Familiar Territory Once Again

Once again, a long gap between updates, and I apologise for that.

However, I now have no excuse for such gaps because....it's here.

HOME INTERNET HAS ARRIVED. EPIC WIN.

Yup, finally after 5 weeks hijacking poor wireless connections and staying for far too long in coffee shops while people look at me in a funny way...I have my own web connection in my apartment. And it's an absolute monster - 30Mbps, which anyone who knows about such things would say is pretty Ferrariesque speed.

Obviously in light of this development, a new portable hard drive to replace Behemoth II (lost a couple of months ago to a virus with 600 GB of films and TV series, grrr) is definitely on my shopping list, and when I have it there will be a massive pr0n film and TV series download session!

Anyway - back to more interesting current events.

I had a decent last couple of days up in Seoul, including having a very nice Korean buffet and hitting many bars on the last night

and being given a phonecard as a gift for being class leader (even though I didn't actually have to do anything in the role other than say one or two notices), before heading back to Cheongju last Thursday with Mary Hahn, my liason at the Chungbuk Office of Education.

We headed back into Cheonjgu on the bus, and actually seeing the now familiar big buildings as I came in actually gave me the feeling that I was coming....home. I know it's only been a little more than a month, but I'm really settling down here now, thanks largely to the people. I know I'm repeating myself here...but nothing is too much trouble for them. It's amazing.

Anyway - after getting back to Cheongju it was back to routine on the Friday with 4 classes, including two which are probably my most difficult. However, I had an ace-in-the-hole - my Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Team Quiz! Seems to be an easy way to run a lesson - compose 15 questions, stick them in a PowerPoint you prepared earlier, print out several copies of the letters A, B, C and D and you're good to go!
Thanks largely to that, Friday passed without significant incident, and after visiting the Immigration Office to FINALLY lay my grubby little mitts on my Alien Registration Card (the piece of plastic which you need for practically anything important here) I did my usual Friday night thing of consuming horrific amounts of alcohol and appearing in random photos, eg.

Incidentally, I had known all of these people for about 10 minutes before this photo was taken. Fun times.
Anyway, crashed through my door at around 5am Saturday morning (which is about the norm for Korean nights out) so Saturday was something of a writeoff. Sunday passed pretty uneventfully too - unless you count sorting out washing and cooking a nice chicken curry eventful.

So...back to work at elementary school on Monday, and in my afterschool classes on Monday and Tuesday I showed off two of England's greatest TV institutions - Wallace and Gromit and Dr Who. I had managed to dig up some dubbed Korean footage of the good Doctor, and my coteacher has all the W & G episodes in Korean, so we were able to show them off to the kids. And they loved them both. Maybe it's my bad sense of humour, but Wallace's mad run to grab the crackers in A Grand Day Out still makes me laugh - even if the dialogue is in a language I know roughly two sentences of.

In any case - come yesterday evening, I get my internet installed, quickly run a speed test, and pass out when I see four-figure KB download speeds when I try to torrent Pitch Black. It finishes in 25 minutes. Sensational.

And we move onto today - not much really to say other than some other Year 9 groups got a taste of my Millionaire quiz, and I finally have an idea about when I'm going to get my allowance from EPIK and my pay packet, which is good because I still don't have that much of this. However, considering I've had four separate offers of help on that score should I need it I don't think I need worry.

So - I skimmed on massive details of the events of this week so as not to bore you to death with an impossibly long post. Hope I did a good job giving you an overview without being either too detailed or too vague. Trust me, subsequent updates will be richer, fuller and more REGULAAAAAARRR!!!

Coming up this week - possible three day weekend :-D and definite birthday party to attend on Saturday! :-)

Peace out! And remember people - RRC (Read, Review and Comment!)