a day late, a buck short, I'm writing the report...

Dammit. I have now twice destroyed this just when I was on the verge of posting it. I'm going to try not to rip out my hair, or keyboard, but I can't promise anything. I hate it when things like this happen.

So working in Jongno is going pretty well. The receptionists and manager speak better English than the Yeouido team, which is kind of a relief. The teacher I'm replacing (albeit very briefly) was also a Brit, so most of my students don't have much of a problem with my accent, which is certainly handy. One of my students gave me an impassioned blurb about British English being the proper form, whereas American English is deviant and bad. I'm not sure if these are her own conclusions (possibly facilitated by some slightly odd translation services) or if the previous teacher had some Fascist tendencies. Either way, I couldn't really be bothered to launch a counter-argument. Besides, whilst I logically understand a lot of the differences between the two, sometimes Americanisms do grate. I especially hate that 'football' refers to American football (it seems so counter-intuitive in a country that's obsessed with 'soccer'). Also, 'colour' is spelt with a 'u'. I will brook no argument!

In general the branch seems to be better organised and somehow more grown up than Yeouido. In part I may be getting that impression from the other 'native speaker' teachers. They're all well-mannered, excessively tall boys from the Southern US who have a few years on me, and make me feel rather short and young! They're all perfectly pleasant, but I don't feel that I've really clicked with them. Then again, probably we'd all have put a bit more effort in if we didn't know that it would only be a four day acquaintance. The bloke from Santa Fe is the first Jew I've met here, and we both got a bit unreasonably excited about that fact. He's totally cross eyed, it's probably a result of all that inbreeding.

It does make me giggle that I've spent a good part of the last couple of days hanging out with Southern boys (one of them an honest-to-God Texan), and that I have a teeny-tiny incredibly cute partner called Sandy who seems almost a foot shorter than me! If you want to call me Jared I'd understand why.

My students have provided me with several opportunities to prove my ability to hold back the giggles. I seem to have more than my fair share of awkward, pimply faced teenage boys who constantly need words like 'attractive' and 'physical' explained to them, and present me with poetic gems such "you're pretty because you have a yellow hair". My Mormon student (who is neither teenage nor male) noticed my tongue piercing and asked for the meaning (a phrase which worked better when we were discussing Stonehenge, I feel), I could only vaguely respond that "I like it". She replied, in an awed tone, that I look like an entertainment! I'm choosing to take that as a compliment, especially as Mormons aren't rude. In my experience they just take you and 50 family members out for dinner at (honestly, a fairly crappy) Hilton and provide you with bizarre Mormon paraphernalia like vitamins and baseball caps.

I still can't believe I get paid for this; talking about 'soccer' or listening to adamant students claiming that "The Beatles are the best band by far!". On the first day three of my lessons were cancelled and I had an empty slot anyway, so I'm getting paid for four hours of work even though I did less than half of that. They also let me escape early when my last lesson was cancelled, even though they normally won't let anyone do that. Being a substitute does have advantages! Yesterday, though, was all a-go-go and I had no breaks. Which just goes to show that you never can tell.

At the moment I would really like to find some washing powder or equivalent so I can do some laundry, perhaps there's some hiding in the apartment. I did manage to find a wok the size of my head in one of the cupboards yesterday, not sure how I managed to miss that. I would also like to know what my address in Sinchon is going to be so that I can fill in the ID card form properly and get that all sorted.

Apparently my parcel should be arriving (at the Yeouido branch) fairly soon. It got held up because my mother decided to send me deodorant (clearly a necessity) and it's some kind of security risk. I assume that this is going to be a crazily heavy box that I can't carry when I finally get my grubby mitts on it.

I wanted to a round-up post of my recent experiences with books and films, but I think I'll stick to Television, Television for now and attempt to get round to that soon!

Weeds has continued to be excellent. I'm still a bit miffed at the loss of Conrad, Heylia and Vaneeta (what the show can only cope with one 'efnic' group at once?) but the fact that I seriously love Guillermo Diaz makes up for that a little bit. I'm also eagerly anticipating Silas' surely imminent illicit love affair, because that means there will be Hunter Parrish sex scenes on my screen again. I don't usually like blonds but he is pretty.

I've also finally gotten around to watching Carnivale. I know that I'm coming incredibly late to the party, but let's just be glad that I showed up at all (and let's just ignore the amount of Sorkin plagiarising I do). I've only watched the first two episodes so far and don't really envision having the time to plow through the rest of the episodes soon, but I am enjoying both the show and the chance to savour it. It's one of those shows that I always figured that I would enjoy when I got around to watching it, and it hasn't disappointed. The only reason I didn't get into it when it first aired was that it was late at night on Sci-Fi or some other stupid channel that doesn't have subtitles, the bastards. I'd really recommend it to anyone who likes dark, slightly creepy and mysterious shows with a supernatural tinge. I'm already a little bit in love with Ben Hawkins, and have come round to the fact that Clea DuVall is in basically everything that's ever been made.

In other news, I liked a vid! Although I love funny videos as much as the next person with the brain of a 14 year old boy I've never really wrapped my head around the joys of vidding. However this one came from someone whose Supernatual fics and picspams I've enjoyed, so I figured I'd give it a gander, and I actually enjoyed it!

Probably I should get dressed now.