George Glass has nothing on Obama.

So it’s June 2010. And everyone knows what that means ... the World Cup.
A time when Americans pretend to care about soccer and Koreans become so nationalistic they make even McCarthy look like a commie.
The first game between Korea and Greece took place a couple weekends ago, and I chose to watch it in a local Gwangju bar with some friends.
Sorry Grandma, but I figured I would forego my host-family’s barely functioning television that has but two channels and emits only the color green ... and watch it with a room full of die-hard Korean soccer fans, dressed head to toe in “Hey, let’s go Korea!” gear.
This “Hey, let’s go Korea!” gear consists of: Red anything
Red scarves (because it was only about 80 degrees that night)
Red t-shirts
Red mini skirts
Red socks and shoes
Red Korea national jerseys (one of which I now proudly own)
Red bang-together-make-a-really-loud-noise-sticks
and
Red devil horns - pretty much every Korean ever had on a pair of red devil horns, because as I later found out the soccer fan-club / mob calls themselves the “red devils” (I still have no idea why) and shows solidarity by imitating Lucifer.

Side-note: Lucifer = a cutes-y Korean girl who wears devil horns with miniskirts, stilettos, on the arm of her ambiguously gay Korean boyfriend.

Anyway, I won’t bore you all with the events of the game (because I’m sure you all watched it at home, at 7:30 in the morning). Basically, Korea dominated ... they were able to put the ball inside the goal 2 times more than Greece.
I had a fantastic time watching the game with my friends and the “red devils” ... and as I later discovered, it was the first time I had ever watched an entire soccer game from start to finish. (Minus those 30 minute games in which I was forced to participate in high school physical education class.)
With Korea’s first win, the country only intensified its Korea-ness. My students were super concerned with me knowing that Korea won their first game and America only “same same” with England ... and then later “same same” with Slovenia.
Come on America.
Weak sauce.
However, there’s nothing I love more than a little “who’s country is better”. Because, isn’t that really why I came to Korea?
I’m tempted to wear my American flag sweater to school everyday this week ... even though it’s late June.
America!

As for the second game, Korea went head to head with Argentina and sadly the outcome wasn’t as awesome as the first. As I’m sure you’re all aware (because you keep a close tab on the Korean soccer team) they lost. And pretty badly.
But my students didn’t seem to make it a point to tell me how Korea was dominated by Argentina. They must have forgotten.

And the third game? A tie with Nigeria. And even though it’s pretty lame to tie, (unless, of course, you’re America ... and then anything you do is awesome because you have guns) the tie allowed Korea to advance into the sweet 16 round. (While I’m no soccer buff I am not totally sure if “sweet 16” is a legit term for the World Cup, but it is as far as I’m concerned.)
This advancement into the sweet 16 revived Korean spirits, and once again every Korea nand their mother (really, the ajummas are totally into Korean soccer) are wearing red, shouting “대한민국” / “Republic of Korea” every 10 seconds, listening to the new national anthem (a pop song produced by Big Bang - one of Korea’s hottest boy bands - and Yuna Kim - remember, the gold-medaling figure skater - especially for the 2010 World Cup), and dancing the national “we are awesome at soccer” dance that coincides with this new national anthem. There really is a choreographed dance.
(I’ll post a link to the song and its video at the end of my post, so you all at home can get in on all this “Korea-ness”.)

Moving on.
Things around the Eee / Lauren’s home-stay house have been pretty hectic. This past week Eun Sue, my youngest host-sister, the high school senior, is preparing for her KAIST interviews.
As I’ve mentioned before, she’s in the process of applying to KAIST ... Korea’s top science university that is super difficult to get into. The application process is also insanely difficult / ridiculous, and includes multiple test scores, recommendations from many of her high school teachers, a portfolio of all her academic awards, a portfolio of all her extracurricular activities (volunteering, taekwando, green tea ceremonies, pretty much anything else that doesn’t involve books), and on top of that she must pass through about a million interviews in English and Korean (and maybe one in German, you never know). This past week she met with the KAIST people for the first time and had her first of the interviews (in Korean).
I’m not exactly sure how it went down (because strangely they didn’t invite me to sit in on it), but I’m sure she did fantastically because she’s been memorizing answers to what she thinks the interviewers will ask her for weeks. Questions such as:
“Why is KAIST so awesome?” “Are you awesome enough to come to KAIST?” “What awesome things will you study at KAIST?” “What have you done in high school to prepare you for this much awesome?”
Her English interview is sometime next week ... of which I’ve been helping her prepare for. It’s only a 5 minute shindig, but 5 minutes ... speaking in a foreign language ... about how awesome you are requires a lot of preparation. She is talking specifically about an experiment she did last year that won her the 2nd most awesome award a Korean science student can receive, and I’m helping her to craft her English sentences so she sounds super smart and super awesome.
The experiment she preformed dealt with nails, oxidation, roofs, and urine.
Yeah, I’m teaching her how to best talk about urine.
Apparently she discovered that in old time Korea when rust-fighting agents weren’t that popular, old Koreans would dip the nails they used to build houses in their pee, which would prevent rust. So being the little scientist that she is, Eun Sue recreated this experiment and dipped some nails in some pee. And what do you know; her pee was so awesome she won a legit science award.
So after her Korean and English interview, she has a third interview ... or a 10 minute meeting with the KAIST people to “sell herself” and show that she does indeed have enough awesome for KAIST.
I’m also helping her with her final interview, because she said she needs to be really creative and unique ... so default to the American, because we’re all creative and unique (so thinks Korea). Actually, the new president of KAIST is American, and this new and more rigorous interview process is thanks to him and his desire to mimic the “American style” of university admissions ... not relying on the traditional Korean way (take one super important test that basically decides your entire future). So I told Eun Sue that a pretty sweet way to woo / sell yourself to the people at KAIST would be to do so in the best and most glorious of American ways.
Jeopardy.
Yeah, the game show.
(Forget for a minute that Trebek is Canadian.)
We’re working out a way for Eun Sue to play Jeopardy with the KAIST people (she being Trebek, of course) and they, the contestants, choose from categories such as: “Awesome awards Eun Sue won”, “Fun facts about how awesome Eun Sue is”, or “I bet you didn’t know Eun Sue was awesome at these things too!”
Jeopardy never fails. I’m sure she’ll get in.

