Rain rain go away

It has been pouring all day. Even if I wore my rain boots and umbrella, I would still get wet if I went outside. Days like this make me really miss having a car. So I have been inside all day, catching up on American music, reading, and watching Glee. I am obsessed with Glee! I resisted it for a long time because I thought I would hate it, but I was so wrong. I've watched almost a whole season in about 2 weeks. It's so great. And I'm reading Eat Pray Love. I don't like it as much as I hoped I would, but its good. I love reading about all the places she visited.

Anyways...I'm bored so you're going to get a lot of random thoughts. One day Yuri and I were driving to the bank and she said "Most foreigners come to Korea and lose weight. I think you have not." haha what?! What I heard is "Why are you still a fat American?" I blame it on the amount of white rice they feed me. A few days later Sam and I were sitting in the teachers lounge/snack room and he said "Your makeup looks nice today. Are you going on a blind date tonight?" Again...what?! There have been a few times my co-teachers have asked me if I was going on a date. I have no idea who they think I'm going to date in this country. And they are obviously very observant and aware of my looks.

There's a website for foreign teachers in Korea. We use it to share lesson plan ideas and funny things that happen in our lives and to ask each other for help. I read it when I'm bored at work. Somebody started a post called "Stuff my students said" and this was my favorite one. It didn't happen to me, but it happened to some high school teacher in this country.
Student: Teacher what's wrong?
Teacher: I'm very tired.
Student: Why teacher?
Teacher: Because I had 7 classes today.
Student: I had 9.
I laughed out loud at my desk. This is how hard the students work - sometimes they're busier than their teachers.

The Korean language doesn't really distinguish between the sounds "l" and "r", "f" and "p", and also "d" and "t". This week I was teaching my students the word "got" - like - "I got a present for my birthday" and a few of them thought I was saying "god." That same day we were talking about the past tense and a lot of them thought I was teaching them the fast tense. These are the moments when you need a Korea co-teacher to explain what's going on. Luckily I had one.

In Korean a word will almost never end in a consonant, so they have a really hard time pronouncing English words that do, and they'll add a little sound at the end to make it more Koreanized. So I hear words like this all day:
teachaaaa
pinisheee (finished)
My favorite is when they combine these and say: teachaaaaa I pinisheeeee
nice-uh
what-uh

My students often use the word "my" instead of "I'm" so they'll say things like:
my happy today
my sick
my go home
my good at soccer

Ok, my TV is on, and I just saw a commercial where they combined a Martin Luther King Jr speech with an Obama speech, and they were advertising a phone. Not really sure how that all goes together. But Koreans love Obama. One of my friends has a picture of his student wearing socks with Obama's face on them. How funny is that?! I want some. Also, they run commercials really differently here. Commercial breaks within are literally 1 or 2 commercials. It's awesome. But what's not awesome is that the breaks between shows are 15-20 minutes long, and sometimes they throw those long ones in movies too. There have been times that I've literally forgotten what I was watching because the commercial break was so long.

It's almost summer break! I don't really get a break because I have to teach English camp, but it'll be really nice to have a different routine and schedule for a while. Camp at Sun-am starts in 2 weeks, and on Monday Yuri told me what age kids I'll be teaching and that I had a week to create all my lesson plans and materials. On Friday after lunch Jenny gave me a schedule for camp and said I had to give her an outline of all my lesson plans by the end of the day. I was not thrilled. But...that's the way things are run over here. Planning does not happen very far in advance.

Well this has occupied me for a while, and I'm sure you're bored by now. It's raining less hard now, so maybe in a while I could actually go outside. Hopefully.