I am so ready for this heat and humidity to be over! I can't even imagine what July & early August were like here. I've had to quickly buy a bunch of cheap skirts and light t-shirts to wear to school...I definitely did not bring enough hot-weather clothes with me. Good thing the streets around here are full of racks of cheap clothing, my favorite! Can't beat 5,000 won for a shirt (under $5 US).

Today we had the birthday party for Alice, one of my kinders. It was so much fun!! Everyone, including Britney Teacher, got party favors and cake. Cindy Teacher (one of the three full-time Korean teachers on staff) helped out, taking pictures of Alice posing with her cake and her classmates. The class also got Capri Sun juiceboxes, sausage tubes, fruit mentos, cubed watermelon, and cherry tomatoes (they tend to have random food pairings like this all the time; for example, the pasta place nearby serves a bowl of sweet pickles as an appetizer, and a local bar serves a bowl of canned peaches over ice cubes along with your alcohol!).

In the afternoon, all the kindergarten classes had arts & crafts. I was pretty much in my element with that one: teaching cute Korean children + art class = happy Britney! The students are told what to draw and create in their art workbooks. Today, the directions were to draw squirrels in trees and then make Origami acorns to glue on the picture. Ummm kindergarteners making origami?? Highly unlikely...it ended up being a chaotic hour of the girls drawing princess squirrels and the boys trying to make Origami paper airplanes. There were glue sticks rolling around without caps, sticky fingers grabbing at me every second, and scraps of paper covering the floor...and I loved every minute of it!

Tomorrow morning we have a staff meeting regarding the swine flu and its health concerns for fall & winter. The other teachers think the staff is going to forbid us from leaving the country to travel during our October break, and possibly even during Christmas break. It's hard to know whom to believe, though, on the issue of the flu threat here. Some kindergarten parents have joined together in refusing to expose their children to the just-arrived international teachers here (the 2 new girls from MN, Shauna & Christine). Yet, many of these parents have been sending their children to school with head lice in the past few weeks...even while knowing that the children had lice! It seems like they become very neurotic about some health standards, but are then so lax toward other common-sense health measures (head lice pandemic prevention?)!

Weekend plans- staff party on Friday (hopefully to end at the nore-bong...more on that later) and hopefully moving into my new apartment!