Phone Photos

This is pretty much the funniest Korean I have encountered while here, pretty lazy student though.

Our friends just got this adorable puppy

Angry Birds is very popular here at the moment and most of the kids have some sort of Angry Birds clothing but this is by far the best that I have seen.

We are now halfway through the term and it has gone by very quickly. I got lucky with my classes this term which makes everything a lot easier. Unfortunately everything else at work seems to be falling apart. Our Branch Manager is extremely pregnant and will be leaving at the end of a month and the woman that is replacing her has not exactly won me over. The first email message that we received from her reminded us to "obey all commands of our head instructor and branch manager". Probably a lot got lost in the translation but still not great. In addition the one amazing Korea teacher that was very helpful and attentive had to leave to take care of her mother and it seems her replacement does not speak English. Its a pretty big bummer not to have any good Korean teachers because they are the only ones that seem to have any discipline power over the students. So without her we pretty much don't have any way of really punishing students that continually misbehave. It is pretty clear that the students are aware that we (the foreigners) are very limited in what we can do in terms of punishment and some of them can be totally out of control and rude.
On top of all the staff changes we will be moving buildings at the end of the month. It seems that the new building will be much nicer and hopefully we will have bigger classrooms as mine is tiny right now. The only bummer is that it is a little bit further away and a bit of a walk from the subway. Hopefully that switch will go somewhat smoothly.
The Busan Film Festival is currently going on but figuring out how to get tickets and what to see was way to confusing so instead I am going out to dinner with some friends and then we are going to go to the casino (it will be my first time). Gambling (along with all other fun activities) is against the law for Koreans but foreigners are allowed (I wish they had these kinds of rules for other things). Anyway, should be interesting! Speaking of breaking the law, the big drama for all the middle school girls is the one of the members of Big Bang one of the most popular boy bands here (thing 'NSYNC in their hayday) got caught with a joint. My students said that his story was that a fan gave it to him and he thought it was a cigarette. When I told them that that was obviously a lie and he probably smokes weed they looked at me with shock and confusion.