last week belated

My schedule got shifted around a lot this week, so writing another blog entry got put off for the sake of planning lessons and marking tests. Last weekend I started missing some of the normalities from home. Saturday night, Burger King made its way into all of my dreams. I'm not normally much of a fan, but the next day those dreams made the two whoppers I had for lunch taste all that much better. I even bought an extra whopper Jr. to put in my pocket and eat a few hours later on the bus ride back home. I had gone into the city to check out an english church service and also with the hope that I might go grocery-store-hopping looking for normal foods that I can't get here in Naju. Lucky for me, one of the teachers agreed to bring us around to the bigger places that she'd found. Those places turned out to be gigantic grocery stores with the smallest spice racks in the 'international food' sections. For spices, I managed to get basil, thyme, "Mexican" oregano, bay leaves, and paprika. In the end I also found some worchester sauce, real peanut butter, tomato paste, baked beans, normal mustard, good ketchup, caesar dressing and some soy sauce that doesn't smell like rancid-flavored hard liquor. I still couldn't find vanilla extract anywhere. You never realize how much it limits the food that you can make when you can't get things like basic spices, unless you're a fan of bland vegetable stew. When I got home, I went straight to cooking up a wicked good tomato sauce to eat with the spaghetti you can buy pretty much anywhere (..??). I've been having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast all week.

One of the bad parts of being in this part of the world is that beef is suddenly too expensive to eat for anything but special occasions or in small quantities. That's why I was overjoyed last week when I found out that there is an all-you-can-eat-for-$5 place right around the corner from where I live that has beef! It's nothing like anything I've seen in North America before, though. You go up to the buffet with trays and plates and get your salad and soup and rice and lots of pieces of marinated raw meat. You have a couple small burners back at your table where you cook the pieces of meat yourself, then cook more as you eat that stuff and repeat that process until it's hard to stand up straight. So, I've found a place where I can go to get my fill of beef whenever I feel that absense in my life. The only sad thing about this place is that it closes before I get off work on most weeknights, so I can only fill my red meat cravings if they fall on the appropriate days.

My mind has been clearing up and staying clear for longer than it has in as long as I can remember. This leaves me with the dilemma of how to use this mental clarity and finding things to think about. Unfortunately, my job doesn't give me a lot of opportunity to use my mind like you would imagine that most teaching jobs would. Any time that I've tried to get creative with a lesson plan, the kids end up giving me blank stares and then quickly becoming disinterested. If I don't stick to the "repeat this sentence back to me" or "memorize this list" structure, they can't follow. So, I've been trying to read up on some of the civil wars and political crises around the world. It's too hard to build a coherent 'bigger picture' of these things without making too many assumptions. Lucky for me, I still have access to online journal resources from a university and this gives me the opportunity to research deeper into whatever topic I see as necessary. When I heard last week that Donald Rumsfeld resigned I was happy for a few moments until I saw that Bush was going to be the one to suggest his replacement. It's pretty difficult to put any hope in his judgment calls. Anyways, a little research on this new guy linked him to the NSA during the Iran-Contra affair that rocked the Reagan administration. I knew very little about this besides that the CIA was using drug money to fund South American terrorists... so I dug deeper into things and went on a researching binge. It felt good.

One of the last things from last week that I wanted to write about was a holiday here called 'Pepero Day' on November 11th (11/11). On this day, teachers and kids bring these little chocolate-coated cookie sticks of all different varieties to school and exchange them with whoever they like... kind of like the kids' version of Valentines Day. The kids insisted that we celebrate it a day earlier, because they don't have academy on Saturdays. The kids that like you the most give you little cardboard gift boxes covered in hearts and smiling anime characters with some stale gritty cookie sticks inside. It wasn't all that exciting for me, but the kids were all pretty pumped about it and at least it was a break from the same-old.