Karaoke!

Things are going good.  Yesterday was the last day of teacher orientation, so my room is decorated and looking good and I'm ready for the kids to show up.  Monday is the first day of school here.  The assignment for my teaching changed, so I'll be doing 9th Grade English, 9th Grade Honors, 8th Grade English, 7th Grade English, and the computer class..  I have a huge stack of books full of curriculum, which is a good thing, but it's hard to choose what to cover.  I guess I'll figure it out as I go.

Last night we all went out to eat as a group (all the teachers).  Our school director took us to an Italian restaurant about 45 minutes away.  The area was really beautiful.  They had a big lake, a walking trail, and a place to go bungee jumping.  The restaurant was really nice, and we were all escorted upstairs to a corner that had chairs and couches.  The couches were covered in velvet and the walls had velvet padding (I guess in case we got too loud).  I sat on one of the couches, but it was just too weird.  I ended up switching seats with someone so I could sit in a chair.

It's too bad I don't have pictures of the food because it was interesting.  We got bread and oil and vinegar 1st, which was delicious.  Next was a cream soup.  It was completely white with small bits of onion in it.  The main course was steak, which was supposed to be medium well but ended up looking medium rare or rare in some places.  It was covered in a dark sweet sauce and had a little bowl of crispy straws covering it.  On top was a skewer with garlic, tomato, zuchinni, and some other stuff I didn't recognize.  It was really good.

The highlight of dinner was when 2 of the teachers sang and played the violin.  Afterwards, several of the Korean teachers wanted to go to karaoke, and since I'd never been I wanted to check it out.  It was so much fun! 

First I have to explain how it is in Korea with the buildings.  The buildings are all really tall, and there are signs on the outside all the way up advertising different companies.  There's a bottom floor which connects to the street and has vendors selling mostly food and clothes, but in the middle of each building is a four-way tunnel that connects the outside to a place with an elevator and bathrooms.  Side-note: If you have to go the bathroom in Korea, you have to find one of these types of bathrooms because there are none in the stores.  And you have to bring your own toilet paper because there won't be any.

Anyway, once you get on the elevator, you can go to any floor in the building and you can find different businesses, anything from a dentist to a hair salon to bowling to karaoke.  So that's where we went - the 5th floor of one of these buildings. 

When we stepped out of the elevator, we could all hear a man's voice blaring through the hallway and the music behind it.  It was in Korean, but the slurring of his speech and terrible pitch was a dead giveaway he was drunk.  The lady behind the counter was courteous and showed us to a room while her little dogs yapped at us. 

The room was dark and had 1 big screen at the front and 2 little screens at the back, with a huge table in the middle with a couch surrounding it, and a space for dancing and singing.  We had 2 microphones so it was less embarrassing if you didn't want to sing alone.    

One of the girls picked out the famous Spice Girls song "I'll tell you what I want what I really really want..." and it started blaring while we searched through the books for some other English songs we could sing.  I sang a couple rap songs and some Black-Eyed Peas, which shocked some of the people there. :)  There was some Queen, U2, Boyz 2 Men (sorry if I got that wrong), and Gwen Stefani.  We had a great time and when we weren't singing we were up dancing to the song or singing along.  We got there at 10 and stayed until about 11:30 last night.  One of the last songs 2 of the girls got up and sang a K-Pop song.  It was really cool.  A girl there told me her and her friends do karaoke as a workout sometimes, and by the end of the night I knew why.  I had no trouble falling asleep right away when I got home.