What happens if it loses an arm? It grows a new arm!

Yesterday was so busy for my first full day here! I woke up with a full night's sleep (luckily) and went to have coffee with Brenda, another English teacher who arrived with me and is staying at the motel with me. It's so nice to have her around. She was born in Korea and moved to the USA when she was 10 so she still knows some Korean. She helped me order at the coffee shop, perhaps one of the funniest moments of the day. I asked how to order a muffin and she said when in doubt just order with a Korean accent: "One muffin, please" I tried. The barista looked at me like I was nuts, "Uhh...one muppin, please?" I asked a second time, "Aaaah! Yes one muppin!"And he warmed it up for me. Every fast food place or coffee shop gives you one of those buzzers you get a the Cheesecake factory to let you know that your food is ready...even though it's only about three minutes of waiting. It's really nice though and they serve you everything on trays and make it feel very fancy.
After coffee Tommy (who picked me up at the bus station the night before and takes care of driving us around when we need to go to appointments and stuff...he's like a liason for the school but speaks very little English) brought me to the hospital. Brenda didn't have to go because she worked in Korea last year for a few months. She's also taught English in Italy for the last four years, so she's an excellent resource! Anyway, hospital observations:

-All the older people were walking around in funny hospital pjs. The women in pink with a tie at the waist, the men in blue with buttons! I wasn't given a pari so I didn't feel part of the club.

-They had me give them a urine sample and gave me a cup and two tubes to pour the urine into from the cup. I thought this was the strangest thing! It was my job to walk the samples from the restroom to the sample rack? Then when they took my blood there was no concern about blood contamination. No rubber gloves, not even bandaids. They had me hold a swab to my bleeding arm (and I bleed a lot), when I dropped the swab the nurse just picked it up with her bare hands and used the same swab to mop up some of the spilt blood! Sorry if this makes you queezy, but I couldn't get over the non existent fear of contamination! I talked with Mallory (another English teacher whom I knew from Seattle) about it and she said there's not fear of HIV hear in Korea which is one of the reasons that the treatment of bodily fluids is so casual...

-Little boys love my bug necklace. In the middle of all my testing a little boy spotted my bug necklace. For any of you who haven't seen it, it's become a bit of Spruce Street School emblem. It's a rectangle of clear plastic with a glow in the dark background and shine green and blue beetle in it. The little boy kept tapping the plastic trying to wake up the beetle then saying, "It's dead! It's dead," in Korean.

After the hospital I wen to my first day of work a the hagwon (which is the Korean name for an English school that teaches classes after regular school). The kids here go to school for SO LONG every day. First they have a regular 7-hour school day, then a lot of them go to hagwon 2-3 days per week for 3 more hours! Some of them only sleep about five hours per night! I feel sad for them, but most of the English teachers try to make their time in the Hagwon fun. Most of the kids are very sweet, some are troublesome but not in any truly unmanagble way, so I'm optimistic that I'll be able to make teaching fun and interesting this year! The curriculum I'll be teaching is straight out of a work book and we teach for quarterly exams when the students move up a level or have to remain at the same level for another year.

I learned that in Korea, they say that you are one year old when you are born, so when students give me their ages, I have to mentally subtract a year to understand when they really are. I was shocked when I heard that one class was 11 and 12-year-olds because they seemed so much younger! When you're that age, a year means a whole lot!

I should explain the title of this post, when I was observing one of the youngest leveled classes that I'll be teaching this year, the focus of the unit they were learning was "A Trip to the Aquarium." One of the vocabular terms was, "grows a new arm"! I thought this was hilarious. In the recorded dialogue, the English speakers had a conversation about starfish growing a new arm, but hearing a whole class of new English speakers repeat the phrase "grows a new arm" was pretty funny as an isolated moment!

I have more to say but it's time to head to work, and this post is too long already. Hope everyone is well and happy!