Still, it felt odd to be at a wedding, which I consider quite personal, with a ton of people no one knew and my coworkers, and I met neither the bride nor groom, and I saw none of the actual wedding. We even had to hunt and find the head teachers and give proper greetings. So much here is about obligation and whatever even if you have no desire or need to do so.

Either way, it was an experience.


I managed to make it to dance class like 45 minutes late, and I really should have just skipped haha. I had prepared not at all, so I listened to EXO's Love Me Right on the way. It helped none percent.


I came in at about 30 seconds and we only learned like 30 seconds more of the song. It was really hard! It's so fast and the beats are hard to hear. I also am not a super fan of the song. I think it drags and has a lot of mismatched parts.

Anyway, here is the MV, where they famously used American football jerseys and wore Yankees hats, had an "Alice in Wonderland" theme, had a song called "Love Me Right" featuring a group of 9 guys and no girls, and VERY FAMOUSLY claimed that Tao (a Chinese member who had had an open letter from his father begging SM to let his son leave the group go back to China and heal from some terrible injuries) was "in America recovering and would not be a part of the repackage" right before Tao fucking dropped an album in China and sued SM.

And the insane dance practice:

Our attempts:

As you can see, we did not love it right. I am also not in the videos much as I did not learn half of the dance haha. Still, it was fun.

Here is Call Me Baby, which Love Me Right is a repackage (the add like one new song and repackage the same album to sell more....) of and which still features Tao as a member. 

I didn't like Call Me Baby much at first, but I like it a lot now and much more than LMR.

We had another practice after for the event in December, Dance Joa's 10th anniversary.

Pau had the coolest headband.

Tina and I got to show off our Korean, other Koreans told us how surprised they were by our class (We're really loud and supportive and don't care if we do poorly at the dance... when we split into A and B teams we cheer, not criticize, always smile and have energy, etc...), we drank and ate and had fun.

Then it was back to reality on Monday. My students were terrible today. They're learning days of the week and months of the year, which is a lot different and difficult for them to learn. Sigh.

I got surprised with needing my English camp plan by Wednesday so Lord knows how I'll pull that off. Whatever. 

I also went to costco to get pumpkin pie, as this week is thanksgiving yayyyy!!! I'm sure some of my frustration and irritation comes from the fact that I miss home a lot this time of the year, so I hope I can power through. 

Stay warm, everyone! And eat lots of turkey for me!

Rhythm Ta~

Phew! I am so tired this week! It felt so long to me and after an extra long dance practice I am wiped.

What even. My face mask is even like what?

Fall is super here though! Woo! This is on my walk home:

So pretty~^^

Here is a video of our class doing last week's "Miss Right" since I liked it a lot and you can see how it should look since our teacher kills it:

Woo!

It is very cold in my classroom despite it not being suuuuuuper cold yet. And up until Friday, we couldn't use our heater. So I took it upon myself to gear up. I bought a USB heated mousepad since my mouse hand it always freezing.

om nom nom

My wrist rest and my mousepad haha

This week was a bit crazy. It should have been relaxing but it was not.

Monday I had another staff dinner, this time with the young teachers since the principal wanted to get to know us better. We had some noodles and seafood and cheese mandu, which were both delicious, and then... it finally happened. I had to go to noraebang with my coworkers.

Seunghee (my 3/4 co), Young Shik (sports teacher) and I are the youngest teachers, so we all had to sing solos. I sang "Lost Stars" from the movie Begin Again because I knew all the teachers loved that movie and they sang along instead of listening to me warble through it. Young Shik is actually an amazing singer so he kept getting asked to sing a lot during the hour. The VP hates noraebang so he demanded we get no extra time (sometimes if it isn't busy they tack on like 15 extra minutes... or like 2 hours...) so it only lasted an hour.

Some highlights: I got to dance Bang Bang Bang since everyone was excited about that, and AOA's "Heart Attack" since the teachers all desperately want to distract from the singing. And I also got roped into singing "My Heart Will Go On" since my principal is really good at and loves English. It was memorable. It was pretty fun, honestly. We have some really good singers, and the young teachers like songs that I know. Will we go again? No clue. But it was a good experience. 

I was close enough to walk home so I did with the other teachers who live near me.

Tuesday was uneventful.

Wednesday was 11/11 which means Pepero day! Pepero is a chocolate covered biscuit stick and it is delicious. If you've had the Japanese version, Pocky, it's almost the same. I prefer Pepero. Anyway, peopl go nuts and bring in tons for their teachers, friends, love interests, passerbys, whatever. I got quite a few despite only having 2 boxes, so I was stoked. 

Not shown, the box I already ate. But still, this is like 6 more boxes than I got last year!

 I was not so stoked when I had my 3rd grade class. Now, their homeroom teacher told them not to bring in pepero. But that did not help. They were CRAZY. Could not sit still. Bouncing around. Not listening to me or Seunghee. I thought my throat would burst it hurt so bad after all of our techniques proved fruitless. I had them lay with their heads down for like 5 minutes to get them to calm down. No dice.

