Everything is sunshine and roses here, I must say. I have been setting up house in a rather tiny but otherwise nice apartment. I have a washing machine that plays a song when it's done, a hippo that eats smells in my bathroom, and an expensive lavender-scented pillow that I bought because the woman selling them was the first Korean in two days to have a conversation with me that required more than "내" and "감사합니다" on my part. I have managed to get my XBox plugged in; it has two plugs, one to connect to the TV and one actual plug, and both were a challenge as the actual plug is US-style and required an adapter and the TV is mounted on the wall in such a way that it was impossible to get at the adapters. Fuck women's lib; for a while there I desperately wanted a man around to deal with this situation. Eventually I figured out how to unmount the TV without unscrewing the whole setup, spent a few moments balancing a big heavy expensive TV in my arms, and got the XBox plugged in.

My school is all sorts of exciting. The English teacher, my coteacher, a fellow French major (thus giving us three language conversation options), is a friendly young recently married guy who seems very nice, even a little too nice; he thought the ten-minute walk from my house to the school was too long "for a woman". The principal (aka God in a Korean school) was friendly and the only person who would speak to me in Korean; everybody else seemed nice enough, but annoyed me slightly because they wouldn't speak to me in English because they thought they couldn't speak it, but wouldn't speak to me in Korean because they assumed I couldn't speak it. Sadly, it's true that I can't keep up with a Korean conversation, and I know my pronunciation is shit, but hopefully with time and the aid of my seventy or so Korean TV channels, I shall overcome this. My classrooms have a smartboard, a few student computers, and loads of English resources. The Korean government textbooks we have to use could present a problem as they are mostly filled with Korean words and are at a level that would make my previous hagwon kindergarten students laugh. My coteacher and I have a big staffroom all to ourselves and we both have nice computers with big monitors.

As for actual work, I won't have much of that until September. I'm only going to be observing for the first two weeks, though I may beg Mr. Park to let me help out a bit in class. Then the next two weeks there are exams, so the class schedule will be somewhat disrupted anyway. Then there's an overnight school trip which is probably optional for me, but which I intend to attend anyway because I am going to really, really try to be good to my coworkers; I mean, I dressed up and took out the lip ring and did tons of smiling widely and bowing yesterday. The previous 원어민선생님 was a Korean-Australian guy who spoke Korean, so they mostly have no experience with actual foreigners. After the school trip is a five-week school vacation during which I have to teach a camp for a couple of weeks. Also, this Tuesday is a national holiday, so in fact I will have one day of observing and then another day off.

When I flew to Korea I went business class because I found a cheap ticket and the baggage allowance was bigger. This was an entirely new experience for me. Not only did I get the short line at check-in, but my line had a carpet. Then I got the short line at the gate as well, and then had a chair with more buttons than I knew how to use. I had to stop myself from pressing every button just to see what they did. In business class, you know, I wanted to try to be at least a tiny bit classy. I had, of course, tons of leg room, far more than I needed, and when it was dinnertime I got a tablecloth on top of my plastic airline tray table. We had individual entertainment screens and I watched some Korean movie that I missed the name of that was about bank-robbing ajummas.