I've kind of messed up this whole blogging thing

So I'm living in a place where I don't really know anyone, besides my dad (weird coincidence that we are both in Seoul at the same time).I don't speak the language. I just started a new job. I just moved into an apartment. I don't have anything besides a laptop and a few clothes.
I've been quite busy. Too busy to dork it out over the internets.

So......the last two weeks...let's see if I can type this in less than 15 minutes, before I have to split.

I was hired by the government organization that oversees all the schools in Seoul. As a political move, the Korean government is trying to get one native English speaker in every school in Seoul. I am one of the teachers who got hired. I left my couchsurfer to go to a week long orientation. The thing is that no one told me that the orientation was at a hotel 1/2 an hour outside of the city and that we would be staying there, day and night for a week. I assumed that we were going to stay in Seoul and have lodging provided for us, in Seoul. So I just came to the bus with a notebook. A few others were in the dark as well, and we all had to go back to Seoul that night and get our stuff. The orientation was good, but a bit weird. 200 teachers. A lot of Americans and Canadians and a few people from Australia, the UK and New Zealand. Some of them had very strong accents. Imagine taking an English class from a guy who sounds like he's from Trainspotting. We had workshops all day and night with breaks in between where people smoked thousands of cigarettes, play ping pong and complain about being on lockdown (we were not suppose to leave the premises of the hotel). In many ways it felt like summer camp. At night myself and about 10-40 others would sneak away down a trail in the woods to the convenience store and drink beer and soju. Convenience stores in Korea have tables and chairs out front so people can drink the beverage they just bought. Some of the teachers were in their 40s and 50s. It was especially funny and surreal to sneak away with these people. I'm a grown man and everything, but a 50 year old sneaking out to have a beer? Some of them were real afraid of getting caught. It was very odd.
The workshops were beneficial, but the best thing was talking to other teachers who had already taught in Korea, which was most of them.

After a week I met up with one the teachers from the school that I am now teaching at, and he took me to my place. It's a efficiency apartment that is good enough for me. Once I get internet at the pad I'll post some pics and blog more, it's hard to get things like internet when I don't speak Korean. It took me a week to get a cellphone.

There are 6 English teachers at my school, all of them Korean of course. One guy lived in London for college and has a brilliant English accent, everything he says is funny. He is kind of funny but I think watching Monty Python at a very young age has just imprint my brain with the idea that anything said with a british accent is hillarious. Another teacher spent part of her life in Little Rock and went to school with Chelsea Clinton. Generally Korean English teachers know all their grammar and spelling up and down but are not good at speaking, it's difficult if you've never lived in an English speaking county. I'm very lucking in this respect.

The middle school kids love me. I'm rock star status. Girls come in my room, blush, giggle and then run away screaming. I'm not taking it personally. It's just because I look very young, and different from them.

The job is great. I teach almost every student in the school and see each one of them once a week. I also teach an English club and 8 mothers who want to learn English. I really don't know how to teach the moms. They already dislike me because they think I stole their coffee maker.

The other day, I kept making fun of this one kid because he wouldn't stop talking. He yelled something and I said, "someone tell Jason to shut up", then I looked over and saw blood all over his shirt. Turns out he just had a bloody nose but it almost gave me a heart attack.

So the one really bad thing about my school. It turns out that they really don't have the distinction between public and private schools that we do in the states. Some of the "private schools" are just public schools that have a religious affiliation. So I am teaching in a Christian school.

Everyone is nice and I love the job, so I not going to fight this. But man it's fucked up that I'm teaching in a Christian school. Everyday starts with the school staff reading the bible together (of course it's in Korean and I don't know what they're saying). They all know that I'm "not religious". But I kind of consider my agnosticism to be a religion, at least it's a view that I strongly believe in. No one from the office of education asked me if I would be OK with working in a Christian school, what if I was an orthodox Jew?

Again, it's ok because the students, teachers and principles are all great and they understand that I got randomly placed there. I think I am just going to write a letter to the person who did the hiring and express my discontent.

The next 2 weeks are going to be hard because I'm down to $50.
Then I get paid. I still think that money and greed are terrible things, but it is going to be orgasmic to get a pay check with 6 zeros behind a number--even if it's not in US dollars and not really that much money.

The next blog will have some links and photos and nice prose and whathaveyou.

I promise.