 Thankfully I had several boxes of pepero to help me after class...

Wednesday evening I hung out with Tina and Grace for Grace's birthday. I got her VIXX's new album, since she and I love VIXX. And their songs kept coming on in the restaurant so we suspect the owner saw us with the poster haha.

VIXX's concept, "Chained Up" got me feeling some kind of way...

I like the dance even more than the MV. 

Anyway Grace is amazing and we had so much fun just chatting and chilling. Thanks to Dance Joa for uniting us!

Thursday proved to be a bit eventful as I had one student refuse to listen in my worst 6th grade class and I went off in English and So Jung decided not to/couldn't translate since I was yelling so fast. It scared the shit out of my students since I am not usually the discipline teacher. So Jung told me when she yells at them in Korean they get used to it and can say "oh she's crazy I didn't do that. Why is she yelling at me?" But when I yell in English they don't understand and think "Oh it must be because I did this" so it was newer to them and scared them. They did do well after I yelled. I don't like yelling but damn English class isn't turn around and talk to your friends in Korean time. Rage.

I didn't have my language exchange on Thursday so I took to pinterest for a DIY project. Namho won me a Dance United shirt from my studio, but it was a 2XL. How can I jam in that? So I took to fixing it:

Actual fitting size.

Cool back

Far away view

post dance class pic

I'm pretty proud of how it turned out!

Friday my classes were calm until 3rd grade again but I am used to this class being crazy. Then it was the weekend!! Yay!

Tina and I went to where I take my Korean class so she could take the test and get into a class for more practice. After, we got dinner at Tomatillo:

Tina got a quesadilla and I got an enchilada. Yummy!

After, we headed down to Gangnam for Shannon (our dance friend!)'s birthday party. It was so fun! We got to talk to lots of new friends, Korean and otherwise, have a good time, have plenty of drinks, get Tina's number to the cute Korean busboy who lived in New Zealand for 3 years and said things like Nahhh in the cutest accent, and in general be amazing. The rain couldn't dampen our spirits!

Saturday was a rainy day so we chilled around a lot. We got brunch with Lauren, who I haven't seen in ages, then went back to my place for some much needed chill time. 

The street lights were messed up again.

I hadn't been able to see Namho much this week, so we decided to meet up in my neighborhood. This is great, but I have no idea what there is to do here. I usually go to Hongdae or something, so we wandered a bit before using our phones to find something to do. We tried to find a cat cafe, and found the alleged location, but it was all lies. It wasn't there. Sad.

Instead we ended up at a board game cafe. I've been wanting to go to one for a while. You buy a drink, then play board games. Namho and I played 4 games so it was like $17. but we were there for like 3 hours and it was really fun.

I got to relive my childhood and play Connect 4:

weeee

I don't mean to brag, but I absolutely schooled him. My competitive nature and childhood nights of playing with Ted and Tina combined to make me a champion at this game. Seriously. After he'd had enough of losing, we played a game he likes: Jenga.

Not a bad tower!

The next piece made it topple.

Then we played this game with monkeys and sticks and it was really fun.

Basically you randomly stick all the sticks through the tree then drop the monkeys on top. Roll the dice to determine what color stick you pull. Starting from the top layer, pull the colored sticks out. If the monkeys fall out of the tree onto the bottom, whoever pulled the stick gets them. BUT YOU WANT TO HAVE THE LOWEST NUMBER OF MONKEYS. It was super fun. 10/10 would play again. Wish I was playing now.

Then we played a random pirate game where you stick swords in the barrel and whoever makes the pirate pop out of the barrel is the loser. I am unlucky so I lost a lot, but we went all or nothing on the last one and I won!

I made my way home to relax before dance class on Sunday, where we learned iKON's "Rhythm Ta."

iKON actually was the losing team on a YG Entertainment show called Win. The winning group, WINNER, debuted and is active. iKON was the losing group, but they were popular enough and eventually also got to debut! Bobby, the main rapper in the group with the really raspy voice, won Show Me the Money, a show for rappers, and grew up in Virginia. I like the really little guy in the group. I don't know their names and they are all hella young, but I like the dance a lot.


Here's the dance practice:

I don't usually like the more rap based songs, but I love the beat and dance of this one. At first glance it's a lot easier than Teen Top, but I can assure you it was not. The slow, deliberate movements were certainly easier movements, and on countable beats, but you're moving the whole time and it has to look sharp and clean. It was easier than Teen Top. but not quite easy.

Here is me and Tina and our group doing the dance:

There are no words to describe how much I love this dance. It was so fun! I'm hella sore though.

After class we had more practice for a charity event and the 10 year Dance Joa anniversary, and it was hard to do after iKON. But we powered through!

Me and my new socks be chillin.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/eugeneyang/one-man-transformed-into-a-k-pop-group#.unMZY0D8v

Buzzfeed also killin' it with Kpop again as Eugene, the Korean guy in the Try Guys, transforms into an entire Kpop group and gives a lot of info about the way they work!

On to another week! Hopefully things will be less rainy, more calm, and not so cold!

Stay well, all!