And Now for Something Completely Different: A Good Monday.

We got to the Sinback campus this morning right on time.  Which is a near miracle for us.  Gene was waiting outside the door for Terry, who was inevitably about fifteen minutes late.  He told us that Julia would not be coming.  I guess we can thank Gene for convincing Julia to let him do his job.  It turned out that Terry didn't have a key either ("Key... opseyo.")  So, we went over to the headquarters to utilize a meeting room.  The only other time we've been to the main building was during our first days here when we introduced ourselves in front of a room full of Korean English teachers.  The place gives both Ian and I a bit of anxiety.

The meeting went very well.  It mostly consisted of Ian and I outlining our lesson plans (granted, they are based on the plans Julia made for our week via Gene's translation) and Gene offering the very occasional suggestion.  No repetition, no condescension.  It was wonderful.  Though we didn't get started until after 10:30am, we were still finished before noon.  Ian and I spent our free time this morning at Dunkin' drinking citron tea, which is a little too strong, but I still like it.

My classes went smoothly, though I was very tired today.  My kids give me energy (when they're good), so that helped.  Starting with young classes is always good for me; it cannonballs me into my day and makes it go by quickly (by the way, "hurry up" in Korean is "bali bali!").  I taught one of my Basic 3 (10-11 year olds) the word poo today.  We were talking about compost and fertilizer and they felt they really needed to know how to talk about excrement in English, so I gave them the most comically inoffensive word I could think of.  Come to think of it, I should have taught them "excrement."

Gene was in Ian's classes today, but Terry never showed.  I don't know what's going on with any of that.  I like having someone there to occasionally translate or play partner to a kid who doesn't have one, but at least my every misstep isn't being reported.

Ian brought home 비빔밥 (bibimbap: rice with veggies, a fried egg and red pepper sauce called gochujang) and 김밥 (gimbap: rice and seaweed rolls with veggies or whatever else, like sushi only never raw and no vinegar) for dinner.  The 비빔밥 was good, but the 김밥 had fish cake in it, so I didn't have any.  Ian, however, ate two little pieces of fishcake trying to figure out what it is.  I'm hoping he'll adopt my "it doesn't look vegetarian, so I'm not going to push my luck" philosophy.  I don't know why there was fish cake in it, because Gene wrote Ian a note listing everything we don't eat and asking for our orders of 김밥 and 비빔밥.  Ian had to go to the place we've had trouble with because the good place was closed, which may be the reason.

Here's hoping I don't have to rework the HTML code for this post.  I never successfully fixed last night's.  Wish me luck!  Update: The formatting seems intact for Mozilla and Internet Explorer, but if you're using Google Chrome, it's still weird.  Good night!