Meeting a police officer, disobedient children, and health checkups

Hi everyone! Here's another update from the 35th parallel. 

First of all, we were given an insiders tip about a restaurant district incredibly close to the school. What should we find there but a MEXICAN FOOD RESTAURANT!!! This is so incredibly rare and special... Irene almost cried haha. It's cheap too!

Dos Mas burritos with Irene and CheongHyeon

 In other news, welcome to my school. This is what it looks like when everybody has gone home for the day. Students have their own homerooms and sometimes different teachers visit the classroom for a special class (i.e. the English teacher might visit a grade 3 homeroom class instead of the grade 3 class coming to the English classroom). Everyone wears slippers at my school (I bring my own because they don't have enough guest pairs) because shoes "wreck the floors". I think this has to do with how Korean buildings are usually heated by hot water pipes under the floors, but I think the practice of indoor shoes vs. outdoor shoes is based a lot on tradition. Plus, Korea is a dirty place, so I suppose it would be disrespectful to bring all that crap into your building on your shoes.

The 1st floor hallway. There are approximately zero
swinging doors in this school.

These students are competing to be voted class president

Welcome to Damyang. Emphasis: bamboo

 In other news, I was apparently supposed to have a medical checkup quite soon after I moved into the dorms (that will make it 3 medical checks thus far). I promise I don't have AIDS! I was supposed to go with my roommate last week, but I was busy at elementary school, so I missed it. This is the consequence:

Shame on all you people for missing your medical checks!

 Yes that's right, that paper lists the names, room numbers and ID numbers of all the students who missed their medical checkups (my name is on there too. You can tell it's a foreigner because it's more than 3 characters long). If they don't get them done by this Friday, they get kicked out of the dormitory. Yikes!

In other news, my students drew pictures of me today. At least they didn't have devil tails or pitchforks haha. I'll take what I can get.

Can you guess which gender drew these?

News from home. My dad won a contest put on by my city's newspaper. People were to submit photos of their gardens and environmentally friendly ways of outdoor living, and my dad won a prize! Rightly so, David Suzuki should take note.

Congratulations!

Finally, something of interest to those from Abbotsford. Berries here are expensive! Plus they're rare. So far, I've only seen these blueberries. That means no raspberries, Saskatoon berries, lingonberries, acai berries, cloud berries, elderberries, etc.

These berries cost 11,800 won (about $11 CAD).
They were actually on sale at the time of print for 8,000won.

PS - I forgot to mention! The Gwangju Biennale (shouldn't it be spelled "Bienniale?") is going on right now, which means the art museums are full and there's concerts around the city. Last weekend I went to one of these concerts with several other teachers. It was "world music" and kind of boring (but one lady was singing in Swedish! Didn't expect that!), plus it was dark and I was tired, so I decided to leave.

I left the group and no later than 2 seconds after I turned around, a young Korean man was asking me why I didn't want to stay at the concert. I wasn't really in the mood to practice English, but he wasn't going to let me get away. Turns out he is a plain clothes police officer! I apologized for not having my ARC yet, it was going to be delivered in a few days (police can ask you for that card at any time. Helps them control illegals), but he quickly assured me that's not why he was talking with me. He likes foreigners and wanted to make friends. He showed me his badge to prove that he was legit. He asked if I knew how to get back to where I was staying.

"Actually, do you know where I can catch the 83 bus?" I asked.

He replied that he didn't know, but if I was comfortable with the idea, he could drive me back to the dormitory. He told me that as a Korean police officer, he has a duty to be nice to foreigners and assist them when they need help. "Fine with me" I thought, and we were off. I bought a drink for him at a convenience store, since he was being so generous in taking me all the way back to the university. He told me that surprisingly enough, he's bad with directions and parked kind of far away. Whatever, I'm used to walking everywhere in Korea. Turns out he parked on the other side of a long, dark, narrow, poorly lit, overgrown, behind a building, dirt path. He realized what an awkward situation this looked like, but I reassured him that I saw his badge, so I know he's legit.

We walked, talked, found his car, and he took me back to my dormitory (which was actually quite fortunate because it started POURING). We've met for coffee since then; he's a real nice guy wanting foreign friends to practice English, and I'm wanting Korean friends. Deal!