Bowling and a walk

I have three hours to kill before the end of the day...so I might as well update this (for you mom:)

Friday night some friends and I went bowling.

Did you know, fellow east-coasters, that nobody else bowls like us? I was TRYING to tell the Americans and the Ontarions that bowling should be done with a small ball, and ten pins.

AmerOntr People: Oh, you use five pins.

Me: No...ten...(love you guys!!)

I'd only ever seen this kind of bowling on tv before, the kind where you have to put your fingers in the holes in the ball. I definitely felt like I was going to break my fingers every time I threw (heaved the fifty pound) ball with all my might.

AND as you might expect, I was TERRIBLE. But I DID get a strike!! (Which brought the score for my first string up to a whoping 34 points!)

Korea has been treating me pretty well lately. I am totally adjusted to my mon, tues, wed school (where I have a lovely co-teacher to team teach with) and am SLOWLY settling in to my Thurs-Fri school.

But MAN no one tells me ANYTHING unil the last possible second!

Today (Thursday) at the start of recess, a teacher asked me if I wanted to go for a walk (using mainly charades mind you).

She is probably in between 50-60 years old and she was DECKED OUT! She had white gloves on, a tracksuit, and a huge visor that obscured most of her face (it's very important not to EVER let the rays of sun hit your skin! Although...they may have something with that, considering how slowly Korean people wrinkle...hmmm...).

Since no one ever invites me to do anything at this school I said 'sure, I'll go for a walk with you' thinking that if I was late for my class after recess I'd just blame this lady.

I was a little curious as to where we were going to go, for how long, and what I was supposed to talk to her about using her limited English and my ten words of korean, but whatever.

So we go outside and she starts talking to her class who are all holding ginormous skipping ropes. They're not long enough for two people to hold the ends and turn the rope for the other kids, but they're WAY to long for these teeny children.

Suddenly, all of the students in her class are standing in two rows facing us.

I don't know why I still bother trying to figure out what is going on when random things like this happen, but first I thought, 'she is going to check their skipping ropes' then I thought 'she is going to make them speak English'. (sidenote, one time when I was teaching her students she said something sharply and they all raised their hands. She looked at me expectiantly. The students looked at me expectantly. I had no idea why their hands were in the air.)

Of course my guesses about the reason behind these mystery rows were completely wrong.

The teacher gestures for me to walk... and the class follows us in their rows. Ok, her class is coming for a walk too. Then the grade four class gathers from the four corners of the playground and lines up too. Suddenly the whole school is en route to a mysterious destination.

Guess I didn't have to worry about being late for my next class if we're all coming!

We all trip along merrily to who-knows-where. I notice all of the other teachers, the vice-principal and the principal, are all wearing tracksuits and have whistles hanging around their necks. I am dressed in business casual.

The students are very good and stop at road crossings. When the green man turns on, they RUN across the street as fast as their little legs will carry them (which is probably a good thing considering the fact that red lights are not deterents to motorists).

Ten minutes later we arrive at our destination. A non-descript area, that is very similar to the school playground.

The students skip with their ropes. Ten minutes later we return en masse to the school.
It seemed like a very short trip to necessitate full-on gym gear on the teachers' part. Oh well.

On the walk home a chain of five grade five girls links arms with me. We are soon walking forward in a very haphazard way, as one of us is always directly in the path of a post, tree, or fire hydrant. I don't have the heart to disengage myself.

Period three starts ten minutes late as we were all just getting in from our lovely, pointless walk (and it really WAS lovely, it must be around 25C today, which feels pleasant to me now).

The teacher in this room tells me 'vacation tomorrow, you know?'. I had no idea but I'm not complaining. I asked her whether I had no class or no school (sometimes when we have no class we still have to come and look foreign). She told me she didn't know. So through some extensive charades I asked the vice-principal. I THINK he told me to stay home. So I am going to. And I hope that I am understanding everything correctly!

I also think:
That the grade five teacher doesn't want me to do games with the students
That I am going on a school trip to the aquarium in Busan next Friday
That SOMETHING is happening on Thursday
and that I should maybe try and learn Korean!!!