A little update..

As many of you know, but also many of you don't, I have been teaching extra courses at my school for the month of January that have made it very hard for me to blog or be on skype as frequently as I would like. I thought I would take a moment here during my break at school today and let you know a little of what I've been up to.

January has been going pretty great so far, to be honest. I really do love being busy, even though it can be a little stressful from time to time. I blogged last about the holidays and since have gone back to work and have just about successfully gotten back into the swing of things. My apartment is not as neat as it has been in the past, but there are only a few more days left to the month, and then I'll be back on a more normal schedule. Yay!

The extra class I've been teaching is actually pretty interesting. I teach them for 1.5 hours every day of the week and they are pretty great kids. There English is really improving from all the extra work they've been doing. The vacation schedule here in Korea is very different from that at home. Kids get almost two months vacation in the winter and then more vacation in the summer. Except, its no vacation. These kids work soo hard! They still do all their regular classes at SLP (my school), plus extra classes, and they are also going to a million different academies and winter camps where they spend there days doing more work. We're also encouraged to give them lots of homework because they're on break, as I'm sure all the other teachers they see are too... Instead of calling it vacation they should call it time-off-from-public-school-so-we-can-do-even-more-work-at-private-institutions-ion ... yikes!

I've also been attending a really cheap Korean class offered at one of the universities here. Korean is a really interesting language to learn. It looks like characters, like Chinese, but it is actually phonetic, and pretty easy to learn the alphabet. I got a really neat electronic translator for Christmas which has really been helping me out with new vocabulary and stuff. Awesome!

I was thinking about putting some here for you to see, but I don't know how to start. Hmm... Let me show you some of the basic symbols.

ㄹ = L/R
ㅗ = O
ㅏ = A

So, if you put these sounds together you make, 로라 = Laura!

Usually Koreans pronounce my name Rora, because of the L/R thing, but it normally works pretty well.

Also, in interesting news, I really have been missing cheese a fair bit since I got here, because it is rare to find, and expensive when you find it, so cheese dishes have quickly been climbing my delicious list. (Not that they were ever that far down the list... hehe) When we were at a place called Rocky Mountain Tavern a few weeks ago which is a Canadian bar around an hour or so from my house, we had the most disappointing poutine... Randy knew how much good poutine means to me so somehow he managed to find out that there was a New York Fries in Seoul! I also didn't know until the day he took me there as a surprise that New York Fries is a Canadian chain... it was an interesting day of discovery. But oh, so delicious!

Anyway, I have more lesson planning to do and a class that starts in less than 15 mins so I should go and get ready, but I'll be back soon with bigger and better Korean adventures to tell you about! :)