Our latest

Yesterday was Meet the Teacher Night at Busan Foreign School. We got the option to leave early (as soon as the kids left) and go freshen up etc for our long night. Since Haley had a bunch of homework, we just stuck around. I got caught up on scanning class notes to post on my web page, and Haley worked on her homework. We did walk home briefly, to eat dinner and snag Haley's laptop.

Dinner was Chamchi Kimbap -- tuna kimbap, which is a lot like a sushi roll with veggies and canned tuna. Then as we left the kimbap restaurant carrying our rolls, there was a big oven on a truck with meat on spits rotating. I asked (using mime and sound effects) and the man told me it was pork. So I bought $10 worth, and he sliced it for me into a container. We ate our kimbap and dipped the pork into the sauce it came with. Very good, if a bit fatty. I would definitely buy it again though :)

Then we came back to school for Meet the Teacher Night. The parents followed their kids' schedules, except we shortened all the periods to 10 minutes. Haley hid in the back of Ivy's room and I did my roaming teacher thing. Luckily, the order in which we ended up doing the 2 days worth of classes meant I only had to move rooms once. It was pretty funny though, since several parents came to 2 or more presentations. Some of them have more than one kid in my classes, and a few kids are taking 2 math classes at the same time. I didn't really do anything different, so they got the same speil twice.

After the big meeting in the cafeteria, we were able to leave at 9pm. Bleah. Haley walked home with Ivy and Zoey and went to bed. (It's really cool having a keypad to open our door -- it totally eliminates the worry about your kid losing the key.) Meanwhile, I caught a cab with another teacher and rode down to Emart. I bought a toothbrush holder and a vacuum.

No, I have no idea why Haley has two toothbrushes...

Brooms here are weird; most of them have a very short, 2 foot handle. They are used one handed, and the sweeper bends over at the waist to sweep. They do have long-handled brooms, for outside use. I bought one, not knowing what it was. However, the bristles are stiff plastic, good for sweeping stubborn twigs but not so great for catching grit and dust. Watching the fluffballs wafting away from the broom was so disheartening that we didn't want to sweep. Our floor got pretty disgusting, so I talked to some other people and found out how they cleaned. Most of them said that they bought one of the little vacuums that are sold in Emart. They're very, very lightweight upright vacuums intended for use on hardwood floors (because nobody here has carpet).

Our new vacuum is pretty neat. It's a cordless vacuum with a charging station. Not having to worry about a cord is very liberating! I'm not really worried about the battery life; I just vacuumed this morning and it took less than half an hour. The floor part has a rolling beater, the dust goes into a cup that I empty into the trash (not a bag that I have to replace), and the middle of the vacuum comes off and is a little hand-vac dust buster thing, to get in crevices and vacuum the couch. This is going to make it much easier to keep our apartment clean. Now I just have to find a place to store all of my groceries and get my trash and recycling figured out, and we'll have it made :)