In Which Leslie Surprises Daniel by Encouraging Him to Buy Large Quantities of Australian Grain-Fed Steak

I know that I have gotten over my jet lag.  The reason I know this is that I have recently been having trouble going to sleep at night.  For the first week or so, I would conk out within about five minutes of lying down.  Now, the Korean mattress on which we sleep — which was designed by and for a people who have only recently, and by no means universally, adopted the Western fashion of sleeping in a bed,  and who for thousands of years previously were perfectly well accustomed to sleeping on a hard floor — is no longer quite as inviting when I lie down at night to go to sleep.  I was awake until at least 3:00 last night (this morning?).  So I've been tired today, and will probably go to bed earlier tonight, and hopefully sleep better tonight and into the future, for reasons that will shortly be disclosed.

Today at school we had a lot of meetings.  First, we had a meeting for all the secondary school teachers, led by the secondary principal; then, a training session on how to put things for our students on the school's website, and how to use the school's grading program.  We then had an hour and a half to work in our classrooms before lunch.  I think my room is essentially ready for Day 1; the only thing left is to figure out how to give the kids their assigned seats.  (Maybe make a diagram on my computer and display it on the SmartBoard?  Leslie printed out papers with all her students' names on them, laminated them, and cut them up to put on their desks.)  I have been having a lot of helpful conversations and email exchanges on what to do with my classes, how to assign them journal writing, etc., with several of my colleagues.  My mentor this year will be Nathan, a fellow Minnesotan and the secondary ESL teacher, and he's been extremely helpful thus far; my neighbor across the hall, who had my eighth graders last year, Mo (French Canadian) has also been very helpful and willing to talk.

After lunch, we had a meeting on how to help our ESL students improve their skills, and then a bunch of us got on a bus to go shopping at Costco.  Yes, they have Costco in Korea!  Not in Minnesota, apparently, but in Korea, yes!  (UPDATE: They do have Costco in Minnesota.  I guess they didn't when Leslie lived in Edina.)  Leslie and I wanted to get a membership, but apparently we can't until we get our Alien Registration Card or whatever it's called.  Fortunately, anyone with a card is allowed to make two purchases in a visit...so Hye Sin, a fellow teacher of Korean parentage who has spent most of her life in London, used her card (well, actually it was someone else's card she was borrowing) to let us buy our stuff after she'd bought hers.

The trip was a little overwhelming.  We had a little over an hour, and a sizable shopping list, and a huge store to navigate.  And Costco is the kind of place where there's something to tempt you every 10 feet or so.  We spent a while agonizing over whether to buy a fairly thin $50 mattress pad to make our bed softer, or a really thick one that cost $250.  We finally decided to buy two of the thin mattress pads right before we checked out.  (Also — when I use the dollar sign, you should generally interpret it to mean "thousands of won."   A dollar is actually worth about 1240 won at the moment.)

We got all sorts of things — a swiffer to clean our floors; lots of ziplock bags; liquid hand soap; pillows; and lots and lots of food.  The food was down a floor from all the other stuff.  I took my shopping cart down an escalator ramp (slanted moving walkway?).  The wheels on the cart were designed so that they would get caught in the escalator slats and not roll down.  We got huge boxes of Kashi and Honey Nut Cheerios, a big box of Bisquick (yay pancakes!), Tim Tams (a favorite of Leslie's from Australia), frozen shrimp, frozen salmon, Hormel maple flavored bacon, salami, jumbo size containers of peanut butter and jelly, bagels, sandwich bread, ravioli...and steak.  Our colleague Meghan, an elementary ESL teacher and a real foodie, explained how she often stocked up on large amounts of meat at Costco, to put in her freezer and eat later.  In my young life, there are only two kinds of meat I've ever actually cooked, both of them in a frying pan: bacon and steak.  (Attempting to roast a sausage on a stick in a campfire while out camping as a Cub Scout doesn't count.)  So I figured I'd best avoid the pork tenderloin and the whole chickens.  (Besides, I'm the only meat eater in the household!)  In the large butcher's section, there was a sizable amount of steak.  The top sirloin seemed to be priced really well, about $14 for a fairly hefty package of two large and two rather smaller steaks.  I had thought I might get one or two steaks for myself.  Then, I was going to get one package... but when my dear wife, who professes to be disgusted by the sight of steak, but knows how much I love it,encouraged me to get three packages, I did not protest.  Now I should be set for quite a while.

We spent more money than we had intended to — we hadn't anticipated how many things we would want, and we didn't bring enough cash.  We were very fortunate that another colleague, a new arrival like us, had enough to lend us to cover everything.  It was a pretty major undertaking to get everybody's stuff back on the bus.  The bus ride was long; there was quite a bit of traffic.  We dropped off those with children first — the two other married couples among the new teachers have five children among them.  Little Søren, the son of the school's new chaplain, finally stopped hiding his face from me every time I looked at him and played peek-a-boo with me today.

The bus we were on is too big to fit down the streets that lead to our apartment.  We had way too much stuff to walk with from where the bus left us, so the driver and the other remaining teacher, a Korean-American named Jee Young, helped us flag down a taxi.  We needed several trips to get everything inside.  Leslie made ravioli, and I made a steak.  Now we're sitting in the living room digesting our food, listening to Hem (thanks, Meredith!) and Camera Obscura (thanks, Sarah!).  I should iron a shirt for tomorrow — it's new student orientation day.  Leslie has already picked one out for me.  Then I should put the new mattress pads on our bed, and see if they help me get a better night's sleep tonight.  Good night from the future, everyone back home!