The Month of March

Our first month back to work/school has really flown by. It's hard to believe that we've already got our 1st mid-term at grad school this Tuesday. Our finance class is not our favorite; the professor basically reads from the book and is not helpful with our homework assignments either. At least he's allowing us to have a cheat sheet for our test. 

Our school life has also had some changes. B has 3 new Korean co-workers, and 1 new foreign teacher. His class schedule now includes going to an elementary school twice a week as well. They've set up after school programs for most of the elem. schools in our area, so most of our friends also have to take part in this. It's a lot more planning and a bit of headache to get out to the schools (since they're all in the rural areas) but B has his motorcycle so he's fine.

I also has a new foreigner at school. Actually,  my guy is dating B's co-worker (they came together). I've also got a new main co-teacher, so that's been a big change. The best new thing at my school, by far, is the new English classroom. Some schools in Korea have been given grants by the govt to establish English Zones, classrooms filled with hi-tech goodies for the foreign teacher to use. My room reportdly cost over 30,000 US dollars to renovate and set up. I'll have to take some pictures and post them on here soon.

Our computer's hard disk crashed a week ago. At first we thought we would lose all of our data, but luckily the repairman was able to find most of our documents and recovered them for us. We were happily surprised that he only charged us a total of 120,000won (about $100) to fix it up. So far it's working well again.

On the 7th we took in "The Marriage of Figaro" in Seoul.

Last weekend was our friend's b-day party. Roxanne & I got dolled up for the event.

Our group enjoying dinner.

Back to Work

On Monday we both headed back to work. The Korean school year begins in March, so we have a new bunch of 7th graders at our school. In addition to new students, there were a number of faculty changes in both of our schools  as well. Both of us have at least one new English co-teacher, so that will be a big change since we work together with them in the classroom. We've also learned that both of our schools will be getting an additional foreign teacher. H's school will get a man and B's school will get a woman. We've been told that these two newbies are married, but they will arrive sometime next week and we'll find out more then.

H is still going out to her rural middle school every Friday (starting on the 6th), and now B will also be picking up an additional school. He's been told that it will be an elementary school, but the details aren't set yet.

Tomorrow (the 6th) after work we will be heading into Seoul to watch the opera, "The Marriage of Figaro." We're looking forward to our second opera experience (the 1st being in Prague when we were studying abroad in '06). We'll spend the night in Seoul since Saturday is our first grad school course of the new school year. We start with an analtyitcal accounting class every Tuesday and Saturday, and in April we'll begin our 4-week long finance class. This semester's classes sound more rigorous than last terms', but we'll see how it goes. 

We'll leave you with a few fun quotes from our new 7th grade students:

"Teacher, what size shoe do you wear?"

"Do you have a gun?"  (When asked why he would ask that, he replied that he read that all Americans own guns).

"Can your cat jump high?"

"What's your blood type?"