mandu seems to be the topic of the day...with good reason

the wonderful world of mandu and my screwed up back.

i bought a whole meal of mandu (steamed pork dumplings) for $2.00. yesterday i wrote about eating the best meal i've eaten here so far, which was bbq chicken. the dumplings kick the bbq chicken's ass. they're cheap as hell and you get a whole lot of food. good gad. edibles here seem so simple, as there are relatively few side dishes, but the meat has so many spices in it, it's crazy. and i'm sure there were a ton of different spices in the sauce alone for these dumplings. but they're packaged just like some chicken nuggets or something. crazy amounts of food for so cheap. no matter what neighborhood i end up living in, i'l have at least 20 different eateries at my disposal. that's pretty cool.

today i taught for the first time. it was pretty cool. i learned that the syllabus for each class doesn't mean anything, particularly when you're teaching the same material to every age group. 5-6 yr. old koreans could care less about the cpu of a computer and what url stands for, but if you give them a picture of all that crap to color, they go nuts. i think i'm going to forgo the rules outlined in the syllabus and try to teach them the alphabet, since not one of them today could write it past the letter h. but why the letter h? what's so special about it? i dunno. but they sure like to throw crayons.

the kids in all the classes have been assigned american names by the teacher i replaced. so they're all named after his family members. my last class consisted of 11-yr olds named kevin, jay, gene, jena, terry and andy. this is the arrangement we were in when we played go fish today. they were all too smart to learn the parts of a computer...but they weren't too smart to play go fish for 45 minutes. fine by me...

prior to moving to korea, i had never ridden in a cab by myself before, let alone hailed one, ridden in it, said hello goodbye and thank you in a foreign language, and actually made it to my destination with no mess ups. i'm pretty proud of myself for this seemingly miniscule task. as long as i keep racking up the small victories like this, i think i'll be happy with my progress. i've also got some lofty goals for teaching at this school. there's a fine line between babysitting and teaching, and i want to make sure i ride the right side of it. i keep telling myself that kindergarten teachers don't refer to themselves as babysittters, but as educators. and i need to remember that.

tonight i again sleep in this sex dungeon-y hotel; this one's even worse than the first one. besides being woken up by abrupt pleasure moans through these too thin walls, i encountered a used prophylactic in the elevator (i'm trying to tone it down here...). there's also a pretty freaky vending machine that sells all sorts of aids to help one perform better, if you know what i mean. and the entrance to the parking lot/garage is half covered with all these ropes, a la a car wash, so people can't see in to the license plates to see if their husbands or colleages are cheating on their wifes. so obviously i can't wait to move to my actual apartment. moving all my luggage around has officially hurt my already janky back. i can't stand up straight right now--my left hip is raised about two inches higher than my left and it hurts like hell to attempt to balance myself. sleeping in a bed that feels like a brick with a paper towel on it doesn't alleviate any of this pain. but at least i found my earplugs today so maybe i'll actually be able to sleep through the gutteral noises.