Shoes and Kindergarteners

We lost another teacher this week. She was really only a temporary solution to our missing teacher who disappeared on us a couple months ago, and we did know it was coming. The problem is that the new teacher to replace her wont be here until Thursday. That means that the rest of us get to take on extra classes for three days, and the new teacher gets to jump in feet first, into some rather deep water.

For me (Chris) this means that I am going to pick up a morning kindergarten class (5 Year Olds!!! Which is 3-4 in Western years). I am rather concerned about this due to my previous experience with younger kids. When I walked in and two out of ten started crying and other problems like not knowing/remembering their names and such. I would appreciate your prayers on this as it will be rough for me.

We don’t know for sure if Jenn has any additional classes yet, but will find out when we go in on Monday. Yay for not having a plan in place early!!! I don’t know why they tend to do that so often here.

Finally, we went shoe shopping today (Sunday). When I left for Korea I had two brand new pairs of shoes and now, after four months of heavy use, I am down to one which I don’t expect to last more than another month, if that. Also, due to the size of my feet (only 10 ½) I have a difficult time finding shoes that will fit. We had seen a couple of shoe places on the way to church, so we decided to check them out.

Can you say expensive and ugly? Well that is an apt description of most of what we found. Since I am supposed to dress reasonably nice (well actually I am supposed to wear a full button-up shirt and tie, but they neglected to mention it before we came despite our request for the dress code so they get to deal with polos and slacks now) for work, tennis shoes aren’t really what I should buy, so I was looking for something that looked at least reasonably nice. We found a couple, but they were expensive ($70+) and did not feel comfortable enough for an 8 hour day on my feet, plus a 20 minute walk to work and then back again later.

Jenn also needs some new walking shoes, but our efforts for her were equally fruitless. Once again, most of it was ugly, and the stuff that wasn’t was too pricey for us. We are going to try another place or two. These were name brand outlets (Reebok, Nike, Doc Martins, etc), which probably also have the Korean import tax on them thus making expensive items even more expensive. But finding shoes for someone my shoe size is difficult here. One of my friends has had incredible troubles trying to find shoes to fit his feet here. He wears the same size as me, so I guess it’ll be an adventure.