Going Home

We're going home to Canada in 2 days now. I've been hoping to update this for a while but the past several weeks have been busy preparing middle school students for high school entrance exams. I had a few classes of students who wanted to get into the best high school in Jeonju so I had to prepare them for an English interview as part of their exam. They took the exam last Saturday and 13 out of 15 students passed. All of the English teachers are relieved to have those classes finished and to have such a high number pass. Our boss is pretty focused on those numbers and uses them for advertising so there was a lot of pressure on us to do well.

As for going home, we are all packed up and ready to go except for washing and scrubbing today. We hope to put in a good day's work today and then go see the movie Wallace and Grommit as our reward tonight. I still have 2 movie vouchers from winning a prize during my kumdo test about 6 months ago. Also regarding kumdo, I was able to pass my blackbelt test and received a blackbelt, a plaque and a blackbelt card with a magnetic stripe. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with that, but I figure the best use will be to pull it out when I'm making a purchase and feign a mistake, "Oh that's not my credit card...that's my blackbelt card." Maybe that will impress someone...

I wanted to bring my sword home on the airplane but I was told it would be too much of a hassle for just 3 months while I'm in Canada. Apparently I'm supposed to contact the airline and all of the airports I will be at during my journey. While I'm at each airport, I will be escorted by airport security from the moment I enter the airport to the moment I get on the plane. I'll bring it home next time.

We're both looking forward to going back to Canada and spending Christmas with my family. We often talk about the things we miss in Canada such as turkey, mashed/scallopped/baked potatoes, and my wife's favorite, Lay's potato chips.

I also landed a job at a very good high school in Gunsan for March so we will be returning to Korea in February to get set up. It's pretty exciting as the work hours are less than I do now but the courses are more varied and the students are all very good at English as it's a specialized language high school. There are also teachers for other languages such as Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and I don't even know what else. They want me to teach American History and Literature for the SATs. I told them I didn't know much about American History but I would be willing to try and they accepted me as a teacher so we'll see what happens. Two of my present students were accepted into this high school so I'll get to see them next year. It's a small world.