YM School Lunch

Cleaning up before I go on vacation ...

The food at my school is generally pretty good--I'd say 9 days out of 10; but occasionally they'll pollute some perfectly good pork with octopus tentacles or ruin a mushroom soup with odeng. Every day about lunchtime, they send out via the school's messaging system a PPT slide with a labelled photo of the day's meal.

I had the idea to collect a week's worth of these and make a post about school lunch. Then for some reason, they have stopped sending them, leaving me with only three days' worth. But here they are anyway:


They also publish a monthly calendar which lists the menu as well as possible allergy information and the average Calorie, protien and fat data for each week.

PSP Video

At each graduation ceremony of the extra HS program at Nambu district, there was speechifying, diploma-getting, and also video-watching.

Each term, someone in the office compiles photos and video from all phases of the program and puts them together in a pretty slick presentation. Whenever my picture comes up, the kids from my class always cheer and yell--God knows why, I try to be just as gruff and curmudgeonly as I can!

They haven't released this semester's video (and may not, since the program is ending), so here is the video from last semester:

Farewell, Saturday Class

Tonight was a sad "Farewell" to the Public Speaking class I've been teaching at Nambu District since 2010. The pay was very handsome, for a start; but more than that, it was an opportunity to work in my specific area, and to work with really bright students. Without having to go around regularly beating them about the head and shoulders, yelling, "Speak English! Speak English!" all the time. And also very high quality co-teachers!

Tonight we had the final graduation ceremony. One unexpected plus is that all the teachers received a 500 GB Toshiba external hard drive. I think once or twice before we've received a 8 GB USB drive, so this was nice. Still, since the program is ending at least partly due to SMOE's ongoing downsizing of the NSET program, I'd rather they spend the monwy on our employment. Oh, well.
As I said, we had the final graduation ceremony, followed by a very nice dinner--Korean sashimi. It's not my favorite, as there's not much tuna, but it was quite good. Quite expensive, with beer and soju, and all free, of course. I took pictures on my iPhone, and I'm trying to see how well I can create a blog post with pictures on my new iPad (uh, new to me) before carting the thing around on my upcoming vacation.

First is the place setting, with some samjang, sweet chili and some soy sauce. The second picture is the first main, with smoked salmon in the center; the ones with red to purple bits are quite fishy, and the almost pure white ones rather tasty. They were all impeccably fresh and buttery soft.


There was also some sushi, including shrimp and tuna roll, plus that grilled skinny fish you always seem to have in izikayas. Next came a plate of some non-fish sea life, including sea cucumbers in the middle (good, but salty), marine snails (top left), conch, and oysters on the half-shell with a bit of peppery greens and some hot sauce.


I neglected to take pictures of the assembled teachers, but I was already kind of tired of pictures because they make such a big deal out of group pics at the ceremony itself. So I have to end with a shot of one of the last items on our menu, 왕세우튀김, or king-sized batter-fried shrimp, golden, crispy and delicious.


This post should have taken about an hour and ten or fifteen minutes, but I'm now about two hours in because it is almost impossible to move the cursor around! It's easy enough in the word processor I bought, but the Blogger thing is infuriating. Anybody?

I have had to give up because you simply can't edit anything. Ridiculous! I'm not sure whether to blame the iPad or Blogger ...