Christmas and beyond

Christmas was a little lonely without my family but we went to an Italian restaurant for dinner with a couple of other English teachers. It was the typical Korean version of Italian food but I was pleasantly surprised by the green tea fetuccini alfredo. We finished off the evening at the movie theatre. Unfortunately everyone in Jeonju had the same idea so the only choices we had for movies were Japanese animations. We went anyway but I understood nothing. My wife had subtitles but she said she didn't understand it either...I think it was called Flying Castle or something. We invited 11 English teachers to our house for New Years but only 2 showed up. Of course I didn't ask many of them until the day before so many had plans already. We had a good time though and the two that did come expressed an interest in getting together more often.

January has been hectic. Our schedule has changed to mornings but our workloads have increased. My employer has hired my wife to teach English and in her first week she had a 45 hour week. She's glad to have the work but she really only teaches for 31 hours. For some reason I don't yet understand, the foreign English teachers are allowed to go home when they are finished their classes but all Korean teachers must stay at school for the full 9 hours that the school runs. This means that my wife sits around for 2 hours at the end of each day trying to look busy. My schedule is not as bad. I have 27 hours of teaching and I'm at the school for 37 hours.

With the extra time I have I've been going to the gym to exercise. Fortunately we have a gym across the street from our apartment and it's only 100,000 won for 5 months which works out to around $20 CDN per month. The last time I went to a gym in Korea I paid 100,000 won for 3 months and the gym was above a sauna so it was always roasting hot and it was far too crowded. This gym is cool and there's not a lot of people there.

We're trying to get some friends addicted to Settlers of Catan. It's getting boring playing with 2 people...of course according to the rules you're not supposed to but when you're desperate you have to make do. So we played last night with the other foreign English teacher and she seemed to enjoy playing. The last time I was in Korea we played games every Friday night with a bunch of English teachers. It was so much fun that we'd like to do it again so we're thinking about hosting a game night every week or two and invite teachers from our school.

We're planning on a trip to China for February to visit my wife's sister. My wife and her sister were just talking on the phone about the trip and it sounds like we're going to visit The Great Wall, some huge castle and travel by train to a far away city for an ice festival. It's not guaranteed yet but it sounds like it's likely to happen. With both of us working at the same school and both of us teaching the same subject, the likelihood of us getting another holiday together at the same time is low.