Adventures in the last 24 hours...

Well, to start, Happy Chusok to everyone. The next few days are the Korean Thanksgiving holiday, and I do not need to go back to school until Thursday. This is a great opportunity to get out and explore a bit more of Pusan.
Now for the adventures. Wow.

Minor background: Ryan is a teacher that arrived the day after I did. He has joined three of his best friends here, so I'm a little jealous that they are always going around to places and doing things. But then again, half the time they are out until three, four, five o'clock in the morning.

One of the teachers at school has been really fantastic to me. Guylaine (or something, French, pronounced Gee-lynn) has been here four years, and her Korean husband also works at the school. She hung out late with me on Wednesday night to give me some pointers about discipline: her focus in school was behavioral problems, so she is a wealth of information. They had planned to take me to the beach today (this fell through, explain that in a bit). Also, Guylaine has not agreed with Jenny on many things. Jenny is the director of the schools and is married to Eddie who did my interview. I live downstairs from them in their house. Jenny does a little bit of micromanaging, from what I can tell.

First, yesterday's (Friday's) classes went quite well until the afternoon. Cindy, the head office person and teacher in on the C. side of the school (it is divided into C. and kindergarten, I teach on both sides), asked me to take over Guylaine's Grade 3 (no big deal, two hour class that meets the same time as my class. Same material, same time, a lot more chaos), and Cindy asked another teacher to cover Guylaine's other classes.

We thought she was sick or something. Until she showed up for work.
I didn't hear much about the situation until last night. A bunch of the teachers went to a beautiful restaurant for dong-dong ju. The place was sort of an open air restraurant with grass on the ground and round stones for a floor. Plenty of ferny-type plants that I cannot quite identify.

Guylaine was there, but she didn't really want to talk about it: she simply said that she was fired. Ted, her husband, and I spoke for a while, and it sounds like she and Jenny had a fight on Thursday. So Jenny fired her. No warning, no severence, no nothing. Visa revoked.

Guylaine proceeded to get a bit drunk. If the situation weren't a little awful (I'm going to miss her terribly because she has given me some fantastic advice and information about the specific kids and the specific classes and because she has really been looking out for me), it would have been pretty funny. She lapsed into French a bit (she's from Quebec and speaks almost fluently), and eventually she was wearing some guy's fedora hat.

This was just the beginning of the night. Maybe midnight.

So we stopped into a few Western bars. Mostly, the people there were a little strange, so I wasn't very comfortable. I was going along to hang out with the teachers and try to be supportive (watch over) Guylaine a little because Ted had gone home. One bar called the Crossroads had a couple of guys in short jean cutoffs and knee high socks, then they wore some sort of odd wig. Another had tight camo pants on tucked under his beer gut with an open jean jacket vest and a striped orange and yellow tie. I talked with a guy from Canada (who knew I had to go to Korea to meet so many Canadians?) who told me to save him from a boring conversation; I said no thanks; he told me he would buy me a beer if he had any money; and I promptly said I was drinking water anyway and I could get it myself.

I'm such a jerk sometimes.

So we were with a few other teachers from other schools: namely Katie who just got in a week ago. We went dancing around three o'clock in the morning, and at this point Guylaine was a dancing phenomenon. I tried to stay near her, to make sure she was okay, and she gave me an earful about loosening up. I also got some dance lessons from a slightly chubby but very adorable Korean guy name Raison. Very fun.

Now comes the crazy part.

So people started to leave about four o'clock. Guylaine was doing just fine. Still dancing like Abba on a good night. Most of the other teachers had left. Katie, the new teacher, was worried about getting home, so Ryan and I decided to split a cab and head back with her. She couldn't really pronounce where she lived, but Ryan was great. He was talking to the cabbie, and it was okay. Ryan thought it might be a good idea to walk her home to make sure she was okay. It is safe here and everything, but she was pretty drunk.

Even though she recognized the street, she had a hard time finding her apartment. We finally got her to her apartment: no keys. She freaked.

We looked through her purse for ten minutes.

Nothing. No keys.

We knocked on a teacher's door that was in the same building, but there wasn't anything he could do. So Katie, Ryan, and I got back in a cab and headed back to the "ghetto"--our affectionate term for the area where the apartment is located. I fed Katie some food and some water, and by six o'clock, Katie was asleep on my bed, I had found a comfortable place to sleep, and everyone is OK. I think that was about six o'clock in the morning.

Today has been relatively low key. Breakfast at this great Western place that makes a killer mocha, watching a movie in a video room (there's a name for this, but I can't remember what it is called), and some shopping for Chusok. I don't know if everything will be closed the next few days, so I bought some groceries.

Okay, more adventures later. I'm tired, and I'm going to bed.