It's starting to feel like we live here...

Thanks for the Christmas and birthday cards! It was nice to receive actual mail... I now have cards on my desk at work.

Work itself is a bit slow this week. We have been at school from 9 - 5 with the sole task of planning the upcoming English Camps. I'm working on several sessions - pop songs, "English Math Fun", arts and crafts, cooking class and a taekwondo session, among others. In case it isn't obvious, some of these sessions were prescribed. Apparently I am going to teach Korean kids taekwondo, which should be interesting. I've been going for less than three months, and there are always a couple kids in each school group that have their black/red belt. My form is... well, let's just say I'm not an expert. Ha ha... oh well! I'm sure it will be fun, or at least funny.

Over the course of the week we'll also be learning a play. Out of curiosity, would you say that most Canadian kids know the story of The Merchant of Venice? Okay, how about Canadian high school students? University students? I would venture to say that a few people may have studied it in high school or uni English classes, but beyond that? Well, I was informed today that the script of a fairy tale that Alden and I had carefully selected and modified (for simplicity of the English, number of characters, length of the play, etc.) would be dropped in favour of a narrative version of The Merchant of Venice. Narrative meaning that the script has yet to be written. The play now needs to be a "very famous" play, and apparently all Korean kids know Shakespeare intimately. This should be fun, especially since our regular kids have trouble with the English Town dialogues ("May I help you?"/"Yes, I would like that red pencil case."). The kids at our first camp will be from the islands, meaning that they will have an especially low level of English. Ha ha... cultural differences. They are starting to become apparent.

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In other news, I had a wonderful birthday in Busan. We had sushi, watched a movie and enjoyed some champagne. That may not sound very extravagant to people back home, but trust me, it was! It was great.