Two Great Weekends (and an icky week in between)

I just got back last night from Busan, which is on the southeastern coast of Korea. I had a great time. I got to lay out on the beach, sleep, listen to my Harry Potter book on Audio... in short, my own personal heaven. I also got to spend time with some cool new people that I met last week (get to that in a minute) and it was just a lot of fun. Unfortunately, the water was freezing, and there was this really strange man in a thong speedo (Eww!) that kept blowing his whistle if anyone even tried to swim. He wasn't even a lifeguard. I don't get it, but whatever. TIK. There was also yummy food and dancing involved in my weekend. Overall it was pretty great. Oh and I got a little burned... Oh well.

I really needed the break because last week was just annoying as hell. It was the first week of the new teaching month and those are always the worst. You have almost no time to prepare for your new month of classes. It feels like people are pulling at you from every angle to get shit done, and we have to do our monthly evaluations, which take forever. Also, and for the first time, I got really annoyed at work because on Tuesday, like 5 minutes before I have to go teach a class, my partner teacher says to me, "Oh Susy, the kids don't have the [this] book, they have [that] book." Mind you I had an entire lesson prepared for the first book, not to mention that I had already made my monthly lesson plan for that book, and on top of that I have never taught the second book series so if I had known I would definitely have taken a lot of care to be ready for the class. So I walked over to my boss (and I will admit I was a little peeved), and I said told her what happened. I don't think she really understood why I was upset. But my main thing is, how am I supposed to know that something is changing if no one tells me, especially when I had prior to all of this asked (verbatim) "Are there any changes this month that I need to know about?" Um.. hello?!?!? But it was fine, I went into class and I winged it. What else could I do?
Also because of all of this I ended up missing Hapkido for most of the week, since I had evals to do on Wednesday and Thursday, and I left to Busan on Friday morning.

The previous weekend also happened to be great. On Friday, one of my kindie kid's moms came to the school and she gave me two tickets to the opera. She's so sweet. So I took Liz as my date and I got actually go to the opera (and my seats were pretty sweet). After the opera I decided that even if I had no one to go with, I was going to find a place to go salsa dancing. So I walked over to a place that I had found on the internet called Babalu. When I got there it was empty except for the owner and a couple of people but it ended up being pretty cool. We hung out and chatted (as much I can chat with people who speak very little English) and we danced a little. The owner is a guy named Salsa Hwang (which sounds like Salsa Juan if you don't see how it's spelled so I thought that was pretty funny) and he's awesome. He's a little Korean man with a lot of latin flair. Lol. I went back to salsa on both Saturday and Sunday. I was just putzing around doing some old salsa shines and I got offered a job teaching Salsa for the club. How cool is that? I'm pretty excited. For now I'm going to teach a ladies styling class and then maybe we can start a rueda course. Yay! I also got to make friends with a young Korean guy named Song Gu, but he goes by Ron, who lived in the states and actually lived a few months in Cuba, so it's great cuz dances more like Cuban-style salsa and he's my official translator.

Also on Saturday I went to this fight club thing that I had found on the internet. A guy named Nick is doing it and it was also a lot of fun. It's basically just other foreigners (or weigooks as we are called here) just getting together to practice martial arts and spar. I'm not quite up to their level yet but I try. Nick is pretty awesome. He does cage fighting and Tae Kwon Do, so I like hanging out with him. After salsa on Saturday I met up with him, and a few of the other people from Fight Club at a hip-hop club named... Old Skool. Yes, the name is a little cheese-y. But I had a great time. We danced for hours and it turns out that I am (hopefully) going to be in a music video for a local artist named Tony B (and he's not Korean). The video shoot will be in a couple of weeks. It's a lot, I know. Then on Sunday I went to watch Megan and Luke's softball game and after I went to grab food with David (a tall Canadian boy who I met at Fight Club) and Francis (a funny half-Paraguayan boy that I met at softball and who likes to practice his spanish with me).

So the last two weeks have been pretty eventful. But also pretty good. A few things are in the works that I really hope pan out. I always get a little apprehensive when I see things that I really want and may actually be able to have. But that's just my skeptic side coming out. Wish me luck!