Danielle and I had our first run in with two Mormon missionaries (apparently they just overrun the country). We were walking up the stairs to the train for work and immediately upon reaching the top and American girl asked in a super perky voice and as though we knew each other, “Hey, how are you?” Needless to say it was pretty clear that she, and her missionary partner, a Korean girl, were not English teachers as they were both dressed in long skirts and coats and carrying suspicious looking books and wearing name tags.
Luckily they were not able to begin converting us as we were only on the train with them for a few stops. Slightly interesting to hear about her: used to be a hairdresser in California and got sent to Korea and has to stay for a total of one and a half years (she had completed about a year). As I’m sure you can all imagine my slightly judgmental streak has not been obliterated by the sudden onset of adulthood and had the discussion of the benefits of the Mormon faith been brought up I’m sure I would have found it nearly impossible to keep my mouth shut. Frankly I am quite opposed to the idea of missionaries in general, its great if your religion works for you but I frankly don’t want to be told that I have been living in the dark because I am not part of it. On top of that I have an extremely strong aversion to the Mormon faith. This has been developed through extensive research including a course on Mormonism taught by a fabulous Columbia professor (Randall Balmer), all four seasons of Big Love (obsessed with Chloe Sevigny) and of course filled out with some South Park. Needless to say a religion created at a time when frankly people should know better than to believe some random guy that “was given” gold tablets from God but was the only person who could see them before they were “return” to the angel Maroni not to mention the whole polygamy thing, the mountain meadows massacre, and the exclusion of black men from the ministry until the 1980s as well as the rejection of gays. Luckily that poor California girl did not get to hear these thoughts (let along my thoughts on the Mormon support of Prop. 8 in California).
Other than that the week has been fairly uneventful. Thursday night I went out with some coworkers to get chicken and beer. It seems that fried chicken is quite popular here. In the super markets there is always a section of various kinds of friend chicken and there are tons of friend chicken restaurants. So we had some friend chicken and beer, which was quite delicious though, I felt slightly ill when I was going to bed. I went to the grocery store today to pick up a few items and at the end of every single isle there was a Korean screaming the benefits of some product and handing out samples. I don’t know if this is a regular Saturday occurrence of if I just stumbled upon something special.
So far the teaching is definitely getting smoother. I had my first review with my boss and it was very helpful. She obviously told me that I was awesome and pretty much confirmed my feeling that I am about a million times better with the middle school kids rather than the elementary school ones. I frankly find small children somewhat terrifying and none of them appreciate my monotone not my bitter and sarcastic sense of humor. Apparently an appreciation of all of that comes along with puberty as I get along charmingly with my older students. Unfortunately they all listen to shit music (K-Pop) so I took the liberty to throw out all the research assignments and will be slowly working them through an overview of good music. I figured I would start out easy with the British bands: The Beatles, The Stones and Cream. Each class we have twenty minutes for these presentations and hopefully the kids will enjoy them. It also means that I get to show them cool YouTube videos.
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