The final move, I thought

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  Hanam, Gyeonggi, Korea Rep.
Friday, November 28, 2008

Wow!  I'm finally in my final destination, Hanam city.  It is a suburb of Seoul with a couple hundred thousand people in it.  Its interesting how quickly things can change when you don't feel like anything is changing.  When I was in the van riding from my hotel in Seoul to Hanam I didn't feel like I ever left the city.  From Hanam, in fact, it is only a 15-20 minute bus ride into the outskirts of Seoul where I can grab the subway to any part of the city.  There is a bus stop about 1 block from my apartment.  But as I was saying, Hanam is much different.  The people in Seoul seem to dress up every day.  They are always in a hurry and a lot of them speak some english.  In Hanam things are more laid back.  People don't dress up as much and there are less people running everywhere.  Also, practically nobody speaks any english, which is cool because that will help force me to learn as much as I can. 

So my first day, Friday, I got here about 4pm and my school director, Mr

my classroom

. Kim was waiting for me.  He took me to my hotel and I dropped off my luggage, and then we went to the school.  Its a nice school, the building is just on the middle of a city block (about 10 minute walk from home).  The school takes two floors.  There are 6 teachers.  Three are korean natives who teach the writing and grammar portions so that they can interract with the parents.  They are Christine, David and Jasmin.  Myself and Russel are both from the US and Peter is from Australia.  The three of us are the native english speakers and we teach the speaking portion of classes.  Mr. Kim is the director and "the other Mr. Kim" is the administrator.  On my first day after they showed me around we went to dinner with the whole group and the two teachers who were leaving, Andrew and Jennifer.  I got Andrew's apartment.  We ate a different type of soup dish called Sui Sui (sp?).  It had a spicy broth and we put in raw squid, shellfish, shrimp, and vegetables.  First we ate the meat, then soup.  Then we cooked noodles in the broth and finally they made a sort of fried rice.  Of course there was also an apple cider type beer and Sojou.  Apparently alcohol is big over here.  After dinner I went out with a couple of the others to a live guitar bar.  Sometimes Phillip plays there but he didn't get to that night.

After that, I went back to my hotel.  Apparently, there are a lot of "love hotels" in the area.  We think it is because the business men that have girlfriends want to get out of the city to rendezvous.  My hotel was one of them.  In the VCR there was a nice Korean porno tape waiting to be played and a box of condoms on the bedside table. The good news is that the sheets smelled of fresh bleach, which made me very happy.  There also were no outlets in the entire room.  All electronics were wired through the walls, so I couldn't plug anything in.  Luckily, it was just the one night!

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The blue screen	Russel and the other Mr. Kim	Jennifer, Christine, and Peter	Sui Sui
Octopus	Me and Jasmine	Russel's Rock, Paper, Scissors card

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