Technology sucks...

I'm here at a PC Room for the first time since I got the internet at my apartment. I'm here with my Korean co-teacher on a Saturday afternoon waiting to meet his friends and go to a jam room. You can rent rooms fully equipped with drums, amps, guitars, mics, and a PA system for about 25-30 bucks an hour. We got here early so now we're just killing time.

So I'm writing a blog and he's playing Star Craft, the Korean national past time.

Here's a few funny things that have happened to me lately.

The grade sixes were gone on a field trip most of this week so the principal wanted to go to the grade three classes with my co-teacher. One of the students speaks decent English because her mom is from Singapore and teachers English here in Seoul. I was talking to this little girl and I was very impressed with her English.

We did an activity in that class and the students had to stand up. When I looked at this little girl she had on a pair of tights with a design made up of green leaves. The leaves were actually marijuana leafs and here in Korea 90 percent of the people would not even recognize it.

Yesterday I walked into my "office" and my computer wouldn't turn on. Then I noticed the smell of burnt electronics and I walked into the hallway and the maintenance men were messing with the fuse box. There was a power surge and it zapped two computers and the heater in our teacher's room. This meant that all of material I had prepared for that day was outta reach and I couldn't print it off so I couldn't really do any work.

I started messing with my cell phone because I was bored and I accidently pushed a wrong button that locked my phone. Because the phone was used, the generic password didn't work because the previous owner must have put her own password on the phone.

So there I was with no computer and no phone. Pretty shitty day.

I had to go teach a grade six class so I decided to get one of the good students to start entering numbers on my phone to hopefully unlock the thing. During class, she tried numbers 0000-0500 with no luck. After class one of my co-teachers suggested going to the cell phone service center to get my phone unlocked. It was 1:40 when we left. I had to be back at 3:00 to teach an after school class to the teachers.

My main co-teacher got kinda upset when she heard I left, according to one of my other co-teachers. She was like "Those lessons are private lessons and Richard can't miss that class. He has to teach it."

Well, the joke was on her because I got back to school at 3:00 on the button and taught the class with absolutely no materials besides a sheet of idioms I had printed off. I haven't spoke to her about it yet but I have a feeling I'm gonna get a lecture from her on Monday.

Oh well.

So today I went and bought a new phone. Well, it's used, but it's new to me anyway. And the thing actually has English menus on it so my life has just gotten a whole lot easier. Now I can actually use all the features on my phone, most importantly the alarm clock. I've been using my watch as my alarm and those quiet little beeps are sometimes not enough to wake me from my slumber.

Amazingly, I haven't been late for school yet though. My biological clock wakes me up just in time to rush through breakfast and catch the bus.

Well, I'm off to go jam some Korean pop. Can't say I saw that coming when I decided to come here...