#posting especially early today because of my ~10 hour thursday class block~ lol

[blueskittlesart]

Linktober day 5: species/race

the first of 2 prompts decided by tumblr poll! i'm glad yall chose the rito tbh bc there's less of them for me to draw since theyre only in like 2 games. i do still hate drawing birds but this was fun!

[gracereally]

Getting Stopped by the Cops and Other Embarrassing Things That Happened in My First Week of Freedom

Hello hello!

It's been one week since I was freed from the two week travelers' quarantine upon arriving in Korea. So much has happened this past week I can barely believe it's only been a single week!

Moving to a new country comes with a lot of stumbling blocks, especially when you don't speak the language. Today's post is framed within some of the more embarrassing (and funny) growing pains I have had this week.

Monday

My first day out of quarantine was on Monday! I would be released at 12pm, so my school director thought it would be prudent to get my health exam the same day in order to get it out of the way. Everyone entering Korea with my visa needs a full health exam to ensure we are not bringing any problematic illnesses (besides COVID) to the country.

So my first day out of quarantine consisted of being poked, prodded, peeing in a cup, drawing blood, getting x-rayed fully naked, and other awful ventures. Many people at the health center didn't speak English, but my school director helped when she could, and everyone was very kind. Still, it felt kind of humiliating for my first post-isolation experience.

Afterwards, she took me to a cafe for lunch, to the grocery store for supplies, and she also gave me a tour of my apartment building. It was a full day, and a little overstimulating to be honest. I went to bed early before my first day of work.

Tuesday

On Tuesday I started at my new job! I learned all about the school, it's curriculum, and observed a few classes. I have a lot of thoughts about the school, but I'll speak about it in another post.

Wednesday

I taught a full day of classes.

Yep, you heard right. I taught a full day of classes on my second day of work. For the most part it went alright, but it is a STRUGGLE to jump into a class in which you have no context, don't know the students, or even what they have been learning. But I got through it!

Thursday & Friday

For the rest of the week, I taught most of my classes. Typically teachers will observe for a few days, but my director had me jump right in. It was tough, and I think it's going to continue to be that way for a few weeks. It's kind of terrible to be so unsure of yourself at the front of the classroom, as well as having to conduct myself in such a specific way to fit the school's standards. I've been teaching for years but still really doubted myself this week. But I guess I'll learn!

On Friday after work, a co-worker of mine (also a newbie!) and I were bored and decided to explore the neighborhood. Since we get out of work at 9pm, it was too late for anything to be open. Currently, Seoul is at a level 4 lockdown, so all restaurants and bars are closed by 9pm. Gangnam was a ghost town as we walked around, but it was still nice to get out of the apartment.

Saturday

The same co-worker and I decided to go shopping for new work clothes. I was under the impression my job would be a business casual dress code...but as it turns out they expect us to look extremely professional, and I needed new clothes.

We took the subway to an underground mall and shopped for hours. It was really fun! The mall was underground, and consisted of a ton of clothing stalls. Unfortunately, it was a struggle to find clothes that would actually fit my body. Korea has "free sizes" which are supposed to be one-size-fits-all, but they definitely do not fit all. Most clothes were smaller than an American medium.

I bought a few things, and then we went to a Korean restaurant. It was 8:30pm when we walked in and the restaurant was empty, so we thought it would be a quick, cheap meal before we headed home. The store owner kept asking us to 'hurry up' because of the curfew, so we had to eat fast. But it was yummy at least.

We also may have gotten slightly turned around on our way back home, but we made it back eventually haha.

Sunday

My co-worker texted me that there is a K-pop event not too far from us and she wants to go. I don't know anything about K-pop but I was down. We decided to take electric scooters.

On every street corner here you can find electric scooters waiting to be rented. With a quick download of an app, you scan the scooter's bar code and can enjoy a ride! It was a really fun and inexpensive way to travel. We went to two cafe giveaways, where you apparently order a particular drink to get some K-pop swag. Ordering was a little bit of a struggle with the language barrier, but we managed it. My co-worker is luckily much more knowledgeable about Korean than I am.

You might be wondering what I was talking about in my post title, but no it's not clickbait: I really did get pulled over by the cops. On the scooter.

