The past month(s) have been a little slow, so with no trips to speak of, besides a wonderful trip learning to snowboard with my American and South African friends, I will update you on some favorite Korean Student isms:

Describe the dog using your senses:

Dogs are soft. They is loud and they bark. Dogs taste delicious.

Fill out this web with six describing words about the dog:

Words chosen: Cute, barking, running, soft, furry, meat.

>Me describing "gesture". My student asked me, oh like this? >*sticks up middle finger*<

"See You Next Tuesday Teacherrrr!"

I made the mistake at one point of describing fist in terms of punching. This led to most students using fist as a verb rather than a noun. For example, some of the sentences were: "My brother fists my dog." Or "My dad fists me when he's angry." Not correct. I hope.

Maaaaybe my mind is just in the gutter lately, I can't really say. However, my director suggested I give a certain writing topic after reading a nonfiction passage about beavers. The topic asked students to imagine being friends with a beaver, and what it would be like? What would be the challenges? What would be fun? Here is one of the responses I got:

"Playing with my beaver is fun! It is soft and cute. We have fun together. It is hard when my beaver gets so much wood because I don't like wood. I don't know what to do with all the wood. But my beaver is friendly so we have many friends." ........ Nope. Can't do it.

There are countless COUNTLESS more, such as my first grader using mushroom in a sentence "I eat a mushroom so I'm happy." Or the vocab word 'weed.' "Jeremy grow weed in his garden." Yes.

Of course, I post these all on facebook, so this might be old news to most people. HOWEVER, one of my favorite to date has been when one of my students, American name, Nathan, reacted to our director coming into watch our speech presentations. So, we had been doing these writing projects, and basically, our director is scary. The kids are all frightened of her, but the directors were coming in to watch the speeches. So the one, lets call her J, is super nice, kids love her. They all wanted J to come watch, not, let's call her the 'B,' pun intended. So J comes in, and all the students visably and audibly relax/cheer. Halfway into the presentation, the B comes in. Now, most of the students hardly react, though I know what they're all thinking. Nathan, on the other hand, turns, and to no one in particular, silently screams bloody murder. I mean, if there had been sound coming out of this child's mouth, it would have chilled me to the bone. He was literally terrified that she had entered the room, and no one saw this facial expression but me. It was over as soon as it began, but I had to bury my face in my desk to keep from laughing out loud.

The rest of the time has been pretty slow. My very close friend Ashley is moving back to South Africa for a few weeks. My friend Joe and her have become very close friends of mine, so that's sad. We began having weekend themed dinners of various international foods (Indian, Vietnamese, French, Korean, Mexican, Japanese, etc). We visited a few art exhibits, and had some good times. It'll be sad to see her leave! :(

As far as our Italian fix, though, Anna and I have not let our lack of phones keep us from getting Pizza. We actually Skyped Chris, who is tent camping down the west coast of korea, to tell him the phone number of the pizza place ten mnutes from us, so he could call and order us a pizza to get it delivered to our front door. Desperate much?