Surprise! Surprise! Sur…huh? (7 February)

Back at school after a great vacation, I’m disappointed to discover my scratchy throat seems to be feeling worse and my voice seems to be undecided as to whether or not it’s still on vacation.  Fortunately, I’m only deskwarming for the next three weeks so I’m not too concerned about my rapidly disappearing voice.  Fate, however, seems to have other plans as I soon discover when, at 10:50, Mr Jeong phones me to tell me that we’re following our regular timetable this week since it is the final week of the 2010 academic calendar.  This means that I have a class in 10 minutes.  While he apologises profusely, stating that he thought we’d already been told about this week’s timetable, I run through possible lesson ideas.  I’m actually glad that we’re following a proper timetable again and, as I later tell my co-teacher and Mr Jeong, at least we were given 10 minutes warning instead of only hearing the news after the class has already started.  Their response is that I’ve completed adjusted to Korea and settled in at school. 

With a hastily formulated conversation lesson, NZ1 and I head to the first lesson where we end up just chatting to the students.  I spend a lot of the lesson telling them about my vacation trips to Jeju, Countdown Seoul and Phoenix Park and the students seem to enjoy my anecdotes of my failed ski attempts.  I don’t mind poking fun at myself when it makes students respond and I’m glad the seem to be enjoying the break from their otherwise rigorous timetables. 

By the end of the day, I’m in a good mood and my thoughts quickly return to the cute doctor.  I’ve posted so many comments about the cute doctor on Facebook that friends have asked for a photo of him.  It’s not like I can whip out my camera in an appointment though and take a photo of him – well, I can but I’m not outgoing enough to take this approach.  Instead, I settle for trawling through the Korean version of the Medical Centre’s website until I finally hit the jackpot: A photo of cute doctor with a few key points of where he studied.  I also discover that more than half of my appointments with him have been on days that he’s not the scheduled doctor for outpatients yet still he saw me.  This partly explains why he could spend so much time chatting to me and yet, I find myself more confused than ever before….