We had also decided to go to a different mall later on, and we took the scooters again. This time, we took a bigger road, and made our way to COEX mall. All of a sudden, a cop car pulls up next to us and asked us to stop. Apparently, it's illegal to ride the scooters 1. on sidewalks (though we had seen others doing this) and 2. without a helmet. They took our drivers' licenses and their eyes bugged when they saw our American cards. We explained we had no idea and we had only just arrived in Korea so they let us go with only a warning. We decided to walk the rest of the way LOL

Unfortunately it was still a bust in terms of clothing sizes at the mall, even at the foreign stores like H&M and Zara. I tried on a 16 in H&M and could not even get the clothes on -- I am usually a 10! And yes, they were supposedly US sizes. I guess it will be only online shopping for me.

We decided to end the day at a Mexican restaurant, where our language barrier while ordering caused them to only bring us one meal (we had both ordered 2 enchiladas...so they brought us one order of 2 instead of 2 orders of 2). We talked about how embarrassing and rude of us it feels like to stumble so much with Korean, but most people here have been kind to us.

Anyway, it's been a long but fun week. Life here in SK is definitely going to be different, but it's so interesting to experience such new things. Here's hoping the growing pains get easier.

Until next time,

Grace ~

[canaryatlaw]

Alrighty, well today was pretty good. Had an easier time falling asleep but realized I double dosed myself again (accidentally this time) because I'd already put the old melatonin in my pill box so I took both....whoops. Lol. So I had my alarm set for 11 and like the weak bum that I am when it rang I reset it for 12 and went back to bed lolol. So weak and such a bum. Got up then and jumped into my reading for trial advocacy, because I knew I had 71 pages to do and like 4 hours to do so, not impossible but rushed. It was interesting, the first bit was like the basics of a trial which I pretty much knew all of already, and I dumped highlighting after the first chapter because it was taking too long (there were 3 chapters). Then we got into the actual lesson which was on voir dire (vwah deer) which is when the lawyers select a jury by asking them questions and striking the ones they don't want. Do they was fairly interesting, and the reading sped up towards the end because a lot of it was hypothetical conversations between lawyers and potential jurors, all pretty basic stuff, so I finished the reading by 3:15. After that though I had to do the two "problems" that were assigned, two hypothetical cases that they wanted us to set up a good and bad juror profile for as well as a list of questions to ask for both sides. It was interesting, not terribly hard, because a lot of it was just like opposites, like if one side wants this the other side obviously wants the opposite of it, so it wasn't very hard to come up with stuff. It had been raining and super windy all day, so when it became time to go to class I decided to implement one of my alternate routes to school and see how it goes. This one involved taking the same train from the same station that I normally do, but walking down a few blocks and then taking a bus east about 6 stops to the station, and it wasn't terrible. It was like super windy out, so I don't think I would've wanted to walk through it. The bus was pretty crowded though, and it was still like a 7 minute walk to it so I may not always use it, but it's a good option for now. We were meeting at the major downtown courthouse instead of at school because they let us do that, so I got off two stops earlier and was able to take the "pedway" system over from where I was on the red line to the blue line stop that's right in front of the courthouse. It's like, through a little mall/shopping center, so that's interesting haha. Better than walking in the cold, even if it's not for very long. Got to the courthouse and got through security, which was a fun little exchange about me always setting off metal detectors haha they were in good humor about it. Up to the 13th floor for the courtroom we're meeting in, it's like 5:35 at this point and class starts at 5:50, and already it was pretty crowded but no instructors in sight. So we sat as more students came in, and I struck up a conversation with the guy next to me that was in my crim pro class last semester at first about the class and our grades but then more general stuff and it was nice. The instructors finally came in at like, 6:05, which was pretty typical lol. So there's the one lady who's in charge of everything, then like 7 other people because we would be splitting up into 8 groups, each of which will rotate between 2 instructors, for most of the semester. It's a smart idea because otherwise it would take forever to get through things and people would get a lot more intimidated about speaking in front of like 65 people versus 8 people. Most of them were judges with a few defense attorneys thrown in there, one of which is the school's mock trial coach. So they talked about the class and such for a while, then we split into groups and went off. We were with the only private attorney of the group, and he does criminal defense, nice guy. There were 8 of us, two are girls I knew from my section, two 3L's, and then another two girls I've only seen in passing. So we got to our own room and started the exercise using the jury questions we came up with with fake jurors given a little profile to be used with that problem. It was interesting, because they were obviously given stuff that would be relevant and probative to the problem, and they pretty standardly fell into being good for one side or the other. We did the criminal problem first, armed robbery based on an ID question, so that was fairly interesting and I asked questions for that. It was funny at the end