Yay, I got comments! Thanks! In reply to your questions …..

1) the kids all have a pretty good understanding of English, so they should be able to understand whatever it is I’m nattering about. Some of the classes are quite high-level, others are the opposite. They all struggle with grammar. And they all speak English with American accents because all the resources that are on CD are from America. Its wrong, don’t you think, learning English from Americans?
2) Wal-Mart in Korea: the best thing ever. Unfortunately, its closing down soon, it got bought out by E-Mart.
3) Being vegetarian in Korea: so far so good. I can only eat one dish if we go out for dinner: bibimbop, its egg and vegetables and spicy noodles. My tolerance for spicy foods is going to have to change, you cant escape black bean flavour or gimchi flavours in Korea! For some reason, saying vegetarian doesn’t exclude ham from you food, (kids here cant believe ham comes from pigs. “teacher no! ham comes from shop!”

Today was day 4 of teaching, so by now I have met all my classes. Some of them are really lovely and polite and eager to learn, others just don’t want to be there. Its tough because as their teacher you know you have to help them learn more. But the poor kids are exhausted, they’ve already been at school for 7 hours and then they have to come to English school. I wanted to throttle on of the kids I had yesterday: terrible attitude, shouting at me and other kids, throwing things (don’t even give kids a die to play with, it turns into a very effective weapon. Even huge fluffy soft dice can be made into a weapon).

Korean kids get to choose English names: most of these are pretty normal, I have lots of Max’s, Susan’s, and Ashley’s. I also have a student called Hamburger, one called Tuscany, one called Blueberry, and today one kid decided he wanted to be Toyotashi. And if there is a Tom in your class there will always be a Jerry. Likewise for Harry, Ron and Hermione. Its very difficult to not laugh when you have to say “Hamburger, what is your answer to question x”.