Third Day of Training - Everyone's Panicking

So we managed to hit the middle of training week. I didn't manage to convince anyone to go out last night, so I got stuck eating sandwiches. Today we had our full day of training, plus an extra hour or so of work to do on the computer programs we use at the schools. By the time we were done in the building (i.e. it closed before we were done and we got kicked out), we were all starving and wanting a break from work.

That means, for those of you asking, I have pictures of our next adventure out. Rebekah, Amy, and I saw a sign saying "Grand Open Festival" outside a restaurant across the road from the hotel, so we decided to give it a try. It turned out to be a fried chicken place, which at first sounds very western. That being said, I'll admit they were certainly trying to be western at times. However, this place was quintessentially Korean in nature.

We saw the first forks we've seen since arriving at this place, and also some strange mini-tongs you use to hold other things. Most of the others were eating with their fingers, some people in the booths against the walls had their shoes off, and the place was packed with business-people who had gotten off work and were drinking Soju and smoking cigarettes or enjoying beer.

We weren't feeling too adventurous, so we had "chicken and chips" and "garlic chicken". At this point I must add it's a chicken restaurant, and everything was chicken. I must also add that some of the other teachers were feeling adventurous, and went down to Gangnam Station to eat live octopus (videos to follow later). The benign chicken and chips turned out to be this (I'm glad for it):

Now that probably looks really familiar, and it was, with tater tots and smiley fries, waffle fries, proper chip chips, and hash browns on a plate with fried chicken. But trying to eat it with tongs and a fork was hilariously good fun, and you're only given a little dish to eat it from, so it was a task in an of itself.

The second chicken dish, the garlic chicken, is more on par with the sorts of food you'd expect in Korea, and that looked like this:

It was a bit like sesame chicken or something, but it was also hard to eat in the aforementioned manner, so in the end we watched the other restaurant patrons for clues and ended up eating with our hands.

We were also given a number of things that tasted like pretzel sticks but looked like spaghetti covered in...something. We had pickled parsnips or something similar as well, which for the UK crowd start off tasting like pickled onions, and then fade into some more flat and boring taste. We took awhile to work out how to eat those as well (of if they even were for eating).

Eventually we paid our bill and meandered back to the room to do more studying, which took until about midnight tonight, since everyone wanted to check their own lesson plans against one another. That's also why this post is both short and late-coming.

Tomorrow won't be as busy, so that should be a good time. I'm feeling quite comfortable with teaching at this point, and am looking forward to this weekend and the relocation to Bucheon. Tomorrow, I also intend on checking my debit card, as I'm now down to some ridiculously small amount of cash, and the one ATM I did try is of the opinion my debit card isn't actually a card. We'll see if that's a general problem or ATM specific. I'm not about to panic yet.

I leave you all with these last pictures:

Rebekah and Amy at the fried chicken restaurant.

The move we're all going to see. The film's still called Skyfall, but there's no 'f' sound in Korean, and the 'sky' is broken into "su'kai", so the whole thing comes out sounding more like "su'kai'pall". Anyway, the general belief is it will be subtitled in theaters (apparently most western movies are, so they are shown in English, and since a lot of Koreans speak English anyway, this works out fine), so we won't be completely lost when we watch it. :D

Will be in touch soon!
-Sam