because the instructor asked the prosecution which of the 4 jurors they would strike and they said 2, and then he asked the defense and I was like "oh we'd strike the other 2" and everyone laughed haha but it was true. So then we did the civil one, medical malpractice, and I was a fake juror for that. One of the issues for potential bias in the case was that the victim was a legal immigrant from Mexico, so my juror profile was mostly framed around that, so I was like born in Cuba and came to America with my parents under Castro and such haha so it was interesting. When we finished with that we all went back to the first courtroom where they did a little "demonstration" which was just a mock direct and cross examination of a cop in a case. Our instructor was doing the cross and he was pretty good. While we were waiting to get back into the courtroom I chatted with my instructor a little and got introduced to two others, one of whom is a judge for the juvenile delinquency side, and the other is our other instructor who is a judge now but used to be an ASA and went through juvenile court, so we talked a little about that, and it was good. They let us out around 8:15, so 15 minutes early. I spoke to the mock trial coach after about practice this week because I was gonna send them an email to find out details but I could obviously just ask him here, so they'll be back in the courthouse at 5:30 on Thursday so I'll be there for that. After that headed home, I was looking up routes to take because it's later and the buses don't run as often or at all, but I ended up taking the same train and just walking back and it wasn't too too bad, cold but not unbearably so. Got home and chilled out, watched this week's episode of Conviction which was pretty good I'd say. Apparently they only have like 2 episodes left which I'm kind of sad about. I really liked the character Tess in this episode and I think they're finally getting a handle on the characters where they're not super annoying so that's definitely progress! The case was about a new murder that fit the MO of a serial killer who was supposedly locked up at the time it happened, so they had to figure out if they have the right guy and this was a copycat, or if they got the wrong guy and the real one was out here all this time. So it was a bit different than their normal style being that it was intertwined with an active investigation into the crime as well, and I think they did a good job with it. Interesting solution, the guy in prison was innocent but the reason for the 10 year absence of the killings was that the real guy was also in prison on other charges but then just got out and went back to it, and they found him after he broke into the house of the one victim that survived to supposedly finish the job but she was like bitch no and shot his ass and killed him haha so that finished up the case pretty nicely for them and their guy got out, and he had a little subplot about not knowing if he wanted to be released because he has OCD and was so used to the routine he had in prison that he didn't know if he could handle being out, but they helped him get into a program that would help him readjust so I was glad to see that. And yeah, I hung out for a little while longer and then got ready for bed. Few other things throughout the day, my period randomly showed up tonight after being MIA for like....10 months? Lol. So I'm on birth control because I get fucking awful cramps that land me in bed for 2 days and I can't do that every month when I have class to go to dammit. I usually just go from one set of pills to the next without takin the placebo pills though because I'm not worried about being pregnant because I'm not having sex with anyone, and there's really not a medically necessary reason to have a period every month if that's the case. I have done the placebo in the past though and given it a number of days and it just never showed up, and I didn't think too much of it, but it just showed up now which is kind of strange because I've been taking the real pills this whole time and not having a break in those, but now that it's here I guess I'll do the placebo ones for a few days to let it through or something like that, lol fun times. The other thing which I mentioned earlier was my juvenile justice grade was finally posted, and as expected it was an A. I was obviously happy to see that, but more so just relieved I didn't have to sit in suspense anymore (and I was pretty certain I was gonna get an A anyway). I checked my final GPA's, cumulative and semester, and my late night calculations were mostly correct, my semester GPA being a 3.925 and my cumulative being 3.703. I'm a little ticked off by my cumulative one, though I won't know for sure until rankings come out, but I remember last semester 3.7 was at like top 12%, not top 10% like I was hoping (because then my semester GPA was a 3.7). And the ranking are cumulative, though based on just the semester I'm sure I'm pretty close to the top. If only that was what mattered....lol, I know I'm being ridiculous complaining about being in like, the top 12% instead of the top 10%, but I just want to feel smart and the best at what I do, okay? I'm a hopeless perfectionist, I know. But hopefully rankings will come out soon and be favorable. And CALI's should come out soon too (reminder: a CALI is the highest grade in the class and it's especially recognized and you can put it on resumes and shit) and being that I got 3 A's I'd be in the running for 3 potential CALI's, and that would be really cool....I don't know how likely it is that I'd actually get any of them, at least for evidence and crim pro I really wouldn't know, but I think I have a pretty good shot for juvenile justice, so that's good. And yeah, my eyes want to close now which I'm taking as the new melatonin kicking in and doing its job so I'm not gonna fight it and just go to bed now. Goodnight my dudes. Be well.