Things are still going well at school. By the time 4pm rolls around, I'm ready to pass out. I've been coming home and sleeping for an hour or two everyday after school. Yesterday I played volleyball with the other teachers...and by "played volleyball" I mean me and the male teachers played while the women teachers, still in their teachers clothes and some still in their dress shoes, ducked and ran away from the ball. I was on the vice principals team which was a little intimidating at first, but I got a couple of high fives throughout the game so I'm hoping he may like me a little now. The gym teacher on the other team, who is the only younger guy at my school, was super impressed and told me today that he wants me to be on his team from now. I'm not even any good at volleyball, I just think they were impressed that I didn't run screaming from the ball or duck when they spiked it on me (which they did a number of times...no mercy). The volleyball game is going to be a weekly occurrence this year. Yesterday I was also volunteered/coaxed into teaching two two-hour teacher classes each week, on top of the load of classes I already have. I think this program is run by the city and held at my school, so I will be getting paid extra for these four hours a week. I'll be making the equivalent of about $50 an hour...pretty awesome.

Here are some more of my favorite English names from my classes this week, most of which the students came up with themselves: Cash, Jennilaurens, George Michael, Jeff Goldblum, Blade, Bling, Homework, Fighter, Jeraple, Jeff Hardy, Fire-bad, and Money.

Here are two other random things I meant to tell you about my homestay (inspired by a friends recent update):
#1- There is no drinkable tap water in my house...or in all of Korea I believe. Instead, my family keeps big bottles of water that they run through a Brita filter in the fridge. I think my family usually only drinks about half of one of these relatively small bottles a day. I drink about 2 or 3 all by myself. I get made fun of everyday for this. Also, Koreans barely drink anything during meals (unless its alcohol), while I am getting up at least 3 or 4 times to refill my tiny shot glass of water.

#2- Our entire bathroom is the shower. My family is lucky enough to have an actual tub in our bathroom (some do not) but we have no shower curtain. In fact, the only place I have seen a shower curtain was at the Best Western and in the dorms. Instead, the entire bathroom is tiled and there is a drain in the middle of the floor. When you shower, the whole bathroom gets soaked. This problem would be easily solved with a simple shower curtain. For the life of me, I still can't figure out why Koreans have the bathroom set up this way. The freaking floor stays wet throughout the entire day, so you have to wear "bathroom slippers" in the bathroom. This only helps about half the time, because the other half of the time the bathroom slippers are also wet.

Tomorrow is my birthday, and while I would normally be sad to be away from all of my family and friends, I think tomorrow will be a really good day. My host mom is making me eggs and toast and cereal for breakfast (oh the little things in life...) and the family is taking me out to dinner. On Saturday I am going to Daejeon (the large city that is only a 40 min bus ride from where I live) to meet up with 10-15 other ETA's to celebrate my b-day. We're going to do some sightseeing during the day, and go out for drinks and dancing at night. It will be the first time we see each other since we left orientation, so I'm sure I'll be returning with a ton of hilarious homestay and teaching stories to share with you all.

That's about all for now. Miss you all!