I washed my sheets today, only to discover....

AAAAAAAAGH the power of Christ compels you, etc. etc. Seriously, nice naming there, dudes. Don't try to fool me with your capital 'M'.

Things which I learned today

'Ori' means 'duck' in Korean, so apparently I live at Duck Station. This is awesome. And there are many ducks here, along the river, showing me their 'tocks when I walk to and from school. Unfortunately, there were also ducks on my dinner table tonight, which I kind of half-heartedly poked at while mostly noshing on banchan. They are still a little too cute for me to eat. Alert PETA. Oy.

My liiiiiiiife.

Apologies on the lack of updates, however, Korea does not have a magical anti-shit-hitting-fan shield around it. (Japan does, however. And the Koreans are pissed, I'm sure). Several things have prevented me from sitting down and spending quality time with the Create Post page in recent days, including but not limited to:

Hwangsa - also known as yellow dust, yellow sand, or 'goddammit, China, cut it out'. You can wikipedia it for all the delightful details, but needless to say, total wusses like me are quite affected by this phenomenon. I have been hacking like an 80-year-old asthmatic woman who just went for a run while chain smoking. Or, I've been hacking like I'm after the Gibson, if you are from RIT. A great deal of care has been put into not accidentally coughing up my dinner onto this keyboard. That'd be bad, apparently.

Pullin' the jerk shift - which is not actually an innuendo, unprecedented, I know. It seems my school is down one foreign teacher due to sheer selfishness and a lack of planning on one American's part. I won't shed a tear for the loss of her in my every day life, but losing my breaks during the day can't be helping the aforementioned hwangsa-lung-party. My boss first pulled the apologetic card, buying sweet breads for the Americans and rice cakes for the Korean teachers, and has been very mood-swingy over the past few days. Of course, she expects that the ad I put up on Craigslist will bring us a glittering new teacher in five minutes, but not a single response yet. I'm looking forward to just finding a new teacher and getting all this drama behind us, because my goodness, do I ever get tired of only talking gossip and saying mean things about a person. It just isn't my style.

Kids give the darndest things

I got freaking taekwondo ad socks from a female conversation student today. She doesn't do taekwondo or anything, nor could she very well express what these socks were and why they were for me, but anyhow. Taekwondo ad socks! Pretty sweet!

LADIES

The Seoul, Korea craigslist site is my favorite source of Engrish of questionable appropriateness. I troll it when I am feeling particularly in need of really quality attempts at my native tongue. Take, in particular, this charming fellow:

"Safe Fun - 28 - Seoul

Hi.

I want to meet someone
who knows how to play safe way,
who knows what is the polite way when meets somebody,
who knows what is "hot" when in the bed,
as I do.
(I mean phisically and socially safe way, but hot in the bed.) "

I am hot in the bed, sometimes. Particularly in the summer when I leave my air conditioning off to save on bills. FELLAS.

So this is the new year

The new school year has started in Sparkling (read: sparkling with raindrops) Korea, and so I am being treated to new kids, new teachers, new attitudes, new ways of being totally unable to communicate!

Friday marks the end of the first week of the new school year, and really, I am spending great amounts of mental power trying to will it closer. It's been a long week. An intelligent change to the schedule means that each foreign teacher spends time with 2 classes, instead of bouncing back and forth like a native-speaking ball between sometimes 5 different classes on any given day. However! My classes are Gentle (6 year olds who have no English learning experience) and Sunny (5 year olds, also they tell me that 'juice' is their favorite color). They are cute, to be sure, but it gets a little frustrating when my VERY ANGRY TEACHER FACE AND GENERAL DEMEANOR OF EXTREME IRRITATION are met with giggles.

This is the lowest of the low-level, people. I am nostalgic after four days for the call of 'teacher, what?' when a student's soul is troubled. 'Teacher, what?' seems like beautiful prose to my tired ears. I need to get used to the fact that these kids probably don't even understand the concept of Korean and English being two different languages. I get treated to cute and desperate lines of questioning each day, where a kid is trying to tell me that they can't find their older sister, or they'd really prefer to color with a red crayon thanks very much, or could they please have more curry. I can't answer them, and I can only understand enough to gather that something's pretty darned wrong, or that they really need to hit up the sshi post-haste.

So, hopefully, each child is in fact a super-genius, and they're gonna learn at least the basics, like, tomorrow.