Birthday, Weekend, Canadians, Contract

It is cool in the apartment. Or maybe I have a fever. I don't feel sick, just really damned cold! ANyways, here's some recent happenings.
There's a huge contradiction here in terms of health and cleanliness. They have sprays to kill the germs that get on your fruit by washing them with water. They do everything here because "it's healthy", from mountain climbing to justifying their continued production of kimch'i. And in spite of this health consciousness, they have no issues with dumping a half-finished drink back into a communal bowl, and drinking from/pouring you drinks from any used glass that may be within reach. It seems a little backwards is all...
This past Friday was Jessie's birthday. We had a big breakfast and dinner for the occasion, and Jessie sounded like she had a pretty good day at school. While sitting in the english lab (probably working in the fume hood) she heard a dog barking or whining... she though it must be in a class, so went to investigate. She found the source of the noise to be in the broom closet of the boy's bathroom! One of the boys had found a puppy and decided to keep it in there until the end of the day! Jessie took it to the english lab and it sounds like she had a pretty good time with it. So good, that we almost wound up the new owners of the puppy. It would have been neat to have a dog... but so much work!
I bought Jessie flowers, which is the source of another good story... or lack of story. I left school a little early and ran downtown to get flowers before my students got out. Unfortunately, it took just a little too long, so when I turned to leave the flower shop, I was faced with a street full of my students from the girls' school. Now, Jessie will vouch for me not making this up, but they go CRAZY when they see me. They actually screamed the other day. Not just one, but a whole group. Screaming together. You can't imagine how awkward that is when you are just walking around shopping downtown. I made a hasty retreat to the back of the flower shop, and decided to see if I could wait it out. The first wave of girls passed, and I bolted. It sounds sad, but I did not even want to imagine the mayhem that would break out if they saw me with a bouquet of flowers. PANDEMONIUM would erupt. I actually ran accross the street and hid behind a car. I tried to do it inconspicuously, but I'm pretty sure the flower shop lady caught on to what was happening, because she was smirking a bit. I made it home unnoticed, and it was great.
We went to Mokpo on Saturday, and met up with some other Canadians. I had never met any of them, which made things a little awkward, but we had fun anyways. It was a larger group than expected, because the people we were visiting had more guests I think than they had expected. It was fun! We went out to a bar called "WaBar", and got to drink Canadian beer (Molson Canadian) and I actually had Guinness, which was an unexpected surprise. Unfortunately, it was an expensive unexpected surprise. Then, onto the Karaoke bar, which got mixed reviews. There was a Korean girl with us who would skip other people's songs to get to hers, so the vibe was very bad. The two highlights of the night were just hanging out pre-bar with other Canadians, venting and exchanging, and then at "WaBar" hearing one of the other teachers telling us about "training" his Korean girlfriend... if you need more blank-filling, here's a quote "... and then I just text her "EXCITED" and she'll come over". Anyways, it was a lot of fun, and it was nice to meet some other Canadians as well.
We came back on Sunday. Jessie's coteacher wanted to meet with us before we left, but, Korean are super hard to meet with in any regard, and plans tend to change around you with NO notice at all, sometimes even without your knowledge. Jessie's coteacher wanted to meet us because there was a big mix-up with our contract, in that they put the wrong dates on it, so we were "working" on days when we were still in Canada. Anyways, Jessie signed a new one, and she had to sign a third, because she the correct signed date on it, as in "October 13", or whenever she actually signed it, rather than on the day we would have signed it in Toronto. Anyways... it didn't seem right that we should have to backdate a contract. It seems, as Jessie pointed out to me, that this is less about fixing the problem than covering up that a mistake was made in the first place. I don't know, I was really uncomfortable with faking the date, but it's hard to debate here. I think a lot of foreigners probably wind up doing stuff just because they don't know how to explain that they don't want to. Kind of like the early morning phone calls to Mrs. Kang!

That's all for now!