Bar Refaeli sexy in lingerie fashion

Israeli model Bar Refaeli is said to have not taken her loss of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover to Brooklyn Decker too well.Refaeli, 24, was reportedly looking miserable when she arrived at the magazine's party on February 9 at the Gansevoort Hotel's club Provocateur. "She had a scowl on her face and wouldn't even look up for photographers who had been waiting for hours in the freezing cold outside," the New York Daily News quoted a source as saying. "She even walked right by fans who were pleading for her to sign her past issues of Sports Illustrated," the source said.The model finally gave in, but only after hearing that Decker, 22, had posed with her admirers.

Jennifer Lopez sexy in lingerie fashion

'Out Of Sight', starring George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, has topped a new list of Sexiest Films.Clooney and Lopez's onscreen tryst in the sexy thriller landed the 1998 movie the top spot on the new Entertainment Weekly countdown, reports Contactmusic. 1940 classic 'His Girl Friday' and 2005's 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' also featured in the list.Other movies that made the top 10 are 'Body Heat', 'Bull Durham', 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and 'Don't Look Now'.

We interrupt this class for a .... war drill???

Any time a camera comes out, the peace signs go up

It happened Wednesday in the middle of a perfectly normal class (ie the kids were running across the room playing the game "what time is it mr. wolf"). So clearly we were busy learning when suddenly a siren sounded and a stern voice erupted from the loudspeaker. Fire drills are easy to recognize regardless of where you live so i sent the kids straight outside. As I was heading out myself, I asked one of my Korean co-teachers if fire drills were common here. She said, "oh no. Is not fire drill. Is war drill." Such is life when you live next door to a tiny, spittle-emitting dictator.

This was our "Market Day". It's when students get to use the stickers they earned for being good and/or smart to buy fun little things

On a related note, my kids are adorable. Today a group of my 3rd grade girls came up and asked if I was a Christian. I smiled and said yes. They became very excited by this, explaining that they were too (ok explaining may be too strong a word. more like saying "me christian too" with a big smile). Regardless I couldn't help grinning at their enthusiasm as they led me off to play games with them until the next class.

Clearly Market Day requires difficult choices

I also found out today that I am now the tech support guy for all the English speakers in our building. I was asked in one evening to
1) help someone figure out how to download movies from the internet
2) setup a guy's computer so he can call the US for free
3) help find korean subtitles for christmas movies.

It finally dawned on me that I had become our resident Tech when a friend asked me why his program for calling home wasn't working. As I started to head 3 floors down to his place I realized: there is an insanely obvious thing that must be turned on for this to work (a red light that has to be turned to green to work) and I didn't ask him about it on the phone. Anyone who's done this type of work before knows what came next. I was proven clairvoyant.

But once they make up their minds, they can't wait to buy!

Oh and ps, my tropical island is apparently only tropical 7 months out of the year. Today it snowed lightly for most of the day. Fortunately after adjusting to average temps in the lower teens last year, upper 30s aren't so bad. Maybe we'll even get a white christmas :)

The toughest part of the event was crowd control

Korean culture: private time = community time

An interesting aspect of Korean culture popped up this weekend. The Office of Education(POE) is having a traditional Korean games event Saturday from 10am-3pm. Its not mandatory but it is being treated like it was by the administrators. I had to remind myself that this is a different culture with different rules. In the US, non-work time is your private time to be used for whatever you like. Here your non-work time still belongs to the communities you are a part of. As a teacher, my communities are my two schools and the office of education. Therefore, when my school or the POE sets up something after hours, they expect me to always attend.

This can obviously create a conflict when something is planned that I don't particularly want to attend. Like say the occasional friday night round of dinner, drinks and korean karyoke that schools arrange. After a long week, the last thing I want to do is spend 5 hours having extremely broken conversations with my increasingly drunk vice-principle. This would be quite a problem if I was more accommodating. Fortunately, I'm not :) In a trait no doubt inherited from my grandfather Earl, I do what I want to do, when I want to do it and I don't give a damn what people think of me for it. It may not make me the life of the party but it does make me happy!

(*singing) I'll be home for ..... no wait

I may only have 1 string of Christmas lights but I use it well. And for those of you who have never lived somewhere where Christmas isn't celebrated, its almost impossible for me to explain just how much I value these simple lights

In case you haven't guessed, I won't be coming home for Christmas this year. In fact I work both Christmas eve and the week after Christmas. This is definitely sad but its part of living abroad.

My consolation is that I get to take a 3 week trip to Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia from late January to early February. This visit promises to be full of tropical weather, spicy food, cheap prices and gorgeous beaches. I am definitely excited. I absolutely love the kids I teach but it'll be nice to get away from school for a couple weeks. My loose plan right now is to fly into Bangkok, look around for a couple days, then fly to Singapore. I'll explore a bit there, then take the train through Malaysia, stopping whenever I feel like it. After that, I'll head up to a couple of the many Thai islands and spend a week or so relaxing and hopefully learning to scuba dive. Finally i'll take the train up to Bangkok and fly back to Jeju. The relaxed pace of this trip should give me plenty of opportunities to explore my chosen destinations.

