Almost halfway through October

The first weekend of October I finally went to Seoul to see my friend who recently arrived. There isn't too much to tell about the trip, because it was the holiday weekend and there weren't many people or even open stores, so there wasn't a ton to do. We mostly just walked around a bit of the downtown, and Itaewon, which is the 'foreigner' part of the city (because it's near the U.S. Army base). At the very least, my friend and I were able to catch up a bit, and I figured out all of the logistics involved in going to and from Seoul.

This last weekend was a bit crazy, but I had a good time. We were even able to drag ourselves out of the house on Sunday afternoon to go to the last soccer game in Chuncheon for this season. I bought a team scarf and the small group I went with was up on the jumbo-screen at least five or six times.

The weekends have been more and more important since I'm starting to get a little frustrated by some of the work stuff going on. The biggest thing for me is having kids who are either so busy or tired that they just don't care about the class. It's hard to teach anything in an environment like that, and it makes me not care about teaching when they don't care about learning, which is not a good thing. I'm working on it, day by day.

My other highlight of this week was that I got my very first paycheck! It was getting kind of desperate and I had had to borrow a fair amount of money in order to not go into my U.S. accounts, so it was the biggest relief when I checked the ATM after work. We then went out to the giant grocery store and spent a ton on food and cleaning products. I'm most thrilled about the 3$ bottle of Dran-O I found, because now I can take a shower without having to wade around in a lake for hours after (remember when I said that there was no stall for the shower - yeah, after the shower clogged it was just gross).

In other big news, it seems that there is going to be a country-wide strike coming up next Tuesday, which means that we have to make up classes on the following Saturday, which means the DMZ trip has to be temporarily suspended. More on this as it develops.