Open Day and Shiny Goodbye



Its been a busy couple of weeks with a teacher leaving, a new teacher starting, an open day, the return to baseball action, the start of my Korean football and Korean cricket careers, the inevitable knee injury, and a visit to the toilet museum. Let me see if I can bring you all up to speed . . .

First up, the longest serving foreign teacher at our school left to go to Canadia, which means at a little over 6 months, I'm now the longest serving foreigner! As all the teachers live in the same building, we also had a little shuffle with our apartments, and before leaving, he made his apartment nice and shiny;

So on to Open Day. A couple of times a year, all the parents come in to observe the lessons for the day. Its a fee paying private school, so the parents want to see what they're paying for, and its also an opportunity for the school to really show off and hopefully drum up some extra business. This means the bosses are stressing out for weeks beforehand, as we practice and demo our classes again and again. But the day itself went really well. Its definitely a strange experience having 20 parents sat in the classroom aswell as your 20 kids, but it just gives you some extra motivation to really show off and play to the crowd. Its great fun!

There was a tiny little issue in my science class, as the Korean teachers moved some of the displays around prior to Open Day, and they didn't put things back exactly as they had been. See if you can spot the error (there may be more than one);

In sports news, I made my debut for Inter Suwon FC, but it didn't last long. What was later diagnosed as a sprained PCL (posterior cruciate ligament) meant I had to come off at halftime. So no more football for 4-6 weeks. That doesn't stop me playing baseball or cricket though, as I also made my debut for the Seoul Exiles cricket team. However, we were thrashed by the Pakistan Eagles. I put on 15 off 5 overs for the opening wicket, but after I feathered one behind, we collapsed to 43 all out off only 10 overs. Unsurprisingly, we struggled to exert much scoreboard pressure in defending that total, and lost pretty quickly. Still it was nice to get out there, and we might be playing a friendly against the Korean National side soon.

I also visited Suwon's world famous Restroom Cultural Park and Toilet Museum. I was flush with excitement, and rightly so, it was amazing! Its not often you get to read sentences like

"The Toilet Culture Movement started in the late 1990s in Suwon . . . "

Aswell as learning all about the great work that the WTA (thats the World Toilet Association) does around the globe, and the 'Toilet Revolution' that was started right here in Korea.

It was brilliant! Pick your favourite from the pictograms below (I like Indonesia and Canadia)

Finally, the Adventures of Tyrion the Turtle

Well its Korean Thanksgiving next week, so there's many gift packs and special things for sale in all the shops and supermarkets. As Tyrion is a Korean turtle, I decided to buy him a little present to give thanks

Koreans love spam. FACT

(Turtles love spam too. FACT)