Today we had our weekly meeting with Julia. It went relatively well, mostly because we just played along and pretended everything she said was the most exciting thing we have ever heard. We'll play it this way for awhile and see if she eventually lays off. Letting her know our true feelings sure wasn't working, so maybe this will. Plus, it's less emotionally taxing if we don't try to communicate. She said her son would be there today to translate. She apparently meant that she would try (to no avail) to get him on a video call using MSN. Then she called him repeatedly on the phone and made him sit there and wait while she talked to us. He eventually hung up. I really don't blame him.
Julia wants us to do more songs with the younger kids. I think that's a great idea, though I think she's thinking of different songs than we are. Ian and I are totally going to use some Yo Gabba Gabba. But, until we get that stuff together, Ian thought he'd get on Julia's good side by doning one of the songs that she suggested. The song assigns a family position to each finger. The thumb is the "daddy finger," the pointer is the "mother finger" and so on. Aside from being generally disturbing, the song isolates each finger, having the singers hold them up individually. So, when you get to "brother finger" you have a classroom full of ten-year-olds giving each other the bird. And, yes, they know what it means. They use the American sign for the angry expletive here. Not that many of them actually understand the literal meaning behind the command, but the malintent is understood. Ian's kids got out of control pretty quickly and he had to discipline them. He asked the instigating student if he knew what the gesture meant. The kid replied, "It means fuck you." Ian said, "Okay, do you know what THAT means?" The kids said no and Ian told him that he didn't know because he was "Pbabo." Stupid. Sounds mean, but having dealt with these kids, I think Ian did a very good job of putting him back in his place.
In other Ian news, a student tore out a page of his book and ate it yesterday. It seems that when I asked him if anything interesting happened, it slipped his mind.
We had a little thunder storm this evening. It seems to be mostly passed us already. I looked up the weather online and it seems that the entire northwestern portion of Korea is having thunder storms. At first I was really impressed and then I remembered that South Korea is 38,622 square miles in area while Washington State is 71,303 square miles. Ian just said "We'd have been all over this place twice by now if we had a car." That's probably true.
We're going to Seoul on Saturday. I'm so excited. I'll post our itinerary when we decide on it. All we know is that our last stop will be Costco. They're open until 10pm, so we'll go shopping after our day of tourism and then hop on the last bus. We're also going to Seoul for Halloween. We'll stay the night in a hotel that weekend and see more. After that, we've decided our next Korea daytrip/ weekend trip will be Busan.
I hope you all have a fabulous day! Ian and I are about to sit down to a late night dinner of tempura.
