Some stuff about my school

So people have been asking about my day-to-day at work, which I usually don’t talk or write about. But some of you are pretty nice, so I’ll give it a go.

I’m teaching at an all girls high school in Suwon. I have 17 classes throughout the week, two of which are ‘teacher classes’ where the focus is mainly on conversation. One class is for all the English teachers in the school and the other is for any non-English teacher that wants to learn more English. I’m at school from 8am – 4pm and have lunch at noon everyday. These are the healthiest lunches I’ve ever eaten. Also, now that I’m not eating meat, sometimes I can only eat the daily white rice and vegetable dish (usually some variant of kimchi.) Thankfully, a nice Korean lady comes around at 10am every morning and gives me yogurt, for which I pay a monthly fee. She saves me on days when I can only eat the rice.

Things of note about the school:

• Even though it’s public, every girl wears a uniform (white top and maroon skirt, w/some variation). And since every girl has the same hair color and roughly the same haircut, I’m a big racist and can’t remember most of their names. (might also be cos I’m teaching 500+ students)
• The students don’t go home after 4pm—they stay at the school and study until 10PM! I still can’t get over this fact and have not gotten used to seeing herds of schoolgirls walking the streets late at night by themselves.
• At around 2pm everyday, every student takes 10 minutes to…clean the school. I’ll be in the teacher’s lounge and a nice Korean girl will be sweeping behind my desk and another, cleaning my coffee cup. Now that’s what I call service! :-/
• The bathrooms: toilet paper is not a given, so you have to carry a roll around w/you at all times. Also, there’s about 1 or 2 regular (Western) toilets and the rest are squat toilets. The use of the latter has firmly cemented the reasoning for why I think Korean women have great legs.
• A funny/endearing fact: several of my co-teachers are extremely fond of the movie The Dead Poets Society and aspire to be like the teacher Robin Williams portrays.

So, that’s it for now. Soon I will be writing about my life outside of school. Namely, my recent excursions into Seoul – this last weekend having seen what was promised to be a tranny burlesque show, but was really a trannies lip-syncing to music show. It was still pretty amazing.