culture shock

Wow...today was intense. I jumped out of bed and realized that the battery had come out of my clock, I scrambled to my ipod and breathed a sigh of relief when I realized that it was only 7:20. After my cold shower (no hot water here) we headed to breakfast and the opening ceremony. We found out that we would still be getting health checks because now they are really worried that the children will bring swine flu to the camp. Everything is so crazy. The schedule changes literally every 5 minutes and the Korean's English leaves something to be desired. I am in a constant state of confusion and I've been trying to ask as many clarifying questions as I can but the Korean culture is very indirect so they always say "maybe" before they answer our questions.After the meeting we headed outside and were greeted with a torrential downpour. We ran through the rain and I managed to get a 2 big blotches in the shapes of a sperm on my new white camp t-shirt. At lunch I sat with my class and they refused to speak to me despite my best efforts. I did get them to tell me their names but the rest of the time I listened to them giggle and wondered what they were saying. After lunch we met with our groups to play some icebreaker games. I have 6 girls and 4 boys in my class and at first they wouldn't stop talking. I had the same problem throughout the day, when the teacher talks here they students don't stop talking and no matter what I say they do not stop talking. It was very awkward for me. I even pulled out the evil stare. After playing some games they took a pre-test and we gave them a break. If you tell the children what time to be back they just leave and come back on their own. We don't need to supervise them at all. Weird. After the break we met again with the goal of creating a team poster and a team cheer. We played Duck, Duck, Goose and Down by the Banks and then the kids were in a good mood. Our team name is the "Shooting Stars" and our cheer was to the tune of Twinkle, Twinkle little star. I feel like today was so overwhelming I am having a hard time even describing how odd and alien everything was teaching them. I have 2 boys that never listen or participate in anything that we do. They were playing fighting games the whole day and I had to keep taking away the things they were using to fight with (my hospital supplies, markers, chalk...). After dinner we had to go to the auditorium to describe the posters we made and perform our cheer. My group had the best cheer in my opinion :) At the end we were informed that the native teachers had to vote on the best team poster (the cheer didn't even count!) It was really awkward and I felt really bad voting because only the top teams would get a prize. They also informed us that we would be responsible for performing songs in front of everyone. On the spot we decided to sing "Take me back to the ballgame," and "Stand by me." It was so weird. I can't stop saying how weird it is here. Sorry I don't have a better adjective. Afterwards I noticed that most of the American teachers were not looking too happy. In the elevator the horror stories started to come out and I realized how lucky I was to have such a semi-cooperative homeroom class. Many of the students were completely unresponsive and negative the entire day...to say the least. Too bad, it makes me nervous to get all the other rooms if they hate being here. I hope I can get them excited. Tomorrow is the first day that I will teach my Hospital unit, I hope it is OK. It is definitely one of the hardest lessons in the whole book. I found out today that it was written by a middle school teacher. The students can barely speak as it is let alone describe their ailments and draw an entire hospital floor plan. Ummm, so even though it's 10pm I was just told that we have a meeting...