So that none of you will ever have to wonder what a birthday in quarantine feels like I will explain in depth. It's kinda awesome that since we are a day ahead here I get to have my birthday in Korea a day ahead and then all of you can wish me happy birthday today. So I get 2 days of birthdays. The day started the same as they all have with some special bday hot dogs and toast. It is rainy and stormy and people are starting to get a little stir crazy being stuck here with nothing to do. Some new instructors came to help us with the curriculum. One of them is a Canadian lady who was extremely upset with the facilities. She gave them an earfull and magically a whole bunch of workers showed up to finish with construction. So we get to be extra careful when changing now since there are guys on scaffolding outside our windows and random workers running around the building.
After breakfast we met with our fellow campers to decide which subjects we will be teaching. I pulled the birthday card and they let me have the art booth for the middle school and for elementary school Marty and I played rock, paper, scissors to see who was going to teach the hospital booth. I won. I picked it because we teach them to say really funny things like "I got ink in my eye," and "I suntanned for one hour." Nice.
After that we broke into groups to dissect our lessons. I know what you're thinking: "What an EXCITING day!" At lunch I got to see Ian and Mango with the webcam and then it was back to orientation where the Canadian teacher, Andrea, discovered that one of the Korean directors had stolen her entire powerpoint and she was presenting it to us for the 2nd time. MY favorite quote from her, "Well, that's why *Su Sang* SUCKS."
After lunch I was feeling really bored and lazy but Christine made me get up to go do something. We decided to walk down the hill to see what the beach is like here. I wish I had something exciting to say about it. There were a lot of fast little crabs everywhere but other than that it was really slimy. There is no sand, only rocks and the water looked to be full of nets and slimy seaweed. On our way down a large group of Korean workers got really excited and started screaming "HI!!"and waving frantically.
No terribly exciting meals today. At dinner, to my extreme embarrassment, Christine stood up and announced that it was my 26th birthday and made everyone sing to me. The Koreans bought me a cake and to all of our surprise it was a really, really nice fancy chocolate cake. Soooo yummy. Unfortunately it was rather small and all 70 campers started to stare at me and random people began to hover around it. People who have never talked to me started smiling at me and wishing me happy birthday. Christine had a great idea to share with the people who have to stay at camp Wando...we got a few boos but oh well.
Margaret went to the store for us and bought us a big bag of snickers, beer, and soju so Christine, Susan, Shannon and I went back to Christine's room to start drinking. They mix beer and soju here (which is good because the beer here is like 2%).
Marty brought a guitar so we had a big sing along and moved along to the auditorium after quiet hours. By this time many of us had a lot of soju in our systems and someone noticed that the karaoke machine was still here. We sang some more bad songs which evolved into a big dance party. We danced like crazy people to hip hop songs and stumbled drunkenly to our rooms at 2am and passed out. Needless to say I am not feeling 100% today. This morning I thought I was going to throw up my toast and my head was going to explode. Soju makes bad things happen to your head.
Yeah. So bday in quarantine 2009 didn't turn out so bad. I've had worse...Today is even stormier than yesterday and they are going to make us practice our lessons in front of our groups. NOT COOL. I don't like teaching to adults. For those of you still reading, even though Mercury is the planet closest to the sun, Venus is the hottest due to the clouds that act as a coat to trap in the heat.
The end
*Names have been changed to protect people's identity...actually I just have no capability to remember Korean names so I made one up.
I enjoy reading your blog, Michelle. Happy birthday--twice :-) When do you get out of quarantine?
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed your lesson about Venus. It reminded me of the time I told Tyler, when he was little, that the bright star we were looking at was actually a planet called Venus. He said it couldn't be his "penis" up in the sky and that I was wrong!
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