update

So it's been a little while since I've updated, so here's the skinny on what I've done the past few weeks.  I hiked the tallest mountain in this province, mu deong san, with my buddy a few weekends back.  It was a pretty easy til the last half kilometer or so, which was pretty steep and tiring. 

One weekend more recent than that I went to Busan, an international city on the South East side of South Korea ( I live in the South West..) for an international fireworks festival with my friends Josh, Darrell, and Brooke.  We left Gwangju at 8.30 am, checked into the hotel and got to the beach around 1.30.  The festival didn't start til 8, but we heard that it got super crowded, so we got there early and set up a portable picnic table and just poker on the beach all day, had a few beers and got dinner while we waited for the show to start.  It was a good thing we got there early because by 7.30 you could barely get off the beach to go to the bathroom and get back on (which after drinking beers all day was needed often).  Then we eventually managed to get onto the subway and get back to the area of Busan we had a hotel in.  On our way home we got some snacks from a mini mart, and when we came out it looked like a guy was proposing to his girlfriend outside, he was down on one knee and everything..  Josh went up and started clapping for the couple, but apparently he wasn't proposing to her, or she said no, because the Korean guy wanted to fight Josh about it, I had to jump in between them and cool it off. 
The next day we went to the bus terminal to get tickets home, but they were sold out of the soonest available bus, so we had to wait 2 and a half hours for our bus, so we whipped out our handy portable picnic table and our cards and started playing poker.  After about an hour of playing a cop came up to us and confronted us (it's illegal to gamble in Korea I think) it's understandable, we did have a crowd of people watching our game, we felt like we were playing in the world poker tour or something!  But the cop said something to us, and we tried to explain to him that we weren't playing for money (our poker chips was a big bag of change so it looked like we were... and we actually did have 5 bucks each riding on the game...) he seemed okay with it, the Korean guy next to us said the cop said we could keep playing...  But the cop came back 5 minutes later with another cop that was itching to give us a ticket.  We put the cards and chips away immediately and managed to not get a ticket.  All in all it was a really fun trip.

We had a halloween / birthday party last Friday at school, which was a lot of fun.  There is a themed birthday party for everyone who had a birthday in that month on the last Friday of every month, and the whole Kindergarten part of the school (4 - 7 year olds) get together to celebrate.  Most of the students had costumes, and we had a haunted house which was really lame, but scared the crap out of some of the kids.  I wish I had remembered to bring my camera that day, or to the fireworks festival (I brought it to Busan, but left it at the hotel).

This last weekend was my friend Shannon's birthday, and we had a crazy hat party at her place to celebrate, and then went downtown.  Besides that I just hung out with friends and played a bunch of poker.  I wanted to go climb the nearest mountain, but was too lazy and unmotivated to do it by myself. 
My classes are pretty good.  Daisy Duck (my 6 year old class) is still a little wild, but I'm figuring out what works as I go.  I found one activity they all do well, so I printed out a bunch of similar ones so I can have them do that if they finish early instead of run around hitting each other.  Today was a long day, my first class got me flustered because three boys kept fighting, which had me in a bad mood for my second class, which is a rather unruly class.  I usually have fun with that class, but not today because I was already frustrated with my first class, and the fact that I have two more classes starting this week, new books, no cd's for the books, and an oddly planned field trip and work this weekend.  I have a bunch of paperwork building up from all the new stuff I have coming at me.  I am also still having some of my classes observed, which makes me nervous when I have my boss sitting in class watching me, and I have to do detailed report cards on every student I have in the next few weeks, so it's just a really busy time for me right now.  Oh, I also start my Korean class this Saturday, and I also have work Saturday.  I think I can manage to do both if I time it right, BUT my fellow teachers that have taken the class suggest that I learn to read the Korean alphabet before I go to the first class, which is gonna take up what little free time I do have this week.  I also had a spider bite on my wrist for about a week now, which hurt and was swollen for the first few days, now it's just a bump going away.

I know it will get easier once I get used to these new classes and get this coming stuff out of the way.  So next week should be better, and hopefully this field trip on Thursday is fun.  The field trip is actually to get all the foreign teachers out of the building because we have some inspector coming and it is technically illegal to teach the younger kids at our school english... or something like that.  so the big boss just figured it would be easiest to send all the foreign teachers out with the older kids.  Alright, well I'm going to look up something online that can help me learn Korean alphabet, because I don't have a book yet.  Hopefully my next update will be sooner than it took me to write this one!