Oi, God, What Did You Turn The Central Heating Down For?

So, now we're freshly up to date...it's time to talk about today. And I suppose I'd better (seeing as I haven't yet) give you an idea about what actually goes on during my average day.

So, on a Tuesday I go to my primary school (Monday and Tuesday are my primary school days, Wednesday Thursday and Friday my secondary school days). This means the alarm clock goes off at 6.50am, and after a coffee and breakfast I'm out the door by 7.45am.

10 minutes walk away is my bus stop on the main road running through Cheongju, and once there I wait (for never more than about 5 minutes, I hasten to add) for my particular bus that will take me on a 30-40 minute ride to the village/town where my primary school is. The city public transport system here really is worldclass (cheap, fast and efficient), however this is somewhat tempered by the driving style of some of the bus drivers, who seem to take great pleasure in what I like to call 'suicide runs' - cutting up cars whilst blasting their horns, ploughing through junctions around 0.000001ns before the traffic lights turn red, and hitting the brakes so hard when arriving at a bus stop that standing up in preparation to get off normally results in you flying halfway down the bus.

Therefore bus journeys are inevitably interesting.

Anyway, I managed to get a seat rather than having to stand for the first part of the journey (usually about 50/50 chance on this, though as you pass through the city and all the schoolkids get off at their various schools you usually end up with a seat anyway) and stuck on my music whilst enjoying the scenery - as I always do - as we headed out of Cheongju and into the countryside.

Roughly half an hour later, my bus dropped me off outside my school - around 10 to 15 minutes before lessons started at 9am.

At my primary school, I have 4 classes in the 'morning' session, all 40 minutes long with different groups. As I'm a 'native English speaker' my lessons are largely focussed on speaking and listening exercises as opposed to reading and writing. One of the reasons why I'm here is that English is a very difficult language to learn in terms of the nuances of pronunciation and inflection, and only a true native English speaker knows most of these nuances - most Korean English teachers, though their spoken English is very good, would have trouble pronouncing certain English words in what would be considered the 'correct' manner. Therefore, my lessons involved a lot of speaking and repeating - but there's some fun in there too.

My lesson for today (for all 4 groups) involved a quick review of the previous lesson, and then an introduction to some new words to extend the vocab of the students. After that, we played a quick bingo game, before watching a dialogue video and repeating the conversation. That's pretty much standard fare for my primary students...get them talking as much as possible.

Repeat 3 times...and we're at 12.10pm, and lunch. Today there was rice (staple over here) and some other seafood-stuff that I tried to force down but couldn't. At least they throw in a piece of fruit with every meal - I actually look forward to that and it's giving me some vitamins and minerals.

Then I get quite a long break - nearly two hours in fact  - as I have no lessons until the 'after school' club I run from 2.40pm. During that time today I realised that I hadn't put my phone on charge the night before, so it has died and I couldn't text my girlfriend. Massive facepalm.

Putting that to the back of my mind I rested up and checked out the BBC website before heading back to the classroom at about 2.30pm.

My 'afterschool' English class is made up of kids who are pretty good at English and want to learn more, which usually makes for a fun environment. We play some games ('Guess Who' being one of the most popular with the kids and me because it encourages good questioning and answering skills), do a little bit of textbook work and sometimes watch some video clips (last week the students were introduced to the wonders of Wallace and Gromit with Korean subtitles - they loved it). Today they learned a bit about animals and their characteristics - it's very good to see how quickly they pick stuff up, even though sometimes they are inattentive and I have to whack them put on my 'loud' voice which invariably leaves me with a sore throat.

So...lesson finished at 4.15pm and I was out the door and on the bus home. Stopped off in Chungdae (my local area of Cheongju) for a Lotteria (Korea's answer to McDonalds and I really couldn't be arsed to cook) before checking my bank account (been paid on time this month, LOADSA MONEY!) and heading back to my humble abode to do a bit of lesson planning and get up to date with this.

Pretty much the moment I'm out of Lotteria I figure something.

It's cold. Really, really cold. I've got my shirt on and my leather jacket done up to the top, and I'm still cold.

When did this happen? From when I came out here to yesterday, all day every day it's been warm enough to go out with just a shirt or t-shirt on your top half. Suddenly the temperature has dropped around 10 degrees overnight.

Guess this highlights how seasonal the weather is over here - very different to England in that respect.

And that's pretty much the long and the short of it, and what I get up to on an average school day. Know this entry has been a but humour-lite, but it's been a long day...

...another update tomorrow. In the meantime, please comment!