My Long-Unattended Blog

Hello everyone:
This is probably written for zero readers, in the likelihood that anyone who actually knew of this blog has long given up hope, assuming I was either dead or had lost the use of my hands in a freak ninja attack. Neither has happened, I may assure you. Laziness is the lamentable, and even more terrible, cause of my absence from both the blog and email in general. It's been over five months since I've even looked at this; that was meant to be funny, but it just sounds a bit sad.
Thanks to my dear friend Tracy for her gentle encouragement that I should update every so often so as not to leave friends wondering about the aforementioned situations. I love you, Trace!
So where to update you on everything that's been going on? I could create a lengthy list of all my activities in the past months, but that's pointless and rather boring. Instead, I'll update you on a few things and then we'll all (or both... or just me, as I don't believe anyone else will read this) just pretend that we never missed a beat.
I am, of course, living and working in Pusan... or Busan. There are many English letters that don't translate exactly in Korean. For example, the ㅂ. It is pronounced as slightly between a "p" and a "b" (if you'll listen closely when mouthing them to yourself now, you'll see that these two letters are quite similar to each other). So 부산 can be transliterated Busan or Pusan. Take your pick; you'd see it as both. I do believe that Busan is now the official form.
Some of you will be greatly surprised by my ability to read any Korean, given that I swore all last year I wouldn't learn any more than I needed. Something about not wasting time on a language if I wouldn't live in the country for long. Please allow me a moment's pause to fully chew and swallow those words.... thank you. Seeing as how I came back for a second year, I had a (short-lived) surge of inspiration to learn. So I can now read signs, but can't tell you at all what they mean.
Ironically, I've best been learning Korean from my students (to whom I'm supposed to be teaching English... oh well. I need to milk the job for everything I can get!). This way, however, I'm picking up completely obscure words, like slang ("Asah!" meaning, "Oh, yeah!") or grammatical and classroom terms ("bareum," which is pronunciation; "chureeyuh," which is "attention"). Not terms I can use when speaking with the general populace. He he. Imagine me on the street: "Chureeyuh! Asah, bareum!" One could assume that the Koreans who heard would assume I was a somewhat militant foreigner who was excited about pronunciation. Which is true, I guess.
I'm able to learn words from my students this year (an occasion to which I was strictly prohibited last year) because it turns out a public school is a lot more lenient than a Haegwon (an academy... a specialized after-school institute to which parents shell out exorbitant amounts of money so as to allow their children to sit in classrooms from dawn til dusk, hoping all the while that they learn all knowledge available to man. No small expectations there). It's MUCH more lenient. To be honest, I rarely work. I've possibly worked the same number of days that I've had off. I get annoyed now if I have a work week without a day off. "What?! FIVE days of work in a row?! How absurd!" Yes, please hate me. All my friends here do now, anyway. I never miss an opportunity to brag.
My school's name is 동아 중학교. For all you English speakers, that's "Dong-a Jung haekyo," which means "Dong-a Middle School." Fun! I have 1000 students. Yes, I typed the correct number of zeros there. That's one thousand. I teach 27 classes having between 35 to 40 students apiece. I see each class only once a week. For my third year classes, it's less; I see them every other week. So I'm actually only teaching 23 or 22 classes each week. And if train A left the station at 11:12 am, how many students would I have? Sorry, that was a brief retrogression back to word problems in high school math. I felt like that's what I was writing. But if you take the time to do the pointless and vague math, it comes out to about 1000. Asah!
Alright, that's about it for this post. Here's to hoping that it happens again. See you in another 5 months, I guess!
Love,
Aubrey