Sunday Stuff

One thing about living in a little town is I can often easily tell when something's going on 'round here. The sound travels through the air and bounces around off the mountains before wafting in through my screen door. Something was happening today at the bandshell in the centre of town. I don't quite know what it was, but for sure there were some people shouting through the echoey boombastic sound system, and that was interrupted by samplings of Wonder Girls and Big Bang. If I were to guess, I'd say that perhaps there was a Dance-Taekwondo demonstration going on. Something like that. I don't know because my curiosity wasn't even close to being great enough to drag me from the happy place I'd created in my mind whilst snuggling Mister Kamikaze and watching "The Weather Man" on TV.

Mister Big-Face.

When the things-going-on at the Bandshell concluded, they had a spectacular five minute or so long fireworks extravaganza. I took some shaky pictures from my balcony.

Bada Boom


Bada Bing


Kablooey

This upcoming week should be interesting. It's the last week I'm going to be working at my school!

Noooooo - I'm not leaving. But my school is leaving. My new boss has given up on our franchise association. In it's heyday it was very popular, but it's been sliding downhill for the last few years. There used to be eight franchises in the city, but after we close there will be only one left standing. We're joining in a new, and hopefully up-and-coming franchise and we're incorporating new texts and a whole new program. So far I'm completely in the dark about what it's going to mean for me. I haven't yet looked at the material I'm supposed to start teaching coming the beginning of December. So I anticipate being busy for the next little while.

There are some other disturbances in the work world here as well. My lazy co-worker doesn't want to teach any classes and instead wants to take up the managerial position she was promised when she was hired. Fair enough, I suppose. Thing is, the amount of students and managerial duties required at our school needed doesn't warrant a full time manager, so she'd end up spending most of the day surfing the net or using the extra time to increase her frequency of "Oh! I'm COLD!" complaints (though I can't see how that's possible unless she starts answering the phone with "Anyonghaseyo, Yongo hagwon emneeda, ah choowayo! Jinja choowa!") Everything she does - from working to sleeping to eating a cookie - is just a stop-gap between the hours she can spend at church anyways. However, her desire to do little to nothing for her paycheque is creating some bad feelings amongst my boss and co-workers. Three of us wish she'd just shaddup and work hard already.

In other news, my boss and other co-worker are losing their shirts in the stock market and aren't too pleased about that. Seriously. Most of their savings have gone down the toilet in the past few weeks. My boss is now trying to sell his recently purchased apartment and has a marital separation looming in the near future. Still, you might not know this if you were to visit the staff-room. So far everyone seems to be pulling through and slapping a smile on, which pleases me.

And for some reason, Jane - my former manager that I haven't spoken to in almost a year now called me out of the blue today. She made a lame joke about standing me up at Christmas last year, and then talked about meeting up next month sometime. Perhaps she wants to make the Christmas stand-me-up a yearly event!