I can't believe one week ago it was snowing, but alas, this is what weather does - it changes. It was a beautiful afternoon, but I had to rush home because I really needed a bathroom and try as I may, I couldn't find a public restroom along the way. Now that I'm inside, I want to take a nap and let rush hour pass without me suffering the fumes and the honking. I'll go out later and get something to eat and maybe take a walk.
Yesterday I mentioned that I taught in Korea last summer which got Nancy very excited. She said she loves Korean food and said there was one mentioned in her guide book. We looked and it is three blocks from school. During the break we decided we were going to talk Claudia into holding class in the Korean restaurant tomorrow, and when she came back, we mentioned it and she agreed. On the way home from school, I passed it. Even though I had walked down that street many times, I never noticed it - it is really three blocks from school.
Well, I couldn't wait until tomorrow and decided to go there today. When I got there, they had just opened. There was a Korean looking gentleman behind the bar and the restaurant was empty. I said, "are you open?" and he said yes. So I took a seat facing the entrance with my back to the bar. I sat there for a while and looked to see if he was going to come out from behind the bar and give me a menu, but when I looked, he was in the kitchen. I guess the customer is only minorly important here. The same thing happened when I went to drop my clothes off at the laundry today. The woman who smiled at me when she wanted my small change was there, as usual. And as usual, when I walked in, she looked up, and then looked down and then walked away. She was doing something that was too important to be interrupted (I don't know what she was up to today, but the last time I was there, she was sweeping the floor). So, I stood there and waited and when she was ready, she walked over to the counter and then said to me, "Senor?"
So today in the Korean restaurant I was already prepared to be ignored. Turns out the Korean guy behind the counter was not the waiter. A latino waiter came out and approached my table and asked me if I wanted a menu. Menus also seem to be something that people don't use a whole lot here - there are never enough of them and you almost always have to ask for one. Of course, I wanted a menu.
He brought me the menu and I decided what I wanted and like a good customer closed my menu to signify I was ready. And I waited patiently. And waited. And waited. Finally, I turned around and looked behind me and saw that he was busy putting glasses on tables. I motioned that I was ready and also noticed that it was now 12:25. I had been there 20 minutes and had not yet ordered! I told him I had little time. He got the hint.
I ordered "man du gook" which is Korean dumpling soup. It came with a few little side dishes - kim chi, some fish cake, small sardines, spicy cucumbers and some pickled vegetables and rice. The side dishes were not as good as at my favorite Korean restaurant in San Francisco, but it was so nice to not be eating meat and potatoes and to have something spicy! The soup was great and just what I needed. And the rice was also excellent - so much better than any rice I've had here.
All in all it was a good meal in spite of the fact that they started mopping the floor while I was there and the fumes from the detergent mixed with my food. I guess they don't want to have to pay people for time beyond the hours that they are open -so all of the prep and cleaning must be done during open hours. It was a strange experience and we'll see if it is better tomorrow.
I finished my homework for Martin and when we got to class and started checking it, I was the only one who had done it all! Cynthia doesn't do homework at all, and she definitely does not like to read. We had to read a very lengthy article about popular saints in Argentina. I thought that this was something that would never be permissible in an ESL class in the States and something I would never use because it was obviously about religion. Even though it was interesting, it was very Christo-centric, and if you didn't come from a culture that is not Christian based, you'd have no idea what this article was about. And of course, there was no preparation before reading it.
Anyway, Cynthia doesn't read or do homework, so it really didn't matter. She did get in a few tidbits about China, for example here, there are saints, but in China they are heroes. She kind of missed the point and mostly just sat there looking at the ends of her hair checking for split ends (that used to drive me nuts in Japan when the girls would do that).
We had an exercise after the reading where we had a sentence and then had to replace words in the sentence with different conjunctions such as "aunque" - although. It was a very poorly planned exercise, and wasn't clear at all. A lot of the connectors I had never seen before. I did it anyway, because I am thinking I am over-analyzing this stuff and should just do it even if it seems dumb.
When we started checking the exercise, I told Martin that the difficult part was that we didn't know the meaning of a lot of these connectors and there were no examples. He justified it somehow (I don't understand what he said) and Nancy backed me up, so he justified it again. Cynthia, who had not done the homework, said, "it's grammar" - as if that wasn't clear to me. I knew it was grammar, but my point was that you can not ask students to do a grammatical exercise with grammar that they have not been exposed to. I wish she had stuck to checking for split ends. Martin was not hearing what Nancy and I were saying, so I just shut up and we went ahead and did the exercise. I got more than half of them right, which just proves that the exercise was kind of mindless. I could do it even though I didn't know the meaning of many of the connectors - so what was the point?
Martin spoke for most of the class. We basically just read the answers to the questions we did for homework and then he commented on each one of them. For some reason he was looking at me more than he looked at Cynthia and Nancy and I was so bored, but had to maintain eye contact and appear interested. I was exhausted by the end of class.
I walked home and took a slightly different route. I was thinking of walking to the Museum of Belles Artes, but then decided to try the Holocaust Museum which I discovered last night and is closer to my apartment. When I got there, they had a sign that it was closed because of the 13th anniversary of a bombing that killed 85 people. The sign said, "we are closed, today, July 18th...", and I just walked away. But later, I looked at my watch and saw that tomorrow is the 18th. Oh well, maybe they were closed today too, but at least I know not to return tomorrow.
On the way home I passed some new shops and one of them was a candle shop. I bought a candle in a can and am burning in my bathroom now to try to get rid of the smell of the toxic fumes from Hernan's ant attack and from the exterminator this morning.
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