Day 18

• Today I went to Cambridge Day held at Korea University, Seoul. At the door there is a person who takes your temperature with an ear thermometer to make sure you don’t have H1N1 to give to everyone at the conference. Sunny and I went to a few lectures on English Language Development. It was very informative and I even got some good ideas to use at work. I was shocked to find that the English Language exams given for students to enter the Universities in both Japan and in Korea are actually at a harder reading level then their first language. That means that students are required to read much harder texts in English then they are in Korean, which is ridiculous when English is your second language!!!!
• Today I went to E-mart with Chin and Richard today; it seems to be our Saturday ritual. I got to the checkout with all my food and Chin insisted on buying it for me because my fridge had broken and spoiled all my food. I told her I would only let her do it if she makes the company reimburse her for it. I thought it was really sweet of her to do that. She also gave me some plates, bowls, utensils, pillows, and blankets from her apartment because she is moving and didn’t want to take everything with her. She also offered to give me her refrigerator next week when she moves to replace the one that broke. I have a little college dorm size fridge for now, but once I have her refrigerator I will bring the little fridge to our office.
• On the subway today, Sunny taught me how to read a few characters in Korean. Now I can recognize: D, D’oh, ‘ee’, ‘oh’, ‘oo’, and ‘r’ which is kind of an ‘l’ sound. I felt like I was three years old; every time I recognized a letter I would point it out and say the sound. Sunny would just laugh and said I was learning so quickly.
• Sunny also taught me that 11/11 is just another made up holiday corporations came up with to sell more crap. They also celebrate Valentine’s Day, and two other Valentine’s Day type holidays, white day and black day. I can’t remember which is which, but one of the days the girls give presents to the boys, and the other day boys give presents to the girls. It’s just like that Simpsons episode… “Happy Love Day everyone!!!”
• I am so glad that I am the kind of person who just presses buttons until things work. It’s good that I never look at instructions, because here the instructions are in Korean so they wouldn’t help anyways. I was getting really frustrated because I couldn’t get my washing machine to drain the water. But after 10 minutes of pressing different buttons it finally did what I wanted it to do.