Happy "Remember Pepero Day"

Being 11/11 and all, I think that it is important that I stop and remember the important holiday that this is. As would be expected, I have stopped to think about the troops that have/do/and will serve(d) for just causes around the world and may or may not watch "Hurt Locker" "Saving Private Ryan" or "Generation Kill" tonight to commemorate the day. However, there is a very strange holiday also going on in Korea called "Pepero Day" It is all about the tall, skinny, candy covered wafers called Peperos. The day is 11/11 because the 1's look like pepero sticks. It may be the ultimate manufactured holdiay as no one actually knows the origin other than the fact it was somewhere in the 80's or 90's and the fact that the Lotte company has a real lock on the pepero industry. There is really nothing special about it, other than you get/give copious amounts of peperos. Yes, they sound delicious like a kit kat or some other awesome treat, but the overall execution is more like a chocolate covered pretzel with half the chocolate and twice the pretzel. Sure something like that is good for one, maybe two sticks, but after 20 you realize that you have just gorged yourself on a whole lot of flavourless junk with no satisfaction but you ate it because it was there. Very frustrating situation to be in but hey, I only get one pepero day so I guess I'll buy in.

Today was a crazy day at the school. Apparently the Korean staff was all in the school until close to midnight last night making it absolutely perfect for "parents day" tomorrow when they get the "report cards" and present their english plays.

I use quotations for "parents day" because it is the title, but for "report cards"they are more descriptive of my feelings about them. Max teaches a kid that can not speak more English then the memorized responses of "Hello Teacher", "Fine thank you", and "me sticker" and who can not sit through 25 minutes of class without throwing a full out tantrum but we have been told that there are to be no negative comments, no strongly good comments, and no bad "grades" so this kid is getting a grade of "e" for excellent in 4 categories and a single "Satisfactory". It is just such crap I can't believe but that's the life of working in a Hagwan I guess.

So back to the day. We went to the regular school and up to our classes where we waited for 10 minutes until a teacher told us to go to the afternoon school where our kids would be. We did that and found the child equivalent of "the island of misfit toys from the "Frosty the Snowman" christmas movie. There was some kind of an inspection going on in the Korean kindergarten and all of the decent-good students were pulled out of our English classes and brought to the Korean school I guess to bolster the level of students at the school. This left us with the kids that have less-developed English skills or are tougher to deal with in the classrooms. The situation just felt so weird and obvious but I guess it's just to get show off the school. Anyway, we were told that we had 20 minutes to deal with the equivilant of the school prison population for 3 hours but that we could do what we want. We just played games and watched "Up" on the TV, but this inspection has been known about for weeks and they just sprung it on us in the morning. The lack of organization is very normal for the school but you never really get used to it.

Enough about the school for now, will report back after "parents day", as it apparently is an incredibly awkward and frustrating day.