Possible!

I have come to realize that Korean people are very persistent; even when dialing a wrong phone number. This morning my Canadian co-worker got several calls from a Korean man that had the wrong number. He started calling her at 8:00AM and kept calling her and speaking in Korean in spite of the fact that she told him ten times that she does not know Korean. She gets to the office and he calls again, this time I answer... I exhausted all of my Korean vocabulary (excluding all the curse words) in random order with random English words, that most Koreans know because of marketing advertisements, in between. "Possible" is one of those words that my Korean friend Alex over uses and abuses. As soon as I said "possible" my Canadian co-worker burst into laughter and frustration. Primarily because he just did not get the fact that I had no idea what he was saying. I talked his arm off and even had the phone handed to some woman and talked her arm off too. After about three minutes I broke into Bislama, and the laughter of my co-workers continued. I still have no idea what we talked about and don't know what half of the things I said in Korean were, but it was a pleasant 5 minute conversation. I pray that I did not just agree to buy a Ronco Pocket Fisherman or something random like that. ;-)

Would you believe that he called back two more times! The next call was passed to one of the Korean staff that told him that he had the wrong number. Unfortunately he called again. I answered and pretended to be a pizza delivery restaurant and took his order. He hung up and did not call back. That was hilarious!

Picture Day!

So yesterday was picture day for the morning Kindergarten classes. They try to arrange it so there is one Korean teacher and one foreign teacher in every picture. I got to be in two of my morning classes Oxford and MIT. Oxford, initially, was a very messy class. On my first day they pretty much chewed me up and spit me out and the Korean teacher ended the misery 10 minutes early for me as she saw that I had enough. Now that the culture shock is over and I am more relaxed that class has turned into a favorite of mine. The class is just wild and I can't change that, so I don't. I don't challenge them too much, make things easy, and just laugh at them for a half an hour four days a week.

That easy going spirit, that has needed to return, backfired on me today as I was left unsupervised with them for a half and hour and they went nuts and had me backed into a corner praying for the time to be finished. I think my paranoia is a remnant of my days volunteering with a local church youth group where the parents wondered why an unmarried male in his thirties would want to work with youth. I remember on one outing an overly concerned mother cornered me in Utah on an outing and questioning me in private about how I interacted with a girl that splashed me in the river...I only did what every other good leader of the youth group did... Splash back (regardless of gender)! Fortunately for me several of my best friends had kids in that youth group that I had been with on several outings so I could say to her that she needed to speak to them BEFORE accusing me of wrongdoing. She did and apologized.

So to get back to the point, Oxford pretty much had me backed into a corner calling me "Daddy" and dog piling me. There was no lesson planning as it was picture day so I was told to wing it. That class is pretty rough... Four boys and eight girls; you can imagine why I'd be paranoid. Perhaps I need to work on that.