As I know you all will remember, this semester I’ve been teaching an English novels club class for 10 advanced English students, to prepare them for the much anticipated (by my principal) English-novels competition this June.
And well, guess what. It’s June ... meaning the competition was this past week.
Each participating school in my province sends in two of its most glorious English students to compete in this competition (makes sense, right?).
As I’ve said, I teach 10 students in my novels class, 8 of who are 1st grade students ... i.e high school freshmen ... and they are glorious.
I like to think I am aiding in their English awesomeness as we read Pride and Prejudice and basically talk about how douchey is Mr. Wickham, how incredibly silly Elizabeth is being, and how my students feel about Hwasun High School love (which basically functions similarly to the love Austen displays in Pride and Prejudice).
Side-note: My novels class is also equipping students with much more distinguished insults, as one of my more glorious students once informed me (speaking about this fellow classmate): “Rauren. He is no Darcy. He is a Wickham.”
Anyway, after teaching this 6 month novels class I thought I would be able to choose who I thought were the two most glorious students to send along into the competition.
Yeah, I was wrong about that.
My high school principal figured that he knew what was best (because he has totally sat in on zero of my classes) and he sent two students that don’t even attend my class into the novel battle. (It sounds more dramatic that way.)
The two students he sent are fairly good (if not more glorious than the 1st grade students) at English, but have absolutely no idea of the basic contents of any of the books we have read.
Sweet life, Mr. Principal.
But our hard work is promised not to be wasted, as my co-teacher promised to send two of the currently 1st grade students to the competition next year.
And next year they will dominate.
(But I have yet to hear the outcome of this year’s competition ... or how much Hwasun High School dominated ... but once I do I will totally inform the blogging world. Because I know you’re all super anxious to know.)

One of my students recently came to me seeking relationship advice.
Adorable, I know.
Apparently he’s the 3rd grade class heartbreaker, and it’s really interfering with his studies. Seriously, his biggest concern is not how to get a girl, but how to un-get a girl so he can focus more on math and science.
(I too had that problem in 3rd grade ... and my multiplication tables really suffered from it.)
So a particular girl in his class ... we’ll call this girl “Hwasun High School’s president” ... or “Obama” for short (because she may or may not be the Hwasun High School president) ... has a crush on this dude, and quite a big one.
It is so big that she went to the lengths of stealing his cell phone just to see who he’s been in contact with. Such a presidential move.
Dudebro then came to me, the only female teacher under 30 at school, seeking advice on how to handle this particular silly “Obama”.
So I gave him a plethora of advices, many of which I hope he at least attempts:
1. Steal her cell phone. Hammurabi style.
2. Tell your class teacher and hopefully get her Nixon-ed.
3. Become so horribly unattractive that she will give it back to you out of pity and end her little crush.
4. Create a fake girlfriend, a la “Georgina Glass”, so she might give up.
He promised to let me know how this drama plays out, as he hopefully implements some of these strategies to get rid of “Obama”.
Also ... if this doesn’t affirm the belief that Eun Sue should have won the Hwasun High School presidency, I don’t know what does.

Oh hey there weekly readers.
The promised answers from last week’s logic puzzles:

1. Put a math symbol between (5 __ 9) to make a number bigger than 5 and smaller than 9.

. (decimal point)


2. Two girls were born to the same mother, on the same day, at the same time, in the same month, and in the same year.
But they are not twins.
How is this true?

They are 2 girls, in a set of triplets


3. How can you add eight 8’s to equal 1,000? (use only addition)

888 + 88 + 8 + 8 + 8 = 1,000


4. What letter comes next in this sequence?
J ... F ... M ... A ... M ... J ... J ... A ... __ ... O ... N ... D

S = September


5. How can you cut a cake into 8 parts with just 3 cuts?

First cut - across, vertically
Second cut - across, horizontally
Third cut - cut the cake in half, to separate the top half and the bottom half


6. In the equation: 101 - 102 = 1, move one number in order to correct it.

101 - 10(insert small 2 “squared” symbol here, because I can’t find it on my Mac) = 1



7. An electric train is traveling south. The wind is blowing from the north. What direction does the train’s smoke blow?

An electric train doesn’t produce smoke.


8. A farmer has 17 sheep. All but 9 die. How many are alive?

9


9. How much dirt is in a hole 3 meters x 3 meters x 3 meters?

0 ... in order to be a hole, there must not be any dirt inside


10. How can you throw a ball and have it come back to you?
It doesn’t bounce off anything.
Nothing is attached to it.
No one catches and throws it back to you.

Throw it up ... to the sky.


As promised … the Korean World Cup fight song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik44awloHsM

And here’s an instructional video for you all to follow in hopes of perfecting the dance:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq5cPaTPTpA