The view from my apartment building down to the ocean

Other than travel planning my week had 2 small highlights. The first was that I got the entire day off Tuesday to go to a 90 minute meeting :) The second was that I played the boardgame Risk for the first time in my life on Saturday and I managed to completely conquer Asia. Apparently that's not easy to do :) Neither of these sound very important (because they aren't) but I always try to live by Zombieland rule #32: "Enjoy the little things"

Asia conquered!

How to mess up a good bad mood

Halla Mountain in the center of Jeju

I swear Christmas music is cheating. I got back late tonight because I had an after-school english camp in the middle of nowhere. I was tired, cold, grumpy and working on a pretty solid bad mood (waiting for a bus for 30 minutes in a cold north wind will do that to you). But then I made a mistake. I thought "It's after thanksgiving. Time for me to listen to Christmas music." So I put some Trans-Siberian Orchestra on my mp3 player. Instantly, my bad mood was ruined. Suddenly the cold felt refreshing. Even without Christmas lights, the city looked prettier. The hill to my house looked like an invigorating walk. As the Grinch once said "Blast this Christmas music!! It's joyful AND triumphant!"

Hereafter follows a few of my random musing from the week. And yes I'm safe. The bombs you may (or may not) have heard about that hit South Korea were far far away from me. Look at the map.

Monday my Korean lunch and I had issues. I was still recovering from being sick the previous week and my stomach had been bothering me most of the morning. Lunch was not contrived to help this problem. A strange combination of tentacles and unpleasant sauces greeted me on my tray. Upon receiving the reports of first contact from my eyes and mouth, my stomach decided to take unilateral action. It climbed up my chest, through my throat and took my brain hostage. It forced my body to walk to the nearest trash can and empty the contents of my tray so that I wouldn’t be forced to empty the contents of my stomach. After explaining that my stomach was upset and I wasn’t hungry, I returned to my desk and promptly ate a snickers bar. My tummy was appeased.

Late Tuesday night I discovered an interest fact about chocolate. It's a good cough suppressant. It stopped my chronic coughing and allowed me to get a good night's sleep. And I just know that upon reading this, all of my female friends suddenly developed terrible coughs that need immediate treatment.

Thursday the expats of Jeju had a party to celebrate Thanksgiving. Since I don't cook well to begin with (and the limited kitchen facilities here don't help) I decided to attend and assist by providing some drinks and ice cream. Just call me chef. Fortunately, some of the girls here possess excellent culinary skills and a feast was enjoyed by all. Friendly conversation and even a couple fireworks added to the pleasant atmosphere. Its one nice thing about Jeju. The English level of the locals is so bad and there are so few expats here, that any time I meet another foreigner we're immediately friends. Just having the ability to talk to them at all produces an instant camaraderie. More diversity would be nice (and good for the people here) but I'm helping provide some of that just by living here. Hopefully it will continue to increase over time.

For now time to get some sleep before part two of my English camp Saturday morning. TTFN

What an elementary school teacher in Korea actually does

Thanks to a conversation I had with a friend recently, I realized I haven't really explained what teaching elementary school here entails. Since teaching occupies the vast majority of my time here, I thought I'd take a moment and explain what it is I do and why I am so lacking in free time.

First you need a little background on schools here. Korean children go to 2 schools each day. They start the day in public school. That lasts from 8am-1pm. There are after school activities which keep them busy until about 4pm. After that, they go to private schools called Hagwons that last until around 8 or 9pm. If this sounds like overkill to you ..... well it does to me too.

Some of my oldest students

My job is in the public school system. I teach K-6 each week. Because of all the school they have, there are no quizzes, homework assignments or tests in English class. Also because they are only exposed to English in schools, my student's English abilities are quite poor. As a result my job is to teach them something simple, make it fun and play lots of games with them. And thanks to the fact that every classroom has a projector hooked up to the computer, I can and do use internet resources and games for pretty much every class. For my morning classes there are books we are supposed to work out of (though I don't always because they're really pretty bad), which definitely makes planning for those classes simpler.

Some of my youngest students

Sounds easy so far right? Here's where the difficulty comes in. Over half of my classes are of the after school variety with no textbook and no guidance. As my Korean co-teacher told me "you can do anything you want." A double-edged sword. While I am given a great deal of freedom to teach what and how I choose, these classes require significantly more planning and preparation time than normal classes do.

I also teach six more classes each week than a normal teacher (I do get paid extra for this). This doesn't sound like much until you put it in perspective. A normal teacher here teaches for 22 of the 40 hours they work each week. That gives them about one hours prep time for each class (which is about right). I teach 28 of my 40 hours each week which is not nearly enough time to prepare for that many classes. Especially since the majority of them are unstructured. And because I teach such a wide range of ages, reusing lessons is difficult.


Thus I often work all day at school, only to find my evenings filled with lesson planning and my weekends full of backlogged chores. I admit this is a hard adjustment for me after teaching an average of 3-4 days each week in Prague.

My situations clearly has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side I make a good bit more money that most of the teachers here. On the downside my free-time is practically nil. Maybe I'll try to get my schedule lightened in the Spring. With a lighter schedule, I'd have more time and energy to really enjoy the island. For now I'll smile and try to think about how that extra work will soon be translated directly into time on a tropical beach.