I love food toilets

Wow! I am almost finished with my 2nd day of teaching in Korea! I woke up yesterday feeling very sick and thought for a minute that somehow, after all this time, I still managed to get the swine flu. It was scary. The cold shower didn't help much either. As soon as I started teaching however I felt great and everything was fine. My first class was excellent. The students were absolute angels, they listened respectfully and even though many of them had very limited English they did all the assignments and waited patiently for all of their classmates to finish their work before moving on.
The second group was a little more difficult in terms of management but there were no major problems and during the breaks I got to talk to Ian over IM in my classroom. I was feeling super excited and ready for the evening activities after dinner. We went to the auditorium to play a game called "KABOOM" -it is like jeopardy only sometimes there is a bomb or a missile behind the paper. Our team won, they answered some pretty hard questions all by themselves. Afterwards they had waaay too much time to write in their journals (a very short fill-in-the-blank worksheet) and then we had to pick a song to perform for "Camp Idol." This is when things got frustrating. They wouldn't pick a song and finally I just had to decide for them. Then we had over and hour to practice and they got really bored and tired. Oh well.
After dinner we were finally granted permission by the camp principal to go out with our Korean buddy from quarantine, Ethan. He took us to a nice seafood restaurant in downtown Mokpo. As we entered there was a tank of live octopi, we took off our shoes and sat Kris cross at the tables. They ordered us a dish with many kinds of seafood mixed in with many small side dishes (several kinds of kimchi of course). Linzay is very brave and tries everything so I figured I might as well just go for it and not ask what things were until after I had tried them. I discovered that I really like to eat octopus and jellyfish (yeah, that's right, jellyfish!), the fish intestines were actually really good too...the only thing I had to spit out was this weird little clam-like blob. When I bit it juice squirted all the way across the table, it was hard and chewy and tasted TERRIBLE.
I am learning a lot about Korean manners. If you want to hand someone something you always have to use 2 hands...which can be very awkward when reaching far distances. Also you can never fill your own glass of alcohol, an older person with (usually the oldest man) has to notice and fill it for you (which you accept with both hands). When you cheers you have to touch glasses lower or higher that the other person depending on where they are in the hierarchy. It's all very confusing. There are so many times during the day when I'm not sure how to respond to something going on around me.
Afterward we went across the street to a bar, I guess it is famous in Mokpo because you can buy your beer in a glass made of ice, then when you are finished you throw it at a target and break it. I think if you hit the target you win another beer but I'm not sure. It was really fun to get out and see the city. I wish we could do things like that more often. I think Jeju island and Seoul will be very fun....I just hope they give us our stipend or I can find an atm that works...I am completely out of won! We got home at 1am and I passed out before my head hit the pillow.
They play really loud morning music here to wake up the kids so I woke up at 6:50 and took a cold shower. Teaching went well again. I am already bored teaching the hospital unit but at least it is easy, I barely have to think about what I am doing at this point. The lessons go by very fast. The students were great and we played another fun game in the gym today. Everyone had to tie a balloon around their ankles and then each team had to chase another team around trying to stomp on their balloons to pop them. My team won again. They are awesome. After that we played a relay game and went to dinner. The food here is really good, I think it is much better than Wando's food. We get lots of variety and the facilities are very nice.
The first day we were here I was fascinated by the food dumping machinery. First we dump our garbage and leave our spoons and chopsticks then you step up to a trough and water begins to shoot out down to a drain, you dump your food and the water carries it down. I think it is recycled or fed to animals or something. Anyway I named it the "Food Toilet." The girls liked that one. They made me do lots of cheers last night "To food toilets!"